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Volume V · Page 1162
| concentration camps of Germany and occupied
territories are the ignoble monuments to these bolt and nut-turners.
One of the purposes of the war crimes program is to let the German people see what miserable wretches and bankrupt souls were running and ruining their nation. One of the objects of the trials is to demonstrate that such an oath as above quoted, which makes no acknowledgment of a Supreme Being and which takes no account of responsibility to the people of the nation, is first a sacrilege and then a dastardly crime, in that it puts an engine of destruction into the uncontrolled hands of a maniac. This kind of an allegiance is no demonstration of the cardinal virtue of loyalty, it is the utter renunciation of reason and thought. It is also one of three other things: feeble-mindedness, guileful conspiracy, or the criminal negligence of one who indifferently casts a monkey wrench out of a high window into a crowded street below. One who puts into motion a train of circumstances which can only inevitably lead to the harm of others may not plead lack of intent to do harm. One salubrious prospect in the Nuernberg scene is the opportunity it affords the German people to see what frauds their leaders were, what petty thieves they were, and more than all, what despoilers they were not only of the present but of the future. There can be no doubt that the vast mass of the German people believed that once the war was ended, peace, prosperity, and all the tranquility and harmony of home life would return, never to depart. But we have seen from Himmler's Metz speech that the Nazis plans were to fight continuous wars, that each German family was to have at least four sons, so that allowing for two to be mangled in death on some distant shrapnel-torn battlefield, there would still be two left to transmit the name. This was the pleasant future that the criminal rulers of Germany were holding out for their homeland. No democracy worthy of the name would have tolerated a Himmler. With his ugly and grotesque posturings as world conqueror a democratic people, with democratic processes would have laughed him out of public life. In a true democracy Hitler could not have been elected the second time to the position of dog catcher, but under the sheerly fantastic idea of the Fuehrerprinzip he could and did remain in power until, with his own hand he pushed himself into the grave no other German was able or willing to dig for him. And the German people who had given him obeisance never before accorded a modern ruler were reviled and cursed by him in those final days. And Himmler, the man who operated the concentration camps, who murdered millions of in- […nocents] |
