The Nuremberg Trials (Vol.6). International Military Tribunal

singular distinction. On 22 September 1940 Hitler awarded him the War Merit Cross 1st Class as Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia. That is in the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 22 September 1940.

      He was also awarded the Golden Badge of the Party and was promoted by Hitler, personally, from the rank of Gruppenführer to Obergruppenführer in the SS on 21 June 1943. And I also inform the Tribunal that he and Ribbentrop were the only two Germans to be awarded the Adlerorden, a distinction normally reserved for foreigners. On his seventieth birthday, 2 February 1943, it was made the occasion for most of the German newspapers to praise his many years of service to the Nazi regime. This service, as submitted by the Prosecution, may be summed up in two ways:

      1) He was an internal Fifth Columnist among the Conservative political circles in Germany. They had been anti-Nazi but were converted in part by seeing one of themselves, in the person of this defendant, wholeheartedly with the Nazis;

      2) His previous reputation as a diplomat made public opinion abroad slow to believe that he would be a member of a cabinet which did not stand by its words and assurances. It was most important for Hitler that his own readiness to break every treaty or commitment should be concealed as long as possible, and for this purpose he found in the Defendant Von Neurath his handiest tool.

      That concludes the presentation against the Defendant Von Neurath.

      THE PRESIDENT: In view of the motion which was made yesterday by Counsel for the Defendant Hess, the Tribunal will postpone the presentation of the individual case against Hess, and will proceed with the presentation of the case by counsel for France.

      M. CHARLES DUBOST (Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): When stating the charges which now weigh upon the defendants, my British and American colleagues showed evidence that these men conceived and executed a plan and plot for the domination of Europe. They have shown you of what crimes against peace these men became guilty by launching unjust wars. They have shown you that, as leaders of Nazi Germany, they had all premeditated unjust wars, and had participated in the conspiracy against peace.

      Then my friends and colleagues of the French Delegation, M. Herzog, M. Faure and M. Gerthoffer, submitted documents establishing that the defendants, who all in various positions counted among the leaders of Nazi Germany, are responsible for the repeated violations of the laws and customs of war committed by men of the Reich in the course of military operations. However, it still remains for us to expose the atrocities of which men, women, and children of the occupied countries of the west were victims.

      We intend at this point to prove that the defendants, in their capacity as leaders of Hitlerite Germany, systematically pursued a policy of extermination, the cruelty of which increased from day to day until the final defeat of Germany; that the defendants planned, conceived, willed, and prescribed these atrocities as part of a system which was to enable them to accomplish a political aim. It is this political aim which closely binds all the facts we intend to present to you. The crimes perpetrated against people and property, as presented so far by my colleagues of the French Prosecution, were in close connection with the war. They had the distinct character of war crimes stricto sensu. Those which I shall present to you surpass them both in meaning and extent. They form part of the plans of a policy of domination, of expansion, beyond war itself.

      It is Hitler himself who gave the best definition of this policy in one of his speeches in Munich on 16 May 1927. He was deceiving his listeners about the danger that France, an agricultural country of only 40 million inhabitants, might represent for Germany, which was already a highly-industrialized country with a population of nearly 70 million. That day Hitler said: