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peace because the required criminal knowledge and intent had not been
proven. The judgment of the Tribunal concluded that the evidence with respect
to the defendants Krauch, Schmitz, von Schnitzler, and ter Meer fell very short
of “establishing beyond a reasonable doubt” that their activities
“were undertaken and carried out with a knowledge that they were thereby
preparing Germany for participation in an aggressive war or wars,” and
that the evidence against the other defendants “is weaker.”
Throughout the case the most contested question on the charges of
aggressive war was whether the defendants had the requisite “state of
mind” to warrant a finding of guilty. Almost all of the opening and
closing statements deal with this question to some extent (see secs. III, and
XI). The defense motion for a finding of not guilty, made at the end of the
prosecution's case in chief, and the prosecution's answer thereto, were almost
exclusively directed to this matter (subsec. B above). A great deal of the
evidence reproduced in earlier subsections bears on the question of knowledge,
as for example the statements of Hitler and Goering in connection with the Four
Year Plan (subsec. F above), the statements of Defendant Krauch, in April 1939,
on the situation after the invasion of Czechoslovakia (subsec. G above), and
most of the documents and testimony concerning mobilization planning (subsec. H
above). This concluding subsection on crimes against peace contains some of the
evidence directly bearing on this question not reproduced earlier in this
volume.
These materials are arranged as follows: affidavits and
extracts from the testimony of Prosecution Witnesses Wagner and Ehrmann (2
below); extracts from two affidavits by Defendant von Schnitzler (3 below); an
affidavit of Defendant ter Meer (4 below) a number of contemporaneous
documents, including various speeches of Hitler concerning his peaceful
intentions (5 below); testimony of Dr. Frank-Fahle, secretary of Farben's
Commercial Committee; an affidavit of Seebohm, Farben's representative in
Czechoslovakia, concerning the Conference on Czechoslovakia in May 1948 (6
below) and extracts from the testimony of four defendants: ter Meer, Haefliger,
Ilgner, and Kugler. |
1486 |
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