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form “a part of the said planning on conspiracy” (German
Tr. p. 51) ; this means that they are incorporated in the all comprising
conception of conspiracy for the commission of crimes against peace.
It
is evident that the two afore mentioned groups of offenses are on different
levels as far as their nature is concerned. The field outlined by the
indictment includes anything from the responsibility of individuals for world
shattering developments and decisions, as are expressed in the charge
concerning the unleashing of aggressive wars and the conspiracy aiming at such
wars, a charge which has been legally sanctioned for the first time by the IMT,
up to the traditional charges in connection with the alleged war crimes and
crimes against humanity, which in the main, may be judged without difficulty
even on the basis of the civilized nations’ traditional conceptions of
penal law. The above discrimination is necessary, because the fact that a small
number of industrialists have been picked from a score of persons in equal or
similar positions and have been connected from the point of view of penal law,
with the alleged criminal instigation of political developments and world
shattering events of historical importance, requires a specially careful
examination of the conception of criminal responsibility, as far as the facts,
the causation, the state of mind, and the actual guilt are concerned. In this
connection it will be necessary to describe the course of political events
before and during the war in their actual significance and simultaneously to
outline the personal, and in particular the professional career of the
defendant, in this case Dr. Korschan, during the periods in question. This
exposition will show that it will not be possible to maintain the charges made
against Dr. Korschan of participation in a conspiracy for the waging of
aggressive wars or, going even further, of direct participation in those wars,
or to prove that he has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity,
without shattering the foundations of the basic conception of individual
criminal, responsibility.
In his capacity of chairman of the Vorstand
of the Bertha Works at Markstaedt, Dr. Korschan is mainly charged with having
committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by a compulsory employment of
foreign labor, concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war, and other groups
of workers, as well as by his unhuman treatment of those workers. In this
connection it will be necessary, by starting out from the crux of the matter,
that is, the unquestionable autocratic power which the State and Party
exercised over the industry within the National Socialist State, to show up the
decisive responsibility of the governmental, |
205 |
. 
