. NMT04-T0409
Volume IV · Page 409
| to answer for themselves to the highest
American Military Tribunals as the ones who held the most responsibility. As
long as I live I shall never understand that decision. Yet, I shall never
complain about my fate. I need have no fear for myself as to the verdict of
this Tribunal. Even if fate placed me in a prominent position in this manner, I feel eager to state my opinion at this point concerning the charge of the prosecution that every defendant was filled with boundless contempt for human life, because of the National Socialist ideology in which he believed. I joined the SD when I was a young man twenty years of age, a member of a generation born during the First World War and the majority of them probably witnessed the second one in the front lines. Everywhere we were in the center of events without having ourselves held any responsibility worth mentioning. And now once again, I am brought into the center of an event in the judgment of persons who were responsible for past happenings. I became a National Socialist and even more so an SD member, not because of contempt for human life, but because I always strongly approved of life in a community of human beings. The severe stroke of fate in my young life did not change this either, when, before my eastern assignment I lost my wife and child as a result of Allied operations during the war. The love for my people always made my duty towards my Fatherland a perfectly natural sentiment. While searching for a real life in a genuine community of people, we found our way to National Socialism. From 1934 to 1945, in the SD, I considered it my noblest duty to serve my people. When we set out on the Russian Campaign we stood on the crossroads of events of decisive importance to the world, not only as far as time is concerned, but also because of the place, in a territory between two worlds. We did not set out to kill, but we set out to defend Western civilization. Being an adjutant of an Einsatzgruppe, I was outside the sphere of the events contained in the indictment, but I was all the closer to the men in those units, who, the prosecution asserts, were filled with boundless contempt for human life. I was with these men for months in the area of the assignment. I know the mentality of these men, their surroundings, their troubles, and worries. I saw them when carrying out the hard task they had been given and I saw their struggle between duty and conscience when they were concerned with having to carry out the Fuehrer Order discussed here. I know that there was no one in those units that could have carried out the tasks assigned to him only because he did not respect the sacredness of human |
