. NMT04-T0032
Volume IV · Page 32
| doctrine of a master race -- an arrogance
blended from tribal conceit and a boundless contempt for man himself. It is an
idea whose toleration endangers all men. It is, as we have charged, a crime
against humanity. The conscience of humanity is the foundation of all law. We seek here a judgment expressing that conscience and reaffirming under law the basic rights of man. |
| NAZI DOCTRINE OF SUPERIOR
AND INFERIOR RACES |
| As this trial deals with the crime of genocide, it is essential to investigate the basic tenets and the development of the Nazi doctrine which inspired the crimes we shall prove. It is conceded that the Nazis neither invented nor monopolized this idea of superior peoples, but the consequences they wrought gave it a new and terrible meaning. The Nazi conception has little in common with that arrogance and pretention which has frequently accompanied the mingling of different peoples. The master race dogma as the Nazis understood and practiced it was nothing less than the most all-encompassing and terrible racial persecution of all time. It was one of the most important points of the "unalterable program of the Nazi party" and the only one which was consistently advanced from the very beginning of Nazi rule in Germany to the bitter end. It was, as Gottfried Feder, the official commentator of the Nazi program, called it "the emotion foundation of the Nazi movement". The Jews were only one of the peoples marked for extermination in the Nazi program. The motivation of the crime of genocide, as it was carried out by Hitler and his legions in all of the occupied and dominated countries, stemmed from the Nazi ideology of "blood and race". In this theory of the predominance of the alleged Nordic race over all others and in the mystic belief that Nordic blood was the only creative power in the world, the Einsatzgruppen had their ideological basis. In this primitive theory, derived in part from Nietzsche's teaching of the Germanic superman, the Nazis found the justification for Germany's domination of the world. As Rosenberg put it in mystic fog: |
"A new faith is arising today; the myth of the blood, the faith, to defend with the blood the divine essence of man. The faith, embodied in clearest knowledge that the Nordic blood represents that mysterium which has replaced and overcome the old sacraments." |
| In his speech, concluding the Reichsparteitag in Nuernberg, on 3 September 1933, Hitler professed a similar creed, but gave it a more practical expression: |
