GÖRING: No, that is not correct. The population of Belgrade did defend itself. Belgrade was far more a center of military installations than the capital of any other country; and I would like to draw your attention to this.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Well, now, I am going to pass from that matter to one or two points on which you gave evidence—I think at the instance of counsel for the organizations. You remember you gave evidence in answer to Dr. Babel about the Waffen-SS? Do you remember that—a few days ago?
GÖRING: Yes.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: I would just like you to look at a document which has not got a number, but it is the Führer’s ideas about the Waffen-SS, and to see if you agree. It is Document Number D-665, and it will be Exhibit Number GB-280. It is a document from the High Command of the Army, General Staff of the Army—statements of the Führer regarding the future state military police—and the covering letter of the document says, “After the Führer’s proposals for the Waffen-SS had been passed on, doubts arose as to whether it was intended that they should be given wider distribution.” If you will pass to the documents, perhaps you will follow it while I read it. I do not think it has been introduced before:
“On 6 August 1940 when the order for the organization of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler”—Adolf Hitler Bodyguard—“was issued, the Führer stated the principles regarding the necessity for the Waffen-SS as summed up below:
“The Greater German Reich in its final form will not include within its frontiers only those national groups which from the very beginning will be well disposed towards the Reich. It is therefore necessary to maintain outside the Reich proper a state military police capable in any situation of representing and imposing the authority of the Reich.
“This task can be carried out only by a state police composed of men of best German blood and wholeheartedly pledged to the ideology on which the Greater German Reich is founded. Only such a formation will resist subversive influences, even in critical times. Such a formation, proud of its purity, will never fraternize with the proletariat and with the underworld which undermines the fundamental idea. In our future Greater German Reich, a police corps will have the necessary authority over the other members of the community only if it is trained along military lines. Our people are so military-minded as a result of glorious achievements in war and training by the National Socialist Party that a ‘sock-knitting’ police, as in 1848, or a bureaucratic police, as in 1918, would no longer have any authority.
“It is therefore necessary that this state police proves its worth and sacrifices its blood at the front, in close formations, in the same way as every unit of the armed forces. Having returned home, after having proved themselves in the field in the ranks of the Army, the units of the Waffen-SS will possess the authority to execute their tasks as state police.
“This employment of the Waffen-SS for internal purposes is just as much in the interests of the Wehrmacht itself. We must never again allow the conscripted German Wehrmacht to be used against its fellow countrymen, weapon in hand, in critical situations at home. Such action is the beginning of the end. A state which has to resort to such methods is no longer in a position to use its armed forces against an enemy from without, and thereby gives itself up.
“There are deplorable examples of this in our history. In future the Wehrmacht is to be used solely against the foreign enemies of the Reich.