. NMT04-T0384
Volume IV · Page 384
| X. FINAL STATEMENTS OF
THE DEFENDANTS* |
| OHLENDORF |
| May it please the Tribunal, all literature
published in the last two years dealing with the problems of National Socialism
seriously and, particularly, religious literature, agrees that National
Socialism is not the cause, but the effect of a spiritual crisis. That crisis
which unfolded itself in the last centuries, and particularly, in the last
decades, is twofold: it is a religious and a spiritual one, and it is a
political and social one. Catholic and Protestant literature both agree that at
least since the application of Gallican freedoms, Christian religion as the
final aim of humanity was increasingly eliminated from the spheres of the state
which form the core of historical development. The end of the Christian idea as
a binding goal for humanity in its social systems and of the individual turning
to the beyond, to life in God, had a double effect. 1. Man lacked absolute and uniform values in his life. In his mind and impulses he no longer found a uniform and firm guiding point which could have supplied him with the motives for his actions. Religious values and laws took an ever smaller space in his emotions, thinking, and acting. The Christian values, if they remained at all important, actually could not prevent man from being split into a "Sunday" and "week-day" individual. Week-day supplied him with different motives than an even temporary meditation on God's will. Life this side of the grave had not only acquired a significance of its own, but indeed ruled him independently with its concepts of autonomy, wealth, social position, and so forth. 2. Society, organized into separate states, found in this development no uniform values which might have been the constant objective of society or the state. As individuals and majority groups were in a position to make their separate aims the objects of society and politics, the inviolate metaphysical relatedness of politics was lost, and in consequence such social and political order as existed at a given time had to be disputed by the differing concepts of other individuals and other groups. The endeavors to preserve the status quo within the state and the nations was replaced by the will to eliminate the status quo by means of war or revolution. My generation, when it became aware of social conditions |
* Final statements are recorded in mimeographed transcript, 13 February 1948, pp. 6605-6645
