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NUERNBERG MILITARY TRIBUNAL
Volume V · Page 32

this case is primarily concerned. Nowhere else can the world gain so complete a picture of the extremes to which the Nazis went in their attempts to carry out this program as in the record of this proceeding.

The crimes charged here were not committed in a heat of passion brought on by over-zealous wartime patriotism. These were premeditated acts. They had long been contemplated and their seeds are to be found in the avowed aims of the Nazi Party itself. On 5 January 1919, not two months after the conclusion of the armistice which ended the First World War, the Nazi Party had its beginning and adopted a platform. This program, which remained unaltered until the Party dissolved in 1945, consisted of twenty-five points. The first four points contain the Nazi doctrines of Lebensraum and the inferiority of other races, which were the immoral bases for the detailed program launched during the war.

"Point 1. We demand the unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany, on the basis of the right of self-determination of peoples.

"Point 2. We demand equality of rights for the German people in respect to the other nations; abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.

"Point 3. We demand land and territory for the sustenance of our people, and the colonization of our surplus population.

"Point 4. Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race * * *¹

Throughout the years that followed the first pronouncement, the members of the Nazi Party and the world in general were constantly reminded of the objectives of the Nazis. Hitler's "Mein Kampf," the Nazi bible, continued to preach the same doctrine. This book was published about 1925 and, as the International Military Tribunal judgment expressed it,

"* * * was no mere private diary in which the secret thoughts of Hitler were set down. Its contents were rather proclaimed from the house tops. It was used in the schools and universities * * *. By the year 1945 over 61/2 million copies had been circulated. The general contents are well known * * *".²

"The second chapter of book one of Mein Kampf is dedicated to what may be called the ‘Master Race’ theory, the doctrine of Aryan superiority over all other races, and the right of

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¹ Trial of the Major War Criminals, op. cit. supra, pp. 174-175.
² Ibid., p. 187.

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