The immunity of the Chiefs of State and of their associates was hardly conceivable when they accepted the principle of the submission of wars to the restrictions and rules of common law, conventions and the rights of people.
of every rule, and under pressure of the universal conscience an evolution of international custom takes shape against it. I have already shown in concluding my statement in February last, I will not revert to that point. It should be enough to add that the Charter of 7 August 1945, considering thwe work of the different commissions of war crimes of 1940 at the capitulation, maintained the conclusions of a Frenchman M. de Lapradelle at the 1919 War Guilt Commission. It is because of their acts committed on behalf of the German State that the defendants are arragned before you - and if it is necessary that law should reinforce the authority of custom, the Statute of London, drawn up in accordance with the significance of the evolution of common law in course of formation, justifies still more our study of the defendants responsibility in regard to the crimes committed for such a State. Article 6 of the Charter concerns only with crimes committed for such a State. Defense Counsels put all their hopes on a narrow juridical or pseudojuridical reasoning.
Numerous questions were debated. Are there just and unjust wars, defensive wars and wars of aggression, is there, yes or no, a worldwide juridical conscience, are there unequivocal criterions of aggression? This is what makes the defense anxious, not knowing to what extent it is expedient to punish those who have collaborated in the machinery of extermination.
When the Defense Counsels speak of "law in force" it is to deny to this Tribunal the right to condemn, and Dr. Jahrreiss denied all authority to the law"such as it should be conceived" inthe light of morality and progress (page 3). All forget that the law in force is not only the law of the past, the only one which they invoke, but that the law in force is also the one that the judges invoke in a concrete manner from the Bench.
All forget that jurisprudence evolves with the times. There where there is no written law, one can only speak of the preceding tendencies and find out if they are still valid and can be invoked.
In any case, the charter must be applied.
But let is now follow this any further. We would ourselves confuse the issue. the one of the methodical, systematic extermination of all the men who occupied the space coveted by Germany. to the end. One is tempted to say secondarily and accessarily, so much is one overwhelmed to such an extent by the atrocity of the final crime. the danger that such a precedne is created for humanity and therefore demand adequate punishment.
These men's crimesis not a simple one, we have already shown that. The common criminal knows his victim, he sees it. He strikes him himself and knows the effect of his blow. Even if he is only an accomplice he is never, morally and psychologically, sufficiently far removed from the chief perpetrator not to share to a certain extent his apprehension end reactions when the blow is delivered and the victim falls. anonymous. Nobody bears the chief responsibility. Everybody stares it, those who, by their present maintain and support the administration, those who conceived it, those who willed it, as well as he who issues the order. As for the executioner, he repeats to himself: "Befehl ist Befehl", "An order is an Order" and he carries out his killers task.
Those who decide do it without shuddering. They have perhaps, not an accurate, concrete idea of the consequences of their orders. Thus the amazement of some of the accused in the few minutes after the showing of the film about the camps must be understood. As for those who promote the execution of the crime by their general cooperation in the work of Party and State, these have the feeling of being passive witnesses of a scene in which they are no concerned. Indeed, there is no there is no punishment to be feared.
In the German scheme the State and the Party are strong, and determined to remain so for a thousand years.
They have destroyed Justice. munity or at least is believed to ensure it. Moreoever, there exists no permanent international jurisdiction that can stand up against gangster States. As for the possibility of a military failure, nobody stops to consider it in view of the seemingly thorough precuations taken. It is in fact remarkable that the culmination of the massacres coincided with due consideration for the delay necessary for the operation of the gas chambers, with the period in which the State and regime believe in the certitude of victory, or have not yet taken the omens of defeat seriously. It is really the perfect anonymous crime as imagined by the French moralist when he propounded the case of the mandarin as a test of moral conscience. And conditions were all in favor of absence of reaction. The facts have demonstrated that none of these men felt a decisive recoil in those conditions. They have, I think, been more intent on relieving their conscience than on attempting to deceive their judges by casting their guilt on their neighbors. Few of them have had the courage to acknowledge, as did Schirach and Frank, that they were components and part of the whole system, and as such could not evade their responsibility.
At the rist of letting the guilt fall upon the German people which proved incapable of rejecting their evil master, the others excused themselves. They attempt, in the exposition of their case, to minimize responsibilities in the hope of conjuring them away, but since it is true, as was stated by Severing and previously by the Mayor of Oranienberg, and the Mayor of Buchenwald and was confirmed by Frank, that it was whispered all over Germany that people died in camps as everybody now knows, do they hope to make us believe that they alone were in ignorance thereof?
The less guilty among them, if one can establish a hierarchy among "major criminals", did not dare to object, but their criminal cowardice had such appalling consequences that there cannot possibly be any extenuation of penalty. one, and where there is no popular control through lack of freedom of thought, freedom of expression and lack of free elections, State-committed crime is of all crimes the easiest to commit subjectively speaking. Moreover, the technical progress made the world over has put almost every natural force at man's service His capacity for evil has been considerably increased thereby. gratification which is also the corrupt fruit of material progress unbridled by intellect. highly improved methods of repression. In the international scheme the process is similar. It is only on a larger scale, because so far there have been no means of repression on an international scale. Industrial revolution and the development of natural sciences have multiplied the virtual power of States. If the State concentrates in its hands natural wealth in its exploitation, if it accentuates its grip upon credit by monetary manipulations, increase of taxation multiplication of free or forced loans; and still further bind the populations to its fate by the development of public charity: control thought by radio propaganda; use to this end eloquent propagandists capable of stirring blind mob passions within the most scattered and the most peaceful of men; if this State at the same time annihilates in its opponents every mode of expression, prevents all popular control, all, including private, criticism it becomes a despotic ruler holding in his hands tremendous means of action for better or worse. Every criminal technicality is within its reach and it can make use of them without restraint, unless, Gentlemen, you insert the element of sanctions in International Law. It must henceforth be possible to put an end to the criminal activity of a gangster State through the power of a super - State organization directed by a legal institution of the same kind, otherwise the freedom of nations is doomed. The weapons of revolt fell from their hands the day when States and States alone could possess methods of destruction against which the courage of citizens remains helpless.
Operated by a small number of men devoted to the criminal regime, these arms which are the property of the States can drown in blood the slightest attempts at resistance, and if revolt against tyranny remains the most sacred of duties, such revolt is now hopeless. This is the danger, and Germany succumbed to it. It is true that favourable conditions were present there all at the same time. Under the impulse of the industrial revolution which ever since 1850 was more violent in this country than in any other, a sweeping change in social standards has taken place, the population meanwhile changing from rural and agricultural to urban and industrial. From this, there resulted in a lowering of the spiritual level with disastrous consequences, since the bourgeoisie had received no political education under the Empire. Deliberately kept away from public affairs by their past rulers, the German masses, where the industrialist upper class and proletariat are concerned, were interested only in the economic development of the Reich, and where the middle class is concerned, only in the Army and in the future of the Reich. When, after the first war, the Germans were forced to suffer the disillusionments of defeat; when, in a common and embittered environment all the rancour and resentment as described by defendant Goering at the beginning of his testimony was added thereto as well as the bitter feeling of material and social downfall; when in particular youth strove to materialize its hopes into a concrete reality, Pangermanism then awoke, was spread, popularised and came within the reach of all the dissatisfied. At the same time, the old antithesis between vitalism and intellectualism, between culture and civilization, healthy eagerness and decadent lassitude, the cult of life and the cult of intellect has been awoken and crystallized for the use of simple and puerile brains in the form of the dynamic antithesis between the Nordic Aryan and the Semitic Jew. Appropriate education has easily imposed this biologic materialism. The gound had long been ready. The German is particularly attracted to inculcated doctrine because it alone can make up for the lack of personal, independent discipline which is characteristic of him on the intellectual and moral plane. He loves anything that can be recited as a creed simultaneously admitted by everybody, and as a stereotypes phrase easy to make use of on all occasions. Young Germans therefore learned for their Abitur examination the six races allowed by Guenther in the same way as they learned Grammar, and did not dream of doubting the former any more than they doubted the latter.
And when the German mind reproached nations as lively, as attached to their soil, to their tradition, to their supple and varied human culture, such as England and France, contenting themselves with a miserable and artificial intellectualism, while it reproached them with the crime against life (and Dr. Stahmer was the echo thereof) - the German mind created for itself, as a result of the coarse and facile instructions it claimed to inflict upon all, an intellectualism different to ours in its danger and artificiality. The aim of these so-called ethics of Life was a practice and a doctrine of pure collecti social pseudo-scientific, biological - materialistic opportunism. This aim was the sterilizations, the physiological experiences in the camps, and 15,000,000 persons dead. The reflection of the old French thinker flashes irresistibly through our minds at this result: "Science without conscience is but ruin of the soul" - Neo-Machiavellism, of which Goering gave an example in his statement took root ..... exist, and that the search for the boundaries between right and wrong is determined by historical and national standards (Dr. Nelte). Hitler had already said: "That which is right is that which is profitable to the nation" and Frank paraphrased thus the testimony of his Defense Counsel, "What is profitable for the people is right. The common interest has priority over the individual interest". While reading this, I think of the answer which would have been given by the absolutist Bossuet, who knew how to determine the human measure. (The Defense Counsel compared French absolutism with Nazism: Here is the answer " Politics sacrifice the individual to the common weal, and this is right to a certain degree.
It is good that one man die for the people.
revenge against those who shed it."
We are aware of what could be the result of the Nazi precepts. The witness Roser related the words of this young German soldier, who, after having described the mass murders in a ghetto, concluded: "Ah, my dear Friend, it was horrible, but .... an order is an order". The Tribunal will find at the end of document F-655 which is in one of the Document Books submitted by the French Delegation, Kramer's terrible reflection. Before being Commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Kramer commanded the Natzwiller camp in Alsace, where he himself asphyxiated eighty persons by gas, the proof of which has been given. To the question: What would you have done if all of them had no been dead?", he answered: "I should have tried again to asphyxiate them by injecting a second dose of gas into the room. I felt no emotion at all while accomplishing these acts, for I had received the order to execute the eighty internees in the way I explained you. After all I have been trained in that way What a terrible charge against the system! Before being assasin by order, this man had been a book-keeper at Augsburg. How many peaceful accountants trained in that way are left in the Fermany of to-day? and now "the innocent blood cries for vengeance."
You know the crime: You know why and by what means it was perpetrated! The heinous crime without precedent is that of the National Socialist "StateParty", but the defendants in their capacity of chiefs of the National Socialist Party and the great State officials, have all accepted major responsibilities in the conception and perpetration of this crime. Their participation in the crime of the "State-Party" is their personal error which is covered by no immunity whatsoever! and the proof of it has been given for all time.
They must be punished; you are also aware of the dangers to which the world is exposed by their crime, the miseries, the misfortunes it spread among mankind.
You must hit hard, without pity! Let your verdict be just, that is sufficient! To be sure, there are shades in their guilt. Does it follow that the penalties themselves must be caried, if even the least guilty as we think deserves the death-penalty? To-morrow, whence this international trial will be closed and these principal war criminals sentenced, we shall go back to our own countries where, before our own Tribunals we shall perhaps have to prosecute those who merely executed the orders of the National Socialist State, those who were only executioners. another Hoess, for the camp commandants who have on their conscience millions of human creatures by order, if today we hesitate to claim the supreme penalty against these who were the instruments of the criminal State, the State which issued the orders.
Moreover the fate of these men lies entirely with your conscience! This is beyond our competence, our task is finished. Now, it is for you in the silence of your deliberations to listen to the innocent blood crying for justice.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn.
(A recess was taken until 1400 hours.)
( The hearing reconvened at 1400 hours, July 29 1946)
THE PRESIDENT: I call on the chief prosecutor for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
GENERAL RUDENKO: My Lord, your Honors : German war criminals. During nine months, all the aspects of the case and all the evidence, presented to the Tribunal by the Prosecution and by the Defense, have been subjected to the most meticulous and detailed examination. accused, has been left without verification, not a single significant circumstances has been overlooked during the investigation of the present case.
For the first time in the history of manking. criminals against humanity are being held responsible for their crimes before an International Criminal Tribunal; for the first time, nations are trying these who had inundated vast expanses of the earth with blood, who had annihilated millions of innocent people, destroyed cultural treasures, who had made a system of massacres tortures, extermination of aged people, women and children, who had made a wild claim to the mastery of the world and hurled it into an abyss of unheardof calamities. A Tribunal sits in judgment, a Tribunal created by the peace-loving and freedom-loving countries, who represent the will of and who defend the interests of the whole progress-loving mankind, for mankind does not wish the recurrence of calamities, which will not permit a gang of criminals to carry out with impunity their preparations for the enslavement of nations and the extermination of peoples, prior to putting their heinous plans, into effect.
Mankind calls the criminals to account; and on the behalf of mankind we, the prosecutors, accuse at this trial. judge the enemies of mankind, how vain the attempts to deprive nations of the right to punish those who made the enslavement and the extermination of peoples -their aim, and who for many years strove to realize this criminal aim by criminal methods.
who are accused of the most heinous crimes, are given all the possibilities for a defense, all the necessary legal guarantees. In their own country, the defendants who stood at the head of the Government, destroyed all legal forms of justice, and discarded all the principles of legs proceedings accepted by civilized mankind. dance with all legal guarantees and they are assured of all their defense rights. drawing conclusions from the evidence examined before the Court; we are considering all the data upon which the accusation is based.
We ask : were the charges put against the defendants proved before the Court; has their guilt been established ?
To this question, there is only one answer : the legal proceedings fully established and proved to the Court beyond all doubt, whilst all the menstrous crimes have indeed been proved, crimes which were prepared over a period of many years by a band of wild criminals, who seized power in Germany, and who perpetrated these crimes during many years, having no regard for the principles of law or the most elementary standards of human morality.
These crimes have been proved; the defendants' testimonies and the arguments of the defense have been powerless to contend the charges; they is the lasting result of this trial, the unfailing issue of our long and stubborn efforts. that there existed a common plan or conspirancy for the preparation of aggressive wars, in violation of international law, the planned enslavement and the extermination of peoples, in which the defendants took part.
just as there is no doubt about the leading part played in it by the defendants. during the legal proceeding, by irrefutable documents, by the testimonies of witnesses and of the defendants themselves. and the initiation of aggressive wars. All their so-called "ideological work consisted in the cultivation of beastly instincts, in the intillation of the absurd idea of racial superiority in the conscience of the German people and in the practical realization of the plans for extermination and enslavement the peoples of "inferior"races, who were supposed to serve as a fertiliser for the growth of the "master race". Their "ideological work" consisted in calling to murder, to plunderm to the destruction of culture, and the extermination of human beings. them, attacking other countries, seizing foreign territories, exterminating people. When was this plan or conspiracy conceived? Of course, it is hardly possible to give an exact date, day and hour, on which the defendants conspired to commit their crimes. guesses and suppositions, but it must be considered as established beyond doubt that from the moment when the fascists seized power in Germany they started the realization of their aims and utilized this power for the preparation of aggressive war. Indeed, immediately, after their seizure of pow the fascists began to carry out a huge program of rearmament and reconversion of economy for war purposes. of Germany for war. This rearmament and reconversion of economy for war purposes is an irrefutable fact; it has been proved by documents and admitted by the defendants themselves.
immediately after the seizure of power ? Could this be a defensive war ? But nobody intended attacking Germany; nobody had such an idea, and in my opinion such an idea could not have even existed. As Geramny was not preparing for a defensive war and in as much as the very fact that she did prepare for war is established it is evident that she was preparing for a war of aggression. That is the logic of the facts and such are the facts themselves. Germany initiated and waged the war which she had been preparing, and the events of 1937-1939 were that for what she had been preparing in 1933.
Hence we may conclude : the plan or the conspiracy existed at least since 1933, i.e., from the moment when the Fascists seized the power and used it for their own criminal purposes. themselves uttered at a time when they did not suppose that they ever would be defendants in this dock. which they describe how the Fascist Government was preparing for war and how all the fields of political and economic life were subordinated to this one purpose. that in 1933 when the Hitlerites seized the Power in Germany they created a plan or conspiracy including the perpetration of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. ted by the defendants which consists in planning, preparing, initiating and waging aggressive wars, in violation of international treaties, agreements and assurances.
The facts here speak for themselves; wars which involved innumerable victims and destructions; wars, the aggressive nature of which has been undoubtedly established. has been fully proved.
The charge of perpetrating war crimes, in waging war by methods contrary to the laws and customs of war, have been fully proved. Neither the defendants themselves, nor their counsel, could contest the very facts of their having committed these crimes. not committed these atrocities the extermination of people, "murder vans" and concentration camps; they had not destroyed the Jews with their own hands, and had not even known about such particular facts. But that such facts existed the defendants themselves do not deny. The defendants admit these facts. This is indeed fruitless method of defense ! Certainly, the defendants occupying high leading posts in Hitler's Germany wer in no need of shooting, hanging, smothering, freezing live people themselves, by way of experiment. Their subordinates did that according to their insturctions; henchmen did, so to say, the dirty work whilst the defendants only had to give orders which were unwaveringly obeyed. Therefore, the attempts of the defendants to deny their connection with the henchmen, to separate themselves from them, were hopeless. This connection is evident and indisputable. If the Commandant of Auschwitz Rudolph Hoess, pulled out the golden teeth of the dead, we may say that the Reichsminister, Walter Funk, opened special safes in the cellars of the Reichsbank to keep these golden teeth in. If the subordinates of Kaltenbrunner exterminated people in "murder vans", the vans themselves were built at the works of Sauer, Daimler and Wenz, which were subordinated to the defendant Speer. If the prisoners of war were destroyed by professional henchmen of the unit "Toten Kopf" (Death Head Unit) and by the guards of the camp, the orders to exterminate were signed by Fieldmarshal of the German army, Keitel. That is to say, the defendants appointed the terms of extermination, the date and issued the orders to create a special technique of murder, explained the reasons for the right of the master races to exterminate "inferior races."
For every murder, for every drop of innocent blood shed by Hitler's henchmen the defendants are responsible, for between them and the direct perpetraters of the crimes, murderm torture, there is a difference only in rank and scope of action; these were direct henchmen, and these are the principal henchmen the chiefs of the henchmen, henchmen of a higher grade. They are far more dangerous than those trained in the spirit of hatred towards humanity and wild fanaticism, whom they now repudiate in order to save themselves. The criminality of the defendants in the perpetration of war crimes, has been fully proved; that they initiated a system of exterminating war prisoners peaceful inhabitants, women, old men and children; it is their fault, that wherever the German soldier stepped, there lay heaps of murdered and tortured people, ruins and places left barren by fire, land desecrated and soaked with blood.
The crimes committed against humanity have been completely proved.
29 July A LJG 13-1 We cannot omit the crimes committed by the defendants in Germany during their domination: the extermination of all those who expressed their discontent in any way with the Nazi regime; slave labor and extermination of people in concentration camps, mass extermination of Jews, and the same slave labor and extermination of people in the occupied territories. All this has been proved and the charges are irregutable. What means of defense have the counsels used? What kind of proofs and arguments could they give to refute the charges? main groups. First, a number of witnesses summoned by the defense counsel. These witnesses had to extenuate the guilt of the defendants with their evidence, to diminish the part taken by then in committing the crimes, rehabilitating them by all means. in other trials. the evidence given by the witnesses of the defense, if the innocence of the defendant Funk should be confirmed by his deputy and accomplice, a member of SS since 1931, Heller, bearing the rank of Gruppenfuehrer SS; if the criminal Rainer, member of the Fascist Party since 1930, and Gauleiter of Salzburg, and then of Kaernten was summoned to give evidence on behalf of Seyss-Inquart? the right hand of the defendant Frank and accomplice to all his crimes, or Bohle, one of the principal leaders of the spying activities of the Hitlerites abroad and chief of the foreign section of the fascist party, came here in order to commit a perjury to try to protect their former "bosses" and to save their own lives.
Nevertheless most of the "witnesses" for the defense during the cross-examination, became witnesses for the Prosecution.
They were themselves convicted by the "mute witnesses" - documents 29 July A LJG 13-2 mostly German; they themselves were forced to expose those whom they had intended to protect.
and considerations. quantity of irrefutable facts and strongly established on the principles of law and justice. Therefore, already in the opening speeches for the Prosecution, so much attention had been paid to the legal aspect of the responsibility of the defendants. were again raised:
a) Of the importance of the principle "Nulla crimen sine lege"
b) Of the importance of the order
c) Of the responsibility of the State and individuals
d) Of the concept of conspiracy. to some legal questions in order to answer to the attempts of the defense to confuse the simple and clear statements and to transform legal argument into a kind of smoke-screen in an effort to conceal from the Tribunal the gruesome reality of the fascist crimes. that at the time when the defendants were perpetrating the offenses incriminating them, the latter had not been foreseen by the existing laws to be crimes, and therefore the defendants bear no criminal responsibility for them.
I could simply refer to the principle "Nulla Crimen Sine Lege", as the Charter of International Military Tribunal, which is an immutable law, and which provides that this Tribunal "shall have the power to try and punish persons, who, acting in the interest of European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organization" committed any of the crimes enumerated in Article 6 of the Charter.
Therefore from the legal point of view, sentence can be 29 July A LJG 13-3 pronounced and carried out without requiring the deeds incriminating to the defendants to have been fore seen by the criminal law at the time of their perpetration.
Nevertheless, it is without doubt that the deeds of the defendants at the time when they were being committed were criminal acts from the point of view of the existing, criminal law. international Military Tribunal are the expression of the principles contained in a number of international agreements enumerated in my opening statement of 8 February 1946 and in the criminal law of all civilized countries. bility for murder, torture, violence, plunder, and so on. The fact that those crimes have been initiated by the defendants on a scale surpassing human imagination and bearing the marks of unheard of sadistic cruelty, does not of course exclude, but on the contrary, increases many times the responsibility of the defendants. and in respect of the citizens of any country, according to the Declaration of the Heads of the Governments of USSR, Great Britain and United States of America, published on 2 November 1943, and - in full agreement with the universally accepted principles of criminal law, they would have been tried in that country and according to its laws.
This Declaration set forth that "the German officers, soldiers and members of the Nazi Party who were responsible for the above-mentioned cruelties, murders and executions, or who voluntarily took part in those, would be deported to the countries where those gruesome crimes had been committed, in order to be tried and punished according to the law of those liberated countries and free governments which would be established there."
Nevertheless, the defendants are war criminals "whose 29 July A LJG 13-4 offenses have no particular geographical location" (Article 1 of the Agreement of the four Powers of the 8 August 1945), and, therefore, the International Military Tribunal, acting in accordance with the Charter, is competent to try their crimes.
The Counsel for the defendant Hess took the liberty to assert that there can be no doubt that the crimes against peace, as they are stated in article 6, Paragraph 2, of the Charter, do not exist. national agreements. ago recognized as criminal.
B. Execution of an Order Tribunal attempted to present themselves as poor dwarfs, blind and obedient executors of another's will - the will of Hitler. Defense Counsel Jahrreiss spoke at length about Hitler's order. In the opinion of Counsel Jahrreiss Hitler's order was quite different from the order of any other leader; Hitler's order was an act "legally immutable". Therefore, Counsel Jahrreiss asserts that; "Whatever the Charter understands by the orders which it rejects, as a factor excluding criminal responsibility, is it possible to take the same attitude towards an order of Hitler? Could this order be considered as an order in the meaning of the Charter?" lawyers, including the Defense Counsels, nevertheless, it is uncomprehensible what logical or other methods were guiding his assertion that the provisions of the Charter specially elaborated for the trial of major war criminals of the fascist Germany, did not indeed aim at the very conditions of the activity of these criminals.
What orders then, issued by whom and in what country, are 29 July A LJG 13-5 contemplated by the Charter of the Tribunal?
the Charter were fully aware of the specific conditions existing in Hitlerite Germany, were thoroughly familiar, by means of the material of the Kharkov and other trials, with the attempts of the defendants to hide themselves behind Hitler's orders, and it is for this very reason that they made a special provision to the effect that the execution of an obviously criminal order does not free from criminal responsibility. large group of ministers, Gauleiters and war commanders behind. Hitler's back, became to a certain extent, doubtful of the convincing power of such a defensive manoeuvre, and a new line of defense was set up to assist this manoeuvre.
"If the German Reich began an attack in spite of the stillexistent non-aggression pact" - said the counsel Jahrreis, "then Germany committed an international offense and must answer for it according to the principles of international law ... the Reich alone, but not an individual person." above point of view is not exactly now: even before the beginning of the official defense at this trial, certain unofficial defenders of war criminals willingly propagated the version to the effect that it was the German government and the German nation, who were be bear responsibility for the criminal aggression and war crimes and not individual persons.
When the subject of international law, i.e. a state, violates the principles of international law, this entails certain consequences of an international character, but in no case does it entail the criminal responsibility of the state. tions is committed by physical persons, by officials and by the agents of that state. In carrying out such acts, these individuals may be guilty of the most varied offenses in violation of either the common or the criminal law. In the latter case, i.e. when their individual criminal responsibility is involved, they bear this responsibility in appropriate cases, in conformity with the laws and before the courts of their own country, as well as - if such is the case - in conformity with the laws and before the courts of a foreign state. of international law, resulting in measures taken against the states, but also some individuals, in committing these acts, have personally committed criminal offenses, for which they bear the criminal responsibility in accordance with the Charter before the International Military Tribunal. versions, to dispute the charges of criminal conspiracy made against the defendants. Extracting from various sources one-sided and selected definitions of the conspiracy, the counsels have tried to prove that Goering, Hess, bibbentrop and others cannot be considered as accomplices of the conspiracy. of the statemens of the defense. acting to achieve common criminal purposes. Such a society doubtlessly existed. I stands to reason that in this case the threads and lovers uniting the members of this conspiratory criminal society are very complicated, as the conspirators had seized the government of a country.