The Mazal Library

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NMT05-T0964

NUERNBERG MILITARY TRIBUNAL
Volume V · Page 964

persons and property, including plunder of public and private property, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, unlawful imprisonment, torture, persecutions on political, racial, and religious grounds, ill-treatment of, and other inhumane and unlawful acts against thousands of persons, including German civilians, nationals of other countries, and prisoners of war. The indictment then relates in detail the means and methods by which the above criminal acts were accomplished.

Counts two and three of the indictment conclude with the averment that these crimes and atrocities "constitute violations of international conventions * * *, the laws and customs of war, the general principles of criminal law as derived from the criminal laws of all civilized nations, the internal penal laws of the countries in which such crimes were committed, and of Article II of Control Council Law No. 10."

COUNT FOUR — MEMBERSHIP IN
CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION

The fourth count of the indictment avers that all of the defendants herein except defendant Hohberg were members subsequent to 1 September 1939, of the SS, declared to be criminal by the International Military Tribunal and paragraph 1 (d), Article II of Control Council Law No. 10.

The law, as pronounced by the International Military Tribunal with reference to membership in an organization declared criminal, is as follows:

"In dealing with the SS the Tribunal includes all persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS including the members of the Allgemeine SS, members of the Waffen SS, members of the SS Totenkopf Verbaende, and the members of any of the different police forces who were members of the SS. The Tribunal does not include the so-called riding units * * *

"The Tribunal declares to be criminal within the meaning of the Charter the group composed of those persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS as enumerated in the preceding paragraph who became or remained members of the organization with knowledge that it was being used for the commission of acts declared criminal by Article 6 of the Charter, or who were personally implicated as members of the organization in the commission of such crimes, excluding, however, those who were drafted into membership by the State in such a way as to give them no choice in the matter, and who had committed no such crimes. The basis of this finding is the participation of the organization in war crimes and crimes

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