22 Nov. 45

case, I would just like to call the attention of the Tribunal to the fact that the larger chart which now appears is a simplification of the duplicated chart which Your Honors have been furnished. For if it had been reproduced in the same detail, I am afraid many of the boxes would not have appeared intelligible from this point.

I would like to call your attention first of all to an organization with which we will have to become very familiar: the Leadership Corps of the NSDAP, (the Reichsleiter), which has been named as a defendant organization and which comprises the sum of the officials and leaders of the Nazi Party. If Your Honors will be good enough to follow me down the center line of the chart, we come to the main horizontal line of division where the word "Reichsleiter" appears. That is the first category of the Leadership Corps, I should say, the main category, perhaps, of the Leadership Corps

The Führer, of course, stands above it. As we follow the vertical line of division to the lower part of the chart, we reach five additional boxes, which may be referred to collectively as the Hoheitsträger, the bearers of the sovereignty of the Party, and those are the Gauleiter, the Kreisleiter, the Ortsgruppenleiter, the Zellenleiter, and the Blockleiter.

The Führer at the top of our chart is the supreme and the only leader in the Nazi hierarchy. His successor-designate was first the Defendant Hess and subsequently the Defendant Goring.

The Reichsleiter, of whom 16 are shown on this chart, comprise collectively the Party Directorate (Reichsleitung). Through them, coordination of the Party and State machinery was achieved. A number of these Reichsleiter, each of whom, at some time, was in charge of at least one office within the Party Directorate, were also the heads of other Party formations and affiliated and supervised organizations of the Party and also of agencies of the State, and they even held ministerial positions. The Reichsleitung may be said to represent the horizontal organization of the Party according to functions, within which all threads controlling the varied life of the German people met. Each office within the Reichsleitung of the NSDAP executed definite tasks assigned to it by the Führer, or by the leader of the Party Chancellery (Chef der Parteikanzlei), who on the chart before you appears directly under the Führer.

In 1945 the chief of the Party Chancellery was Martin Bormann, the defendant in this proceeding, and before him, and until his flight to England in 1941, the Defendant Rudolf Hess. It was the duty of the Reichsleitung to make certain that these tasks assigned to it by the Führer were carried out with expedition and