. ©MAZAL LIBRARY

NMT04-T0622


. NUERNBERG MILITARY TRIBUNAL
Volume IV · Page 622
Previous Page Home PageArchive
 
III. OPENING STATEMENTS 
 
A. Opening Statement of the Prosecution¹
 
MR. McHANEY: May it please the Tribunal, the crimes of these defendants, thirteen men and one woman for which they stand here accused, are the result of a vast and premeditated plan to destroy national groups in countries occupied by Germany. This program of genocide was part of the Nazi doctrine of total warfare, war waged against populations rather than against states and armed forces. Hitler once said that —
 
"The French complained after the war that there were twenty million Germans too many. We accept the criticism. We favor the planned control of population movements. But our friends will have to excuse us if we subtract the twenty million elsewhere. After all these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and lowly, it is about time we decided to protect the strong against the inferior. It will be one of the chief tasks of German statesmanship for all time to prevent, by every means in our power, the further increase of the Slav races. Natural instincts bid all living beings not merely to conquer their enemies, but also destroy them."² 
All of these defendants played an active and leading role in carrying out this broad program which had the two-fold objective of weakening and eventually destroying other nations while at the same time strengthening Germany at their expense, territorially and biologically, in order to secure German domination first of Europe and finally of the world.

This program was based primarily upon the two Nazi concepts of Race and Lebensraum. Belief in German racial supremacy is not new in German thought. At the end of the 19th century it became crystallized in the theory of Aryan supremacy. The "Aryan" had long been used to denote that family of languages to which ancient Norse, Greek, and Sanskrit belonged. Now the term Aryan was applied to a mythical race which was creator of all the culture existing in the world.

As Hitler himself said in "Mein Kampf" — ³
 
"All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan."
This theory of race played a prominent role in the rise to power of the Nazis. It convinced the German masses of Aryan
__________
¹ Tr. pp. 24-125. 20 October 1947.
² Rauschning, "The Voice of Destruction", New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1940, p. 133.
³ "Mein Kampf", 1943 Edition, Houghton, Miflin & Co., p. 290.

 
 
 
622
Next Page NMT Home Page