Defendant Klemm: The prosecution has endeavored to show that I am not worthy of credibility. In long winded arguments it endeavors to connect a very few apparently positive points by combinations which lack all foundation, both in factual and political respect. Distortions and arbitrary additions have to serve this purpose. In the case of Sonnenburg it is said that Hecker had stated that Hansen had said that Klemm did not feel comfortable in connection with this matter. Not a word to this effect is to be found in the transcript of Hecker’s testimony. Although, in cross-examination, Hecker clearly could not maintain the agreement as he described it in his affidavit, the prosecution maintains the agreement, although its own witness, Eggensperger, denied it as well. And now another final example. Heydrich’s directives to his police agencies to take Jewish women into protective custody is presented by the prosecution as being an agreement with the judicial administration. There are many more examples. But please let me say only the following with regard to what the prosecution stated this morning. Due to the propaganda of the State, we were convinced at the outbreak of the war that justice was on our side. A dictatorship could not and does not permit its cards to be shown. And, finally, we are not here charged with crimes against peace. To what Mr. King said regarding Prosecution Exhibit 252,[554] let me state the following: The list of 17 January 1945, containing reports on death sentences, deals with a list of the Minister, for it contains doubtful cases, and from that I gathered that it could not be my list after I had also seen from the photostat that there were several dates on the top of the list. Even if both lists should be from 1945, the same applies as with regard to the lists on pages 154 through 157 in document book 3-L, according to which separate reports were made to me on individual cases and to the Minister on death sentences. If the prosecution bases its case on the testimony of the witness Altmeyer, this testimony has been refuted with overwhelming clarity by the testimony of Hartmann, Franke, and Ehrhard, and the prosecution overlooks that, in his cross-examination, the witness Altmeyer, in particular had to deviate from his affidavit. The prosecution mentioned furthermore a case of theft from airmen where proceedings were quashed. I remember the case distinctly. An airplane had been destroyed, and from the wreck objects had been stolen which had already been partly destroyed by rain and fire. The proceedings were stopped because the subjective prerequisites of theft could not be proved. The prosecution has failed to show what this theft from a wrecked airplane had to do with lynching of aviators. All in all, the result of the statements of the prosecution is as follows: In this trial it was not only German justice of the past years that was indicted, but the continental legal system, a system in which for many decades the obedience to the law and the norm created by the State has been the only task of the jurist. Before 1933 I had been educated and trained in this school of thought. What legal and factual opportunities were open to me I used in favor of justice wherever I could do so. To revoke laws and norms which had existed for years was not in my competency.
Presiding Judge Brand: The defendant Rothenberger may address the Tribunal.
Defendant Rothenberger: I was a National Socialist, and in that respect I distinguish myself from those who for 10 years and more were placed in leading positions in the Third Reich and today say that they were not National Socialists. When I realized that national socialism was destroying the very values for which I had lived and for which it had promised to work, I decided with all my energy to influence the development of national socialism in the sphere of justice. I did not want to be a hanger-on. It was not my way to content myself with tactical maneuvers or withdrawals, which gradually brought about an undermining of the administration of German justice. The struggle for the idea of the judiciary within the framework of a totalitarian state I made the focal point of my life. And, therefore, I consider myself to be under an obligation to declare today that the German judge and his judgment, since 1933, were subjected to excessive attacks from the Party and from the SS without being given any backing from the leadership of the Ministry. Here lie the causes for my actions. At the beginning, I believed that in a totalitarian state there could exist a free judiciary. In the course of time I realized that most of the Party leaders, and in particular the SS leaders, found the very essence of the judiciary an obstacle in their way. I did not wish it to be true that there should be no way to save my Fatherland from such a dangerous development and therefore I clung to Hitler. In so doing I found myself in the company of many clever people in all spheres of human activity in Germany and abroad. As to whether my reform of the administration of justice has been rightly called by the prosecution a Nazi reform which—it is true—called itself National Socialist, but which aimed at excluding the influence of the SS and the Party from the administration of justice, and which contains not one word against Jews or foreigners, but on the contrary claimed the entire administration of penal justice, including that for foreigners and Jews, for the judiciary—with confidence I leave it to the Tribunal to decide that question.
I do not ignore today that my life work which has eaten up my nervous strength was bound to fail; nor do I ignore that my aims were, at times, in contradiction to the practice of life and also my own attitude, but is it not always like that in the life of human beings that just because there are such abuses and just because at times one’s self is weak, one takes that very circumstance for a cause to set up postulates which serve as aim and direction, but which we cannot immediately, particularly in wartime, put into effect, since the power of conditions is stronger than ourselves. And how far the power of the SS and the Party had extended I realized as late as 1942 when I came to Berlin and got an insight into conditions in the Reich. That Hitler himself was a despot and that he coupled me together with a man who showed himself to be a tool, without any will of his own, of Himmler and Bormann, that was my tragic misfortune.
I had to experience one set-back after the other. At the very beginning of my work I was compromised in the whole of the Reich by the well known SD report of Himmler’s in October 1942, which prophesied that I would soon resign, and the only positive point which kept me was the hope and the confidence of the German judges.
There are only two charges of the prosecution which they made in their final plea that I want to answer now. How can the prosecution from my speeches in Hamm and Lueneburg, of the latter of which the text does not even exist, conclude that I was in favor of exterminating the Jews? Both speeches exclusively relate to degenerate and incorrigible criminals. In the usage of the German language, they are antisocial elements and for those elements I demanded, according to another prosecution document, a judicial authority. And the second charge is that I am a liar. The Jewish pogrom in 1938, they say, had been on quite a different scale in Hamburg from the way I had described it. As to how the Jewish question was handled in Hamburg you can see clearly not only from a prosecution document but also from the affidavit by the man whom the British, after the surrender, appointed Lord Mayor of Hamburg. I am speaking of Mayor Petersen who is half-Jewish himself.
That in my struggle I was placed in outward contact with wrong, that lay in the very nature of things. I assume responsibility for every action of my own. The consequences which are now borne by the whole German people justify the fact that former leading personalities also bear the consequences. But I am of the opinion that crimes which were committed by my greatest enemies behind my back cannot be held against me. As soon as I heard of them I drew the consequences.
After 16 months, in 1943, Himmler, Thierack, and Bormann finally made me unemployed. I was 47 years old at the time. Without overestimating the power of my personality, the road for the wishes of those men, concerning the administration of German justice, now lay open.
Presiding Judge Brand: Defendant Lautz may now address the court.
Defendant Lautz: At the beginning of the prosecution’s oral presentation, the chief prosecutor emphasized that the roles which the defendants are assigned in these proceedings are new for them. That is true, as far as this refers to the position which we now have to hold before this Tribunal. Apart from that, we public prosecutors are quite familiar with the role of defendants in criminal proceedings. A man like myself who, in 25 long years, became acquainted with the fate of men in prisons, in courtrooms, in penal institutions, and on the way to the place of execution, knows very well the tragedy of this role and one who, under the official robe, has preserved a human heart, will the better recognize that not blind zeal for prosecution, but much rather wisdom coupled with human understanding are best designed to serve the aim of true judicial administration.