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Volume III · Page 32
This conduct was dishonor to their profession. Many of these misdeeds may well be crimes. But, in and of themselves, they are not charged as crimes in this indictment. The evidence which proves this course of conduct will, indeed, be laid before the Court, as it constitutes an important part of the proof of the crimes which are charged. But the defendants are not now called to account for violating constitutional guaranties or withholding due process of law.
On the contrary, the defendants are accused of participation in and responsibility for the killings, tortures, and other atrocities which resulted from, and which the defendants know were an inevitable consequence of, the conduct of their offices as judges, prosecutors, and ministry officials. These men share with all the leaders of the Third Reich — diplomats, generals, party officials. industrialists, and others — responsibility for the holocaust of death and misery which the Third Reich visited on the world and on Germany herself. In this responsibility, the share of the German men of law is not the least. They can no more escape that responsibility by virtue of their judicial robes than the general by his uniform.
One other word of clarification. Some of the evidence in this case will relate to acts which occurred before the outbreak of war in 1939. These acts will be proved in order to show that the defendants were part of a conspiracy and plan to commit the crimes charged to have been committed after the outbreak of war, and to show that the defendants fully understood and intended the criminal consequences of their acts during the war. But none of these acts is charged as an independent offense irk this particular indictment.
The charges in the indictment have been so limited for purposes of clarity and simplicity. There is no need to test in this case delicate questions concerning the criminality per se of judicial misconduct since the accusation and the evidence cut much deeper. The defendants are charged with using their offices and exercising their powers with the knowledge and intent that their official act: would result in the killing, torture, and imprisonment of thousand of persons in violation of international law as declared in Control Council Law No. 10. Nor is there any need to inquire here into what acts committed before the war are cognizable as crime` against humanity under Law No. 10, since the bulk of the proof relates to acts which occurred during the war.
In summary, the defendants are charged with ,judicial murder and other atrocities which they committed by destroying law an justice in Germany, and by then utilizing the emptied forms of legal process for persecution, enslavement, and extermination
