These operations are supposedly measures of reprisal which were caused by the action of the Resistance. But the necessities of war have never justified the plundering and heedless burning down of towns and villages nor the blind massacres of innocent people. The Germans killed, plundered, burned down, very often without any reason whatsoever, whether in Ain, in Savoie, Lot, or Tarn-and-Garonne, in Vercors, Corréze, in Dordogne. Entire villages were burned down at a time when the nearest armed groups of the Resistance were tens of kilometers away and the population of these villages had not made a single hostile gesture towards the German troops.
The two most typical examples are those of Maillé (in Indre-et-Loire) where on 25 August 1944, 52 buildings out of 60 were destroyed and 124 people were killed; and that of Oradour-sur-Glane (in the Haute-Vienne). The war diary of Von Brodowski makes mention of the latter act in the following manner:
“All the male population of Oradour was shot. The women and children took refuge in the church. The church caught fire. Explosives were stored in the church. (This assertion has been shown to be false.) Also women and children perished.”
In the scale of criminal undertakings, perpetrated in the course of the war by the leaders of National Socialist Germany, we finally meet a category which we have called crimes against human status (la condition humaine).
First of all it is important that I should define clearly for the Tribunal the meaning of this term. This classical French expression belongs both to the technical vocabulary of law and to the language of philosophy. It signifies all those faculties, the exercising and developing of which rightly constitute the meaning of human life. Each of these faculties finds its corresponding expression in the order of man’s existence in society. His belonging to at least two social groups—the nearest and the most extensive—is translated by the right to family life and to nationality. His relations with the powers constitute a system of obligations and guarantees. His material life, as producer and consumer of goods, is expressed by the right to work in the widest meaning of this term. Its spiritual aspect implies a combination of possibilities to give out and to receive the expressions of thought, whether in assemblies or associations, in religious practice, in teachings given or received, by the many means which progress has put at the disposal for the dissemination of intellectual value: Books, press, radio, cinema. This is the right of spiritual liberty.
Against this human status, against the status of public and civil rights of the human beings in occupied territories, the German Nazis directed a systematic policy of corruption and demoralization. We shall treat this question last because it is this undertaking which presents a character of the utmost gravity and which has assumed the most widespread prevalence. Man is more attached to his physical integrity and to life than to his property. But in all high conceptions of life, man is even less attached to life than to that which makes for his dignity and quality, according to the great Latin maxim, “Et propter vitam, vivendi perdere causas.” On the other hand, if, in the territories occupied by them, the Germans did not, in spite of the importance and extent of their crimes, plunder all the property and goods and if they did not kill all the people, there remains not a single man whose essential rights they did not change or abolish and whose condition as a human being they did not violate in some way.
We can even say that in the entire world and as regards all people, even those to whom they reserved the privileges belonging to the superior race and even as regards themselves, their agents, and accomplices, the Nazi leaders committed a major offense against the conscience which mankind has today evolved from his status as a human being. The execution of the enterprise was preceded by its plan. This is manifest in the entire Nazi doctrine and we shall content ourselves by recalling a few of its dominant features. The human status expresses itself, we say, in major statutes, every one of which comprises a complex apparatus of very different provisions. But these statutes are inspired in the laws of civilized countries by a conception essential to the nature of man. This conception is defined in two complementary ideas: The dignity of the human being considered in each and every person individually, on the one hand; and on the other hand, the permanence of the human being considered within the whole of humanity. Every juridical organization of the human being in a state of civilization proceeds from this essential, two-fold conception of the individual, in each and in all, the individual and the universal.
Without doubt, to Occidentals this conception usually appears connected with the Christian doctrine; but, if it is exact that Christianity is bound up with its affirmation and diffusion, it would be a mistake to see in it only the teachings of one or even of certain religions. It is a general conception which imposes itself quite naturally on the spirit; It was professed since ancient pre-Christian times; and, in more recent times, the great German philosopher Kant expressed it in one of his most forceful formulas, by saying that a human being should always be considered as an end and never a means.
The role, as we have already exposed, of the zealots of the Hitlerian myth was to protest against the spontaneous affirmation of the genius of mankind and to pretend to break at this point the continuous progress of moral intelligence. The Tribunal is already acquainted with the abundant literature of this sect. Without a doubt, nobody expressed himself more clearly than the Defendant Rosenberg when he declared in the Myth of the 20th Century, Page 539:
“Peoples whose health is dependent on their blood do not know individualism as a criterion of values any more than they recognize universalism. Individualism and universalism in the absolute sense and historically speaking, are the ideological concepts of decadence.”