Thierack was president of the People’s Court prior to his appointment as Reich Minister of Justice. He was then succeeded by Freisler, the former under secretary of the Ministry of Justice, who remained as president until nearly the end of the war, when he was killed in an air raid. The defendant Engert was vice president of the People’s Court prior to his transfer to the Ministry of Justice in 1942. The defendant Nebelung was president of the Fourth Senate of the People’s Court. The defendant Petersen, the only nonlawyer in the dock, was an SA Obergruppenfuehrer (lieutenant general) who sat as a lay judge on many occasions in the First and Special Senates of the People’s Court. Three of the defendants were judges of the Special Courts. The defendant Cuhorst was president of the Special Court in Stuttgart, and the defendant Rothaug was president of the Special Court in Nuernberg. The defendant Oeschey also sat on the Special Court in Nuernberg and succeeded Rothaug as its president when the latter became a public prosecutor. Oeschey was also president of the emergency civil court martial at Nuernberg. 4. _Public prosecutors_--The prosecution of criminal offenses, under the Third Reich, was handled by a special group of state attorneys (Staatsanwaltschaft) directed by the Ministry of Justice. Increasingly under the Third Reich there was interchange of personnel among judges and prosecutors. The defendant Rothaug, for example, left the bench of the Special Court at Nuernberg to become a senior public prosecutor of the Reich (Reichsanwalt). The defendant Barnickel also held this title. The defendant Joel, in 1943, left the Ministry of Justice and became the public prosecutor of the district court of appeals for Westphalia, at Hamm. The most important prosecutor among these defendants, however, was Ernst Lautz, Chief Public Prosecutor of the Reich (Oberreichsanwalt). In this capacity, Lautz prosecuted many important cases before the People’s Court. COUNT ONE THE DESTRUCTION OF LAW AND JUSTICE IN GERMANY I turn now to an examination of the means by which the defendants and their colleagues seized control of Germany’s judicial machinery and turned it into a fearsome weapon for the commission of the crimes charged in the indictment. The destruction of law in Germany was, of course, part and parcel of the establishment of the Third Reich dictatorship. Initially, the dictatorship arose out of the decrees in the early part of 1933 which suspended the constitutional guaranties of freedom and vested Hitler’s cabinet with legislative power, unrestrained by constitutional limitations. These early decrees put an end to law as we know it in a democracy.