Therefore it is not even necessary to refer to the mutual visits of the Chiefs of General Staffs, to which Milch and Bodenschatz testified, the visits of the Chief of the British Intelligence Service, Courtney, the permanent presence in Berlin of military attachés of nearly all countries, in order to recognize that the so-called secret rearmament was quite public and only safeguarded a few technical secrets, as did rearmament in every state. The outside world knew of the existence of this rearmament and, in any case, considered it to be compatible with world peace longer than Schacht himself did.
It is not for me to criticize the attitude of the outside world, nor is it my intention to do so. Each part on the stage of life has its own rules of tact, including the part played by the defendant and his defense counsel. Their task is to establish a defense, and not to bring charges and make an attack. In connection therewith I expressly wish to guard against a possible misunderstanding to the effect that I want to appear as an accuser, a critic, or a know-it-all in any way. I present all this only from the aspect of my submission that the indirect circumstantial evidence submitted by the Prosecution is not conclusive.
Furthermore, the Prosecution argues that Schacht was a member of the Reich Cabinet, at least as Minister without Portfolio from the time of his dismissal in January 1938, as Minister of Economics, until January 1943. The Prosecution makes the Reich Cabinet responsible—criminally responsible—for the belligerent invasions of Hitler. This argumentation has an attractively convincing power for somebody who starts with the normal concept of a Reich Cabinet. The effect disappears once it has been ascertained that the so-called Reich Cabinet was not a cabinet in the usual sense applying to a constitutional state.
Judgments should not, however, be based on outward appearances and form—not on fiction, but only on actually established conditions. This makes it necessary to penetrate sociologically the nature of the Hitler regime and to examine whether a member of the Reich Cabinet, hence of the Reich Government as such, must in this capacity bear the same criminal responsibility as if he were in any other normal state set-up, be it a democratic republic or a democratic monarchy or a constitutional monarchy or a monarchy which, although absolute, was nevertheless founded on law, or some other constitutionally based set-up which bears the character of a somehow lawful state based on a constitution. We are thus obliged to investigate the actual sociological structure of the Hitler regime. We have heard an account on the Führer Order (Führerbefehl) in this connection by Professor Jahrreiss. Here, too, I want to avoid repetition and would only state the following in abbreviated form:
I want to say first of all, in order to avoid once more the danger of a misunderstanding, that when I speak of the Hitler regime here I do so without referring in any way to the persons sitting in the dock; naturally with the exception of Schacht. For the latter, I do so in the negative sense, for he did not belong to the regime as such, in spite of the fact that he was a member of the Reich Government and President of the Reichsbank. I leave the question completely open as to whether any of the other defendants should be considered a member or supporter of the regime. That question is subject only to the judgment of the Tribunal and the evaluation of the defense counsel for each case.
At the very beginning of my argument I indicated that, even for a person who lived in Germany during the Hitler regime, it is difficult to differentiate between the ostensible distribution of power and the actual underlying influence, since this requires a great deal of political intuition; it is bound to be impossible to judge for people who lived outside Germany and can only be arrived at through the findings resulting from the presentation of evidence before this Tribunal. We have established here that the Reich Cabinet, whom Hitler termed a club of defeatists, was convened for the last time in 1938 and that it met then only to receive a communication from Hitler. For actual deliberation and the passing of a resolution it had last been convened in 1937. We have also established that Hitler deliberately kept all news of political importance from the Reich Cabinet, as is proved quite unequivocally by the so-called Hossbach minutes of 10 November. During this meeting the Führer called the attention of the chiefs of the branches of the Wehrmacht and the Reich Foreign Minister, who were present—Schacht, of course, was not present and did not learn about the Hossbach minutes until he came here—to the fact that the subject for deliberation was of such great importance that it would result in full Cabinet meetings in other countries but that, just because of its great significance, he had decided not to discuss the matter with the Reich Cabinet.
Thus, at least after 1937, the members of the Reich Cabinet can no longer be considered the architects and supporters of the political aspirations of the Reich. The same holds true for the members of the Reich Defense Council, which as such was nothing but a bureaucratic and routine affair. Accordingly Hitler, in the spring of 1939, explicitly excluded the Reich Defense Council also from further war preparations, saying: “Preparations will be made on the basis of peacetime legislation.”
Despotism and tyranny showed themselves in unadulterated form as from 1938. It is a characteristic quality of the Fascist as well as the National Socialist regime, to have the political will concentrated in the head of the Party, who with the help of this Party subjugates and becomes master of the State and the nation. Justice Jackson also recognized this when he stated, on 28 February 1946, that the apex of power rested with a power group outside the State and the Constitution.
To speak, in the case of such a regime, of a responsible Reich Government and of free citizens who, through some organizations or others, could exert influence on the formation of the political will, would be to proceed from entirely wrong hypotheses. Intangible elements devoid of all sense of responsibility usually gain influence on the head of the State and Party in such regimes. The formation of the political will can be recognized in its crystallized form only in the head of the State himself; all around him is shrouded in a haze. It is another characteristic of such a regime—and this again belongs to its inner untruthfulness—that beneath the surface of seemingly absolute harmony and union several power groups fight against each other. Hitler not only tolerated such opposing groups, he even encouraged them and made use of them as a basis for his power.
One of the defendants spoke here of the unity of the German people during this war in contrast with the first World War, but I must stress in reply that hardly at any time during its history was the German nation so torn internally as it was during the Third Reich. The apparent unity was merely the quiet of a churchyard, enforced through terror. The conflicts between the individual high functionaries of the German people, which we have ascertained here, reflect the inner strife-torn condition of the German nation, carefully concealed through the terror wielded by the Gestapo.