dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
M. CHARLES DUBOST (Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): It is really the perfect anonymous crime imagined by the French moralist when he propounded the case of the mandarin as a test of moral conscience. And an the conditions favor the absence of a reaction. The facts have demonstrated that none of those men have experienced 'tine decisive revulsion in those circumstances. Most of them did feel that they had played a part in the tragedy. They have, I think, been more intent on relieving their consciences than on attempting to deceive their judges by shelving guilt onto their neighbors. Few of them have had the courage to acknowledge, as did Schirach and Frank, that they were component parts of the whole system, and as such could not evade responsibility. The others deny it at the risk of letting the guilt fall upon the German people who were incapable of throwing off the yoke of their evil masters. They attempt, in the exposition of their case, to minimize their responsibility in the hope of conjuring it away,. but since Severing's statement and those made previously by the mayor of Oranienburg and the mayor of Buchenwald and confirmed by Frank, are true, namely, that there were rumors all over Germany that people died in these camps, as everybody now knows, do they expect to make us believe that they alone were in ignorance thereof? The less guilty among them, if one can establish different categories of "major criminals," did not dare to object, but their criminal cowardice had such appalling consequences that they cannot possibly justify any lessening of the penalty. As we now see, crime committed by the state in a regime in which state and party are one, and in which popular control is prevented by the absence of freedom of thought, freedom of expression and free elections, is, from the point of view of the criminal, the easiest to commit. Moreover, technical progress all over the world has harnessed almost every natural force in the service of mankind. His capacity to work evil has been considerably increased thereby.
M. CHARLES DUBOST (Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): Moral restraint has at the same time been relaxed by the pursuit of materialistic gratification which is also the corrupt fruit of material progress not controlled by intellect. Generally speaking, crime seems to be on the increase in every state, in spite of highly improved methods of repression. In the international scheme of things, the process is similar. The only difference is that it is on a larger scale, because as yet there is no international means of repression. The industrial revolution and the development of . natural sciences have multiplied the virtual power of states. If the state keeps in its own hands natural wealth and its exploitation, accentuates its grip on credit by monetary operations, increase in taxation, the levying of additional loans, whether voluntary or forced, if it binds its people even more firmly to it by developing public welfare institutions, and influences their mental life by means of radio propaganda, employing with this end in view eloquent propagandists capable of arousing the blind passions of the mob within men most peacefully disposed and most 29 July 46. widely scattered-if this state at the same time takes away from its opponents every possibility of expressing their views, prevents any control by the people and every form even of private criticism, it becomes an absolute ruler possessed of tremendous means of action for better or worse. Every criminal technique is within its reach and it can make unrestrained use of it unless, Gentlemen, you introduce the element of sanctions in international law. It must be possible henceforth to put an end to the criminal activities of a gangster state through the power of a superstate 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 as soon as states-and states alone-could possess methods of destruction against which the courage of individual citizens was unavailing.
M. CHARLES DUBOST (Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): Operated by a small number of men devoted to the criminal regime, those arms which are the property of the state can drown in blood the slightest attempts at resistance, and although revolt against tyranny is still the most sacred of duties, such revolt is now hopeless. This is the danger, and Germany succumbed to it. It is true that every favorable condition was present at the same time. Under the impulse of the industrial revolution which from 1850 onward was more violent in this country than in any other, social standards have changed enormously; and at the same time the population itself has changed from rural and agricultural to urban and industrial. This has resulted in a lowering of its mental level which has brought with it disastrous consequences, since the bourgeoisie had received no political education under the Empire. Deliberately kept at a distance from public affairs by their former rulers, the German masses, with regard to the industrialist upper class and proletariat, were interested only in the economic development of the Reich, and, with regard to the middle class, only in the Army and the future Reich. When, after the first World War, the Germans had to endure the disappointment of defeat; when to shabby and commonplace surroundings were added all the rancor and resentment described by the Defendant Goering at the beginning of his testimony, in addition to the bitter consciousness of social and material downfall; when youth in particular strove to make its hopes a concrete reality, Pan-Germanism awoke, was disseminated and brought down to the level of the mob and then came within reach of all the discontented elements. At the same time, the old antithesis between vital force and intellectualism, culture and civilization, healthy eagerness and decadent lassitude, the cult of life and the cult of intellect was brought to life and given definite shape for the use of simple and puerile minds in the form of the dynamic antithesis between the Nordic Aryan and the Semitic Jew.
M. CHARLES DUBOST (Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): With the help of appropriate education this biological materialism was easily imposed. The ground had long been prepared. The German is particularly attracted by inculcated doctrine because it alone can supply 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 universally acknowledged creed, a stereotyped phrase suitable for use on all occasions. For this reason, young Germans learned for their Abitur examination the six races admitted by Guenther just as they learned grammar, and no more dreamed of doubting the former than they doubted the latter. And when the German mentality accused nations as much alive and as strongly attached to their land, their traditions, and their flexible and varied human culture, as England and France, of being content to possess only a puny and artificial intellectual life, when it accused them with the crime against life-and Dr. Stahmer echoed this-the German mind created for itself, by reason of the coarse and facile creed which it claimed to impose upon all alike, an intellectualism differing from ours in its danger and its artificiality. The result of these so-called ethics of life was a practice and a doctrine of pure opportunism-collective or social, pseudoscientific, biological, materialistic-which resulted in the sterilization, the physiological observations made in the camps, and 12 million dead. The reflection of the old French philosopher comes irresistibly to our minds when we are confronted with this result: "Science without conscience is but ruin of the soul." A neo-Machiavellism, an example of which was afforded us by Goering in his statement, took root. I read lately somewhere in a final pleading that right in itself does not exist, and that efforts to establish a dividing line between right and wrong are guided by historical and national standards (Dr. Nelte).
M. CHARLES DUBOST (Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): Hitler had already said: "Right is what is profitable to the nation" and, according to his defense counsel, Frank paraphrased this statement as follows: "What is profitable for the people is right. Collective interests take precedence over individual interests." On reading this, I thought of the answer which would have been given by the absolutist, Bossuet, who knew how to determine human standards. The Defense Counsel compared French absolutism with Nazism. Here is my answer: "Politics sacrifice the individual to the common good, and this is right to a certain extent; it is good that one man should die for the people. By that, Caiaphas understood that an innocent person could be sentenced to the supreme penalty for the sake of the common good, which is never allowed, for, on the contrary, innocent blood cries for vengeance against those who shed it." We know what consequences the Nazi precepts could produce. The witness Roser reported the words of this young German soldier who, after describing a massacre in a ghetto, concluded: "Ah, my dear friend, it was horrible, but. . . an order is an order." The Tribunal will find Kramer's terrible words at the end of Document Number F-655, which is in one of the document books submitted by the French. Before he was made commandant of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Kramer commanded the Nataweiler Camp in Alsace, where he himself asphyxiated 80 persons by gas. This has been proved. In answer to the question: "What would you have done if they had not all been dead?" he said: "I should again have tried to asphyxiate them by letting a second dose of gas into the room. I did not feel any emotion while carrying out these acts, for I had received orders to execute the 80 internees in the way I told you. After all I have been trained in that way." What a terrible charge against the system! Before becoming a murderer by order, this man had been a bookkeeper in Augsburg. How many peaceful bookkeepers so trained are still in Germany today?
M. CHARLES DUBOST (Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): And now "innocent blood cries for vengeance." Conclusion: You know the crime! You know why and by what means it was perpetrated! This heinous and unprecedented crime is that of the National Socialist Party-State, but the defendants in their capacity as chiefs of the National Socialist Party and high State officials have all accepted major responsibility in the conception and perpetration of this crime. Their participation in the crime of the Party-State is their own personal fault and brings with it no claim whatsoever to immunity! Proof has now been brought against them! They must be punished; you know also the dangers to which the world is exposed by their crime and the misery and misfortune it has brought to mankind. You must hit hard without pity. It is enough that the verdict be just! To be sure, there are degrees in their guilt. Does it follow that there must be degrees in the penalties themselves, when those whom we consider the least guilty merit the death penalty! Tomorrow, this International Trial over and the principal war criminals sentenced, we shall go back to our own countries where we may have to prosecute before our own tribunals those who merely carried out the orders of the National Socialist State, who only played the part of hangman. How could we demand the death penalty for another Kramer, or another Hoess, or for the camp commandants who have on their conscience the deaths of millions of human creatures whom they killed by order, if we hesitated today to demand the supreme penalty for those who were the driving force of the criminal State which gave the orders. The fate of these men lies entirely with your conscience! It is now out of our hands, our task is finished. Now, it is for you in the silence of your deliberations to heed the voice of innocent blood crying for justice.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn. [The Tribunal recessed until 1400 hours.] Afternoon Session
THE PRESIDENT: I call on the chief prosecutor for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
GEN. RUDENKO: Your Lordship, Your Honors. We are summing up the results of the/legal proceedings against the major German war criminals. In the course of 9 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 a careful and detailed scrutiny. Not a single deed of which the defendants have been accused has been left without verification, not a single significant circumstance has been overlooked during the investigation of the present case. For the first time in the history of mankind criminals against humanity are being held responsible for their crimes before an international criminal tribunal; for the first time nations are trying those who have soaked large areas of the earth with blood, who have annihilated millions of innocent people, destroyed cultural treasures, instituted a systematic massacre and torture, exterminated old people, women, and children, and who in their mad desire for world domination have hurled the universe into an abyss of unprecedented misery. This Trial, to be sure, is the first of its kind in legal history. A tribunal is sitting in judgment, a tribunal created by the peaceloving free countries, who represent the desire of mankind for progress and to prevent the recurrence of calamities suffered, determined not to permit a gang of criminals to carry out with impunity their preparations for the enslavement of nations and the extermination of peoples in the realization of their fanatic plans. Mankind has called the criminals to account and we, the prosecutors, on behalf of all mankind, are the accusers at this Trial. And how pitiful are the efforts to dispute the right of mankind to judge its enemies, how vain the efforts to deprive nations of the right to punish those who made enslavement and genocide their aim, and who for many years strove to realize this criminal aim by criminal methods.
GEN. RUDENKO: The present Trial is being so conducted that the defendants, who are accused of the most heinous crimes, are given every possibility to defend themselves and are offered all the necessary legal guarantees. In their own country the defendants who stood at the helm of the Government destroyed all legal forms of justice, and discarded all the principles of legal procedure accepted by civilized mankind. But they themselves are being tried by an international court with legal guarantees to assure all the rights of defense. We are now summing up the results of the legal proceedings, we are drawing conclusions from the evidence examined before the Court, we are considering all the data upon which the accusation is based. We now ask: Were the charges levied against the defendants proved before the Court, has their guilt been established? There is only one answer to this question: The legal proceedings fully confirm the charges. We charge the defendants only with those facts which have been fully established and proved beyond all doubt in the course of the proceedings in which monstrous crimes have been proved, crimes which were prepared over a period of many years by a band of bragging criminals who had seized power in Germany, and who perpetrated these crimes over a period of many years, without regard for the principles of law or the most elementary standards of human morality. These crimes have been proved, the defendants' testimony and the arguments of the Defense have been powerless to refute the charges-they cannot be refuted because it is impossible to refute the truth, and truth is the enduring result of this Trial, the consequence of our long and stubborn efforts. The accusation has been proved in every detail. It has been proved that there existed a Common Plan or Conspiracy in which the defendants participated for the preparation of aggressive wars, in violation of international law and for the enslavement and extermination of peoples.
GEN. RUDENKO: There can be no doubt as to the existence of such a plan just as there is no doubt about the leading part played in it by the defendants. This point of the accusation is confirmed by all the data introduced during the legal proceedings by irrefutable documents, and by the testimonies of witnesses and of the defendants themselves. All the activities of the defendants were directed toward the preparation and the launching of aggressive wars. All their so-called "ideological work" consisted in the cultivation of bestial instincts, in the installation of the absurd idea of racial superiority in the conscience of the German people, and in the practical realization of their plans for the extermination and enslavement of peoples of "inferior" races, who were supposed only to serve for fertilizing the growth of the "master race." Their "ideological work" consisted in a call to murder, to plunder, to the destruction of culture, and to the extermination of human beings. The defendants prepared these crimes a long time in advance and then committed them by attacking other countries, seizing foreign territories and exterminating the population. When was this plan or conspiracy conceived? Of course, it is scarcely possible to give an exact date, day and hour on which the defendants conspired to commit their crimes. We cannot and shall not establish our conclusions and assertions on guesses and suppositions. But it must be considered as established beyond any possible doubt that from the moment when the fascists seized power in Germany they embarked on their criminal aims and utilized this power for the preparation of aggressive war. All the activity of the defendants was directed toward the preparation of Germany for war. The rearmament and reconversion of economy for war purposes is an irrefutable fact-it has been proved by documents and admitted by the defendants themselves. We may ask, what was this war for which the defendants began to~ prepare immediately after the seizure of power? Could this possibly be a defensive war?
GEN. RUDENKO: But then nobody intended attacking Germany; nobody had any idea of the kind, and-in my opinion- such an idea could not even have existed. Since Germany was not preparing for a defensive war and inasmuch as the very fact that she did prepare for war has been 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 this very war which she had been preparing, and in 1937-39 occurred precisely that for what she had been preparing since 1933. Hence the conclusion: The plan or the conspiracy existed at least since 1933, that is, from the moment when the fascists seized power and used it for their criminal purposes. These are the facts which are confirmed by the words of the defendants themselves uttered at a time when they did not expect that they would ever be defendants. It is enough to mention the speeches of Schacht, Krupp and others in which they describe how the fascist Government was preparing for war and how all fields of political and economic life were subjected to this one purpose. I consider as fully proved the charges against the defendants to the effect that in 1933, when the Hitlerites seized power in Germany, they created a plan or conspiracy for the perpetration of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The legal proceedings have unequivocally proved the crimes against peace committed by the defendants, which consisted in planning, preparing, initiating and waging aggressive wars, in violation of international treaties, agreements and assurances. Here the facts speak for themselves-wars which involved innumerable victims and destruction, wars whose aggressive nature has been undoubtedly established. The guilt of the defendants in the perpetration of crimes against peace has therefore been fully proved. The charge of perpetrating war crimes, in waging war by methods contrary to all laws and customs of war, has also been fully proved.
GEN. RUDENKO: Neither the defendants themselves, nor their defense counsel could raise any objections to the very fact of their having committed these crimes. All that they could say to this was that the defendants themselves had not committed these atrocities, as for instance the extermination of people in "murder vans" and concentration camps; they had not destroyed the Jews with their own hands, and some of them had not even known about such particular facts. But that such facts really did exist the defendants themselves do not deny. The defendants admit these facts. A fruitless method of defense! Certainly, the defendants occupying high leading posts in Hitler's Germany were in no need of personally shooting, hanging, smothering, freezing live people to death by way of an experiment, and so on. Their subordinates did that according to their instructions, their henchmen did the dirty work, so to speak, while the defendants only had to give orders which were obeyed without a murmur. Therefore, the attempts of the defendants to deny their connection with these henchmen, to detach themselves from them, were hopeless. This connection is evident and indisputable. If the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, extracted the gold teeth of the dead, we may say that the Reich Minister, Walter Funk, opened special vaults in the cellars of the Reichsbank in which to keep these gold teeth. If Kaltenbrunner's subordinates exterminated people in "murder vans," the vans themselves were built at the works of Saner, Daimler and Benz, who again were the subordinates of the Defendant Speer. If the prisoners of war were destroyed by professional henchmen of the Death's-Head unit and by the camp guards, the orders to exterminate were signed by Keitel, Generalfeldmarschall of the German Armed Forces. That is to say, it is the defendants who gave the sign for extermination, issued the orders to create a special murder technique, and explained!
GEN. RUDENKO: the ideological reasons for the right of the master races to exterminate "inferior races." It was they who calmly and ruthlessly watched the tortured victims and, as Hans Frank, delivered solemn speeches about "one more step forward" taken by German fascism toward ridding "the living space" of "the inferior races." The defendants are responsible for every murder, for every drop of innocent blood shed by Hitler's hangmen, for between them and the direct perpetrators of the crimes, murders, tortures, there is a difference only in rank and scope of action. Those are the direct hangmen, and these are the principal hangmen, hangmen of a higher rank. They are far more dangerous than those they trained, in the spirit of hatred toward humanity and cruelty, and whom they nosh, repudiate in order to save themselves. The criminality of the defendants in the perpetration of war crimes has been fully proved in the sense that they initiated a system of exterminating prisoners of war, peaceful inhabitants, women, old men, and children. It is their fault that wherever the German soldier stepped there lay the heaps of murdered and tortured people, ruins and places left barren by fire, devastated towns and villages and the land desecrated and soaked in blood. The crimes committed against humanity have been completely proved. We cannot omit the crimes committed by the defendants in Germany during their domination: The extermination of all those who in any way expressed their discontent with the Nazi regime, the slave labor and the extermination of human beings 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 irrefutable. What means of defense have the counsels used, what kind of proofs and arguments could they give to refute the charges? The arguments of the defendants may be divided into two main groups. First, a number of witnesses summoned by the Defense Counsel.