. NMT06-T0132
Volume VI · Page 132
| that this topic will also be dealt with in
the case-in-chief of the general defense. Above all, however, the concern of my case-in-chief, and that of my fellow defense counsel, will be to prove that the institutions of the State alone were responsible for the so-called slave-labor program, and that the individual citizen is obliged to obey the criminal laws or orders of his government. We will say more on this subject in the final speech for the defense. I will therefore undertake to prove that the defendant Flick did not, as the prosecution maintains, voluntarily and willingly let these workers be used in his plants. The opinion, however, that in the Third Reich anyone would have been in a position to refuse to fulfill the production demands made by the government with the explanation that he refused to employ foreign workers or concentration camp inmates, or, for armament works, prisoners of war or any foreign workers whatsoever, because they did not come voluntarily — the opinion that anyone could so refuse without having to pay for this refusal with the penalty of death for alleged sabotage and undermining of the German defense morale, is inconceivable to those familiar with the justice of the Third Reich and with the tasks and habits of the Gestapo. The defense cannot unhesitatingly presume that the Court is acquainted with this. Proof will therefore be furnished for this also. No one who knows the Third Reich can hold the opinion that a voluntary martyr’s death could have changed anything in the conditions which are censured by the prosecution. We will also undertake to prove this theoretical question. If such conditions existed, however, then the conception of the unimportance of an order, a law, or any other government injunction is untenable. No legal obligation exists to die a martyr’s death without obtaining any result whatever. To assert the contrary would be inhuman. |
| COUNT TWO — SPOLIATION |
| The authoritative legal points of view for this count have been briefly sketched at the beginning of my argument. We will undertake to prove that Flick did not personally enrich himself by administering the works in the east and west as a trustee, but rather pursued a policy of investment, particularly in Rombach, which improved the real capital of the enterprise; that the original owners were never divested of their property; and that the so-called seizures and returns were dictated by necessities of war insofar as it was not a question of objects, machines, etc., originally imported from Germany. Moreover, the question of the exploitation of the productive capacity of these works for the war potential is not a matter of evidence, but rather a legal question |
