. NMT03-T0132
Volume III · Page 132
political ends. I shall prove that this was not the case. In order to demonstrate the seeming contradiction between outward appearance and actual private character, I consider it my duty to give the Tribunal a comprehensive picture of the personality of my client as a jurist and as a man. It will become evident that he was and remained a simple and straightforward person, even after he rose higher in his career, that he was a man of sensitive disposition and refined feeling and always endeavored to act objectively and above all justly. I shall therefore have to ask my client to explain in the witness box the ideas he had conceived as to the aims of the NSDAP, the hopes he had before him in the legal and political field, and the way in which he believed it possible that the political intentions of the leadership of the state could be combined with the idea that law has to prevail. He will have to explain to the Tribunal how many things he actually did not know in order to enable us to gain an accurate picture of the situation at that time and of the developments.
So far as the separate phases of the activity of the defendant Klemm are concerned, it must be said —
the indictment takes as the first phase his activity as Oberstaatsanwalt and Ministerial Councilor in the Reich Ministry of Justice. The two charges specially raised against him in this field are concerned with the so-called "more severe interrogation" through organs of the Gestapo and with the fact that he was the Ministry's chief of liaison with the SA. I shall prove that it was not the duty of the defendant to suggest in certain cases "more severe interrogations," in other words, maltreatment of prisoners by the Gestapo. It was, on the contrary, his duty to prosecute such cases through criminal proceedings, since also the Gestapo and its organs were prohibited from ill-treating prisoners. In this connection I shall be able to take the opportunity to describe the attitude of my client by reference to the documents which were submitted in the IMT trial. It was the defendant Klemm who as an official in the Ministry of Justice of Saxony suggested the strict prosecution which was made so much of both in indictment and in the judgment given in the IMT trial of those SA men who had rendered themselves guilty of ill-treatment of prisoners in the concentration camp at Hohenstein in Saxony, There is no ground for the assumption that Klemm's attitude changed at a later date, when he worked in the Reich Ministry of Justice.
The position of a chief of liaison between the Ministry and the SA leaders will be described by me through reference to the documents. The judiciary as a public authority, had the duty to inform the SA leaders of any prosecution or condemnation of a member of the SA. It was the purpose of such information to
