The Defendant Keitel and his assistant, the Defendant Jodl, are responsible for treatment contrary to the laws of war inflicted upon war prisoners, for murders and killings to which they were subjected, as well as for handing over great numbers of them to the Gestapo. The Defendant Göring shares their responsibility for the execution of Allied aviators and soldiers belonging to the commando groups. The Defendant Sauckel directed the work of war prisoners for the German war production in violation of international law.
The Defendant Keitel and the Defendant Kaltenbrunner both bear the chief responsibility for the terrorist actions carried out jointly by the German Army and the police forces in the various occupied countries and notably in France against the Resistance, as well as for the devastations and massacres carried out against the civilian population of several French departments. The Defendant Jodl shares in this responsibility, most particularly through his initial order, “Fight against Partisan Bands,” dated 6 May 1944, which provides for “collective measures against the inhabitants of entire villages.” These blows against mankind are the result of racial theories of which the Defendant Hess, the Defendant Rosenberg, and the Defendant Streicher are among the instigators or propagandists. The Defendant Hess participated notably in the elaboration of this subject, which is found in Mein Kampf.
The Defendant Rosenberg, one of the principal theorists of racial doctrine, exercised the function of special delegate for the spiritual and ideological training of the Nazi Party. The Defendant Streicher showed himself to be one of the most violent anti-Semitic agitators. In the execution of the policy of Germanization and Nazification responsibility is shared between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that is to say, the Defendant Ribbentrop; the General Staff, that is, the Defendants Keitel and Jodl; the Central Office for all the occupied territories, that is, the Defendant Frick.
The major National Socialist culprits had their orders carried out in the divers Nazi organizations, which we ask you to declare criminal, in order that each of their members may be then apprehended and punished.
The Reich Cabinet, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the General Staff, the High Command of the German Armed Forces represent only a small number of persons whose guilt and punishment must ultimately result from the evidence, since they participated personally and directly in the decisions, or ensured their execution through some eminent person in the political or military hierarchy, and without being able to ignore their criminal nature.
The leaders of the Nazi Party are unquestionably in the forefront of those who participated in the criminal enterprise, and around the Defendants Keitel and Jodl the military High Command directed the Army to the execution of hostages, to pillage, to wanton destruction, and to massacres.
But perhaps it will seem to you that the punishment of hundreds of thousands of men who belonged to the SS, to the SD, to the Gestapo, to the SA, will give rise to some objection. I should like to try, should this be the case, to do away with that objection by showing you the dreadful responsibilities of these men. Without the existence of these organizations, without the spirit which animated them, one could not understand how so many atrocities could have been perpetrated. The systematic War Crimes could not have been carried out by Nazi Germany without these organizations, without the men who composed them. It is they who not only executed but willed this body of crimes on behalf of Germany.
It may have seemed impossible to you that the monstrous barbarity of the National Socialist doctrine could have been imposed upon the German people, the heir, as are our people, of the highest values of civilization. The education by the Nazi Party of the young men who formed the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo, explains the hold Nazism exercised over all Germany. They incarnated National Socialism, and permitted it to accomplish, thanks to the guilty passiveness of the whole German population, a part of its purpose. This youth, those who carried out the tenets of the regime, were trained in a veritable doctrine of immoralism, which results from the ideology that inspired the regime. The myth of the race removed from war in the eyes of these disciples of Nazism its criminal character.
If it is proved that a superior race is to annihilate races and peoples that are considered inferior and decadent, incapable of living a life as it should be lived, before what means of extermination will they recoil? This is the ethics of immorality, the result of the most authentic Nietzscheism, which considers that the destruction of all conventional ethics is the supreme duty of man. The crime against race is punished without pity. The crime on behalf of race is exalted without limit. The regime truly creates a logic of crime which obeys its own laws, which has no connection whatsoever with what we consider ethical. With such a point of view, all horrors could have been justified and authorized. So many acts which appear incomprehensible to us, so greatly do they clash with our customary notions, were explained, were formulated in advance in the name of the racial community.
Add that these atrocities and these cruelties were perpetrated within the rigid framework created by the “esprit de corps,” by the soldierly solidarity which bound individuals and insured the legitimacy of the crime an unlimited field of action. The individuals who committed them would not only be covered by the regime itself, but spurred on by the discipline and the “camaraderie” of these corps, imbued with Nazi criminality.