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ONE HUNDRED
AND EIGHTY-NINTH DAY |
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| Monday, 29 July
1946 |
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| Morning
Session |
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THE PRESIDENT: I call on the Chief
Prosecutor for the Provisional Government of the Republic of France, M.
Champetier de Ribes.
M. AUGUSTE CHAMPETIER DE RIBES (chief Prosecutor
for the French Republic): Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Tribunal:
On presenting the final address of the French Public Prosecutor, I beg
the Tribunal to permit me to express the admiration and the gratitude of my
country for the objectivity and calm with which these proceedings have been
conducted. In the course of the last 9 months the events of more than 15 years
of history have been evoked at this bar. Germany’s archives, those of them
that the Nazis were unable to burn before their defeat, have yielded up their
secrets. We have heard numerous witnesses, whose recollections would have been
lost to history but for the present Trial.
All the facts have been
presented with strict objectivity, leaving no room for passion nor even for
sensibility. The Tribunal have excluded from the proceedings everything that,
in their opinion, seemed insufficiently proved, everything that might have
appeared to be dictated by a spirit of vengeance. For the chief concern of this
Trial is above all that of historical truth.
Thanks to it, the
historian of the future, as well as the chronicler of today, will know the
truth of the political, diplomatic, and military events of the most tragic
period of our history; he will know the crimes of Nazism as well as the
irresolution, the weaknesses, the omissions of the peace-loving democracies.
He will know that the work of twenty centuries of a civilization, which
believed itself eternal, was almost destroyed by the return of ancient
barbarism in a new guise, all the more brutal because more scientific.
He will know that the progress of mechanical science, modern means of
propaganda, and the most devilish practices of a police which defied the most
elementary rules of humanity, enabled a small minority of criminals within a
few years to distort the collective conscience of a great people, and to
transform the nation described by Dr. Sauter at the conclusion of his speech in
defense of |
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| 530 |
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