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Volume II · Page 123
KARL BRANDT¹
BY DR. SERVATIUS
Mr. President, Your Honors:
I cannot comment on all the questions which the prosecution brought up this morning. I must limit myself to a few things and can refer to my closing brief where I have gone into considerable detail on all these questions.
This morning I heard the detailed legal arguments advanced by the prosecutor. I have commented particularly on these legal questions in my closing brief, and I will now merely make a few brief comments.
The prosecution assumes that Law No. 10 is an independent law. This is not correct, for it designates itself explicitly as a law for the execution of the London Charter and declares that Charter to be an integral part of the law.
Now, the sole purpose of the London Charter is to punish disturbances of international legal relations, and not what has happened or is happening somewhere within an individual state. Any other interpretation would put an end to the conception of sovereignty, and it would give right of intervention into the affairs of other states.
In the trial before Tribunal III, Case No. 3, against Flick et al.,² General Taylor referred to an alleged right of intervention, quoting a considerable amount of literature with regard to this right of intervention into the internal affairs of another country.
I have ventured to refer to the position taken concerning this by one of the four signatory powers of the London Charter, a signatory power which was itself the victim of intervention in the name of civilization, the Soviet Union. I have attached the said literature to part I of my closing brief.
The Soviet Union drew a clear inference from the intervention to which it had been exposed by the Entente at the end of the First World War and obtained an alteration in the text of the London Charter, under which intervention would have been possible, by insisting that the text, which was ambiguous in consequence of the punctuation, be altered by the insertion of a comma. This comma was so important that the representatives of the four signatory powers met on purpose to discuss it.
It results therefrom that the internal affairs of a country cannot be affected by the London Charter and, consequently,
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¹ Final plea is recorded in mimeographed transcript, 14 July 47, pp. 10797-10817.
² United States vs. Friedrich Flick et al. See vol. VI.
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