' .... "The population cannot grasp that systematic actions are carried out which, in accordance with Par.
211 of the German "Officials of the Secret State Police, it is said, are trying to threats.
In the interest of public peace, this may be well intended. \ lation cannot be changed by it; the conviction will be increased with that the actions themselves are not prosecuted under penal law."
I quote the last paragraph of the letter, the postscript:
"I am submitting copies of this letter to the Reich Minister of the Interior and the Reich Minister for Church Affairs.
(Initialled by above)" secret law created by defendant Frick, Himmler and others, continued year after year.
I offer in evidence Document 3592-PS,
THE PRESIDENT: Was any answer made to that letter?
DR KEMPNER: No answer has been found. I say no answer has been found. I have other letters which I am not able to quote here today which have the remark "Don't answer."
THE PRESIDENT: I didn't follow that.
DR KEMPNER: I have other letters which have the remark "Please don't ans wer."
THE PRESIDENT: "Please don't answer?"
DR KEMPNER: That it should be unanswered. the secret law created by defendant Frick, Himmler and others continued year after year. I offer in evidence Document 3592-PS, U.S.A. Exhibit 718, which is a certified copy of the charge, specifications, findings, and sentence of the U.S Military Commission at Wiesbaden, against theindividuals who operated the Hadamar Sanitarium, where many Russians and Poles were murdered. In this particular proceeding seven defendants were charged with the murder in 1944 and 1945 of 400 persons of Polish and Russian nationality, and three of the defendants were sentenced to be hanged; the other four were sentenced to confinement at hard labor. Frick's responsibility, which arises under his position as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia for the period from August 20, 1943, until the end of the war. I think it is not necessary to say anything about the functions of the protector of Bohemia and Moravia; these broad powers are known to the Court.
THE PRESIDENT: Before you pass from 3592-PS, is it clear that that trial relates to the killing of Polish and Russian nationalities in nursing homes or institutions of that sort?
DR KEMPNER: Who did the killing?
THE PRESIDENT: Is it clear that the document you just referred us to, 3592, relates to a trial of German nationals for killing Poles and Russians in nursing homes?
DR KEMPNER: It is absolutely clear in this document, the sentence of the Military Commission of Hadamar for Wiesbaden.
THE PRESIDENT: Will you show me where that is?
DR KEMPNER: Document No. 3592-PS. I quote:
"Specification: Alfonso Klein, Adolf Wahlmann, Heinrich Ruoff, Karl Willig, Adolf Merkle, Irmgard Huber, and Phillip Blum, acting jointly and in pursuance of a common intent, and acting for and on behalf of the then German Reich did from or about July 1, 1944, until about April 1, 1945, at Hadamar, Germany, wilfully, deliberately, and wrongfully, cooperate and participate in the Killing of human beings of Polish and Russian nationality; their exact names and number being unknown, but totalling in the aggregate in excess of 400; and they were then confined by the German Reich as an exercise in belligerent control."
THE PRESIDENT: It doesn't show that it came within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior.
DR KEMPNER: Sometime ago I referred to the Manual of "the German administrative Officials. This manual points out clearly that nursing homes, sanitaria, and similar establishments are under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior.
THE COURT: I follow that, but this document does not refer to nursing homes. That is what I was asking you.
DR KEMPNER: Yes, it says only Hadamar. It is in fact the Hadamar nursing home. This portion wasn't given by the Judge Advocate General, but I am willing to give later a more extended document that Hadamar is a common name for the so-called Hadamar killing mill, which is a nursing home.
THE PRESIDENT: Wait a moment, Dr. Kempner. Counsel for the defense wishes to speak. There is a gentlemen standing by your side.
DR. PANNENBECKER (Counsel for Frick): Dr. Pannenbecker, counsel for Defendant Frick. I cannot find that the defendant Frick is connected with the document in any way.
THE PRESIDENT: Surely it is not necessary for you to get up and repeat what I have just said.
DR. PANNENBECKER: I would like to add something else.
THE PRESIDENT: I beg your pardon.
DR. PANNENBECKER: I would like to add that the defendant Frick since August, 1943, was not Minister of the interior, and for that reason this document shouldn't be used against him.
THE PRESIDENT: And it doesn't give the date of the death of those people. At any rate, until Dr. Kempner produces something to show that this was a nursing home and at a time during which the defendant Frick was Minister of the Interior, the Tribunal will not treat it as being evidence which implicates Frick.
DR. KEMPNER: I quoted this killing in Hadamar for two reasons: First, because the Ministry of the Interior has become acquainted, as I said before, with the letter of the Bishop of Limburg, in 1941, when Frick was Minister of the Interion and knew about this facts; and I quoted the military decision for the reason that those killings were still going on in 1944 and 1945 under a law of which the defendant Frick was the cc-author.
The final phase of Prick's responsibility arises under his position as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia for the period from 20 August 1943 until the end of the war. I shall mention one example. I offer in evidence Document No. 3589-PS, U.S.A. Exhibit 721, which is a supplement to an official Czechoslovak report on German crimes against Czechoslovakia. I would like to que only the following brief passage from this report:
"During the tenure of office of defendant Wilhelm Frick as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia from August 1943 until the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, many thousands of Czechoslovak Jews were transported from the Terezin ghetto in Czechoslovakia to the concentration camp at Oswiecziem (Auschwitz) in Poland and were there killed in the gas chambers." From the territory over which Frick was Protector to the gas chamber. 1923 until the Allied armies crushed the resistance of the Nazi armed forces. Frick's guilt rests on his own record and on the record of his co-defendants, for whom he is co-responsible under our Charter. in connection with the preparation of this case by my colleagues Mr. Karl Lachmann, Lt. Frederick Felton, and Captain Seymour Krieger.
(At 1720 hours the Tribunal adjourned.)
Official transcript of the International Military Tribunal, in the matter of:
The
THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Counsel for France.
M. FRANCOIS de METHON: The conscience of the peoples who only yesterday were enslaved and tortured both in soul and body calls upon you to judge and to condemn the most monstrous attempt at domination and barbarism of all time, both in the persons of some of those who bear the chief responsibility and in the groups and associations which were the essential instruments of their crimes. which were launched by German imperialism, bore almost alone, in May and June 1940, the weight of armaments accumulated by Nazi Germany over a period of years in a spirit of aggression. Although temporarily crushed by superiority in numbers, material, and preparation, my country never gave up the battle for freedom and was at no time absent from the field. The engagements undertaken and the will for national independence would have sufficed to assure France's support of General de GAULLE in the camp of the democratic nations; but if our fight for freedom slowly took the shape of a popular uprising, at the call of the men of the Resistance belonging to all social classes, to all creeds and to all political parties, it was because, while our soil and our souls were crushed by the Nazi invader, our people refused not only to submit to wretchedness and slavery, but even more, because they refused to accept the Hitlerian dogmas which are in absolute contradiction to their traditions, their aspirations and their human calling.
France, who was systematically plundered and ruined; France, so many of whose sons were tortured and murdered in the jails of the Gestapo or in their concentration camps; France, who was subjected to the still more horrible grip of demoralization and return to barbarism diabolically imposed by Nazi Germany, asks you, above all in the name of the heroic martyrs of the Resistance, who are among the greatest heroes of our national legend, that justice be done.
France, who so often in history has been the spokesman and the champion of human liberty, of human values, of human progress, through my voice today also becomes the interpreter of the martyred peoples of western Europe, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, peoples more than others devoted to peace, peoples who are among the noblest of humanity by their aspirations and their worship of the values of civilization, peoples who have shared our sufferings and have refused, like us, to give up liberty and to sacrifice their souls before the assault of Nazi barbarism.
France here becomes their interpreter to demand that justice be done.
The tortured peoples' craving for justice is the basic foundation of France's call to your High Tribunal. It is not the only one, nor perhaps the most important one. More than toward the past, our eyes are turned toward the future. for humanity which still today is torn asunder, suffering and anguished, except through the cooperation of all peoples and through the progressive establishment of a real international society. There can be no well balanced and enduring nation without a common consent in the essential rules of social living, without a general standard of behavior before the claims of conscience, without the adherence of all citizens to identical concepts of good and of evil; there is no domestic law which in defining and punishing criminal violations is not founded on criteria of a moral order which are accepted by all--in a word, without a common morality. There can be no society of nations tomorrow without an international morality, without a certain community of spiritual civilization, without an identical hierarchy of values; international law will be called upon to recognize and guarantee the punishment of the gravest violations of the universally accepted moral laws. This morality and this international criminal law, indispensable for the final establishment of peaceful cooperation and of progressof lasting foundations, are inconceivable to us today, offer the experience of past centuries and more especially of these last years, after the incredible and awesome sacrifices and the sufferings of men of all races and of all nationalities except as built on the respect of the human person, of every human person whosoever he may be, as well as on the limitation of the sovereignty of states.
society through the free occupation of all peoples, on this morality and on this international law, it is necessary that after having premeditated, prepared and launched a war of aggression which has caused the death of millions of men and the ruin of a great number of nations, after having thereupon piled up the most odious crimes in the course of the war years, Nazi Germany shall be declared guilty and her rulers and those chiefly responsible punished as such. Without this sentence and without this punishment the nations would have no faith in justice. When you have declared that crime is always a crime, whether committed by a national entity against other nations or by one individual against another, you will thereby have affirmed that there is only one morality, which applies to international relations as well as to individual relationships, and that on this morality are built prescriptions of law recognized by the international community, you will then have truly begun to establish an international justice. German people. These people have been for many years intoxicated by Nazism; certain of their eternal and deep seated aspirations, under this regime, have found a monstrous expression, their entire responsibility is involved, not only by their general acceptance but by the effective participation of a great number of them in the crimes committed. Their re-education is indispensable. This represents a difficult enterprise and one of long duration. The efforts which the free peoples will have to make in order to reintegrate Germany in the international community cannot succeed in the end if this re-education is not carried out effectively. The initial condemnation of Nazi Germany by your High Tribunal will be a first lesson for these peoples and will constitute the best starting point for the work of the revision of values and of re-education which must be its great concern during the coming years. as crimes both the war of aggression itself and those acts in violation of the morality and of the laws of all civilized countries which have been committed by Germany in the conduct of the war, to impose the supreme penalty on those who are chiefly responsible, and to declare criminal the members of the various groups and organizations which were the principal perpetrators of the crimes of Nazi Germany.
agreement of 8 August 1945, acting in the interests of all the United Nations, is qualified to mete out to Nazi Germany the justice of the free peoples, the justice of liberated humanity. to judge the crimes committed by those principally responsible in Nazi Germany, is based solidly on the principles and usage of International law. As an eminent British jurist has recently reminded us; the practice and the doctrine of International law have always given to belligerent states the right to punish enemy war criminals who fall into their power. It is an incontestable rule of international law which no author has ever contested. It is not a new doctrine. It was born with the birth of International Law. Francisco de VITTORIA and GROTIUS laid its foundations. The German authors of the 17th and 18th century developed the doctrine. said: "Enemy soldiers who act in violation of International Law, should they fall into the hands of their adversaries, are not to be treated as prisoners of war. They can suffer the same fate as thieves and murderers." The prosecutions which the United States, Great Britain, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and France are today carrying out against the men and the organizations appearing before your high Tribunal under the indictment drawn up in Berlin on October 18, 1945, therefore have an unimpeachable juridical foundation: The right universally recognized by international doctrine of bringing War Criminals before a repressive jurisdiction. even more irrefutable. every State the right to punish crimes committed on its territory. The application of the territorial principles covers the violations of international law in territory subject to military occupation; these violations are the chief source of war crimes.
But the crimes committed by the defend-
ants were not directed against any given state, in any given occupied territory. The National Socialist conspirators, against whom we ask that justice be done, directed the policy of the Third Reich. armed forces have been equally victims both of the illicit war which they launched and of the methods used by them in the conduct of this war. the privilege of trying these criminals. Only an International Tribunal, emanating from the combined United Nations, which were yesterday at war with Germany, can rightly claim this privilege. This is why the declaration as to enemy atrocities made at the end of the Moscow conference in October 1943 had provided that the leaders of Nazi Germany would, after the joint victory of the Allies, be brought before an international jurisdiction. There is, therefore, nothing new from a juridical point of view in the principle of justice which you are called upon to render. Far from being merely a statement of power from the side of the victors, your competence is founded on the recognition by international law of the territorial jurisdiction of soverign states. court constitutes a notable progress in the setting up of an interstate repressive procedure.
It does not constitute any innovation in the legal foundation of the justice which you are called upon to render. objections. This horrible accumulation and maze of crimes against humanity both include and go beyond the two more precise juridical notions of crimes against peace and War Crimes. But I think -- and I will revert later separately to crimes against peace and War Crimes -- that this body of crimes against humanity constitutes, in the last analysis, nothing less than the perpetration for political ends and in a systematic manner of common law crimes such as theft, looting, ill treatment, enslavement, murders and assassinations, crimes that are provided for and punishable under the penal laws of all civilized States. your task of justice. of written texts to justify the penal qualification that you will apply to their crimes. Socialism, admitted that in domestic criminal law even the judge can and must supplement the law. The written law no longer constituted the Magna Carta of the delinquent. The judge could punish when, in the absence of a provision for punishment, the National Socialist sense of justice was gravely offended.
How could the judge of the Nazi regime supplement the law? legislator. Proceeding from the firm basis of the National-Socialist programme, he sought the rule which he would have proclaimed had he been a legislator. The defendant FRANK, in his speech at the Juristentag in 1936, declared: "Say to yourself at each decision you have to make, how would the Fuehrer decide in my place? At each decision which you must make, ask yourself: Is this decision in accordance with the National-Socialist conscience of the German people? Thus you will have a firm basis of conscience which will also bear for all time, in your own sphere of decisions, the authority of the Third Reich, passed on the unity of the popular National-Socialism whole and on the recognition of the will of the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler."
science, the accused FRANK and his accomplices would be ill advised to protest a lack of written texts with appropriate sanctions, especially as, in addition to various international conventions, these texts, though they be not codified in an inter-state penal code, exist in the penal code of every civilized country. aspects of the National-Socialist plot, its planning and its development, from the first days of the conspiracy of Hitler's and his companions rise to power, until the unleashing of unnumerable crimes in a Europe almost entirely at their mercy. of agreements, of promises which were the prelude to the many wars of aggression of which Germany was guilty. criminality springs from what I may be allowed to call a crime against the spirit, I mean a doctrine which, denying all spiritual, rational and moral values by which the nations have tried, for thousands of years, to improve human conditions, aims to plunge humanity back into barbarism, no longer the natural and spontaneous barbarism of primitive nations, but into a diabolical barbarism, conscious of itself and utilizing for its ends all material means put at the disposal of mankind by contemporary science. This sin against the spirit, this is the original sin of National-Socialism from which all crimes spring.
This monstrous doctrine is that of racism: and natural concept. Germans as individuals do not exist and cannot justify their existence, except in so far as they belong to the race or Volkstum, to the popular mass which represents and amalgamates all Germans. Race is the matrix of the German people; proceeding therefrom this people lives and develops as an organism. The German may consider himself only as a healthy and vigorous member of this body, fulfilling within the collectivity a definite technical function; his activity and his usefulness are the exact guage and justification of his liberty.
This national body must be "moulded" to prepare it for a permanent struggle. political system; this is what is called authoritative or dictatorial biology.
The expression "blood" which appears so often in the writings of the Nazi theorists denotes his stream of real life, of red sap which flows through the circulatory system of every race and of all genuine culture as it flows through the human body. To be Ayran is to feel this current passing through oneself, this current which galvanises and vivifies the whole nation. Blood is this region of spontaneous and unconscious life which reveals to each individual the tendencies of the race. The intellectual life must never, in extolling itself, separate us from this elemental basis of the sacred community. Let the individual go into himself and he will receive by direct revelation "the commandments of the blood". Dreams, rites and myths can lead to this revelation. In other words the modern German can and must bear in himself the call of the old Germany and find against its purity and its youthful primitiveness.
The body and soul unity (Leibseele Einheit) of the individual must not be disputed. One reads in the "Nationalsozialistische Monatsheft" of September 1938: "It is said that the body belongs to the State and the soul to the Church and to God. It is not so. The whole of the individual, body and soul, belongs to the Germanic nation and to the Germanic State." National-Socialism affirms indeed that the moral conscience is the result of ortho-genetic evolution, the consequence of the most simple physiological functions which characterise the individuality of the body. Therefore, the moral conscience is also subject to heredity and consequently subject to the postulate and to the demands of the race. technical activity, but subordinates them rigorously, brings them infallibly to the racial myth.
element of the race. This affirmation is logical if one admist that not only physical and psychological characteristics but also opinions and tendencies are bound, not to the individual but to the nation. Anyone whose opinions differ from the official doctrine is asocial or unhealthy. He is unhealthy because in the Nazi doctrine the nation is equivalent to the race. Now, the characteristics of the race are fixed. An exception in the formation from the spiritual or moral point of view constitutes a malformation in the same way as does a club foot or a hare lip. by the race and for the race, without freedom of action or any definite aim. Totalitarian doctrine which excludes every other concept, every other aspiration or requirement save those connected with the race, totalitarian doctrine which eliminates from the individual every other thought save that of the interest of the race. zen into that of the state and in the denial of any intrinsic value of the human person. savage tribe. All the values of civilization accumulated in the course of centuries are rejected, all traditional ideas of morality, justice and law give way to the primacy of race, its instincts, its needs and interests. The individual, his liberty, his rights and aspirations, no longer have any real existence of their own. members of the German community from other men. The diversity of the races becomes irreducible, and irreducinle, too, the hierarchy which sets aprat the superior and the inferior races. The Hitler regime has created a veritable chasm between the German nation, the sole keeper of the racial treasure, and other nations. ior variety of men there is no longer any common measure. Human brotherhood is rejected, even more than all the other traditional moral values.
classic antiquity and christianity, by the ideals of liberty, equality and social justice, by the common heritage of Western humanism to which she had brought such noble and precious contributions, could have come to this astonishing return to primitive barbarism. tomorrow the evil by which our entire civilization came so near to perishing, it must be recalled that National Socialism has deep and remote origins. crises which Germany underwent in the 19th Century and which abruptly broke out again in its economic and social structure through a particularly rapid industrialization. National Socialism is in reality one of the peaks of the moral and spiritual crisis of modern humanity, convulsed by industrialization and technical progress. Germany experienced this metamorphosis of economic and social life not only with an extraordinary brutality but at a time when she did not yet possess the political equilibrium and the cultural unity which the other countries of western Europe had achieved. dominated the spirits, an uncertainity admirable defined by the term "ratlosigkeit" which cannot be translated into French but which corresponds to our popular expression, "One no longer knows in what saint to believe". This is the spiritual cruelty of the 19th century which so many Germans have described with a tragic evocative power. A gaping void opens before the human soul disoriented by the search for new values. relativism; to a deep scepticism regarding the lasting quality of values on which Western humanism has been nurtured for centuries. A vulgar Darwinism prevails, bewilders and befuddles the brain. The Germans cease to see in Human groups and races anything but nuclei closed in upon themselves, in perpetual struggle with one another. I sees in the values of humanism and in the elements that derive from it only "maladies", which it attributes to an excess of intellectualism and abstraction of everything that restrains men's passions by subjecting them to common morms.
From this point on classic antiquity is no longer considered in its aspect of ordered reason or of radiant beauty. It is seen only in the light of civilization vitally enamoured of struggles and rivalries, linked especially to Germany through their would-be German origins. religions of honor and brotherhood, calculated to kell the virtues of brutal force in man. then against all the internationals. traditional values the culminating philosophy of Nietzsche was to exercise a dominant influence. In taking the will to power as a point of departure, Nietzsche preached, not inhumanity but superhumanity. If there is no final cause in the universe, man -- whose body is matter which is at once feeling and thinking -- may mould the world to his desire, choosing as his guide a militant biology. If the supreme end of humanity is a feeling of victorious fullness which is both material and spiritual, all that remains is to insure the selection of physical specimens, Who become the new aristocracy of masters.
For Nietzsche the industrial evolution necesarily entails the rule of the masses.
The automatism and the shaping of the working multitudes. The state endures only by girtue of an elite of vigorous personalities who, by the methods so admirably defined by Machiavelle, which alone accord with the laws of life, will lead men by force and by ruse simultaneously, for men are and remain wicked and perverse.
We see the modern barbarian arise. Superior by his intelligence and his willful energy, freed of all conventional ethies he can enforce upon the masses obedience and loyalty by making them believe in the dignity and beauty of labor and by providing them with that mediocre well-being with which they are so easily content. A one and same force will, therefore, be manifest in the leaders, whose elementary passions by the harmony between their elementary passions and the lucidity of their organizing reason, and in the masses, whose dark or violent instincts will be balanced by a reasoned activity imposes with implacable discipline. the brutal simplicity of National Socialism. Nevertheless, NationalSocialism was wont to glorify Nietzsche as one of its ancestors. And justly so, for he was the first to formulate in a coherent manner criticism of the traditional values of humanism; and also , because his conception of the government of the masses by masters knowing no restraint, is a preview of the Nazi regime. Besides, Nietzsche believed in the sovereign race and attributed privacy to Germany, whom he considered endowed with a youthful soul and unquenchable resources. German soul, unbalanced by the moral and spiritual crises endured by modern humanity, joined up with the traditional thesis of Pangermanism.
Fischer's "Speeches to the German Nation" had already, by exaltingGermanity, clearly revealed one of the main key ideas of Pangermanism - namely, that Germany visualizes and organizes the world as it should be visualized and organized.
The apology of war is also no novelty. It dates back to Fichte and Hegel, who had stated that by classifying peoples, war alone established justice among nations On page 433 of his "Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechtes", Hegel writes, "The moral health of nations is maintained thanks to war, just as the passing breeze saves the sea from stagnation". century.
It is a well-known geographical and historical demonstration which such people as Ratzel, Arthur Dix and Lamprecht will take up later on, comparing conflicts between peoples to a savage fight between conceptions and realizations of space and declaring that all history is moving towards German hegemony.
State totalitarianism also has deep roots in Germany. The absorption of individuals by the State was hoped for by Hegel, who wrote, "Individuals disappear in the presence of the universal substance (that is the people or state idea) and this substance itself shapes the individuals who are demanded by the ends in view". Germany, either as a spontaneous formation which might be due to the consequence of the defeat in 1918, nor is it the mere invention of a group of men determined upon seizing power. National Socialism is the ultimate result of a long evolution of doctrines; the exploitation by a group of men of one of the most profound and most tragic aspects of the German soul. But the crime committed by Hitler and his companions will be precisely that of unleashing and exploiting to its extreme limit the latent force of barbarity, which existed before him the German people. with it for all Germans the "soldier-life", that is to say, a kind and a system of life entirely different from those which obtain the bourgeois West and the proletarian East. It amounted to a permanent and complete mobilization of individual and collective energies. This integral militarization presupposed complete uniformity of thoughts and actions. It is a militarization which conforms to the Prussian tradition of discipline. greatness of the community. Those consenting masses find an artificial derivative for their moral anguish and their material cares in theories of race and in a mystical exaltation held in common.
Souls which yesterday were wounded and rent asunder once more find themselves united in a common mold.
of traditional moral teachings, those being replaced by the cult of race and of strength.
The race-myth tends to become a real national religion. Many writers, substituting themselves to the duality of religious confessions, dream of dogmas of German conception, which would amount to being the religion of the German race, as a race. beyond Christianity and civilization to the primitive barbarity of ancient Germany. She makes a deliberate break with all universal conceptions of modern nations. The National Socialist doctrine, which raises inhumanity to the level of a principle, constitutes in fact, a doctrine of disintegration of modern society. the systematic use of criminality in the waging of war. national law whatsoever, the cult of strength, the exacerbation of community mysticism, made Germany consider recourse to war, in the interests of the German race, logical and justified. nations considered decadent. Germany is about to resume the great invasions of the barbarians. Moreover, most naturally and logically, she will wage her war in barbarous fashion, not only because National Socialist ethics are indifferent to the choice of means, but also because war must be total in its means and in its ends. fore not faced by an accidental or accasional criminality which events could explain without justifying it. We are, in fact, faced by systematic criminality, which derives directly and of necessity from a monstrous doctrine put into practice with deliberate intent by the masters of Nazi Germany.
From National Socialist doctrines there arises directly, the immediately pursued preparation of crimes against peace.
As early as February 1920, in the first program of the National Socialist Party, Adolf Hitler had already outlined the future basis of German foreign policy. But it was in 1924 in his Landsberg prison, while writing "Mein Kampf", that he gave a fuller development to his views.
According to "Mein Kampf" the foreign policy of the Reich must have as its first objective to give back to Germany her "independence and her effective sovereignty" which is clearly an allusion to the articles of the "Treaty of Versatile, referring to disarmament and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. It would then endeavor to reconquer the territories "lost" in 1919, and fifteen years before the outbreak of the Second World War, the question of Alsace and Loraine is clearly raised. It would also have to seek to extend German territories in Europe, the frontiers of 1914 being "insufficient" and it would be indispensable to extend them by including "all Germans" in the Reich, beginning with the Germans of Austria. everything necessary to "insure the means of existence" on this planet of the race assembled by the State, by means of establishing a "healty relation" between the size of the population and the extent of the territory; by "healthy relation" is meant a situation such that the subsitance of the people will be assured by the resources of its own territory. "A sufficient living space on this earth will alone insure to a people its liberty of existence".
But so far that is but a stage. "When a people sees its subsistance guaranteed by the extent of its territory, it is nevertheless necessary to think of insuring the security of that territory", because the power of a State "arises directly out of the military value of its geographical situation".
Those ends, Hitler adds, cannot be reached without war. It will be impossible to obtain the reestablishment of the frontiers of 1911; "without effusion of blood". How much more would it be impossible to acquire living space if one did not prepare for a "clash of arms".