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arrive at the same ruling. Since I consider myself my father’s
successor in this defendant dock, I ask you to examine what the results of a
trial against my father would have been had not his illness prevented its
taking place. He was the only industrialist, the only private person in a
circle of the highest political and military leaders. Among them there were
those who alone knew the most secret aim of national socialism, who alone knew
its most vicious methods, and who applied them.
My father certainly did
not belong to them. The very contrast would have represented his best defense.
His acquittal would have stricken the name and the work of Krupp from the list
of war criminals. Fate willed it differently.
I am here in the place of
my father, but not I alone. None of our associates and now codefendants would
have come here had not the firm which they served borne the name of Krupp. Our
position is by far more difficult than that of my father’s in the trial of
the major war criminals. The very existence of many of his codefendants, their
knowledge, and their deeds would have spoken on his behalf. These men are dead,
and now their plans of which we did not know, their conferences in which we did
not participate are to incriminate us. We are to answer for a system which we
did not create, which we only incompletely knew, and of which in many cases we
disapproved. The living creators of this system would have testified on our
behalf. Are the dead to speak against us now?
In the final analysis the
essence of which we are charged with is this: You cooperated. No one will be
able to hold it against us that in the emergency of war we took the part of
duty, a part which millions of Germans had to take at the front and at home,
and which led them to death. If we are being charged with having plundered the
occupied territories, this charge will remain incomprehensible to anyone who
knows international economic relations. Economics go beyond national borders in
peace as well as in war.
In the discussion of the living conditions of
foreign workers, apart from the infinite efforts to cope with difficulties of
the war, incidents have been mentioned, the seriousness of which I do not wish
to belittle. Not even the prosecution maintains that we wanted or caused such
incidents. They charge us with indifference toward the laws of humanity. This
charge we take seriously. In our enterprise man was always more important than
money. My whole education taught me to make our enterprise service the men who
worked in it; many of them in the second and third generation. This spirit
filled the entire plant. Can you believe that something which took a century to
grow can suddenly dis- [… appear] |
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