. NMT04-T0355
Volume IV · Page 355
| lesser value in order to preserve one of higher value is, in view of the struggle for existence in 1941, not to be rejected. Here, too, therefore, the effect of an error in fact derived from the uniqueness of the concrete situation will have to be taken into consideration. |
| c. Justification Because
Allied Bombings Killed Non-Combatants |
| EXTRACTS FROM THE TESTIMONY OF
DEFENDANT OHLENDORF* |
| DIRECT EXAMINATION |
| * * * * * * * * * * |
| DR. ASCHENAUER (Counsel for defendant
Ohlendorf): How do you explain the disgust with which the whole world regarded
these exterminations in the East? DEFENDANT OHLENDORF: This seems to have several reasons. For one thing, the deeds in the East were published as being isolated excesses done by the SS. One took them out of their context and made the SS alone responsible. In reality these executions in the East were a consequence of total war which was inevitable if an ideology of one power was to prevail which had as its goal the destruction of every resistance against their conquering the world with their idea. This war was never finished. The preparations for a possible conflict seem to express that whatever happened in the East was only a prelude. Another point. It has been customary so far to judge executions during a war by various standards. The element regarded as heroic, which made killing seem honorable was the fight of man against man. This has long been overcome. The individual war opponents try to exterminate as many enemies as possible by preserving their own strength. The fact that individual men killed civilians face to face is looked upon as terrible and is pictured as specially gruesome because the order was clearly given to kill these people; but I cannot morally evaluate a deed any better, a deed which makes it possible, by pushing of a button, to kill a much larger number of civilians, men, women, and children, even to hurt them for generations, than those deeds of individual people who for the same purpose, namely, to achieve the goal of the war, must shoot individual persons. I believe that the time will come which will remove these moral differences in executions for the purposes of war. I cannot see that political factors and political |
* Complete testimony is recorded in mimeographed transcript, 8, 9, 14, 15 October 1947, pp. 475-756.
