WAGING OF WAR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26915, 29 October 1948, Page 5

WAGING OF WAR

HIGH GERMAN COMMANDERS ACQUITTED AMERICAN COURT’S FINDING N.Z.P.A.—Copyright NUREMBERG, Oct. 27. The American War Crimes Court to-day acauitted 13 of Germany’s top commanders of plotting to launch the Second World War. The three-man court, completing a nine months’ trial of three field-mar-shals, four generals, an admiral, and five lieutenant-generals, added that those on trial were not policy-makers. The judgment said: “ The acts of commanders and staff officers below DOlicy- level in planning campaigns, preparing means for carrying them out, moving against a country oi> orders, and fighting a war after it has been instituted do not constitute the planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of war, or initiation of invasion, that international law denounces as criminal.” The court also struck out a conspiracy charge. The tribunal said that, no matter how absolute his authority, Hitler alone could not formulate a policy of aggressive war, and alone implement that policy by preparing, planning, and waging such a war. Somewhere between the dictator and the supreme commander of the military forces of the nation and the common soldier was a boundary between the criminal and the excusable participaton in the waging of an aggressive war by an individual engaged in it. - The court noted that no definite line had been judicially drawn since there had been no other prosecution of defendants in the same category.

The defendants were Field-marshal Wilhelm von Leeb, commander of Hhe northern group of armies in Russia; Field-marshal Hugo Sperrle, commander of the German Legion in Spain and of the air fleet which bombed London in 1940; Field-marshai Georg von Kuechler, who commanded the German Eighteenth Army in the invasion of Holland and later sue ceeded von Leeb in Russia; General Hermann Hoth, commander of the Fifteenth Motorised Corps in the invasion of Poland and Holland; General Hans Reinhardt, who commanded the Fourth Panzer Division in the invasion of Poland; General Hans von Salmuth, chief of staff of an army group in the west; General Karl Hollidt; Admiral Otto Schniewind, chief of the Navy Armament Office; Lieu-tenant-general Karl von Roques; Lieu-tenant-general Hermann Reinecke chief of the High Command’s. National Socialist indoctrination staff; Lieuten-ant-general Walter Warlimont, chief of the Department of National Defence; Lieutenant-general Otto Woenler, commander in chief of the southern army group in Russia; Lieu-tenant-general Rudolf Lehmann. Judge-Advocate-General of the German armed forces. The fourteenth defendant. General Johannes Blaskowitz, conqueror of Poland and occupation commander in France in 1940, committed suicide the day the trial opened last FebruaryLater, the court announced that it found von Leeb guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Nazi-occupied territories, and Sperrle not guilty on all charges against him. Sperrle’s immediate release was ordered. Von Keuchler and Hoth were found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They will be sentenced to-morrow. After the verdicts had been given on the remaining charges against the other, accused the court’s judgment was that von Keuchler and Hoth knew of the mass executions of insane persons and Jews by Himmler’s extermination sauads in the territories under their command. The judgment added that both issued orders which “ speak Hitler’s language and show sympathy with Hitler’s ruthless exploitation of the country’s population.” Sperrie, who organised the bombing of London in 1940, was acquitted mainly on lack of evidence.