IMT01-T179
VolumeVolume I — Page 179
provided for the discharge of "all civil servants who belong to the Communist Party." Similarly, the judiciary was subjected to control. Judges were removed from the bench for political or racial reasons. They were spied upon and made subject to the strongest pressure to join the Nazi Party as an alternative to being dismissed. When the Supreme Court acquitted three of the four defendants charged with complicity in the Reichstag fire, its jurisdiction in cases of treason was thereafter taken away and given to a newly established "People's Court" consisting of two judges and five officials of the Party. Special courts were set up to try political crimes and only party members were appointed as judges. Persons were arrested by the SS for political reasons, and detained in prisons and concentration camps; and the judges were without power to intervene in any way. Pardons were granted to members of the Party who had been sentenced by the judges for proved offenses. In 1935 several officials of the Hohenstein concentration camp were convicted of inflicting brutal treatment upon the inmates. High Nazi officials tried to influence the Court, and after the officials had been convicted, Hitler pardoned them all. In 1942 "judges' letters" were sent to all German judges by the Government, instructing them as to the "general lines" that they must follow.
In their determination to remove all sources of opposition, the NSDAP leaders turned their attention to the trade unions, the churches, and the Jews. In April 1933 Hitler ordered the late Defendant Ley, who was then staff director of the political organization of the NSDAP, "to take over the trade unions." Most of the trade unions of Germany were joined together in two large federations, the "Free Trade Unions" and the "Christian Trade Unions." Unions outside these two large federations contained only 15 percent of the total union membership. On 21 April 1933 Ley issued an NSDAP directive announcing a "coordination action" to be carried out on 2 May against the Free Trade Unions. The directive ordered that SA and SS men were to be employed in the planned "occupation of trade union properties and for the taking into protective custody of personalities who come into question." At the conclusion of the action the official NSDAP press service reported that the National Socialist Factory Cells Organization had "eliminated the old leadership of Free Trade Unions" and taken over the leadership themselves. Similarly, on 3 May 1933 the NSDAP press service announced that the Christian trade unions "have unconditionally subordinated themselves to the leadership of Adolf Hitler." In place of the trade unions the Nazi Government set up a Deutsche Arbeits Front (DAF), controlled by the NSDAP, and which, in practice, all workers in Ger-
