. NMT06-T0163
Volume VI · Page 163
| Private individuals. It was a general
principal that the responsibility for observing rules of international law was
the state's. The international Military Tribunal has deviated from this
principle in the great Nuernberg judgment and it holds responsible not only the
impersonal state, but also those persons who have acted for this state. This
argument may at least be justified in the interest of the development of
international law because it seems to be logical that he who acts in the name
of the state is just as responsible as the state itself. But it is not
understandable if now the prosecution goes beyond that and wants to make even
the individual citizens, that is, private persons, responsible, although these
private persons have not themselves acted for the state in the course of its
measures, but on the contrary were the victims of the measures taken by the
State; that is to say, they were obliged as citizens of the state to suffer the
measures taken by this state. It is in agreement with this when the French Chief Prosecutor de Menthon in the great Nuernberg trials said the following in his opening statement of 17 January 1946:* |
"It is obvious that, in an organized modern state, responsibility is limited to those who act directly for the state, they alone being in a position to estimate the lawfulness of the orders given. They alone can be prosecuted and they must be prosecuted." [Emphasis supplied.] |
| The present prosecuting authorities are
opposing this trend of thought when they prosecute the industrialists, that is,
private persons who, in contrast to the defendants at that time, such as
Goering, Sauckel, Rosenberg, etc., did not act for the State. This fundamentally new attitude taken up by the prosecuting authorities has consequently evoked considerable opposition in the whole world. Justice Jackson, the American Chief Prosecutor in the first trial, had not been able to carry through before the Tribunal his idea of the collective guilt of the German people; beyond that he championed the trial of the industrialists and in the meantime, influenced by the IMT judgment, withdrew from further trials while another member of the prosecution, selected by President Roosevelt, General Donovan, did the same thing many months earlier. In December 1946, that is 2 months before the present indictment was made, the prosecutor Pommerantz returned to America and to the journalists stated expressly that he could no longer represent the prosecution out of legal conviction. In the meantime, as is generally known, the Republican Party in the United States declared itself against the Industrial Trials and — |
* Trial of the Major war Criminals, op. cit., volume V, Page 388.
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