“The Fuehrer’s orders were law already a considerable time before this Second World War.
“In this state order of his, the German Reich was treated as a partner by the other states, and this in the whole field of politics. In this connection I do not wish to stress the way (so impressive to the German people and so fatal to all opposition) in which this took place in 1936 at the Olympic Games, a show which Hitler could not order the delegations of foreign nations to attend, as he ordered Germans to the Nuernberg Party Rally in the case of his state-shows. I should like rather only to point out that the governments of the greatest nations in the world considered the word of this “almighty” man the final decision, incontestably valid for every German, and based their decisions on major questions on the fact that Hitler’s order was incontestably valid. To mention only the most striking cases, this fact was relied upon when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, after the Munich Conference, displayed the famous peace paper when he landed at Croydon. This fact was adhered to when people went to war against the Reich as the barbarous despotism of this one man.
“No political system has yet pleased all people who live under it or who feel its effects abroad. The German political system in the Hitler era displeased a particularly large and ever-increasing number of people at home and abroad.
“But that does not in any way alter the fact that it existed, not lastly because of the recognition from abroad and because of its effectiveness, which caused a British Prime Minister to make the now world-famous statement at a critical period, that democracies need two years longer than the totalitarian governments to attain a certain goal. Only one who has lived as if expelled from among his own people, amidst blindly believing masses who idolized this man as infallible, knows how firmly Hitler’s power was anchored in the anonymous and innumerable following who believed him capable only of doing what was good and right. They did not know him personally, he was for them what propaganda made of him, but this he was so uncompromisingly that everybody who saw him from close-to and saw otherwise, knew clearly that resistance was absolutely useless and, in the eyes of other people, was not even martyrdom.
“Would it therefore not be a self-contradictory proceeding if both the following assertions were to be realized at the same time in the rules of this trial? * * *
“* * * The functionaries had neither the right nor the duty to examine the orders of the monocrat to determine their legality. For them these orders could not be illegal at all, with one exception which will be discussed later—an exception which, if carefully examined, is seen to be only an apparent one—namely with the exception of cases in which the monocrat placed himself, according to the indisputable values of our times, outside every human order, and in which a real question of right or wrong was not put at all and thus a real examination was not demanded.
“Hitler’s will was the ultimate authority for their considerations on what to do and what not to do. The Fuehrer’s order cut off every discussion. Therefore, a person who, as a functionary of the hierarchy refers to an order of the Fuehrer’s, is not trying to provide a ground for being exempted from punishment for an illegal action, but he denies the assertion that his conduct is illegal; for the order which he complied with was legally unassailable.
“Only a person who has understood this can have a conception of the difficult inner struggles which so many German officials had to fight out in these years in face of many a decree or resolution of Hitler’s. For them such cases were not a question of a conflict between right and wrong: Disputes about legality sank into insignificance. For them the problem was one of legitimacy; as time went on, human and divine law opposed each other ever more strongly and more frequently.
“Therefore, whatever the Charter understands by the orders which it sets aside as a ground for exemption from punishment, can the Fuehrer’s order be meant by this? Can it come within the meaning of this rule? Must one not accept this order for what it was according to the interior German constitution as it had developed, a constitution which had been explicitly or implicitly recognized by the community of states? * * *
“* * * The one supreme will became, quite simply, technically indispensable. It became the mechanical connecting link for the whole. A functionary who met with objections or even resistance to one of his orders from other functionaries only needed to refer to an order of the Fuehrer’s to get his way. For this reason many, very many, among those Germans who felt Hitler’s regime to be intolerable, who indeed hated him like the devil, looked ahead only with the greatest anxiety to the time when this man would disappear from the scene; for what would happen when this connecting link disappeared? It was a vicious circle.