MAJOR FARR: May it please the Tribunal, the next organisation to be dealt with is the S.S. The document books in this case are lettered “Z.” For convenience in handling the books, because of the bulk of documents, we have divided them into two volumes. I shall in referring to a document number, refer to the volume in which that document appears.
About a week or ten days ago there appeared in a newspaper, circulated in Nuremberg, an account of a visit by that paper’s correspondent to a camp in which S.S. prisoners-of-war were confined. The thing which particularly struck the correspondent was the one question asked by the S.S. prisoners. Why are we charged as war criminals? What have we done except our normal duty?
The evidence now to be presented to the Tribunal will, we expect, answer that question. It will show that just as the Nazi Party was the very heart - the core - of the conspiracy, so the S.S. was the very essence of Nazism. For the S.S. was the elite group of the Party, composed of the most thoroughgoing adherents of the Nazi cause, pledged to blind devotion to Nazi principles, and prepared to carry them out without any question and at any cost - a group in which every ordinary value has been so subverted that its members can ask “What is there unlawful about the things we have done?”
During the past weeks the Tribunal has heard evidence of the conspirators’ criminal programme for aggressive war, for concentration camps, for the extermination of the Jews, for enslavement of foreign labour and illegal use of prisoners-of-war, for deportation and Germanisation of inhabitants of conquered territories. Through all this evidence the name of the S.S. ran like a thread. Again and again that organisation and its components were referred to. It is my purpose to show why it performed a responsible role in every one of these criminal activities, why it was - and, indeed, had to be - a criminal organisation.
The creation and development of such an organisation was, indeed, essential for the execution of the conspirators’ plans. Their sweeping programme and the measures they were prepared to use and did use, could be fully accomplished neither through the machinery of the Government nor of the Party. Things had to be done for which no agency of government and no political party - even the Nazi Party - would openly take full responsibility. A specialised type of apparatus was needed, an apparatus which was to some extent connected with the Government and given official support but which, at the same time, could maintain a quasi-independent status, so that it acts could be attributed neither to the Government nor to the Party as a whole. The S.S. was that apparatus.