Under Defendant Frank’s administration this criminal plan was consummated, but the execution went even beyond the plan. Food contributions to Germany increased to the point where the bare subsistence reserved for the Government General under the plan was reduced to a level of mass starvation. The savage program of exterminating Jews was relentlessly executed. Resettlement projects were carried out with reckless disregard of the rights of the local population and the terror of the concentration camp followed in the wake of the Nazi invaders.
This statement of evidence has been compiled in large part from statements by the Defendant Frank himself, from the admission found in his diary, official reports, reports of conferences with his colleagues and subordinates, and his speeches. It is therefore appropriate that a passage from his diary should be quoted in conclusion. It is our Document 2233(aa)-PS. It appears at Page 59 in the document book. I offer the original in evidence as Exhibit Number USA-613. The German text appears in the 1943 volume of labor conference meetings at the 25 January 1943 entry on Page 53. In his address Defendant Frank, prophetically enough, told his colleagues in the Government General that their task would grow more difficult. “Hitler”, he said, “could help them only as a kind of ‘administrative pill box.’ ” They must depend on themselves.
“We are now duty bound to hold together”—and I quote Frank—“We must remember that we who are gathered together here figure on Mr. Roosevelt’s list of war criminals. I have the honor of being Number One. We have, so to speak, become accomplices in the world historic sense.”
This concludes the presentation on the Defendant Frank.
May it please the Tribunal, Lieutenant Colonel Griffith-Jones of the British Delegation will now deal with the individual responsibility of the Defendant Streicher.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL M. C. GRIFFITH-JONES (Junior Counsel for the United Kingdom): If the Tribunal please, it is my duty to present the case against the Defendant Julius Streicher.
Appendix A of the Indictment, that paragraph of the Appendix relating to Streicher, sets out the positions which he held and which I shall prove. It then goes on to allege that he used those positions and his personal influence and his close connection with the Führer in such a manner that he promoted the accession to power of the Nazi conspirators and the consolidation of their control over Germany, as set forth in Count One of the Indictment; that he authorized, directed, and participated in the Crimes against Humanity, set forth in Count Four of the Indictment, including particularly the incitement of the persecution of the Jews, set forth in Count One and Count Four of the Indictment.
My Lord, the case against this defendant can be, perhaps, described by the unofficial title that he assumed for himself as “Jew-baiter Number One.” It is the Prosecution’s case that for the course of some 25 years this man educated the whole of the German people in hatred and that he incited them to the persecution and to the extermination of the Jewish race. He was an accessory to murder, perhaps on a scale never attained before.
With the Tribunal’s permission I propose to prove quite shortly the position and influence that he held and then to refer the Tribunal to several short extracts from his newspapers and from his speeches and then to outline the part that he played in the particular persecutions that occurred against the Jews between the years 1933 and 1945.
My Lord, perhaps before I start, I might say that the document book before the members of the Tribunal is arranged in the order in which I intend to refer to the documents. They are paged and there is an index at the beginning of the book and if the Tribunal have got what is called the trial brief, it is in effect a note of the evidence to which I shall refer and again in the order in which I shall refer to it, which may be of some assistance.
My Lord, this defendant was born in 1885. He became a school teacher in Nuremberg and formed a party of his own, which he called the German Socialist Party. The chief policy of that party, again, was anti-Semitism. In 1922 he handed over his party to Hitler; and there is a glowing account of his generosity which appears in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which I do not think it worth occupying the time of the Tribunal in reading. It appears as Document M-3, and is the first document in the Tribunal’s document book. The copy of Mein Kampf is already before the Tribunal as Exhibit GB-128.
The appointments that he held in the Party and State were few. From 1921 until 1945 he was a member of the Nazi Party. In 1925 he was appointed Gauleiter of Franconia, and he remained as such until about February of 1940; and from the time that the Nazi Government came into power in 1933 until 1945, he was a member of the Reichstag. In addition to that he held the title of Obergruppenführer in the SA. All that information appears in Document 2975-PS, which is already exhibited as Exhibit Number USA-9, and is the affidavit that he made himself.
The propaganda that he carried out throughout those years was chiefly done through the medium of his newspapers. He was the editor and publisher of the paper called Der Stürmer, which was a weekly journal, from 1922 until 1933; and thereafter the publisher and owner of the paper.
In 1933 he also founded and thereafter, I think, published—certainly was responsible for—the daily newspaper called the Fränkische Tageszeitung.
There were, in addition to that and particularly later, several others, mostly local journals, that he published from Nuremberg.
Those are the positions that he held; and now if I may, I shall quite briefly trace the course of his incitement and propaganda more or less in chronological order by referring the Tribunal to the short extracts. I would say this: These extracts are really selected at random. They are selected with a view to showing the Tribunal the various methods that he employed to incite the people against the Jewish race; but his newspapers are crowded with them, week after week, day after day. It is impossible to pick up any copy without finding the same kind of stuff in the headlines and in the articles.
If I might quote from four speeches and articles showing his early activities from 1922 until 1933—at Page 3 of the Tribunal’s document book, Document M-11—that is an extract from a speech that he made in 1922 in Nuremberg, and—after abusing the Jews in the first paragraph—I refer only to the last two lines: “We know that Germany will be free when the Jew has been excluded from the life of the German people.”
I pass to the next document, which is M-12, on Page 4. The first document was Exhibit GB-165. That is the book, I understand, that is being given that number, so that the next document, which is taken from the same book, will be the same. Perhaps I might be allowed to read that short extract. It is an extract from a speech:
“I beg you and particularly those of you who carry the cross throughout the land, to become somewhat more serious when I speak of the enemy of the German people, namely, the Jew. Not out of irresponsibility or for fun do I fight against the Jewish enemy, but because I bear within me the knowledge that the whole misfortune was brought to Germany by the Jews alone.
“. . . I ask you once more, what is at stake today? The Jew seeks domination not only among the German people but among all peoples. The Communists pave the way for him. . . . Do you not know that the God of the Old Testament ordered the Jews to devour and enslave the peoples of the earth? . . .
“The Government allows the Jew to do as he pleases. The people expect action to be taken. . . . You may think about Adolf Hitler as you please, but one thing you must admit. He possessed the courage to attempt to free the German people from the Jew by a national revolution. That was a great deed.”
The next short extract appearing on the next page is taken from a speech in April of 1925:
“You must realize that the Jew wants our people to perish. . . . That is why you must join us and leave those who have brought you nothing but war and inflation and discord. For thousands of years the Jew has been destroying the nations.”
I ask the Tribunal to note now these last few words:
“Let us start today, so that we can annihilate the Jews.”