TRIAL IN NUREMBERG

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26640, 10 December 1947, Page 5

TRIAL IN NUREMBERG

CHIEFS OF KRUPPS COMBINE CHARGED WITH CRIMES AGAINST PEACE NUREMBERG, Dec. 8. In the historic courtroom where Goering and other leading Nazis were condemned, the trial began to-day of 12 chiefs of the giant Krupps munitions combine, headed by Alfred -Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach, the heir to and sole owner of Krupps since 1943. He is in dock in place of his father, who is in a condition of senile decay and unable to stand the trial. The eleven other accused are Edward Oskar Loeser, Eduard Houndrement, Erich Mueller, Friedrich Wilhelm Jannsen. Karl Pfirsch, Max Otto Ihn, Karl Eberhardt, Heinrich Korschan, Friedrich von Buelow, Warner Lehmann, and Hans Gustav Kupke. All but Loeser and von Buelow are alleged to have been members of the Nazi Party. All the defendants are charged with crimes against peace, the plunder of occupied countries and spoliation, the deportation, exploitation, and abuse of slave labour, and also with forming a common conspiracy for aggressive warfare. They listened intently as the United States prosecutor, Brigadier-General Telford Taylor, told the story of Krupps from the period after the First World War, when Krupps reorganised secretly in violation of the Versailles Treaty, to the final collapse of the Nazi regime. General Taylor described Krupps and the German militarists as the indestructible cortfmon denominator of Germany’s murderous and obstinately repeated lunges at the world’s throat.

Describing how Krupps “shared the spoils of conquest,’’ the prosecution said the German occupation authorities in France turned over to Krupps one of Europe's largest textile machine factories, which was in Alsace. In Holland Krupps had plundered factories in Hilversum, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, and elsewhere, and their local representatives were able to tell the occupation authorities where stores of materials and products were located and available for seizure.