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Volume VI · Page 33
| labor troubles, and a swift increase in
production to support rearmament and the reestablishment of German economic
hegemony in Europe and across the seas. To the military, he promised the
reconstruction of the Wehrmacht and the resurgence of German armed might.
"Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy," said Hitler to the industrialists, and they agreed. "We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced, more or less, with an iron fist," he went on, and they agreed to that, too. "The question of restoration of the Wehrmacht will not be decided at Geneva, but in Germany," he said in conclusion, and this was what the industrialists and the military leaders had been thinking for a long time. † (D-203, Pros. Ex. 734.) † The foregoing quotations are from a speech by Hitler to a representative group of German industrial leaders on 20 February 1933. "For whether Germany possesses an army of 100,000 men, or 200,000, or 300,000 is, in the last resort, completely beside the point, the essential thing is whether Germany possesses 8,000,000 reservists whom she can transfer into her army * * *."† (NI-8544, Pros. Ex. 731). When Hitler spoke like this the industrialists and the General Staff dreamed of the day the gray legions of the German Army would again be led to foreign conquest. † From Hitler's speech at the Industry Club in Duesseldorf on 27 January 1932. As Mr. Justice Jackson put it in opening the international trial, the Nazi Party came to power: |
"* * * by an evil alliance between the most extreme Nazi revolutionists, the most unrestrained of the German reactionaries, and the most aggressive of the German militarists." |
| The defendants and some of their fellow lords of industry drank deep of this witches' brew. Soon they were consorting with Himmler and his sinister coterie, and then they began to give him money which he spent on certain of his less fastidious hobbies. Later they took to lining their pockets at the expense of wealthy Jews in Germany and the occupied territories. After the victories of the Wehrmacht in France and Russia, they were on hand to seize and exploit the choicer industrial properties. They enslaved and deported the peoples of the occupied countries to keep the German war machine running, and treated them like animals. Tolerance of such crimes will destroy man's capacity for self-respect; their repetition would destroy mankind itself. |
* Trial of the Major War Criminals, volume II, page 103, Nuremberg 1947.
