No less did the Germanization program compromise human rights in the other broad aspects that we have defined: Right of the family, right of professional and economic activity, juridical guarantees. These rights were attacked; these guarantees were curtailed. The forced labor and the deportations infringed the rights of the family, as well as the rights of labor. The arbitrary arrests suppressed the most elementary legal guarantees. In addition, the Germans tried to impose their own methods on the administrative authorities of the occupied countries and sometimes unfortunately succeeded in their attempts.
It is also known that racial discriminations were provoked against citizens of the occupied countries who were catalogued as Jews, measures particularly hateful, damaging to their personal rights and to their human dignity.
All these criminal acts were committed in violation of the rules of international law, and in particular the Hague Convention, which limits the rights of armies occupying a territory.
The fight of the Nazis against the human status completes the tragic and monstrous totality of war criminality of Nazi Germany, by placing her under the banner of the abasement of man, deliberately brought about by the National Socialist doctrine. This gives it its true character of a systematic undertaking of a return to barbarism.
Such are the crimes which National Socialist Germany committed while waging the war of aggression that she launched. The martyred peoples appeal to the justice of civilized nations and request Your High Tribunal to condemn the National Socialist Reich in the person of its surviving chiefs.
Let the defendants not be astonished at the charges brought against them and let them not dispute at all this principle of retroactivity, the permanence of which was guaranteed, against their wishes, by democratic legislation. War Crimes are defined by international law and by the national law of all modern civilizations. The defendants knew that acts of violence against the persons and property and human status of enemy nationals were crimes for which they would have to answer before international justice.
The Governments of the United Nations have addressed many a warning to them since the beginning of the hostilities.
On 25 October 1941 Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, and Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, announced that the war criminals would not escape just punishment:
“The massacres of France”—said Churchill—“are an example of what Hitler’s Nazis are doing in many other countries under their yoke. The atrocities committed in Poland, Yugoslavia, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and particularly behind the German front in Russia, exceed anything that has been known since the darkest and most bestial ages of humanity. The punishment of these crimes should now be counted among the major goals of the war.”
During autumn 1941 the representatives of the governments of the occupied countries met in London upon the initiative of the Polish and Czech Governments. They worked out an inter-Allied declaration which was signed on 13 January 1942. May I remind the Tribunal of its terms: