The Nuremberg Trials (Vol.6). International Military Tribunal

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СКАЧАТЬ customarily held an 11 o’clock conference with his closest collaborators within the Propaganda Ministry. When both Goebbels and his undersecretary, Dr. Naumann, were absent, Goebbels, after 1943, entrusted Fritzsche with the holding of this 11 o’clock press conference.

      In Document Number 3255-PS the Court will find Goebbels’ praise of Fritzsche’s broadcasts. This praise was given in Goebbels’ introduction to a book by Fritzsche called, War to the War Mongers. I would like to offer the quotation in evidence as Exhibit Number USA-724, from the Rundfunk Archiv, at Page 18 of Your Honors’ document book. This is Goebbels speaking:

      “Nobody knows better than I how much work is involved in those broadcasts, how many times they were dictated within the last minutes to find some minutes later a willing ear by the whole nation.”

      So we have it from Goebbels himself that the entire German nation was prepared to lend willing ears to Fritzsche, after he had made his reputation on the radio.

      The rumor passed that Fritzsche was “His Master’s Voice” (Die Stimme seines Herrn). This is certainly borne out by Fritzsche’s functions. When Fritzsche spoke on the radio it was indeed plain to the German people that they were listening to the high command of the conspirators in this field.

      Fritzsche is not being presented by the Prosecution as the type of conspirator who signed decrees or as the type of conspirator who sat in the inner councils planning all of the over-all grand strategy of these conspirators. The function of propaganda is, for the most part, apart from the field of such planning. The function of a propaganda agency is somewhat more analogous to an advertising agency or public relations department, the job of which is to sell the product and to win the market for the enterprise in question. Here the enterprise, we submit, was the Nazi conspiracy. In a conspiracy to commit fraud, the gifted salesman of the conspiratorial group is quite as essential and quite as culpable as the master planners, even though he may not have contributed substantially to the formulation of all the basic strategy, but rather contributed to the artful execution of this strategy.

      In this case the Prosecution most emphatically contends that propaganda was a weapon of tremendous importance to this conspiracy. We further contend that the leading propagandists were major accomplices in this conspiracy, and further, that Fritzsche was a major propagandist.

      When Fritzsche entered the Propaganda Ministry, the most fabulous “lie factory” of all time, and thus attached himself to this conspiracy, he did this with a more open mind than most of these conspirators who had committed themselves at an earlier date, before the seizure of power. He was in a particularly strategic position to observe the frauds committed upon the German people and upon the world by these conspirators.

      The Tribunal will recall that in 1933, before Fritzsche took his party oath of unconditional obedience and subservience to the Führer and thus abdicated his moral responsibility to these conspirators, he had observed at first-hand the operations of the storm troopers and the Nazi race pattern in action. When, notwithstanding this, Fritzsche undertook to bring the German news agencies in their entirety within fascist control, he learned from the inside, from Goebbels’ own lips, much of the cynical intrigue and many of the bold lies against opposition groups within and without Germany. He observed, for example, the opposition journalists, a profession to which he had previously been attached, being forced out of existence, crushed to the ground, either absorbed or eliminated. He continued to support the conspiracy. He learned from day to day the art of intrigue and quackery in the process of perverting the German nation, and he grew in prestige and influence as he practiced this art.

      The Tribunal will also recall that Fritzsche had said that his predecessor Berndt fell from the leadership of the German Press Division partly because he overplayed his hand by the successful but blunt and overdone manipulation of the Sudetenland propaganda. Fritzsche stepped into the gap which had been caused by the loss of confidence of both the editors and the German people, and Fritzsche did his job well.

      No doubt Fritzsche was not as blunt as the man he succeeded; but Fritzsche’s relative shrewdness and subtlety, his very ability to be more assuring and “to find,” as Goebbels said, “the willing ears of the whole nation,” these things made him the more useful accomplice of these conspirators.

      Nazi Germany and its press went into the actual phase of war operations with Fritzsche at the head of the particular propaganda instrument controlling the German press and German news, whether by the press or by radio. In 1942 when Fritzsche transferred from the field of the press to the field of radio, he was not removed for bungling but only because Goebbels then needed him most in the field of radio. Fritzsche is not in the dock as a free journalist, but as an efficient, controlled Nazi propagandist, a propagandist who helped substantially to tighten the Nazi stranglehold over the German people, a propagandist who made the excesses of these conspirators more palatable to the consciences of the German people themselves, a propagandist who cynically proclaimed the barbarous racialism which is at the very heart of this conspiracy, a propagandist who coldly goaded humble Germans to blind fury against people they were told by him were subhuman and guilty of all the suffering of Germany, suffering which indeed these Nazis themselves, had invited.

      In conclusion, I wish to say only this. Without the propaganda apparatus of the Nazi State it is clear that the world, including Germany, would not have suffered the catastrophe of these years; and it is because of Fritzsche’s able role on behalf of the Nazi conspirators and their deceitful and barbarous practices in connection with the conspiracy that he is called to account before this International Tribunal.

      SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE (Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): May it please the Tribunal, it was intended that the next presentation would be by Colonel Griffith-Jones in the case of the Defendant Hess. I understand that the Tribunal has in mind that it might be better if that were left for the moment; if so, Major Harcourt Barrington is prepared to make the presentation with regard to the Defendant Von Papen.

      THE PRESIDENT: Yes. We understood that the Defendant Hess’s counsel could not be present today, and therefore it was better to go on with one of the others.

      SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: If your Lordship pleases, then Major Harcourt Barrington will deal with the presentation against the Defendant Von Papen.

      MAJOR J. HARCOURT BARRINGTON (Junior Counsel for the United Kingdom): My Lord, I understand that the court interpreters have not got the proper papers and document books up here yet, but they can get them in a very few minutes. Would your Lordship prefer that I should go on or wait until they have got them?

      THE PRESIDENT: Very well. Go on then.

      MAJOR BARRINGTON: May it please the Tribunal, it is my duty to present the case against the Defendant Von Papen. Before I begin I would like to say that the documents in the document books are arranged numerically and not in the order of presentation, and that the English document books are paged in red chalk at the bottom of the page.

      THE PRESIDENT: Does that mean that the French and the Soviet are not?

      MAJOR BARRINGTON: My Lord, we did not prepare French and Soviet document books.

      THE PRESIDENT: Major Barrington, the French members of the Tribunal have no document books at all.

      MAJOR BARRINGTON: My Lord, there should be a German document book for the French member. I understand it is now being fetched. Should I wait until it arrives?

      THE PRESIDENT: I think you can go on.

      MAJOR BARRINGTON: The Defendant Papen is charged primarily with the guilt of conspiracy, and the proof of this charge of conspiracy will emerge automatically from the proof of the four allegations specified in Appendix СКАЧАТЬ