 |
able to seize and consolidate
their power in Germany, and the Third Reich would never have dared to plunge
the world into war.
"Farben's devotion to the National Socialist Party
and the Third Reich remained unshaken." |
The attitude revealed in these and other statements is wrong, though
understandable in a man who never lived in the Third Reich and bases his
opinion, certainly in an honest attempt to find the truth, partly on
uninformed, prejudiced reports from emigrants — although I concede to them
their moral justification for nursing such a prejudice. A client of mine of an
uncommonly high standard of character and intelligence, the former editor in
chief of the "Berliner Tageblatt," Theodor Wolf, whom I looked up in
Switzerland in the first days of his emigration, stated to me that, though he
would do some writing while in exile, he would never make the political
conditions in Germany the subject of his literary activities, "because an
emigrant, for natural reasons and, as it were, by the will of God, is about the
worst-qualified judge of home affairs." These words made a deep impression upon
me, and experience has corroborated them. The General, furthermore, must base
his judgment on a rather malicious source of knowledge, namely on a not
inconsiderable part of the German press after the collapse, when, to say the
least, an enormous resentment formed the "leitmotiv."
I commented upon
this erroneous attitude in my closing statement in the first industrialists'
trial, the Flick trial, and I would like not only to repeat my former
statement, but also establish its truth in my proof. |
| |
| "Hitler owes his rise to the fact that the trade unions (which in
1920, on the occasion of the Kapp-Putsch, defeated, by a general strike, this
movement thought by them to be reactionary) had been ground down in 1933 by
years of unemployment, because they no longer had behind them the masses who
had lost their belief in the trade unions. Six millions of unemployed had been
crowding the streets, some of them for years, and the trade unions, which for
decades had promised them the Socialist heaven, were unable to help them. Then
there arose from the ranks of the proletariat the "Savior" who promised them
salvation — salvation from misery — and all these masses of the lower
middle class and the proletariat followed this rat catcher from Hamelin. Where
else did the number of votes he received come from?" |
__________
* The closing
statement for defendant Flick in the Flick
case is reproduced in section IX F, volume VI, this series.
220 |
. 
