One of the first fellow-fighters of Adolf Hitler was the Defendant Rudolf Hess. Like Hitler, he was also a front-line soldier in the first World War. As a volunteer he joined at the outbreak of the war, and he had risen to the rank of infantry lieutenant when he was wounded in Romania. Incapacitated for the infantry through this wound, he enlisted in the Air Corps.
After the armistice, he fought with various volunteer corps. But in 1919, after the conclusion of the Versailles Peace Treaty, he had to recognize that the victors did not really desire a peace based on justice and a corresponding adjustment of interests. As could be expected, the terms of the Peace Treaty of Versailles, and especially the burden of the reparations on the already seriously affected German economy, had to have...
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Seidl, it may be difficult for you to cut out of your speech the various references to the topics which I have referred to; but you must kindly try to do it. For if you continue to refer to the topics to which I have referred, namely the justice or the legality of the Treaty of Versailles, the Tribunal will have to stop your speech and go on with some of the other defendants.
DR. SEIDL: Mr. President, the subject I was just dealing with was not a question of justice or legality but a question of the consequences and referred to the investigation of the causal connection. If the Prosecution, in weeks of presenting evidence, showed how the rise of the National Socialist Party came about and how the numbers of its mandates increased...
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Seidl, those are all facts which the Prosecution is perfectly entitled to prove. What you are now referring to is an argument that certain clauses of the Versailles Treaty were unjust. And that is an argument which the Tribunal is not prepared to listen to. It is not a statement of fact; it is an argument.
DR. SEIDL: Of course, it is an argument...
THE PRESIDENT: I have said that it is an argument we are not going to listen to. If you do not understand what I mean, you will have to stop continuing your speech. Do you understand that?
DR. SEIDL: Page 8, then, if you please.
When in 1925 the Party was founded anew, Rudolf Hess was once more one of the first...
It is impossible, Mr. President, to continue my speech, because all the following statements are concerned with the question: What did the Defendant Hess do up to the seizure of power? And I must say and have said that the mainspring of his activity within the Party and the German people consisted in achieving a revision of the Versailles Treaty and its most unbearable terms. This is the very question of the whole National Socialist movement up to 1933.