Archive/File: people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Judgment/Judgment-058 Last-Modified: 1999/05/27 Legal Analysis of the Findings of Fact in the Light of the Indictment 181. The acts of the Accused against the Jewish People were detailed in eighth counts 1-8 of the indictment. In all these counts, the Accused was charged with offences under Section 1 of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, 5710-1950. This section defines three crimes for which the punishment is death: Crime against the Jewish People - Section 1(a)(1), and with this the Accused is charged in counts 1-4; Crime against humanity - Section 1(a)(2), and with this the Accused is charged in counts 5-7; War crime - Section 1(a)(3), and with this the Accused is charged in count 8. Section 1(b) defines the nature of these three crimes. 182. We shall now devote our remarks to the Crime against the Jewish People, referred to in counts 1-4. The legislator has specified in seven sub-sections the acts which he regards as a crime against the Jewish People. We have to deal only with the first four sub-sections in this list, because counts 1-4 are parallel to these four sub- sections, as follows: (1) killing Jews, is dealt with in the first count; (2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to Jews, is dealt with in the third count; (3) placing Jews in living conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction, is dealt with in the second count; (4) devising measures intended to prevent births among Jews, is dealt with in the fourth count. According to the first part of Section 1(b) of the Law, all these acts amount to a crime against the Jewish People only if they were committed with intent to destroy the Jewish People, in whole or in part. As to the periods during which the crimes were committed, the first and second counts mention the period 1939-1945 and, from the recital of facts, it appears that the reference in these counts is to the period which commenced with the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. In the third count, the "period of the Nazi regime" is mentioned as the period of the commission of the crimes, and in the fourth count, the period is "commencing with the year 1942." It has been proved that the specific intent to destroy the Jewish People, within the terms of Section 1(b), lay at the basis of the plan called "the Final Solution of the Jewish Question," from the time in mid-1941, when Hitler gave the order for general extermination. The acts of murder and violence against the Jews, committed by the Nazi regime and under its influence from that time onwards, were committed without a shadow of a doubt with specific intent to destroy the Jewish People as such, and not only Jews as individuals. Hence, also, the ruthlessness shown even towards little children, because those who sought to strike at the roots did not wish the survival of the new generation, which would ensure the future and continuity of the Jewish People. We have found above that information on the plan for the Final Solution reached the Accused at the beginning of the summer of 1941 (section 163 of the Judgment). Further we have seen (sections 163-164) that, at the end of August 1941, the Accused sought to prevent the emigration of Jews from German-occupied territories, lest these Jews escape the Final Solution "which was now in the preparatory stage," and that, not later than mid-September 1941, the Accused paid his first visit to Globocnik in Lublin, and immediately afterwards took part in discussions about the first deportations from the Reich territory to the Lodz Ghetto. It may be said that, from the moment he heard of the order for total extermination, the Accused did not sit with his arms folded, and that, from then onwards, all his activities as Referent for Jewish Affairs in the RSHA were co-ordinated and directed towards the target of the Final Solution. But since in the evidence before us we have not found positive proof of specific action on the part of the Accused in the interim period between June and August 1941, we think it more cautious to find that his activity within the framework of the Final Solution commenced in August 1941. 183.The facts which have been demonstrated, showed not only that the Accused knew of the intent to destroy the Jewish People, which lay within the plan for the Final Solution, but he personally was also permeated with this intent. The very breadth of the scope of his activities is evidence of this. Moreover, he prepared the material for Heydrich's address at the Wannsee Conference, both the statistical material and the section on the lesson to be learned from history, the lesson which dictated the complete extermination of the Jewish People (section 164). We may recall his reference to "elements of much greater ethnic value who are more fertile," who must not be kept alive (section 116) and his statement on "the important biological material...whose emigration to Palestine is not desirable" (section 155). All this also bears witness to the aim of biological extermination, directed against the entire Jewish People. We shall further quote Hoess' statement about the Accused, solely in order to sum up the Accused's attitude on this question, which has in any case been well proved: "Eichmann was permeated with the conviction that if there would be success in destroying the foundations of Jewry in the East by complete extermination, then Jewry as a whole would never recover from this blow. For the assimilated Jews of the West, including America, are not able - nor do they wish - to replace the enormous losses in blood, since amongst these Jews there is no expectation of offspring in considerable numbers." (Hoess on Eichmann, T/88, p. 3) The question arises whether this same intent to destroy the Jewish People existed in the heart of the Accused already at an earlier date, before he was informed in 1941 of the Final Solution. In the third count, Section (b), of the indictment, the Attorney General charges the Accused with causing grave bodily and mental harm to millions of Jews, during the entire period of the Nazi regime, with intent to destroy the Jewish People, and in the list of acts in section (d), supra, mention is made of mass arrests of Jews and their torture in concentration camps, such as Dachau and Buchenwald, and the organization of mass persecutions on the Crystal Night, the organization of a social and economic boycott of Jews, and stigmatizing them as a subhuman racial group, and the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws. 184. With regard to the period up to the outbreak of war, the acts specified in section (d) of the third count were not yet part of the programme for the Final Solution by way of complete physical extermination. Accordingly, we have to consider separately each of these series of acts - for example, the events of the Crystal Night. If so, there is, in our view, grounds for saying that the mass acts of violence, committed by the National Socialist regime up to the outbreak of the War, as for instance the dispatch of thousands of Jews to concentration camps, were already committed with intent to destroy the Jewish People in part, and therefore they already come within the definition of "crime against the Jewish People," within the meaning of Section 1(a)(1) of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law; for it was clear from the outset to those who sent the Jews to the concentration camps because of their being Jews, that the prisoners would be placed there in such living conditions as would cause many of them to die - and this was the purpose of those who sent them there. But there is no need for us to decide this question finally, because, in our view, it has not been proved that, until his transfer to Vienna in 1938, the Accused had already taken an active part in the mass persecutions mentioned in section (d) of the third count. We have explained above (in section 62) that up to that date the Accused was engaged in intelligence work and not on executive measures. We have also found that it has not been proved that the Accused participated in the organization of the Crystal Night in Austria (Section 64). 185. With regard to the activity of the Accused in the Central Office for Emigration in Vienna, Prague and Berlin, designed to bring about the forced emigration of Jews, we have found that here the Accused exerted pressure and used threats of terror (Section 65). Amongst other things, he also threatened to send Jews to a concentration camp if emigration were not speeded up as he wanted. We have come to the conclusion that these threats do not amount to active participation in dispatching Jews to concentration camp or in what occurred inside these camps. The organization of forced emigration itself was not yet accompanied by intent to destroy the Jewish People, but there is no doubt that in the circumstances that have been described these were acts of expulsion of a civilian population which fall within the definition of "crime against humanity." 186. With regard to the expulsion of Jews, in the organization of which the Accused was engaged in what we have called above the "second stage," that is to say, between the beginning of the War and mid-1941, namely the deportations to Nisko, the evacuation of Jews from the areas annexed to the Reich in the East (the Warthe district, etc.) and from Vienna, the expulsion of the Jews from Stettin, and from Baden and the Saar Palatinate (sections 72-75, 77): We have found that these were organized by the Accused in complete disregard for the health and lives of the deported Jews. So, too, it has been proved that many Jews died as a result of the expulsions from Nisko, Stettin and the Warthe district. There is no doubt that here, there was cruelty which bordered on premeditated malice, and we have weighted carefully whether or not the Accused foresaw the murderous consequences of these deportations, and this was what he wished. But in the final analysis, a doubt remained in our minds as to whether there was that intentional aim to exterminate which is required for the proof of a crime against the Jewish People, and we shall, therefore, deal with these inhuman acts as being crimes against humanity.
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