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PREFACE
In April 1949, judgment was rendered in the last of the series
of 12 Nuernberg war crimes trials which had begun In October 1946 and were held
pursuant to Allied Control Council Law No. 10. Far from being of concern solely
to lawyers, these trials are of especial interest to soldiers, historians,
students of international affairs, and others. The defendants In these
proceedings, charged with war crimes and other offenses against international
penal law, were prominent figures in Hitler's Germany and included such
outstanding diplomats and politicians as the State Secretary of the Foreign
Office, von Weizsaecker, and cabinet ministers von Krosigk and Lammers;
military leaders such as Field Marshals von Leeb, List, and von Kuechler; SS
leaders such as Ohlendorf, Pohl, and Hildebrandt; industrialists such as Flick,
Alfried Krupp, and the directors of I.G. Farben; and leading professional men
such as the famous physician Gerhard Rose, and the jurist and Acting Minister
of Justice, Schlegelberger.
In view of the weight of the accusations and the far-flung
activities of the defendants, and the extraordinary amount of official
contemporaneous German documents introduced in evidence, the records of these
trials constitute a major source of historical material covering many events of
the fateful years 1933 (and even earlier) to 1945, in Germany and elsewhere in
Europe.
The Nuernberg trials under Law No. 10 were carried out under
the direct authority of the Allied Control Council, as manifested in that law,
which authorized the establishment of the Tribunals. The judicial machinery for
the trials, Including the Military Tribunals and the Office, Chief of Counsel
for War Crimes, was prescribed by Military Government Ordinance No. 7 and was
part of the occupation administration for the American zone, the Office, of
Military Government (OMGUS) Law No. 10, Ordinance No. 7, and other basic
jurisdictional or administrative documents are printed in full hereinafter.
The proceedings in these trials wore conducted throughout in
the German and English languages, and were recorded in full by stenographic
notes, and by electrical sound recording of all oral proceedings. The 12 cases
required over 1,200 days of court proceedings and the transcript of these
proceedings exceeds 330,000 pages, exclusive of hundreds of document books,
briefs, etc. Publication of all of this material, accordingly, was quite
unfeasible. This series, however, contains the indictments, Judgments, and
other important portions of the record of the 12 cases, and it is believed that
these materials give a fair picture of the trials, and as full and illuminating
a picture as is possible within the space available. Copies of the entire
record of the trials are available in the Library of Congress, the National
Archives, and elsewhere.
In some eases, due to time limitations, errors of one sort or
another have crept into the translations which were available to the Tribunal.
In other cases the
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