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III. OPENING
STATEMENTS |
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A. Opening Statement of the
Prosecution¹ |
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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
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"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"
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"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
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__________ 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 |