Q. To this extent then there is a considerable difference between your position and the position of the Military Commander of Greece?
A. Yes. Yes, in the purely military sphere there was, certainly.
Q. I see. Thank you.
CROSS EXAMINATION GENERAL FELBER BY MR. FENSTERMACHER:
Q. General Felber, when members of the German Police or the Serbian police were killed, you issued orders to Meyszuer as Higher SS and Police Leader to retaliate for their deaths didn't you?
A. Subsequent to a report from Meyszuer who brought these things to the attention of the Military Commander.
MR. FENSTERMACHER: That's all.
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: The witness may stand aside.
Has Dr. Gawlik or his assistant appeared?
We will take a 10-minute recess at this time, and will you please get word to Dr. Gawlik to be here at that time.
(Tribunal in recess until 1515 hours)
(AFTER RECESS)
THE MARSHAL: The Tribunal is again in session.
MR. FENSTERMACHER: Before we begin, I would simply like, on behalf of the Prosecution, to extend our very sincere appreciation to a small group of people who did a very good and very difficult job in a very competent manner. The Court interpreters from German to English, Miss Evand, Mrs. Schaeffer and Mr. Weber, and from English to German, Mr. Hopfer, Miss Lenzen and Mr. Scharf, who have been with us throughout and have always, with great patience, and great good humor, I believe, stayed up with these proceedings.
The Court reporters have, I think similarly done a very competent job. Unfortunately, there were so many of them we do not have the names, and cannot, unfortunately read their names get into the record.
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: The record will show the attitude of the Prosecution in the matter.
DR. LATERNSER: Your Honor, I join these thanks, in the name of the Defense counsel, to the fullest extent.
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: The record will show your attitude. Dr. Gawlik.
DR. GAWLIK: (Counsel for the defendant, General Dehner):
Your Honor, first of all I would ask that Document, Dehner No. 59, to which I have already given Exhibit Number, Dehner No. 55, be now accepted as sur rebuttal evidence.
I submit it to refute the credibility of Bach-Zelewski. It is an excerpt from a Prosecution Document PS 1919, an excerpt from a speech of the Reich Fuehrer SS in Posen on the 4th of October, 1943, in which Himmler stated that 95 out of 100 of all reports were either lies or only one-half correct. This is the document which I showed the witness BachZelewski during his examination and to which, at that time, I gave the number, Dehner 55.
MR. FULKERSON: I do not want to raise a long objection, but this is an excerpt from this Posen speech Dr. Gawlik attempted to use, unsuccessfully, because of the ruling of the Court, in the course of his crossexamination of General Gach-Zelewski, and it has no probative value; it means absolutely nothing in so far as rebutting the specific statement that General Bach-Zelewski made on the witness stand here.
DR. GAWLIK: I would like to draw the attention of the Tribunal first of all to the fact that it is a Prosecution document, and I am very astonished that the Prosecution maintains its own document, that it has no probative value.
In addition, I submit it to rebut the statement of Bach-Zelewski that all of the reports were true. Here in the witness stand he stated that no incorrect reports were made, end in order to refute these statements by Bach-Zelewski, and at the same time to impeach his credibility.
I am now submitting this document as an exhibit in the trial.
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: The objection will be sustained.
DR. GAWLIK: The next document I would like to submit is Document Dehner No. 36. This document I have already submitted during the examination of Bach-Zelewski. I assume that at that time it was not accepted because at that time the reason was that it could not be submitted during the examination of Bach-Zelewski, but at the present stage in the proceedings, I would like to submit it to refute the statements of Bach-Zelewski.
It is an affidavit by Konstantin Kammerhofer.
MR. FULKERSON: I object to this document. As I pointed out before during the examination of a witness we had the other day, this document has been in Dr. Gawlik's document book for a good long while, and he could very easily have put it in before, but he waited and attempted, after having deliberately passed over it, he attempted to use it in the cross-examination of a witness here the other day, and he now attempts to go back and put it in, thus depriving us of a chance of cross-examination. I object
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: Mr. Fulkerson, I am sure that you did not intend to do it, but you interrupted Dr. Gawlik before he had concluded his statement.
Proceed, Dr. Gawlik, to make your statement.
DR. GAWLIK: While submitting my documents I did not present this document because when I checked over the documents again I did not think that it contained relevant, evidentiary material, and at the time I only wanted to submit those documents which were relevant, and for this reason I limited myself to a very small number of documents, but since the Prosecution, in rebuttal, brought the witnesses Bach-Zelewski and Kern, this document is now relevant, and the position for me, as Defense counsel, is now different from what it was at that time when I presented my documents.
For this reason I think that now I have the right to offer this document in evidence.
It is further incorrect, as the Prosecutor has asserted it, that I left it out intentionally for some specific reason. I do not know what reasons they could have been. I can state here that the only reason was that at that time it was not relevant.
If the Prosecution had produced the witnesses Bach-Zelewski and Korn in their case-in-chief before I started with my documents, then I would have presented the document at that time,--this is, as I said, supposed to be a document to refute the statement of Bach-Zelewski and Korn, and on the same subject for which the Prosecution brought them here, namely, the connection between the Wehrmacht and the SS, and I would like to inform the Tribunal that the first witnesses on this subject was brought forward in the rebuttal proceedings.
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: Mr. Fulkerson.
MR. FULKERSON: I think that I have pretty well covered the subject in what I said before, except that there is one other peculiar thing to be pointed out about this, and that is that it is being used to rebut, according to Dr. Gawlik, the testimony of the witness Korn.
Now the witness Korn was called here by Dr. Gawlik, and has already appeared. Now it appears that he has been holding an affidavit in reserve; not having used the man as his own witness, he has been holding this Kammerhofer affidavit in reserve to attempt to rebut him with it in case somebody else put him on the stand.
That is another very good reason for objection.
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: Your objection therefore was?
MR. FULKERSON: My objection if Your Honor pleases, is that this Kammerhofer document is entirely irrelevant and is not proper sur rebuttal.
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: Your objection will be sustained.
Does that conclude your matter, Dr. Gawlik?
DR. GAWLIK: Yes, Your Honor.
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: Does that indicate that all defendants have rested?
It so appears, and the Adjournment of the Tribunal will be placed in the hands of the Presiding Judge, Judge Wennerstrum.
Judge Wennerstrum.
PRESIDING JUDGE WENNERSTRUM: Heretofore the Tribunal has indicated its desire that both the Prosecution and the Defense Counsel submit their closing arguments at a time, and within a time which will permit the translation department, and the reproduction department to handle these particular documents, and papers or addresses in a way which will not put any great pressure upon those particular divisions.
The Tribunal has indicated the time within which these are to be presented, and that they shell be handed to the translation department at least within a day after the close of the evidence.
Do you wish to make a statement, Mr. Rapp?
MR. RAPP: Yes, Your Honors. Dr. Mueller-Torgow has asked me to make a statement on behalf of the Prosecution regarding the inquiry I made of him prior to the recess, and I am prepared to state now that Dr. Mueller Torgow did not send for translation to Mr. Hodges any document after the Court ruled on that particular issue.
I went to have the record so show. I wanted merely to inquire, and I have now gotten the answer.
THE PRESIDENT: The record shows heretofore that the Prosecution rests. Is that correct, Mr. Rapp?
MR. RAPP: Yes, Your Honor.
THE PRESIDENT: I again want to urge both Prosecution and Defense counsel to submit their closing arguments to the necessary departments promptly, and so that there will be no undue pressure placed upon those particular departments.
With that statement the Tribunal will adjourn until February 2nd at 9:30 AM, at which time the Tribunal will hear the closing arguments for both the Prosecution and the Defense, and give the following week over for that purpose.
The Tribunal will be in recess, as previously announced.
(Tribunal in recess until 0930 hours, February 2, 1948)
Official Transcript of Military Tribunal V, Case VII in the matter of the United States of America against Wilhelm List, et al, defendants, sitting at Nurnberg, Germany on 3 February 1948, 0930, Judge Wennerstrum presiding.
THE MARSHAL: The Honorable, the Judges of Military Tribunal V. Military Tribunal V is now in session. God save the United States of America and this Honorable Tribunal. There will be order in the court.
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Marshal, have you ascertained that all the defendants are present in the court?
THE MARSHAL: May it please your Honors, all the defendants are present in court.
THE PRESIDENT: It was my understanding that the prosecution was to present their argument at this time. Are they ready?
MR. RAPP: If your Honors please, the prosecution is prepared to offer its closing argument at this time. I would merely like to make one request for the record. I have checked our files and there are still a small number of photostatic copies in the hands of the defense counsel which have not been returned. I will give Dr Laternser during the recess a list of these numbers and I ask that you be kind enough to return them as soon as possible.
PROSECUTION'S CLOSING STATEMENT Case No. 7 It is a challenging and formidable task for any advocate to sum up a record of almost 10,000 pages in a trial which has lasted for almost 7 months.
When the panoramic events of several years of military and political history in four different nations are the subject matter of a judicial proceeding, when nearly 700 Prosecution documents - orders, reports, war diaries, photographs and even films - are introduced into evidence, when 50 odd witnesses have personally appeared before the Tribunal and more than a thousand by affidavit - then in summation one can do little more than outline in incomplete highlight the contents of this sordid and depraved text.
Many things may be said in future days about this trial. None enjoys the process of being tried and judged, and it would be too much to expect from the defendants praise of the fairness and detachment with which this litigation has been conducted. But it must be obvious even to them that they could not have found a more dispassionate forum anywhere in this world.
No matter what might be said by history about this proceeding,of one thing we can be sure. No fair-minded critic may ever say that not all was said in these defendants' favor which might have been said.
It has been somewhat more than a year since the International Military Tribunal handed down two historic decisions involving the criminal responsibility of high-ranking officers of the German Army for the outrages of German troops during World War II. In one, Keitel and Jodl were held to be as guilty as Goering and Ribbentrop for the aggressive acts and wars, with their inevitable consequences, that mark the period of German hegemony in Europe. In the other, it was held that the group of military leaders indicted as the German General Staff and High Command was too amorphous a collection to be dealt with as a group or organization. But in commenting on the evidence concerning the guilt of individual German officers the Tribunal made this clear and unequivocal pronouncement:
"They have been, responsible in large measure for the miseries and suffering that have fallen on men, women and children.
"Many of these men have made a mockery of the Soldier's oath of obedience to military orders. When it suits their defense, they say they had to obey; when confronted with Hitler's brutal crimes, which are shown to have been within their general knowledge, they say they disobeyed. The truth is they actively participated in all these crimes, or sat silent and acquiescent witnessing the commission of crimes on a scale larger and more shocking than the world has ever had the misfortune to know.
This must be said.
"Where the facts warrant it, these men should be brought to trial so that those among them who are guilty of these crimes should not escape punishments" By filing the indictment here, the prosecution was in effect carrying out the mandate of the International Military Tribunal.
The defendants in the dock all fit the description of those officers whom the International Military Tribunal believed should not be allowed to escape the consequences of the vile acts which they either fathered, furthered or allowed to be carried out by their subordinates without a rummer of protest.
Since these crimes all occurred either in territory where active fighting was taking place or in territory which was being occupied by the German Army - Since, in a word, they took place in areas where the German Army constituted the only real source of political or military power and where the only organizations of any kind were either directly or ultimately controlled by the Army - it is only to be expected that the nature of these criminal acts follows a more or less uniform pattern. Indeed, it would be surprising if this were not the case. Most of these defendants, as has been said, served on the Russian front before being transferred to the Balkans. One does not ordinarily expect to see a total change of character and habits of thought effectuated by an individual's transfer from one place to another, especially if he serves in the name capacity in both places.
Further, the nerve center of the entire German. Army was in Berlin, and German troops, wherever they were stationed, were influenced to a certain extent by the broad. policy directives which issued from the OKW, so that one would expect to find, as in the case of any Army, a certain uniformity of policy and, within a broad framework, certain accepted ideas and methods of action. The defendants, of course, seize on this unifying direction and attempt to balance on the pin point of the OKW a whole absurd inverted pyramid of argumentation to the effect that most of the indefensible acts committed by their troops and auxiliaries can be laid at the door of the OKW, and that they, who were mere Lt. Generals and Colonel Generals and Field Marshals were completely stripped of any discretion whatever.
This tendency to minimize their own importance is a characteristic which does not appear in their biographies prior to the date the indictment against them was filed.
We will deal with this newly-developed self-abasement presently. What is pertinent for the moment is that this identity of personnel, especially in the higher ranks in various theaters during the course of the war, plus this centralized direction of policy reduces the number of legal issues to be considered in this litigation.
Especially in the case of the execution of hostages is the legal issue simple and clear. The prosecution takes the position that the killing of a civilian whose only proved offense is that he or she lives in the neighborhood of a place where some unidentified person did something which displeased the German occupation power, is simply murder, no more, no less. This seems to be a principle which is utterly indigestible to the Defense.
We might say parenthetically that it is rather amusing that they, on the one hand, can argue with apparent seriousness that it is perfectly legitimate to drag a man out of his house, stand him up against the wall and shoot him without even asserting that he is guilty of anything, and yet on the other hand, with an equally straight face,they are able to quiver with indignation at the outrage on their private rights which was perpetrated when they were relieved of their medals by some souvenircollecting GI in 1945. But this is only one of the many spectacles of moral acrobatics to which we have been treated in the course of this trial.
And the factual issues are really little more complicated. Lifted out of the morass of detail with which the record is deliberately and unnecessarily encumbered, the case is impressive in its simplicity, The prosecution has had no trouble establishing that the German Army carried out executions of innocent hostages and other savagely disproportionate reprisal measures, that it killed prisoners of war of lawful belligerents by the thousands, and that it participated in the round-up and incarceration.
in concentration camps of the Jews, Gypsies and other groups classified as inferior by the philosopher friends of Hitler. It was easy to show that the Army often was used as a uniformed press-gang to shanghai foreign workers for the German war machine.
The only complication has arisen in showing where these men were and what positions they held at a given point in time. In order to do this, we have had to go up and down chains of command like so many squirrels. We have had to go into the question of temporary absences from duty caused by sick leaves, holiday leaves, emergency leaves and every other sort of furlough recognized by the German Army.
The accuracy of self-serving personal diaries and prejudicial affidavits of orderly officers with amazingly unerring memories is somewhat more than questionable. But this defense causes us little difficulty. The crimes perpetrated were on so enormous a scale and so continuous in time that there is more than enough to go round for each defendant. Even making allowance for a few days' or weeks' absence from headquarters means at best but a slight deduction from a still staggering totality. The major characteristic which this proceeding has in common with all of the other war crimes trials heard here in Nurnberg is that the Prosecution's case is based principally upon captured records of unchallenged authenticity which these very defendants, and their closest subordinates and collaborators themselves prepared, unwittingly and dispassionately enough, in the ordinary course of their business of running a war. Ordinarily, in a criminal case, documentary evidence plays a minor role. Most of the proof consists of the oral testimony of the persons who were present or near by when the crime was committed. But for the Prosecution to prove by oral testimony all of the murders and arsons and unlawful arrests and deportations committed by the agencies which these defendants directed was quite impossible for a number of reasons.
In the first place, a person charged with a crime is ordinarily tried within a fairly short time after the act is committed. In a friendly country where the majority of inhabitants are on the side of the law and the wrongdoer is an outcast, the latter will, in the usual case, be readily apprehended. But it took several years before any one German general could be called to account for atrocities committed by his troops in the occupied territories of Europe. The bulk of the criminal acts which have been the subject of this litigation were committed between 1941 and 1944. The lapse of time and the press of events which occurred subsequent to their commission in themselves made it impracticable to attempt to prove the commission of these acts by oral testimony.
Further, in the normal criminal case only one crime, or at the most two or three, are charged against the defendant; and even if more than one criminal act is involved, all of the acts will at least have taken place within a reasonably small area. The courts of one locality are generally spared the task of trying persons who are charged with having committed crimes outside its usually restricted borders, Here, on the other hand, we are dealing with a series of deeds which are only limited geographically by the perimeter of the German Army's territorial conquests. It is not even entirely accurate to use the term 'series', because some of these crimes occurred simultaneously in different parts of Europe. List and Foertsch, for example, were killing hostages in Serbia at the very same time when Kuntze, Lanz and Leyser were executing commissars in Russia.
Finally, in the conventional murder case the Prosecution is usually able to find someone who was in the vicinity of the place where the crime was committed and who lived to tell the tale. Frequently, the murders which form the subject matter of this litigation were committed in such a way that this is not possible. When twenty hostages were marched out of a camp, stood up against a wall and shot by German troops, it was unlikely that anyone except the German troops actually witnessed the scene and lived to describe it.
The proof of the commission of a criminal act by documentary evidence has certain advantages. It eliminates uncertainty and avoids the hazards of human frailties which living witnesses are heir to, such as poor memories, mistaken identifications and good or bad demeanor on the witness stand. It enables the Prosecution to be more detached and reduces the number of controversial factual issues.
But unfortunately, though documents have some advantages, they are not entirely satisfactory. The dry and dull figures of hanged hostages, shot partisans and helpers do not and cannot reflect the destroyed homes, shattered hopes, the disillusionment and misery and pathos that lie behind them. The human mind - perhaps fortunately for our own ultimate well-being - is capable of absorbing only so much tragedy. If one single murder is brought into sharp focus we can take it in, comprehend and be moved emotionally. But when crime is piled upon crime, as has been done in this case, we are in danger of losing our sense of proportion, of allowing the meaning to blur and our moral judgment to become numbed and ineffectual. It is only by considering a cumulative effect that one can shake off the anesthetizing influence of these documents upon one's reason and one's sensibility.
Recorded evidence is handicapped in another respect - documents cannot talk back. They cannot get on the witness stand to annihilate some flimsy explanation, to correct some obvious misinterpretation, or to contradict some outright lie. To the extent that the Prosecution's case is based on documentary evidence, the defendant always has the last say. We can prove that a defendant ordered a given excess to be committed and we can prove that it was committed as a result of his order, but we cannot prove that the defendant did not read the order which he signed or that he did not mean what he said.
But the Prosecution's case does not rest entirely on documents.
Despite the difficulty of seeking out and transporting witnesses from the countries where these crimes took place, the Prosecution managed to Case 7: Closing Statement produce some - a Yugoslav, five Greeks and two Norwegians.
They were unsophisticated folk of the laboring classes who simply described what they had seen done by German troops under the command of these defendants. It is unlikely that their memories were inaccurate. When a man sees practically all of his follow villagers, including a good many members of his own family, murdered before his eyes, it is probable that the incident will make a sharp and indelible impression on his mind.
Though the German firing squads missed scarcely a man in Kragujevac during the three days that no Serb will ever forgot, somehow they failed to kill Zivojin Iovanovitch. He lived to relate that 2300 of his fellow townsmen were rounded up, marched off and sent to their deaths in the last of the three 100:1 reprisal executions that make October 1941 a blemish on German arms that can never be erased.
By sheer good fortune, Stephanos Pappas was able to give an eye witness account of the burning of his village of Konneno and of the indiscriminate slaughter of his friends and neighbors. And in what must certainly be the most miraculous and breathtaking of all escapes, Takis Sipliopoulos told in quiet and subdued detail the story of his own execution. Had one of Felmy's executions not chanced to omit the crucial coup de grace, one might never have known of the massacre at kalavritha.
The Prosecution also used four German witnesses. These men were grilled on cross-examination with particular severity, but with negligible profit. It may be that one reason those witnesses stood up so well was that they knew what they were talking about in the first place.
General Felber certainly knew whereof he spoke when he discussed the nature and purpose of reprisal measures; Bach-Zelewski had more than enough experience to support his conclusions on the subordination relationship of higher police and SS leaders to Army military commanders and General Ferdinand Jodl demonstrated some courage in violating caste loyalty to denounce his one-time commander-in-chief for militarily unnecessary devastation in Norway.
Significantly enough, in spite of the self-proclaimed opposition to National Socialism of every last defendant in the dock, it remained for the Prosecution to turn up, in Willy Finger, the only genuine anti-Nazi who appeared in court during this entire case.
Oftentimes German soldiers, not anticipating subsequent capture and search by the enemy, roguishly photographed their own gruesome work. A number of these photographs were introduced by the Prosecution. Can he who had once seen them ever forget the stark horror of their reality: bent figures poised on the edge of a shallow ditch with the raised rifles a moment before the command to fire; the brutal beheading with an axe -- in four separate scenes -- of a captured partisan; the scattered bodies at Sabac and the German soldier calmly documenting the carnage; the grinning Army troops and the burning thatched village in the background; the bodies grotesquely hanging from street poles along the main street in Belgrade; and the revealing humor of the postcard photographer of three men hanging from a tree and the perverted caption, "Trees in bloom in Serbia, Spring 1941."
But notwithstanding the films on Greece and Norway and the photographs and witnesses from Yugoslavia and Greece, the Prosecution has necessarily been forced to rely upon the verichrome records, orders and communications of the German Army itself in order to prove precisely what the German Army did. These records were kept with no thought of damning or of exculpating either their authors or their recipients. They are the most trustworthy evidence of the events to which they relate that can be imagined.
Such is the general character of the Prosecution's proof. What has the Defense adduced to meet it? Principally, their evidence has consisted of disquisitions by the defendants themselves. We will take up the general burden of their song when we discuss their common defenses.
They have also brought in a number of witnesses. Most of these defense witnesses have been former subordinates of the defendants, whose selfinterest have been former subordinates of the defendants, whose selfinterest and bias isso palpable that it merits no extended discussion.
General Hoelter and General Vogel are but two examples who come readily to mind. Hoelter, Chief of Staff of the 20th Mountain Army during the evacuation of Finnmark, might well have found himself in the deck alongside his Commander-in-Chief charged with complicity in perpetrating the very same crime. And Vogel's credibility -- aside from the fact that he was a corps commander under Rendulic during the same operation -- is clearly indicated by the fact that all of his testimony about the piety and modesty of the defendant Rendulic was squarely contraverted by the entries which the witness had made in his own personal diary during the war.
There was also Dietloff von Winning, the ubiquitous supply officer not only of the 12th Army but of its successors Army Groups E and F, who appeared on behalf of all three of his former superiors, List, Kuntze and Foertsch. Though he had never commanded troops and never smelled powder, von Winning was an authority on everything from objects of art in the White Castle in Belgrade to the number of calories required to keep a Greek hospital patient from dying of malnutrition. Though he knew all about the death of the German members of the 521st Signal Regiment, he could not recollect any action on the part of the German troops in reprisal because retaliation measures were outside his sphere of activity. And in his own orbit of work he could not possibly recall furnishing concentration camps with rations or other supplies.
Dr. Gerd Feine was called to testify concerning the capitulation agreement signed by Germany and Yugoslavia towards the end of April 1941. Dr. Feine got off to a shaky start by confessing, of all things, to having been extremely well treated during his recent trip to Yugoslavia in connection with an investigation of the work of the German Legation in Belgrade prior to the war.
Dr. Feine stated that Cincar Markovic, the former, and deposed, Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia, signed the capitulation agreement on behalf of the Yugoslav Government. Oddly enough, King Peter, as well as Prime Minister Simovic, who was not only a general in the Yugoslav air force but also Commander-in-Chief of the Yugoslav Army, had already left their country for England and could not accept Field Marshal von Weichs' cordial invitation to enter into contractual relations. Dr. Feine talked about a mysterious power of attorney which Simovic had allegedly given to a General Kalafotovic, who in turn was gracious enough to pass it on -- apparently without so much as a by your leave from Simovic -- to power-conscious Markovic. This whole transaction -- is clothed in deepest obscurity. But what really makes the whole suspicious structure collapse is the fact that Dr. Feine, though present throughout the entire capitulation proceedings, never actually saw the magic document which Markovic offered as his authority to transact the business of surrender in Simovic's place and stead.
Friedrich von Sidow allowed the prescribed form of oath to be administered to him without any spoken word of protest though, judging from his testimony, with a good many unuttered reservations. Like the rest of the defense witnesses, he too did no German evil, saw no German evil and heard no German evil. He know only about vicious attacks by partisans in Serbia in 1941; that he did not know by which partisans and never bothered to ask did not appear to strike him as at all unusual for one who, like he, was a major in the German Army. Only 300 Serbs, not almost. 1800 as the captured documents show, were killed at Kraljeve, if you believe his testimony, and that only because 300 Germans had been killed in previous attacks. And even the 1:1 retaliation taken was not for attacks simply at Kraljevo but, to be sure, for attacks which had occurred all over Serbia. Though Sidow claims he was in Serbia throughout October 1941, he never heard the slightest rumor about three large German mass executions at Valjevo, Kraljevo and Kragujevac.
He knew nothing at all about the execution of hostages, about concentration camps or about villages burned in reprisal. Indeed Mr. von Sidow's sense of honor was outraged at the more suggestion that such had occurred. His parting answer can scarcely have passed unnoticed: no, he said, he was not joking, he really had been in Yugoslavia in 1941.
Two other "star" witnesses were the self-styled Balkan experts, both longtime members of the Nazi Party and co-followers with Rosenberg and Streicher of the muse of history. One of them, Dr. Rudolf Ibbeken, had never taught or been taught a single course in Balkan history, he did not speak Serbo-Croat and he had been in Yugoslavia the extended period of six to nine months. He demonstrated his comprehensive grasp of the intricacies of his special field by being unable to answer questions about Balkan personalities which a sixth-grade student in good standing could have covered without great difficulty. Considerably embarrassed by Dr. Ibbeken's ignorance, the Defense produced a slightly more informed Balkan expert in the person of Professor Georg Stadtmueller -- a man so filled with regard for the triumph of international law that even if his country were invaded by an aggressor, and his relatives and friends killed through reprisal actions, even then his deep seated concern for the majesty of law would have restrained him from taking any hostile actions against the enemy occupier. The convincing effect professor Stadtmueller made with this personal confession was dissipated somewhat by the unobjectivity of his conclusion that the Balkan nations had made no recognizable contribution to European culture. Yet one ought not to deal too severely with professor Stadtmueller's testimony. On more sober reflection he did concede, however grudgingly, that yes, the Greek-discovered concept of democracy was something of a contribution to Western civilization after all.
We have talked of the "testimony" of the defendants and of the defense witnesses. The word "testimony" is too charitable: it would really be more accurate to describe what went into the record on direct examination as the depositions of the defendants and their witnesses, because they all took with them to the witness stand reams of paper on which were written all the questions that they were to be asked and all the answers with which they were to respond. So far as these people are concerned, the court can give no more weight to their demeanor on the witness stand during direct examination than it could if they had never come into the courtroom.
In addition, the defense has introduced several bushels of affidavits. A word about those would not be out of place. It was obviously impossible for the Prosecution to call all of these affiants to the witness.