. NMT04-T0500
Volume IV · Page 500
| law of humanity, and, by doing so, preserve the human race itself. Through the centuries, man has been striving for a better understanding between himself and his neighbor. Each group of people through the ages has carried a stone for the building of a tower of justice, a tower to which the persecuted and the downtrodden of all lands, all races, and all creeds may repair. In the law of humanity we behold the tower. |
| Simferopol |
| Although the tone of this opinion is of
necessity severe, it is without bitterness. It can only be deplored that all
this could happen. The defendants are not untutored aborigines incapable of
appreciation of the finer values of life and living. Each man at the bar has
had the benefit of considerable schooling. Eight are lawyers, one a university
professor, another a dental physician, still another an expert on art. One, as
an opera singer, gave concerts throughout Germany before he began his tour of
Russia with the Einsatzkommandos. This group of educated and well-bred men does
not even lack a former minister, self-unfrocked though he was. Another of the
defendants, bearing a name illustrious in the world of music, testified that a
branch of his family reached back to the creator of the "Unfinished Symphony",
but one must remark with sorrow that it is a far cry from the Unfinished
Symphony of Vienna to the finished Christmas massacre of Simferopol, in which
the hapless defendant took an important part. It was indeed one of the many remarkable aspects of this trial that the discussions of enormous atrocities was constantly interspersed with the academic titles of the persons mentioned as their perpetrators. If these men have failed in life, it cannot be said that it was lack of education which led them astray, that is, lack of formal education. Most of the defendants, according to their own statements, which there is no reason to disbelieve, came of devout parents. Some have told how they were born in the country and that, close to nature and at their mothers' knee, learned the virtues of goodness, charity, and mercy. It could be said that the one redeeming feature about this entire sordid affair is that those virtues are still recognized. One inexperienced in the phenomena of which the human soul is capable, reading the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, could well despair of the human race. Here are crimes that defy language in the depths and vastness of their brutality. Here pitilessness reaches its nadir and nothing in Dante's imagined Inferno can equal the horror of what we have discovered happened in 1941, 1942, and 1943 in White Ruthenia, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Esthonia, Latvia, and the Crimea. |
