I shall now deal with the conspiracy to commit Crimes against Humanity, and I should like first of all to point out that Admiral Dönitz is not accused, under Count Four of the Indictment, of direct commission of Crimes against Humanity. Not even participation in the conspiracy to commit Crimes Against Humanity was contended in the detailed charges. That, I would say, is an admission that there was in fact no relation, between his activity and the Crimes against Humanity of which the Prosecution has brought evidence. Nevertheless the Prosecution presented some documents which are apparently meant to prove his participation in the responsibility for certain Crimes against Humanity.
In judging these documents the most important question always is: What did Admiral Dönitz know of those alleged crimes? On this subject I should like to make one point clear. During the entire war he resided and lived at his staff headquarters, first on the North Sea coast, after 1940 in France, in 1943 for a short time in Berlin, and then in the Camp Koralle near Berlin. When he was at the Führer’s headquarters, he stayed with the naval staff there. Even outside his duty, his time was thus spent almost exclusively with naval officers. This may have been a weakness, but it is a fact which gives an additional explanation of his lack of knowledge of many events.
The fact that the defendant forwarded a proposal by the Ministry for Armaments to employ 12,000 men from concentration camps as workers in the shipyards proves, according to the Prosecution, that Admiral Dönitz knew and approved of the arrest of countless innocent people and their ill-treatment and extermination in concentration camps.
He actually knew, of course, that concentration camps existed and he also knew that, apart from the professional criminals, people arrested for political reasons were kept there. As has already been explained here, the protective custody of political adversaries for reasons of safety is a measure adopted by all states, at any rate in an emergency, and knowledge of such a measure can therefore incriminate no one. However, an unusually high number of political prisoners—out of proportion to the number of the population—may stamp a regime as a regime of terror, but taking into account a population of 80 million in the fifth year of a grim war, even twice or three times the number of 12,000 men, which is the number mentioned by Admiral Dönitz, would not indicate a regime of terror, and the Prosecution will hardly claim that.
Admiral Dönitz stated here that the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, as well as his collaborators and the overwhelming part of the German people, did not know of the abuses and killings that occurred in the concentration camps. All that the Prosecution has put forward against this are assumptions, but no proofs.
On this point, therefore, I will only refer to the statement of the then Minister for Armaments, Speer, according to which the inmates of concentration camps were much better off in industrial work than in camp, and that they tried with all means to obtain employment in such work. The proposal forwarded therefore did not imply anything inhuman, but rather the opposite.
The same request also contains a suggestion to take energetic measures against sabotage in Norwegian and Danish shipyards, where seven out of eight vessels under construction had been destroyed. If need be, the personnel should be entirely or in part employed as “KZ workers” because, so it says, sabotage of such dimensions can only occur if all the workers silently condone it. This therefore amounts to a proposition for security measures to consist in keeping the workers who actively or passively participated in sabotage in a camp close to the shipyard, so that their connections with sabotage agents would be cut off. I do not believe that juridical objections can be raised against such measures of security. According to the practice of all occupation troops even measures of collective punishment would be justified in such cases.[[37]]
Actually the measures proposed were never carried out and the Prosecution presumably presents them only to accuse Admiral Dönitz quite generally of a brutal attitude toward the inhabitants of occupied territories. For this same purpose it even refers to a statement of the Führer at a conference on the military situation in the summer of 1944, according to which terror in Denmark must be fought with counterterror. Admiral Dönitz’s only connection with this statement was that he heard it and that his companion, Admiral Wagner, wrote it down. The Navy had no part in this statement, nor did it take any measures as a result of it.
In contrast to this line of evidence of the Prosecution, I should like to emphasize the attitude which Admiral Dönitz actually showed toward the population of the occupied territories. There is before the Tribunal a survey of the administration of justice by the naval courts in protecting the inhabitants of the occupied territories against excesses by members of the Navy. The survey is based on an examination of about 2,000 files on delicts and some of the judgments given are quoted with the facts and the reasons of the verdicts. Judging from that survey, one can fairly say that the naval courts protected the inhabitants in the West and in the East with justice and severity, including their lives as well as their property and the honor of their women. This administration of justice was constantly supervised by the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy as the Chief Court Administrator. Under terms of legal procedure it was his duty to confirm death penalties imposed on German soldiers.
The time at my disposal does not permit a more detailed discussion of some of these judgments. A phrase expressed in one of them may be taken to apply to all: All soldiers must know that in occupied territory as well the life and property of others will be fully safeguarded. This was the general attitude in the Navy, and the severity of the penalties inflicted proves how seriously it was taken.