Upon their arrival the prosecutor in the case, Markl, was directed to draw up an indictment based upon the Gestapo interrogation. This was at 11 o’clock of the day they were tried.
The witness Kern was summoned by the defendant Rothaug to act as defense counsel in the case approximately 2 hours before the case came to trial. He informed Rothaug that he would not have time to prepare a defense. According to Kern, Rothaug stated that if he did not take over the defense, the trial would have to be conducted without a defense counsel. According to Rothaug, he told Kern that he would get another defense counsel. In either event the trial was to go on at once.
The trial itself, according to Kern, lasted about half an hour; according to the defendant, approximately an hour; according to Markl, it was conducted with the speed of a court martial.
The evidence consisted of the alleged confessions which one of the defendants repudiated before the court. Rothaug states that he thereupon called the Gestapo official who had obtained these alleged confessions and questioned him under oath. According to Rothaug the Gestapo official stated that the interrogations were perfectly regular. There was also a letter in evidence which it was said the defendants had tried to destroy before their capture. The witness Kern stated on cross-examination that this letter had little materiality.
The defendant attempts to justify the speed of this trial upon the legal requirements in existence at this time. He states, in contradiction to the other witnesses, that a clear case of sabotage was established. This Tribunal is not inclined to accept the defendant Rothaug’s version of the facts which were established. Under the circumstances and in the brief period of the trial, the Tribunal does not believe the defendant could have established those facts from evidence.
According to the witness Kern, one of the defendants was 17 years of age. This assertion as to age was not disputed. A German 18 years of age or thereunder would have come under the German Juvenile Act and would not have been subject to trial before a Special Court or to capital punishment. Whatever the age of the defendants in this case, they were tried under the procedure described in the ordinance against Poles and Jews which was in effect at this time, by a judge who did not believe the statements of Polish defendants, according to the testimony in this case. These two young Polish women were sentenced to death and executed 4 days after trial. In the view of this Tribunal, based upon the evidence, these two young women did not have what amounted to a trial at all but were executed because they were Polish nationals in conformity with the Nazi plan of persecution and extermination.
The second case to be considered is the Lopata case. This was a case in which a young Polish farmhand, approximately 25 years of age, is alleged to have made indecent advances to his employer’s wife.
He first was tried in the district court at Neumarkt. That court sentenced him to a term of 2 years in the penitentiary. A nullity plea was filed in this case before the Reich Supreme Court, and the Reich Supreme Court returned the case to the Special Court at Nuernberg for a new trial and sentence. The Reich Supreme Court stated that the judgment of the lower court was defective, since it did not discuss in detail whether the ordinance against public enemies was applicable and stated that if such ordinance were applicable—a thing which seemed probable, a much more severe sentence was deemed necessary.
The case was therefore again tried in violation of the fundamental principles of justice that no man should be tried twice for the same offense.
In the second trial of the case, the defendant Rothaug obligingly found that the ordinance against public enemies had been violated.