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This solemn injunction, far from being a bar to the jurisdiction of
the Tribunal, is its foundation. It reminds the individual of his own frailty
and fallibility. It is not for any man to pierce the veil and divine the great
absolutes. The judge must not judge in his own name nor uninstructed; he judges
under the laws derived from revered scriptures and the wisdom of the ages, and
declared or commonly accepted as binding by the community, large or small,
whose agent and servant he is. That is why the judicial robe is a garment of
humility, not of pride. But this mandate is not for judges only; it is
universal. It warns man not to set himself up as better than his fellows, and
not to impose his personal notions of good and evil on his neighbors. It is an
exhortation against arrogance, presumption, and vanity. It is the divine
ordinance of right and duties among men. From it are derived all the great
proclamations of human dignity in modern times, and on it are bottomed the very
principles of law under which these defendants are to be tried.
The
crimes with which these men are charged were not committed in rage, or under
the stress of sudden temptation; they were not the slips or lapses of otherwise
well-ordered men. One does not build a stupendous war machine in a fit of
passion, nor an Auschwitz factory during a passing spasm of brutality. What
these men did was done with the utmost deliberation and would, I venture to
surmise, be repeated if the opportunity should recur. There will be no
mistaking the ruthless purposefulness with which the defendants embarked upon
their course of conduct.
That purpose was to turn the German nation
into a military machine and build it into an engine of destruction so
terrifyingly formidable that Germany could, by brutal threats and, if
necessary, by war, impose her will and her dominion on Europe, and, later, on
other nations beyond the seas. In this arrogant and supremely criminal
adventure, the defendants were eager and leading participants. They joined in
stamping out the flame of liberty, and in subjecting the German people to the
monstrous, grinding tyranny of the Third Reich, whose purpose it was to
brutalize the nation and fill the people with hate. They marshaled their
imperial resources and focused their formidable talents to forge the weapons
and other implements of conquest which spread the German terror. They were the
warp and woof of the dark mantle of death that settled over Europe.
The
defendants will, no doubt, tell us that they were merely overzealous, and
possibly misguided, patriots. We will hear it said that all they planned to do
was what any patriotic businessman would have done under similar circumstances.
The German Wehrmacht was weak; they helped to make it strong. They were
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