Documentary evidence of the Nazi Government’s plans for systematic annihilation of the Jews of Europe was presented at today’s session of the war crimes trial here by Major Frank Wallis, on behalf of U.S. prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson.
Major Wallis submitted a memorandum issued by Julius Streicher, and also other documents, as proof that the pogroms which swept Germany on Nov. 10, 1938, were not spontaneous as the Nazis claimed, but were carefully planned, down to minute details on how shops and synagogues were to be destroyed, and what clothes the rioters should wear.
He also presented evidence of a meeting, under Goering’s chairmanship, held later in November, 1938, at which plans were discussed for carrying out Hitler’s order that the Jewish question must be “solved.”
JACKSON SAYS NAZIS FANATICALLY COMMITTED TO ANNIHILATE JEWS
Major Wallis’ presentation followed the line taken by Justice Jackson yesterday in his opening address in which he charged that “the most savage and numerous crimes planned and committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews.”
“It is my purpose to show a plan and design, to which all Nazis were fanatically committed, to annihilate all Jewish people,” Justice Jackson said. “The persecution of the Jews was a continuous and deliberate policy. It was a policy directed against other nations as well as against the Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism was promoted to divide and embitter the democratic peoples and to soften their resistance to the Nazi aggression.”
“The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jew was so methodically and thoroughly pursued that, despite the German defeat and Nazi prostration, this Nazi aim largely has succeeded,” he stressed. “Only the remnants of the European Jewish population remain in Germany, in the countries which Germany occupied, and in those which were her satellites or collaborators. Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in Nazi dominated Europe, 60 per cent are authoritatively estimated to have perished; 5,700,000 Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by emigration; nor are they included among displaced persons. History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.”
The determination to destroy the Jews “was a binding force which at all times cemented the elements of this conspiracy,” Justice Jackson pointed out. “On many internal policies there were differences among the defendants. But there is not one of them who has not echoed the rallying cry of Nezism–‘Deutschland erwache, Juda verreckel’ (Germany awake, Jewry perish!)
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