6 Dec. 45

"Germany has never had any conflicts of interest or even points of controversy with the Northern States; neither has she any today. Sweden and Norway have both been offered non-aggression pacts by Germany and have both refused them solely because they did not feel themselves threatened in any way."

Those are clear and positive assurances which Germany gave. The Court will see that violation of those assurances is charged in Paragraph XXII of Appendix C of the Indictment at Page 43. The Court will notice that there is a minor typographical error in the date of the first assurance which is alleged in the Indictment to have been given on the 3rd of September 1939. The Court will see from Document TC-31, which is Exhibit GB-79, that the assurance was in fact given on the 2d of September 1939.

Now those treaties and assurances were the diplomatic background to the brutal Nazi aggression on Norway and Denmark, and the evidence which the Prosecution will now place before the Court will in my submission establish beyond reasonable doubt that these assurances were simply given to lull suspicion and cause the intended victims of Nazi aggression to be unprepared to meet the Nazi attack. For we now know that as early as October 1939 these conspirators and their confederates were plotting the invasion of Norway, and the evidence will indicate that the most active conspirators in that plot were the Defendants Raeder and Rosenberg.

The Norwegian invasion is, in one respect, not a typical Nazi aggression in that Hitler had to be persuaded to embark upon it. The chief instruments of persuasion were Raeder and Rosenberg; Raeder because he thought Norway strategically important and because he coveted glory for his Navy, Rosenberg because of his political connections in Norway which he sought to develop.

As the Tribunal will shortly see, in the Norwegian Vidkun Quisling the Defendant Rosenberg found a very model of the Fifth Column agent, the very personification of perfidy. The evidence as to the early stages of the Nazi conspiracy to invade Norway is found in a letter which the Defendant Raeder wrote on the 10th of January 1944 to Admiral Assmann, the official German naval historian.

I put in this letter, the document C-66, which will be Exhibit" GB-81, and which the Court will find further on in this book of documents. I should explain that in this book of documents the documents are inserted in the numerical order of the series to which they belong and not in the order of their submission to the Court. I am trusting that that will be a more convenient form of bundling them together than to set them down in the order of presentation.

THE PRESIDENT: 66?