18 Dec. 45

COL. STOREY: If Your Honor pleases, again it was included for the purpose of connecting one of the defendants here ...

THE PRESIDENT: What I was pointing out was that it was merely cumulative.

COL. STOREY: Yes, all right, Sir. It may be strictly cumulative. I will omit the next reference, which will probably also be cumulative and turn over to ...

THE PRESIDENT: The same document, you mean?

COL. STOREY: No, Sir. There is another document that I was going to offer, Number 2849-PS. There is a quotation from another book; it probably bears on the same point. I will omit it also. The next is a reference to the Ministerial Council's being given legislative power. I don't believe that that has been introduced before — that the Council itself was given legislative powers. That is in Article 2 of the decree of 30 August 1939, Document 2018-PS. The ordinary Cabinet continued to legislate throughout the war.

Obviously, because of the fusion of personnel between the Ministerial Council and the ordinary Cabinet, questions were bound 'to arise as to what form should lend its name to a particular law. Thus Dr. Lammers, the Chief of the Reich Chancellery and a member of both agencies, wrote a letter on 14 June 1942 to the Plenipotentiary for Reich Administration about this question.

This next document, if the Court please, it may not be necessary to read. It just shows that both agencies continued to legislate side by side, and it would really be cumulative evidence. There were others that possessed legislative powers, besides the ones I have mentioned. Hitler, of course, had legislative power. Göring as Deputy of the Four Year Plan, could and did issue decrees that had the effect of law. And the Cabinet delegated power to issue laws which could deviate from the existing law to the Plenipotentiaries of Economy and Administration and the Chief of the OKW, the so-called "Three-Man College" — the Three-Man College having authority to legislate. This was done in the war-planning law, the Secret Defense Law of 1938, Document 2194-PS, Exhibit Number USA-36. These three officials, Frick, Funk, and Keitel, however, were, as we have proved, also members of the Council of Ministers, as well as being part of the ordinary Cabinet. It can therefore be readily said, in the language of the Indictment, that the Reichsregierung possessed legislative powers of a very high order in the system of German government and that they exercised such powers has in part already been demonstrated. I simply refer to that to show that it was a secret Cabinet law-without quoting-that the executive and administrative powers of the Reich were concentrated in the central Government primarily as the result of two basic Nazi laws that reduced the separate states — called Länder — to mere