. NMT04-T0030
Volume IV · Page 30
| III. OPENING STATEMENT OF
THE PROSECUTION* |
| Mr. FERENCZ: May it please your Honors: It
is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of
more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children. This was
the tragic fulfillment of a program of intolerance and arrogance. Vengeance is
not out goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this Court to
affirm by international penal action man's right to live in peace and dignity
regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to
law. We shall establish beyond the realm of doubt facts which, before the dark decade of the Third Reich, would have seemed incredible. The defendants were commanders and officers of special SS groups known as Einsatzgruppen — established for the specific purpose of massacring human beings because they were Jews, or because they were for some other reason regarded as inferior peoples. Each of the defendants in the dock held a position of responsibility or command in an extermination unit. Each assumed the right to decide the fate of men, and death was the intended result of his power and contempt. Their own reports will show that the slaughter committed by these defendants was dictated, not by military necessity, but by that supreme perversion of thought, the Nazi theory of the master race. We shall show that these deeds of men in uniform were the methodical execution of long-range plans to destroy ethnic, national, political, and religious groups which stood condemned in the Nazi mind. Genocide, the extermination of whole categories of human beings, was a foremost instrument of the Nazi doctrine. Even before the war the concentration camps within the Third Reich had witnessed many killings inspired by these ideas. During the early months of the war the Nazi regime expanded its plans for genocide and enlarged the means to execute them. Following the German invasion of Poland there arose extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Maidanek. In spring 1941, in contemplation of the coming assault upon the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen were created as military units, but not to fight as soldiers. They were organized for murder. In advance of the attack on Russia, the Einsatzgruppen were ordered to destroy life behind the lines of combat. Not all life to be sure. They were to destroy all those |
* Tr. pp. 30-60, 29 Sept. 1947.
