. NMT04-T0084
Volume IV · Page 84
| "The Frenchman" as he goes on to state — and I want to add to it — the American and the British — "will never understand that there are people who acknowledge an authority over them which may prescribe to them how to behave". This in itself, a regrettable and frightening character trait, to give one's individuality up completely and only to be a small wheel in the set-up of a clockwork, has become the theme of a critical essay by Robert d'Harcourt "The mental perspectives of the Germans (Die geistigen Perspektiven des Deutschen) " There it says, |
"Resistance — this word means something disreputable to the Germans * * *. They have superstitious veneration for legal forms, which also reaches into the ranks of the opposition * * *. In the presence of power, in the presence of an order issued by the authorities, the power of judgment in the Germans becomes befogged. The ability to evaluate properly is suspended in the actual sense of the word. The only reaction to a given order is its acceptance and its execution * * *." |
| A further important contribution to the comprehension of the problem, how it was possible that decent and blameless people, according to the statements of the prosecution, could so diligently and punctually serve the National Socialist annihilation machinery, is given in the statement contained in the above-mentioned essay by d'Harcourt, |
| "There is no other nation that in its whole make-up is more removed from any public affairs than the Germans. That the German is a family father in the first instance and in the second instance a citizen * * *." |
| His desire for secure living conditions for
himself and for his family predestinate him exactly to function in the
prescribed sense in the authoritative state. And this state utilized the
endlessly docile, yielding disposition of a nation to which the security of the
family meant more than the duty of the citizen who is conscious of his
responsibility, to form it at will and to its own purposes. On such a soil only the actions could grow which have brought Blobel as well as the other defendants into the dock. Under 8 (C) to (J) the indictment charges the defendant Blobel with the murder of nearly 60,000 people. Up to the present presentation of evidence by the prosecution, the latter seems to consider the case as a simple case of murder, in which on the one hand there is the perpetrator and on the other hand there is the known number of people executed. But it is not quite as simple as the prosecution seems to think, even if the actual facts are apparently sufficiently proved by documents. My task as defense counsel commands me here to point to |
