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means of feeble glossings over of the facts or by means of legal
hairsplitting. The intention of the United States of America, when conducting
the Nuernberg trials is to promote the ethical ideal of restitution of a true
state of law. The German defense admit frankly that the leaders of the National
Socialist Reich presumptuously provoked fate and brought immeasurable misery to
their own people as well as to foreign peoples. This conclusion remains valid,
even if a future encompassing historical evaluation of the years which we have
passed through should disclose further causes in connection with the
responsibility for this catastrophe. There will always be a policy which does
not accord with the principles of morals and ethics. But there is an
inalienable human dignity, to which all institutions of law and state will have
to bow if they do not want to nullify their own purpose. Only on the basis of
this realization will it be possible in future for us Germans to find among the
turmoil and the chaos of the present times a clear path, equally free from
hatred and resentment as from inferiority complexes, and openly to acknowledge
the wrong, also on behalf of our own people, the effects of which we see daily
in the misery of millions of German fugitives and starving masses. Hitler and a
restricted circle of his confidants were guilty of a cynical contempt of the
human individual and of their own people. They were the persons who were
responsible for instigating a policy which led to catastrophe. It is impossible
to place a man like Dr. Korschan who, as innumerable other Germans like him,
was simply swept away by an overpowering tidal wave, in the same street as
these persons.
Law, and international law in particular, is an
expression of the times that produce it. The powers that signed the Control
Council Law No. 10 accuse each other of all the crimes which form the subject
of this trial, starting from the enslavement of masses and the spoliation of
occupied territories up to the preparation of an aggressive war. Who is
“right,” and what is “right”? In this connection not only
the question of the formal validity of Control Council Law No. 10 will have to
be examined, but also the question whether the penal provisions contained in it
constitute binding substantive law. There is open anarchy within the legal
community and legal system formed by the powers that signed the Control Council
Law No. 10. The course of world politics today is not directed by
considerations of law, still less of international law, but by power policies
on a tremendous scale which face each other within the confined area of
Germany. No German, be he in the eastern zone or in the western zones, can take
up a position in which he will be safe — however he may behave — from
the most severe criminal charges, according to the contra- […dictory]
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. 
