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Volume III · Page 106
role in Party affairs. They too, by the very nature of the position,, they occupied in the judicial system, to say nothing of the fact that they were high in the Party councils, must have been aware of the activities recited by the International Military Tribunal as the basis for its declaration of criminality.
Indeed, the guilt of these seven defendants under count four is, in many respects, deeper than that of many full-time officers of these organizations. The defendants were highly educated, professional men, and they had attained full mental maturity long before Hitler's rise to power. Their minds were not warped at an early age by Nazi teachings; they embraced the ideology of the Third Reich as educated adults. They all had special training and successful careers in the service of the law. They, of all Germans. should have understood and valued justice.
Crimes, theoretically and, more often than not, actually, are these acts, which are so contrary to the moral conscience of the community or so dangerous to the maintenance of a reasonable degree of order, justice and peace in the community, that the community, by appropriate processes, demands their elimination and suppression in the interest of the individuals who constitute the community. Therefore, those within a nation or a state who institute proceedings to enforce this community decision as prosecutors, speak for the community conscience or community decision. For this reason, criminal prosecutions within states or nations are brought in the name of the State or the Commonwealth, or by the use of words suitable to describe the offended community.
In this proceeding at Nuernberg, the world is the community, The four nations which have written the substantive law under which we proceed, their responsible government heads and their elder statesmen, have proclaimed it as a codification of crane' denounced as such by the moral conscience of that community where the crimes we try were committed.
Therefore, although this indictment is brought in the name of the Government of the United States, this case in substance is the people of the world against these men who have committed criminal acts against the community we know as the world. For surely few spots on this earth are so remote that they have not felt in some degree the disruptive, if not indeed the destructive impact of the criminal acts of these men or those others whom they served and with whose acts they were criminally connected Therefore, unless all the countries of the world fight a continued struggle to match the moral conscience of the world which has
