Post by Matt Seccombe During June I analyzed the defense documents of Walther Funk and one-third of the documents of Admiral Doentiz. This ended one year’s work on the IMT following the COVID related “pause,” and also one year with the defense material. During the year I worked through the documents of defendants Frank, Frick, Funk, Goering, Hess, Kaltenbrunner, …
Post by Matt Seccombe During May I analyzed the defense documents of Julius Streicher, the antisemitic propagandist, and Hjalmar Schacht, the regime’s banker in the 1930s. Streicher was the most repulsive of the defendants and Schacht the most sympathetic. I expected Streicher’s material would be difficult to deal with and Schacht’s to be dull (considering his role as a …
Post by Matt Seccombe During April I finished the analysis of Hans Frank’s fourth and fifth document books, and then analyzed Wilhelm Frick’s defense documents. Frick, the Interior Minister, presented a more compact defense than the other high-level defendants, relying on his record as a bureaucrat who had no role in the planning of the war and no control …
Post by Matt Seccombe During March I began work on the defense documents of Hans Frank, who was prosecuted mostly for his activities as governor of occupied Poland (the Government General). I worked through three of his five document books. Pluribus aut unum (many or one): On 24 April 1946 Frank’s attorney formally introduced his exhibits, most notably this …
Post by Matt Seccombe During February I spent the first third of the month catching up on the transcript work for Keitel’s and Kaltenbrunner’s defense presentations, noting when new documents were entered and documents presented earlier were discussed. Even though these defendants presented few documents themselves compared to Ribbentrop (1/10th as many for Keitel and 1/20th for Kaltenbrunner), they …
Post by Matt Seccombe During January I worked through the IMT prosecution’s rebuttal to Ribbentrop’s defense, Keitel’s defense documents, and Kaltenbrunner’s defense documents. Kaltenbrunner’s document book supplement included a bonus of sorts: a set of 15 prosecution documents concerning the killing of captured Allied airmen in mid-1944 (either by the “lynch law” of civilians or by the security police). …
Post by Matt Seccombe December is a short work-month at HLS, so this is early. During the month I finished analyzing Ribbentrop’s last three defense document books, his attorney’s final argument, and the affidavit he prepared just before his execution for a Japanese diplomat facing trial at the IMT Far East. His documents covered 1940-41 with a now-familiar theme: …
Post by Matt Seccombe During November I worked through three of Ribbentrop’s nine defense document books, two of them on Poland, to pin the blame for the war on the Poles, and one on the expansion of the war in 1940, blaming the “encirclement” strategy of Britain and France. In a literal sense Poland provided considerable evidence for Ribbentrop’s …
Post by Matt Seccombe During October I worked through Ribbentrop’s evidence document books three and four and began the fifth book, placing me roughly at the half-way point in Ribbentrop’s defense case. Most of the documents offered were rejected as evidence by the tribunal as being irrelevant to the issues in the trial, but they still provide a …
Post by Matt Seccombe In September I completed analysis of the defense documents for Rudolf Hess and began those for Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister. We now have just over 4000 documents in the system for the IMT, ca 3800 for the prosecution and 200 for the defendants so far. A variety of strategies: Goering, the lead …