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constitute a crime against peace in the waging of aggressive war. The
IMT fixed that standard of participation high among those who lead their
country into war.
The defendants now before us were neither high public
officials in the civil government nor high military officers. Their
participation was that of followers and, not leaders. If we lower the standard
of participation to include them, it is difficult to find a logical place to
draw the line between the guilty and the innocent among the great mass of
German people. It is, of course, unthinkable that the majority of Germans
should be condemned as guilty of committing crimes against peace. This would
amount to a determination of collective guilt to which the corollary of mass
punishment is the logical result for which there is no precedent in
international law and no justification in human relations. We cannot say that a
private citizen shall be placed in the position of being compelled to determine
in the heat of war whether his government is right or wrong, or, if it starts
right, when it turns wrong. We would not require the citizen, at the risk of
becoming a criminal under the rules of international justice, to decide that
his country has become an aggressor and that he must lay aside his patriotism,
the loyalty to his homeland, and the defense of his own fireside at the risk of
being adjudged guilty of crimes against peace on the one hand, or of becoming a
traitor to his country on the other, if he makes an erroneous decision based
upon facts of which he has but vague knowledge. To require this of him would be
to assign to him a task of decision which the leading statesmen of the world
and the learned men of international law have been unable to perform in their
search for a precise definition of aggression.
Strive as we may, we are
unable to find, once we have passed below those who have led a country into a
war of aggression, a rational mark dividing the guilty from the innocent. Lest
it be said that the difficulty of the task alone should not deter us from its
performance, if justice should so require, here let it be said that the mark
has already been set by that Honorable Tribunal in the trial of the
international criminals. It was set below the planners and leaders, such as
Goering, Hess, von Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Keitel, Frick, Funk, Doenitz, Raeder,
Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and von Neurath, who were found guilty of waging
aggressive war, and above those whose participation was less and whose activity
took the form of neither planning nor guiding the nation in its aggressive
ambitions. To find the defendants guilty of waging aggressive war would require
us to move the mark without finding a firm place in which to reset it. We leave
the mark where we find it, well satisfied that individuals who plan and lead a
nation into and in an aggressive war should be held guilty of crimes against
peace, but not those who merely follow the leaders and whose participations,
like those of Speer. “were in aid of the war |
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