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Volume III · Page 31
A. Opening Statement for the Prosecution*
BRIGADIER GENERAL TAYLOR: This case is unusual in that the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the name of the law. These men, together with their deceased or fugitive colleagues, were the embodiment of what passed for justice in the Third Reich.
Most of the defendants have served, at various times, as judges, as state prosecutors, and as officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice. All but one are professional jurists; they are well accustomed to courts and courtrooms, though their present role may be new to them.
But a court is far more than a courtroom; it is a process and a spirit. It is a house of law. This the defendants know, or must have known in times past. I doubt that they ever forgot it. Indeed, the root of the accusation here is that those men, leaders of the German judicial system, consciously and deliberately suppressed the law, engaged in an unholy masquerade of brutish tyranny disguised as justice, and converted the German judicial system to an engine of despotism, conquest, pillage, and slaughter.
The methods by which these crimes were committed may be novel in some respects, but the crimes themselves are not. They are as old as mankind, and their names are murder, torture, plunder, and others equally familiar. The victims of these crimes are countless, and include nationals of practically ever country in Europe.
But because these crimes were committed in the guise of legal process, it is important at the outset to set forth certain things that are not, here and now, charged as crimes.
The defendants and their colleagues distorted, perverted, and finally accomplished the complete overthrow of justice and law in Germany. They made the system of courts an integral part of dictatorship. They established and operated special tribunals obedient only to the political dictates of the Hitler regime. They abolished all semblance of judicial independence. They brow-beat, bullied, and denied fundamental rights to those who came before the courts. The "trials" they conducted became horrible farces, with vestigial remnants of legal procedure which only served to mock the hapless victims.
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*Tr. Pp. 34-137, 5 March 1947.
