dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): Sir Hartley Shawcross then enumerated the various breaches of treaties, of agreements, of promises which were the prelude to the many wars of aggression of which Germany was guilty. I propose today to prove to you that all- this organized and vast criminality springs from what I may be allowed to call a crime against the spirit, I mean a doctrine which, denying all spiritual, rational, or moral values by which the nations have tried, for thou-' sands of years, to improve human conditions, aims to plunge humanity back into. barbarism, no longer the natural and spontaneous barbarism of primitive nations, but into a diabolical barbarism, conscious of itself and utilizing for its ends all material means put at the disposal of mankind by contemporary science. This sin against the spirit is the original sin of National Socialism from which all crimes spring. This monstrous doctrine is that of racialism: The German race, composed in theory of Aryans, would be a fundamental and natural concept. Germans as individuals do not exist and cannot justify their existence, except insofar as they belong to the race or Volkstum, to the popular mass which represents and amalgamates all Germans. Race is the matrix of the German people; proceeding therefrom this people lives and develops as an organism. The German may consider himself only as a healthy, and vigorous member of this body, fulfilling within the collectivity a definite technical function; his activity and his usefulness are the exact gauge and justification of his liberty. This national body must be "moulded" to prepare it for a permanent struggle. The ideas and the bodily symbols of racialism form an integral part of its political system. This is what is called authoritative or dictatorial biology. The expression "blood!' which appears so often in the writings of the Nazi theorists denotes this stream of real life, of red sap which flows through the circulatory system of every race and of all genuine culture as it flows through the human body.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): To be Aryan is to feel this current passing through oneself, this current which galvanizes and vivifies the whole nation. Blood is this region of spontaneous and unconscious life which reveals to each individual the tendencies of the race. The intellectual life must never, in extolling itself, separate us from this elemental basis of the sacred community. Let the individual go into himself and he will receive by direct revelation "the commandments of the blood." Dreams, rites, and myths can lead to this revelation. In other words the modem German can and must bear in himself the call of the old Germany and find again its purity and its youthful primitiveness. The body and soul unity (Leib Seele Einheit) of the individual must not be disputed. One reads in the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte of September 1938 that the body belongs to the State and the soul to the Church and to God. It is no longer so. The whole of the individual, body and soul, belongs to the Germanic nation and to the Germanic State. National Socialism affirms, indeed, that the moral conscience is the result of ortho-genetic evolution, the consequence of the most simple physiological functions which characterize the individuality of the body. Therefore, the moral conscience is also subject to heredity and consequently subject to the postulate and to the demands of the race. True, this pseudo-religion does not repudiate the means of reason and of technical activity, but subordinates them rigorously, brings them infallibly to the racial myth. The individual has no value in himself and is important only as an element of the race. This affirmation is logical if one admits that not only physical and psychological characteristics, but also opinions and tendencies are bound, not to the individual but to the nation. Anyone whose opinions differ from the official doctrine is asocial or unhealthy. He is unhealthy because in the Nazi doctrine the nation is equivalent to the race. Now, the characteristics of the race are fixed.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): An exception in the formation from the spiritual or moral point of view constitutes a malformation in the same way as does a clubfoot or a harelip. That is the totalitarian doctrine which reduces the individual to nonexistence save by the race and for the race, without freedom of action or any definite aim; totalitarian doctrine which excludes every other concept, every other aspiration or requirement save those connected with the race, totalitarian doctrine which eliminates from the individual every other thought save that of the interest of the race. National Socialism ends in the absorption of the personality of the citizen into that of the state and in the denial of any intrinsic value of the human person. We are brought back, as can be seen, to the most primitive ideas of the savage tribe. All the values of civilization accumulated in the course of centuries are rejected, all traditional ideas of morality, justice, and law give way to the primacy of race, its instincts, its needs and interests. The individual, his liberty, his rights and aspirations, no longer have any real existence of their own. In this conception of race it is easy to realize the gulf that separates members of the German community from other men. The diversity of the races becomes irreducible, and irreducible, too, the hierarchy which sets apart the superior and the inferior races. The Hitler regime has created a veritable chasm between the German nation, the sole keeper of the racial treasure, and other nations. Between the Germanic community and the degenerate population of an inferior variety of men there is no longer any common measure. Human brotherhood is rejected, even more than all the other traditional moral values. How can one explain how Germany, fertilized through the centuries by classic antiquity and Christianity, by the ideals of liberty, equality, and social justice, by the common heritage of western humanism to which she had brought such noble and precious contributions, could have come to this astonishing return to primitive barbarism?
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): In order to understand it and to try to eradicate forever from the Germany of tomorrow the evil by which our entire civilization came so near to perishing, it must be recalled that National Socialism has deep and remote origins. The mysticism of racial community was born of the spiritual and moral crises which Germany underwent in the 19th century and which abruptly broke out again in its economic and social structure through a particularly rapid industrialization. National Socialism is in reality one of the peaks of the moral and spiritual crisis of modem humanity, convulsed by industrialization and technical progress. Germany experienced this metamorphosis of economic and social life not only with an extraordinary brutality but at a time when she did not yet possess the political equilibrium and the cultural unity which the other countries of western Europe had achieved. While the inner and spiritual life was weakening, a cruel uncertainty dominated human minds, an uncertainty admirably defined by the term "Ratlosigkeit," which cannot be translated into French but which corresponds to our popular expression, "One no longer knows in what saint to believe." This is the spiritual cruelty of the 19th century which so many Germans have described with a tragic evocative power. A gaping void opens before the human soul, disoriented by the search for new values. The natural sciences and the sciences of the mind give birth to absolute relativism; to a deep scepticism regarding the lasting quality of values on which Western humanism has been nurtured for centuries. A vulgar Darwinism prevails, bewilders, and befuddles the brain. The Germans cease to see in human groups and races anything but isolated nuclei in perpetual struggle with one another. It is in the name of decadence that the German spirit condemns humanism.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): It sees in the value of humanism and in the elements that derive from it only "maladies," which it attributes to an excess of intellectualism and abstraction of everything that restrains men's passions by subjecting them to common norms. From this point on, classic antiquity is no longer considered in its aspects of ordered reason or of radiant beauty. In it one sees only civilizations violently enamored of struggles and rivalries, linked especially to Germany through their so-called Germanic origin. Sacerdotal Judaism and Christianity in all its forms are condemned as religions of honor and brotherhood, calculated to kill the virtues of brutal force in man. A cry is raised against the democratic idealism of the modem era, and then against all the international Over a people in this state of spiritual crisis and of negations of traditional values the culminating philosophy of Nietzsche was to exercise a dominant influence. In taking the will to power as a point of departure, Nietzsche preached, certainly not inhumanity but superhumanity. If there is no final cause in the universe, man, whose body is matter which is at once feeling and thinking, may mould the world to his desire, choosing as his guide a militant biology. If the supreme end of humanity is a feeling of victorious fullness which is both material and spiritual, all that remains is to insure the selection of physical specimens, who become the new aristocracy of masters. For Nietzsche the industrial evolution necessarily entails the rule of the masses, the automatism and the shaping of the working multitudes. The 'state endures only by virtue of an elite of vigorous personalities who, by the methods so admirably defined by Machiavelli, which alone are in accord with the laws of life, will lead men by force and by ruse simultaneously, for men are and remain wicked and perverse. We see the modem barbarian arise.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): Superior by his intelligence and his wilful energy, freed of all conventional ethics, he can enforce upon the masses obedience and loyalty by making them believe in the dignity and beauty of labor and by providing them with that mediocre well-being with which they are so easily content. An identical force will, therefore, be manifest in the leaders, by the harmony between their elementary passions and the lucidity of their organizing reason, and in the masses, whose dark or violent instincts will be balanced by a reasoned activity imposed with implacable discipline. Without doubt, the late philosophy of Nietzsche cannot be identified with the brutal simplicity of National Socialism. Nevertheless, National Socialism was wont to glorify Nietzsche as one of its ancestors. And justly so, for he was the first to formulate in a coherent manner criticism of the traditional values of humanism; and also, because his conception of the government of the masses by masters knowing no restraint is a preview of the Nazi regime. Besides, Nietzsche believed in the sovereign race and attributed primacy to Germany, whom he considered endowed with a youthful soul and unquenchable resources. The myth of racial community which had arisen from the depths of the German soul, unbalanced by the moral and spiritual crises endured by modem humanity, allied itself with the traditional theses of Pan-Germanism. Already Fichte's speeches to the German nation exalting Germanism clearly reveal one of the main ideas of Pan- Germanism, namely, that Germany visualizes and organizes the world as it should be visualized and organized. The apology for war is equally ancient. It dates back to Fichte and Hegel, who had affirmed that war, through its classifying of peoples, alone establishes justice among nations. For Hegel, in Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechtes, Page 433, states: "The moral health of nations is maintained thanks to war, just as the passing breeze saves the sea from stagnation." The living-space theory appears right at the beginning of the 19th century.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): It is a well-known geographical and historical demonstration which such people as Ratzel, Arthur Dix, and Lamprecht will take up later on, comparing conflicts between peoples to a savage fight between conceptions and realizations of space and declaring that all history is moving towards German hegemony. State totalitarianism also has ancient roots in Germany. The absorption of individuals by the State was hoped for by Hegel, who wrote: "Individuals disappear in the presence of the universal  substance" - that is the people or state idea-"and this substance itself shapes the individuals in accordance with  its own ends." Therefore, National Socialism appears in present-day Germany neither as a spontaneous formation which might be due to the consequence of the defeat in 1918, nor as a mere invention of a group of men determined upon seizing power. National Socialism is the ultimate result of a long evolution of doctrines; the exploitation by a group of men of one of the most profound and most tragic aspects of the German soul. But the crime committed by Hitler and his companions will be precisely that of unleashing and exploiting to its extreme limit the latent force of barbarity, which existed before him in the German people. The dictatorial regime instituted by Hitler and his companions carries with it for-all Germans the "soldier-life," that is to say, a kind and a system of life entirely different from that of the bourgeois West and the proletarian East. It amounted to a permanent and complete mobilization of individual and collective energies. This integral militarization presupposed complete uniformity of thoughts and actions. It is a militarization which conforms to the Prussian tradition of discipline. Propaganda instils into the masses faith, drive, and a thirst for the greatness of the community. Those consenting masses find an artificial derivative for their moral anguish and their material cares in theories of race and in a mystical exaltation held in common.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): Souls which yesterday were wounded and rent asunder once more find themselves united in a common mould. The Nazi educational system moulds new generations which show no trace of traditional moral teachings, those being replaced by the cult of race and of strength. The race myth tends to become a real national religion. Many writers dream of substituting for the duality of religious confessions a world-wide dogma of German conception, which would amount to being the religion of the German race as a race. In the middle of the 20th century Germany goes back, of her own free will, beyond Christianity and civilization to the primitive barbarity of ancient Germany. She makes a deliberate break with all universal conceptions of modem nations. The National Socialist doctrine, which raised inhumanity to the level of a principle, constitutes, in fact, a doctrine of disintegration of modem society. This doctrine necessarily brought Germany to a war of aggression and to the systematic use of criminality in the waging of war. The absolute primacy of the German race, the negation of any international law whatsoever, the cult of strength, the exacerbation of community mysticism made Germany consider recourse to war, in the interests of the German race, logical and justified. This race would have the incontestable right to grow at the expense of nations considered decadent. Germany is about to resume even in the middle of the 20th century the great invasions of the barbarians. Moreover, most naturally and logically, she will wage her war in barbarous fashion, not only because National Socialist ethics are indifferent to the choice of means, but also because war must be total in its means and in its ends. Whether we consider a Crime against Peace or War Crimes, we are therefore not faced by an accidental or an occasional criminality which events could explain without justifying it. We are, in fact, faced by systematic criminality, which derives directly and of necessity from a monstrous doctrine put into practice with deliberate intent by the masters of Nazi Germany.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): From the National Socialist doctrine there arises directly the immediately pursued perpetration of Crimes against Peace. As early as February 1920, in the first program of the National Socialist Party, Adolf Hitler had already outlined the future basis of German foreign policy. But it was in 1924 in his Landsberg prison, while writing Mein Kampf, that he gave a fuller development to his views. According to Mein Kampf the foreign policy of the Reich must have as its first objective to give back to Germany her "independence and her effective sovereignty" which is clearly an allusion to the articles of the Treaty of Versailles , referring to disarmament and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. It would then endeavor to reconquer the territories lost in 1919, and 15 years before the outbreak of the second World War the question of Alsace and Lorraine is clearly raised. It would also have to seek to extend German territories in Europe, the frontiers of 1914 being "insufficient" and it would be indispensable to extend them by including "all Germans" in the Reich, beginning with the Germans of Austria. After having reconstituted Greater Germany, National Socialism will do everything necessary to "insure the means of existence" on this planet to the race forming the state, by means of establishing a "healthy relation" between the size of the population and the extent of the territory. By "healthy relation" is meant a situation such that the subsistence of the people will be assured by the resources of its own territory. "A sufficient living space on this earth will alone insure to a people its liberty of existence." But so far that is but a stage. "When a people sees its subsistence guaranteed by the extent of its territory, it is nevertheless necessary to think of insuring the security of that territory" - because the power of a state "arises directly out of the military value of its  geographical situation." Those ends, Hitler adds, cannot be reached without war.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): It will be impossible to obtain the re-establishment of the frontiers of 1914 "without bloodshed." How much more impossible it would be to acquire living space if one did not prepare for a "clash of arms." "It is in Eastern Europe, at the expense of Russia and the neighboring countries that Germany must seek new territories. We are stopping the eternal march of the Germans towards the South and the West of Europe and are casting our eyes towards the East." But before anything, declares Hitler, it is necessary to crush France's tendency towards hegemony and to have a "final settlement" with this "mortal enemy." "The annihilation of France will enable Germany to acquire afterwards territories in the East." The "settlement of accounts" in the West is but a prelude. "It can be explained only as the securing of our rear defenses in order to extend our living-space in Europe." Henceforth, also, Germany will have to prevent the existence near her territory of a "military power" which might become her rival and to oppose "by all means" the formation of a state which possibly might acquire sufficient strength to do so; and if that state exists already, to "destroy" it is, for Germans, not only a right but a duty. "Never permit"- recommends Hitler to his compatriots, in a passage which he calls his political testament"the formation in Europe of two continental powers. In every attempt to set up a second military power on Germany's borders, even if it were in the shape of a state which might possibly acquire that power, you must see an attack on Germany." War to reconquer the territories lost in 1919, war to annihilate the power of France, war to acquire living-space in eastern Europe, war, finally, against any state which would be or which might become a counter-weight to the hegemony of the Reich, that is the plan of Mein Kampf. In this way, from the inception of National Socialism, he does not recoil from any of the certainties of war entailed by the application of his doctrines.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): In fact, from the moment of his accession to power, Hitler and his companions devoted themselves to the military and diplomatic preparation of the wars of aggression which they had resolved to wage. It is true that, even before the accession to power of the National Socialists, Germany had shown her determination to reconstruct her armed forces, notably in 1932 when, on the occasion of the Disarmament Conference, she demanded "equality of rights" as regards armament; and Germany had already secretly violated the articles of the Treaty of Versailles regarding disarmament. But after the arrival of Hitler to power, German rearmament was to be carried out at a vastly different rate. On 14 October 1933 the Reich left the Disarmament Conference and made known 5 days later its decision to withdraw from the League of Nations under the pretext that it was not granted equality of rights in the matter of armament. France had, however, expressed her readiness to accept equality of rights if Germany would first consent to an international control which would enable the actual level of existing armaments to be determined. Germany very obviously did not wish to agree to this condition, for an international control would have revealed the extent of the rearmament already carried out in secret by the Reich in violation of the treaties. As a matter of fact, at a cabinet meeting which took place on 13 October 1933, the minutes of which have been found, Hitler had declared that he wished to "torpedo?' the Disarmament Conference. Under these conditions it is not surprising that the attempts made to resume negotiations with Germany after her withdrawal ended in failure. When 18 months later Hitler's government decided to reestablish conscription and to create immediately an army which would, on a peace establishment, comprise 36 divisions, as well as to create a military air force, it was breaking the engagements which Germany had undertaken by the Treaty of Versailles .