Document Analyst's Report

During the past ten weeks I worked through three boxes on NMT 11 (Ministries Case) material, containing mainly prosecutions briefs that presented the case against individual defendants and groups of defendants charged under seven of the eight counts of the indictment (the fourth count had been dismissed), covering the issues of aggression, genocide, plundering, forced labor, and membership in criminal organizations. The other material in the boxes included two defense motions and an incomplete copy of the tribunal’s final judgment (599 of the total 834 pages). I also found a copy of the partial dissent filed by one of the judges, which had been stored in another part of the collection. My goal was to finish work on the parts of the prosecution material outside of the presentation of evidence, in order to clear the way for the larger task of working on the prosecution document books that hold more than 3800 exhibits. I have reached document book 1, with 215 more next in line.

The defense pushes back: The defense attorneys had considerable success in getting either the prosecution or the tribunal to dismiss particular charges against the defendants, which partly reflected the complexity of the case. They also persuaded the tribunal to dismiss count 4 of the indictment altogether. That charge concerned persecution of religious and political groups in Germany before the war, and the tribunal decided that its jurisdiction did not extend beyond crimes committed during the war. The most audacious defense effort, initiated with the two motions I found, was an effort to have all the tribunals and all the trials invalidated, citing the role the USSR had in setting up the tribunals in 1945. The motions called for a hearing and did not explain the reasoning of the claim; of course, it did not succeed.

The reticent witnesses: At one point in its judgment the tribunal noted that several of the witnesses who had given precise evidence in affidavits before the trial had foggy memories once they took the stand. The judges connected this pattern to a movement evident in Germany at the time to discourage Germans from providing incriminating evidence at the war crimes trials. That may have been one reason why the judgment was so long (834 pages) and detailed: The judges wanted to establish the historical and legal record.

The list-makers: The NMT 11 prosecution staff made lists of all the documents (more than 3800) they prepared as evidence. One list identified the 216 document books, noting when they were used in court. Another listed all the prosecution exhibits, noting their evidence code numbers (e.g., NG 2586) and the document books they were in. A third listed all the evidence file documents used in the primary prosecution case (January-March 1948). Connecting evidence file code numbers with exhibit numbers and trial dates is an enormous time-saver for our work, especially for finding where document appeared in the transcript. And when I was asked to make a shortlist of key trial documents that could be shared with students, I knew of a document that was probably the most important one in NMT 11, and one of the most important in all of the trials, but not where it was located in the collection; the lists directed me to the right folder, document book 59. See the next item.

Wannsee: Exhibit 1452, NG 2586-G, was the record of “the conference on the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem held on 20 January 1942 in Berlin, Am Grossen Wannsee.” Hitler had assigned Goering in 1938 to manage the “Jewish Problem,” and in July 1941 Goering had instructed Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS Security Service (SD), to develop a plan for the “final solution.” The meeting was not a briefing on a completed plan; the officials present were asked to help finalize it in order to assure coordination in carrying it out. After reviewing the earlier policy of coerced Jewish emigration, Heydrich outlined the solution: all of Europe’s Jews were to be taken into custody; elderly Jews were to be kept in ghettoes (where they would die out); all other Jews were to be sent “to the East” for “use as labor”; many of the workers would “fall out”—die—from the hard labor; the surviving “remnant” would constitute a threat of resistance and would be “given treatment accordingly.” The final solution would be complete. In Case 11, the details of the extermination program were already well known; what mattered more was list of attendees, representatives of the departments that were informed and expected to cooperate: there were six officers of the SS, including Heydrich and Eichmann, an official from the party chancellery, and eight officials from seven different government departments, including the Reich chancellery, the Four Year Plan, the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Justice, and the Foreign Office.

Matt Seccombe, 15 October 2025