Military Tribunal III
Case 3
The United States of America
—against—
Josef Altstoetter, Wilhelm von Ammon, Paul Barnickel, Hermann Cuhorst, Karl Engert, Guenther Joel, Herbert Klemm, Ernst Lautz, Wolfgang Mettgenberg, Guenther Nebelung, Rudolf Oeschey, Hans Petersen, Oswald Rothaug, Curt Rothenberger, Franz Schlegelberger, and Carl Westphal, Defendants
INTRODUCTION
The “Justice Case” was officially designated United States of America vs. Josef Altstoetter, et al. (Case 3). Of the sixteen defendants indicted, nine were officials in the Reich Ministry of Justice. The two persons who held the position of Reich Minister of Justice during the Hitler regime, Franz Guertner and Georg Thierack, were both dead before the indictment was filed. Between Guertner’s death in January 1941 and Thierack’s appointment in August 1942, the defendant Schlegelberger served as Acting Reich Minister of Justice. The defendants Schlegelberger, Rothenberger, and Klemm each had held the position of Under Secretary (“Staatssekretaer”, also translated as State Secretary) in the Reich Ministry of Justice. Two other officials of this Ministry were indicted but not tried: the defendant Westphal committed suicide in Nuernberg jail after indictment and before the opening of the trial; a mistrial was declared as to the defendant Engert, whose physical condition prevented his presence in court for most of the trial. The defendants who were not officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice included the chief public prosecutor of the People’s Court and several prosecutors and judges of both the Special Courts and the People’s Courts. Both the Special and the People’s Courts were established as important parts of the administration of justice during the Nazi regime.
All sixteen defendants named in the indictment were charged with criminal responsibility under the first three counts of the indictment. Count one charged participation in a conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity; count two alleged the commission of war crimes against civilians of territories occupied by Germany and against members of the armed forces of nations at war with Germany after September 1939; count three charged the commission of crimes against humanity, including offenses against both German civilians and the nationals of occupied countries, after the outbreak of World War II. The specific offenses charged included murder, persecution on political, racial, and religious grounds, deportation and enslavement, plunder of private property, torture and other atrocities. Count four charged seven of the defendants with membership in the SS, the SD, or the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, all organizations declared to be criminal by the International Military Tribunal.
During the course of the trial the Tribunal ruled with respect to count one “that neither the Charter of the International Military Tribunal nor Control Council Law No. 10 has defined conspiracy to commit a war crime or crime against humanity as a separate substantive crime; therefore, this Tribunal has no jurisdiction to try any defendant upon a charge of conspiracy considered as a separate substantive offense.” However, the Tribunal ruled further that count one “also alleges unlawful participation in the formulation and execution of plans to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity which actually involved the commission of such crimes. We therefore cannot properly strike the whole of count one from the indictment, but, insofar as count one charges the commission of the alleged crime of conspiracy as a separate substantive offense, distinct from any war crime or crime against humanity, the Tribunal will disregard that charge.” Judge Blair, in a separate opinion filed at the time of judgment, dissented from this ruling, declaring that the Tribunal should have declared that the military tribunals created under Ordinance No. 7 had jurisdiction over “conspiracy to commit” any and all crimes defined in Article II of Control Council Law No. 10.
Of the 14 defendants who stood trial to the end, ten were convicted on one or more counts, and four were acquitted on all counts.