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a prisoner of war in the armament industry would constitute a war
crime. If this conception were correct the number of guilty Germans would be
infinite. For then, every owner of a large, medium, or small industrial
enterprise or of any workshop and each supervisor, engineer, foreman, and
laborer in whose department or shop foreign workers had been employed would be
liable to punishment as participant as defined by the Control Council Law. This
concept however is incorrect, it must be incorrect and it has logically been
rejected in the judgment in the Flick trial. Only the prosecution continues in
this train of thought and it is biased in favor of the Morgenthau plan.
It is regrettable that the prosecution conducts the trial as if no
binding rules had been established by the IMT judgment and as if no judgment
had been pronounced in the Flick trial. Unfortunately the trial is considerably
prolonged by such conduct of the prosecution. Many points are settled by
themselves if one takes the judgment in the Flick trial as a basis. In this
respect I shall only remind you of the viewpoints in the IMT judgment, already
mentioned by me, and beyond that with regard to the judgment in the Flick case
I shall recall the fact that the American Tribunal in that case recognized the
political and economic dictatorship prevailing in the Third Reich and
consequently acknowledged the state of compulsion the German industry was
subject to. The trial could be conducted easier, more speedily and affording
more of a general view of the whole. In order to facilitate the trial, in spite
of the adverse attitude of the prosecution, I intend to proceed from the
foundation laid by the IMT judgment and the judgment in the Flick trial in
important questions concerning international and penal law in the complete
conviction that the Tribunal will recognize the foundation laid by both these
judgments since both trials have been conducted with the utmost care and
accuracy.
If the trial against Krupp and I.G. [Farben] does not afford
a general view of the whole and if the material presented has assumed boundless
proportions, it is largely due to the fact that charges of planning and
preparations for aggressive war have been raised in the Flick trial but have
not been incorporated as a special count in the indictment. The prosecution in
both these trials has submitted immense material in order to prove by
circumstantial evidence what it cannot prove directly. The defense, in
presenting its evidence, shall deal with this comprehensive material and is
compelled to deal with it because the prosecution sees incriminating evidence
in it in spite of the IMT judgment to the contrary, for example in rearmament
in the introduction of the MEFO bills of exchange a point, which has
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