“8. Legacies of NN prisoners who have been executed or died from other causes must be kept at the prison where the sentence was served.” It is not our purpose here to review all of the gruesome details of carrying out the spirit of the Nacht und Nebel program which became the daily routine of these defendants. As the Court will see, all of the stipulations regarding the secrecy of the original decree and indeed the addition of other unbelievably harsh and inhuman provisions were systematically executed and improved upon by these men. If, to take one example, the Wehrmacht erroneously arrested in the occupied countries individuals who were patently innocent of any resistance to the Nazis, these victims, in order to preserve the secrecy of the program, had to be treated in exactly the same way as other individuals who managed to escape with a prison sentence. Never did the families and friends of the convicted or innocent know their fate. In the alleged trials before the Special Courts none of the accused was, at any time, ever able to introduce evidence from his own country as to his innocence and, in no case, were the accused permitted to choose legal counsel other than that assigned to them by the court. Again the defendants flagrantly violated rights secured by the Hague Convention of citizens of countries occupied by the German armed forces--the right of family honor, the lives of persons, and the right to be judged under their own laws. c. Illegal Transfer of Prison Inmates to Concentration Camps MR. WOOLEYHAN: A Ministry of Justice policy of extermination through calculated denial of all judicial and penal process, in close collaboration with the Gestapo and SS, characterizes the second substantive group of crimes previously mentioned. By 1939, inspections of Reich penitentiaries operated by the Ministry of Justice disclosed that large numbers of political prisoners in security detention were engaged in paid labor on projects incompatible with the rearmament effort which then was at a climax. At Hitler’s order these prison inmates were transferred to concentration camps where their work could be both unpaid and of more use to munition requirements. Thus was initiated a program which was to eventually erase any practical difference between the fates of those victims who were put through the shams of criminal court procedure, and those who were thrown by the police into concentration camps without the formality of a hearing. Apparently noting that transfers from Reich prisons to concentration camps aroused no immediate public clamor or official opposition, judges saw therein an outlet for increasingly burdensome numbers of criminal cases, particularly political cases, as the defendant Engert has stated (_NG-471, Pros. Ex. 276_):