Dr. Seidl, will you present the case of the Defendant Frank?
DR. ALFRED SEIDL (Counsel for Defendant Frank): Mr. President, My Lords. The Defendant Dr. Hans Frank is accused in the Indictment of having utilized his posts in Party and State, his personal influence, and his relation with the Führer, for the purpose of supporting the seizure of power by the National Socialists and the consolidation of their control over Germany. He is also accused of having approved, led, and taken part in the War Crimes mentioned in Count Three of the Indictment, as well as in the Crimes against Humanity mentioned in Count Four, particularly in the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the course of the administration of occupied territories.
As I have already explained in the case of the Defendant Hess, the Indictment fails to adduce any facts in substantiation of these accusations. It is similar in the case of the Defendant Frank; here again the Indictment contains no statement of factual details to substantiate the accusations. Like all the other defendants, the Defendant Frank is accused of having taken part in a common plan which is alleged to have had as its object the planning and waging of wars of aggression and the commission in the course of these wars of crimes which infringe upon the laws and customs of war.
The evidence has shown that the Defendant Frank joined the National Socialist Party in the year 1928. Both before and after the assumption of power by the National Socialists he was concerned almost exclusively with legal questions. The Reich Law Department was under his control as Reichsleiter of the Party until the year 1942. After Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, Frank became the Bavarian Minister of Justice. In the same year he was appointed Reich commissioner for the co-ordination of legal institutions. This task consisted in the main of transferring to the Reich Ministry of Justice the functions of the administrative legal departments of the component states of the Reich. That was completed by the year 1934. When the affairs of the Bavarian Ministry of Justice had been transferred to the Reich, the office of the Defendant Frank as Bavarian Minister of Justice came to an end. In December 1934 he was appointed Reich Minister without Portfolio. In addition he became, from 1934 onward, President of the Academy for German Law, which he himself had founded, and President of the International Chamber of Law. Finally, he was the Leader of the National Socialist Lawyers Association.
This list of the various posts held by the Defendant Frank in Party and State would alone be sufficient to show that his work was almost exclusively concerned with legal matters. His tasks were in the main confined to the execution of Point 19 of the Party Program, which demanded a German common law. And in actual fact almost all speeches and publications by the Defendant Frank, both before and after the assumption of power by the National Socialists, dealt with legal questions in the widest sense of the term.
In the course of his examination in the witness box, the Defendant Frank testified that he had done everything he could to bring Adolf Hitler to power and to carry out the ideas and the program of the National Socialist Party. But whatever the defendant undertook in this respect was done openly.
The aims of the National Socialists before they assumed power can be expressed in a few words: Liberation of the German people from the shackles of the Versailles Treaty; elimination of the mass unemployment which had arisen in consequence of that treaty and the unreasonable reparations policy of Germany’s former enemies; counteraction against the symptoms of degeneracy—political, economic, social, and moral—connected with that unemployment; and finally, the restoration of the sovereignty of the Reich in all spheres.
The Prosecution was unable to produce any evidence to show that the revision of the Versailles Treaty was, if necessary, to be carried out by violent means and by war. The political, military, and economic situation in which Germany found herself before the assumption of power—a situation in which it could only be a question of eliminating the terrible consequences of the economic collapse and of enabling seven million unemployed again to play their part in the economic process—could not but make any serious thought of a war of aggression appear futile.
Moreover, the evidence brought forth nothing to show the existence of the common plan as stated in Count One of the Indictment, as far as one understands thereby a definite and concrete plan among a narrow uniform circle of persons. The evidence, in particular the testimony given by the witness Dr. Lammers and the defendant himself in the witness box, has shown on the contrary that Frank did not belong to the circle of Hitler’s closer collaborators. The Prosecution was unable to present to the Tribunal a single document dealing with important political or military decisions with which the Defendant Frank was connected. In particular, the Defendant Frank was not present at any of the conferences with Hitler which the Prosecution considers especially important in proving the alleged common plan, the minutes of which conferences the Prosecution has submitted as Exhibits, Numbers USA-25 to 34.
The only statute which is important in this connection is the Law on the Reintroduction of General Conscription of 16 March 1935. The facts have already been explained, and will be further enlarged upon, which led to the promulgation of that law and why it cannot be looked upon as an infringement of the Versailles Treaty. The Defendant Frank signed that law in his capacity as Reich Minister, as did all the other members of the Reich Government. That law, which had as its object the restoration—at least in the military sphere—of the sovereignty of the German Reich, did no harm to any other nation. Nor did the content of that law, or the circumstances which led to its enactment, admit the conclusion that it was part of a common plan with the object of launching a war of aggression.