Now, if at any place I appear to trespass on Count Three, it is with the consent and courtesy of the Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic.
My Lord, on the second page of the brief are set out first the positions held by the Defendant Dönitz; and the document in question is the first document in the document book, 2887-PS, which has already been put in as Exhibit Number USA-12. The Tribunal will see that after his appointment in 1935 as Commander of the Weddigen U-boat Flotilla—that was, in fact, the first flotilla to be formed after the end of the World War in 1918—the defendant, who was in effect then Commander of U-boats, rose steadily in rank as the U-boat arm expanded, until he became an admiral. And then on the 30th of January 1943, he was appointed Grossadmiral and succeeded the Defendant Raeder as Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, retaining his command of the U-boat arm. Then on the 1st of May 1945, he succeeded Hitler as head of Germany.
My Lord, as appears from a number of documents which I shall put in evidence, the defendant was awarded the following decorations: On the 18th of September 1939 the Cluster of the Iron Cross, first class, for the U-boat successes in the Baltic during the Polish campaign. This award was followed on the 21st of April 1940 by the high award of the Knight’s Cross to the Iron Cross, while on the 7th of April 1943 he received personally from Hitler the Oak Leaf to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, as the 223rd recipient, for his services in building up the German Navy and, in particular, his services for the offensive U-boat arm for the coming war, which were outstanding. And now I put in the next document in the document book, D-436, which becomes Exhibit GB-183. That is an extract from the official publication _Das Archiv_ on the defendant’s promotion to vice admiral. It is dated the 27th of September 1940, and I read the last two sentences:
“In 4 years of untiring and, in the fullest sense of the word, uninterrupted work of training, he succeeds in developing the young U-boat armed personnel and material till it is a weapon of a striking power unexpected even by the experts. More than 3 million gross tons of enemy shipping sunk in only 1 year, achieved with only a few boats, speak better than words of the merits of this man.”