Nazi Conspiracy & Aggression It is
no use having a leader unless there are also people willing
and ready to serve their personal greed and ambition by
helping and following him. The dictator who is set up in
control of the destinies of his country does not depend upon
himself alone either in acquiring power or in maintaining
it. He depends upon the support and backing which lesser
men, themselves lusting to share in dictatorial power,
anxious to bask in the adulation of their leader, are
prepared to give. In the Criminal Courts, where men are put
upon their trial for breaches of the municipal laws, it not
infrequently happens that of a gang indicted together in the
Dock, one has the master mind, the leading personality. But
it is no excuse for the common thief to say "I stole because
I was told to steal"; for the murderer to plead "I killed
because I was asked to kill".
These men are in no different
position for all that it was nations they sought to rob,
whole peoples they tried to kill. "The warrant of no man
excuseth the doing of an illegal act." Political loyalty,
military obedience are excellent things. But they neither
require nor do they justify the commission of patently
wicked acts. There comes a point where a man must refuse to
answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his
conscience. Even the common soldier, serving in the ranks of
his Army is not called upon to obey illegal orders. But
these men were no common soldiers: they were the men whose
skill, and cunning, whose labour and activity made it
possible for the German Reich to tear up existing treaties,
to enter into new ones and to flout them, to reduce
international negotiations and diplomacy to a hollow
mockery, to destroy all respect for and effect in
International Law and finally to march against the peoples
of the world to secure that domination in which as arrogant
members of their self-styled master race they professed
their belief. If the crimes were in one sense the crimes of
Nazi Germany, they also are guilty as the individuals who
aided, abetted, counselled, procured and made possible the
commission of what was done.
[Page 644]
The sum total of the crime these men have committed -- so
awful in its comprehension -- has many aspects. Their lust
and sadism, their deliberate slaughter and the degradation
of so many millions of their fellow creatures that the
imagination reels incomprehensively, are but one side only
of this matter. Now that an end has been put to this
nightmare and we come to consider how the future is to be
lived, perhaps their guilt as murderers and robbers is of
less importance and of less effect to future generations of
mankind than their crime of fraud -- the fraud by which they
placed themselves in a position to do their murder and their
robbery. This is the other aspect of their guilt. The story
of their "diplomacy", founded upon cunning, hypocrisy and
bad faith, is a story less gruesome but no less evil and
deliberate. And should it be taken as a precedent of
behaviour in the conduct of international relations, its
consequences to mankind will no less certainly lead to the
end of civilized society. Without trust and confidence
between Nations, without the faith that what is said is
meant and what is undertaken will be observed, all hope of
peace and of security is dead. The Governments of the United
Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, of the USA, of the
USSR, and of France, backed by and on behalf of every other
peace-loving Nation of the world, have therefore joined to
bring the inventors and perpetrators of this Nazi conception
of international relationship before the bar of this
Tribunal.
They do so that these Defendants may be punished for their
crimes. They do so also that their conduct may be exposed in
its naked wickedness. And they do so in the hope that the
conscience and good sense of all the world will see the
consequences of such conduct and the end to which inevitably
it must always lead. Let us once again restore sanity and
with it also the sanctity of our obligations towards each
other.
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
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Volume
I Chapter IX
Opening Address for the United Kingdom
(Part 17 of 17)