Remember, gentlemen, the words of Göring when he said: “If famine is to reign, it will not reign in Germany.”
Secondly I should say to my adversaries if they made such an objection: The Germans and their Nazi leaders wanted the war which they launched, but they had no right to starve other peoples in order to carry out their attempt at world domination. If today they are in a difficult situation, it is the result of their own behavior; and they seem to me to have no right to take recourse to the famous sentence: “I did not want that.”
I am coming to the end of my statement. If you will permit me, gentlemen, I will conclude in two minutes the whole of this presentation by reminding the Tribunal in a few words what the premeditated crime was, of which the German leaders have been accused, from the economic point of view.
The application of racial and living space theories was bound to engender an economic situation which could not be solved and force the Nazi leaders to war.
In a modern society because of the division of labor, of its concentration, and of its scientific organization, the concept of national capital takes on more and more a primary importance, whatever may be the social principles of its distribution between nationals, or its possession in all or in part by states.
Now, a national capital, public or private, is constituted by the joint effort of the labor and the savings of successive generations.
Saving, or the putting into reserve of the products of labor as a result of deprivations freely consented to, must exist in proportion to the needs of the concentration of the industrial enterprises of the country.
In Germany, a country highly-industrialized, this equilibrium did not exist. In fact, the expenditures, private or public, of that country surpassed its means; saving was insufficient. The establishment of a system of obligatory savings was formulated only through the creation of new taxes and has never replaced true savings.
As a result of the war of 1914-1918, after having freed herself of the burden of reparations (and I must point out that two-thirds of the sum remained charged to France as far as this country is concerned), Germany, who had established her gold reserve in 1926, began a policy of foreign loans and spent without counting the cost. Finding it impossible to keep her agreements, she found no more creditors.
After Hitler’s accession to power her policy became more definite. She isolated herself in a closed economic system, utilizing all her resources for the preparation of a war which would permit her, or at least that is what she hoped, to take through force the property of her western neighbors and then to turn against the Soviet Union in the hope of exploiting, for her profit, the immense wealth of that great country. It is the application of the theories formulated in Mein Kampf, which had as a corollary the enslavement and then the extermination of the populations of conquered countries.