Every civilized nation had been impregnated with a common humanism, growth of a long tradition, Christian and liberal. Based on this common heritage and achieved at the price of given experience, each nation, enlightened by the well-conceived interests of man, had understood or was coming to understand that in public as in private affairs loyalty, moderation, and mutual aid were golden rules which none could transgress indefinitely and with impunity.
The defeat, the catastrophe which has fallen upon Germany confirm us in this thought and give only more meaning and more clarity to the solemn warning addressed to the American people by President Roosevelt in his address on 27 May 1940:
“Although our Navy, our guns, and our planes are the first line of defense, it is certain that back of all of that there is the spirit and the morality of a free people which give to their material defense power, support, and efficiency. . . .”
And in this struggle, the echoes of which are still rumbling in our ears, it was indeed those who could rest their strength upon law, nourish their force with justice, who won out. But because we have followed step by step the development of the criminal madness of the defendants and the consequences of that madness throughout these last years, we must conclude that the patrimony of man, of which we are the recipients, is frail indeed, that all kinds of regressions are possible, and that we must with care watch over their heritage. There is not a nation which, ill-educated, badly led by evil masters, would not in the long run revert to the barbarity of the early ages.
The German people whose military virtue we recognize, whose poets and musicians we love, whose application to work we admire, and who did not fail to give examples of probity in the most noble works of the spirit; this German people, which came rather late to civilization, beginning only with the eighth century, had slowly raised itself to the ranks of nations possessing the oldest culture. The contribution to modern or contemporary thought seemed to prove that this conquest of the spirit was final; Kant, Goethe, Johann Sebastian Bach belong to humanity just as much as Calvin, Dante, or Shakespeare; nevertheless, we behold the fact that millions of innocent men have been exterminated on the very soil of this people, by men of this people, in execution of a common plan conceived by their leaders, and this people made not a single effort to revolt.
This is what has become of it because it has scorned the virtues of political freedom, of civic equality, of human fraternity. This is what has become of it, because it forgot that all men are born free and equal before the law, that the essential action of a state has for its purpose the deeper and deeper penetration of a respect for spiritual liberty and fraternal solidarity in social relations and in international institutions.
It allowed itself to be robbed of its conscience and its very soul. Evil masters came who awakened its primitive passions and made possible the atrocities which I have described to you. In truth, the crime of these men is that they caused the German people to retrogress more than 12 centuries.
Their crime is that they conceived and achieved, as an instrument of government, a policy of terrorism toward the whole of the subjugated nations and toward their own people; their crime is that they pursued, as an end in itself, a policy of extermination of entire categories of innocent citizens. That alone would suffice to determine capital punishment. And still, the French Prosecution, represented by M. Faure, intends to present proof of a still greater crime, the crime of attempting “to obliterate from the world certain ideas which are called liberty, independence, security of nations, which are also called faith in the given word and respect for the human person,” the crime of having attempted to kill the very soul, the spirit of France and other occupied nations in the West. We consider that to be the gravest crime committed by these men, the gravest because it is written in the Scriptures, Matthew, XII, 31-32:
“All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men, but the blasphemy unto the Spirit shall not be forgiven unto men. Whosoever speaketh against the Spirit shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, nor in the world to come. . . . For the tree is known by its fruit. Race of vipers, how could ye speak good words when ye are evil. . . .”
THE PRESIDENT: [To M. Faure of the French Delegation] Yes, M. Faure.