Justice can be administered only when the Court possesses that inner liberty and independence which owes allegiance only to conscience and to God himself. Such a sacred activity had largely been forgotten in my country, above all, by the governing class of the nation; Hitler had prostituted the law. But this Tribunal intends to prove to the world that the welfare of the peoples is based on law alone. And no conception could arouse more joy and hope within the heart of people of good will than that of unselfish justice.
I am not criticizing the provisions of the Charter; but I do ask whether any justice has ever been, or ever could be, found on earth if might submitted to reason so far as to grant its enemies regular trial, but could not see fit to crown this tribute to reason by appointing a genuinely international tribunal; for even though 19 nations have approved of the legal basis of the Charter it is far more difficult to administer the laws laid down.
The American chief prosecutor has emphatically declared that he did not propose to hold the entire German nation guilty; but the records of this Tribunal, which history will some day scrutinize attentively, nevertheless contain many things which, to us Germans, appear to be false and, therefore, painful. Unfortunately they also contain numerous explicit questions on the part of the French Prosecution as to the extent to which, for instance, certain Crimes against Humanity committed both inside and outside Germany were known to the German people. Indeed, the French Prosecution have asked explicitly: “Could these atrocities remain, on the whole, unknown to the entire German nation, or were they aware of them?” These and similar questions are not conducive to the solution of such a difficult and tragic problem with even the slightest approach to the truth. Insofar as evil, which always grows and manifests itself organically, reigns supreme in a nation, every individual who has reached the age of reason will bear some guilt for his country’s disasters. Yet even this guilt, which is on the metaphysical plane, could never become the collective guilt of a nation unless every individual member of this nation has incurred a separate guilt. But who would be entitled to establish the existence of such a guilt without examining thousands of individual circumstances?
The problem, however, becomes even more difficult if one should try—and this is the final aim—to establish the so-called national guilt for any past crimes against peace, humanity, and so forth, committed on the part of the omnipotent State, no matter through what agencies. One must bear in mind most carefully the condition of the Reich before 1933. This has been done sufficiently here and I shall not discuss it.
Hitler claimed for himself alone such far-reaching concepts as the powerful German diligence, austerity, family affection, willingness to make sacrifices, aristocracy of labor, and a hundred more. Millions believed in this; millions of others did not. The best of them did not lose hope of being able to avert the tragedy which they foresaw. They flung themselves into the stream of events, assembled the good, and fought, visibly or invisibly, against the evil. Can the man in the street be blamed for not immediately refusing to believe in Hitler, considering the latter’s ability to pass as a seeker after the truth, and the fact that he constantly raised the palm of peace for the benefit of the peace lovers? Who knows whether he himself was not convinced at the outset that he could strengthen the Reich without going to war? After the assumption of power large sectors of the German people probably felt themselves to be at unison with many other peoples on earth. Therefore, it is not astonishing that gradually, and with the approval or tolerance of other countries, Hitler acquired the nimbus of a man unique in his century. Only a German who lived in Germany during the past few years and did not view Germany through a telescope from abroad, is competent to report on the historical facts of an almost impenetrable method of secrecy, the psychosis of fear, and the actual impossibility of changing the regime, and thus to comply with Ranke’s demand of historians to establish “how it was.”
Ought the artisans, peasants, merchants, or housewives categorically to have asked Hitler or Himmler for a change? I would be quite willing to let the Prosecution answer this, as I am of the opinion that there are living in my country no fewer idealistic and heroic people than in any other country.
It will never be possible to ascertain how large a number of Germans knew and approved of concentration camps, their terror and such like. Only if one could establish knowledge and approval in the soul of every individual German, considering general and particular conditions prevailing in the Germany of the last 12 years, which it is not now the moment to discuss, these, and only these, could be considered guilty.
Therefore I do not think it just to put, to a larger or smaller extent, the principle of collective guilt in the place of individual responsibility, as it is held valid in all civilized nations; it was unfortunately similarly applied by the National Socialist regime to a whole people, and almost led to its complete extermination. May there be no repetition of Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, that portentous document of the twentieth century.
Let me say a few words about that secrecy. This Trial has shown clearly that the State itself managed to suppress such facts as would lower its prestige and betray its real intentions. Even the men indicted here, who have been termed conspirators, have been the victims of that carefully devised system of secrecy, or most of them at least.
A special place in that system of secrecy is reserved to the plan—ordered by Hitler and executed by Himmler, Eichmann, and a circle of the initiated—for the biological destruction of the Jewish people, the ghastly aim of which was for years concealed by the term “final solution”—a term not immediately self-explicable. The problem of the Jewish question ...