Decree Nacht und Nebel

The "Directives for the prosecution of offenses committed against the Reich or the Occupation Forces in the Occupied Territories" (in German: Richtlinien für die Verfolgung von Straftaten gegen das Reich oder die Besatzungsmacht in den besetzten Gebieten) entitled a decree signed on December 7, 1941 and developed by a series of guidelines applied by the authorities of the Third Reich for the repression and physical elimination of political opponents to the Nazi regime in the occupied territories, as well as enemy combatants members of the Resistance and prisoners of war of the Allied Forces during World War II.

Theoretical framework

These directives are known by the euphemistic name of "Night and Fog Decree" or "Nacht und Nebel Decree" (in German: Nacht und Nebel-Erlass, from Nacht night and Nebel, fog, that is, secretly), or also "Decree NN", in reference to its particular operation and the application of practices of forced disappearance of people, including the murder of prisoners of war whose rights were then protected by the Geneva Convention. The prisoners taken in application of this decree were deported in a hidden manner, without any testimony or record of the facts and their circumstances being preserved, to specific concentration camps such as Struthof-Natzweiler, in the annexed Alsace, or Gross. -Rosen, in Germany, where they were identified on their clothes with the letters NN and known as NN prisoners.

The International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg declared the Nacht und Nebel decree an act of war crime and expressly condemned the Marshal of the Wehrmacht, its signatory, Wilhelm Keitel. Several German judges, prosecutors, and other senior officials in the Reich justice system were tried by the United States Military Court in the Nuremberg Trials known as the Judges' Trial, charged primarily for their connection to the Nacht und Nebel plot. In particular, the Reich Prosecutor General, Lautz, was one of the defendants recognized for his most active involvement in the development of the plan between 1942 and 1944.

Carl Albrecht Oberg, later known as the "Butcher of Paris", was the first SS HSSPF chief who, after the regrouping of the German and French police forces since May 1942, promoted the NN plan in France.

The documentary film Nuit et brouillard by French director Alain Resnais (1956), which describes the implementation of the Night and Fog plan, as well as other aspects of the Holocaust in France, was awarded the Vigo Prize but It caused controversy when it was withdrawn from the Cannes Film Festival after pressure from the authorities.

Decree

On December 7, 1941, coinciding with the attack on Pearl Harbor that led to the entry of the United States into World War II, Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the document entitled Directives for the Prosecution of Violations committed against the Reich or the occupation forces in the occupied territories or Richtlinien für die Verfolgung von Straftaten gegen das Reich oder die Besatzungsmacht in den besetzten Gebieten, which meant, according to the conclusions of the subsequent Nuremberg trial, a milestone in Nazi criminal violence that reached its climax at the Wannsee conference on January 20, 1942, where the Final Solution or Endlösung was approved. The author of this text was the lawyer and SS Sturmbannführer Karl Heinz Hoffmann and it was put into practice by the Reich Central Security Office or RSHA for its acronym in German.

The text of the decree, secret, was reconstructed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and reached 40 pages of detailed operational instructions.

The following paragraph is introductory: "Within the occupied territories, communist elements and other circles hostile to Germany have increased their efforts against the German State and the occupying forces since the Russian campaign began. The number and danger of these machinations force us to take severe measures..."

Hitler's basic order intended that acts of resistance by the civilian population in occupied countries be judged by a court martial:

• (a) where there was a certainty that the death penalty would be applied ("at least to the main actor") and,
• b) when the sentence is pronounced "in a very short time."

The rest of the opponents were to be detained during "the night and the fog" and taken clandestinely to Germany. "In the event that the German or foreign authorities were interested in such prisoners, the answer must be that they had been arrested but that the procedures did not allow further information."

During the Keitel trial, he stated that, with respect to the policy of repression in the occupied countries, especially in Eastern Europe after the invasion of the USSR, Adolf Hitler had declared that "The deterrent effect of these measures"... "lies in that: a) it allows the disappearance of the accused without leaving a trace and b) that no information can be disseminated about their whereabouts or destination". “Effective and lasting intimidation is only achieved by death sentences or by measures that keep the relatives and the population in uncertainty about the fate of the prisoner” and "for the same reason, the delivery of the body For his burial in his place of origin is not advisable, because the place of burial could be used for demonstrations... Through the dissemination of such terror all dispositions of resistance among the people will be eliminated& #34;.

Practice

According to the ideologists of Nazism, the Decree had a special importance, since it implied a "basic innovation" of the State: the organization of a system of forced disappearances.

A fundamental characteristic of the directive is that it allowed the secret application of the sentence, without leaving testimony or evidence about the circumstances and term thereof, hence the euphemistic use of the words Night (Nacht) and Niebla (Nebel), inspired directly from a song from the opera Rhinegold by Richard Wagner.

Its application to prisoner combatants, thus violating the convention, was particularly followed in the West with the Resistance guerrillas of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and massively with the military of the Soviet Union.

For the application of the decree, the isolation and deportation of the prisoner in the territory of the Third Reich from the occupied country was authorized. The instruction was not to transmit any information about the destination or place of death, if necessary. The Struthof-Natzweiler camp held many of these prisoners whose uniforms bore the initials N.N.

The Nuremberg trial allowed public knowledge of the existence of the NN prisoners and the crimes associated with the decree, leading to their express condemnation of Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.

Modern precedent of the crime of forced disappearance

The Nacht und Nebel decree is considered one of the historical precedents of the crimes of forced disappearance perpetrated by various political regimes in the second half of the century XX regarding the violation of human rights.

The evocation of the fog is remembered by the testimony of one of the direct witnesses of the death flights practiced in Argentina, where the NN methodology was integrated into through the doctrine of counterinsurgency. A truck driver transporting a shipment of corpses declared that, when asking a soldier about the fate of the deceased, he responded: “They are going to the fog of nowhere.”