The crimes charged in count two and in count three fall generally into several categories.
Substantively, there are first those war crimes which arise out of the violation of the laws and customs of war, including section I, articles 4–7; section II, article 23; section III, articles 43, 45, 46, and 50 of the Hague Regulations of 1907; and chapter 6, title I, articles 2–4 of the Prisoners of War Convention (Geneva 1929); and the decision and judgment of the IMT of 30 September and 1 October 1946.
These defendants, in one or more of the relationships set out in paragraph 2 of article II of Law No. 10, committed numerous criminal acts as defined in Law No. 10, article II.
These include, as the first substantive group of crimes, the wrongful extension of German law and German courts into and over the Eastern Territories and other overrun nations and the Protectorate, each of which, we contend, was not only an act done by these defendants in connection with, and in furtherance of, aggressive war, but also done by them for purely political reasons which made no pretense of being based upon military necessity, so that it was ipso facto unlawful or malum per se and made every act initiated thereafter under such wrongful extension, as against any of the defendants who are responsible under Law No. 10, article II, for that wrongful extension of German law, fall into the category of a felony, murder, or a criminal enslavement, mayhem, or atrocity; or a larceny while armed, or a robbery as to plunder of public or private property.
The other large group in this category of war crimes is the acts done in connection with the promulgation of the Nacht und Nebel decree of 7 December 1941 and the acts thereafter done in carrying out that program.
The second substantive group consists of the crimes arising out of the activities of the defendants in connection with the Gestapo, SIPO, SS, and other police groups in which either under the façade of judicial proceedings or by open violation of the meager protection afforded the individuals under Nazi law, Germans and non-Germans were turned over to enslavement and in many cases to demonstrable certain deaths in concentration camps, or in prisons where no pretense was made to operate them other than as concentration camps or human slaughterhouses.
The third group is the cases where, under alleged trials, in the People’s Court, Special Courts, and civilian courts martial, certain of these defendants, by the use of the prescribed procedures or those actually practiced, the fixing of penalties which outrage the universal moral judgment of mankind, and through convictions based only upon the subjective conclusions of the prosecutor or judge, which we describe now only as examples, give rise to the legal conclusion that the defendants thus convicted were murdered or unlawfully enslaved under the guise of exercising a judicial process.
The Court will get a better understanding of these basic categories of substantive crimes by the following illustrations from the evidence, which I will now ask Mr. Douglas King to first present at this time.
a. Murder Committed in Violation of Articles 43, 46, etc. of the Hague Convention
Mr. King: The extension of German law and German courts into conquered and occupied countries followed as a matter of course after the victorious German armies had done their work. In Poland and the Eastern Territories decrees of 4 October 1939 and 6 June 1940 introduced and extended the German jurisprudence into these countries. It was, however, unthinkable to the Nazi mind that a Pole should be able to appeal to German law, that he should have the right to sue a German before a German court in the capacity of a plaintiff, or to appear against a German in a case, or even to serve a writ of execution with the assistance of a bailiff.