RACIAL PERSECUTION
The record contains innumerable acts of persecution of individual Poles and Jews, but to consider these cases as isolated and unrelated instances of perversion of justice would be to overlook the very essence of the offense charged in the indictment. The defendants are not now charged with conspiracy as a separate and substantive offense, but it is alleged that they participated in carrying out a governmental plan and program for the persecution and extermination of Jews and Poles, a plan which transcended territorial boundaries as well as the bounds of human decency. Some of the defendants took part in the enactment of laws and decrees the purpose of which was the extermination of Poles and Jews in Germany and throughout Europe. Others, in executive positions, actively participated in the enforcement of those laws and in atrocities, illegal even under German law, in furtherance of the declared national purpose. Others, as judges, distorted and then applied the laws and decrees against Poles and Jews as such in disregard of every principle of judicial behavior. The overt acts of the several defendants must be seen and understood as deliberate contributions toward the effectuation of the policy of the Party and State. The discriminatory laws themselves formed the subject matter of war crimes and crimes against humanity with which the defendants are charged. The material facts which must be proved in any case are (1) the fact of the great pattern or plan of racial persecution and extermination; and (2) specific conduct of the individual defendant in furtherance of the plan. This is but an application of general concepts of criminal law. The person who persuades another to commit murder, the person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of its commission, and the person who pulls the trigger are all principals or accessories to the crime.
We turn to the national pattern or plan for racial extermination.
Fundamentally, the program was one for the actual extermination of Jews and Poles, either by means of killing or by confinement in concentration camps, which merely made death slower and more painful. But lesser forms of racial persecution were universally practiced by governmental authority and constituted an integral part in the general policy of the Reich. We have already noted the decree by which Jews were excluded from the legal profession. Intermarriage between Jews and persons of German blood was prohibited. Sexual intercourse between Jews and German nationals was punished with extreme severity by the courts. By other decrees Jews were almost completely expelled from public service, from educational institutions, and from many business enterprises. Upon the death of a Jew his property was confiscated. Under the provisions for confiscation under the 11th amendment to the German Citizenship Law, supra, the decision as to confiscation of the property of living Jews was left to the chief of the Security Police and the SD. The law against Poles and Jews cited supra (4 December 1941) was rigorously enforced. Poles and Jews convicted of specific crimes were subjected to different types of punishment from that imposed upon Germans who had committed the same crimes. Their rights as defendants in court were severely circumscribed. Courts were empowered to impose death sentences on Poles and Jews even where such punishment was not prescribed by law, if the evidence showed “particularly objectionable motives”. And, finally, the police were given carte blanche to punish all “criminal” acts committed by Jews without any employment of the judicial process. From the great mass of evidence we can only cite a few illustrations of the character and operation of the program.
On 30 January 1939 in an address before the Reichstag, Hitler, who was at that very time perfecting his plot for aggressive war, said:
“If the international Jewish financiers within and without Europe succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the obliteration of the Jewish race in Europe.”
We quote from the writings of Alfred Rosenberg (since hanged), “High Priest of the Nazi Racial Theory and Herald of the Master Race:”
“A new faith is arising today—the myth of the blood, the faith to defend with the blood the divine essence of man. The faith, embodied in clearest knowledge, that the Nordic blood represents that mysterium which has replaced and overcome the old sacraments.”[659]
The Rosenberg philosophy strongly supported the program of the Nazi Party, which reads as follows:
“None but members of the nation (Volk) may be citizens of the State. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation.”