Document Analyst's Report

During June I completed the analysis of the final defense documents for Constantin von Neurath, the former foreign minister, and then all of documents for Hans Fritzsche, the propagandist, and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s aide and chief of the NSDAP chancellery (who was tried in absentia on the theory he had survived the war and escaped). Those were the last three individual defendants in the trial. After the defense attorneys’ final arguments (which are all done) and the closing arguments of the prosecuting powers (in progress), the next stage of the trial will be the defense cases of the six organizations charged as criminal organizations.

Who could have done this crime? In July 1941 Fritzsche reported in a radio broadcast on what happened during the Soviet retreat from Ukraine, according to witnesses at the front: in the cities, thousands of civilians “killed or tortured to death,” and hundreds in many villages. In a prelude to the Soviet accusation at Nuremberg that the mass murder of Poles at Katyn was committed by the Germans and not the Soviet Union, the Soviets acknowledged the deaths but claimed the Germans had done the killing. Fritzsche explained why that was impossible: “No German woman, father or mother requires proof that their husband or their son cannot have committed such atrocious acts.” (Similarly, Speer would claim during the trial that evidence that Germans had abused foreign workers must have been fabricated, since Germans were decent people.) If Fritzsche returned to that question when shown evidence of what the Einsatzgruppen had done to civilians on the eastern front, we have no record of it.

An awkward exchange: After Fritzsche completed his testimony on 28 June 1946 he was cross-examined by the Soviet prosecutor. Among other things the prosecutor tried to prove that Fritzsche’s radio broadcasts during the war made him complicit in waging a war of aggression (one of the charges in the indictment). In one broadcast in 1939 Fritzsche had presented the government’s (false) justification for the attack on Poland as a response to Polish provocation, and the prosecutor asked whether Fritzsche had spoken in good faith, believing the government’s explanation, or knowingly lied to justify the aggression. Fritzsche told the Soviet prosecutor that he had believed the government’s account at the time, and then added that the Soviet government had endorsed the German position at the time as well. The prosecutor quickly moved on to another topic.

The difficult client: Bormann’s attorney reported to the court that he could not find any witnesses willing to testify about Bormann’s work, noting that he was widely hated in Germany. (Two witnesses did testify about the likelihood that he had died at the end of the war.) As the attorney noted, Bormann’s reputation, and his absence from court, made it easy for other defendants to point at him, as well as Himmler and Goebbels, as the cause of the regime’s extreme measures, citing his “great, even diabolical influence.”

Matt Seccombe, 9 June 2024