The establishment and use of concentration camps was founded, according to the defendant’s ideas at the time, on the revolutionary conviction inherent in the victorious Movement that it was the sole expression of historical truth, that it alone represented the right path, and that therefore everything was wrong that stood in its way.
There was no political discussion of the right political concept based on logical arguments, as in ideologically neutral liberalism; there was only the totalitarian establishment of a popular regime based on creed as the historically necessary truth.
Any person not caught up by this Movement but; on the contrary, opposing it, was therefore to be removed as an enemy of the true order. Under such conditions, the person concerned could not simply be punished for an infringement of specific rules in the traditional course of justice; but, according to the opinion of the National Socialist Government, he deliberately segregated himself from the newly found community of the people and from every foundation for any legal institution. He had therefore to be removed. There was, accordingly, no question of punishment but of a political purge based on ideological intolerance. Therefore no tribunal or administrative procedure was allowed on behalf of the persons concerned for the examination of the police proceedings. The individual who excluded himself from the community was not entitled to legal guarantees which the Constitution provided for his fellow countrymen. And a fellow countryman was he only who recognized such a community. In handling enemies of the people not only legal principles were applied, but also the viewpoint of the necessities of state.
Since it was an act of political expediency, the Defendant Göring could decide in some cases on his own responsibility that there was no necessity for further confinement and could use all his influence to procure the liberation of individuals who did not endanger the security of the state. In that case it was not a question of an act of grace breaking through any legal principle, neither was it tantamount to an acknowledgement of an injustice done to the other persons concerned; it simply was an act undertaken from the point of view of expediency, each case being decided on its own merits.
Such principles in handling elements which fail to fit into a totalitarian political rule are by no means specifically National Socialist; they also dominate the policy of the victor countries toward the conquered German population. Anyone who does not obey the newly arising democratic order in Germany, even anyone of whom an essential opposition to democracy can be expected because he was grounded in National Socialism before, is now interned. Whereas—according to Document R-129 of the Prosecution—21,000 people were in concentration camps at the beginning of the war in Nazi Germany, more than 300,000 National Socialists and militarists are held in internment camps in the U.S. Zone alone, according to figures published by the occupation powers.
A recently published decree of the Länderrat in the American occupation zone confirms the fact that such acts of political purging are not legal but political acts. This decree removes from the authority of the administration of justice and transfers to the authority of the general administration of the State all workers’ camps in which are interned Nazis who have been sentenced to forced labor on account of their Party membership; and this decree is issued because these camps are foreign to the administration of justice.
Those were the only considerations which influenced the Defendant Göring when he created concentration camps in 1933 and issued laws concerning the Secret State Police. These were intended to be, as he conceived them, a means of cleansing and strengthening the young community of the people. He did not aim at a definite annihilation of political enemies but, after a certain period of education, interceded generously for their release and discharged, at Christmas 1933, about 5,000 and in September 1934 about 2,000 prisoners.
He vigorously counteracted inevitable abuses and errors which he openly admitted in the book he published in 1934, intended for the British public, The Building of a Nation. For example, he permitted the Communist leader Thälmann personally to report to him about his complaints in the concentration camp and took care to have them remedied. He dissolved the so-called “wild” camps of Stettin and Breslau, punished the Gauleiter of Pomerania who had organized this camp without his knowledge and against his will, and had those responsible for these “wild” concentration camps brought to trial for their infringements of the regulations.
This attitude of the Defendant Göring denotes that he never intended the actual physical annihilation of the prisoners. If the Prosecution establishes that this was all in execution of a conspiracy which aimed at committing Crimes against Humanity, such an interpretation has no bearing on the actual political life during the years in question. Such a conspiracy did not exist, nor was it the intention of the defendant to commit crimes against the principles of humanity, nor did he commit any such crimes. As one of the political trustees of the German Government, he felt himself bound to safeguard it against dangerous disturbers of the peace and thereby to guarantee the future of the National Socialist way of life. Far from looking upon such measures as criminal, he considered them, on the contrary, to be the inevitable means of consolidating the political order as a basis of all law.
In 1936 the leadership of the Police, and therefore the management of the concentration camps, passed from the defendant to the Reichsführer SS; Heinrich Himmler. The defendant cannot be held responsible for the subsequent development of the concentration camps nor for the fact that they became, especially after the outbreak of the war, more and more gruesome places of torture and death and led—partly intentionally, partly on account of the chaotic war conditions—to the death of countless people and finally, in the last days before the breakdown of Germany, turned into one vast graveyard.