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21 Nov.
45
The persecution policy against the Jews commenced with
nonviolent measures, such as disfranchisement and discriminations
against their religion, and the placing of impediments in the way of
success in economic life. It moved rapidly to organized mass violence
against them, physical isolation in ghettos, deportation, forced labor,
mass starvation, and extermination. The Government, the Party formations
indicted before you as criminal organizations, the Secret State Police,
the Army, private and semi-public associations, and "spontaneous"
mobs that were carefully inspired from official sources, were all
agencies that were concerned in this persecution. Nor was it directed
against individual Jews for personal bad citizenship or unpopularity.
The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole,
as an end in itself, as a measure of preparation for war, and as a
discipline of conquered peoples.
The conspiracy or common plan
to exterminate the Jew was so methodically and thoroughly pursued, that
despite the German defeat and Nazi prostration this Nazi aim largely has
succeeded. Only remnants of the European Jewish population remain in
Germany, in the countries which Germany occupied, and in those which
were her satellites or collaborators. Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in
Nazi-dominated Europe, 60 percent are authoritatively estimated to have
perished. Five million seven hundred thousand Jews are missing from the
countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be
accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they
included among displaced persons. History does not record a crime ever
perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such
calculated cruelty.
You will have difficulty, as I have, to
look into the faces of these defendants and believe that in this
twentieth century human beings could inflict such sufferings as will be
proved here on their own countrymen as well as upon their so-called "inferior"
enemies. Particular crimes, and the responsibility of defendants for
them, are to be dealt with by the Soviet Government's counsel, when
committed in the East, and by counsel for the Republic of France when
committed in the West. I advert to them only to show their magnitude as
evidence of a purpose and a knowledge common to all defendants, of an
official plan rather than of a capricious policy of some individual
commander, and to show such a continuity of Jewish persecution from the
rise of the Nazi conspiracy to its collapse as forbids us to believe
that any person could be identified with any part of Nazi action without
approving this most conspicuous item in their program.
The
Indictment itself recites many evidences of the anti-Semitic
persecutions. The Defendant Streicher led the Nazis in anti-Semitic
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