10 Dec.
45
the months of secret planning and preparation, and the
unbelievable suffering intentionally and deliberately wrought
when I consider all of this, I feel fully justified in saying that never
before and, God help us, never again in the history of
relations between sovereign nations has a blacker chapter been written
than the one which tells of this unprovoked invasion of the territory of
the Soviet Union. For those responsible and they are here before
you, the defendants in this case it might be just to let the
punishment fit the crime.
I now turn to the final phase of the detailed presentation of the
aggressive-war part of the case: German collaboration with Italy and
Japan, and aggressive war against the United States. The relevant
portions of the Indictment are set forth in Subsection 7 under Section
IV (F) of Count One, appearing at Pages 9 and 10 of the printed English
text of the Indictment. The materials relating to this unholy alliance
of the three fascist powers and to the aggressive war against the United
States have been gathered together in a document book, marked with the
letter "Q," which I now submit to the Tribunal.
Before moving on to the subject matter of this tripartite
collaboration, I should like to invite the attention of the Tribunal to
the significance of this phase. In the course of the joint presentation
by the British and American Prosecution in the past several days, we
have seen the swastika carried forward by force of arms from a tightly
controlled and remilitarized Germany to the four corners of Europe. The
elements of a conspiracy that I am now about to discuss project the Nazi
plan upon a universal screen, involving the older world of Asia and the
new world of the United States of America. As a result, the wars of
aggression that were planned in Berlin and launched across the frontiers
of Poland ended some six years later, almost to the day, in surrender
ceremonies upon a United States battleship riding at anchor in the Bay
of Tokyo.
The first formal alliance between Hitler's Germany and the Japanese
Government was the Anti-Comintern Pact signed in Berlin on 25 November
1936. This agreement, on its face, was directed against the activities
of the Communist International. It was subsequently adhered to by Italy
on 6 November 1937.
I ask the Tribunal to take judicial notice of these official state
documents in accordance with Article 21 of the Charter. The German text
of these treaties-the original German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact and
the subsequent Protocol of Adherence by Italy is to be found in Volumes
4 and 5 of the Dokumente der Deutschen Politik, respectively.
The English translation of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact of 25
November 1936 is contained in our Document 2508-PS; the English
translation of the Protocol