These crimes flow directly, like the war itself, from the National Socialist doctrine. This doctrine is indifferent to the moral choice of means to attain a final success, and for this doctrine the aim of war is pillage, destruction, and extermination.
Total war, totalitarian war in its methods and its aims, is dictated by the primacy of the German race and the negation of any other value. The Nazi conception maintains selection as a natural principle. The man who does not belong to the superior race counts for nothing. Human life and even less liberty, personality, the dignity of man, have no importance when an adversary of the German community is involved. It is truly “the return to barbarism” with all its consequences. Logically consistent, National Socialism goes to the length of assuming the right, either to exterminate totally races judged hostile or decadent, or to subjugate or put to use individuals and groups capable of resistance, in the nations. Does not the idea of totalitarian war imply the annihilation of any eventual resistance? All those who, in any way, may be capable of opposing the New Order and the German hegemony will be liquidated. It will thus become possible to assure an absolute domination over a neighboring people that has been reduced to impotence and to utilize, for the benefit of the Reich, the resources and the human material of those people reduced to slavery.
All the moral conceptions which tended to make war more humane are obviously outdated, and the more so, all international conventions which had undertaken to bring some extenuation of the evils of war.
The conquered peoples must concur, willingly or by force, in the German victory by their material resources, as well as by their labor potential. Means will be found to subject them.
The treatment to which the occupied countries will be subjected is likewise related to this war aim. One could read in Deutsche Volkskraft of 13 June 1935 that the totalitarian war will end in a totalitarian victory. “Totalitarian” signifies the entire destruction of the conquered nation and its complete and final disappearance from the historic scene.
Among the conquered peoples distinctions can be made according to whether or not the National Socialists consider them as belonging to the Master Race. For the former, an effort is made to integrate them into the German Reich against their will. For the latter, there is applied a policy of weakening them and bringing about their extinction by every means, from that of appropriation of their property to that of extermination of their persons. In regard to both groups, the Nazi rulers assault not only the property and physical persons, but also the spirits and souls. They seek to align the populations according to the Nazi dogma and behavior, when they wish to integrate them in the German community; they apply themselves at least to rooting out whatever conceptions are irreconcilable with the Nazi universe; they aim to reduce to a mentality and status of slaves, those men whose nationality they wish to eradicate for the benefit of the German race.
Inspired by these general conceptions as to the conduct to be observed in occupied countries, the defendants gave special orders or general directives or deliberately identified themselves with such. Their responsibility is that of perpetrators, co-perpetrators, or accomplices in the War Crimes systematically committed between 1 September 1939 and 8 May 1945 by Germany at war. They deliberately willed, premeditated, and ordered these crimes, or knowingly associated themselves with this policy of organized criminality.
We shall expose the various aspects of this policy of criminality as it was pursued in the occupied countries of Western Europe, by dealing successively with Forced Labor, Economic Looting, Crimes against Persons, and Crimes against Mankind.
The conception of total war, which gave rise to all the crimes which were to be perpetrated by the Nazi Germans in the occupied countries, was the basis for the forced labor service. Through this institution, Germany proposed to utilize to the maximum the labor potential of the enslaved populations in order to maintain the German war production at the necessary level. Moreover, there can be no doubt that this institution was linked with the German plan of “extermination through labor” of the populations adjoining Germany which she regarded as dangerous or inferior.
A document of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of Germany, dated 1 October 1938, provided for the forced employment of prisoners and civilians for war labor. Hitler in his speech of 9 November 1941 “did not doubt for a moment that, in the occupied territories which we control at present, we shall make the last man work for us.” From 1942 on, it is under the admitted responsibility of the Defendant Sauckel, acting together with the Defendant Speer, under the control of the Defendant Göring, General Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan, that obligatory foreign labor, for the benefit of the war conducted by Germany, was developed to the full.