. NMT04-T0280
Volume IV · Page 280
| here because it seems to please the
prosecution especially. Despite repeated readings I have still not understood
it to this date. Perhaps the last two sentences are reasonable, but the first
two-thirds I cannot make any sense out of. Q. You were in the same state of uncertainty with respect to a great deal of Hitler's statements, were you not? A. It is very difficult to judge statesmen on their ideas about politics from various scattered quotations. If one were to do this it would be hard to find any statesman of whom one could say that he had ever any definite idea, for statesmen are in the difficult position of being in politics which is something changing and developing, and statesmen always adapt themselves to this changing characteristic of politics. This has not been only a quality of Hitler's but of all statesmen, until this very day. Q. Let us leave the statesmen and the politicians then and go to the lawyer of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, whom you quote in your direct examination as the author of what you call the theory of "friend and foe". You pointed out to the Court that this theoretician of the Nazi movement, the top legal theoretician, had, in your opinion, an impossible doctrine. Schmitt was the top juridical commentator on the Nazi State, was he not? A. In 1933 and 1934, yes, but then it was at an end after that. Q. Now, in Schmitt's conception, man had the very power, which Hitler described here, to coerce his weaker brother, did he not, the moral right to do it? A. That is why the SD for instance saw to it that Schmitt disappeared as the top jurist of the Third Reich because he credited such mistaken theories to National Socialism. Q. Will you tell us the name of another man whom the SD destroyed because he opposed your view of National Socialism? A. That is very difficult. You ask very much. National Socialism, unfortunately, had not time to work out its theory thoroughly and thus I looked in vain for even one book of principle on which National Socialism really was based. Q. Let us go to Gottfried Feder.* When was his influence ended in Germany? A. Already before Hitler assumed power, because when he became under secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture in 1933, this was the last honor which one gave him. Actually he didn't have anything to say in the Agricultural Ministry after 1933, nor did he have any political significance at all. Q. Very well. He was free of political pressure, and it was he who said that the master race dogma was the emotional founda- [...tion] |
* Early member of the National Socialist Party, author of the official party program.
