Morning Session (continued 2)

Deliberately kept at a distance from public affairs by their former rulers, the German masses, with regard to the industrialist upper class and proletariat, were interested only in the economic development of the Reich, and, with regard to the middle class, only in the Army and the future Reich. When, after the first World War, the Germans had to endure the disappointment of defeat; when to shabby and commonplace surroundings were added all the rancor and resentment described by the Defendant Göring at the beginning of his testimony, in addition to the bitter consciousness of social and material downfall; when youth in particular strove to make its hopes a concrete reality, Pan-Germanism awoke, was disseminated and brought down to the level of the mob and then came within reach of all the discontented elements. At the same time, the old antithesis between vital force and intellectualism, culture and civilization, healthy eagerness and decadent lassitude, the cult of life and the cult of intellect was brought to life and given definite shape for the use of simple and puerile minds in the form of the dynamic antithesis between the Nordic Aryan and the Semitic Jew. With the help of appropriate education this biological materialism was easily imposed. The ground had long been prepared. The German is particularly attracted by inculcated doctrine because it alone can supply the lack of personal, independent discipline which is characteristic of him on the intellectual and moral plane. He loves anything that can be recited as a universally acknowledged creed, a stereotyped phrase suitable for use on all occasions. For this reason, young Germans learned for their Abitur examination the six races admitted by Guenther just as they learned grammar, and no more dreamed of doubting the former than they doubted the latter. And when the German mentality accused nations as much alive and as strongly attached to their land, their traditions, and their flexible and varied human culture, as England and France, of being content to possess only a puny and artificial intellectual life, when it accused them with the crime against life—and Dr. Stahmer echoed this—the German mind created for itself, by reason of the coarse and facile creed which it claimed to impose upon all alike, an intellectualism differing from ours in its danger and its artificiality. The result of these so-called ethics of life was a practice and a doctrine of pure opportunism—collective or social, pseudoscientific, biological, materialistic—which resulted in the sterilization, the physiological observations made in the camps, and 12 million dead. The reflection of the old French philosopher comes irresistibly to our minds when we are confronted with this result: “Science without conscience is but ruin of the soul.” A neo-Machiavellism, an example of which was afforded us by Göring in his statement, took root.

I read lately somewhere in a final pleading that right in itself does not exist, and that efforts to establish a dividing line between right and wrong are guided by historical and national standards (Dr. Nelte). Hitler had already said: “Right is what is profitable to the nation” and, according to his defense counsel, Frank paraphrased this statement as follows: “What is profitable for the people is right. Collective interests take precedence over individual interests.” On reading this, I thought of the answer which would have been given by the absolutist, Bossuet, who knew how to determine human standards. The Defense Counsel compared French absolutism with Nazism. Here is my answer:

“Politics sacrifice the individual to the common good, and this is right to a certain extent; it is good that one man should die for the people. By that, Caiaphas understood that an innocent person could be sentenced to the supreme penalty for the sake of the common good, which is never allowed, for, on the contrary, innocent blood cries for vengeance against those who shed it.”

We know what consequences the Nazi precepts could produce. The witness Roser reported the words of this young German soldier who, after describing a massacre in a ghetto, concluded: “Ah, my dear friend, it was horrible, but ... an order is an order.” The Tribunal will find Kramer’s terrible words at the end of Document Number F-655, which is in one of the document books submitted by the French Delegation. Before he was made commandant of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Kramer commanded the Natzweiler Camp in Alsace, where he himself asphyxiated 80 persons by gas. This has been proved. In answer to the question: “What would you have done if they had not all been dead?” he said:

“I should again have tried to asphyxiate them by letting a second dose of gas into the room. I did not feel any emotion while carrying out these acts, for I had received orders to execute the 80 internees in the way I told you. After all I have been trained in that way.”

What a terrible charge against the system! Before becoming a murderer by order, this man had been a bookkeeper in Augsburg. How many peaceful bookkeepers so trained are still in Germany today? And now “innocent blood cries for vengeance.”

Conclusion:

You know the crime! You know why and by what means it was perpetrated! This heinous and unprecedented crime is that of the National Socialist Party-State, but the defendants in their capacity as chiefs of the National Socialist Party and high State officials have all accepted major responsibility in the conception and perpetration of this crime. Their participation in the crime of the Party-State is their own personal fault and brings with it no claim whatsoever to immunity! Proof has now been brought against them!

They must be punished; you know also the dangers to which the world is exposed by their crime and the misery and misfortune it has brought to mankind. You must hit hard without pity. It is enough that the verdict be just! To be sure, there are degrees in their guilt. Does it follow that there must be degrees in the penalties themselves, when those whom we consider the least guilty merit the death penalty! Tomorrow, this International Trial over and the principal war criminals sentenced, we shall go back to our own countries where we may have to prosecute before our own tribunals those who merely carried out the orders of the National Socialist State, who only played the part of hangman.

How could we demand the death penalty for another Kramer, or another Hoess, or for the camp commandants who have on their conscience the deaths of millions of human creatures whom they killed by order, if we hesitated today to demand the supreme penalty for those who were the driving force of the criminal State which gave the orders.

The fate of these men lies entirely with your conscience! It is now out of our hands, our task is finished. Now, it is for you in the silence of your deliberations to heed the voice of innocent blood crying for justice.

THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn.

[The Tribunal recessed until 1400 hours.]