The Mazal Library

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NUERNBERG MILITARY TRIBUNAL
Volume IV · Page 505

"Q. Did you think that because they were Bolshevists and had been fighting Germany that they did not have souls?

"A. No.

"Q. You did believe they had souls then, didn't you?

"A. Of course.

"Q. But because they were of the attitude which you have expressed, you did not think it was worth while to try to save those souls?

"A. I had to assume that these were atheists. There are people who do not believe in God, who have turned away from God; and if I tell such a man a word of God, I run the danger that the person will become ironic.

"Q. Well, suppose he did become ironic, that could not be any worse than the fact that he was going to be killed rather soon. Suppose he did become ironic, how did that harm anyone?

"A. These things are too sacred to me that I would risk them in such situations."

He was further asked —

"Do you think that you demonstrated that ‘Love of fellow men’ by letting these people go to their deaths without a word of comfort along religious lines, considering that you were a pastor? Did you demonstrate there a ‘love of fellow men?’."

And his answer was —

"I didn't sin against the Commandments of Love."

Did Biberstein tell the truth when he said that the core of his religion was "Love of his fellow men" and then ordered the shooting of innocent people whom he regarded as swine? Was he trustworthy when he declared that he never heard of the Fuehrer Order until he arrived in Nuernberg? Was he credible when he announced that during all the time he was in Russia, he never learned that Jews were shot because they were Jews?

Religion, which through the ages, has strengthened the weak, aided the poor, and comforted the lonely and oppressed, is man's own determination, but that a minister of the Gospel, via the road of Nazism, participated in mass executions is an observation that cannot go unnoticed. When the Swastika replaced the Cross and Mein Kampf dislodged the Bible, it was inevitable that the German people were headed for disaster. When the Fuehrerprinzip took the place of the Golden Rule, truth was crushed and the lie ruled with an absolutism no monarch has ever known. Under the despotic regime of the lie, prejudice supplanted justice, arrogance canceled understanding, hatred superseded benevolence — and the columns of the Einsatzgruppen marched. And in one of the front ranks strode the ex-minister Ernst Biberstein.

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