THE PRESIDENT: May I ask you what other legal basis there is for the theory you are putting forward, other than the adoption of the blockade?
FLOTTENRICHTER KRANZBÜHLER: I am referring as a legal basis especially to the practice of the first World War, and the statements made by experts after the first World War, and also to the generally recognized rules about mined areas. The mined areas actually in this war proved to be operational zones where every means of sea warfare was used to sink without warning. I shall later refer to this topic once more.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.
FLOTTENRICHTER KRANZBÜHLER: During the presentation of documents, the Tribunal has eliminated all those which I intended to utilize in order to prove that British naval warfare also paid no attention to the interests of neutrals when they were in contradiction with their own interests. If it is the Tribunal’s wish, I will not go into the details of the British measures, and in summing up I will mention them only insofar as they are indispensable for the legal argumentation. The following points are essential:
(1) The British regulations of 3 September 1939 concerning contraband goods, which practically precluded neutral mercantile traffic with Germany through the introduction of the so-called “hunger blockade.”
(2) The decree concerning control ports for contraband goods, which compelled neutral ships to make great detours right through the war zone, and to which must be imputed without doubt a series of losses of neutral ships and crews.
(3) The introduction of an export blockade against Germany on 27 November 1939, by means of which the importation of German goods was cut off for neutrals.
(4) The introduction of the navicert system and the black lists, which put the whole of neutral trade under British control and which made ships refusing to accept this system liable to be seized and confiscated.
I do not have to examine the question here whether these British measures toward neutrals were admissible or not from the point of view of international law. In any case the neutrals themselves considered many of them inadmissible, and there was hardly a single one which did not bring forth more or less vehement protests, for instance from Spain, the Netherlands, Soviet Russia, and the United States. From the beginning, the British Government for its part had forestalled any legal examination of the measures by renouncing the optional clause of the Permanent International Tribunal in The Hague, through a note of 7 September 1939. This step was expressly vindicated by the necessity for providing the British Navy with full freedom of action.
On the British side the fact was emphasized in the first World War and ever since that although British measures did prejudice the interests and possibly also the rights of the neutrals, they did not imperil either the ships or the crews and were therefore to be considered morally superior to the inhuman German measures. Actually, as mentioned before, the obligation to enter control ports was dangerous for neutral ships and crews and for this very reason the neutral countries protested against it. But apart from this, it seems to me that the actual divergence between the British and German measures for blockading the adversary is not founded upon moral differences, but rather upon difference in sea power. In the waters where the British Navy did not exercise naval supremacy, namely, off the coasts we occupied, and in the Baltic Sea, it used the same methods of naval warfare as we did.