Afternoon Session

DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: Once more, in the autumn of 1938, the Defendant Von Neurath took it upon himself to stem the tide of events in order to spare the German people the immediate danger of war. In view of the corroboratory testimony of Göring and other witnesses, I need not describe in detail how the Munich conference, toward the end of September 1938, had come about. The fact remains that it was held and was successful—I refer to the agreement with Britain and France on the Sudeten question—and this was due in no small measure to the initiative and co-operation of the defendant.

If, however, he was able to accomplish this, it is because of a circumstance which the Prosecution, completely misunderstanding the situation, now include among the accusations—namely, that upon his resignation as Foreign Minister he was appointed President of the Secret Cabinet Council, which had been newly created by Hitler at this time. Had he not been in this position it would not have been at all possible for him to get to see Hitler in September 1938 and persuade him to agree to the Munich conference; for, contrary to the allegation of the Prosecution, even though he kept the title of Reich Minister from the day he resigned as Foreign Minister, he was no longer a member of the Reich Cabinet, which is already shown by the fact that from that day on his salary was decreased by one-third. Any joint responsibility which the defendant might have had for the policy of the Reich ceased as from that day; for, contrary to the assertion of the Prosecution, as President of the Secret Cabinet Council he was not a member of the Reich Cabinet and had no access to it, let alone a seat or a vote in the Cabinet sessions. This is established beyond doubt by the very wording of Hitler’s decree whereby this Secret Cabinet Council was created; for there it says expressly that the sole purpose of this Secret Cabinet Council was to advise the Führer personally—that is, Hitler alone—and only on questions concerning foreign policy. Even Huber’s book Verfassungsrecht des Grossdeutschen Reiches, quoted by the Prosecution under Document 1744-PS in their attempt to prove the contrary, shows that the Secret Cabinet Council and its President had nothing whatsoever to do with the Reich Cabinet, and was not a branch or an organ of it, but only one of several of the Führer’s personal offices.

As had been shown by the testimony of Göring, Lammers, and other witnesses, the Secret Cabinet Council never really functioned, and was never meant to function. In point of fact, all that was intended was to bestow a personal honor on the defendant, and thus efface the impression that differences had arisen between him and Hitler. That he himself did not look upon his appointment in any other way is proved by the fact that after 4 February 1938 the defendant lived a life of leisure on his own estate in Württemberg as a private citizen, and went only very rarely to Berlin where, however, he was not and could not have been active in any official capacity, since all information as to what was happening in the Foreign Ministry was deliberately kept from him.

If the Prosecution believe that they are able to conclude, from the documents submitted under Number 3945-PS, that the defendant received sums of money from the Reich, or the Reich Chancellery, for obtaining diplomatic information, then—apart from the defendant’s own testimony under oath—this is refuted by a letter among these documents, dated 31 May 1939, from Amtsrat Koeppen, the head of the office of the Secret Cabinet Council, which was kept going merely for the sake of appearances—a letter which proves conclusively that these not very large payments at long intervals were for covering the cost of maintaining this office, and were not intended for purposes of secret information.

And if the defendant made no use of his position as President of this Secret Cabinet Council—except for this one occasion in September 1938—he made just as little use of his position as a member of the Reich Defense Council, to which he was appointed by the Reich Defense Laws. Here, too, the Prosecution err when they make use of this membership to accuse the defendant of warlike intentions or of promoting such intentions.

Since this Reich Defense Council has already been discussed so much during the hearing of the evidence, I believe there is no need for me to examine more closely this assertion of the Prosecution, and that I can limit myself to pointing out that no aggressive tendencies of any kind were embodied in these Reich Defense Laws; but that, on the contrary, as their contents state, they merely contain—as is the custom in any country which has to reckon with the possibility of a war—the necessary provisions in the event of the Reich’s being attacked, or being drawn into a war in some other manner. How one can deduce from them that the defendant had warlike intentions, or planned for war, is utterly incomprehensible. Moreover, the defendant did not take part in a single one of the meetings of this Council, and no reports about the decisions of this Council were ever forwarded to him. The Document 2194-PS, submitted by the Prosecution as alleged counterevidence, was not sent to the defendant at all, but to a department of the Reich Ministry of Transportation attached to the Government of the Protectorate—namely, the transport department—and was intended for the latter. Also the sender of the document was not the Reich Defense Council, but the Ministry for Economy and Labor of Saxony.

All these and similar efforts will never enable the Prosecution to prove that the defendant, by his policies, was at any time directly or indirectly guilty of a crime of planning or preparing an aggressive war, or even of approving or supporting such a war. Quite the contrary. All his efforts were directed to one end, and one end only: to attain by peaceful means and in a peaceful way only those aims which had been sought by all former democratic Governments after 1919—namely, the removal of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty which discriminated against Germany and stamped the German Reich as a second-rate power, and the bringing about of a general pacification of Europe. Not one of his diplomatic actions served any other purpose, or was performed with any intention which would imply a crime in the sense of the Charter. It is not surprising, therefore, that his resignation as Reich Foreign Minister was received by the whole world with anxiety and dismay, both outside Germany—I refer to the statement of the witness Dieckhoff—as well as inside Germany, and especially in conservative circles. This alone serves to prove that the assertion of the Prosecution, that he was active in these circles as a fifth columnist, is untrue.

All the Prosecution’s references to Hitler’s speech to his generals in November 1939, and still less to the speeches by the defendant himself of 29 August and 31 October 1937, will alter none of those facts. Hitler’s speech was made at the time of the first military successes and was calculated to vindicate Hitler’s state leadership, and should be taken at its face value. The speeches made by the defendant, however, say just the opposite of what the Prosecution see fit to put into them. For both speeches, Numbers 126 and 128 in my Document Book 4, stress quite clearly the success of the peaceful intentions of the German foreign policy conducted by the defendant, and lay particular emphasis on the fact that the results were obtained entirely by peaceful means, and not by means of force. In particular, the speech of 31 October 1937, the last public speech of the defendant as Foreign Minister, is actually a résumé of his peace policy. That this was and still is a correct résumé, the Prosecution themselves have had to admit in this Court—that Hitler’s speech of 5 November 1937, which was used by my client as an excuse for his resignation, was, as described by a member of the Prosecution, the turning point in German foreign policy. Thus the Prosecution acknowledged unequivocally that up to that day German foreign policy had not been an aggressive policy of force, or pursued any warlike plans or schemes, but had been peaceful throughout.

Indeed it could not have been otherwise, in view of the defendant’s political and humane creed; and this has been unanimously confirmed by all witnesses examined here and in all of the questionnaires and affidavits in my document books. This creed was built on three main pillars: love of men, love of the fatherland, and love of peace—all three springing from and sustained by a deep sense of responsibility toward himself, toward his God, and toward his people.

When, a few days after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Hitler called the defendant to Vienna from his well-deserved otium cum dignitate on his estate, and told him that he had been selected as Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia, it was this same sense of responsibility which made him feel it his duty to accept this post. At first he was opposed to the idea and struggled long with himself, for he had always been an inveterate opponent of any interference in the affairs of other nations, let alone the more or less forcible annexation of a country to the German Reich. It was for this reason that he had also condemned the annexation of Czechoslovakia and the so-called protection pact concluded with President Hacha, although at this time he had not the slightest idea of how this really came about. He got to know the true facts of this incident for the first time here in Nuremberg.

In spite of his reluctance to accept a public office once more, especially at his age, and to serve, again under Hitler and his regime of which he heartily disapproved, his sense of responsibility toward his people and his humane principles persuaded him that it would be wrong to refuse this mission. When Hitler explained to him that he had chosen him as being the only man possessing the necessary qualities to reconcile the Czechoslovakian people with the new conditions and with the German people—which Hitler said was his desire—he could not fail to recognize that the task given him was one which, in the interests of the German people, of humanity, and of international understanding, he ought not to refuse. And was it not indeed a task worthy of the utmost effort, to appease by just government and humane treatment a people who would regard every restriction and encroachment on their liberty and independence as the worst injustice that could be done them, and who would be filled with mortal hatred and resentment toward a people they felt to be an intolerable oppressor, and to reconcile them with these very people and the conditions for which they were directly responsible? But was not this aim in line with the endeavor to insure and preserve peace, which clearly and unequivocally pervaded his whole foreign policy? And he had every justification for telling himself that if he refused this task, then another man from Hitler’s entourage would in all probability be nominated Reich Protector, who would be neither able nor willing to conciliate the Czech people by humane and just treatment, but who, on the contrary, would be more inclined to hold them down by force and terror, as indeed happened 2½ years later.

Such were the only thoughts and considerations which led him to accept the appointment offered him, setting aside all personal interests and willing to face the risk that this might be interpreted and held against him in some quarters as denoting approval and support of Hitler and his regime—for Hitler had made him the definite and firm promise that he would at all times be willing to support the defendant’s intended policy of appeasement and reconciliation for the Czech people through humane and just treatment and through safeguarding the interests of the Czech people to the greatest extent.

He was fully aware that the task which he had accepted was a difficult one. I do not hesitate to admit that it was here a question of a decision, the justification of which could—if one admits the point of view put forward here by the British prosecutor that it was immoral to remain in a government which should be repudiated because of its amorality—cause embarrassment in the judgment of a man whose thoughts and dealings were different from those of the Defendant Von Neurath. But having in mind the character of Herr Von Neurath, which I hope has been described to you clearly enough, and his deep sense of responsibility, this decision was the only possible and logical one. It is a veritable tragedy, resembling those of the ancient Greeks, that the failure of this mission, which had been undertaken with only the highest ethical motives, should have brought the Defendant Von Neurath into this dock.

But at this point now, I should like to make the following comments on the Prosecution’s attempt by means of the photostatic documents which they submitted under Document 3859-PS—consisting of a letter from the defendant to the Chief of the Reich Chancellery Lammers, dated 31 August 1940, and its alleged enclosures—to discredit the defendant’s assertion that in assuming his office as Reich Protector his sole aim was to appease and reconcile the Czech people by safeguarding to the utmost their interests and their national traditions, and thus work for the well-being of this people and their prosperity as a nation. I believe that the second examination of the defendant, which the Tribunal, in their readiness to help, granted to me, has proved that those documents, particularly the two reports attached to the letter to Lammers—which indeed, with regard to the question of the Germanization of the Czech people, cannot be reconciled with the intentions and tendencies of the defendant as mentioned above—have no evidentiary value. Not only do those photostatic copies in no way tally—and the defendant has made a definite statement to this effect—with the contents and the form—that is, the length of the originals attached to the letter to Lammers, and which had been submitted to the defendant for signature and approved by him—but the photostatic copies also give rise in several places to well-founded doubts as to whether they are really identical with the enclosures to the letter addressed to Lammers, and this owing to the following facts.

Contrary to the practice adopted by all administration offices, neither of the photostatic copies bears the reference number of the letter to Lammers, or even a note that they are enclosures to a third document, let alone to the Lammers letter. Neither does the photostatic copy of the first report bear the defendant’s signature which, according to his definite statement, when he signed the letter to Lammers, he added to the report enclosed with it, which report had been drawn up by himself or by his office according to his instructions, and submitted to him in a fair copy. Another thing which strikes one is that it only bears a correction note of the copy which should have been, but actually was not, signed by an SS Obersturmführer working in the office of State Secretary Frank.

These facts support the defendant’s assertion that, if the reports from which the photostatic copies have been made were in fact annexed to the Lammers letter, they have been substituted for the original report of the defendant and for Frank’s report—the draft of which was approved by the defendant in the office of State Secretary Frank which was entrusted with the dispatch—either by the latter or by his orders. Furthermore, the defendant’s statement, made by him in order to explain the purpose of this Lammers letter and its enclosures, is quite worthy of belief: namely, in the same way as was intended by the plan contained in General Friderici’s report—dated 15 October 1940, submitted under Exhibit USA-65, Document L-150—to induce Hitler by reporting verbally to him, and on the basis of the two reports sent, to abstain from dividing the Protectorate territory and from germanizing the Czech people in any way whatever, and to prohibit any such plans, a course which the defendant repudiated for many reasons, but chiefly because he had at heart the interests of the Czech nation, which had been entrusted to him, and its national character and unity. These assertions of the defendant are confirmed by the statements of the witness Von Holleben in the questionnaire answered by him,—Document Book 5, Document Neurath-156—of the witness Dr. Von Burgsdorff, as well as by the defendant’s letter to Baroness Ritter—quoted in her affidavit, Document Book 1, Document Neurath-3.

And the defendant has actually succeeded in carrying his point, as shown by Ziemke’s report on his conversation with Hitler, submitted by the Prosecution. As long as he was in Prague, no measures were taken to germanize the Czech people; the defendant even prohibited the discussion of this entire question, as shown by Document 3862-PS submitted by the Prosecution. Especially by preventing any division of the Protectorate territory and any more or less forcible Germanization of the Czech nation according to plan, the defendant has proved, in the most striking manner, the sincerity of his aims and endeavors to protect and preserve the Czech people, their national traits, and their national unity and character, in conformity with his principles and intentions as stated publicly in his article on the New Order in Central Europe, reproduced by the Frankfurter Zeitung of 30 March 1939—Document Book 5, Neurath-143—which set forth his line of conduct for the accomplishment of his task.

In this article he himself describes his task as a fine one, but at the same time a difficult one. How difficult it really was—how nearly impossible—was to become obvious, unfortunately, only too soon.

Chief among the reasons for this was that from the beginning not only were the full powers in the Protectorate not transferred to the Reich Protector, not only was he not given the sole executive and controlling position—quite apart from his subordination to Hitler—but also his competency and powers were not sufficiently clearly defined. It is true that Hitler’s decree of 16 March 1939, establishing the Protectorate, and the supplementary decree of 22 March 1939—Document Book 5, Documents Neurath-144 and 145—had specified that the Reich Protector was subordinate to the Führer and Reich Chancellor, that he was to be the sole representative of the Führer and the Reich Government, and was to receive his directives from the Führer and Reich Chancellor. But, at the same time, not only were certain administrative branches, such as the Armed Forces, communications, the postal, telegraphic and telephone services, removed from his control at the very beginning, but the Reich Government—that is, the Reich—had also been given the right to take under its own so-called “reichseigene” jurisdiction, in the administration of the Reich proper and independent of the Reich Protector, those administrative branches which actually were Reich Protector offices, and to establish, if necessary, Reich offices which did not fall within the Reich Protector’s competence. The Reich was also given the right to take measures necessary for security and order in the Protectorate over the head of the Reich Protector himself. Furthermore—and this is the most important point of all—every one of the many supreme Reich authorities—that is, not only the Reich Ministries but, for instance, the Reichsbank, the Four Year Plan, the Ministerial Council for Defense of the Reich, and others—was given the right to decree laws and organizational measures on its own authority, quite independently of the Reich Protector and, therefore, could interfere in these administrative branches which actually were to come within the jurisdiction of the Reich Protector without the Reich Protector having either the right or the possibility to protest against or prevent such decrees or measures should they be in opposition to his own decrees, measures, and policy. On the contrary, he was bound not only to publish them in the Protectorate if asked to do so but also to supervise their execution.

Therefore, the position of the Reich Protector was, to use an example by way of explanation, by no means the same as that of the British Viceroy in India; it was more like the position—though to outward appearances on a somewhat higher level—of a Reichsstatthalter or the Oberpräsident. Therefore, it was different from what had hitherto been understood constitutionally by a protectorate; nor could it be otherwise, because this so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia belonged, according to Article 1 of the above-mentioned decree of 16 March 1939,—and to this I wish to draw particular attention here—to the territory of the German Reich—that is to say, it was a part of the German Reich. And it only had a certain amount of independent authority, a limited autonomy within the Reich, so that the laws and regulations valid in the rest of the Reich territory were introduced into the Protectorate as a matter of course. It was quite obvious that this vague and loosely defined limitation of the powers and competence of the Reich Protector was bound to lead very soon to the greatest difficulties, difficulties not only in the way of a uniform policy, uniformly conceived and directed, but difficulties which prevented the defendant himself, as Reich Protector, from governing in the way he wished and from keeping to the course already taken, difficulties and reverses which became more and more acute in the course of time.

In view of all this, it follows that the responsibility of the defendant can only be judged against this background—that is, only by taking into account the power exerted by these many other authorities. He can never be held responsible for decrees, measures, and actions which he did not decree or order himself, but which were decreed without his co-operation, without his knowledge, even against his will, by authorities or other offices outside his sphere of power and influence—decrees, measures, and actions which he had neither the right nor the power to prevent, and for which he was at most an intermediary, a link in the chain.

This is especially relevant for the accusation of joint responsibility brought against him by the Czech Prosecution—Document USSR-60(a)—for all the actions of Hitler and of the Reich Government before and after the setting up of the Protectorate. The Prosecution take as basis for their assertion the fact that Herr Von Neurath, after having given up his post as Reich Foreign Minister, remained a member of the Reich Cabinet—whereas in fact this is incorrect. I have already proved elsewhere beyond all doubt that he was not a member of the Reich Cabinet, either as a Minister without Portfolio or as President of the Secret Cabinet Council; nor was he a member of the Reich Cabinet as Reich Protector. That, too, is certain, and has never been maintained by the Prosecution before this Court. Therewith, any joint responsibility of the defendant for any actions or measures which preceded or prepared the way for the setting up of the Protectorate is disproved. Also I have already proved elsewhere that his statement to the Czechoslovak Ambassador on 12 March 1938, which has been used by the Prosecution in support of their allegation that this prepared the way, was not false, not deceitful, and therefore was not an action which prepared the way for the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

If the Czech Prosecution further deduce from Article 5 of the above-mentioned decree of 16 March 1939 that, as Reich Protector, he was wholly responsible for everything that occurred in the Protectorate during the time he was in office—that is, from 17 March 1939 to 27 September 1941—then this conclusion also is wrong and factually incorrect, in view of the actual position with regard to the division of powers in the Protectorate, as explained above. There is no system of law in the world according to which one can charge a person with criminal responsibility for occurrences and acts by third persons, acts in which he did not participate or co-operate, or which even occurred against his will.

Thus he cannot be made responsible for the fixing of the rate of exchange between the Reichsmark and the Czech crown, because this rate had already been fixed when he took over office; neither had he any hand in fixing it, nor had he the power or right to change the rate of exchange—quite apart from the question, which we need not discuss here, of whether, as the Prosecution maintain without producing proofs, the rate of exchange really was detrimental to the Czech people or not. Incidentally, I need hardly say that even if this had been the case, it would not be a crime according to the Charter, and only as such would it be punishable.

Nor can he be made responsible for the setting up of the customs union and putting it into practice. This had already been laid down in Article 9 of the decree of 16 March 1939, which reads, “The Protectorate belongs to the customs area of the German Reich and is subject to its customs sovereignty.” This regulation was a natural consequence of the fact, which I have already stressed, that the Protectorate was a part of the territory of the German Reich. However, I would like to draw special attention here to the fact that the defendant, because he regarded the inclusion of the Protectorate into the customs area—the customs sovereignty of the Reich—as detrimental and harmful to Czech economy, managed to prevent this inclusion for a year and a half, until October 1940, in spite of all the pressure exerted by the Reich Finance Minister, which is clear proof that the defendant put the interests of the Czech people, who had been entrusted to him, above the interests of the German Reich. He had absolutely nothing to do with the economic measures for the alleged transfer of Czech banks and industrial undertakings nor with filling the key positions with Germans. Those measures were taken by other offices—especially by the Reichsbank and the Delegate for the Four Year Plan—behind his back and without his collaboration. These were merely the natural consequences of the fact that already in earlier days a very large amount of German capital had been invested in these banks and undertakings, and this capital increased after the occupation because the credits given by the other countries were withdrawn by them and were now granted by German firms.

Lastly, he had nothing whatever to do with the judiciary. This was exclusively under the control of the Reich Ministry of Justice. This alone set up the German courts, including summary courts-martial, and the prosecuting authority; it alone appointed judges and prosecutors. Herr Von Neurath himself had nothing to do with these appointments and still less with the jurisdiction of the courts, as is clearly shown by the ordinances and decrees by which they were set up, especially the decree concerning the practice of criminal jurisdiction, of 14 April 1939,—Document Book 5, Document Neurath-147.

Here again I must draw attention to the fact that neither the economic measures nor the setting up of German courts in the Protectorate, which was a part of the German Reich, can even remotely fall under the category of crimes enumerated by this Charter. And this applies equally to the alleged intrusions into the Czech educational system, the appointment of German school inspectors, measures with which the defendant has been charged in the Czech indictment. These measures also were not taken by him, but by the German Reich Ministry for Education. And the closing of a larger number of Czech secondary schools was not ordered by the defendant, nor by order of the German Reich Ministry, but by the Czech Government itself even if it did so at the suggestion of the defendant. This measure turned out to be a useful one, and was in the interests of the Czech youth and, therefore, of the Czech intelligentsia and people because it obviated the danger of the formation and growth of a large well-educated proletariat. After the incorporation of the Sudeten German territory into the German Reich in the autumn of 1938 this danger had become acute, for a very large number of Czech officials and members of the free professions had streamed into the territory of the Protectorate, with the result that because of the overcrowding of all professions and the diminution of the Protectorate territory owing to the separation of the Sudeten territory and Slovakia, the chances of finding employment for the pupils leaving the secondary schools were still further diminished.

In addition to this came the closing of universities in the middle of November 1939 upon personal order of Hitler. The Czech Government could not shut its eyes to the truth of these considerations of the defendant, and itself decreed the closing of quite a number of schools. The defendant did not exercise any pressure on the Czech Government. This has been proved by the evidence. The dissolution of Czech gymnastic and sport clubs and similar organizations, however, as well as the confiscation and the use of their assets, was ordered, without knowledge or participation of the defendant, by the Police, which was not under his jurisdiction. It is not even certain, by the way, whether this dissolution took place while the defendant was holding office or only after his departure. The dissolution of the Sokol, it must be said, was a real necessity for the protection of German interests, and moreover it was a measure which was taken to appease and reconcile the Czech nation, too; for the Sokol was, beyond doubt, the focus of all anti-German efforts and of the incitement of the Czech people toward an active resistance against everything which was German.

The preceding arguments show how manifold were the encroachments of other administrations and offices on the administration of the Protectorate, and, accordingly, the difficulties and resistance which arose against a uniform policy of the defendant. They were, however, by no means removed, but, on the contrary, aggravated by the decree of 1 September 1939 concerning the organization of administration and the German Security Police—Document Book 5, Document Neurath-149. This decree was issued, without previous consultation with the defendant, by the Ministerial Council for the Reich Defense. Its first part especially is obscure and misleading. True, it placed all German administration offices and their officials in the Protectorate under the control of the Reich Protector, but this subordination was a formal one only, that is, simply on paper and not an actual one in view of the administrative duties which were actually performed.

In this respect, things remained unchanged, as had already been indicated from the authority of the supreme Reich offices, according to Article 11 of the decree of 16 March 1939 and of the ordinance of 22 March 1939. The difference was only that from now on all administrations and offices, established or to be established by other offices, were formally attached to the Reich Protector’s office and took up their functions under the official designation of “The Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.” However, this by no means insured that such attached departments were put, in fact, under control of the Reich Protector himself—that is, the defendant—and that they had to receive from him their factual directives and orders to work according to his views and his directives. On the contrary, they received their instructions, just as before, from their original Reich offices, and had to observe and obey them. For instance, the so-called transportation department under the Reich Protector which had to deal with the transportation system—already taken out of the Reich Protector’s jurisdiction by ordinance of 16 March 1939—was controlled just as before by the Reich Ministry of Transportation and not by the Reich Protector, and received instructions not from him but from the Ministry in Berlin. And the same applied to other sectors, also including the purely internal administration.

According to this ordinance of 1 September 1939 of the Ministerial Council for the Reich Defense—and not, as the Czech prosecutor erroneously contends, by a decree of the defendant—a new plan was undertaken for the Protectorate territory with Oberlandratsbezirke and the Oberlandrat at their head, which official is, according to Paragraph 6 of the ordinance, the competent administrator for all administration branches of the internal administration and subordinate to the Reich Protector in an administrative sense. As such, he was invested with far-reaching authority, and also supervised the Czech authorities in the Protectorate, and this, to be sure, not by the order of the Reich Protector, but of the pertinent Reich Ministry in Berlin. This, too, was bound to result in very serious differences between the measures taken by those Oberlandräte on the basis of the directives issued to them by the Reich Ministry of the Interior in Berlin and the policy pursued by the defendant. To what extent the latter affected and influenced the Czech administrative offices does not have to be taken into consideration, since this decree, too, and its result, the control of the activities of the Czech administrative authorities by Reich German officials, is not a crime punishable according to the Charter of this Tribunal. This decree, too, is only a result of the fact that the Protectorate belonged to the German Reich.

On the other hand, this decree clarified the question of the position of the Police within the Protectorate territory, the political as well as the Security Police. This question was quite unsettled until the decree came into force and from the very first day of his activity had led to differences and difficulties between Herr Von Neurath and his State Secretary Frank.

At the time when Hitler charged the defendant with the office of the Reich Protector he had, according to the defendant’s testimony, assured him of far-reaching power, especially for protecting and fully supporting the defendant’s intended policy of conciliation and compromise in opposition to radical aims of the Party and other chauvinistic circles. The defendant deduced from this that as the representative of the Führer in the Protectorate he must and would have a decisive influence on the activity of the Police also. According to his own testimony he could not visualize at that time that a large part of the sphere of activity accepted by him became illusory from the start, since the Police had not been from the outset expressly subordinated to him. However, due to the fact that Frank—who had been made Higher SS and Police Führer in the Protectorate—was at the same time appointed to the position of State Secretary, and as such was subordinated to him, the defendant felt entitled to assume that Hitler’s intention was to centralize the police authority, if not in his own hands, at least under his jurisdiction—that is, in the hands of his State Secretary. In practice, however, this relation worked out entirely differently, since State Secretary Frank had not the slightest intention of letting his official chief, the defendant, have any authority whatsoever over the Police, and recognized only the jurisdiction and authority of Himmler, his superior, as SS and Police Leader, or of his Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt).

This actual state of affairs was established by law in the decree of 1 September 1939. For this, decree unequivocally states that the German Security Police, and thereby also the Gestapo, was not subordinated to the Reich Protector. This is already evident, in itself, from the fact that the decree completely separates the two departmental spheres—administration and Police—by dealing in Part 1 with the building up of a German administration in the Protectorate subordinated to the Reich Protector, and then dealing separately in Part II with the German Security Police. This Security Police is not under the jurisdiction of the Reich Protector, but, as was already reserved in Article V, Paragraph 5, of the decree of 16 March 1939, is taken over by the administration of the Reich itself—that is to say, it receives its orders directly from the Chief of Police in Berlin—that is, Himmler—and in part also from the Higher SS and Police Leader in Prague.

The second sentence of Paragraph 2 describes the relationship of the Police toward the Reich Protector. Its wording is as follows:

“The organs of the German Security Police are to collect and make use of the results of their investigations, in order to notify the Reich Protector and his subordinated offices about important events, and to keep him informed and offer suggestions.”

This signifies that the Reich Protector legally could not actually influence the activities of the Police in any form whatsoever. He could not oppose their orders, emanating from Berlin, prior to their execution; quite apart from the fact that he never got to see them, he had no authority whatsoever to oppose them. He had but one claim and that was to be subsequently informed by the Police about measures already taken by them and even that happened—as was proved by the evidence—only in the rarest cases. He himself did not have any right or any possibility whatsoever of issuing orders to the Police.

In consequence of this separation of powers, and in view of the totally different attitude of Frank toward the Czech people in contrast with Herr Von Neurath, the sharpest differences and contradictions were inevitably bound to crop up from the very beginning. For Frank, as a Sudeten German and one of the leaders of the Sudeten Germans, was filled with hatred and revenge against anything that was Czech. He did not want to hear of a reconciliation or an understanding between the German and the Czech peoples, and gave free rein to this anti-Czech attitude from the first day of his activity.

At first—that is to say, up to the time of the outbreak of the war—the activity of the Police was actually slight, so that these opposing viewpoints did not become so apparent. Herr Von Neurath could consequently assume that this opposition would gradually diminish, and that Frank would conform to his wishes and aims, and would show himself to be accommodating; and he, the defendant, did not yet recognize the necessity of exerting influence upon the Police. When, however, he finally realized from the gradually increasing activity of the Police and their excesses—that his expectations were not being fulfilled, he protested to Hitler orally and by letter, time and time again—as confirmed by the testimony of the witnesses Dr. Völckers and Von Holleben—and implored him to alter this ominous state of affairs, and to subordinate the Police to him, and to him only. However, all of Hitler’s promises and assurances proved to be false, and the subordination of the Police to Herr Von Neurath did not take place.

Yet, he did not want to relinquish the fight so soon, nor despair of the task he had undertaken. Now, more than ever, he wanted to try to impose his ideas and policy and, should he not be successful in major as well as in minor issues, at least try to soften the measures taken by the Police. For this purpose he had the most detailed accounts given to him personally in all cases of measures and action taken by the Police, such as arrests and other excesses, insofar as he received information about them mostly from Czech sources. Wherever he could, he exerted his influence for the release of arrested persons. This is evident from the testimony of all witnesses produced by me, above all, from the testimony of Dr. Völckers who, as head of the defendant’s office, was continually engaged in receiving such complaints. This is moreover evident from documents submitted by the Prosecution themselves, such as the notes of the defendant about his conference with President Hacha of 26 March 1940—Appendix 5 to Supplement Number 1, USSR-60—and even from the testimony of Bienert—who himself was arrested by the Police but released in a very short time upon the intervention of the defendant.

With the one exception of the testimony of Frank of 7 March 1946, submitted during the hearing of evidence, the testimony of all witnesses corresponds on the question of responsibility of the defendant for the measures taken by the Police. Frank’s testimony, however, is in direct contradiction to his own earlier testimony. At his interrogation on 30 May 1945—Document Book 5, Document Neurath-153—Frank said the following, and I quote:

“The Police, however, was not under the control of the offices of the Reich Protector.... Both Gestapo and Security Police received their directions and orders directly from the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin.”

Frank’s statement of 5 May 1945 concerning the student riots—Document Book 5, Document Neurath-152—is also typical of the manner in which the Police received its instructions directly from Berlin, over the head of the Reich Protector. Frank speaks therein of the report on the first demonstrations, which he had sent to Berlin, and in which he had asked for instructions; he had received them by return mail from the Führer’s headquarters through the Security Police in Prague, to which office they had been sent by Berlin directly and he, Frank, received them from there. There is no mention whatever of the person or even of the office of the Reich Protector during the entire proceedings; it is an internal affair of the Police involving the Higher SS and Police Leader Frank.

Because of the importance of this point, I would like to refer explicitly to the statements, made by the witnesses Von Burgsdorff and Völckers, both of whom were, on the basis of their official position, thoroughly conversant with this question during the entire time the defendant was in office. Burgsdorff testified that the Police was under Frank, who received his orders directly from Himmler. Völckers said that the defendant had no influence on Frank’s activities, and thereby on the Police. In practice, from the very start, the Police and, therefore, also State Secretary Frank took their measures independently of the defendant. This was legally confirmed later through the ordinance of 1 September 1939. All witnesses, also in their written testimonies, testify that the relations between the defendant and Frank had been as bad as can be imagined.

It is entirely impossible in such a state of affairs that the Chief of the SD and the Security Police should have been active as political adviser to the defendant. The defendant cannot at all remember a decree of May 1939 about the appointment of this man, to which reference is made in the document by the Chief of Security Police—Document Number USSR-487. In any case, according to his definite statement, he never performed any duties. The document, USSR-487, therefore, does not appear to be conclusive as evidence. The copy handed to me by the Prosecution is dated 21 July 1943. That alone proves that the appointment of the SD leader, if it occurred at all, did not take place during the defendant’s entire time in office. Aside from the date, however, the “reference” of the latter shows that this appointment does not at all concern a political adviser to the Reich Protector himself, but to the State Secretary for Security Matters—that is, Frank. The address “Der Herr Reichsprotektor” is not to be understood to mean the person, but rather the office. In German official circles it was customary to speak of the “Herr” Reichsminister, et cetera, even though he was not meant personally, but some department of his office. It is entirely credible and probable that the SD leader was appointed political adviser to the State Secretary, who at the same time was State Secretary to the office of the defendant and independent State Secretary for Security Matters.

Precisely from the so-called “warning,” given at the end of August 1939, with which the Prosecution charged my client, it can be seen how he himself felt about the ways and means of easing the minds of the population and of preventing acts of violence and insubordination on their part. According to his sworn testimony, the defendant thereby intended to discourage the population from committing acts of violence and especially to prevent acts of sabotage—which were to be expected in this time of high political tension before the war—thus preventing harsh police or legal measures which would only serve to embitter the population even more. It is doubtless more humane to issue such a warning, and thereby prevent such crimes, rather than allow crimes to be committed without previous warning and afterward mete out severe punishment. The fact that acts of sabotage, if it was impossible to prevent them, had to be severely punished in those times would certainly have been acknowledged also in any other country and taken for granted. As the defendant testified, the warning fulfilled its purpose. No special punishments were threatened or fixed; it contained no special threats of punishment whatever, but referred, as the wording proves, to criminal law already in force.

The sentence, that the responsibility for all acts of sabotage affected not only the culprit but the entire Czech population, is, of course, concerned only with the moral responsibility and not the penal one, as was also confirmed by the defendant. It means that in the case of repeated serious acts of sabotage, general measures would be taken in the respective territories, as for example, earlier curfew, ban on going out, or general stoppage of traffic or electric current, under which the entire population would have to suffer. A responsibility in the penal sense would have had to be formulated much more concretely. It was expressly mentioned at the beginning of the proclamation that anyone who committed the cited crimes thereby proved himself to be an enemy of the Reich and had to be punished accordingly. This sentence especially shows that the penal treatment of such sabotage acts was to be applied individually. At that time, nobody in Prague, not even the Chief of Police, would have thought of the idea of decreeing collective punishments or even, as the Prosecution asserted without any evidence whatever, of introducing the hostage system. In this connection, I also wish to refer to the statement made by the witness Von Holleben, Document Book 5, Document Neurath-158, in which he states, “Neurath, therefore, always refused to make a person responsible for acts committed by somebody else.”

From all that has been said previously, we see that the Defendant Von Neurath cannot be made responsible for the arrests made at the time of the occupation of the Czech territory, nor for the arrests made at the outbreak of the war of, as the Prosecution assert, 8,000 prominent Czechs sent to concentration camps or executed as hostages. These arrests, according to the defendant’s testimony, with which Frank’s testimony agrees, were made on direct order from Berlin without knowledge of the defendant nor even of Frank himself. Bienert’s contradictory testimony presented by the Prosecution is factually incorrect, and is based on completely illogical and false deductions. His deduction that this entire action was under the defendant’s direction because his order for Bienert’s release had been issued only 4 hours after his arrest is without any logic and is objectively wrong.

Finally, on the basis of the evidence, it is irrefutable that the defendant is also not responsible for the order to shoot 9 students and to arrest approximately 1,200 students during the night from 16 to 17 November 1939; that these measures, rightly called terror actions, had been ordered during his absence from Prague, and without his knowledge, by Hitler personally and had been carried out on Hitler’s direct order by Frank; and that also the proclamation of 17 November 1939 announcing it was neither issued nor signed by him, that on the contrary his name under it had been misused. It is proved by the testimony of the defendant himself and by that of the witness Dr. Völckers, who accompanied the defendant on his trip to Berlin on 16 November 1939, the day after the student riots, and had returned from Berlin to Prague with him on the very afternoon of 17 November; furthermore by the written testimony of Herr Von Holleben, and finally by the affidavit of the defendant’s secretary, Fräulein Friedrich—Document Book 5, Document Neurath-159—and of the Baroness Ritter, that the defendant, during the night of 16 to 17 November, when the shootings and arrests took place, was not in Prague but in Berlin, and the publication of these incidents was already posted on the house walls of Prague when the defendant returned to that city. The defendant is not in the least responsible for these atrocities. The order for them, as well as the simultaneous order for the closing of the universities, had, on the contrary, been given directly to Frank by Hitler in Berlin, and this, as the witness Völckers expressly affirms, in the absence and without the knowledge of the defendant.

The value, in consideration of this, which may be ascribed to Dr. Havelka’s testimony, presented by the Prosecution, is self-evident. The credibility of this witness Havelka, as well as of all the other Czech testimony submitted by the Prosecution, must in general be examined with the very greatest caution. It is subject, from the first, to two very serious objections. First, all these witnesses are members of the former autonomous Czech Government—that is, the so-called collaborationists, who are in jail today for this reason and are awaiting their sentence. It is humanly quite understandable if today they see in a different light the conditions then prevailing, judge them differently from what they really were, and involuntarily confuse the terrible things which happened after Herr Von Neurath had left Prague with the events while he was there. This results from a haziness of their memory. We must not overlook the fact that, as is quite natural, they hope by incriminating Herr Von Neurath to clear themselves.

Added to this is the fact, which is more important still, that they had no knowledge whatsoever and could not have had any of the internal, factual, and legal conditions and competences within the office of the Reich Protector, and that they therefore are not at all able to judge to what extent the defendant himself was really the man who issued the individual decrees and orders or brought them about. One example shows this very clearly. In the witness Kalfus’ testimony, it is alleged that the defendant was responsible for the customs union between the Protectorate and the German Reich. In this respect, I wish to refer only to the fact that already, in Hitler’s decree of 16 March 1939, it had been expressly announced that the Protectorate belonged to the customs district of the Reich. The witness Bienert further asserts that it was Herr Von Neurath who subordinated to the Germans the political administration of Bohemia and Moravia, which means state as well as communal administration. This is, however, also objectively wrong. As I have already proved, this subordination was ordered by the decree of 1 September 1939, which was not issued by the defendant but by the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich. These examples should suffice to show how little credibility can be attached to all these testimonies, and how little the witnesses were informed about the actual conditions of organization and authority within the office of the Reich Protector. The often repeated assertion of the witnesses that the arrests and many other measures of force by the Gestapo against the Czech population were done on the order or instruction of the defendant personally is, for example, either a deliberate falsehood or proof of their ignorance of even the published official decrees announced in the Czech official gazette. For the Gestapo, as I have already proved, was not at all under the jurisdiction of the defendant. The conclusions to be drawn from this, as to the credibility of all the witnesses, are self-evident. It is obvious that in contrast thereto the sworn testimony of the defendant and of the witnesses presented by me, together with the decrees submitted pertaining thereto, deserve far more credibility.

The allegation of the Czech indictment, and of the testimony on which it is based, that Herr Von Neurath, in the middle of November 1939, ordered the closing of the universities has thus been disproved as objectively wrong. In fact, the closing of the universities took place on the express order of Hitler. As the evidence has shown beyond any doubt, the defendant immediately protested to Hitler and succeeded in obtaining his promise to reopen the universities after one year instead of only after three years. The defendant cannot be blamed for the fact that Hitler did not keep his promise. His efforts for the revocation of the closing of the universities prove, however, how much he was interested in maintaining the educational standard and the intellectual classes of the Czech nation.

The defendant did whatever he could for the Czech nation as a whole and for the individual. This applies especially to the harmful activity of the Police and the Gestapo, as far as he received information about it. According to his own testimony, which is confirmed by that of the witness Dr. Völckers, immediately after the arrest of the students in the middle of November 1939, he used all the influence at his command for their release, and as we have heard here, not only out of his own mouth but also from Dr. Völckers, he succeeded in obtaining the release of almost all the students by the time he left Prague on 27 September 1941. And he worked in the same way continuously for the release of about 8,000 prominent Czechs who had been arrested at the beginning of the war. As proved by his own testimony under oath, these arrests were ordered by Berlin directly and not by the defendant, as the Czech witnesses Bienert, Krejci, and Havelka untruthfully maintain, nor even by Frank or by any other Higher SS or Police Leader in the Protectorate. Moreover, it is also due to the defendant’s personal intervention that in 1941 the order Hitler issued at Frank’s and Himmler’s instigation for the removal and arrest of the then Czech Prime Minister General Elias was rescinded. Only after he had left was Elias arrested by Heydrich and later condemned to death by the People’s Court.

Definitely wrong is the allegation of the Czech witness Bienert that the defendant had arranged for the transportation of Czech workers into the Reich—that is, that he deported Czech workers by force into Germany. It is, on the contrary, true that, during the whole term of office of the defendant, not a single Czech worker was deported by force to Germany. Until 27 September 1941, no compulsory deportation of labor had yet taken place in any territory occupied by Germany. That happened only later. But many Czech workers voluntarily and gladly went to the Reich and accepted jobs there because of the fixed exchange rate of the Reichsmark and the higher wages; they earned much more there than in Prague and could send a great part of their earnings to their relatives in the Protectorate.

If the Czech Prosecution want further to charge the defendant with the sending by the Gestapo of arrested persons to concentration camps, and with the ill-treatment of those individuals there, it must be stated decidedly that until 27 September 1941, the end of the official activity of the defendant in the Protectorate, not a single concentration camp existed in the Protectorate. They were all established only after his departure, under his successor. The decree, too, concerning protective and preventive custody, with which the Czech Prosecution apparently wish to charge him also, was issued only after his departure, on 9 March 1942 as shown by the copy annexed to the Czech report, Document USSR-60.

Lastly, with regard to the charges of the Indictment concerning the alleged measures taken by the defendant against the Jews, in this point too the representation of the Indictment does not correspond to the facts, and is shown to be erroneous on closer examination of the documents submitted by the Prosecution themselves. Of the total of 21 decrees contained in the British Document Book Number 12b, only 4 were signed by the defendant himself; 6 were issued directly by the Reich Ministry, 10 by State Secretary Frank,—or his direct subordinate Dr. Von Burgsdorff—and one by the Czech State President Hacha.

The first decree signed by Herr Von Neurath himself on 21 June 1939, which contained nothing but the introduction of regulations valid for the entire German Reich concerning treatment of Jewish property in the Protectorate—which since 16 March 1939 was also a part of the German Reich—had been laid down for the defendant by Berlin when he assumed office. The fact, however, that it was published on 21 June 1939, 3 months later, proves the correctness of his statement, that he wanted to give the Jews time to prepare themselves for the introduction of the Jewish legislation as in force throughout the Reich. Its postponement to that day was done expressly in the interest of the Jews.

The second decree issued by the defendant himself on 16 September 1940 merely prescribed an obligation to declare securities—that is, mortgages, which were Jewish property—and corresponded to the various decrees of the same or similar kind issued in the German Reich, too, and were applicable to all German nationals.

The third decree, issued and signed by himself, of 5 March 1940, as well as the fourth of 14 September 1940, as quite clearly shown by their contents, aimed at making possible and facilitating Jewish emigration, which the course of events in the Reich had made inevitable. Therefore both decrees had been issued in the very interests of the Jews themselves, and prove that the defendant had no anti-Semitic views.

All the documents submitted by me which refer to this matter, among others the newspaper report concerning the boycott of the Jews in the spring of 1933—Document Book 1, Document Neurath-9—and the submitted depositions of witnesses, show that he did not approve of the measures taken against the Jews, particularly measures of violence, but opposed them. As shown especially by the deposition of the witness Dr. Koepke, such measures would have been in contradiction with his Christian and humane attitude and ideology. It is confirmed that until his departure from Prague not a single synagogue had been closed, and that no religious restrictions against the Jews had been decreed. No particular proof is needed to show that the defendant cannot be made responsible for the six ordinances issued by the Reich Ministry of the Interior. But neither does he bear any responsibility for the decrees signed by Frank and Herr Von Burgsdorff, in view of the independent position of State Secretary Frank and the competence of the Police concerning all Jewish matters, which I have described. In opposition to the assertion of the Indictment, it must be particularly emphasized that, according to his own sworn deposition, no persecution of the Jews occurred during his entire tenure of office.

His afore-mentioned humane and Christian attitude and ideology make the assertions in the Czech report of 4 September 1945 (Document 998-PS), concerning the alleged hostility of the defendant to the Church, appear just as unlikely. It is true that the Czech indictment of 14 November 1945 (Document USSR-60) does not make this report an object of an accusation; but, nevertheless, I should like to speak about it briefly.

It is proved by evidence that the relations between Herr Von Neurath and the Archbishop of Prague were very good, even friendly, and that the latter explicitly thanked the defendant for his support of the churches. This would certainly not have been the case if he had been opposed to the Church or if he had suppressed the churches, their organizations and clergy, or persecuted them in any other way. It is certainly not an extraordinary occurrence that there may have been differences in official matters, as obviously was the case according to the letter of the Archbishop submitted by the Prosecution; State and Church always have had differences with one another, at all times and in all countries. But this cannot under any circumstances be construed as implying, on the defendant’s side, a policy opposing the Church. It may be that members of the clergy were arrested; but, in the first place, such arrests were ordered not by the defendant, but by the Police, which was not under his control, and secondly—if the defendant knew of them at all—not on account of any church activity, but because of political intrigue. Neither is it clear from the mentioned Czech report whether the alleged actions against the Church, its organizations and clergy, actually took place during the defendant’s tenure of office. The evidence has shown that he did not decree any antiecclesiastical or antireligious measures. Pilgrimages to the Czech religious shrines, for example, were expressly permitted by him.

At this point I would also like to emphasize that the defendant was not guilty of injuring Czech national feeling in any way. Contrary to the assertion of the Prosecution, he did not destroy or close any Masaryk houses as the Prosecution would like to charge against him. As far as the closing of any Masaryk houses is concerned, the SS and the Police, which were not under his jurisdiction, are exclusively responsible. His attitude toward the Czech national feeling is best illustrated by the fact that he especially permitted the customary deposition of wreaths at the Masaryk monuments.

Nor did the defendant take measures hostile to culture, in spite of all efforts made in that direction by radical elements. Czech theater life was not touched and remained completely free, as well as Czech literature, which was not suppressed or encroached upon in any way, with the exception, of course, that anything of an anti-German or inciting character was prohibited. Also the press—which, incidentally, was not controlled or censured by him, but by the Reich Ministry for Propaganda—was not submitted to any other limitations than the German press, since the defendant’s efforts altogether were directed toward conserving and encouraging Czech cultural life in its characteristic quality and independence.

I believe it is not necessary for me to go still further into details about that subject, and that I can confine myself to referring to the defendant’s own statements and the statements of the German witnesses about this. The testimony of these witnesses shows clearly what difficulties and opposition on the part of certain radical circles and authorities, not least on the part of his own State Secretary Frank, he had to contend with in his general policy toward the Czech people.

If one wants to summarize his official activities, one may say that his entire life in Prague was one long struggle: A struggle against the forces inspired and led by Himmler; a struggle which was all the more difficult because he did not actually possess full powers in the Protectorate, and because the offices and authorities which were the most important and influential in the field of home politics—the entire Police and the Gestapo—were not subordinate to him. Nevertheless, he did not abandon this struggle, and never grew tired of protesting to Hitler again and again and demanding redress—in many cases successfully; in others, not. He fought up to the very end; he did not allow failures to discourage him, and he remained faithful to his policy of reconciliation and compromise, of pacification and conservation of the Czech people and their national characteristics. And when here again he was forced to recognize, in the autumn of 1941, that to continue his fight was hopeless—that Himmler’s influence on Hitler was greater than his own, and that Hitler had now decided to change over to a policy of force and terror, and to send Heydrich, who was known as a bloodhound, to Prague for this purpose, he immediately, just as in the winter of 1937-38 as Foreign Minister, took the consequences, resigned his post, left Prague, and retired to private life for good.

THE PRESIDENT: Perhaps this would be a convenient time to recess.

[A recess was taken.]

THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will sit in open session on Saturday morning until 1 o’clock.

DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: What impression this resignation created on the Czech people, even the circles most hostile to Germany, and what interpretation was put on it appears, with a clarity that can hardly be surpassed, from the Czech report—Document USSR-60—which was truly not dictated by pro-German sentiments or love for my client, and which characterized this departure of my client as a “gehöriger Schlag” in the German text—“a heavy blow” in the English text—thereby actually disavowing its own accusations against Herr Von Neurath. And indeed I think I have proved that, while discharging the duties of his office, the defendant did not personally become guilty of a single crime against humanity punishable under the Charter of this Tribunal; and only such crime could, after all, be considered here.

And now the basic question of this Trial arises: Did the defendant become guilty—that is, guilty in a manner punishable under the Charter—of supporting or aiding Hitler and his accomplices in the commission of their crimes by accepting the office of Reich Protector and by keeping it, in spite of the war launched by Hitler a few months after his assumption of this office, and in spite of the events in November 1939, and several other occurrences? The Prosecution answer this question in the affirmative. But can an objective impartial judgment of matters really lead to this affirmative answer?

One thing should be absolutely certain after what we have heard here from the defendant himself, from the witnesses whom I questioned on the subject, and from the affidavits which I presented. Herr Von Neurath was not moved by external or material reasons to enter and remain in Hitler’s Government as Foreign Minister. Such reasons were similarly not responsible for his acceptance of the post of Reich Protector. This is already proved by the fact that he declined the donation which Hitler intended to present to him on his seventieth birthday in 1943, but finding this not practicable, he had this donation in his bank, as I have proved on the basis of the letter from his bank—Document Book 5, Documents Neurath-160 and 161—and did not touch one penny of it. And how little the supposedly illustrious position of the Reich Protector attracted or even suited him is clearly evident from his letter of 14 October 1939 to the witness Dr. Koepke—Document Book 5, Document Neurath-150, in which he compares it to a prison.

In both cases, as has been proved not only by the defendant’s own statements but also by the statements of all the witnesses and documents which I have introduced, the motive or the reason for the acceptance of and perseverance in his position was not, by any means, his approval of the ideologies of the Nazi regime with all its methods and his wish to support them, but, on the contrary, his high ethical and moral convictions which sprang from his deep sense of responsibility, as a human being and as a statesman, toward his people. Since he was not in the position and had not the power to remove Hitler and the Nazi regime, he considered it his duty, at least in a limited way within the compass and limits of his power and in the sphere entrusted to his direction, to fight the Nazi tendencies he despised and to prevent their materialization as far as his own strength permitted. Can one, I ask, really reproach Herr Von Neurath for doing this; can one condemn him, because the task he had assumed with a sense of moral duty and a consciousness of responsibility was beyond his strength, and he failed in it?

May I ask you, Your Honors, to free yourselves of all juridical and political prejudices, of the retrospective view of things with its unreliable deductions, and to penetrate into the soul of this man—his world of thoughts and his conception of life.

Brought up in a home inspired by Christian, humane, and respectable ideas, and also by a sense of responsibility toward the German people, he had grown up and reached the age of 60 in a civil service career under the various governments—first under the imperial government, then under the changing governments of the Republic. Without paying attention to their political trends, without asking whether they were conservative, democratic, or social democratic, he had served them, and had carried out the tasks assigned to him in his sphere of work. As a diplomat—as an official of the Reich’s Foreign Service—the field of internal politics was completely remote to him. He considered it his sole duty to serve his people as such, regardless of the government in office and its inner political attitude.

And thus, much against his personal wishes, upon Hindenburg’s call in the hour of distress, he took over the Foreign Ministry and thereby entered the Government of the Reich and remained in it also after Hitler was appointed, not as the representative of any particular political party, but as Hindenburg’s special confidant in the field of foreign politics. He was the guarantor of the Reich’s peace policy, the rocher de bronze in this field. His entire education, his sense of responsibility toward his people, would not permit him to do anything else than remain at his post after he had been drawn into the whirl and dynamics of the National Socialist movement, and then necessarily saw how this Movement was turning in a direction and making use of means which he, too, could only condemn.

But just as their sense of responsibility and duty to their own people had driven other respectable and patriotic Germans to the decision to remove Hitler and the Nazi regime by force, so it was with the defendant, whose sense of responsibility and duty, not only toward himself but also toward his people, forced him to set aside his personal abhorrence of the immorality of this regime and, by remaining in office and continuing to conduct its affairs according to his own principles, to fight actively against this immorality, and thus at least keep it away from the department under his control and protect his German people from this immorality of the Nazi regime and its consequences—namely, war—as long as he was able to do this.

And then, a year and a half after his resignation, when the call came to him again to accept a position—this time as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia—and Hitler declared to him that he had expressly selected him for this position because he considered him the only suitable person to carry out his intended policy of real reconciliation between the Czech people and the new conditions and the German people, the very same sense of duty and responsibility forced him to follow this call. For was it not natural for him to deduce from the fact that Hitler—in spite of knowing his opposition to the National Socialist regime, its policies and methods—desired to entrust him with this task, that Hitler really and honestly meant to effect a reconciliation and appeasement with the Czech people? Here he was confronted with a task, the achievement of which would not only be of the highest benefit to his own but also a foreign people, a task which not only served for the reconciliation of two nations but also for the ideal of humanity and Christian brotherly love, as well as for the protection of the Czech people from the pernicious methods of the Nazi regime.

And now I ask: Is it not at least just as moral and ethical to pledge one’s self and one’s person for such a goal, to work actively—if only to a limited extent—against this regime which one has recognized and repudiated as immoral and corrupt through an apparent collaboration, if only outwardly appearing as such, to prevent the use of the methods of this system and thereby save innocent people from misery and death, as it is to withdraw grumbling out of personal aversion and look on inactively while this regime rages against humanity without restraint?

Not everyone has an aggressive character, is a revolutionary who can use violence against the hated system and its leaders. And do not forget, Your Honors, that at that time under Hitler’s autocratic regime there were only these two possibilities to work really actively and positively against the Nazi regime and its terror. Under this regime there were not the thousand and one possibilities of fighting a hated and accursed government, as is the case in free democratic countries with free and independently elected parliaments. In Hitler Germany any form of active or even public opposition only meant a completely useless sacrifice. And therefore I beg you, Your Honors, in judging these matters and in answering my question, to free yourselves from the democratic conditions and circumstances which you take so much for granted, but which are completely incomparable with the conditions in Germany under Hitler at that time—the lack of consideration of which fact has already caused much disaster up to very recent times.

And did not the Defendant Von Neurath save the freedom and lives of thousands of people, whose freedom and lives would have been irretrievably lost without him, by his very acceptance of the office of the Reich Protector, and by remaining in it despite the fact that he had to realize that through no fault of his, he could not fulfill the task connected with this office, that he did not have at his disposal the necessary means for its accomplishment, but yet, in spite of all this, continuing his fight against the terror of the Nazi regime? Is this not worth a thousand times more; is it not much more moral and ethical than if he had retired immediately, full of abhorrence and moral indignation?

I do not hesitate to answer this question, just as my first question, in the affirmative, and to express my conviction that no one can condemn me for this. Or shall a Sophoclean tragedy be unfolded before us here in the fate of the defendant, in which a man becomes guilty, due to no fault of his own, because he obeyed his conscience and his sense of responsibility?

Your Honors, I believe I have shown and proved by my preceding statements that not a single one of the actions with which the Prosecution have accused my client is criminal within the meaning of the Charter, and that not one of these actions by the defendant was aimed intentionally at committing a crime within the meaning of the Charter of this High Tribunal, so that no criminal action exists, either objectively or subjectively. But I believe I have shown also, over and above this, that all my client’s actions as a whole had just the opposite purpose of what the Prosecution claim they did—namely, not the perpetration, but the prevention of just such actions as the Charter defines as punishable crimes, whether crimes of planning, preparation, or the waging of aggressive wars, be they crimes of war or crimes against humanity.

But there still remains one thing for me to do: to draw the conclusion from all that as to how impossible, indeed, how paradoxical it would be to apply the principles of the conspiracy with regard to my client—his participation in it from the very outset, which sanctions or will sanction the preparatory or any other actions in this respect by the remaining members for attaining this criminal aim.

But when, as the Prosecution are deliberately doing, one regards approval of the criminal objective, and all preparatory actions for its achievement by each one of the other members in their official capacity, as proved in international law, merely by the fact of the assumption of or remaining in an office in spite of knowing the criminal aims, and from this fact alone deduces a criminal coresponsibility on the part of each individual, the consequence inexorably follows with compelling logic that the application of the principle of coresponsibility due to the assumption of an office or simply remaining in it, without consideration of whatever decent and ethical reasons may have caused one to do so, calls for the punishment of one who not only disapproves of these criminal intentions, plans, and actions of the others but even opposed them actively, and who only accepted his appointment or remained in his position for this reason, as was the case with the Defendant Von Neurath.

In a court which not only represents justice—the legal and ethical conscience of all civilized nations on earth—but is also going to show the way to universal peace to the coming generations, I need not prove to you, Your Honors, that such a result is contrary to not only every natural but also to every legal sense of justice and ideas of justice; that it is contrary to that which this High Tribunal have to strive for and are striving for; that it is contrary to every moral and ethical postulate. This task can only be fulfilled if you show mankind once more that any generalization, and leveling, any treatment, and thus also any judgment and conviction of people and of their activities only on the basis of corporative—I could say, gregarious—concepts, and not on the personality, the will, and the designs of the individual, is evil. Such treatment denies the holiness of the individual and in the long run leads inevitably to the adoration of mere force. But this adoration of force, this belief in force, was precisely the underlying cause of the terrible events which once more have been unfolded before us here.

You can only then do justice to and fulfill your double task—to punish where chastisement should be applied according to divine and human law, and, at the same time, to show mankind the way to international peace—if by your sentence you take away from mankind the belief in force and give back, instead of this belief, to all nations on earth, and not least of all to the German nation, the belief in and the respect for the holiness of the individual, whom the Lord once created in his image.

Fully convinced of the truth of this conception, I now confidently place the fate of my client, the Defendant Baron von Neurath, in your hands!

THE PRESIDENT: I now call on Dr. Fritz on behalf of the Defendant Fritzsche.

DR. HEINZ FRITZ (Counsel for Defendant Fritzsche): Mr. President, the result of the evidence in the case of Fritzsche is a relatively clear one.

Although I am one of the last to plead, a close examination of legal problems cannot be avoided. Above all, these problems arise from the fact that Fritzsche was characterized by the Prosecution, in a particularly striking manner, as an accomplice. However, at first I must examine what position Fritzsche had in the Propaganda Ministry, and what part he played in the German propaganda in general. It is these facts which ought to be conclusive in determining what part he supposedly played in the alleged conspiracy.

At the beginning of the Trial, Mr. Albrecht submitted as evidence the organizational structure of the Government of the Third Reich, as of March 1945, in the form of a diagram. Mr. Albrecht admitted himself that Fritzsche’s name did not appear in it in the position of one of the main leaders of the Propaganda Ministry. It is true, he added, that his importance had been greater than one would be led to think from his position as shown on this diagram. He closed his statement by saying that evidence to this effect would be submitted to the Tribunal (Session of 21 November 1945). Has this been done, and was the hearing of evidence really able to prove that Fritzsche had greater importance?

At the session of 28 February 1946, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe introduced as evidence a “compilation of the elements of guilt” which, in a particularly impressive manner, demonstrates in how far the individual defendants are connected with the facts of which they are supposed to be guilty in the opinion of the Prosecution. The classification of the individual defendants follows from the table which is attached to this compilation as Appendix A. The Tribunal will have noticed that the Defendant Fritzsche is the only one not to appear on this table at all. This follows from the fact that he does not belong to any of the organizations which are to be declared criminal here.

A look at the organizational plan of the Propaganda Ministry, which was submitted in Brief E by the Prosecution (Session of 23 January 1946), also shows clearly that Fritzsche, even in his last position as Ministerial Director and Chief of the Broadcasting Division, was only one of 12 officials of the same rank. Such a position in itself excludes a priori the assumption that he could have determined the principles of policy, the principles of news presentation, and the principles of what may or may not become known to Germany and the world. It is true, Captain Sprecher pointed out—evidently in order to increase Fritzsche’s importance—that the Chief of the German Press Division held a unique position, but also did not pass over the fact in silence that he had predecessors and successors in this allegedly unique office.

When, in November 1942, Fritzsche was appointed Chief of the Broadcasting Division by Goebbels, he did not obtain a higher position in the civil service hierarchy as a result. His activity was purely administrative. It concerned technical organizational questions. In his affidavit of 7 January 1946 my client describes the administrative work connected with it. He also lists his numerous predecessors. Did it occur to anybody to indict these other persons also as major war criminals, or to call them supreme commanders of a propaganda instrument? Since this is not the case, the conclusion must probably be drawn that it was not Fritzsche’s official position which formed the basis for the Indictment.

Justice Jackson, too, pointed out (Session of 28 February 1946) that within the framework of the organizations under indictment here not all administrative civil service employees and division chiefs or state officials have been included as a whole; only the Reich Cabinet was named. Therefore, it can also not be imputed to Fritzsche—as is allegedly possible in the case of the members of the organizations—that from his position alone, and from the close connection of the individual members of the organizations they must necessarily have known, and fully and clearly understood the plans of the alleged conspiracy by virtue of their membership alone.

During Fritzsche’s cross-examination, an attempt was also made by the Russian Prosecution to magnify Fritzsche’s position. They introduced three protocols as evidence—namely, the interrogatories of the witnesses Schörner (Document USSR-472), Voss (USSR-471), and Stahel (USSR-473). But these documents cannot be considered as evidence. These depositions were used only to confront the defendant with isolated passages from them. Because of this limitation, I was able to dispense with the cross-examination of the three persons who signed these protocols. But Fritzsche did not fail to express his opinion on these passages, which were held up to him while he was being questioned on the witness stand.

In this connection I have to point to only one more thing: Not one of these three persons has even claimed to have had any insight into the internal organization of the Propaganda Ministry. None of the three depositions contains any definite statement of Fritzsche. On the contrary, these depositions contain mere judgments, judgments which we do not want to have from witnesses, especially not in a case where they cannot furnish any kind of substantial facts. For this reason alone, any value as evidence must be denied them. But aside from that aspect, they represent completely wrong judgments. They can by no means be derived from Fritzsche’s own statements which were submitted in this Trial by the Prosecution—namely from his radio addresses. If evidence against the Defendant Fritzsche bearing out these judgments could have been submitted, then, in view of the fact that the Prosecution could have obtained all of his radio addresses it would have been more to the point to submit here these statements made by him which would have enabled the Tribunal to form their own judgment. The transcripts of the interrogations contain only the summarizing statement that Fritzsche was Goebbels’ “deputy.” I confronted the witness Von Schirrmeister with this assertion, and he termed it as pure nonsense. Fritzsche had to say the same on the witness stand. There can be no doubt that the concurring testimony of both witnesses is correct. Finally, there are still hundreds of others who formerly worked in this Ministry who could verify the truthfulness of these statements from their own knowledge. I can state, therefore, that the attempt at magnifying Fritzsche’s positions, contrary to the facts given in the organizational chart of the Propaganda Ministry as submitted by Mr. Albrecht, is a complete failure.

Beyond that, the hearing of evidence had shown that Fritzsche was not the creator of the great control apparatus for the German press, as was furthermore claimed by the Prosecution (Session of 23 January 1946). On the contrary, it was Dr. Goebbels and other associates of his. Fritzsche could not have been the creator because of the time element alone. In the first place, for years he had merely been an employee. Then he became a consultant—Referent—and it was only since the winter of 1938-39 that he was one of the 12 division chiefs of the Ministry. When he became Chief of the German Press Division, the policy of the press was determined by Reich Press Chief Dr. Dietrich. As has been said already, he became Chief of the Broadcasting Division only in November 1942 and did not create anything fundamentally new there. Neither Goebbels nor Dietrich ever allowed the control of the German press and radio to be taken out of his hands. With regard to the details I wish to refer to the testimony of the witness Von Schirrmeister.

The fact that Fritzsche could have been neither the creator of the Press Division nor a leader of the German propaganda, as far as it emanated officially from the Ministry, is also shown by the other numerous statements both by Fritzsche, when questioned about it on the witness stand, and by the witness Von Schirrmeister. During his entire activity, Fritzsche actually never possessed any authority to give orders in these fields and could not have had it, owing to his rank in civil service, which would justify his being called the creator or leader of the press and radio in the Third Reich. On the contrary, between Dr. Goebbels, Dr. Dietrich, and himself, there were quite a number of other higher intermediary offices. In this connection I can also refer to what Lieutenant Meltzer stated in general about the importance of a state secretary in the Reich Propaganda Ministry and that of the Reich Press Chief, when he referred to an affidavit by Amann of 19 December 1945. He pointed out that the holders of these positions exercised complete control over the news service in Germany (Session of 11 January 1946; Document 3501-PS). Fritzsche never held either one of those positions. Incidentally, the Propaganda Ministry did not have only one, but three state secretaries. Besides, Dr. Goebbels had surrounded himself with a ministerial staff (Ministeramt). I believe it is appropriate to point here to this low rank because the Prosecution thought, as they did in other cases—for instance, in the case of the Defendant Göring—that they could conclude a special responsibility from a high rank; that is, from a defendant’s outward position alone. Therefore, one can by no means start from the assumption that Fritzsche exerted any decisive influence upon the conduct of propaganda in general and upon the policies which were pursued by the press and radio.

The tasks which Fritzsche accomplished on the technical side of the news system involved him only as a journalist and expert. They had nothing to do with the contents of the propaganda which was pursued by the state leadership. In this respect, too, he was only a person who carried out directives. It is true that he set up the technical organization of the journalist news agencies; he thereby modernized and perfected them. It is also true that this news system played a very important part later in the war. In that respect, Fritzsche’s work extended only over the period from 1933 to 1938. But it is a fact that in those years he did not have the least influence upon the contents and political trend of the news, particularly in view of the fact that he was a mere employee at that time.

I make these references to Fritzsche’s official position within the Propaganda Ministry also for another reason. In admitting what he did and said, and wanting to assume full responsibility for it—Fritzsche had an opportunity to explain in detail the cause for and contents of all the excerpts from his radio addresses submitted to him—he cannot, on the other hand, answer for theses which were championed by other offices of the state propaganda apparatus and also within his own Ministry. Still less can he answer for the unorganized propaganda of the Party. Fritzsche described the various controlled and uncontrolled kinds of propaganda of the Third Reich and pointed out their effects. May I remind the High Tribunal that the witness Von Schirrmeister testified to the effect that even Goebbels could not do anything with the “Party doctrines” and the “myth” in the field of propaganda. According to the witness, Goebbels did not regard them as things with which to lure the masses. When the Defendant Speer mentioned the secret agitation about the miracle weapons, he was able to point to other sources of unorganized Party propaganda. Fritzsche does not bear any responsibility for all that. His official position was not influential enough to be able to fight effectively against all faulty conditions and abuses. Therefore, his repeated attempts to have Der Stürmer banned—he considered this paper an excellent means of anti-German propaganda—remained without success. The Party propaganda with all its practical consequences played a much more important part than that which Fritzsche with his comparatively very limited functions could ever have played. I recall the fact that, according to Fritzsche’s testimony, even Dr. Goebbels was afraid of Bormann. This was explained by the portentous sentence according to which it was not the State which had to give orders to the Party, but inversely the Party to the State.

The hearing of evidence—especially the examination of the witness Von Schirrmeister—has thus shown, without any doubt, that the decisive directives for the propaganda of the Third Reich came from other agencies. Goebbels, from whom Fritzsche kept his distance personally, did not allow any of the subordinate officials in his Ministry to interfere with his plans. It has become evident that he carried out his plans with the authority of his position, with the adroitness of his arguments—which the world knows—and, if necessary, by means of fraud. The leadership of the German press policy—let us consider only this limited sphere—was and remained in the hands of Dr. Goebbels and Dr. Dietrich. The same thing happened with the radio, as the witness Von Schirrmeister has stated, when Fritzsche took over its direction in November 1942. Dr. Goebbels, one of the oldest and closest of Hitler’s collaborators, and Dr. Dietrich, Hitler’s permanent escort—during the war he was present almost uninterruptedly in his headquarters—never allowed the leadership of the press and radio to be taken out of their hands, especially by a man who, like Fritzsche, had no connections of any kind with Hitler and had not even had a single conference with him. Ultimately, Hitler’s will was decisive here, too.

We have furthermore heard the influence—it is of no importance here whether it was due to Hitler, Goebbels, or Dietrich—which other governmental agencies successfully exercised on the press and radio. Here I will mention the Foreign Office, the High Command of the Armed Forces, and other ministries, the heads of which were much more closely connected with the three afore-mentioned personages than, for instance, Fritzsche.

In order to avoid a misunderstanding, I would like to point out that the assertion of the Indictment that Fritzsche was in some way closely connected with the Party propaganda apparatus, for instance, with the so-called Reich Press Agency of the NSDAP, or the radio department of the Party, has been positively withdrawn by the Prosecution in the course of the Trial. With this, I think that I have sufficiently established the limits of the defendant’s responsibility. This limitation shows the inaccuracy of the widely spread opinion that Fritzsche occupied a very important and influential position in the “gigantic propaganda apparatus” of the Third Reich. This limitation not only takes into account the legal but also the moral facts, which have been clearly indicated by the hearing of evidence.

Thus to a certain extent I have already taken a stand against the charge that Fritzsche was a member of the alleged conspiracy. The Prosecution have repeatedly tried to incorporate Fritzsche’s work, at its different stages, in the alleged group of conspirators, and have drawn from it conclusions which go so far as to say that Fritzsche was therefore also responsible for War Crimes, for Crimes against Humanity, and even for Crimes against Peace (Session of 23 January 1946). Even in the arguments of the Indictment, these attempts seemed to have little relevant justification.

It is hardly any improper criticism if I declare here that it caused the Prosecution a certain embarrassment to display Fritzsche’s subordinate position as an official as so important and full of meaning. Today, now that the hearing of evidence is complete, it seems to me that the attempts to include Fritzsche in the circle of conspirators have failed. Fritzsche cannot be found at any of the sessions at which Hitler discussed any plans or actions with the closer or wider circle of his collaborators. And apart from this, he never actually took part either in any discussions which might have been of a nature to plunge the world into the blood bath of wars of aggression. He was neither an “old Party fighter,” nor was he decorated later on with the Golden Party Badge. He did not belong, as I had to emphasize especially, to any of the organizations which are here alleged to be criminal. Up to the end he fulfilled the functions of an official in a ministry and received directives like any other official. He could never have been a political adviser.

In view of the circumstances, the bridge between himself and the alleged conspiracy could have been spanned only by the person of Dr. Goebbels. The witness Von Schirrmeister has repudiated such an assumption. According to his testimony, Fritzsche did not even belong to the closer circle around Dr. Goebbels. Indeed, Von Schirrmeister could even state that Fritzsche often had to apply to him because he could not get Dr. Goebbels’ opinion on some question other than through him, as he was Dr. Goebbels’ personal press assistant. Communicating through the state secretaries—for instance, Dr. Dietrich, Dr. Naumann, to mention only a few—also involved certain difficulties. That is not the manner in which conspirators usually communicate. Moreover, the witness Von Schirrmeister has said that it was out of the question that Fritzsche could even have embarked on an exchange of ideas with Dr. Goebbels with a view to forming plans. Now, it would have been the task of the Prosecution to prove to the Defendant Fritzsche where his participation in the conspiracy can be seen. I say that one cannot consider any count of the Indictment as proved.