Mr. Justice Jackson has given you the details of the various phases and aspects of the National Socialist plot, its planning and its development, from the first days of the conspiracy of Hitler and his companions to rise to power, until the unleashing of innumerable crimes in a Europe almost entirely at their mercy.
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 thousands 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. 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 modern 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. 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.