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Volume IV · Page 501
| In this trial, one was constantly confronted
with acts of men which defied every concept of morality and conscience. One
looked in on scenes of murder on so unparalleled a scale that one recoiled from
the sight as if from a blast of scalding steam. But herein is the paradox, and with it the moral encouragement of redemption. Some of the defendants called witnesses to testify to their good deeds, and practically all of them submitted numerous affidavits extolling their virtues. The pages of these testimonials fairly glitter with such phrases as "honest and truthloving", "straight-thinking and friendly manner", "industrious, assiduous, and good-natured", "of a sensitive nature", "absolutely honest". Through the acrid smoke of the executing rifles, through the fumes of the gas vans, through the unuttered last words of the one million slaughtered, the defendants have recalled the precepts gained at their mothers' knee. Though they seemed not to see the frightful contrast between their events of the day and those precepts of the past, yet they do recognize that the latter are still desirable. Thus, the virtues have not vanished. So long as they are appreciated as the better rules of life, one can be confident of the future. Nor are the affidavits merely subjective in phrase. They point out objectively what the defendants did in attacking injustice and intolerance. In various parts of Europe (always with the exception of Russia) the Tribunal is told they occasionally interceded in behalf of oppressed populations and broke lances with the local Nazi despots. The affidavits state, for example, that Ott who enforced the Fuehrer Order from beginning to end in Russia was all kindness and gentleness to the villagers in Grosbliederstroff in the Lorraine, and that Haensch, whose conduct in the East leaves much to be desired, was the epitome of charity in Denmark where the population in paeons of thanksgiving showered him with adulatory messages and bouquets of flowers. During the period that Naumann was stationed in Holland, one affiant states, Naumann befriended the Jews, got them out of concentration camps, and released hostages. In fact, according to one affidavit, Naumann was known as a man "with softness toward Jews". What is the explanation for the appalling difference between the virtues which others saw in these defendants and their deeds as described by themselves? Was it the intimate companionship with evil? The poet Pope sought to describe this phenomenon in his quatrain — |
"Vice is a monster of so frightful a mien, |
