CENTURY DISCREDITED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26216, 29 July 1946, Page 5

CENTURY DISCREDITED

RECORD OF INHUMANITY GUILT SHARED WITH HITLER NUREMBERG, July 26. Summing up the trial of the German leaders at Nuremberg, Mr Justice Jackson declared that the Nazis’ aggressions were the most carefullyplotted war in history, practically every step was iri terrifying succession, and the progress moved according to a master blueprint of subsidiary schedules and timetables. Answering defendants’ arguments that they had to obey Hitler Mr Justice Jackson said: “ They may have become the slaves of a dictator, but they intoxicated him with power and adulation, fed his hates, aroused his fears, apd put a loaded gun in his eager hands. Hitler pulled the trigger. They all of them approved. Dead Men Blamed

“ Some of the defendants reluctantly and some vindictively admitted Hitler’s guilt, but his guilt is the guilt of every man in the dock. The little men of Germany who carried out the criminal policies will be convicted and punished. It would be a vast, unforgiveable caricature of justice if the men who planned the policies and directed the little men should escape penalty.” The defendants unanimously blamed Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and Bormann who were dead or missing. They protested too much. “It was these dead whom these living chose to be their partners in a great conspiratorial brotherhood. The crimes they did together they must pay for one by one.” Hitler was the chief villain, but for defendants to blame him was neither manly nor true. Hitler was the Mad Messiah who started the war without cause and prolonged it without reason. He left life as he lived it, “ a deceiver.” . He was a man whom the defendants exalted to the Fuhrer. They conspired to get him an absolute authority in Germany. He and the system they created brought l'uiri for them all. “If you say these men are not guilty it would be as true to say there had been no war, no .slain, and no crime.” Shameful Crimes

“This mad, melancholy record will live as the historical text of the twentieth century’s shame and depravity.” said Mr Justice Jackson. He said that no half-century had witnessed such slaughter, cruelties, inhumanities, wholesale deportations, slavery, and annihilations of minorities as the last 40 years. “If we cannot eliminate the causes and prevent a repetition of these barbaric events the twentieth century may yet succeed in ringing civilisation’s doom.” The future would never be able to say that the Nazis had not been allowed to say what they could in their favour, but their testimony helped to write their own condemnation. The court heard the evidence of criminals and heard the defendants’ flimsy excuses and paltry evasions. Mr Justice Jackson, after describing how the Nazis seized power and how they maintained it, said the result was the removal of peaceable means to resist a change of Government. The Nazis from the moment they seized power set about feverishly and stealthily arming for war in defiance of the Versailles Theaty. Vindictiveness to Russians Dealing with the Nazis’ warfare in disregard of international law, Mr Justice Jackson said the Teutonic fury against the Soviet people and prisoners knew no bounds. It was also established or admitted that other violations of the Hague and Geneva conventions occurred, such as the murder of Allied airmen, mistreatment of western war prisoners, and forcing Fi'ench war prisoners to do German war work. Mr Justice Jackson said that the Nazi leaders waged against the Jews the most far-flung and most terrible racial persecution of all time. One witness who had charge of the extermination programme estimated that 6,000,000 Jews were killed, of whom 4,000,000 were killed in institutions and 2,000,000 by the security police, who pursued them to ghettos and to their homes, and slaughtered them. Mass Murder of Jews “The programme was so thorough and uncompromising that European Jews as h race no longer exist, thus fulfilling Hitler’s diabolical prophecy at the beginning of the war.” The chief instrument in the programme was the concentration comp, which Goering sired and which Frick and Kaltenbrunner nurtured. Goering, Keitel, Raeder, Frick, and Funk were the key defendants. Goering’s testimony was a strange mixture of wind and wisdom.

The filthy Streicher and the blasphemous Rosenbei-g were made the leaders because anti-Semetism was the vehicle on which the Nazis rode to power. Each defendant, in spite of quarrels among the party, played a part which fitted into every other, and advanced a common plan.