All the other criminal facts which the Prosecution submitted, especially applying to the East, I need not deal with, as Raeder did not participate in them. I hope that here also I shall have the approval of the Court in mentioning the handling of the Katyn case, in which the Court pointed out that Raeder was not involved and therefore refused to allow me to act as defense counsel in this connection; from this I draw the legal conclusion that Raeder cannot even by implication through the conspiracy be considered as burdened with these criminal facts, since he did not know of these events and had nothing to do with them.
The case for the Prosecution is founded on a desire to see its basic theory accepted and acknowledged, namely, the conception that so many crimes cannot have emanated from the will of a single individual but rather that they result from a conspiracy, a plot, involving many persons. These conspirators could logically, in the first place, only have been Hitler’s own collaborators, that is to say, the real National Socialists. Since however, Hitler wished to achieve and did achieve concrete results of military and economic import, something peculiar transpired: There were no specialists among the National Socialists for these tasks. Most of the National Socialist collaborators had not previously followed a trade providing technical education. Hitler, therefore, despite his desire to have only National Socialists around him, took on as key people in particular fields specialists who were not National Socialists, such as for instance Neurath for politics, and Schacht for economics; and for military tasks, Fritsch for the Army and Raeder for the Navy. The Prosecution followed this process from the angle of its conspiracy theory, without paying attention to the fact that these people, not being National Socialists, could in no way be counted among the conspirators and without taking into account that Hitler used these non-National Socialists only as technicians in a well-defined field, and only as long as it seemed absolutely necessary to him; therefore he agreed to the departure of these men, who were essentially not in sympathy with him, as soon as the differences between them seemed unbridgeable, which was bound to happen sooner or later with each of them, depending on the particular field involved.
By this all-embracing conception of the idea of conspiracy and by this extension of the Prosecution’s fight to non-National Socialists, the Prosecution abandoned the basic concept formerly propagated abroad, namely, that of fighting National Socialism but not against the whole of Germany—two ideas which at no time and in no place have been really identical, as the Prosecution now tries to make out. I do believe that thereby the Prosecution is also going back on President Roosevelt’s basic idea.
Yet another factual and legal point of view has not been taken into consideration by the Prosecution. I mean the concept of the division of competence under state law, that is to say the subdivision into individual departments. This division of competence, founded on the idea of division of labor, is essentially separative in character; it divides the field of work according to local, functional, and technical points of view. Thereby it defines positively the limits within which each division is to become active, and at the same time it defines negatively the boundaries of such activity by specifying which problems no longer concern the agencies in question, that is to say, where they must not exercise any official activity.
In a democracy additional contacts exist by virtue of general Cabinet meetings and through the Prime Minister, the Reich President, or the Reich Chancellor, as the case may be. In a dictatorship it is different, particularly if the dictator, as was the case with Hitler in the National Socialist State, exploits the segregation of the various departments with extreme skill and sees to it that they are kept as isolated as possible, with the result that all power of decision rests finally with him as the dictator, who may even play off one department against the other. The strict partitioning into governmental departments as carried out in the National Socialist State in itself refutes the concept of conspiracy and renders it extremely difficult for the individual to exceed the limits of his own department in any manner.
This significance may be illustrated by the following example: The maintenance of political relations with other states, the contracting or cancellation of agreements or alliances with other states, the declaration of war and conclusion of peace, are matters within the jurisdiction of the authority directing foreign affairs; but they are not within the jurisdiction of the agencies concerned with domestic tasks, such as for instance the Reich Finance Administration, Justice, or the Military.
Thus, since the decision concerning war and peace is not a matter for the military, the military has to accept the decisions made by the political leadership, decisions which have a binding material effect on the military authorities. The military commander must assume for his department the consequences resulting from the decision. As soon as war is declared, the military forces must fight. They do not bear any responsibility for the war, since they were not able to take part in the decision that war should be declared. Consequently, for an army the concept of war of aggression exists in the strategic sense only. Aside from that, any war it may be obliged to wage is, to the army, simply war, regardless of how it may be qualified legally (Article 45 of the Reich Constitution).
Responsibility, from the point of view of state law and criminal law, is in proportion to the extent of jurisdiction. Therefore, if the commander-in-chief of a branch of the Armed Forces is responsible solely for the waging of war, though not for the causes leading to war, his responsibility in respect to a strategic plan must be confined to the plan as such, but not to the possible origin of the war for which the strategic plan was worked out.
This officially and legally important segregation of governmental departments and the distribution of authority was, in the interest of strengthening his own power in a particularly emphatic manner, carried out by Hitler in many domains, such as for instance the creation of the “Delegate for the Four Year Plan,” whose field of work should have belonged to the Ministry of Economics; the creation of Reich Commissioners in the occupied territories, whose activity really should have come under military administration; and, finally, a fact of interest in the Raeder case, the very precise delimitation of the three branches of the Armed Forces and the elimination of the Reich Defense Minister or Minister of War who held the three branches of the Armed Forces together and unified them. The greater the number of governmental departments became, the stronger Hitler became as dictator, being the only person with authority over all the innumerable agencies. But along with this the official as well as the legal responsibility for strategic plans on the part of any one individual department decreased; in this instance, that of the Navy.
Consequently, the commander-in-chief of a branch of the Armed Forces, for instance the Navy, can in case of strategic planning only be responsible for the planning of naval strategy; he is not afforded an over-all picture of the total plan. The total plan was discussed nowhere; politically and militarily it was in Hitler’s hands exclusively, because he alone was the center where all threads, all activities of the individual departments joined.