To the Royal Military Court, Berlin:
In the investigation of the case against me, the records of remarks need the following elucidation:
I. The German Government is in its social and historical character an instrument for the crushing down and exploitation of the laboring classes; at home and abroad it serves the interests of junkerism, of capitalism, and of imperialism.
The German Government is a reckless champion of expansion in world politics, the most ardent promoter in the competition of armaments, and accordingly one of the most powerful influences in developing the causes of the present war.
In partnership with the Austrian Government the German Government contrived to bring about this war and so burdened itself with the greatest responsibility for the immediate outbreak of the war.
The German Government started the war under cover of deception practiced upon the common people and even upon the Reichstag (compare, among other things, the concealment of the ultimatum to Belgium, the make-up of the German White Book, the elimination of the Czar's dispatch of July 29, 1914), and it tries by reprehensible means to keep up the war spirit among the people.
It carries on the war with methods that, judged even by standards hitherto conventional, are monstrous. The invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg, poisonous gases, which in the meantime have become of common use by all the belligerents, and then look at the Zeppelin bombs, which outdo everything and which are intended to kill all that live, combatants or non-combatants, within a wide region; submarine commerce warfare; the torpedoing of the Lusitania, etc.; the system of hostages and forced contributions at the beginning, especially in Belgium; the systematic entrapping of Ukrainian, Georgian, Baltic Provincials, Polish, Irish, Mohammedan, and other prisoners of war in the German prison camps for the purpose of having them do treasonable war service and treasonable spying for the Central Powers; Under-Secretary Zimmerman's agreement with Sir Roger Casement in December, 1914, regarding the organization, equipment, and training in the German prison camps of the "Irish Brigade," composed of captured British soldiers; the attempts by means of threats of forcible interment to compel Christians of a hostile nationality found in Germany to do treasonable war service against their countries, and so forth. (Necessity knows no law!)
The German Government has, through the establishment of martial law, enormously increased the political lawlessness and economic exploitations of the people; it refuses all serious political and social reforms, while at the same time it tries to hold the people docile for the imperialistic war policy, by means of rhetorical phrases about equal rights accorded to all parties, about alleged discontinuation of discriminations in social and political matters, about an alleged readjustment and new direction of political matters, and so on.
The German Government because of its consideration for agrarian and capitalists' interests has completely failed to care for the economic welfare of the people during the war, to guard against misery and the practice of revolting extortion upon the people.
The German Government is still holding fast to its war aims and so constitutes the chief obstacle in the way of immediate peace negotiations upon the basis of renunciation of annexations and oppressions of all sorts: Through the maintenance—in itself illegal—of martial law (censorship, etc.) it prevents the public from learning unpleasant facts and prevents Socialist criticism of its measures. The German Government thereby reveals its system of seeming legality and sham popularity as a system of actual force, of genuine hostility to the people and bad faith as regards the masses.