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PREFACE |
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In April 1949, judgment was rendered in the
last of the series of 12 Nuernberg war crimes trials which had begun in October
1946 and were held pursuant to Allied Control Council Law No. 10. Far from
being of concern solely to lawyers, these trials are of especial interest to
soldiers, historians, students of international affairs, and others. The
defendants in these proceedings, charged with war crimes and other offenses
against international penal law, were prominent figures in Hitler's Germany and
included such outstanding diplomats and politicians as the State Secretary of
the Foreign Office, von Weizsaecker, and cabinet ministers von Krosigk and
Lammers; military leaders such as Field Marshals von Leeb, List, and von
Kuechler; SS leaders such as Ohlendorf, Pohl, and Hildebrandt; industrialists
such as Flick, Alfried Krupp, and the directors of I. G. Farben; and leading
professional men such as the famous physician Gerhard Rose, and the jurist and
Acting Minister of Justice, Schlegelberger.
In view of the weight of
the accusations and the far-flung activities of the defendants, and the
extraordinary amount of official contemporaneous German documents introduced in
evidence, the records of these trials constitute a major source of historical
material covering many events of the fateful years 1933 (and even earlier) to
1945, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The Nuernberg trials under Law No. 10
were carried out under the direct authority of the Allied Control Council, as
manifested in that law, which authorized the establishment of the Tribunals.
The judicial machinery for the trials, including the Military Tribunals and the
Office, Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, was prescribed by Military Government
Ordinance No. 7 and was part of the occupation administration for the American
zone, the Office of Military Government (OMGUS). Law No. 10, Ordinance No. 7,
and other basic jurisdictional or administrative documents are printed in full
hereinafter.
The proceedings in these trials were conducted throughout
in the German and English languages, and were recorded in full by stenographic
notes, and by electrical sound recording of all oral proceedings. The 12 cases
required over 1,200 days of court proceedings. and the transcript of these
proceedings exceeds 330,000 pages, exclusive of hundreds of document books,
briefs, etc. Publication of all of this material, accordingly, was quite
unfeasible. This series, however, contains the indictments, judgments, and
other important portions of the record of the 12 cases, and it is believed that
these materials give a fair picture of the trials, and as full and illuminating
a picture as is possible within the space available. Copies of the entire
record of the trials are available in the Library of Congress, the National
Archives, and elsewhere.
In some cases, due to time limitations, errors
of one sort or another have crept into the translations which were available to
the Tribunal. In other cases the same document appears in different trials, or
even at different parts of the same trial, with variations in translation. For
the most part these inconsistencies have been allowed to remain and only such
errors as might cause misunderstanding have been corrected.
Volumes IV
and V are devoted to three trials which were concerned principally with
activities of the SS. The first part of Volume IV is dedicated to the so-called
"Einsatzgruppen Case" (United States of America vs. Otto
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[Note: There is no Page II in Vol.
IV of the IMT]
III |