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Volume III · Page 1087
| the hour. He retired under fire. In spite of all that he had done he still bore an unmerited reputation as the last of the German jurists and so Hitler gave him his blessing and 100,000 RM as a parting gift. We are under no misapprehension. Schlegelberger is a tragic character. He loved the life of an intellect, the work of the scholar. We believe that he loathed the evil that he did, but he sold that intellect and that scholarship to Hitler for a mess of political pottage and for the vain hope of personal security. He is guilty under counts two and three of the indictment. |
| THE DEFENDANT KLEMM |
| Herbert Klemm, formerly State Secretary of
the Reich Ministry of Justice, was born in Leipzig on 15 May 1903. After normal
schooling, he passed his first legal state examination in 1925, his second
legal state examination in 1929. From 1929 to 1933, he was court assessor of
the prosecution authority of Dresden. From March 1933 to March 1935 he was the
personal Referent and adjutant of Thierack, Minister of Justice, Saxony. In
1935, at the time of the centralization of the administration of justice, he
was transferred to the Reich Ministry of Justice where he remained until he was
mobilized for war service on 23 June 1940. On 20 April 1939 he was promoted to
the office of Ministerialrat. In July of 1940 he was assigned to the Reich
Commissioner for the Occupied Dutch Territories, upon the request of the
Plenipotentiary for Occupied Dutch Territories. On 17 March 1941 he was
transferred to the staff of the deputy of the Fuehrer, which later became the
Party Chancellery, in Munich. He remained with the Party Chancellery until 4
January 1944, when he became state secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice
under Thierack. He remained in this capacity until the surrender.
Klemm's Party connections were as follows: he applied for membership in the NSDAP on 4 November 1930; his membership card, 405576, was received 1 January 1931. On 30 June 1933 he joined the SA; the highest rank which he received in the SA was that of Oberfuehrer. When in Saxony he was the legal advisor of the SA for Saxony and liaison officer between the SA for Saxony and the Minister of Justice for Saxony. When he was transferred to Berlin, he was the liaison officer between the Reich Ministry of Justice and the SA Chief of Staff for Germany and the legal advisor to the Chief of Staff of the SA for Germany. He was a member of the National Socialist Jurists' League from 1933. In September of 1944 he was appointed deputy chief of the National Socialist Jurists' League by Thierack, who was at that time chief. |
