21 Nov. 45
ship later boasted, eventually organized and dominated every
phase of German life--but not until they had waged a bitter internal
struggle characterized by brutal criminality we charge here. In
preparation for this phase of their struggle, they created a Party
police system. This became the pattern and the instrument of the
police state, which was the first goal in their plan.
The Party formations, including the Leadership Corps of the
Party, the SD, the SS, the SA, and the infamous Secret State Police,
or Gestapo,-all these stand accused before you as criminal
organizations; organizations which, as we will prove from their own
documents, were recruited only from recklessly devoted Nazis, ready
in conviction and temperament to do the most violent of deeds to
advance the common program. They terrorized and silenced democratic
opposition and were able at length to combine with political
opportunists, militarists, industrialists, monarchists, and political
reactionaries.
On January 3O, 1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the German
Republic. An evil combination, represented in the prisoners' dock by
its most eminent survivors, had succeeded in possessing itself of the
machinery of the German Government, a facade behind which they
thenceforth would operate to make a reality of the war of conquest
they so long had plotted. The conspiracy had passed into its second
phase.
The Consolidation of Nazi Power:
We shall now consider the steps, which embraced the most hideous
of Crimes against Humanity, to which the conspirators resorted in
perfecting control of the German State and in preparing Germany for
the aggressive war indispensable to their ends.
The Germans of the 1920's were a frustrated and baffled people as
a result of defeat and the disintegration of their traditional
government. The democratic elements, which were trying to govern
Germany through the new and feeble machinery of the Weimar Republic,
got inadequate support from the democratic forces of the rest of the
world, including my country. It is not to be denied that Germany,
when worldwide depression was added to- her other problems, was faced
with urgent and intricate pressures in her economic and political
life which necessitated bold measures.
The internal measures by which a nation attempts to solve its
problems are ordinarily of no concern to other nations. But the Nazi
program from the first was recognized as a desperate program for a
people still suffering the effects of an unsuccessful war. The Nazi
policy embraced ends recognized as attainable only by a renewal and a
more successful outcome of war, in Europe. The conspirators' answer
to Germany's problems was nothing less than