. NMT03-T0490
Volume III · Page 490
| [Rothen…] berger) : Dr. Rothenberger,
would you please first make some general statement about your memorandum?
PRESIDING JUDGE BRAND: The exhibit number, please. DR. WANDSCHNEIDER: We are concerned with Document NG-075, Prosecution Exhibit 27,¹ in document book 1-B, page 1. I have submitted a list to the Court on which the documents I shall mention are listed. Please begin with your statement. DEFENDANT ROTHENBERGER: The memorandum is a brief summary of what I had worked out during the previous years in Hamburg. The reason for my writing such a memorandum at all, I believe, I already indicated yesterday. I had pointed out that the development in the Reich until 1942, when this memorandum was written, gave cause for growing dangers and misgivings for every jurist.² Furthermore, I had pointed out how the administration of justice was pushed more and more into a defensive position by the Party and the SS and how the jurists, as well as all Germans, either acquiesced in this condition and this development or even went along with it, and how the administration of justice was more and more in retreat battles. I did not want to and could not go along with this line of action. And I did not want the administration of justice again and again to be confronted with faits accomplis. The Party and the SS concerned themselves with ideas for reforms of the administration of justice and it was my opinion that the only office which was competent for this and an expert organization in the field was the administration of justice itself. And the starting point for the attempt to change the course of this development were my experiences which I had gathered in Hamburg and in England. My conviction grew stronger and stronger to the effect that that question of the position of the judge in a state was significant not only for the administration of justice itself, but that it was a basic problem of political life in every state. Germany had always gone from one extreme to the other in polities, and now we were experiencing, during the year 1933 and the subsequent years, the extreme of a power state. And one of the causes for this was, in my conviction, that in Germany we were lacking a point of rest, an authority which due to tradition and out of its independence was in a position to influence the development critically. |
¹ Reproduced earlier in this section.
² See the extracts from the testimony of defendant Rothenberger reproduced in section V C 1 a.
