During the course of this trial, an attempt will be made to distinguish among that which this defendant did as Generalluftzeugmeister, as Chief of the Jaegerstab, as State Secretary for Air, and as a member of the Central Planning Board. At times it will be difficult, if not impossible, to state in just which capacity he was acting at a particular time. We must emphasize now that it is not essential to the proof of this case that we should be able always to specify the exact capacity in which the defendant acted. The multiplicity of his connection with the slave-labor program is his greatest condemnation, and it is because he knew so much and did so much that there can be no excuse for him.
Erhard Milch operated at a policy level high in the chain of command above the work boss and the concentration camp guard. We need not show him driving the workers to their tasks or crowding them into the hovels in which they lived. We are not primarily concerned with the minute details of the slave-labor program which were carried out by minions who obeyed men like the defendant. We were dealing with a planner of a great crime, and it has not been difficult for the law to seek out and punish those who plan as well as those who obey. The law would indeed be derelict if only those were punished who pulled the trigger to kill, or, comparably speaking, ran a slave camp in which people worked an 84-hour week and dragged out a miserable existence under conditions from which death was welcome relief.
This defendant cannot plead in truth that he did not know that the use of slave labor was wrong. He cannot use even the technical excuse, so common among the Nazis, that this was not illegal because the Nazi law authorized it. Official sanction of slavery would have been a law so evil that even the Nazi masters dared not proclaim it. A search through the mass of decrees and pronouncements which passed for law during the regime of Adolf Hitler fails to reveal sanction for slavery of foreign laborers. On the other hand, certain prohibitory laws survived from a more respectable day.
Paragraph 234 of the German Criminal Law (published in 1942 in Munich and Berlin, pp. 364-365) provides that “whoever seizes another by ruse, threat or force in order to expose him in a state of helplessness, or to deliver him into slavery, bondage, or a foreign military or naval service shall be punished for kidnapping by confinement in a penitentiary.” This law was in force during the Nazi regime and was published in the most recent edition of German Criminal Law which we have been able to find.
That maltreatment was commonplace in the course of the enforced labor program in Germany is well known; that starvation, murder, and all types of personal abuses took place is notorious. All of this was found as a fact in the decision of the International Military Tribunal. There can be no question of the responsibility of the defendant for the murders and privations which were the inevitable byproduct of the slave-labor program.
But we need not follow the crime of slave labor down to its last detail in order to show the defendant as the murderer he was. We can and will prove that he directly participated in crimes of which murder was often the intended and on numerous occasions the inevitable result.
The prosecution charges, and will prove, that he took an important, responsible, and essential part in the practice of experiments upon human beings carried out against their wills and in callous disregard of the lives of its victims.
Cut then to bare essentials the charges set forth in paragraphs 8 and 9 of count two of the indictment and in paragraph 11 of count three can be summarized by the statement that the defendant was officially connected with and took a consenting part in enterprises in which criminal medical experiments were performed upon involuntary subjects.
The nature and extent of these experiments and the fact that they were conducted for the specific benefit of the Luftwaffe will be shown in some detail. We will prove that the defendant was the responsible Luftwaffe officer with ultimate supervisory authority over the experiments. The Court will see that throughout the duration of these experiments, the defendant was constantly treated by all concerned as the ultimate authority within the Luftwaffe in control of the experimental equipment and in charge of certain personnel who were actively engaged in them.
Evidence will be presented which will prove that the defendant was thoroughly informed of the criminal activities of Dr. Rascher, the experimenter, and his associates. We will prove that a conference was held at the defendant’s office, that films were shown there, that communications were sent to him from highest Nazi sources which specifically referred to opposition on the part of “narrow-minded doctors” to the experiments. A web of evidence will be adduced to portray the defendant, as he really was, an active partner in crime. We will show that the defendant authorized the initiation of freezing experiments and that he ordered an extension of the high-altitude experiments for a period of 2 months, during which extended period a number of experimental subjects died.