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It will be demonstrated that no criminal system of bad treatment of
mishandling of foreign workers, devoid of every humanity, existed in the Krupp
firm, just as little as it did in any other German industrial firm. In this
connection, we shall have to deal also with the incriminating witnesses of the
prosecution, who, like the witness Wirtz, showed the perhaps understandable
desire to justify their own deeds by alleged orders of their superiors, only
discovered by them afterwards that witness who thought he could build a whole
criminal system on the three words of his superior; “Fahrt mal
dazwischen” ("Get them moving!"). And we shall also have to go into the
question of the Dechenschule camp, concerning which three men of the Belgian
intelligence service have expressed themselves, three not unlikeable but
certainly still hate inspired men, who were all three revealed under
cross-examination as having been active members of the Belgian resistance
movement and not at all as simple labor service resisters or labor contract
breakers and who, according to existing rules of war of all civilized nations,
could very easily have suffered a different fate.
The prosecution have
from time to time industriously and deliberately called up over the head of the
defendant, Friedrich von Buelow, a menacing shadow — the Gestapo. With
raised finger they point to him as the confidential man of that institution and
obviously seek by this indication alone — and a completely distorted one
at that — to create feeling against him. Things were not so simple as
that, however, in the National Socialist dictator state. It did not follow that
anybody who, officially, or by reason of his position in a firm, came into
touch with the Gestapo, became thereby, through that alone, their confidential
agent, and most certainly not when he was not even a member of this
organization, declared as criminal by the International Military Tribunal
neither does the prosecution apparently wish to assert that he was. I will, on
the other hand, show in what von Buelow’s connections with the Gestapo in
reality consisted and in what manner they were used so as to bring the well
being of the firm and the well being of the people who worked in it into
harmony with the maintenance of order in the works, demanded by the State in
tempestuous times of war and emergency, and at the same time to satisfy the
hard demands of the Moloch State.
In this connection, the judgment on
von Buelow as a man will acquire considerable significance. I will show that
the character of this man is anything but a criminal one. And I am convinced
that, when the evidence is concluded, the Tribunal will agree with me that the
picture of this man is very different from that dark portrait which the
prosecution have sought to draw for us |
217 |
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