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".
"It is in Eastern Europe, at the expense of Russia and the neighboring countries that Germany must seek new territories.
We arrest the eternal march of the Germans towards the South and the West of Europe and cast our eyes towards the South and the West of Europe and cast our eyes towards the East."
But before anything, declares Hitler, it is necessary to crush France's tendency towards hegemony and to have a "final settlement" with this "mortal enemy". "The annihilation of France will enable Germany to acquire afterwards territories in the East". The "settlement of accounts" in the West is but a prelude. "It can be explained only as the securing of our rear defenses in order to extend our living-space in Europe". territory of a "military power" which might become her rival, and to oppose "by all means" the formation of a state which possibly might acquire sufficient strength to do so, and if that state exists already, to "destroy" it is, for Germans, not only a right but a duty.
"Never permit", recommends Hitler to his compatriots, in a passage which he calls his political testament, "the formation in Europe of two Continental powers. In every attempt to set up a second military power on Germany's borders - even if it were in the shape of a state which might possibly acquire that power -- you must see an attack on Germany. power of France, way to acquire living-space in eastern Europe, war, in fine, against any state which would be or which might become a counter-weight to the hegemony of the Reich, that is the plan of Mein Kampf. from any of the certainties of war entailed by the application of his doctrines. companions devoted themselves to the military and diplomatic preparation of the wars of aggression which they had resolved to wage. ists Germany had already shown her determination to reconstruct her armed forces, notably in 1932 when on the occasion of the Disarmament Conference, she demanded "equality of rights" as regards armament, and Germany had already violated in secret the articles of the Treaty of Versailles regarding disarmament, but after the arrival of Hitler to power, German rearmament was to be carried out at a vastly different rate.
known five days later its decision to withdraw from the League of Nations under the pretext that it was not granted equality of rights in the matter of armament. France had however expressed her readiness to accept equality of rights if Germany would first consent to an international control which would enable the level of existing armaments to be determined. Germany very obviously did not wish to agree to this condition, for an international control would have revealed the extent of the rearmament already carried out in secret by the Reich in violation of the treaties. As a matter of fact, at a cabinet meeting which took place on 12 October 1933, the minutes of which have been found, Hitler had declared that he wished to "torpedo" the Disarmament Conference. In these conditions it is not surprising that the attempts made to resume negotiations with Germany after her withdrawal ended in failure.
When 18 months later Hitler's government decided to reestablish conscription and to create immediately an army which would, on a peace establishment, comprise 36 divisions, as well as to create a military air force, it was breaking the engagements which Germany had undertaken by the Treaty of Versailles. However, on 3 February 1935, France and Great Britain had offered to the Reich to resume its place in the League of Nations and to prepare a general disarmament convention which would have been substituted for the military Articles of the Treaty. At the moment when Hitler was on the point of obtaining, by means of free negotiation, the abolition of the "unilateral burden" which, as he said, the Treaty of Versailles laid on Germany, he preferred to escape any voluntary limitation and any control of armaments by a deliberate violation of a treaty. to reoccupy at once the demilitarized Rhineland area, thereby violating Articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles, the German government alleged that in so doing it was replying to the pact concluded and signed on 2 May 1935 between France and the U.S.S.R. and ratified on 27 February 1936 by the French Chamber of Deputies.
It alleged that this pact was contrary to the Treaty of Locarno. This was a mere pretext which was taken seriously by nobody. The Nazi leaders wanted to start building the Siegfried Line as soon as possible in the demilitarized Rhineland area, in order to thwart a military intervention which France might attempt in order to assist her Eastern allies. The decision of 7 March 1936 was the prelude to the aggressions directed against Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. nancial measures which affected every aspect of national life. The entire economic system was directed towards the preparation of war. The members of the government proclaimed priority of armaments manufacture over all other branches of production. Policy passed before economics. The Fuehrer declared: "The people must be resigned for some time to having its butter, fats, and meat rationed in order that rearmament may proceed at the desired rate." The German people did not protest against this order. The State intervened to increase the production of substitute goods which would help to relieve the insufficiency of raw materials, and would enable the Reich, in the event of war, to maintain the level of production necessary for the Army and Air Force, even if imports were to become difficult or impossible. The defendant Goering, in September 1936, inspired the drawing up and directed the application of the Four Years' Plan which put Germany's economic system on a war footing. The expenses entailed by this rearmament were assured thanks to the new system of work treaties. The defendant Schacht, during the three and a half years he was at the head of the Reich Ministry of Economics brought into being this financial machinery and thereby played an outstanding role in military preparations as he himself recalled, .after he left the Ministry, in a speech that he made in November 1938 at the Economic Council of the German Academy.
Germany thus succeeded in three years' time to recreate a great army and to create on the technical plane an organization entirely devoted to future war. On the 5th of November 1937, when expounding his plan for home policy to his collaborators, Hitler was able to state that rearmament was practically completed.
THE PRESIDENT: Would that be a convenient time to break off? We will adjourn, then, for ten minutes.
(A recess was taken from 1115 to 1130 hours.)
While Hitler's government was giving to the Reich the economic and financial means for a war of aggression he was carrying on simultaneously the diplomatic preparation of that war by endeavoring to reassure the threatened nations during the period which was indispensable to him for rearmament and by endeavoring also to keep apart his eventual adversaries one from the other. obtain by force a revision of the Treaty of Versailles although in that speech he asked for it. He stated that he admitted "the legitimate exigencies of all peoples" and he asserted that he did not want to "Germanize those who are not Germans." He wished to "respect the rights of other nationalities." reassured for a time the Warsaw government and to lull it into a state of false security, but it was principally intended to remove a means of action from French policy. In a work published in 1939 entitled "Deutschlands Aussenpolitik 1933-39," a semi-official writer, Professor Von FreytagLoringhoven wrote that the essential purpose of this pact was to paralyze the action of the Franco-Polish alliance and to "over-throw the entire French system." Treaty of Versailles, Germany started negotiations with Great Britain which were to result in the naval agreement of 18 June 1935, negotiation which were intended to reassure British public opinion by shoving it that while the Reich was desirous of becoming once more a great military power, it was not thinking of reconstituting a powerful fleet. the return of the Saar territory to the Reich, Hitler formally declared "that he would make not further territorial demands whatever on France." He was to use the same tactics towards France until the end of 1938. On 6 December 1938 Ribbentrop came to Paris to sign the Franco-German decla ration which agreed "the frontiers as definite" between the two countries and which stated that the two governments were resolved "under reservation of their particular relations with third powers, to engage in mutual consultation in the event of questions of common interests which might show a risk of leading to international difficulties;" he was then still hoping, to quote the French ambassador in Berlin, to "stabilize peace in the West in order to have a free hand in the East."
Did not Hitler make the same promises to Austria and Czechoslovakia? He signed on 11 July 1936, an agreement with the Vienese government, recognizing the independence of Austria, an independence which he was to destroy twenty months liter. By means of the Munich agreement on 28 September 1938 he promised subsequently to guarantee the integrity of the Czech territory which he invaded less than six months later. at the Reich Chancellory, Hitler had made known to his collaborators that the hour had struck to resolve by force the problem of the living-space required by Germany. The diplomatic situation was favorable to Germany. She had acquired superiority of armaments which ran the risk of being only temporary. Action should be taken without further delay. detailed to this court. It has also been shown to you that these various aggressions have been made in violation of international treaties and of the principles of International Law. As a matter of fact, German propaganda did not challenge this at the time. It merely stated that those treaties and those principles "had lost any reality whatever with the passage of time." In other words, it simply denied that one's pledged word had any value, and that the principles which form the basis of International Law had become obsolete; this is a reasoning which is in line with the National Socialist doctrines which, as we have seen, do not recognize any International Law, and sta te that any means is justifiable if it is of a nature to serve the interests of the German race. propaganda made use of to justify the long-planned aggression.
Germany set forth, first of all, her vital interests. Can she not be excused for neglecting the rules of the rights of peoples when she was engaged in a struggle for the existence of her people? She needed economic expansion. She had the right and the duty to protect the German minorities abroad. She was obliged to ward off the encirclement which the Western powers were directing against the Reich. even to his direct associates, in the secret conferences he held in 1937 and 1939 in the Reichschancellery. "Economic needs," he said, "Are the basis of the policy of expansion of Italy and of Japan. They also guide Germany".
But would not Hitler's Germany have been able to seek to satisfy these needs by peaceful means? Did she think of obtaining new possibilities for her foreign commerce through commercial negotiations? Hitler did not stop at such solutuions. To solve the German economic problems, he saw only one way--the acquisition of agricultural territories--undoubtedly because he was incapable of conceiving of these problems under any other form than that of "war economy". If he affirmed the necessity of obtaining this "agricultural space"--to use his own phrase--it was because he saw therein the means of obtaining for the German population the food resources which would protect it against the consequences of a blockade.
The duty of protecting "the German minorities abroad" was the favorite theme which Germany's diplomacy made use of from 1937 to 1939. It could obviously not serve as an excuse for the destruction of the Czechoslovakian State or for the establishment of the "German Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia". The fate of the "Sudeten Germans", that of the "Danzig Germans" was the leitmotif of the German press, of the Fuehrer's speeches and of Ribbentrop's propaganda speeches. Now, it is necessary to recall that in the secret conference of 5 November 1937, one word about the "Sudeten Germans," and to recall that in the "principal point" of the German-Polish controversy?
The "right of nationalities" was, therefore, in his mind only a propaganda "living space."
with Great Britain. This thesis occupied a great deal of space in the German-Polish diplomatic conflict.
Had not the British Prime that British policy had only two aims:
to prevent Germany from dominating Europe and "to oppose a method which, by the threat of force, obliged the weak States to renounce their independence?"
What Hitler Germany called "encirclement" was simply a fence, But German propaganda did not limit itself to this.
Did we the previous year on Czechoslovakia?
A strange argument, which to make war if all the Powers had yielded to her will.
The excuse Hitler's declarations, may have believed that the designs of minorities; it may have hoped that there was a limit to German scope of the German plans clear to the Allies.
How can one be peace could have been "bought" in August 1939 by concessions, been "deeply disappointed" if she had yielded and that he wished a general war?
National Socialists. Their doctrine inevitably led to it.
which Germany is one of the signatories. This Pact continues to May I re-read Article I of this Treaty?
"The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare, in the name instrument of national policy in their reciprocal relations."
European order. The Paris Pact, which remains the fundamental evolution of the relations between States.
The Hague Conventions had regulated the "law of the conduct of war."
They had instituted conflict.
They had, essentially, established a distinction between and those which it prohibits.
The Hague Convention had not reached the very principle of war placed beyond the juridical domain.
This regulates "the right of declaration of war."
framework of regulations. It has gone beyond the empiricism of the force.
Every war of aggression is illegal, and the men who bear of war?
May I quote this well-known passage from Pascal?
"Why do you kill me?" "Don't you live on the other side of the water?
My friend, if you lived on this side, I would be an is just."
sanctions in all legislations. The state of war could make them legitimate only if the war itself was legitimate.
Inasmuch as acts become purely and simply common law crimes.
As Justice Jackson This is the whole spirit of the Briand-Kellogg Pact.
It was of nationals of a foreign power.
Given this formal commitment, really possesses the juridical character of a war.
It is truly an responsibility of all the perpetrators of acts of violence.