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Volume V · Page 929
| general public did not even then abandon the
laws of humanity — apart from very small exceptions — when night
after night the bombs were dropped on the German cities thereby killing women
and children. They were even asked to do so, so insensitive were the German
people in general against bad propaganda. The prosecution will point to the fact that the peculiar ideology of the SS should have imparted the knowledge of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Certainly, there were SS manuals, there were the 12 commandments of an SS man, there was the engagement and marriage instruction. But where do they contain objective elements of a crime? The opinions and thoughts they contained were more or less violently rejected by the world around them. Nobody had the imagination to foresee what was really to happen. Not a word was to be found in the SS manuals or in other places about the Jews to be gassed, about mass killings to be carried out in the concentration camps. If today it is said, one should have read between the lines, well, the question arises, why did the Weimar republic not exhibit a poster above the SS barracks to read : "Attention — Murder Incorporated No. 1." No, the individual SS man was not in a position to realize before the event that Himmler was capable of perpetrating crimes of the sort as have now come to light. The truth was disclosed only after the war. Up to that time it leaked out only gradually and remained unknown to most of the people even up to the very end. In this connection even the question is of no relevance, at what date a man joined the SS. It is also essential not to neglect but to consider the personality of each individual SS man when trying to judge him, or else testimony of the kind presented by the witness Ackermann would be disregarded. The witness Ackermann, who had been arrested by the Gestapo on various occasions beginning from 1933 and who was in a concentration camp, who was kept in concentration camps continuously from 1939 to 1945, declared as a prosecution witness. I quote: |
"* * * just as it has to be proclaimed in public for once, and I feel bound to do so, that among the SS men there were not only dirty swines, but quite a number of decent people, and beyond that SS men who were our best friends." |
| Quite consistently the witness Kogon, surely an unbiased witness, declared: |
"The facts with regard to the question, how far the individual |
