Prosit Neujahr!

Refreshed by their twelve-day vacation, the 20 defendants filed back into Nuern-berg's courtroom. But even the arrogant Nazi war criminals could not work up much enthusiasm for wishing each other Prosit Neujahr (Happy New Year). Slowly but surely the case against them was building up. The Allied prosecution continued to pile up evidence, detailing their guilt with an endless chain of chilling facts. The civilized world, like the Nazis, might have become bored with these horror stories--a U.S. reporter muttered: "0 God, more of the same!"--but the prosecution had more to tell.

Task Force D. Assistant Prosecutor Lieut. Harris Whitney, U.S.N., took up the case of scar-faced Ernst Kaltenbrunner, successor to bloody Hangman Reinhard Heydrich as the Gestapo's No. 2 man. Sample charges: ordering the murder of civilians in occupied countries, devising a system for selecting gas-chamber candidates, encouraging the lynching of Allied airmen.

There was more of the same from Major General of Police Otto Ohlendorf, a drab little man who matter-of-factly told the court that he had been responsible for killing 90,000 men, women & children in one year (June 1941-June 1942). These were the fruits of his Special Task Force D, one of several assigned to liquidate Communists and Jews. Task forces A, B, and C were said to have killed more people than his own D, reported Ohlendorf, but he suspected that they were just boasting.

Desired Results. From a string of other witnesses came stories implicating not merely the obvious organizations such as the Gestapo and SS, but also the then-aristocratic High Command. At one time the Army had ordered executions speeded up because of a food and housing shortage on the eastern front. The secret shooting of recaptured P.O.W.s had been given the professional military label of "operation bullet."

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Heinrich Himmler's chief of all counter-partisan activities in the Soviet Union, testified that Germany's official aim had been to exterminate 30 million Slavs. The High Command, he said, had been well aware of this. Shouted Goring, once again losing his serene composure: "Dirty dog! Damned traitor!"

Now the U.S. prosecution was boring into its most difficult task: mass indictment of the entire German General Staff and High Command (some 114 top generals and admirals) for cooperating with the Nazis and plotting aggressive war beyond the normal duties of a patriotic officer. Said Assistant Prosecutor Colonel Telford Taylor, U.S.A.: "We respect the distinguished profession of arms. . . . We do not condemn a man for being a locksmith, but we do condemn him for taking advantage of his profession to break into his neighbor's house."

The five glassy-eyed locksmiths in the dock (three generals, two admirals) then heard Colonel Taylor read a damning affidavit by one of their own clique. Its author was Field Marshal Werner Eduard Fritz von Blomberg, who had been German War Minister until 1938, when he was given the boot, ostensibly for marrying a prostitute. Wrote Blomberg: ". . . There was no reason to oppose Hitler since he produced the results which [the generals] desired."

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