Over 155,000 Americans made the supreme sacrifice in Germany in this war. These lads gave their lives for this ideal of world justice and world peace. America sought no territorial aggrandizement or material advantage. The American flag in this courtroom ensured to the defendant all the guarantees of the United States Constitution as to a fair trial. No person within the continental limits of the United States itself could have wished for a fuller opportunity to demonstrate his innocence of the charges brought against him.
America and her Allies bestowed upon Germany what no desire can achieve and what no money can buy. The Allied nations gave the blood of their youth to water the roots of the tree of liberty and tolerance which had withered in the twelve-year drought of National Socialism. It is to reveal who were responsible and what was responsible for the desiccation of that tree and to proclaim to the world the inevitable consequences to others who degrade the soil with the pollution and prussic acid of oppression that these trials have been established. The present trial is one chapter in the book which will forever condemn Mein Kampf and offer to the new German nation a volume of proved fact, whose every page will tell of the sorrow awaiting any people which permit any man or men to hoist deceit above truth, power above justice, oppression above tolerance, war above peace and man above God.
[Signed] Michael A. Musmanno
Judge Military Tribunal II
[160] The reference “T” is to the page of the mimeographed transcript.
[161] “IMT” refers to Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Vol. I, Nuremberg, Germany, 1947.
[162] Original German document read 50,000 but, due to clerical error, translation of document which was submitted in Court read 500,000. Incorrectness is obvious by total figure of 220,000 in last sentence.
[163] Chef Ansbildungawesen (Chief of Training).
[164] A word is missing here in the German original.