As has been said by another Tribunal, "Exculpation from the charge of criminal homicide can only can only possibly be based upon bona fide proof that the subject had committed murder or any other recognized capital offense; and, not even then, unless the sentencing Tribunal with authority granted by the State in the constitution of the court, declared that the execution would be accomplished by means of a low-pressure chamber".1 In this connection, it might be noted that German law recognized only three methods of execution, namely, by decapitation, hanging, and shooting.
(German Penal Code, Part I, Par. 13; R.G.B.L. 1933, Part I, p. 151; R.G.B.L. 1939, Part I, p. 1457). Moreover, there is no proof that any of the experimental subjects had their death sentences commuted to any lesser degree of punishment. Indeed, in the sulfanilamide crimes it was the experiment plus later execution for at least six of the subjects.
Since the defendants Gebhardt, Fischer, and Oberheuser have put particular stress on this alleged defense, I should like to make a few remarks in that connection, but it should be remembered that they apply with equal force to most of the other defendants. Gebhardt, speaking for his co-defendants Fischer and Oberheuser, took the position that the Polish women who had been used in the sulfanilamide experiments had been condemned to death for participation in a resistance movement and that by undergoing the experiments, voluntarily or otherwise, they were to have their death sentence commuted to some lesser degree of punishment, provided they survived the experiments. This was no bargain reached with the experimental subjects; their wishes were not consulted in the matter. It was, according to Gebhardt, left to the good faith of some one unnamed to see to it 1 U.S. v. Milch, Concurring Opinion of Musmanno, J., p. 53-4.that the death sentences were not carried out on the survivors of the experiments.
Certainly Gebhardt; Fischer; and Oberheuser assummed no responsibility or even interest in that regard.
It should be pointed out that the proof shows that the experimental subjects who testified before this Tribunal were never so much as afforded a trial; they had no opportunity to defend them selves against whatever crimes they were said to have committed. They were simply arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo in Poland and sent to the concentration camp. They had never so much as been informed that they had been marked for, not sentenced to, death. Article 30 of the Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land; annexed to the Hague Convention; specifically provides that even a spy "shall not be punished without a previous trial".
Gebhardt would have the Tribunal believe that but for the experi ments all these Polish girls would be dead; that he preserved the evi dence which was used against him. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no proof in the record that these women would have been executed if they had not undergone the experiments. The witness Magzka is living proof of the contrary. She was arrested for resistance activities on 11 September 1941 and shipped to Ravensbruck on 13 September. She was not an experimental subject yet she lives today. Substantially all of the Polish experimental subjects arrived in Ravensbruck in September 1941. These girls had not been executed by August 1942 when the experiments began. There were 700 Polish girls in that transport. There is no evidence that a substantial number were ever executed even though most of them were not experimented on.
The proof submitted by the Prosecution has shown beyond controversy that these Polish women could not have been legally executed. The right to grant pardons in cases of death sentences was exclusively vested in Hitler by a decree of 1 February 1935. On 2 May 1935 On 2 May 1935, Hitler delegated the right to make negative decisions on pardon applications to the Reich Minister of Justice.
On 30 January 1940 Hitler delegated to the General Governor for the occupied Polish territories the authority to grant and deny pardons for the occupied Polish territories. By edict dated 8 March 1940; the General Governor of occupied Poland ordered that:
"The execution of a death sentence promulgated by a regular court, a special court, or a Police court martial, shall take place only when my decision has been issued not to make use of my right to pardon.
Thus, even though we assume arguendo, that the experimental subjects had all committed substantial crimes, that they were all properly tried by a duly constituted court of law, and that they were legally sentenced to death, it is still clear from these decrees that these women could not have been legally executed until such time as the Governor General of occupied Poland had decided in each case not to make use of his pardon right. There has been no proof that the Governor General ever acted with respect to pardoning the Polish women used in the experiments, or, for that matter, any substantial number of those not used in the experiments. The only reason these 700 Polish women were transported from Warsaw and Lublin to Ravensbruck, in the first place, was because the Governor General had not approved their execution. Otherwise they would have been immediately executed in Poland. At the very least, these women were entitled to remain unmolested so long as the Governor General took no action. He may never have acted or, when he did, he may have acted favorably on the pardon. Who is to say that the majority of these 700 women did not live through the war even though they did not undergo the experiments? Certainly it was incumbent on the defense to prove the contrary by a preponderance of the evidence. This it did not do by any evidence.
1 NO-3073; Pros. Ex. 534; R. 10359.
The defendants Gebhardt, Fischer, and Oberheuser certainly cannot claim that they believed in good faith that the Polish women could have been legally executed. Even the camp doctor, Schiedlausky, knew that the Governor General had to approve each execution. Moreover, the large number of 700 women being sentenced to death at this early stage of the war was enough to put any reasonable person on notice that something was wrong.
Additionally, the uncontroverted evidence proves that survival of the experiments was no guarantee whatever of avoiding execution in any event. At least six of the experimental subjects were proved to have been executed after having survived the experiments. It was not a question of the experiment or execution, but rather the experiment and execution. Indeed, in February 1945, an effort was made to execute all of the experimental subjects, but because of confusion in the camp due to the war situation, the experimental subjects were able to obtain different identification numbers and so avoid detection.
But even if one takes the case of the defense at its face value, the Tribunal is in effect asked to rule that it is legal for military doctors of a nation at war to experiment on political prisoners of an occupied country who are condemned to death, to experiment on them in such a way that they may suffer death, excrutiating pain, mutilation, and permanent disability, all this without their consent and in direct aid of the military potential of their enemy. There would, of course, be no valid reason for limiting such a decision to civilian prisoners; the experiments would certainly have been no worse had they been performed on Polish or American prisoners of war.
It is impossible to consider seriously this ghoulish ruling being sought for by the defense.
I should now like to turn briefly to the specific defenses of some of the defendants. It is a temptation to take up each defendant in his turn, but since my appropriate time does not permit, I can only hope that we will not be accused of partiality in selecting only a few for comment.
The defense of Handloser is a general denial. He says in effect that: I was a soldier. I was in charge of the medical administration of the Wehrmacht; but had no power and no right to issue orders and that whatever may have happened; I am not responsible for it. It is interesting to note that this defense is very similar to that put forward by Field Marshal Keitel in this same court room approximately a year ago. He was represented by the same defense counsel. Keitel also said that he could not issue orders. We have already discussed in some detail the position of Handloser, and it has been established beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was the supreme authority in the military medical services. We need not stop to consider the practical difference between an order and a directive.
We have pointed out that the opportunity and power to control the participation of the military medical services in these crimes was his. The evidence shows that Handloser was connected with a number of criminal medical experiments including the typhus and other vaccine experiments both in Buchenwald and Natzweiler, and the freezing, sulfanilamide, jaundice, gas and the gas oedema experiments, among others. But it was his participation in the Buchenwald typhus experiments which now causes Handloser the most distress. The first entry in the Ding Diary proves that Handloser participated in the conference which decided that those experiments should be performed. This has brought forth a concerted attack on the authenticity of this document by Handloser as well as Mrugowsky. But after months of torturing and dwisting, the diary has not been disproved in a single respect. To the contrary, it has been substantiated time and again by the introduction of independent documents which are too numerous to here detail. There is scarcely a line in the whole diary which has not been corroborated either by documents or by testimony. The defense itself proved that the diary was all typed on the same machine. The genuineness of the signatures of Dr. Ding, which appear on substantially every page, has been proved beyond controversy. The diary must be accepted as accurate in its entirety. There is no basis for accepting some entires and rejecting others. The defense has presented no creditable evidence of any inaccuracies. The living record of the deceased Ding is the best evidence of what actually happened.
But one could disregard the Ding Diary and the proof would still require a judgment of guilty with respect to Handloser. The Buchenwald typhus experiments were also discussed at a preliminary conference on 29 December 1941 attended by a subordinate of Handloser. His office received a copy of the conference report. Medical officers under the direct command of Handloser were informed of the details of these experiments -- Eyer, Schmidt, and Schreiber.
Eyer received a report on the first series of experiments and later, accompanied by Schmidt, visited the experimental station Typhus infected lice as well as vaccines were furnished to Ding by the Typhus and Virus Institute of the OKH under Handloser. Ding reported on the typhus experiments at a meeting of the Consulting Physicians called by Handloser and presided over by Schreiber. Additionally, the Buchenwald. experimental station was used by Handloser to have yellow fever vaccines tested on inmates, the results of which were sent to his hygienist Dr. Schmidt. Combined vaccine experiments were conducted at Buchenwald on the suggestion of Handloser. Old blood plasma was tested on inmates of the "Little Camp" at Buchenwald for the Military Medical Academy under Handloser. The proof is quite clear that Handloser had knowledge of and participated in the criminal typhus experiments in Buchenwald, as well as other medical crimes.
Rudolf Brandt reached the pinacle in the contest of self-abasement among the defendants. His testimony before the Tribunal can be summed up in one sentence: "I remember nothing." Aside from a description of Himmler as something in the nature of a Jekyl and Hyde, he contented himself with giving answers to leading questions put by his attorney which were calculated to reveal him as a disembodied stenographic automaton or a mechanically proficient half-wit. He complains that the Prosecution only submitted 113 letters written or received by him to establish his complicity in these crimes which he, indeed, admits. He wants the Tribunal to say he is really not very guilty since he was concerned with over 160,000 letters in a life-time at Himmler's side. Of course, this mechanical measure of proof submitted by the Defense works both ways. It can be urged with equal validity that he is twice the murderer that Sievers has been proved to be on, shall we say, 50 documents. I need hardly mention that a great number of these many other letters mentioned by Brandt concerned such matters as the kidnapping of Czechoslovakian children, the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, extermination of Jews, and the notorious Flier Order, which encouraged the lunching of Allied fliers who bailed out over Germany.
The Prosecution does not contend that Rudolf Brandt was as important as Himmler. But he was an important administrative assistant to Himmler. While the basic decisions were made by Himmler, Brandt saw to it that they were carried out. If the principle of relative guilt has any place in the trial of men directly connected with the murder of thousands of persons, which the Prosecution submits it has not, then the significance of Brandt's position and his criminal activities comes into clear relief by comparison with that of the camp commander of Dachau and many of his subordinates, who have long since been sentenced to death for their participation in some of the same crimes charged in this Indictment.
Rudolf Brandt also pleads superior orders in mitigation. There is no evidence that Himmler ordered Brandt to participate in any crime. Brandt did so willfully. There is no evidence that Brandt retained his position out of fear. He flourished in it. Nothing would have been easier for him than to be replaced out of request or feigned inefficiency. Brandt was not a soldier on the field of battle. His activities were far removed from the confusion of the front lines. He did not act in the spontaneous heat of passion; he had full time to consider and reflect upon his course of action. He continued in his position from 1933 until his arrest by the Allies in 1945, no less than 12 years. This fact alone removes any basis for mitigation. Moreover, assuming that Brandt was ordered to commit the criminal acts which are the subject of this trial, when there is no fear of reprisal for disobedience, obedience represents a voluntary participation in the crime. Such is the case with Rudolf Brandt. Finally the doctrine of superior orders can not be considered in mitigation where such malignant and numerous crimes have been continuously and ruthlessly committed over a period of many years.
What has been said with respect to Brandt applies equally to the defendant Fischer who also pleads superior orders. He knew at the time he performed these experiments that he was committing a crime.
He knew the pain, disfigurement, disability, and risk of death to which his experimental victims would be subjected. He could have refused to participate In the experiments without any fear of consequences. This he admitted in saying, "It was not fear of a death sentence or anything like that, but the alternative was to either be obedient or disobedient during war, and thereby set an example, an example of disobedience." Such an admission removes any basis for mitigation. A soldier is always faced with the alternative of obeying or disobeying an order. If he knows the order is criminal, it is surely a hollow excuse to say it must be obeyed for the sake of obedience alone.
The defendant Beiglboeck attempts to run in all directions at once. The gypsies which he used in his experiments he tells us were volunteers, although he carried a pistol on his hip; they took the seawater willingly, although he found it necessary to tie one to his bed and seal his mopth with adhesive plaster to prevent him from obtaining fresh water; none of the experimental subjects suffered any harmful effects, although he contemptuously erased and altered the wording of a clinical record of one of the subjects in a vain effort to conceal from the Tribunal his desperate condition. This reluctant admission of fraud and deceit on his part came only after the proof left him no alternative, but he solemnly assured the Tribunal that he made no further changes in the documents. A further examination, however, shows that he did exactly the same thing with 1/ Transcript, p. 4374 respect to another report of a subject's condition.
But Beiglboeck's primary defense seems to be based on the proposition that it is not a crime against humanity to experiment on gypsies, since they are, at least according to Nazi doctrines, necessarily "asocial" persons. Beiglboeck apparently considers himself something of an expert on this subject. He testified that it was his understanding that a whole family could be classified asocial, although this"does not exclude the possibility that, in this family, there can be a large number of persons who did not commit any crime", l/ This motion that all gypsies are socials is also apparently shared by his defense counsel who when crossexamining the witness Hoellenreiner said, "Listen, Dr. Hoellenreiner, don't evade my question after the fashion of gypsies". 2/ It was also felt necessary to submit an extract from a work known as the "Gypsy Book#, which reads in part as follows:
"The 'gypsy plague' from which we suffer is caused by large numbers of gypsy bands and individual gypsies roaming about the country between the Austrian, Swiss and French borders under the cloak of trading...... thereby seriously endangering public security by their vagrancy, Besides begging, trespassing on fields, forest land and meadows, spreading the risk of epidemics and fires, trickery, these people are inclined to thievery."
While this book was published in 1905, it could not have been better written by Julius Streicher. Such Nazi doctrines of inferior races and peoples simply serve to explain how these crimes of man's inhumanity to man could have occurred.
In Siever's we have an unresisting member of a so-called resistance movement. He asks the Tribunal to free him from guilt for his bloody crimes on the ground that he was really working as an anti-Nazi resistance agent. Nor was he a late-comer to the resistance movement; according to him, he has been resisting since 1/ Transcript p. 8848.
2/ Transcript p. 10508.
1933. Yet in those 14 years, yes to this very day, he has not performed one overt act against the men who ran the system he now professes to have always detested. He joined the Nazi party as early as 1929 and the SS in 1935. He stayed with Himmler's gang until the la,st days of the collapse. He came to Nurnberg in 1946, not to give evidence of the horrible crimes of which he had firsthand knowledge, but to testify in defense of the SS. During his testimony before the International Military Tribunal, he consistently denied any knowledge of or connection with crimes committed by the AAhnenerbe of the SS. It was left to the cross-examination of Mr. Elwyn Jones to prove him the murderer and perjurer that he is. Nor did he show any signs of resistance in this trial except to the manifold crimes with which he is charged. Not one new fact did he reveal to this Tribunal, although specifically asked to tell all he knew. If asked today, he will assure one and all that there is not a, guilty man in the dock, and least of all himself. But, for purposes of argument, let us concede the truth of his many lies. It does not harm our case. It is not the law that a resistance worker scan commit no crime and, least of all, against the people he is supposed to be protecting.
It is not the law that an undercover agent, even an F.B.I. agent, can join a gang of murderers, lay the plans with them, execute the killings, share the loot, and go his merry way. Many are the policemen who have been convicted for taking part in crimes they were entrusted to prevent. No, the said thing is that this collector of living Jews for transformation into skeletons has only one life with which to pay for his many crimes.
In view of the clear and unequivocal proof of the defendant Rose's participation in the typhus murders of Buchenwald he can only plead that he didn't enjoy doing what he did, that he objected to the experiments at the Third Meeting of the Consulting Physicians of the Wehrmacht in May 1943. But this is his condemnation, not his salvation. In March 1942 he was in Buchenwald and saw what was being done. In May of the same year he asked Mrugowsky to test a vaccine for him in those experiments, Four inmates were killed as a result. In May 1943, he objected to the experiments in what he describes as strong terms. But in December, he was again instigating still another experiment which resulted in the murder of six men. He is a living example of a man who could have abstained from participating in these crimes without threat of harm to his person or position by any agency of the Nazi Government. He was not arrested and tried by the SS because of his objection. He was not committed to a concentration camp. In spite of that, he voluntarily participated in these same crimes to which he said he objected, with his knowledge, prestige, and position, he is even more culpable than the miserable and inexperienced Ding who actually performed the experiments in the murder wards of Buchenwald.
CONCLUSION I have already mentioned briefly the principle of relative guilt, but before concluding I should like to say a few more words in that connection.
Over the past half-year or more, we have all because acquainted with ghastly evidence of mass murders both from the record of this proceeding and the trials which have preceded it.
It would not be surprising, therefore, that we might tend to regard a man who killed only three or five persons as a pretty nice fellow by comparison. For example, it might be said that Gebhardt, who admitted that three women died in his sulfanilamide experiments, is entitled to a somewhat different punishment than Karl Brandt, who conceded that 60,000 persons were executed under his euthanasia program. In response to a question put by a defense counsel, Dr. Ivy emphatically stated that "there is no justification in killing five people in order to save the lives of 300".1 The idea that such thinking may be justified, with its inherent usurpation of the Lord's prerogative, is typical of Nazi thought. This whole system of Nazi mathematics is untenable in civilized society. This corruption of thought is found even in a mathematics problem book, published in 1933, for use by German school children. Under the guise of mathematics, the revulsion of normal children against the spreading of death by poison gas is insidiously broken down. Let us look at Problem 200 in this text book on mathematics and see what it says:
"According to statements of the Draeger works in Luebeck, in the gassing of a city only 50% of the evaporated poison gas is effective. The atmosphere must be poisoned up to a height of 20 meters in a concentration of 45 mg/m3. How much phosgene is needed to poison a city of 30,000 inhabitants, who live in an area of 3 square kilometers? How much phosgene would the population inhale with the air they breathe in 10 minutes without protection against gas, if one person uses 30 litres of breathing air per minute? Compare this quantity with the quantity of the poison gas used."2 The same perversion of thinking in terms of Nazi mathematics also explains the mass extermination of what several defendants have called "lives unworthy of living", the aged, the crippled, and the insane.
Any German high school student who had studied this book on mathematics could have told us that. Problems 93 and 97 tell the story more eloquently than we could possibly state it.
1. Transcript, 9229.
2. Mathematics in the Service of National Political Education With Practical Examples from Economics, Geography and Natural History, Adolf Dorner, 1935.
"Problem 95. The construction of an insane asylum required 6 million R.M. How many settlement housed at 13000 R.H. each could have been built for this sum?
"Problem 97. An insane person costs about R R.M. daily, a cripple 51/2 R.M., a criminal 31/2 R.M. In" many cases a civil servant only has about 4 R.M., an office employee barely 31/2 R.H., an unskilled laborer not even 2 R.M. per head of his family.
(a) Illustrate these figures graphically. According to cautious estimates there are in Germany 300,000 insane persons, epileptics, etc. under institutional care.
(b) What is their total annual cost at a figure of 4 R.M.?
(c) How many marriage allowance loans at 1000 R.H. each - subject to renunciation of repayment of the money later - could be paid out from this money yearly?"
This Tribunal must solemnly reaffirm an entirely different type of mathematics; mathematics in the light of religious and humane education which teaches that the value of even one human life is infinite, which means, again mathematically expressed, that one times infinity is just as infinite as 300 times infinity.
A distinguished American scientist said in this court room:
"There is no state or politician under the sun who could force me to perform a medical experiment which I thought was morally unjustified".l This was more than the view point of an individual or of an American.
Dr. Ivy expressed the opinion of all medical men and decent people of the civilized world. These defendants held a very different view in their day of pomp and power, and so these crimes resulted.
A prominent present day German leader has expressed the opinion that we are partly responsible for the snow-balling consequences of rearmament in violation of treaties in 1936, because we did not then strongly enough express our disapproval. There is some logic in this statement, although it illuminates the tragic failure of being too dependent on guidance from outside rather than on the dictates of one's own conscience. Therefore, let there be no doubt about the degrees of 1. Transcript, p. 9229.
your condemnation of the acts of these defendants.
THE PRESIDENT: Before the arguments on behalf of defense counsel the Tribunal will take a short recess.
THE MARSHAL: Persons in the court will be seated.
The Tribunal is again in session.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will now proceed to hear the arguments of defense counsel. Counsel for Karl Brandt may open the argument.
BY DR. SERVATIUS (Defense Counsel for defendant Karl Brandt):
Mr. President, Your Honors:
I cannot comment on all the questions which the prosecution brought up this morning. I must limit myself to a few things and can refer to my closing brief where I have believed to have gone into considerable detail on all these questions.
This morning I heard the detailed legal arguments advanced by the prosecutor. I have commented particularly on these legal questions in my closing brief, and. I want to make merely a brief comment now.
The prosecution assumes that Law No. 10 is an independent law. This is not correct, for it designates itself explicitly as a law for the execution of the London Charter and declares that Charter to be an integral part of the law.
Now, the sole purpose of the London Charter is to punish the disturbances of international legal relations and not what has happened or is happening somewhere within an individual state. Any other conception would be the end of the idea of sovereignty, and it would give a right of intervention into the affairs of another state.
In the trial before Tribunal III, Case No. 3 against Flick et al, General Taylor referred to an alleged right of intervention, quoting a considerable amount of literature in regard to this right of intervention into the internal affairs of another country.
I ventured to put in evidence the position taken by one of the four signatory Powers of the London Charter, a signatory power which was itself the victim of intervention in the name of civilization: the Soviet Union.
I have drawn the attention of the Tribunal to the position of the Soviet Union in my closing brief in the attachment to Part I.
The Soviet Union drew its clear conclusions from the intervention to which it had been exposed by the Entente at the end of the first World War, and obtained a clarification of the text of the London Charter, under which intervention would have been possible, by insisting that the text, which was ambiguous in consequence of the punctuation, be altered by the insertion of a comma. This comma was so important that the representatives of the four signatory Powers met on purpose to discuss it.
It results therefrom that the affairs in the interior of a country cannot be affected by the London Charter and, consequently, by Law No. 10. Punishment by this Tribunal of acts committed by Germans against Germans is therefore illegal.
The Prosecution further discussed this morning at length another question, that is the question of conspiracy. In respect to this I also have taken the position in my closing brief.
The point of view of the defense that a charge for conspiracy as an independent offense is inadmissible was confirmed by the Tribunal's decision of today. In that way the hole in the dike, so to speak, was stopped, and one cannot let the ocean pour into the land from the other side by declaring the conception of conspiracy admissible under common law. The conception of conspiracy is really only a technical expedient of the jurists. Its purpose is to effect beyond the number of accomplices in the true sense of the word other persons whom one considers to deserve punishment, but who cannot be convicted of complicity.
This may be done where the law against conspiracy is common law, but if this law is to be introduced in Germany after the event and applied to facts which have occurred in the past this would mean that by the detour of the law of procedure new conceptions of offense would be introduced into material law. This is equal to ex post facto law and is therefore an illegal attempt pursuant to the legal principles generally recognized.
The purpose of enlarging the circle of participants cannot be obtained under Law No. 10 by a dissolution of the conception of the conspiracy into its components, and the introduction of forms of complicity unknown till now in Germany.
Now, I shall read my statement proper. In the closing statement against the defendant Karl Brandt the Prosecution discussed very little the counter-evidence brought forward by the defense in the course of the proceedings. They relied to a large extent on evidence already advanced in the indictment.
The affidavits of the defendants themselves play a special role in support of the prosecution. For the defendant Karl Brandt they are important in respect of his position, and the resulting knowledge of the events referred to in the indictment.
As far as these affidavits contain charges they can be used, according to the Tribunal's statement, only against the affiants them-selves. In as far as they charge the defendant Karl Brandt, however, they have been clarified in, respect to the decisive issues. But in spite of this correction the first statements may reduce the credibility unless good reasons justify such correction.
Here the result of interrogations made in the initial proceedings is in contradiction to the evidence given before the Tribunal. On the basis of practical experience, German law considers only the result of an interrogation made by a judge valid evidence. The reason is the lack of impartiality to be found, quite naturally with an interrogating official who is to conduct the Prosecution. The capacity of the interrogator to elicit the truth impartially depends on his character, his training, and his professional experience.
The qualification of the interrogators has been attacked here by the Defense, but the Prosecution has made no effort to substantiate it.
To form a judgment it further is important to know on which general line the prosecution carries out its interrogations. Under German Law the Prosecutor is also to ascertain and put forward exculpating material when investigating a case personally or through assistants. For American Procedure, Justice Jackson clearly rejected this principle during the trial before the International Military Tribunal, and said he could never serve two masters.
This critical view of the affidavits is confirmed by their contents, which frequently show the struggle between the interrogator and the interrogated person. He is no classical witness who says, "I believe," "I presume", "as far as I remember," etc., for he shows thereby that he can give no positive information. And such testimony becomes completely worthless, if conclusions are drawn in the form of, "It would have been impossible for him," "he could have known," "perhaps he was the highest authority", etc.
Not only individual words thus demonstrated, that the testimony is composed of conclusions, but whole parts of the reports show the same character.
Considering all this the defendants' contentions are to be believed that they raised objections, but succumbed to the weight of the prepared record presented to them and signed, trusting that they should have an opportunity later to clarify deficiencies and state their true opinion.
This criticism of the defendants' affidavits is also required in respect of the affidavits given by the witnesses for the Prosecution in which facts are recorded which the witnesses do not know themselves, but of which they only heard and which they presume, after having been made to believe them by persuasion. The individual cases in which objections are to be raised in this line have been dealt with in the closing brief.
The charges advanced against the defendant Karl Brandt include the spheres of medical experiments on human beings and Euthanasia.
In both cases the defendant is charged with having committed crimes against humanity.
The press comments on the proceedings, anticipating the sentence by publishing articles about abject characters and wickedness. Pamphlets with strong headings appear.
On the other hand the Tribunal will make itself acquainted with the literature collected by the Defense as evidence. If one reads this literature one loses one's self-confidence and one cannot finish without confessing that here there are problems which before the defendants, persons not considered criminals have tried to resolve. These are problems of the community. The individual may make suggestions for their solution, but the decision is the task of the community and therefore of the State. It is the question, how great a sacrifice the State may demand in the interest of the community. This decision is up to the State alone.
How the State decides depends on its free discretion, and finds its limit only in the revolution of its citizens.