8 April-M-IL-1 & 2 -1- Arminger (Int. Lea) Court II Case IX [Begin block quote] Official Transcript of the American Military Tribunal in the matter of the United States of America, against Otto Ohlendorf, et al, defendants, sitting at Nuernberg, Germany, on 8 April 1948, 0930-1630, Justice Musmanno presiding. [end block quote] THE MARSHAL: The Honorables, the Judges of Military Tribunal II. Military Tribunal is now in session. God save the United States of America and this Honorable Tribunal. There will be order in the court. THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal hands to the Secretary General the Opinion and Judgment in Case No. 9. This document shall be the official opinion and judgment in the case. Any questions regarding translation and transcripts shall be resolved by consultation with this document. In the reading of the judgment any omissions for time-saving [sic] or for any other reason will not affect the authenticity and authority of the official copy of the opinion and judgment filed with the Secretary General. Mr. Secretary General. (The President handed to the Secretary General the Official Opinion and Judgment.) 6646 8 April-M-IL-1 & 2 -2- Arminger (Int. Lea) Court II Case IX [begin block quote] THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - VS - OTTO OHLENDORF, HEINZ JOST, ERICH NAUMAN [sic],: OTTO RASCH, cancelled, ERWIN SCHULZ, FRANZ SIX, PAUL: BLOBEL, WALTER BLUME, MARTIN SANDBERG [sic],: OPINION AND JUDGMENT WILLY SEIBERT, EUGEN STEIMLE, ERNST BIBER-: STEIN, WERNER BRAUNE, WALTER HAENSCH, : GUSTAV NOSSKE, ADOLF OTT, EDUARD STRAUCH : WOLDEMAR KLINGELHOEFER, LOTHAR FENDLER : Case No. 9 WALDEMAR VON RADETSKY, FELIZ RUEHL, HEINZ : SCHUBERT, and MATHIAS GRAF, Defendants : [end block quote] The indictment filed in this case on July 25, 1947, charged the twenty-four defendants enumerated therein with crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership in criminal organizations. The twenty-four defendants were made up of six SS-Generals, five SS- Colonels, six SS-Lieutenant Colonels, four SS-Majors and three SS-junior officers. Since the filing of the indictment the number of defendants has been reduced to twenty-two. Defendant SS-Major Emil Haussman committed suicide on July 31, 1947, and defendant SS- Brigadier General Otto Rasch was severed from the case on February 5, 1948 because of his inability to testify. Although it is assumed that Rasch's disease (paralysis agitans or Parkinsonism will become progressively worse, his severance from these proceedings is not to be regarded as any adjudication on the question of guilt or innocence. The acts charged in Counts I and II of the Indictment are identical in character, but the indictment draws the distinction between acts constituting offenses against civilian populations including the German nationals and nationals of other countries, and the same acts committed as violations of the laws and customs of war involving murder and ill- treatment of prisoners of war and civilian populations of countries under the occupation of Germany. Count III charges the defendants with membership in the SS, SD and Gestapo, organizations 6647 8 April-M-IL-1 & 2 -3- Arminger (Int. Lea) Court II Case IX declared criminal by the International Military Tribunal and Paragraph I(d) of Article II of Control Council Law No. 10. Although the indictment accuses the defendants of the commission of atrocities, persecutions, exterminations, imprisonment and other inhumane acts, the principal charge in this case is murder. However, as unequivocal as this charge is, questions have arisen which must be definitely resolved so that this decision may add its voice in the present solemn re-affirmation and sound development of international precepts binding upon nations and individuals alike, to the end that never again will humanity witness the sad and miserable spectacle it has beheld and suffered during these last years. At the outset it must be acknowledged that the facts with which the Tribunal must deal in this Opinion are so beyond the experience of normal man and the range of man-made phenomena that only the most complete judicial inquiry, and the most exhaustive trial, could verify and confirm them. Although the principle accusation is murder and, unhappily, man has been killing man ever since the days of Cain, the charge of purposeful homicide in this case reaches such fantastic proportions and surpasses such credible limits that believability must be bolstered with assurance a hundred times repeated. The books have shown through the ages why man has slaughtered his brother. He has always had an excuse, criminal and ungodly though it may have been. He has killed to take his brothers property, his wife, his throne, his position; he has slain out of jealousy, revenge, passion, lust, cannibalism. He has murdered as a monarch, a slaveowner, a madman, a robber. But it was left to the twentieth century, 6648 8 April-M-IL-1 & 2 -4- Arminger (Int. Lea) Court II Case IX to proclaim and to produce so extraordinary a killing that even a new word had to be created to define it. One of counsel has characterized this trial as the biggest murder trial in history. Certainly never before have twenty-three men been brought into court to answer to the charge of destroying over one million of their fellow-human beings. There have been other trials imputing to administrators and officials responsibility for mass murder, but in this case the defendants are not simply accused of planning or directing wholsesale [sic] killing through channels. They are not charged with sitting in an office hundreds and thousands of miles away from the slaughter. It is asserted with particularity that these men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing, and taking an active part in the bloody harvest. If what the Prosecution maintains is true, we have here participation in a crime of such unprecedented brutality and of such inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degradation beyond the power of language to adequately portray. The crime did not exclude the immolation of women and children, heretofor [sic] regarded the special object of solicitude even on the part of an implacable and primitive foe. The International Military Tribunal in its decision of October 1, 1946 declared that the Einsatzgruppen and the Security Police, to which the defendants belonged, were responsible for the murder of two million defenseless human beings, and the evidence presented in this case has in no way shaken this finding. No human mind can grasp the enormity of two million deaths because life, the supreme essence of 6649 8 April-M-IL-1 & 2 -5- Arminger (Int. Lea) Court II Case IX consciousness and being, does not lend itself to material or even spiritual appraisement. It is so beyond finite comprehension that only its destruction offers an infinitesimal suggestion of its worth. The loss of any one person can only begin to be measured in the realization of his survivors that he is gone forever. The extermination, therefore, of two million human beings cannot be felt. Two million is but a figure. The number of deaths resulting from the activities with which these defendants have been connected and which the Prosecution has set at one million, is but an abstract number. One cannot grasp the full cumulative terror of murder one million times repeated. It is only when this grotesque total is broken down into units capable of mental assimilation that one can understand the monstrousness of the things we are in this trial contemplating. One must visualize not one million people but only ten persons -- men, women, and children, perhaps all of one family -- falling before the executioner's guns. If one million is divided by ten, this scene must happen one hundred thousand times, and as one visualizes the repetitious horror, one begins to understand the meaning of the Prosecution's words "It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women and children." All mankind can share that sorrow in the painful realization that such things could happen in an age supposedly civilized and mankind may also well cherish the hope that civilization will actually redeem itself, so that, by reflection, cleansing and a real sanctification of the holiness of life, that nothing even faintly resembling such 6650 8 April-M-IL-1 & 2 -6- Arminger (Int. Lea) Court II Case IX a think may happen again. Judicial opinions are often primarily prepared for the information and guidance of the legal profession but the Nuremberg judgments are of interest to a much larger segment of the earth's population. It would not be too much to say that the entire world itself is concerned with the adjudications being handed down in Nuremberg. Thus it is not enough in these pronouncement to cite specific laws, sections and paragraphs. The decisions must be understood in the light of the circumstances which brought them about. What is the exact nature of the facts on which the judgments are based? A tribunal may not avert its head from the ghastly deeds whose legal import it is called upon to adjudicate. What type of reasoning or lack of reasoning was it that brought about the events which are to be here related? What type of morality or lack of it was it that for years bathed the world in blood and tears? Why is it that Germany, whose rulers thought to make it the wealthiest and the most powerful nation of all time, an empire which would overshadow the Rome of Caesar -- why is it that this Germany is now a shattered shell? Why is it that Europe, the cradle of modern civilization, is devastated and the whole world is out of joint? These Nuremberg trials answer the question, and the Einsatzgruppen trial in particular makes no little contribution to that enlightenment.