“The Reich Leader SS has come to an agreement with the Reich Minister of Justice Thierack that the courts will forego the carrying out of regular criminal procedures against Poles and members of the eastern peoples. These people of foreign extraction henceforth shall be turned over to the police. Jews and gypsies are to be treated likewise. This agreement was approved by the Fuehrer.” These instructions to the SS and SD in the East continue: “Those considerations which may be right for the punishment of an offense committed by a German are wrong with regard to the punishment of an offense committed by a person of foreign extraction. The personal motives of the offender are to be disregarded completely. Important only is that this offense endangers the order of the German community, and that, therefore, measures must be taken to prevent further dangers. In other words, the offense committed by a person of foreign extraction is not to be judged from the point of view of legal retribution by way of justice, but from the point of view of preventing danger through police action. From this follows that the criminal procedure against persons of foreign extraction must be transferred from the courts to the police.” With the Jews, Poles, gypsies, Ukrainians and other so-called “asocial” persons throughout the occupied east relegated to a carefully prepared death, this same unholy alliance returned its attention to the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. There, by the infamous decree of 1 July 1943,[53] signed among others by Thierack, all of the foregoing perversions of judicial and penal process were tardily “legalized” by officially denying to all Jews any recourse to the criminal courts and committed any Jews accused of an undefined “criminal action” to the police. With grim humor the following article of that statute ordered the confiscation by the Reich of a Jew’s property after his death. This decree completed the absolute disfranchisement and expropriation of property of Jews in the Third Reich and Bohemia and Moravia who had not already, by that time, been deported or slain. Prison inmates not transferred to concentration camps, pursuant to the foregoing program, were hardly better off in Reich prisons under the hospitality of the Minister of Justice. The defendant Joel had a working agreement with a deputy of Himmler’s whereby he turned over to the SS, for shooting, those defendants whose sentences by the courts were deemed insufficient by Hitler who followed published decisions in the newspapers. A number of charts tabulating the shootings of such defendants, many of whom had received only minor sentences, attest to Joel’s zealous activity on this score. Schlegelberger, too, studiously concocted what was deemed a “legal basis” for these shootings of prison inmates serving minor sentences. d. Judicial Murders in Violation of International Law