Document Analyst's Report

During September I completed work on the documents for the defense of the Nazi party leadership corps, and began work on the documents for the defense of the Gestapo. The leadership files essentially added details to what I found in the first files in August without covering new ground, but there was also a follow-up file from the prosecution responding to the defense, one of the “stray” folders I mentioned in July.

Real leaders and nominal leaders: The NSDAP defense made almost no attempt to argue that the senior leaders of the party were not complicit in the crimes of the regime, arguing instead that the low-level party officials were “leaders” only in name and carried out only minor tasks (like collecting party dues). I went to the tribunal’s judgment to see how the judges decided this issue. The judgment was written with all the straightforward clarity for which legal writing is famous, but if I deciphered it correctly, the judges essentially accepted the defense evidence: The three higher levels of the party structure—the leaders at the province, county, and city level—were found to constitute a criminal organization, while those at the two lowest levels—the intermediary officials and the many thousands of block leaders—did not.

The Gestapo: I have not yet seen the defense attorney’s argument for the Gestapo, so I’m not sure of his strategy, but the documents in his first document book suggest a claim of formal legality. He cited pre-Nazi texts on the “political police” as a necessary agency to protect the government in any nation; the US equivalents might be the Secret Service and the FBI. Most of the documents are copies of prosecution exhibits, showing that the Gestapo was created by legal enactments and that its jurisdiction and powers were all authorized by law. The argument might be that a legal organization by definition cannot be a criminal organization. But if the tribunal did not accept that claim (and it did not), then the evidence served the prosecution more than the defense, as the documents set forth the sweeping powers that the Gestapo held.

The mandate: An early decree of 1933 authorized the Gestapo to ban publications, restrict property rights and personal freedoms, limit union activities and the right of assembly, and breach the privacy of communications. In 1934 Goering was obliged to issue a declaration that the Gestapo did not represent a police state, and that “He who is of good will, has nothing to fear.” In 1935 the emergency powers expanded to “make the Fuehrer’s will exclusively respected.” In 1936 the initial mandate to protect “the State” was revised to protect “the Party and the State.”

The enemies list: Hans Frank, who would become a Nuremberg defendant, published an administrative law book in which he explained that the jurisdiction of the “political police” included anyone who threatened the state, the military, the community, national health and “blood purity” (i.e., the German race), and ideological solidarity.

Matt Seccombe, 8 October 2024