Morning Session (continued 2)
Reading edition
To begin with, this does not apply to the Führer’s order for the extermination of sabotage Commandos, dated 18 October 1942. The Prosecution has tried to establish that this order had been presented to Admiral Dönitz in detail, together with all possible objections, shortly after his assumption of the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. It has failed to establish this assertion. In fact Dönitz, as he himself admits, did read or have presented to him the order in question in the autumn of 1942 in his capacity of Commander of U-boats, and in the same form in which the front-line commanders received it.
I do not wish to speak here of the circumstances which led to objections against this order on the part of the High Command of the Armed Forces. Indeed, all these circumstances could not be discernible to one who received this order at the front. For such a man it was a matter of reprisal against saboteurs who seemed to be soldiers, but did not fight according to the regulations which are binding upon soldiers. Whether such reprisals were admissible at all according to the Geneva Convention, and to what extent, could not be judged by, nor did that come within the competence of, the recipient of the order. Every superior officer, at any rate, probably recognized that the order not to grant any pardon, and to hand over such persons in certain cases to the SD, was in itself an infringement of the rules of war. However, since the essence of any reprisal is to avenge a wrong on the part of the enemy with a wrong on one’s own part, this does not prove anything concerning the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the reprisal order. If no one but the leadership of the State is competent to order reprisals, then hundreds or thousands of German officers cannot be required today to have considered themselves also competent, and to have been presumptuous enough to verify orders whose actual and legal basis was entirely unknown to them. In this case the principle prevails, at least for the front-line commanders, that the subordinate may, when in doubt, rely on the order as given.[36]
Now, the Prosecution seems to be of the opinion that Admiral Dönitz a few months later, when he had become Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, had the opportunity and also the obligation to inform himself as to the basis of the Commando Order. This conception fails to appreciate the duties of a Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. He has to wage naval war. The whole German naval war, especially submarine warfare, in the spring of 1943, owing to huge losses inflicted by the enemy air force, was on the verge of collapse. These were the worries with which the new Commander-in-Chief had to cope, in addition to an abundance of new problems concerning the Navy which were coming up. How can one require such a man as in the quietest of times to cope with an order of remote date, which had nothing whatever to do with naval warfare? On the contrary, a special paragraph explicitly excluded prisoners taken during naval operations.
A word or two on the channels of command. The naval units were under the control of the Naval Operations Staff only in those matters which belonged to the duties of the Navy, that is to say, naval warfare and coastal defense by artillery. Concerning so-called territorial questions they were not subordinate to the Naval Operations Staff but to the Armed Forces commander of the theater of war in which their basis was established. Orders concerning such measures of war on land were given without collaboration on the part of the Naval Operations Staff and their execution was not reported to them. Just as hardly anyone can think seriously of holding a general responsible for German submarine warfare, just as little, in my opinion, does it seem justified to hold an admiral responsible for orders given in land warfare.
Mr. President, I have come to the end of a section.
THE PRESIDENT: Certainly. We will break off.