Kommanditgesellschaft. He was on the Vorstand of both the principal steel concerns [Stahlblocks], Maxhuette and Mittelstahl, but he also concerned himself with the coal companies and the factories for finished steel products. He was assisted by the defendant Kaletsch, who dealt with financial matters, and the defendant Burkart, a specialist in the iron and steel enterprises. Toward the end of 1938, Steinbrinck became dissatisfied with the situation at the Flick Konzern, and at the end of 1939 he completely separated himself from Flick. Fritz Thyssen had fled from Germany upon the outbreak of war with Poland, and Steinbrinck was appointed trustee for the confiscated Thyssen properties. In this capacity, he became deputy chairman of the Aufsichsrat of Vereinigte Stahlwerke, and from then until the end of the war his primary private interest was in the Stahlverein.

One of the principal reasons for Steinbrinck's separation from Flick may have been Flick's increasing preoccupation with founding a family dynasty. The defendant Kaletsch, who was Flick's cousin, was becoming increasingly important in the Konzern, and Flick's oldest son (Otto Ernst) had come of age and was starting to take an active part in the business. Early in 1939, Flick sought to bring into the Konzern his nephew, the defendant Bernhard Weiss, and when Steinbrinck actually left the Konzern, in December 1939, Weiss and Burkart took over the bulk of Steinbrinck's activities.

The resulting organization is shown in the top portion of the chart. Kaletsch, Burkart, and Weiss were all three given the status of general plenipotentiary of the Kommanditgesellschaft, with approximately equal status. Burkart, born in 1899, started his business career in the iron industry of Upper Silesia in 1922, and established a connection with Flick in 1925, when Flick took an interest in the Upper Silesian iron and steel merger. In 1936 Flick gave him an important position with Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke, and he was taken in as plenipotentiary general in the Kommanditgesellschaft in the spring of 1940. Kaletsch, who is the same age as Burkart, came into Flick's inner circle in 1925, and was made a general plenipotentiary of the Kommanditgesellschaft upon its foundation in 1937.

The defendant Weiss was born in 1904 in the Siegerland. His father owned a substantial company (Siegener Maschinenbau, commonly known as Siemag) which manufactured machine tools and other metal products. Weiss succeeded to the leadership of the company and, after 1941, was the sole owner. Flick, Weiss' uncle, was vice chairman of the Aufsichsrat. At the end of 1939,

Weiss joined the Flick Konzern and became a plenipotentiary general of the Kommanditgesellschaft.

The defendant Kaletsch occupied himself with the financial problems of the Flick enterprises and, in this field his authority cut across all companies in the Konzern. Burkart specialized in the supervision of the brown coal and iron and steel companies. Weiss concerned himself principally with the Ruhr bituminous coal companies and the finishing plants, such as Linke-Hofmann and ATG.

The defendant Terberger was not an officer of the Kommanditgesellschaft. He became, however, the leading member of the Vorstand at Maxhuette, the principal Flick enterprise in the American Zone of Occupation. He had become connected with Flick in 1925 as an employee of the Linke-Hofmann-Lauchhammer merger, was thereafter employed at Mitteldeutsche, and was appointed to the Vorstand of Maxhuette in 1937. Terberger joined the Nazi Party on the first of May 1933.

We said at the outset that the defendants committed the crimes with which they are charged in the course of business. The basic causes of all these crimes were the warlike and tyrannical purposes to which the Third Reich was dedicated from its inception, the aggressive acts committed by Germany in Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938, and the invasions and aggressive wars launched by Germany beginning in 1939.

This causation is particularly clear in connection with the first count of the indictment, under which all six of the defendants are charged. The business of the defendants was steel making, and for this they needed principally coal, iron ore, and labor. The outbreak of war and the cutting off of peacetime imports to Germany did not affect their coal supply, since Germany's own resources were more than ample. The situation with respect to iron ore was more precarious, but imports from Sweden were not seriously disrupted, and with the absorption of Austria and Czechoslovakia, the conquest of France, and the overrunning of vast areas in the east, extensive foreign resources of iron ore became available to the German economy.

But, even before the war, labor shortages were envisaged, and with the induction of millions of workers into the Wehrmacht, manpower became a critical problem. The Third Reich attempted to solve the manpower problem by the use and misuse of slave labor on a scale unprecedented in human history. And this is the first of the crimes with which the defendants are charged in the indictment.

Mr. Ervin will continue reading, Your Honors.

COUNT ONE-SLAVE LABOR

MR. ERVIN: All of the defendants are charged in count one of the indictment with the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the planning and execution of the Nazi slave-labor program. This program, designed to enable the Nazi war machine to continue its aggressions, involved the criminal exploitation of every possible source of manpower. Millions of noncombatants from the countries overrun by the Wehrmacht were uprooted from their homes, packed like cattle into transports headed for Germany, and there compelled to work under appalling conditions in mines, foundries, steel mills, and armament plants under the direction of men like these defendants. Prisoners of war provided another source of supply. With the usual Nazi disregard of international obligations, they were put to work in the manufacture of armaments in direct violation of the laws of war. And as the manpower situation became even more critical, there was made available to the leaders of German industry that most unfortunate group of all the victims of Nazi tyranny, the concentration camp inmates. After all, these people could be worked to death rather than immediately cremated or exploded in a pressure chamber, and some benefit could be obtained from the few months of usable energy left in their wretched and miserable bodies.

That the slave-labor program was criminal, is beyond doubt. The International Military Tribunal has so found. The relevant provisions of Control Council Law No. 10 are clear-"deportation to slave labour" is enumerated as a war crime in Article II, paragraph 1 (b); "enslavement" and "deportation" are made crimes against humanity in Article II, paragraph 1(c). Article 52 of the Hague Convention [annex] as to the use of labor in occupied territories, and the provisions of the Geneva Convention as to the employment of prisoners of war, had, long before the enactment of Law No. 10, established principles of international law which condemned such practices. Indeed, an attempt by Germany in World War I to deport labor forcibly from Belgium met such an outcry of world opinion that the plan was attacked even in the Reichstag, and subsequently abandoned.*

James W. Garner, International Law and the World War, (1920), volume II, page 183.

But the evil in this program lay not so much in the fact that it violated the letter and spirit of international law, as in the utterly barbarous way in which it was carried out. The revolting details

were presented in full to the International Military Tribunal, and need only be touched on here. Fritz Sauckel, Hitler's labor plenipotentiary, estimated that 5,000,000 foreign workers were transported to the Reich, and that only 200,000 came voluntarily. The rest of them were corralled in man hunts in which houses were burned down, churches and theaters searched, children were shot, and families torn apart by the SS and other "recruiters". From then on the victims were subjected to all the tortures, indignities, and sufferings that the human mind can encompass. The basic philosophy of their treatment is illustrated by Sauckel's instructions of 20 April 1942, that "All the men must be fed, sheltered, and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent, at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure," and by Himmler's notorious declaration in a speech made at Poznan on 4 October, 1943 (1919-PS, Pros. Ex. 746):

"Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished."

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"We must realize that we have 6-7 million foreigners in Germany ***. They are none of them dangerous so long as we take severe measures at the merest trifles."

Wherein lies the responsibility of these defendants for the murders, tortures, brutalities, and cruelties committed in the execution of this program of wholesale crime? In the first place, they used in the enterprises under their control tens of thousands of impressed foreign workers and concentration camp inmates. The mere utilization of this labor constitutes the crime of enslavement, a crime of which all the defendants are guilty as principals. Flick with his codefendants Burkart, Kaletsch, and Weiss controlled the Flick Konzern, and together they share the responsibility for the widespread use of slave labor throughout its enterprises. Terberger is guilty because of the utilization of slave labor at Maxhuette, where he was the principal management official. Steinbrinck, in his capacity as Plenipotentiary for Steel, and for coal, in parts of the western occupied territories, made extensive use of slave labor.

In the second place, these defendants, by their voluntary participation in this program with full knowledge of the criminal methods used in the recruitment of forced labor, are guilty of the crime of deportation, and of the murders, brutalities, and cruelties committed in connection with such recruitment and deportation. The evidence will show that the defendants knew well the manner in which this labor was being "recruited". In fact, they made