Archive/File: people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Judgment/Judgment-060 Last-Modified: 1999/05/27 192. There is, of course, no better illustration of what we have said just now than the "Final Solution" itself. Here the basis of the crime lay in Hitler's order to achieve the physical extermination of the Jews. This was not an order to exterminate the Jews of Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, Soviet Russia - each group separately. It was not an order to exterminate first one million Jews and later another million, and so on; but the order was one comprehensive order, and the desire of the main conspirators and perpetrators was identical with the wish of the original initiator - general and total. Their criminal intention did not renew itself from time to time; it was not limited, for instance, to the first deportations to Lodz, Minsk and Riga, so that when these deportations were completed, it had been implemented completely and was renewed with the following deportation; but the criminal intent was continuous and embraced all activities, until the whole operation had been completed. 193. This also applies to the objective aspect of the "actus reus." When the order to exterminate the Jews was given, it was evident that this was a most complicated operation. It was not easy to kill millions, dispersed amongst the general population. The victims had to be found and isolated. Not every place is convenient for killing. Not everywhere will the population submit to the killing of their neighbours. Therefore, the victims had to be transferred to suitable places. It was wartime. Labour was needed. Manpower should not be wasted, and, therefore, the working capacity of the victims themselves had to be exploited as long as their muscles could function. It was therefore clear from the outset that a complicated apparatus was required to carry out the task. Everyone who was let into the secret of the extermination, from a certain rank upwards, was aware, too, that such an apparatus existed and that it was functioning, although not everyone of them knew how each part of the machine operated, with what means, at what pace, and not even at which place. Hence, the extermination campaign was one single comprehensive act, which cannot be divided into acts or operations carried out by various people at various times and in different places. One team of people accomplished it jointly at all times and in all places. 194. Hence, everyone who acted in the extermination of Jews, knowing about the plan for the Final Solution and its advancement, is to be regarded as an accomplice in the annihilation of the millions who were exterminated during the years 1941-1945, irrespective of the fact of whether his actions spread over the entire front of the extermination, or over only one or more sectors of that front. His responsibility is that of a "principal offender" who perpetrated the entire crime in co-operation with the others. With due apologies, we shall illustrate our meaning by an example which may seem incongruous, but it may serve to clarify what we have said: Two persons may collaborate in the forging of a document, each one of them forging only a part of the document. In such a case, they are both responsible as principal offenders, for in the words of our Code (Section 123(1)(a)), each one of them "perpetrated one of the acts which constitute the crime," and it is not necessary that both be present at the same time, while each one commits his part of the offence. This is the prevailing rule also in the English Common Law (Macklin, 168 E.R. 1136; Glanville Williams, Criminal Law, p. 177), and also in the law of the United States. We quote from Wharton's Criminal Law, 12th ed., vol. 1, p. 340, para. 255): "If part of a crime also be committed in one place and part in another, each person concerned in the commission of the offence is liable as principal." 195. The Accused was privy to the extermination secret, as from June 1941. As from August 1941, he began to be active in the furtherance of the extermination campaign, occupying a central place in it. We saw that the intention of his deeds was the total biological extermination of the entire Jewish People. We saw the commencement of his actual activities in his letter dated 28 August 1941, wherein he acted to prevent the emigration of Jews, since preparations for the Final Solution were being made. From a legal point of view, this was an act of aiding, committed in order to facilitate the extermination of Jews in accordance with the plan for the Final Solution. Not later than September 1941, or close to that time, the Accused made his first trip to Globocnik on Heydrich's order. Even if this journey was made only in order to gain information on what Globocnik was doing, for the Accused's superiors in the RSHA, this was also an act of aiding, towards the planning of future extermination activities by the heads of the RSHA. Henceforth, all the Accused's activities in rounding-up the Jews and transporting them for extermination, including all the planning and the organization required, were directed not only towards an isolated transaction, such as the killing at Auschwitz of the Jews deported there by him in a certain transport, immediately or after a time, by way of "extermination through labour," but they were done within the general framework expressed concisely in Hitler's order, and detailed in Heydrich's speech at the Wannsee Conference, as confirmed by all those present there. Hence, the Accused will be convicted (if no justification for his acts are found) of the general crime of the "Final Solution" in all its forms, as an accomplice to the commission of the crime, and his conviction will extend to all the many acts forming part of that crime, both the acts in which he took an active part in his own sector and the acts committed by his accomplices to the crime in other sectors on the same front. 196. As we see it, the first and second counts of the indictment complement each other in describing the activities connected with the Final Solution: The first count describes the killing of Jews as a result of the implementation of the Final Solution, and, therefore, the second count must be limited to those Jews who were subjected to conditions of life which were such as to bring about the physical extermination through the implementation of the Final Solution, but remained alive. We shall, therefore, relate this count, for instance, to those Jews who were deported to Auschwitz during the period of the Final Solution, and there put to hard labour, with the intention of killing them, too, in time, in some way; but who were saved because of the advance of the Soviet army. We do not think that the conviction of the second count should also include those Jews who were not saved, as if, in their case, there were two separate actions: first, subjection to living conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction, and later the physical destruction itself. 197. We shall not content ourselves with what we have said up till now about the Accused's responsibility for actions connected with the Final Solution, but alternatively we shall continue and examine his responsibility, assuming, contrary to our opinion, that he is responsible only for those actions connected with the Final Solution in which he personally participated. The factual basis for this examination is to be found in the detailed description of the activities of the Accused and his Section in the previous sections of this Judgment, and we do not intend to repeat the details here. We found that the focus of his activities was within the Reich itself, the Protectorate, and in the countries of Europe to the west, north, south, southeast and Central Europe. During the period of the Final Solution, the Accused acted against the Jews in those countries in all the various ways which have been described, in order to round them up and transport them towards their death in the East. Expressing his activities in terms of Section 23 of our Criminal Code Ordinance, we should say that they were mainly those of a person soliciting by giving counsel or advice to others, and of one who enabled, or aided others in that act (Section 23(1)(b), (c) and (d)). But we wish to emphasize that in any case the Accused is regarded as committing the crime itself, according to the opening part of Section 23(1), whether he committed an act in order to facilitate or to aid another in carrying out the extermination (Section 23(1)(b) and (c)), or whether he counselled or solicited others to exterminate (Section 23 (1)(d)). But more important than that: In such an enormous and complicated crime as the one we are now considering, wherein many people participated at various levels and in various modes of activity - the planners, the organizers and those executing the acts, according to their various ranks - there is not much point in using the ordinary concepts of counselling and soliciting to commit a crime. For these crimes were committed en masse, not only in regard to the number of the victims, but also in regard to the numbers of those who perpetrated the crime, and the extent to which any one of the many criminals were close to, or remote from, the actual killer of the victim, means nothing as far as the measure of his responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, in general, the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands and reach the higher ranks of command, the "counsellors" in the language of our Law. As regards the victims who did not die but were placed in living conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction, it is especially difficult to define in technical terms who abetted whom: he who hunted down the victims and deported them to a concentration camp, or he who forced them to work there. Let us combine the examination of the Accused's criminal responsibility according to the alternative assumption we have made above. We have found the extent of the measure of his activities in the areas annexed to the Reich in the East, the Warthe district, including the Lodz Ghetto, Bialystok, etc., where he was active in considerable measure (sections 133-134), and have found the measure of his activity in the Generalgouvernement area, where the Accused acted concurrently with others (sections 135-137). We have described his activity in areas conquered in the East (section 138), and his activity in connection with the Operations Units, when he visited Minsk, not later than September 1941, and later on by participating in directing their activities as from the spring of 1942 (section 139). As to the camps, we found that the Accused encouraged Globocnik to continue the extermination operations in his camps in the Lublin area (sections 141-142), and this, too, is an act of abetting, within the meaning of the last part of Section 23(1)(c). We have described the extent of the Accused's activities in what took place in the Auschwitz camp (143-146). We have also described his rule over the Terezin Ghetto (sections 150-152) and over Bergen-Belsen camp (section 153). We have dwelt upon his part in introducing the method of killing by means of gas vans, the introduction of the method of killing by Zyklon B gas at Auschwitz and in the supplying of this gas to the victims whom he transported from European countries, including the Generalgouvernement area (sections 132, 137), to the ghettos, to the Operations Units and to the camps in the East, in order to have them exterminated there, whether earlier or later. It appears, therefore, that even if we view each sector of the implementation of the Final Solution separately, there was not one sector wherein the Accused did not act in one way or another, with a varying degree of intensiveness, so that this alternative way would also lead us to find him guilty all along the front of extermination activities.
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