Above all, however, it seems to me essential to point out the following: The contents of any document are of material evidential value only insofar as the document is appreciated in its entirety. The diary of the Defendant Frank with its 10,000 or 12,000 pages is one uniform document. It is improper to put in as evidence certain individual entries without showing the context in which alone some of them can be understood. But it is particularly improper—and this infringes upon the principles of any presentation of evidence—to select from some uniform whole, such as a long speech, a few sentences and put them in as evidence. In Document Book Number 2, I have listed a few examples of this and hereby refer to them.
As the Defendant Frank himself rightly pointed out in the witness box, the diary is a uniform whole; only in its entirety can it be probative and form part of the presentation of evidence. I have read through that diary of more than 10,000 pages and can only confirm his opinion. And that was why I did not use individual entries in presenting my evidence but put in the whole diary.
If I myself, in presenting evidence, have read certain single entries from the diary and if in the course of my present address I shall quote a few more passages from it, then, just as in the case of the extracts put forward by the Prosecution, their evidential value can certainly be gauged only within the framework of the whole diary.
The following may also be looked upon as having been established by the evidence: As the diaries show, and as is evident in particular from the testimony given by the witnesses Bühler, Böpple, and Meidinger, the Defendant Frank in his capacity as Governor General often made two or three improvised speeches in the course of one day. The extracts from the diary presented by the Prosecution consist, for the most part, of single sentences from such speeches. If we take into consideration both the temperament of the defendant and his habit of expressing himself in an incisive manner, then that is another reason which tends to reduce the probative value of these extracts from the diary. And we actually do find many diary entries which flatly contradict other entries on the same subject occurring a little earlier or later.
In connection with the many speeches made by the Defendant Frank, the following must not be left out of consideration and may also be looked upon as established by the evidence: It was a foregone conclusion that the Defendant Frank, as an avowed champion of the idea of a State founded on law and of the independence of the judiciary, would come into increasingly sharp conflict with the representatives of the police-state system; this developed to an even greater degree in the course of the war, both within the Reich and in occupied territory. The representatives of the police state, however, were Reichsführer SS Himmler and, for the area of the Government General, the Higher SS and Police Leader, East, above all and in particular SS Obergruppenführer and General of Police Krüger. The relation between the Defendant Frank on the one hand, and Reichsführer SS Himmler and his representative, Obergruppenführer Krüger, on the other, had been extremely bad even at the time the Government General was established. They deteriorated still more as the divergence of outlook concerning the tasks of the Police came ever more openly to the fore; and the Defendant Frank was forced to lodge increasingly strong protests with the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, Dr. Lammers, and the Führer himself regarding the violent measures taken by the Security Police and the SD.
As I have already mentioned, the Governor General, lacking an executive of his own, had no choice but to make repeated attempts to co-ordinate the work of the general administration with that of the Police, in order to be in a position to carry out any administrative work at all. Obviously these objectives demanded—at least on the face of things in a certain degree—a conciliatory tendency toward the general attitude of the Security Police and, above all, of the Higher SS and Police Leader, East. Moreover, the evidence has further established that the tension existing between the Governor General and the Higher SS and Police Leader often reached such a degree that the Defendant Frank could not but feel himself menaced and—to quote the words of the witness Bühler—was no longer a free agent and master of his own decisions.
The testimony of the witnesses Bach-Zelewsky and Dr. Albrecht leaves no doubt on this point. Quite rightly, therefore, the witness Dr. Bühler also pointed out that the Defendant Frank expressed himself with particular vehemence when the Higher SS and Police Leader or the commander of the Security Police and the SD were present at conferences, while his utterances were made on quite a different note when he was speaking to an audience composed only of members of the administration. Even a cursory inspection of the diary will confirm this. All these circumstances must be taken into consideration in assessing the substantive evidential value of the Defendant Frank’s diary.
It should also be noted that these diaries constituted the only personal property that Frank was able to rescue from the castle at Kraków. On his arrest he handed over all the diaries to the officers who took him into custody. It would have been an easy matter for him to destroy these documents.
Your Lordships, I now turn to the individual accusations brought against the defendant, and their legal aspects. The Defendant Frank is accused of having approved of, and participated in, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the administration of occupied territory.
As the law stands, it rests on the principle that only a sovereign state, not an individual, can be a subject of international law. To make international law binding on an individual, such law itself would have to lay down that a certain set of facts constitutes a wrong and that the rule thereby established is applicable to an individual creating such a set of facts. Only in that way can individuals, who under the law as it stands are subject only to the criminal law applying in each state, by way of exception be directly bound by international law.