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[satisfac...] tion and the fulfillment of my profession; in the
laboratories, in the planning offices and in technology I sought and found my
field of work, not in political or military planning. I was not a politician; I
was not a military man, nor an official. I was engrossed in my work as a
chemist, and this my work resulted from the structure and the traditional
development of chemistry. It was only the state which forced this work into
degrees of priority, to measures of expediency, and demands for expansion. This
was foreign to me, but I could not evade it.
I almost envy the people,
now that I have been ill this trial, who never ran the risk of becoming the
focal point of such state interests. If, during the course of the war, I had to
use my technical experience and knowledge in other countries too, I was not
thinking of plunder and spoliation. On the contrary, I built up there too. I
never wanted material gain or profit, and I never got it. I felt that I was
working together with all of the workers. All the deeper am I affected by the
charge of having committed crimes against humanity.
When, at the end of
1946, I was arrested by order of Nuernberg, I had 110 idea of becoming
indicted, and I therefore believed that everything could be quickly cleared up
by a frank discussion. That, for example, I would be connected with the
atrocities of the Concentration Camp Auschwitz, I could not understand. I was
shocked when I learned for the first time from documents in other trials of the
events in the Concentration Camp Auschwitz, but I cannot deal with this charge
of the indictment in any other way, than to say simply that I learned of all of
these things only after the collapse. The indictment refers here to things
which happened outside of my sphere of work and which are so horrible that even
today they surpass my powers of imagination.
I must deny emphatically
any causal connection with these things. My conscience is clear.
I
trust in your just judgment. |
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| 6. DEFENDANT BUERGIN |
| |
PRESIDING JUDGE SHAKE: Dr. Buergin.
DEFENDANT BUERGIN: Your
Honors, to serve technology, and to be of service to humanity was the slogan of
my work. In the 1914-18 war I served the Fatherland as an officer. After the
war, we had to work to regain what had been destroyed and lost, and together
with millions of Germans, who had made enormous sacrifices of goods and blood,
we had to regain for German products the old respect inside and outside of our
borders. This matter was the primary task of industry capable of export, and
specifically that of German chemistry. Export is a vital question for Germany.
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