. NMT04-T0353
Volume IV · Page 353
| in regard to the Jewish problem, were at
first glance of such a nature as to confirm the correctness of the National
Socialist ideology in the eyes of the soldiers fighting in Russia. He who came
to Russia in 1941, whether officer or enlisted man, had to get an idea of the
problem from personal experience. He had the opportunity to find out that the
percentage of Jews in the administration was very high and that especially
those offices, which were particularly unpopular among the masses of the people
as the economic authorities and the political police, were permeated with Jews
to an especially large extent; moreover, the German soldier, in his
conversations with the native population, noticed an unmistakable antisemitism
(which on the other hand varied considerably according to the region);
eventually one could notice very soon that the Jews played a special role in
the resistance movements and particularly in the underground organizations of
the partisan movement. Under these circumstances it is a necessary consequence that, among those circles of the German Wehrmacht in the East who so far had not been inclined to an anti-Semitic conception a priori a clearly defined resentment against Jewry could very soon be noticed. One regarded the Jew as the spiritual leader of resistance and sabotage and this fact on its part again created the psychological conditions mentioned, the psychological atmosphere for the fact that the liquidation order was accepted as a "raison de guerre" about which the individual might think as he wanted, which, however, in the framework of the general developments, were to be taken notice of and were to be carried out without discussion. 3. Conclusions in regard to criminal law In the aforementioned statements a summary has been made of — under 1, the objective (actually given), under 2, the subjective (psychologically effective) prerequisites of putative assistance in distress respectively putative necessity. It is now to be examined whether these prerequisites can justify the assumption of putative assistance in distress or of putative necessity in the sense of the continental conception. a. Putative assistance in case of distress In 1941, the German Reich was facing acts of war of an opponent who, filled with the concept of class struggle, denied the obligations of positive international law and, even under his own doctrine of international law, in as far as he referred to the rules of international law, only utilized these rules in the interest of his theory of class struggle. The coming conflict [die kommende Auseinandersetzung] took place, from the outset, outside the boundaries drawn by inter- […national] |
