 |
| Tribunal to find justice. It would be the reward for this ardent
endeavor if also the result of your examination, Your Honors, would he.: This
man is not guilty. |
| |
| D. Closing Statement for Defendant Schmitz* |
| |
DR. RUDOLF DIX (counsel for defendant Schmitz): Your Honors! Allow
me to preface my closing statement with a personal confession. I believe that
no judge can find the truth in this trial or pass a just sentence, who
considers as isolated phenomena, or, worse still, from a formalistic point of
view only, the organic developments with which we are here concerned, or who
imagines that he can allow himself to see everything in either black or white,
or who believes that "facts" and "figures" alone suffice - and who fails to
realize that he must plumb the depths of sociological and psychological
research if he wants to understand the complexity of those organic developments
which connect Farben, and, therefore, these defendants, with the origin, the
rise, and the fate of Hitler and his Third Reich.
When considering my
client, Schmitz, and his fate, a concept inevitably comes to one's mind which
the most intelligent nation which ever existed, the ancient Greeks, developed
in the course of their philosophical quest: the abstract concept and the
concrete realization of a “moira,” of ineluctable fate, whose
experience of pleasure and pain is the predetermined consequence, independent
of free will, of that “moira.”
Eminently suited to the theory
and practice of finance, interested in little else, devoid in particular of
interest in, and talent for, things political, a law abiding citizen, an
excellent “craftsman” in the sense in which Hedda Gabler was in
Ibsen’s play of that name, he was a man who worked quietly in the
seclusion of his study, who was averse to any kind of public display, and who
was at the same time, as all the witnesses agree, a great humanitarian —
in short, the type of German who has always rightly been acclaimed throughout
the world. But now, in the 68th year of his life, he appears as a defendant in
a trial of a definitely political nature and with a definitely political
background, — trial which has been linked by the world press and by the
prosecution with the dreadful and monstrous atrocities connected with the name
of Auschwitz a trial which involves world history, since one of the accusations
levelled at the defendants by the prosecution states that they intentionally
helped to unleash the most dreadful war of all times, that they were involved
in the crimes committed by Hitler’s praetorian guard, and in Hitler’s
rise to power and in the |
__________
* Mimeographed transcript 2
June 1948. pages 14634-14662.
935 |
. 
