Читать книгу The Nuremberg Trials: Complete Tribunal Proceedings (V. 5) - International Military Tribunal - Страница 9

“Surprise as the requisite for quick initial success will often require hostilities to begin before mobilization has been completed or the armies are fully in position.

“A declaration of war is no longer necessarily the first step at the start of a war.

“According to whether the application of the rules of warfare create greater advantages or disadvantages for the warring nations, will the latter consider themselves at war or not at war with the neutral states.”

It may, of course, be said that those were only theoretical words and they might apply to any other nation which might be minded to make war on Germany. The Court can use its judicial notice of the conditions of things in Europe in 1938 and ask itself whether Germany had any potential aggressor against her.

But, My Lord, I emphasize that passage because I submit it so clearly envisages exactly the way in which Germany did make war in 1939 and in the subsequent years.

My Lord, I now start to tread the road which has been trodden so many times and which will be trodden so many times again, the road from 1938 to 1941: the final act of aggression. My Lord, I believe that I can treat this, so far as Keitel and Jodl are concerned, in a very few sentences, because I submit that the documents which are already in, which have been read and reread into the record, demonstrate quite clearly that Keitel, as would only be expected, he being Chief of the Supreme Command of all the Armed Forces, and Jodl, as only would be expected also, he being Chief of the Operations Staff, were vitally and intimately concerned with every single act of aggression which took place successively against the various victims of Nazi aggression.

My Lord, Your Lordship has in front of you the document book and perhaps the trial brief in which those documents are set out under the heading. If I might take first the aggression against Austria, Your Lordship will remember, in Jodl’s diary on the 12th of February 1938, how Keitel, who was something more than a mere soldier, put heavy pressure upon Schuschnigg—that is Document 1780-PS, Jodl’s diary—how on the following day Keitel writes to Hitler—Document 1775-PS, Exhibit USA-75—suggesting the shamming of military action and the spreading of false but quite credible news.

Then the actual operation orders for “Operation Otto,” Exhibits USA-74, 75, and 77, all of the 11th of March 1938, are OKW orders for which Keitel is responsible.

THE PRESIDENT: What are the numbers of them?

MR. ROBERTS: My Lord, Documents C-102, C-103, and C-182. One of them is actually signed or initialed by Keitel, and two are initialed by Jodl. Those are the operation orders for the advance into Austria, the injunction, if the Tribunal remembers, to treat Czech soldiers as hostile and to treat the Italians as friends.

My Lord, that is the first milestone on the road, the occupation of Austria. My Lord, the second is, is it not. . .

THE PRESIDENT: Well, perhaps if you are going to pass on to another, we had better adjourn now until 2 o’clock.