Then my friends and colleagues of the French Delegation, M. Herzog, M. Faure and M. Gerthoffer, submitted documents establishing that the defendants, who all in various positions counted among the leaders of Nazi Germany, are responsible for the repeated violations of the laws and customs of war committed by men of the Reich in the course of military operations. However, it still remains for us to expose the atrocities of which men, women, and children of the occupied countries of the west were victims.

We intend at this point to prove that the defendants, in their capacity as leaders of Hitlerite Germany, systematically pursued a policy of extermination, the cruelty of which increased from day to day until the final defeat of Germany; that the defendants planned, conceived, willed, and prescribed these atrocities as part of a system which was to enable them to accomplish a political aim. It is this political aim which closely binds all the facts we intend to present to you. The crimes perpetrated against people and property, as presented so far by my colleagues of the French Prosecution, were in close connection with the war. They had the distinct character of war crimes stricto sensu. Those which I shall present to you surpass them both in meaning and extent. They form part of the plans of a policy of domination, of expansion, beyond war itself.

It is Hitler himself who gave the best definition of this policy in one of his speeches in Munich on 16 May 1927. He was deceiving his listeners about the danger that France, an agricultural country of only 40 million inhabitants, might represent for Germany, which was already a highly-industrialized country with a population of nearly 70 million. That day Hitler said:

“There is only one way for Germany to escape encirclement; and it is the destruction of the state which, by the natural order of things, will always be her mortal enemy: that is France. When a nation is aware that its whole existence is endangered by an enemy, it must aim at one thing only: the annihilation of that enemy.”

During the first months that followed their victory, the Germans seemed to have abandoned their plan of annihilation; but this was only a tactical pretense. They hoped to draw into their war against England and the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics the western nations they had enslaved. By doses of treachery and violence, they attempted to make these western nations take the road of collaboration. The latter resisted; and the defendants then abandoned their tactics and came back to their big scheme, the annihilation of conquered peoples in order to secure in Europe the space necessary for the 250 million Germans whom they hoped to settle there in generations to come.

This destruction, this annihilation—I repeat the very words used by Hitler in his speech—was undertaken under various pretenses; the elimination of inferior, or negroid races; the extermination of bolshevism; the destruction of Jewish-Masonic influences hostile to the founding of the pseudo “New European Order.”

In fact, this destruction, this elimination, conduced to the assassination of the elite and vital forces opposed to the Nazis; it also led to the reduction of the means of livelihood of the enslaved nations.

All of this was done, as I shall prove to you, in execution of a deliberate plan, the existence of which is confirmed, among other things, by the repetition and the immutability of the same facts in all the occupied countries.

Faced with this repetition and this immutability, it is no longer possible to claim that only the one who performed the crime was guilty. This repetition and this immutability prove that the same criminal will united all the members of the German Government, all the leaders of the German Reich.

It is from this common will that the official policy of terrorism and extermination, which directed the strokes of the executioners, was born; and it is for having participated in the creation of this common will that each of the defendants here present has been placed in the ranks of major war criminals.