A military area, even far behind the front, is not a desert where one can wander to and fro unchallenged. It is a veritable maze of roar headquarters, trucking companies, ammunition dumps, supply depots, signal installations, hospitals, gasoline dumps, railway guards, prisoner-of-war stockades, anti-aircraft batteries, airfields, engineer, ordnance units, motor pools--a thousand and one other tropps that furnish the base of operations and the line of communications for an army in the field. The smooth functioning of this vast and complicated train is vital to the success of the combat troops. The enemy knows this, and is eager both to disrupt it and to extract intelligence from it through sabotage groups, agents, and partisans. Wherefore the occupying forces guard their installations, patrol the roads and railways, and garrison the centers of population. Travellers, no matter what uniform they wear, are stopped and questioned and asked for identification. These troops in the rear come in close contact with the civilian population, and know what is going on among them. Military police and counter-intelligence troops police the area and report on its condition to higher headquarters. under special orders from home at large in his area. This is particularly true when, as here, the units came as servants of Himmler, whom the German generals say they thought to be their enemy, intent on usurping their powers and functions. The idea that Himmler's extermination squards flitted through Russia, murdering Jews and communists on a large scale, but secretly and unbeknownst to the army, is utterly prposterous-- the desperate sparring of men who have no recourse but to say what is not true.
Let us look again at the pattern as a whole. Most of it was written down in plain German before the attack on Russia was launched. Terrorize the populace, let acts of violence and brutality on the part of German troops go unpunished, kill the commissars, kill 100 communists whenever you can find an excuse, make way for and food and house Himmler's squads performing "tasks which result from the struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems." And the political system for which the commanders-in-chief were fighting had already been exterminating communists and Jews and boosting about it for years.
The German generals were bright enough to understand this pattern. In any event, it had been explained to them The OKW directive suspending the courts martial ended with a directive to the military leaders to inform their legal advisors about the "verbal information in which the political intentions of the High Command were explained to the Commanders-in-Chief." The defendant Rosenberg, at the time of or before the invasion, advised Keitel, Jodl, Warlimont, Brauchitsch, and Raeder about his "political and historical conception of the eastern problem." According to Brauchitsch, Hitler and had explained the "ideological" nature of the war to all the commanders-in-chief in conference at the time the commissar order was issued. The affidavits of Generals Roettiger, Rode, and Heusinger further confirm the obvious conclusion that the whole pattern of "pacification" was well understood throughout the German military leadership. will behave in a brutal way in circumstances where they have no explicit orders, I have not, for instance, instance, se*---* a written order that Soviet prisoners who could not march should be shot. I am prepared to believe that some German generals treated prisoners as well as they could, but I also find convincing the complaint of the young German lieutenant that efforts to pacify and exploit the Ukraine were being frustrated because:
"prisoners were shot when they could not march any more, right in the enemy propaganda."
and with enormous loss of life among innocent civilians. As the divisions of the German army were transferred between the eastern and western fronts, the practices on each front spread to the other. Slaughter at Kherson and Kovno was reflected in massacre at Malmedy and Oradour. The German army had been demoralized by its leaders. I recall to the Tribunal that a high German military judge, as early as 1939, granted "extenuating circumstances" to an SS officer who, without any reason, shot 50 Jews in a Polish synagogue because:
"as an SS man, particularly sensitive to the sight of Jews, and to the hostile attitude of Jewry to the Germans, he therefore acted quite thoughtlessly in a youthful spirit of adventure."
One must remember the observation before this Tribunal of SS ObergruppenFuehrer Bach-Zelewsky, who pointed out that:
"when for years, for decades, the doctrines are preached that the Slavic is inevitable."
order. A mass of affidavits have been submitted by individual commanders-inchief and subordinate officers in which they express their abhorrence of these orders and profess that they did not execute them. Again we hear of tacit understandings, even in the fact of evidence as to the slaughter which the orders caused. It makes one gasp that such a defense can be put forward at all, apparently without shame. in the indictment. Keitel, Jodl, Brauchitsch, Goering, and their colleagues at the center of affairs circulated these malignant orders, the criminality *---* which a child could see.
Kleist, Kluge, Rundstedt, Reichenau, S**ebert, Manstein and the other field commanders - in-chief distributed them to their subordinate officers. No secret agreements could forestall the terrible result which followed inevitably. have refused to distribute these orders ? Is soldiers they were bound to obey their supreme commander, but their own law an code says that it is the duty of every soldier to refuse to obey order; which he knows to be criminal. This is hard for the ordinary sold acting under pistol-point orders from his lieutenant. It is far less difficult for the commander-in-chief, He is expected to be mature, educated, accustomed to responsibility end disciplined to be steady and unfliching when put to a test. Under their own law and under the traditions they are so shameless as still to vaunt, the leaders were in duty bound to reject these orders. Their failure caused suffering and death to hundreds of thousands; their failure resulted directly in countless murders and other brutal crimes; and they, far more than the soldiers whom these orders led into crime, are the real criminals.
Hitler needed the commanders-in-chief; he needed them desperately and would have been helpless without them. They could have held securely and firmly to the standards which every soldier and, indeed every man, is expected to meet. And it was not, in most cases, fear of Hitler that caused then to betray these standards. They were ready enough to desagree with Hitler on other matters which they regarded as more important. They did not want to risk a breach with Hitler over what they callously regarded as a minor matter. They were intent on "larger " things--the conquest of Europe -- on which they and Hitler were in agreement. willing to go much farther and to stand sponsor for Nazi ideology, Reichenau and Manstein lent their names and prestige shamelessly in order to advance these vile doctrines. We cannot capture all the orders; we cannot tell how many German commanders-in-chief there are who, like Manstein, unctuously protesting their desapproval of Nazi doc-trine, could he confronted with their Own nauseating manifestos.
ders-in-chief disliked the pattern of orders and doc/trines which the evedence here has unfolded. He who touches filth is not excused because he holds his nose. For reasons which appeared to them sufficient, the German military leaders helped to weave this pattern. It is just this calculated indefference to crime which makes their conduct so unspeakable. Those individual commandersin-chief, if any, who can show clean hands may come forth and clear themselves. But the military leaders as a group, I submit, are proved beyond doubt to have participated directly, effectively, and knowingly in numerous and wide-spread war crimes and crimes against humanity. of major war ciriminals, Keitel and Raeder and the other military defendants are on trial not only as individuals but as representatives of the German military leadership. The military defendant committed their crimes as military leaders and hand-in-hand with others. It is in their representative capacity that the military leaders in the dock are truly important. that their attempts at defense must be desperately and inconsiste ly contrived. When called to account as a group fort their crime the famous German General Staff disintegrates, like a child's puzzle thrown on the floor, into 130 separate pieces. We are told that here is nothing there. Called upon to state their views on Hitler, aggressive war, or other unpleasant subject, the pieces reassemble themselves into pattern instantly and magically. With true German discipline, the same words come from every mouth. When the question is the participation of the Wehrmacht in killi Jews, they indignantly deny that their soldiers would do such things. When the question is the enforcement of law and discipli within the Wehrmacht, we are met by affidavits saying that German soldiers who killed Jews were court martialed and shot.
Charged with responsibility as a group, they plead immunity on the ground that they could not resign and that their statuts was therefore involuntary. Seeking to establish that they desapproved the policie of Hitler, they boast that many of their number who expressed their opposition were allowed or requested to resign. The inconsistency to their appeal to the soldier's oath of obedience is particularly shameless. Charged with launching aggressive wars against neighboring countries, they plead the oath in their defense. Accused of crimes committed during the war, they take credit to themselves for refusing to obey criminal orders. And so it is represented that the soldier who in time of peace was completely bound by his oath give unquestioning obedience, regardless of consequences, to a perjured head of state, could nevertheless, when his country was at war and obedience supposidly far more necessary, dabble in secret disobedience and thereby shift the blame and responsibility for the murder of cammandos and kommissars onto other shoulders. we have just examined. They are a group in more ways than one. They are more than a group; they are a class, almost a caste. They are a course of thought and a way of life. They have distinctive qualities of mind, which have been noted and commented on by the rest of the world for many decades, and which have thir roots in centuries. They have been a histrical force, and are still to be reckoned with. They are proud of it. deny all this. But in their very denial, the truth is apparent. Ther group spirit and unity of outlook and purpose is so deep that it drops from their lips willy-nilly. Read their testimony; always they refer to themselves as " we " or " we old soldiers", and they are forever stating " our " attitude on this or that subject. Rundstedt's testimony is full of such expressions of the attitude of the German military leaders as a group on a great variety of questions.
Manstein told us that " we soldiers mistrusted all parties "; " we all considered ourselves the trustees of the unity of Germany "; and " The National Socialist aim of unification was according to our attitude, but not the National Socialist methods. " What are the characteristics of the German military leaders ? They have been familiar to students of his try for a long time; books have been written by them and about them.
They are manifest in the documents and testimony before the Tribunal.
They are careful observers of Germany's internal politics, but their tradition and policy is not to indentify themselves with parties or internal political movements. This is the only true note in the refrain, sung so often at this trial, that " we were soldiers and not politicians. " They regard themselves as above politics and politicians. They are concerned only with what they consider to be the deeper, unchanging interests of Germany as a nation. As Manstein put it :
" We soldiers mistrusted all parties because every party of Germany.
We all considered ourselves the rustees of the unity of Germany in this respect ..." politics and diplomacy.
Any intelligent professional officer must be. Training is conducted, equipment is built, and plans are evolved in the light of what is known about the military potential and intentions of other countries. No officiers in the world were more aware of this than the Germans; none studied the international scene as closely or with such cold calculation. It was their mentor, Clausewitz, who described war as an instrument of politics.
fluctuations, and a government which will mobilize German resources behind the Wehrmacht and inculcate in the German public the spirit and purposes of militarism. This is what Rundstedt meant when he said that: "The National Socialist ideas which were good were usually ideas which were carried ever from old Prussian times and we had known already without the National Socialists." That is what Manstein meant by the "unity" of Germany.
The German military leaders believe in war. They regard it as part of a normal, well-rounded life. Manstein told us from the witness box that they "naturally considered the glory of war as something great". The "considered opinion" of OKW in 1938 recited that:
"Despite all attempts to outlaw it, war is still a law of nature which may be challenged but not eliminated.
It serves the survival of the "This high moral purpose gives war its total character and its ethical justification."
permanent. They have been bad for the world, and bad for Germany too. Their philosophy is so perverse that they regard a lost war, and a defeated and prostate Germany, as a glorious opportunity to start again on the same terrible cycle. Their attitude of mind is nowhere better set forth than in a speech delivered by General Beck before the German war Academy in 1935. The audience of young officers was told that "the hour of death of our old magnificent army" in 1919 "led to the new life of the young Reichswehr", and that the German army returned from the first world war "crowned with the laurels of immortality". Later on they were told that if the military leaders have displayed intelligence and courage, then losing a war "is ennobled by the pride of a glorious fall". In conclusion, they are reminded that Germany is a "military-minded nation" and are exhorted to remember "the duty which they owe to the man who re-created and made strong again the German Wehrmacht".
In 1935, that man was Hitler. In previous years it was other men. The German militarist will join forces with any man or government that offers fair prospect of effective support for military exploits. Men who believe in war as a way of life learn nothing from the experience of losing one.
is an unfamiliar one, but because it is so familiar that it may be in danger of being overlooked. We must not become preoccupied with the niceties of a chart or details of military organization at the expense of far more important things which are matters of common knowledge. The whole world has long known about and suffered at the hands of the German military leadership. Its qualities and conduct are open and notorious. Is the world now to be told that there is no such group? Is it to hear that the German war-Lords cannot be judged because they were a bunch of conscripts? We have had to deal seriously with such arguments only because there are no others. less important. We are at grips here with something big and evil and durable; something that was not born in 1933 or oven 1921; something much older than anyone here something far more important than any individual in the dock; something that is not yet dead and that cannot be killed by a rifle or a hangman's noose. mountains of corpses, human-skin lampshades, shrunken skulls, freezing experiments, and bank vaults filled with gold teeth. It is vital to the conscience of the world that all the participants in these enormities shall be brought to justice. But these exhibits, gruesome as they are, do not Lie at the heart of this case. Little will be accomplished by shaking the poisoned fruit from the tree. It is much harder to dig the tree up by the roots, but only this will, in the long run, do much good.
The tree which bore this fruit is German militarism. Militarism was as much the core of the Nazi party as of the Wehrmacht itself, Militarism is not the profession of arms. Militarism is embodied in the "military-minded nation" whose leaders preach and practice conquest by force of arms, and relish war as something desirable in itself. Militarism inevitably Leads to cynical and wicked disregard of the rights of others and of the very elements of civilization. Militarism destroys the moral character of the nation that practices it and, because it can be overthrown only by its own weapons, undermines the character of nations that are forced to combat it.
group of professional military leaders who have become known to the world as the "German General Staff". That is why the exposure and discrediting of this group through the declaration of criminality is far more important than the fate of the uniformed individuals in the box, or of other members of this group as individuals. Keitel and Reader and Rundstedt and Kesselring and Manstein have shot their bolt. They will not lead the legions of the Wehrmacht again. but the future influence of the German General Staff within Germany, and, consequently, on the lives of people in all countries. That is why it was declared at Yalta:
"It is our inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and the peace of the world.
We are determined to disarm and disband all.
German armed forces; break up for all time the German General Staff that has repeatedly contrived the resurgence of German militarism."
right here in this court room. The German General Staff has had plenty of time to think since the spring of 1945, and it well knows what is at stake here. The German militarists know that their future strength depends on reestablishing the the faith of the German people in their military prowess and in disassociating themselves from the atrocities which they committed in the service of the Third Reich. Why did the Wehrmacht meet with defeat? Hitler interfered too much in military affairs, says Manstein. What about the atrocities? The Wehrmacht committed none. Hitler's criminal orders were discarded and disregarded by the generals. Any atrocities which did occur were committed by other men such as Himmler and other agencies such as the SS. Could not the generals have taken any stops to prevent Germany's engulfment in war and eventual destruction? No, the generals were bound by their oath of obedience to the chief of state. Did not an SS general say that the Field Marshals could have prevented many of the excesses and atrocities? The reaction is one of superiority and scorn: "I think it is impertinent for an SS man to make such statements about a Field Marshal", says Rundstedt.
The documents and testimony show that these are transparent fabrications. But here, in embryo, are the myths and legends which the German militarists will seek to propagate in the German mind. These lies must be stamped and Labelled for what they are now while the proof is fresh. Militarism has flourished far more widely and obstinately in Germany than elsewhere, but it is a plant which knows no national boundaries; it grows everywhere. It lifts its voice to say that war between East and west, or Left and Right, or White and Yellow is inevitable. It whispers that newly devised weapons are so terrible that they should be hurled now lest some other country use them first. It makes the whole world walk under the shadow, of death. the aegis of Nazism. The German militarists will the themselves to any man or party that offers expectation of a revival of German armed might. They will calculate deliberately and coldly. They will not be deterred by fanatical ideologies or hideous practices; they will take crime in their stride to reach the goal of German power and terror. We have seen them do it before. state the truth plainly. The German militarists joined forces with Hitler and with him created the Third Reich; with him they deliberately made a world in which might was all that mattered; with him they plunged the world into war and spread terror and devastation over the continent of Europe. They dealt a blow at all mankind; a blow so savage and foul that the conscience of the world will reel for years to come. This was not war; it was crime. This war not soldiering; it was savagery. Those things need to be said. We cannot here make history over again, but we can see that it is written true
M. CHAMPTIER DE RIBES: Mr. President, Your Honors: has bathed the World in blood. Today, when we ask you to declare the criminal organizations which served as instruments for their desigs, we are seeking from your justice the moral condemnation of an entire, coherent system, which has brought civilization into the gravest danger which it has known since the collapse of the Roman world.
as the one which we requested yesterday. it no less salutary to remind those who are powerful today, and will be tomorrow, of the dictates of a moral law without which neither Order nor Peac can rule the universe. when the folly of men has used the prodigious progress of science and technic for the work of death, and when, as a philosopher has said, "our civilization has equpped itself for suicide", the problems which confront the world's anguish are above all moral problems?
"Humanity", our great Bergson has said, "groans, half-crushed by the weight of the progress which it has made ... The enlarged body awaits the addition of a soul and the machinery demands a mystical faith." It is that which at the apogee of Gra eco-Roman civilization, at a time when Cato the Elder, the wisest of the wise, was writing in his treatise on politic economy: "One must know the right time to sell one's old oxen and one's old slaves", introduced these two ideas into the world, which were enough to revolutionize it, the idea of personality and that of human brotherhood. the isolated man, the mere number in the political order, the cog in the economic order, but the entire man, body and soul, soul incarnate, no doubt, but above all a soul for the flowering of which society is made, the social man, who finds his full development only in fraternal communion with his neighbor, the man whose calling confers a dignity upon him which rightfully permits him to escape any attempt at enslavement or monopoly. the written or traditional constitutions of all civilized nations, ever since Great Britain, the mother of democracies, guaranteed to every free man, by vir of Magna Charta and the act of Habeas Corpus, that he would be "neither arrested nor imprisoned, except by judgment of his peers rendered by due process of law It is this which inspired the American Declaration of 1776:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men have been endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." It is this which inspired the French declaration of 1791: "The representatives of the French people, appointed by National Assembly, considering that ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt for the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments, have resolved to set forth, in a solemm declaration, the natural inalienable and sacred rights of man: Consequently, the National Assembly recognizes and declares in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of the man and the citizen." also inspire the constitution of the Union of Soviet Sociaust Republics, which, in its Chapter X, proclaims "the fundamental rights and duties of citizens of the USSR without distinction as to nationality or race?" 26 June, 1945, at San Francisco by 51 nations, begin with this solemm declaration: "We, the Peoples of the United Nations, resolved to preserve future generations from the scourge of war which twice within the span of one human life has inflicted indescribable sufferings on humanity, to proclaim our faith in the fundamental rights of man, in the dignity and value of human personality, in the equality of rights of men and women, as well as of nations, large and small?" stical faith as much as they desired. All of us recognize that it is Christianity's chief contribution to the world and that extending its conquests slowly, in the course of centuries, it has laid the foundations of world civilization. of the 20th century, attempted a violent reaction, by setting up against it his barbarous ideology of racism, his primitive concep tion of social life, regulated by biological laws alone.
For he not only envisaged establishing Germany's military domination in Europe, he had the ambition to impose his "culture" on the world, which upsets all the moral and intellectual foundations upon which the civilized world has rested ever since the Christian era. are equally applicable to human communities, and primarily those of natuarl selection and the struggle for existence. independence of the human personality. Like the ant in the antheap, the individual exists only by and for the group, the State is not made for the individual but the individual for the State.
From this point of view there could be no question of pity, no: of brothersly love. Christianity, the religion-of the degenerate and the diseased, will be replaced by the new religion which recognizes no law except that of the stronger, no duty except of domination.
This animal conception of human life, this "culture," this religion, is not the work of a philosopher who is proposing a new theory in the field of intellectual speculation, it is the work of a realist, who puts it into practice. of the German people of the elements which contaminate it, and the improvement of the race of blond Aryans. And the Jews will then be driven out or exterminated. The abnormal, the sick, the weak, will be eliminated or at least sterilized. Youth, snatched at an early age from its family, will be formed by the State, for its mission, which is "to make the world tremble." "I want," said Hitler to Rauschning, "I want to see in its glance the gare which one sees in the eyes of a wild beast." Even so he slanders the wild beast, which kills, doubtless, because it is hungry, because it is afraid or because it is in rut, .but which is not acquainted with the sadism of refined tortures.
relations. "A stronger race," he writes in "Mein Kampf," "will driv out the weak races, for the ultimate struggle for life will break through the ridiculous barriers of a pretended individualistic humanity, to make place for humanity according to nature, which annihilates the weak in order to give their places to the streng new religion, how many dead the realization of this pretended doctrine of life has cost; the concentration camps, the gas chambers and the crematory ovens, the inoculations with viruses, the sterilizations, the vivisection practised on prisoners and deportees, the enslavement of peoples who were, believed assimilable, and above all the mot wedical extermination of those who are alleged to be inferior, and in short "genocide"-- all this is the monstruous fruit, of the Hitlerite ideology.
M. de Menthon was right in saying that the sin against the spirit is the fundamental vice of National Socialism and the source of all the crimes committed in its name. And did not Louis Vouillot have prophetic gifts, when he wrote in his "Parfum de Rome" in 1871;
"Germany, Germany, to whom heaven had given so much! when then shalt see an enperer's ghost reappear, who will not wield the sword to protect justice and defend the ancient law, but who will call himself the emperor of the people and the sword of the now law; then will be the hour of the great expiation."
crimes of National Socialism. But to realize their diabolical pl of universal domination, not only of territories but of consciences, they needed collaborators inspired with the same mystical faith, formed according to the same disciplines, and this is why the leaders, the "fuehrers", conceived and realized, little by little, this complicated and coherent system of leadership, coer cion and control, which constitutes the entirety of the organizations of the State and of the National Socialist Party. by virtue of the "Fuehrer-Prinzip", general orders and directive and these are the Reich Cabinet and the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party. necessary, the Gestapo, the SA, the SD, and the SS. Party policy, and this was the work of the General Staff and the High Command, purged of all elements which were insufficiently nazified. groups or these offices were more or less the fanaties of the regime, and the Tribunal recalls the specious distinction made in the course of Ribbentrop's examination between the "pure Nazis" and those who were only halfway so. All had at least accepted the doctrine and the material advantages which the regime lavished up them. Because certain ones made a mental reservation, are they less contemptible and loss guilty? buted to the work of universal domination by overy means, has been abundantly proven in the course of these proceedings. during the interrogations of the individual defendants, and were not all of these defendants, in various capacities, members of on and often several of these organizations, so that the close cooperation between the collective organizations and the men who are now on the defendants bench has been established in an indis table way?
after the addresses of my eminent colleagues of the American and British prosecution staffs, I shall refrain from recalling once more the innumerable atrocities in which the groups or organizations listed in the indictment have participated, by ordering them. by executing them, or by permitting them. to which the defense counsels, and particularly those for the Gestapo, the SD and the High Command, appear to attach the greatest importance. in the heat of the struggle, which had become pitiless, in the course of the war, which had become total, but it was never a question of anything but individual crimes, which might involve the responsibility of the persons who committed them, but not th of the groups which condemned them. ce, seperated the various organizations of the Reich. For this reasons the activity of each organization should be examined separately and this examination does not reveal a criminal inten tion or activity in any of them.
First argument: To determine if an organization is criminal it is necessary, says the defense, to examine the essential principles of its structure. there is nothing criminal about thi from that time on, the crimes, if perhaps any have been committe could not have been attributed to the individuals, and does not allow the criminl character of the group as a whole to be inferr is a state police, charged, like all police of civilized states, with aiding in the work of justice and protecting the group against individuals who treaten its security.
It is possible that it has sometimes received and carried out orders from above, which are not directly relevant to its essential mission of protection, like the mass arrests of Jews, the extermination of Russian priso ners of war, the assassination of recaptured escaped prisoners. But those accidental activities do not fall within its competenc as an institution. They do not alter the essential character of the organization, which has nothing criminal about it. and sounding out of the public opinion, a sort of Gallup poll, of itself harmless.
It is possible that members of the S.D. have collaborated accidentally in the repressive measures of the Gestapo. It is true that members of the SD have held a number of high positions and have indulged in a number of questionable activities, but they did not act then as functionaries of the SD and could not compremise the organization, the institution character of which had nothing criminal about it. Thus the High Command was charged institutionally only with the defense of the Reich and only with its defense. It does not busy itself with politics and has nothing to do with the police. It is possible that it may have sometimes everst ped its mission. It is true that it aboved the order to deport these who resist to an unknown destination, to hand over to the police for extermination the core dos and escaped prisoners, which is against military honor, but it acted then as a simple internediary agent for Hitler's or Himmler's orders. This accidental activity, outside the bounds of its own jurisdiction could not change its essential character, which is not criminal. Thus the defense always tries to distinguish between the institutional character of the organization which it believes it has shown to be non-criminal, and the practical activity of the group, which, it recognizes could be subject to criticism, a distinction, which could be understood in a democratic regime, when pre established institutions limit the arbitrary nature of governments, when the au nomy of the individual and the liberty of the citizen are protected from the mi se of power, but which is incomprehensible in the Hitler regime. Did Best, the police theorician trouble about respecting a principle when he wrote that the means of action of the police are prescribed by the enemy ? Does the decree of 23 February 1933 trouble about principle, when it allows the all-powerful State to ignore all legal limitations ? Does Hitler make any distinction between principle and practice, when, at the conference of 23 may 1933 which assemble at the Chancellery the members of the High Command he states; "The principle consisting in avoiding the solution of problems by adaption to circumstances must be banished. Rather must circumstance be adopted to necessities. It is no more a question of justice or injustice, but -- the existence or the non-existence of 80 million people". In reality, under the HITLER regime there are no pre-established institutions, no locality, no limitation to arbitrariness, no possible abuse of power, There is no other principle than the "Fuehrerprinzip", no other legality than their good pleasure of the chief, the order of whom, from the top to the bottom of the ladder, must be executed without any possible dissension.
The concept of a pretended institution which had supposedly presided over the constitution of the collective organizations and given them a certain character, is merely an "a posteriori" construction of the defense counsel's ingenuity". The concrete activity of the collective organizations alone counts, and we have monstrated that it was criminal. Moreover, the defense seeks a way to exculpate the collective organizations by the fast that the members of the Gestapo, the SS, or the SD, who have indulged these criminal acts did not perform them in the name of their original organization, but were temporarily detached therefrom. Is the proof not to the contrary that, in the general organization of the National Socialist system, these groups played the role of reserves and preparator schoo whence the leaders, for their work of domination, drew the executors, perfectly prepared for the criminal deeds entrusted to them ? And the fact that HITLER often conferred the dignity of honorary membership in one of these organizations on his accomplices, is also proof of the importance which he attached to the testimony of orthodoxy, which was the appurtenance of one or other of these groups. Thus, according to whichever point of view one takes, the first argument of the defense cannot be maintained.
THE PRESIDENT: M. Champtier de Ribes, I think you can hardly finish your spe before the adjournment; I think perhaps we had better adjourn now.
M.CHAMPTIER DE RIBES: Yes, Sir.
( A recess was taken until 1400 hours).