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Volume IV · Page 506
| The Fuehrerprinzip |
| In every Nuernberg trial, an invisible
figure appears in the defendant's dock. At each session in this Palace of
Justice, he has entered the door and quietly moved to his place among the other
defendants. For over two years he has been making his entrance and exits. He
never takes the witness stand, he never speaks, but he dominates every piece of
evidence, his shadow falls over every document. Some of the accused are ready to charge this sinister shadow with responsibility for their every reverse and misfortune. But were he to cast off the cloak of invisibility and appear as he was, the animadversions of the other occupants of the defendants' box might not be so audible, because he knows them well. He was no sudden interloper in Germany's destiny. He did not appear in a flash and order his present companions into action. Had it happened that way, the story of physical and moral duress they recounted from the witness stand would not be so incongruous. But, of their own free will, they threw in their lot with that of the specter's, and in their own respective functions enthusiastically carried out the shadow's orders, who was then not a shadow but a fire-breathing reality. In explanation of their willingness to follow him in those days, they explain they had no reason to doubt him. He had been so successful. But the very successes they cheered most were usually this man's greatest crimes. Each defendant has claimed that the propaganda of the day assured them that Germany was always fighting a defensive war, but these men were not outsiders, nor were they children. They were part of the government, they belonged to the regime. It is incredible that they should believe that Germany was being attacked by Denmark, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Belgium, and even little Luxembourg. Indubitably they revelled in these successes. One of the defense counsel declared that the defendants could well believe of Hitler that "here was a man whom no power could resist". And indeed never did a man wield so much power and never was a living man so ignominiously and stupidly obeyed by other men. Never did living beings, made in the image of man, so pusillanimously grovel at feet of clay. But it is not true that no one could resist him. There were people who could resist him, or at least refused to be a party to his monstrous criminality. Some voluntarily left Germany rather than acknowledge him as their spiritual leader. Others opposed him and ended up in concentration camps. It is a mistake to say or assume that all the German people approved of nazism and the crimes it fostered and committed. Had that been true, there would have been no need of |
