The government of a totalitarian country may be carried on without representatives of the people, but it cannot be carried on without any assistance at all. It is no use having a leader unless there are also people willing and ready to serve their personal greed and ambition by helping and following him. The dictator who is set up in control of the destinies of his country does not depend on himself alone either in acquiring power or in maintaining it. He depends upon the support and the backing which lesser men, themselves lusting to share in dictatorial power, anxious to bask in the adulation of their leader, are prepared to give.
In the criminal courts of our countries, when men are put on their trial for breaches of the municipal laws, it not infrequently happens that of a gang indicted together in the dock, one has the master mind, the leading personality. But it is no excuse for the common thief to say, “I stole because I was told to steal”, for the murderer to plead, “I killed because I was asked to kill.” And these men are in no different position, for all that it was nations they sought to rob, and whole peoples which they tried to kill. “The warrant of no man excuseth the doing of an illegal act.” Political loyalty, military obedience are excellent things, but they neither require nor do they justify the commission of patently wicked acts. There comes a point where a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his conscience. Even the common soldier, serving in the ranks of his army, is not called upon to obey illegal orders. But these men were no common soldiers: They were the men whose skill and cunning, whose labor and activity made it possible for the German Reich to tear up existing treaties, to enter into new ones and to flout them, to reduce international negotiations and diplomacy to a hollow mockery, to destroy all respect for and effect in international law and, finally, to march against the peoples of the world to secure that domination in which, as arrogant members of their self-styled master race, they professed to believe.
If these crimes were in one sense the crimes of Nazi Germany, they also are guilty as the individuals who aided, abetted, counselled, procured, and made possible the commission of what was done.
The total sum of the crime these men have committed—so awful in its comprehension—has many aspects. Their lust and sadism, their deliberate slaughter and degradation of so many millions of their fellow creatures that the imagination reels, are but one side of this matter. Now that an end has been put to this nightmare, and we come to consider how the future is to be lived, perhaps their guilt as murderers and robbers is of less importance and of less effect to future generations of mankind than their crime of fraud—the fraud by which they placed themselves in a position to do their murder and their robbery. That is the other aspect of their guilt. The story of their “diplomacy”, founded upon cunning, hypocrisy, and bad faith, is a story less gruesome no doubt, but no less evil and deliberate. And should it be taken as a precedent of behavior in the conduct of international relations, its consequences to mankind will no less certainly lead to the end of civilized society.
Without trust and confidence between nations, without the faith that what is said is meant and that what is undertaken will be observed, all hope of peace and security is dead. The Governments of the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, of the United States of America, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and of France, backed by and on behalf of every other peace-loving nation of the world, have therefore joined to bring the inventors and perpetrators of this Nazi conception of international relationship before the bar of this Tribunal. They do so, so that these defendants may be punished for their crimes. They do so, also, that their conduct may be exposed in all its naked wickedness and they do so in the hope that the conscience and good sense of all the world will see the consequences of such conduct and the end to which inevitably it must always lead. Let us once again restore sanity and with it also the sanctity of our obligations towards each other.
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Attorney, would it be convenient to the prosecutors from Great Britain to continue?
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: The proposal was that my friend, Mr. Sidney Alderman, should continue with the presentation of the case with regard to the final acts of aggression against Czechoslovakia and that that being done, my British colleagues would continue with the presentation of the British case. As the Tribunal will appreciate, Counts One and Two are in many respects complementary, and my American colleagues and ourselves are working in closest cooperation in presenting the evidence affecting those counts.
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Alderman, would it be convenient for you to go on until 5 o’clock?
MR. ALDERMAN: Yes. May it please the Tribunal, it is quite convenient for me to proceed. I can but feel that it will be quite anticlimactic after the address which you just heard.
When the Tribunal rose yesterday afternoon, I had just completed an outline of the plans laid by the Nazi conspirators in the weeks immediately following the Munich Agreement. These plans called for what the German officials called “the liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia.” You will recall that 3 weeks after Munich, on 21 October, the same day on which the administration of the Sudetenland was handed over to the civilian authorities, Hitler and Keitel had issued an order to the Armed Forces. This document is C-136, Exhibit USA-104.