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IV. OPENING STATEMENT OF THE
PROSECUTION BY BRIGADIER GENERAL TELFORD TAYLOR, 9 DECEMBER 1946.*
The defendants in this case are charged with murders,
tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science.
The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A
handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this
courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright
or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected.
For the most part they are nameless dead. To their murderers, these
wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots
and were treated worse than animals. They were 200 Jews in good physical
condition, 50 gypsies, 500 tubercular Poles, or 1,000 Russians. The
victims of these crimes are numbered among the anonymous millions who
met death at the hands of the Nazis and whose fate is a hideous blot on
the page of modern history.
The charges against these defendants are brought in the name of the
United States of America. They are being tried by a court of American
judges. The responsibilities thus imposed upon the representatives of
the United States, prosecutors and judges alike, are grave and unusual.
It is owed, not only to the victims and to the parents and children of
the victims, that just punishment be imposed on the guilty, but also to
the defendants that they be accorded a fair hearing and decision. Such
responsibilities are the ordinary burden of any tribunal. Far wider are
the duties which we must fulfill here.
These larger obligations run to the peoples and races on whom the
scourge of these crimes was laid. The mere punishment of the defendants,
or even of thousands of others equally guilty, can never redress the
terrible injuries which the Nazis visited on these unfortunate peoples.
For them it is far more important that these incredible events be
established by clear and public proof, so that no one can ever doubt
that they were fact and not fable; and that this Court, as the agent of
the United States and as the voice of humanity, stamp these acts, and
the ideas which engendered them, as barbarous and criminal.
We have still other responsibilities here. The defendants in the dock
are charged with murder, but this is no mere murder trial. We cannot
rest content when we have shown that crimes were committed and that
certain persons committed them. To kill, to maim, and to torture is
criminal under all modern systems of law. These defendants
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*Tr. pp. 12 74.
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