Various

“ I expect that no German lawyer fails to recognize the seriousness of the hour and the magnitude of the task. I expect the complete mobilization of all resources for tasks that war puts before us, including our people’s struggle for freedom. I know that we shall win this battle, if we work together and fight like one man. ”

“ The judge is the representative of justice. It is he who in the eyes of the people is the guarantor of justice, not the professional jurist nor the public prosecutor, nor the attorney; because he, the judge, administers justice, uninfluenced by friend or foe, unbiased and unswayed by the quarrels and tendencies of the day, not prey to human foibles. With him rests the decision over life and death; he intervenes decisively in every sphere of human life and in the most treasured possessions of a people such as liberty, honor, family, work, land, etc. ”

“ I took advantage of that opportunity to tell Hitler with all the frankness at my disposal that an intact and independent administration of justice was a vital question for Germany; that his method to form his judgment on the basis of information received from Gauleiters, and his intention to retire judges who had done their duty, was an impossibility. The very concept of a judge required independence. People would never respect the judgment of a dependent judge as an expression of law. ”

“ If we should adopt the view that by reason of the fact that the war was a criminal war of aggression every act which would have been legal in a defensive war was illegal in this one, we would be forced to the conclusion that every soldier who marched under orders into occupied territory or who fought in the homeland was a criminal and a murderer. The rules of land warfare upon which the prosecution has relied would not be the measure of conduct and the pronouncement of guilt in any case would become a mere formality. ”

“ Thus, a historical revolution such as the present one will, of necessity, bring about a crisis in law, and particularly a crisis in the administration of justice; and the extent and intensity of this crisis depend on the extent of the revolution. A crisis is customarily defined as a state of the most violent intensification of the symptoms of a sickness, which is followed by a decisive turn, either toward the worse, to final descent—death in the case of man, and dissolution in that of a public institution—or the pendulum swings to the other side after the climax of the crisis, toward recovery. ”

“ The United States cannot evade the challenge of these responsibilities. We can fulfill only the smallest part of them at Nuernberg. But Nuernberg must be a symbol, not of revenge or of smug self-satisfaction, but of peace and good will among nations and peoples. It is the crime of shattering the foundations of peace and denying the very fact of humanity that is charged in this and other proceedings at Nuernberg. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At a time when thousands of our best men, fathers and sons of our people, are being killed in battle, nobody shall hope to live who attempts to depreciate at home the sacrifice which is made at the front. No matter under which disguise the attempt is made to disturb this German front, to undermine the resistance power of our people, to weaken the authority of the regime or to sabotage production on the home front ”

“ 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. ”

“ With things as they were, one has to understand that a large portion of the German nation, many jurists among them, became tired and apathetic toward authority, and skeptical. And on the other hand it could not be avoided that many impulsive individuals revolted, wanted to take action, wanted to do something about it, wanted to come to a decision, to a clarification, to a simplification, to find a way to see through all that.
In our era—at least one can say that for Europe—the political disease of fanaticism and doctrinism has broken out; tolerance became more and more rare ”

“ I myself was a criminal judge. One single murder frequently, in the court of assize, occupied our time for 2 to 3 weeks, and it was a terrible thing. Two murders by one person—that was horrifying. If someone had eight to ten murders on his conscience, then he was described as a mass murderer in the press of Europe, and people asked themselves whether this was something that could be handled by means of the penal code at all. ”

“ We are not attempting to pass judicially upon a question which is solely within the jurisdiction of the political departments of the Four Powers. The fixing of the date of the formal end of the war and similar matters will, of course, be dependent upon the action of the political departments. We do not usurp their function. We merely inquire, in the course of litigation when the lives of men are dependent upon decisions which must be both legal and just, whether the great objectives announced by the Four Powers are themselves in harmony with the principles of international law and morality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It never was an objective of the Third Reich to create any system of law. On the contrary, it was its fundamental purpose to tear down every vestige of law in Germany, and to replace it with a mere bureaucracy which would mete out reward and punishment in accordance with the tyrannical ideology and tactical necessities of the dictatorship. The one-time sage of Nazi jurisprudence, the late Dr. Hans Frank, summed this up aptly in 1935 (NG-777, Pros. Ex. 19) —
“National socialism is the point of departure, the content, and the goal of the legal policies of the Third Reich.” ”

“ The letter of the defense counsel to a traitor in a penitentiary speaks for itself. Not only is the unconcealed wooing of clients repulsive, but especially the inconceivable lack of dignity and the servility with which this German lawyer addresses a declared marked enemy of the state, calling him “Dear Sir,” wishing him “all the best for the future,” and after mentioning “his esteemed wife” closes with “best regards and Heil Hitler, yours.”
Surely it cannot be expressed more clearly that one is unqualified for the legal profession. ”

“ The achievements and sacrifices of the German soldier, the German worker, the farmer, our women in town and country, that is, the millions of our middle classes, imbued only with the idea of victory, demand the corresponding attitude on the part of those who themselves have been called by the people to protect their interests. In times like the present there can be no sacrosanct individual with established rights but all of us are merely obedient servants of the nation. ”

“ The superficial view that an authoritarian state cannot tolerate a vigorous judiciary is therefore wrong. The better the inner strength of a state is consolidated, the better is justice assured and the stronger is therefore the judiciary. Only a state based on external force must be afraid of a strong judge, and history has shown time and again that nothing leads faster to self-annihilation than a paucity of laws and a feeble administration of justice. ”

“ Thus, the German lawyers have become the rear guard of the fighting forces. The complete concentration of all resources which this involves and which is expected especially from the senior members who take the place of their younger colleagues, presupposes unified direction and rigid execution of the work of all lawyers regardless whether they are judges, public prosecutors or attorneys.
In the hour, when our people have entered upon the decisive battle for its right to live, each lawyer must concentrate all his attention solely on this battle for freedom. ”

“ Whoever realizes that law is of vast significance to the life of the community, conscious of the problem facing a lawyer in the serving of his nation and its ways of life, recognizing the high [563] ethical value of such legal work, and measuring the importance of each individual case for the community, will not underestimate the defense of the life and freedom of a fellow citizen in a criminal case; but rather consider it more vital and important than the contesting of property rights or other legal questions which perhaps are of secondary concern to the community. ”

“ A mistaken appeal to this principle has been the cause of much confusion about the Nuremberg trial. It is argued that parts of the Tribunal’s Charter, written in 1945, make crimes out of what before were activities beyond the scope of national and international law. Were this an exact statement of the situation we might well be concerned, but it is not. It rests on a misconception of the whole nature of the law of nations. International law is not a body of authoritative codes or statutes; it is the gradual expression, case by case, of the moral judgments of the civilized world. ”

“ Opinion of the Reich Minister of Justice
The court applies the same criteria for imposing punishment as it would if it were dealing with a German fellow citizen as defendant. This cannot be sanctioned. The Jew is the enemy of the German people, who has plotted, stirred up, and prolonged this war. In doing so, he has brought unspeakable misery upon our people. Not only is he of different but of inferior race. Justice, which must not measure different matters by the same standard, demands that just this racial aspect must be considered in the meting out of punishment. ”

“ We are unable to say in one breath that life imprisonment for habitual criminals is a salutary and reasonable punishment in America in peace times, but that the imposition of the death penalty was a crime against humanity in Germany when the nation was in the throes of war. The same considerations apply largely in the case of looting. Every nation recognizes the absolute necessity of more stringent enforcement of the criminal law in times of great emergency. ”

“ May I ask you, now that you have answered the question of legality on the one hand and theories of legitimacy on the other hand, would you now, from the developments, explain the constitutional status of the Hitler decrees within the meaning of my first question as to whether he was supreme legislator of the Reich.
A. I am afraid I shall have to go back a bit for that because that question really concerns the entire question of the so-called constitution of the Third Reich. Even for many a German, Hitler’s authority is a mystery, but it must be that for all those who are not Germans. ”

“ It is true that the denial to Jews of the right to proceed in civil litigation without advancement of costs appears to be a small matter compared to the extermination of Jews by the millions under other procedures. It is nevertheless a part of the government-organized plan for the persecution of the Jews, not only by murder and imprisonment but by depriving them of the means of livelihood and of equal rights in the courts of law. ”

“ This leads, as a matter of course, to a basic discussion of the individual cases which have been particularly stressed by the prosecution, and which lie in the direction of the prosecution’s main thrust. No one knows better than the judge the human inadequacy and fallibility because by the very nature of his profession he deals with that aspect of life. Thus, he would be the last to believe himself immune from human error, least of all at a time of intellectual revolution and under the effect of the very highest wartime pressure. ”

“ The bourgeois-liberalistic state which, under the influence of the doctrine of the division of power, empowered the courts to control legislation and administration, has finally been superseded by the unity of the Reich. The courts are merely an organ of the state, as the arm is only a limb of the human body. ”