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Volume VI · Page 117
| of this foreign legal thought. However, American legal thought also recognizes the difference between an outward act and personal guilt in the said act. Also, American legal thought takes it as a matter of course that a criminal offense cannot have been committed by a person if there is no causal connection between the acts of this person and the facts which are punishable per se, if these criminal facts have not been brought about by these acts, but these acts, on the contrary, run parallel to these facts completely independently and in no way causally. It is also of course current in American legal thought that a person can only be punished for having committed a deed objectively punishable, if this person recognizes the individual characteristics of the deed and intended to carry it out. In short, we are in agreement about the significance of the concept of criminal guilt, and we have to be impartial representatives of civilized and professionally disciplined legal thought. Even if, for example, a criminal statute has been drafted so loosely with regard to assumption of a criminal act, as was the case in Control Council Law No. 10, there can hardly exist a controversy between us that the causality which the have just defined and the subjective guilt of the perpetrator which we have also defined must always be existent in order to arrive at a conviction based on the standards of Control Council Law No. 10. If, therefore, Article II [paragraph] 2 (d), goes so far as to say that any person is deemed to have committed a crime who was connected with plans or their execution involving the commission of an act, punishable under this law, a free act of volition on the part of the perpetrator must, of course, be a prerequisite. This must always be existent even though the outer participation of the perpetrator in the punishable act is limited to a minimum in the law. Or, if, according to Article II, [paragraph] 2(c) it is sufficient for punishment for the perpetrator to be a member of an organization which was connected with the commission of the act, a punishable act of the perpetrator himself could only exist — even according to your legal thought, and in the face of this broad concept — if it involved an organization the membership in which was in itself compulsory and enforced by law, ipso jure, such as was, for instance, the case in the Reich Association Coal and the Reich Association Iron. There can be no further controversy of the fact that, in spite of this compulsory membership by law, punishable acts may be committed by individual members or even by members of the board, as a result of their activities in these organizations, or other organs. The prerequisites of these, however, always are — a relevant individual criminal act and individual guilt, at least if a crime against humanity is involved, as in such a case criminal |
