Document Analyst's Report

During February and March, I worked through the defense documents of the German military general staff and high command, and the prosecution’s final argument against them. The term general staff meant all the generals and admirals in the military (about 130 men), and the high command referred to the organization under Hitler (the commander in chief) that issued high-level orders and planned and coordinated operations (managed by the defendants Keitel and Jodl). Under the indictment, the prosecution argued that these groups constituted a criminal organization that planned and conducted wars of aggression and committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during those wars.

Hitler and the generals: The defense argued that the key military decisions, including the planning and initiation of the wars, were all made by Hitler alone, while the generals simply carried out the orders given by their commander. They claimed that they obstructed some of his extreme orders, such as the order to execute captured Allied commandos and air crews rather than treat them as POWs. They had neither expected nor wanted a continental or world war, and especially not a two-front war that Germany could not win. They found that Hitler did not want their strategic advice and did not trust their judgment, which he considered to be too cautious and tradition-bound. One clue to this mutual distrust appears in the names of the officers who gave evidence: von Brauchitsch, von Dawans, von Gersdorff, von Kleist, von Kuechler, von Leeb, von List, von Luedinghausen, von Manstein, von Mellenthin, von Nestitz-Wallwitz, von Obstfelder, von Runstedt, and von Weichs. Hitler, the Austrian corporal turned revolutionary, and these aristocratic generals came from different worlds.

An officer’s agile career: One defense document aimed at portraying the army’s occupation of Ukraine as humane and constructive was a wartime report by a Lt. Oberlaender that recommended treating Ukrainians as allies against Soviet Russia. A search for the author’s full name turned up a full biography: Theodor Oberlaender was a young economist who specialized in eastern Europe. Before the war he worked in the USSR on a project to improve its agriculture. During the war he served in military intelligence as an expert on the East. One of his observations—which the defense did not present as evidence—was that Poland’s ideal population would be 8,000,000 less than it was. After a brief spell as a post-war POW, he worked for a US-sponsored intelligence organization in 1946-48. He served in the Bavarian government, 1950-53, and then the West German government, 1953-65. He received medals of honor from the governments of Bavaria, Germany, and France (but not Poland or Ukraine).

The military-Nazi coalition: In his closing argument against the general staff, Telford Taylor first outlined how the generals had served Hitler and the Nazi program, including the aggression and various crimes committed. He closed with a very different point: Rather than being servants of the Nazi program, the generals had their own agenda and worked with the Nazis to achieve it. That was the military domination of Europe. The generals were “German war-lords” carrying on an old tradition of German militarism. Punishing individual officers such as Keitel and Goering for their crimes was less important than establishing the criminality of the military high command as a group, Taylor claimed, in order to prevent the renewal of that militarism.

The tribunal: The IMT judges concluded that crimes had been committed by the military commanders and that the senior officers constituted “a ruthless military caste,” reflecting Taylor’s argument. “Caste” was a descriptive term, however, and not a group identification. Citing article 9 of the IMT charter, the tribunal decided that the general staff did not constitute a group or organization and therefore were not a criminal organization. (Article 9 does not provide any standard for defining a group or organization.) Individual senior officers were to be tried for specific crimes; five were tried and convicted in the IMT, and many more would be tried in the subsequent trials at Nuremberg (the NMT cases).

Matt Seccombe, 23 April 2025