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Volume VI · Page 1117
| occupation and the population, Steinbrinck, by his personal
intervention, achieved the cancellation of these orders. This attitude of his toward the indigenous industry of the occupied countries and their population was not considered forceful enough by those in power in the government of the Third Reich, and led to his dismissal as Plenipotentiary General for Iron and Steel. Is a man of this type supposed to have plundered? Is a man like this supposed to have forced the population of occupied territories into slave labor? He, the very man who endeavored, as the Belgians and French testified, to stop the recruitment of workers for Germany! In the so-called Aryanization cases, too, Steinbrinck advocated an objective, correct, and clear line being taken, a line for which the government authorities, and also the other negotiating parties did not always have the right understanding. Could the defendant's refusal to cooperate have been of any avail to the victims? Could not the State have carried out its measures regardless of whether Steinbrinck accepted the proposition or not? Even if one were to adopt the line of thought of the prosecution in this connection, the defendant could not be pronounced guilty, and the same applies to the last count, a promotion of criminal tendencies of organizations declared criminal by IMT ruling. Here too there is not a shadow of proof that Steinbrinck had identified himself in any way with tendencies which must be condemned from a moral point of view. I move, Your Honors, that my client be acquitted. |
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| E. Extracts from the Closing Statement for Defendant Weiss* |
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| DR. SIEMERS (counsel for defendant Weiss) : Your Honors! The up to now greatest trial of industrialists is coming to its end, a trial of industrialists based on penal law. The prosecution has set a wide and large frame to which the defense had to adhere, and the result was, that these proceedings from their first day until today have lasted over 8 months. The prosecution presented more than 30 document books with three to four thousand pages, and the defense did about the same. Is the Flick Concern actually that big? Are the relevant criminal acts of the six defendants really that extensive that they correspond to the material presented? I believe that everybody who witnesses this trial will answer this question with "no" and feel that there was another reason for the prosecution to choose |
* Complete closing statement is recorded in mimeographed transcript, 28 and 29 November 1947, pp. 10787-10884.
