Presiding Judge Brand: Defendant Rothaug may address the Tribunal.
Defendant Rothaug: Prosecutor King in his final plea mentioned a death sentence passed by a French court against a president of a court in Strasbourg. May I refer to the fact that this involves a so-called in absentia sentence in which the defendant had no opportunity for his own defense whatsoever, because at that time he was in a German internment camp and by sheer accident happened to read of it in a newspaper.
I served my country throughout my life and in whatever position I was assigned to, in faithfulness, with a pure heart, and without malice. Seen from my present position you might consider this wrong, and you could say I and all those who surrounded me should have been more suspicious of developments as they took place. This prognosis in retrospect is just as convincing as it is cheap. Nobody in our position at that time could be of the opinion that the State which we served could be accused of being altogether illegal and that the war that it waged was a war of aggression, as is demonstrated today to all the world. Therefore, it is no accident and no excuse that, apart from defending myself against the flood of personal defamations which I received from the circle of my previous friends and assistants, I am now anxious to prove to you that both in the service as a judge and prosecutor, I applied the laws of my country in the manner in which they were intended, to the best of my conscience and belief. We were guided by the practice of the Reich Supreme Court and went the same way which was taken by the remaining 60 to 80 Special Courts in the Reich. We were no specialists in crimes against humanity, and no proof has been furnished in any single case that, in any connection, we had applied an illegal method.
Thoughts of extermination were not represented in my sphere of work, nor did we ever hear anything to the effect that in the field of justice they played any part at all. We knew of shootings of people who had been sentenced only to prison terms. That was openly reported in the newspapers. Apart from that, these proceedings applied to four people who, under my presidency, had been sentenced to imprisonment—among them, the Eisenberger case mentioned here. But I myself only heard of the inner connections of these events when internal official files of the public prosecution became accessible to me here. We saw and judged the facts in a different light. The country was an area of warfare. I have experienced the terrors of Verdun. As far as misery is concerned, it cannot be compared with the effects of one single air raid, lasting 45 minutes, on the civilian life of this city. The principle of war which threatens life itself had been made the principle of life. We therefore understood, guided by this point of view, that the laws required harsh proceedings in the case of crimes which exploited conditions of war, and that habitual criminals, violent criminals, and saboteurs of all kinds, in view of the decreased security of the conditions as they existed in the country, had to be held down. If, on the other hand, we are told that thereby we had supported a war of aggression carried on by our government, then we can only say “we did not know that.” Once war had come, the life and existence of millions of peoples was involved, and we derived therefrom the ethical justification for severity against individuals, which stood in no proportion to what was at stake. The logical calculation of war in regard to life is that hundreds of thousands of people are sacrificed to save the lives of millions, and this principle was transferred to the entire public life and in the field of criminal law, this was tied to the concept of guilt. And that was how our work, our activity, was understood. If today we are no longer understood, and if attempts are made today to judge our actions as criminal, this is not very surprising in view of a world which does not look too far below the surface of things. For the catastrophe has made all our actions appear in the destructive light of “in vain.” This qualification which also has a demoralizing effect, disguises all connections which might speak in our favor in the question of humanity. This is the tragedy of our case, and we are convinced that Your Honors will not fail to see it.
Presiding Judge Brand: Defendant Barnickel may address the Tribunal.
Defendant Barnickel: May it please the Court. The great Frenchman Honoré de Balzac, for whom I have had a great respect since the days of my youth, puts into the mouth of one of his characters these words, “I believe justice to be a development of a divine idea which is suspended above the world.” That idea, whether one shares it or not, is certainly very beautiful. It remains beautiful even if justice does not always reflect its divine origin. We jurists whom fate had condemned to work in the Third Reich—and I am by no means referring only to us who are here, I am referring to all of them—we know what was the matter with the administration of justice in the Third Reich. But in whatever way this administration of justice may have worked, I believe one must view it in connection with the fate of the German people. Professor Jahrreiss, to whom all of us in this trial listened with interest, once coined the phrase that for decades the German people had no longer known normal life. Every single one of us actually experienced that himself. If I may make it more clear from the example of my own life, I want to read a few sentences from my diary for the last time. This is an entry which I made on 9 June 1942, and I wrote it under the influence of a Swiss novel, the title of which is “Amadeus”, and I quote:
“When I thought about it for longer as to what I liked so much about ‘Amadeus’, this occurred to me, it is peace, the peace in which these people live, and in which they can develop. Peace which, to us Germans, has become something quite strange because since 1914 we have not had it any more. Before that time we, too, lived in such an atmosphere, but since then we have always had war, or at least a pressure which was like war. From 1914 to 1918 there was a war on. In 1919 an intermediate phase set in. From 1920 to 1923 there was the inflation. From 1924 to 1927 there was the deflation. From 1928 to 1929 there was a brief recovery. From 1930 to 1932 there was a financial crisis and a continuous political crisis. From 1933 to 1939 the German people were molded into a new cast by force. From 1939 to 1942 there was war. From 1942? Still war!
“I am 57 years of age today—at that time—18 years of that were the years of my youth; 28 years were war years. For 11 years there was a real life. And these were the years of development—of immaturity—years of struggle, years of suffering and poverty. But in between there were also many happy hours.”
That is how I looked at my life at the time. And it was similar for every average German citizen. Every normal German longed for peace, for peace which had become something quite strange to us, and every German has that longing deep in him, just as I myself—but it was not within his power to achieve that peace. We saw it merely like a ghost. But the same fate which individuals have, is the fate of the spiritual institutions of their nation. And the administration of justice, too, shared our fate; it, too, was hemmed in in war and political violence, which were foreign to its nature. No wonder that, at the end of that last period of 30 years, justice, too, had been wrecked, just as millions of people and their lives had been wrecked! Let us hope that from that destruction, new life and new culture will develop. For, after all, so far every generation has lived on the ruins which were left by its predecessors, and built its houses from those ruins. Let us hope that what we see in Germany at this moment is already part of reconstruction and no longer of destruction, and also, I hope, that we—as Balzac put it—one day again shall be able to believe that justice is the development of a divine thought which is suspended above the world!
Presiding Judge Brand: Defendant Petersen may address the Tribunal.