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Volume VI · Page 973
| some state of affairs, and peace is a fitful, restless, tense period
. of preparation for war. Love for one's country is a crime, unless the country
be Germany; Frenchmen, Poles, Czechs, and Russians must work for the glory of
the German fatherland and render unquestioning obedience. Human slavery is
commonplace and a necessary part of the scheme of things. The police, so far
from being the guardians of law and order, are dangerous and malevolent
malefactors. This was a bad and brutal world. But, just as the ear gradually
accommodates itself to a badly tuned piano, or as the eye adjusts to the
Lilliputian scale of a puppet show, so do our minds tend to accept a morally
topsy-turvy world if we focus on it too long and without an occasional side
glance at a normal world. This, indeed, is the prime function of criminal law
and law enforcement. By judgment and sentence, the universal standards of
conduct embodied in civilized law are confirmed again and again. And it was the
collapse of law enforcement in Germany, and the abdication of moral and legal
responsibility by just such men as these defendants, which brought about and,
indeed, constituted, the disastrous disintegration of German society, and led
to the cataclysm from which we have hardly yet started to recover. Most
fundamentally, the defendants have sought refuge in this case by dividing the
perverted world of the Third Reich into "we" and "they". "They" are the bad
men, a cast of characters which constantly shifts according to the charge at
issue. Sometimes "they" are less fearsome figures like Pleiger or Kranefuss;
upon occasion "they" speak through the ghostly hardly ghastly voice of a
Finnish masseur. Whoever "they" are, "they" are the root and branch of all the
evil of the Third Reich. "We," on the other hand, were quite innocent of evil
intent. but "we" did fear "them." To placate "them," "we" had to be on the best
terms with "them." "We" gave Goering large sums of money and acted as his
agent; "we" housed Himmler, gave him pocket money, and masqueraded as members
of his "Circle of Friends"; "we" regretfully acquired properties which Goering
and Pleiger seized from unfortunate Jews and Frenchmen; "we" were shocked to
discover that "we" had been obliged to use thousands of foreigners whom "they"
had enslaved to keep our businesses going. It was most regrettable, but what
could "we" have done about it? The prosecution submits not only that these matters are legally insufficient to constitute a defense, but also that the record shows this entire line of defense to be utterly spurious and meretricious. The leading defendants, Flick and Steinbrinck, were not reluctant dragons. All the defendants are uncommonly able to take care of themselves and have been phenomenally successful at accomplishing what they set out to do. To suggest that these men, whose |
