Document Analyst's Report

During August I worked through three files for the defense of the Nazi Leadership Corps (the prosecution term), aka the Political Leaders (the defense term), including two document books and one file of affidavits; this was the first defense case of the six groups charged as criminal organizations. One issue was the definition: who counted as a political leader, given the Nazi tendency to make as many party members as possible a “leader” of something, however small or minor. The second was numerical: the estimates for the total number of political leaders in the party ranged from 600,000 to 3,800,000. At the time of the trial, tens of thousands of Germans were held in Allied internment camps as political leaders, and the IMT decision on the organization would affect their cases as individuals. The two document books held official party rules and decrees addressed to party officials; the affidavits were statements made in 1946 by various party leaders, mainly the lowest-level and most numerous leaders, the block leaders who handled party business (such as party dues and wartime rationing coupons) on individual blocks of cities, towns, and villages.

The not-to-do lists: The top-level party leaders, notably Hess and Bormann, issued many rules and decrees about what the lower-level leaders should and should not do; for party members these were essentially legal requirements, given the official status of the party. One pattern in criminal law is that when a regime prohibits people from committing specific acts, that indicates that people are committing those acts. Among the rules were the following:
1935: Leaders are not to intervene in church affairs, but clergymen “who talk politics and such like” are to be reported.
Party members cannot commit “acts of terror against individual Jews.”
1936: Local leaders “should never become obnoxious” when dealing with citizens, nor engage in “prying and spying.”
1937: School principals are to report on their teachers’ party work, and “Teachers whose conduct shows unpleasantly are to be reported by name.”
1938: Leaders are not to intervene with police forces to prevent the prosecution of crimes committed by party members. (They were also not to try to initiate criminal prosecution of their personal enemies.)
1942: Leaders are not to use their official status to gain favorable treatment from wartime rationing offices.

Rumors from the east: In October 1942 the party acknowledged that, in spite of the secrecy orders, men home on leave from service in the east were telling people about “very severe measures” taken against Jews there. The party stated that “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question” required “the complete segregation and elimination of the millions of Jews” in Europe. Political leaders were asked to explain to their constituents that in practice this meant that European Jews were to be sent to work camps in the east, or further east (perhaps meaning Siberia). In a post-war affidavit one local leader recalled that “soldiers on leave told that the Jews in the Polish territories were being murdered. . . . But people who heard such reports did not dare to pass them on. . . . what could we have done?”

Matt Seccombe, 4 September 2024