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Volume II · Page 795
high stations. By accepting such attractive and lucrative posts under a head whose power they know to be unlimited, they ratify in advance his every act, good or bad. They cannot say at the beginning, "The Fuehrer's decisions are final; we will have no voice in them; it is not for us to reason why; his will is law," and then, when the Fuehrer decrees aggressive war or barbarous inhumanities or broken covenants, to attempt to exculpate themselves by saying, "Oh, we were never in favor of those things."
One cannot escape the conviction that, had the war terminated in victory for Germany, all of the acts of Hitler, including those related to the charges in this indictment, would have been hailed as strokes of genius, and that this defendant would now be elbowing his way into the front row of those claiming to have successfully and victoriously carried out Hitler's orders and policies — in fact, claiming co-authorship in many. But with Germany defeated and Hitler dead, it becomes naively convenient to take refuge in the flimsy claim that no one except Hitler was in favor of the invasion of Poland and Russia and France and the rape of Holland and Belgium and Norway and Denmark.
The defendant insists that he knew nothing of the atrocities and violence which were cumulating day by day throughout Europe. Being a good German, he says, he supinely obeyed the decree which forbade listening to foreign broadcasts or reading foreign periodicals. He surrendered to a political philosophy which outlawed the ordinary means of knowledge and which prevented the formation of rationalized opinion or judgment. No one might read or listen or talk except in predetermined channels. Ignorance was prescribed by law. The first weapon of tyranny is to keep its victims in darkness. The Germans were an intelligent, cultured people; they were not ignorant serfs. What a travesty to say that a people which has produced some of the greatest intellects in human history is not fit to be told the truth.
Desperate and discouraged peoples, distraught with the crushing problems of hunger and insecurity, have always cried out for a miracle worker to lead them out of the wilderness. Then is the golden opportunity for the mountebank with bland promises and soothing phrases to provide a poisonous panacea for their distress. In their desperation they fail to realize that despotism has a way of beginning with benevolence and ends by being merely despotic. Masquerading in the mantle of a messiah, the wily opportunist lulls them into subscribing to some glib Fuehrerprinzip which means, "Ask no questions; leave everything to me." And when the debacle comes, they realize that they have left everything to him — honor, dignity, self-respect, liberty, even life itself — and they end up degraded, ashamed, impoverished, and hopeless. But
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