4 Dec. 95

which these treacherous attacks were carried out, and by which he was able to lead his fanatical followers into peaceful countries to murder, to loot, and to destroy. They are the men whose cooperation and support made the Nazi Government of Germany possible.

The government of a totalitarian country may be carried on without representatives of the people, but it cannot be carried on without any assistance at all. 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 on himself alone either in acquiring power or in maintaining it. He depends upon the support and the 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 of our countries, when men are put on 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." And these men are in no different position, for all that it was nations they sought to rob, and whole peoples which 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 labor 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 to believe.

If these 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.

The total sum of the crime these men have committed — so awful in its comprehension — has many aspects. Their lust and sadism, their deliberate slaughter and degradation of so many millions of their fellow creatures that the imagination reels, are but one side 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,