17 Dec. 45
"This is also the reason why all
participation of the Reich Labor Service in revivals and other
meetings and festivals of religious character are impossible."
The Tribunal will appreciate
that the position of the Defendant Bormann, as Deputy of the Führer
of the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party and Chief of the Nazi Party
Chancellery, and the position of the Defendant Rosenberg, as the Führer's
representative for the whole spiritual and philosophical education of
the Nazi Party, give to the views of these defendants on religion and
religious policy the highest official backing. The anti-Christian
utterances and policies of these two defendants reveal a community of
mind and intention amongst the most powerful leaders of the Party which
was amply confirmed, as the evidence will show, by the actual treatment
of the churches since 1933 and throughout the course of the conspiracy.
I now offer in evidence Document 2349-PS, Exhibit Number USA-352, which
is an excerpt from the book The Myth of the 20th Century,
written by the Defendant Rosenberg. I quote from that document:
"The idea of honor — national
honor — is for us the beginning and the end of our entire
thinking and doing. It does not admit of any equal-valued center of
force alongside of it, no matter of what kind, neither Christian love,
nor the Free-Masonic humanity, nor the Roman philosophy."
I now offer in evidence Document 848-PS, Exhibit Number USA-353, which
is a Gestapo telegram, dated 24 July 1938, dispatched from Berlin to
Nuremberg, dealing with demonstrations and acts of violence against
Bishop Sproll in Rottenburg. The Gestapo office in Berlin wired its
Nuremberg office a teletype account received from its Stuttgart office
of disorderly conduct and vandalism carried out by Nazi Party members
against Bishop Sproll. I quote from the fourth paragraph of Page 1 of
the English translation of Document 848-PS, which reads as follows:
"The Party, on 23 July 1938, from
2100 on, carried out the third demonstration against Bishop Sproll.
Participants, about 2,500-3,000, were brought from outside by bus,
et cetera. The Rottenburg populace again did not participate
in the demonstration. This town took a rather hostile attitude toward
the demonstrations. The action got completely out of hand of the Party
member responsible for it. The demonstrators stormed the palace, beat
in the gates and doors. About 150 to 200 people forced their way into
the palace, searched through the rooms, threw files out of the
windows, and rummaged through the beds in the rooms of the palace. One
bed was ignited ... The Bishop was with Archbishop Gröber of
Freiburg and the ladies and gentlemen