 |
| At this juncture of my closing statement in the Flick trial, I
reminded my listeners of the testimony of the witness Krueger, who, under
cross-examination, described very vividly how horrified he was when, after the
seizure of power, he suddenly saw rows of thousands of swastika flags
fluttering in the wind in the so-called lower-middle class and working class
neighborhoods. And so I continued in the Flick plea: |
| |
"It was the masses that carried
Hitler, not the elite, using this expression here in a sociological sense. And
will you please not impute to me any snobbish or socially presumptuous motives
for choosing this expression which is just a technical term used in Europe. (In
the United States, I think, the expression ‘intelligentsia’ is used
to a great extent.) The elite, however, are powerless without the masses. Today
the legend has spread that the whole of the former electorate of
Social-Democrats and Communists had been in opposition to national socialism.
How mistaken, how untrue this assertion is, is shown from the votes cast at the
Reichstag elections. All these facts have been distorted by a maze of myths
which today have already assumed the nature of incontestable facts and have
become the basis of so-called ideologies." |
Your Honors, your lofty task in the Farben trial is to separate the
facts from these myths. I do not in the least accuse these stultified masses.
What I fight against is the attempt to try, unjustly, to find a scapegoat. This
conception, against which I am fighting but which the prosecution has made its
own, has, in my firm opinion, not only caused the prosecution to prefer these
charges against the big industrialists, but is the main obstacle to the
recognition of truth and, thereby, one of the main proofs of the innocence of
these industrial researchers and industrial businessmen in the dock.
In
order to eliminate this fundamental historical error, proof must be adduced
before this Tribunal that it is simply not true that the leading figures of
industry as such — exceptions only prove the rule — and especially
the leading men of Farben, represented the prototype of the Nazis; that it is
not true that an alliance existed between them and Hitler with the aim of
bringing Hitler and his brown battalions to power and of participating in this
power, and, with the help of this power, of subjugating and enslaving, first
the masses of the German people, and then the rest of the world, by force and
by war, There can be no doubt that this matter is of relevancy not only with
regard to count one, but with regard to nearly all charges in the indictment.
It is indeed the basic matter. |
221 |
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