dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): It may be difficult for you, Your Honors, and for the entire world to understand how infinitely painful it is for us Germans that it is just our state and our people who have furnished cause for the creation of such international law by a war in which we engaged; yet my client, the Defendant Von Neurath, and I could not help but welcome this Trial, because the greatest efforts were made by my client during his entire official activity, from his first day in office to the last, to avoid war and to serve peace. And I do not hesitate to emphasize this, although it is because of an entirely new principle of law that my client is facing this Court today. Because for the first time in history the idea is to be carried into practice according to which the statesmen of a nation are to be held personally responsible and are to be punished for the inhuman acts of wars of aggression caused by them. This thought, which this High Court is about to carry into practice as a principle of law, is a novelty in the history of international law. But if the present Trial and the Charter on which it is based is to be more than a single procedure worked out and intended for this one case-in other words for this war just ended-if it arose not merely from the thought of vengeance because of harm and damage done to the victorious nations and if it really was brought forth by the will and the decision to eliminate war in itself for good by holding the statesmen of the nations personally responsible, then this constitutes a deed which the sincere conviction of every peaceloving person will welcome. It furthermore contains two elements calculated to revolutionize all that was heretofore known in this world regarding the foreign policy of states and to raise it to a new and undoubtedly higher ethical basis.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): Since the famous speech made by Pericles and since Plato's state doctrines it is an ancient' well-established postulate for the policy of a statesman to endeavor to obtain for his people, for the state under his stewardship, the highest possible level of existence, the maintenance, and improvement of its standard of living, of its position among the nations, irrespective of the means it might require. Every nation on earth includes in its history statesmen who, seen in this light, are extolled and honored as shining examples, and who went down in history Is such merely because they were successful, without examining whether the means they used to obtain success were in harmony or not with the ethical principles not only of the Christian but of all leading moral philosophies. To this maxim the Charter of this High Tribunal opposes a new maxim in that it plainly stipulates that every war of aggression places culpability on the person responsible for the war, regardless of whether the war was won or lost. However, this means nothing else but subjection to the moral law-which rejects application of force of any kind as a means of policy-of every state stewardship, even the successful and the victorious. If, however, this is to have practical meaning and is to be successful, then there follows the subjection of every state stewardship to the test and judgment of all other civilized states in the world. On that principle of the Charter established by this High Tribunal it would call for the examining and possible judgment of all inner-political measures which, in retrospect, might be seen as actions of preparation for this war.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): To discuss consequences resulting from this would lead too far; this must rather be left to the discussion by scholars of state law and to further developments, and I wish, therefore, to confine myself to pointing to one consequence only, the consequence that the statesmen involved in the war of aggression will be subject to such judgment of a future international world court and will be liable to punishment, even if that war of aggression ends in victory. Perhaps this is the main point, reflecting the highest ethics of the stipulations and principles established in the Charter. If I particularly stress these points it is not because my client or I doubt that the authors of this Charter were not fully aware of these consequences too. But in the fact that this new tenet of international law is to find application for the first time before the world forum and by the Allied governments not through a power dictate but through a court procedure based on objectivity and impartiality, in this fact my client and I see proof that this court procedure had its birth in the ideal aspiration of mankind to free itself from the scourge of war. And even if my client and I fully recognize the important issue in this Trial as based on the Charter, namely that in sharp contrast to the principles of law of all democratic states, of every democratic-liberal principle of law, it proposes to pass judgment and inflict punishment for actions which at the time they were committed were not governed by law, my client and I nevertheless are confident because of our conviction that this High Tribunal will not base its verdict on individual and incoherently joined actions, on single bare facts, but that it will scrutinize and examine with care the motives and aspirations which moved each individual defendant.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): If then you, Your Honors, will establish, as I awn convinced you will, that from the first to the last day of his official activity as Reich Foreign Minister or as Reich Protector, my client was moved by one desire only, that all his deeds and actions were governed by one aspiration, to prevent a war and its cruelties, to maintain peace, and that the very reason for his remaining in office was to prevent war and its inhumanity through his influence and that he did not withdraw from his post until he was forced to conclude that all his efforts were in vain and that the will and determination of the highest ruler of the State, Hitler, to wage war were more powerful than he, then the fact of his membership and continuance in office in the Reich Government until that moment cannot possibly be construed as approval, much less as assistance and copartnership in the planning, preparing, or waging of war, thereby placing upon him joint responsibility for the war, and even for cruelties and atrocities committed during its course. The very fact of the application-an application made for the first time in this Trial, at least in international law and in democratic states-of the legal doctrine, that an action already committed can subsequently be made punishable by law, results in the imperative demand that the question of the subjective guilt of the defendant-in other words the consciousness not only of the amorality and the presumed criminality of the deed in question, but also the intent to commit the deed or at least to offer active assistance despite such awareness-be examined and answered before a verdict is arrived at. Disregard of this postulate would not only rob this Trial of its high ethical importance but would open wide the door to arbitrariness, making such court procedure 23 July 46 - appear before the world, not as a real court in the truest meaning but a power dictate wearing the robe of justice.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): An extraordinary responsibility is thus placed upon your shoulders, so great as has never before been placed on the shoulders of any court in the world. Carrying out the will and the vision of the father of this Trial, President Roosevelt, who passed away far too soon, it is your task, Your Honors, to lay the first cornerstone for the temple of peace of the nations of the earth. You are to lay the foundation for the attainment of the ideal he envisaged, perpetual peace. Coming generations are to continue to build on your judgment. You are to give the directives according to which those who come after us must continue to aspire to this high goal. It is not a precedent you are to establish, not an individual case you are to judge and to punish the guilty men according to your judgment, but you are to lay down the fundamental principles of a new international law which is to govern the world in the future. This alone, this task assigned to you, establishes the meaning of this Tribunal, its justification, and its high ethical inspiration, to which we yield. At the same time, however, this also includes the recognition that the verdict to be established by you in regard to these defendants is not a verdict in the ordinary meaning of the word; it is not merely a judge's sentence pronounced on behalf of individual defendants and their deeds; but it is the new fundamental law itself, the source from which all future courts are to draw, in accordance with which your verdict is to be established. It is, therefore, your task, Your Honors, to interpret the provisions of the Charter according to their principle and to establish in practice and for all time to come, the rules and principles of the Charter.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): The responsibility which you thereby assume before history puts two fundamental questions to you, the answers to which are all the more complicated because the legal concept of conspiracy incorporated in the Charter and forming the legal foundation of the Indictment is a concept foreign not only to the majority of peoples, especially the European peoples, but also because in some countries it owes its existence to its previous application to the fight against common crimes and offenses against the legal provisions governing domestic affairs and against those alone. The postulate necessarily follows that the method of interpretation and the application of this legal concept in international law must never be the same as that employed in the fight against common bands of gangsters, guilty of a breach of the social order of a particular country and of the laws promulgated for its protection. The latter ordinarily involves individuals of a more or less amoral disposition, who act for reasons of selfishness, lust for money, or other unethical instincts which place them outside the existing social order. In the last analysis, however, and particularly when wars of aggression are involved, international law does not deal with individual statesmen but much rather with whole peoples. The age of absolutism, where the will of the ruler alone determined the destiny and acts of a people, has definitely passed. In this age it may be said that one cannot imagine any avowed dictator or omnipotent despot who can rule without or against the will, or at least the tacit approval of the nation, at least its majority. And so-it is necessary to make this known to the world-invisible behind the defendants, there sits also in the prisoners' dock our poor beaten and tortured German people, because it placed upon a pedestal and selected as leader a man who led it to its doom.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): From this follows of necessity the inescapable demand that, contrary to the concept of a conspiracy applied in regard to ordinary criminals, application of the concept of conspiracy applied in international law must first proceed gate and examine how it happened-how it could happen that an intellectual, high ranking people, a people who gave so much to the world in terms of cultural and spiritual gifts as the German people did-that it could hail a man such as Hitler, follow him into the bloodiest of all wars, giving him the best it had. Not until you, Your Honors, have taken this into consideration and examined this question, will you be able to establish a just verdict in regard to the individual defendants themselves, with due consideration for their dissimilarity-a judgment which will stand the test of history. Because of such reasoning and not merely by reason of my right as defense counsel of the Defendant Freiherr van Neurath, but also because of my duty as a German, I deemed it necessary to explain in mere outline the fact of Nazi domination which the world outside Germany cannot grasp; to make you visualize how it happened as a result of the effects of the Versailles Treaty and finally, because of the manner of its application, how it was bound to happen, true to historical necessity. In view of the short amount of time made available to me by the decision of the Tribunal, I must refrain from reading that part of my final pleading; but I express my definite hope that the Tribunal will subsequently go to the trouble of reading it themselves and that they will consider its arguments when pronouncing the verdict. After the world-embracing battles of her great emperors, after the death of the last of them, the Emperor }3arbarossa, the royal sovereignty perished and consciousness of national unity became more and more lost; the ancient hydra of dissension among the German tribes raised its multiple serpent's head. On the decayed ruins of the German throne a new world of particularized territorial powers came into being.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): Spiritual and temporal princes, free cities, counts and knights Loomed in the course of the following centuries a shapeless confused mosaic of incomplete greater, smaller, or infinitesimal state structures, which undermined and strangled all desire for a unified state and nation. Princes, freemen, and peasants all chose their own individual ways. Particularistic and selfish interests of the different classes frustrated all attempts to classify politically the abundance of creative power within the German nation, and to reconstruct in some form the decayed unity of state and nation. In addition to all this an event occurred at the turn of the fifteenth century which was perhaps the greatest tragedy in the history of the German nation: The Lutheran Reformation, born of the deepest origins of German religious feeling and thought. This Reformation however, instead of uniting the various German races instead of arousing this nation split into hundreds of small parts to a common ideal and to a consciousness of national unity, brought a still greater and deeper schism, the schism of faith, to this poor dismembered people under the rule of an emperor who, though powerful again, not only failed to understand German mentality or the Reformation born of it, but even felt hostile toward it. For Charles V attempted to smite this Reformation, which he considered heretical and sinful, with fire and sword and thus led the German people into the darkest hour of their history. In the subsequent wars of religion, Germans turned their weapons against Germans, forgetting their kinship to such a point that they called in foreign nations to aid them against their own German fellow countrymen and tore each other to pieces side by side with them.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): With the end of the Thirty Years War the helplessness of the German nation was finally settled, It became the plaything of its neighbors' desires, the welcome battlefield of foreign nations; and all this occurred at the very time when the English people under the leadership of their gifted Queen Elizabeth, and shortly afterward under Oliver Cromwell and under a Parliament which, freely elected by its people, was possessed of a sense of responsibility, laid the foundation necessary for its ultimate position as a world power, at a time when the French people, led by their energetic and powerful kings after the defeat of a feudal aristocracy, had long been welded together into full unity and into a nation. In Germany, however, every German purpose became benumbed. Through poverty caused by the long wars all national consciousness vanished, not only in the political but also in the psychological sphere, even to the very language. The people embroidered their ancient language with foreign idioms, and the great philosophers and poets wrote in French or Latin. Thus, in the petty troubles of a miserable existence, the mass of the German people lost its last recollections of the sovereignty of their Reich. Unfamiliar and no longer understood, the Gothic cathedrals tower up in this changed world as witness as of the past glory of the German burghers. Each lived only for himself, for his poor petty existence. Was it to be wondered at that on such miserable soil, under the rays emanating from the admired French monarchy, an absolutism developed in almost all German courts, down to the smallest domains, which enabled these more or less important gentlemen to copy the Roi Soleil of France? Only when, at the beginning of the 19th century, Germany in alliance with other countries rose against the foreign rule of Napoleon, did the Germans reawaken to consciousness of their racial community by these wars of liberation.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): After eight centuries the slumbering desire for a revival of the ancient glory of a unified and honored empire of the German nation in a new form was rekindled. But only some 75 years ago, after decades of strife and disappointment, did this ardent dream become reality, so that a unified German Reich could arise in a new form. In this hour though, for the first time in its history, the German people was taken into consultation by the new Constitution, to advise and collaborate in the direction of this new Reich. Together with this fight, however, the common responsibility for the administration of the State was also imposed. However enthusiastically and joyfully this new right was received, the people could hardly judge at once of the eminent seriousness of this duty. Was it not demanding too much that a people, the bulk of whom had for centuries been excluded from any participation in the leadership of its country and its fate, should learn in a few years that which others had taken centuries to learn gradually, something which was to be an essential part of its existence, thought, acts, and feeling? One of the leading men in the oldest democracy in the world, the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, in his speech in the House of Commons on 11 March 1935, declared democracy to be the most difficult system of government, which can only function if the entire population is able to think intelligently and to appreciate well-considered opinions and is not liable to be led away by propaganda and sentiment. This is the fundamental difference between the Germans and the other western peoples, which cannot be erased by any dialectics and which explains to a great part the developments of the last seven decades. An entire population, however gifted and clever it may be, cannot in a period of 50 years be trained and fully educated in a sphere previously unknown.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): By experience alone, and even then only gradually and slowly, are political intelligence, sense, and instinct evolved together with a gift of perception of fight and the understanding of cohesion in political and social life, and likewise the knowledge that each individual is himself responsible for what is done for and in the name of his people. Inexorably the continuous action of the past in the present is reflected in the history of those nations which do not believe in this historical law nor wish to do so. Inevitably, the primary consequence of nonparticipation and lack of coresponsibility in the government for hundreds of years by the German people was the belief that it could give its confidence to the men charged with the leadership, the more so if such leadership, particularly in matters of foreign policy, was in the hands of a statesman like Bismarck, under whom the young Reich incontestably flourished in all spheres, particularly in its economic life and under whom it enjoyed a blessed period of peace such as it had not experienced for a long time. Trusting and inexperienced as they still were, the German people believed it could also meet the successor of a Bismarck with the same confidence. But even if in the sphere of domestic politics some opposition was gradually voiced against the new policy, the bulk of the German people was firmly convinced that in foreign policy the new leaders would not divert from Bismarck's peaceful trend. In its lack of experience and faced with the secret diplomacy generally followed, the German people were not in a position to judge whether the policy followed by their leader was fight or wrong. It therefore never occurred to the bulk of the German people, nor could it occur to them, that the policy followed by Bismarck's successors might lead to war. To the people itself the idea of war was quite remote. It had no other wish, no other longing, but to work peacefully for the domestic development of its recently created empire, and to live for the growth of its prosperity.
DR. OTTO FREIHERR VON LUDINGHAUSEN (Counsel for Defendant Von Neurath): There was nothing beyond this wish that would have been worth the blood of its sons. The nation was therefore utterly disconcerted when the first World War broke out and could not understand how other countries could possibly believe it to bear the exclusive guilt for this war after its Kaiser's ostensible exertions for the preservation of peace. With the greatest seriousness, inspired by the most sacred conviction that it was now a matter of defending home, wife, and child against the unprovoked attacks of hostile powers, it took to arms. And for the same motive, the German nation has never, even after the cot/apse of its powers of resistance through enemy superiority, to this day understood or in any way sanctioned the admission of exclusive war guilt imposed upon it by the Peace Treaty of Versailles. Consequently it did not feel and, to this day, does not feel this treaty to have been a real peace treaty, but a peace dictate imposed upon it by the victorious powers, a dictate which, to it, is not the expiation of a wrongdoing it committed, the kindling of a war, but solely the expression of the purpose to destroy the unity and freedom it had reconquered only a few decades back, and its existence as a nation and a state. Again this poor people stood on the brink of the abyss; all that it had longed for and dreamed of during long centuries had finally become reality a few decades ago, and now everything threatened to crumble once more into rubble and ruin. Again it stood, as centuries before, at the bier of what it possessed; again it stood in danger of losing its existence as a people and a nation and of falling back again into the misery of earner times. Only one thing was left to it at this time; and that was the consciousness of its national character, of its solidarity as a nation.