Hitler or Judah?
A Second Nuremberg Tribunal, Chapter 5

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Chapter 5

Third Session

I made my way to the auditorium, accompanied by some English and German journalists who were following the debate discreetly. We arrived at about 10:00 a.m. and found the tribunal to be already in session. A few minutes later, the President asked the Public Prosecutor to address the assembly.

Prosecutor Loubski: “Gentlemen of the court, gentlemen of the jury, my indictment will probably surprise those who believe me to be still a prisoner of the one-sided propaganda which has dominated the world for the past 30 years. Be that as it may, I have, as it were, ‘cleansed the walls of my chamber of all images.’ All of you who have elected me, reject the concept of nations, which is no more than the sawdust of history. I, in turn, attach little credit to the law which is taught at the University of Paris; its only purpose is to ensure a further lease of life for a tower of Babel, which is already crumbling. My indictment will, therefore, be made exclusively on the basis of natural law.

“Advocate Hollander and Advocate Kleist have described the conflict between Judah and Hitler, from 1933 to 1939. Because of his anti-Semitic doctrine, which both the Germans and the Jews must have known about, since it was set out in Mein Kampf, and also expounded in thousands of public meetings throughout Germany over a period of ten years, Hitler represented a grave danger for Judah as soon as his doctrine acquired the force of law. I therefore ask the court to declare Adolf Hitler guilty of establishing a system which must, of necessity, have been injurious to that section of the Jewish people, resident in Germany. However, at the same time, I must point out that the Jews suffered only moderate discomfort and that high-ranking officials in Germany, including Hitler himself, did their best to contain the brutality with which all peoples habitually treat minorities. I refer, amongst other things, to Hitler’s condemnation in August 1935 of acts of violence, committed by individual members of the NSDAP against Jews.[1] Rudolf Hess echoed this condemnation twenty-four hours later,[2] and on the 30th of the same month Frick made his own position absolutely clear in a directive addressed to all police departments.[3]

“With regard to the propaganda which has since 1945 described Judah as being essentially peaceful, humanitarian, and defenseless, I must point out that the Jewish diaspora in fact declared economic war against the Third Reich as from February 1933. This could — and did, as has been proved by history — degenerate into a military conflict, which aggravated the lot of the Jews still living in Germany. Furthermore, certain sections of the diaspora sabotaged the application of the agreement drawn up during the Evian discussions in 1938; and thereby prevented a peaceful exodus of the German Jews, to which Hitler had given his assent. The negative attitude of the World Jewish Congress in 1938 suggests extenuating circumstances for Adolf Hitler. At the same time, the reaction of the great white nations — England, France, the United States of America, Canada, and Australia, countries with enormous unoccupied territories — suggests the possibility of extenuating circumstances for the diaspora. To expel the Jews from Germany was relatively simple, but to reassemble them on a territory which they could have developed by their own efforts and where they could have been racially united in accordance with natural law, appeared to be impossible because of the indefensible selfishness of the above-mentioned great nations. At this point, gentlemen, I must go into some detail.

“First of all, the British Government, promoter of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Realizing that the Arab world would rise up in revolt against massive Jewish immigration into areas which had belonged to the Arabs for 28 centuries, the British Government began to block the stream of emigrants leaving Germany for the so-called Promised Land. In 1933, Palestine admitted 37,337 Jews. There were 66,472 in 1935, but only 10,629 in 1937.[4] Britain even went as far as to repudiate the policy, inaugurated in 1917 by the Balfour Declaration, and limited immigration to 75,000 Jews for the period extending from April 1st, 1939 to March 31st, 1944. In July 1939, England canceled all immigration into Palestine for a period of six months.

“Let us now look at the other side of the Atlantic. The United States of America granted Great Britain 85,575 immigration visas each year. The London Cabinet thought that a number of these visas could be given to Jews. This caused the following reaction from the American Government: “The quotas accorded by Congress by virtue of an existing law are not the property of the States to which they have been accorded.” Only about 2,000 visas were set aside for Jews.

“In 1939 the States of Western Europe were of the opinion that they could accept no more Jews from Germany and the Eastern countries. Belgium had 10,000, Holland 20,000, France 40,000, and Switzerland 10,000.

“And the United States? Arthur Morse estimates that from 1933 to 1943 the USA could have taken in 1,000,000 without affecting the stipulations of the Immigration Act. It would, however, have been necessary to finance the scheme, and the American Government was of the opinion that this was a task for private initiative. Anthony de Rothschild also maintained that it was the 4,000,000 American Jews who should pay, but they turned a deaf ear. Gentlemen, once again I should like to paraphrase Sartre’s well-known remark, by saying: ‘The Jews are other people’s business!’

“For years the Evian Committee and the great powers discussed the problem of a country, other than Palestine, which could be given to the Jews: Ethiopia, Madagascar, the three Guyana territories, Brazil, Portuguese Angola, Haiti, Northern Rhodesia, and Australia were mentioned in turn. But it was impossible to settle on a plan for the wandering Jew! France was afraid of saddling Madagascar with the problem of a German speaking minority. Mussolini would not hear of parting with Ethiopia! Roosevelt considered Haiti to be a zone of vital strategic importance for the security of the United States. The English refused to put pressure on Salazar when he broke off the talks on Angola. Northern Rhodesia was quite willing to accept some Jews, but not more than 150! Oswald Pirow, the South African Minister of Defense, actually asked Hitler to offer Tanganyika to the “wandering Jew” and was reminded with some vigor that, since the Treaty of Versailles, Germany no longer had control of her former colonies! In the end, it was Australia who settled the problem of Jewish emigration, raised by Germany, and she did so with complete racist objectivity. I refer to the texts which have been provided for these debates by Advocate Hollander. You will observe that Australia accepts only British citizens and that with an anti-Semitism which does not dare to show its true colors, Australia refuses to include any Jews in the immigration quotas.[5]

“Mr. President, members of the jury, the Jewish problem, which has been troubling the world for the past three thousand years and for which Adolf Hitler endeavored to find a peaceful solution, was not solved in the way he had anticipated. The Jews of the diaspora, living in the wealthy countries of the West, did not help their coreligionists, and they even took advantage of their plight to aggravate the tensions existing between Hitler’s Germany and the democratic nations. The latter were wealthy in terms of money and territory and had relatively small populations. Nevertheless, they sabotaged every attempt at a peaceful solution with a selfishness and a hypocrisy which have always been characteristic of them. They claimed to be friends of the Jewish people, but they deliberately left them in the lurch.

“I, therefore, ask that Hitler, the Jewish diaspora, and the great colonial powers should be condemned most severely. Since the decisions of this court cannot be enforced by law, it would be ridiculous to demand penal sanctions. But a vigorous moral condemnation could possibly serve the cause of historical revision!”

President Schoepf: “Counsel for Judah is requested to address the court.”

Adv. Hollander: “Gentlemen of the court, gentlemen of the jury, I have listened with the greatest attention to the accusations made against Judah. They are all groundless. The Jews were brutally assaulted by a criminal in 1933. Were they supposed to let themselves be slaughtered like lambs, as they had so often been in the past? Throughout history, gentlemen, we have had to fight for our survival. Read and reread the book of Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings — in what you are pleased to call the Old Testament. Read Flavius Josephus, Jewish collaborator of the Roman enemy, but nevertheless a great historian, and you will see how we defended Jerusalem against the legions of Titus, how our womenfolk defended the ramparts of the city after all the men had been slaughtered. You will see how they used their little children as living clubs against the invader when there were no more weapons available! Go and visit Israel, and examine the Fortress of Masada, which our archaeologists have laid bare with scrupulous respect. The guide will tell you about its siege by the Romans, and you will hear how Masada resisted for more than two years the assaults of trained troops, ten times more numerous. You will be told of the one thousand zealots who defended it, and who had themselves stabbed to death on the last day by a small group of specially chosen comrades who, after this task of mass slaughter had been accomplished, killed themselves down to the last individual . . . this last person being a woman! You are possibly unaware of the oath which is pronounced in the ruins of this old fortress by every batch of young officers who have been trained for Tsahal, the army of Israel: ‘We shall never surrender Masada.’

“But the Jews have today become pacifists, they love to pursue cultural activities and indulge in religious speculation during leisure hours. Their leaders nevertheless try to help those coreligionists who are dispersed throughout the world in a cruel situation, imposed by history and maintained by the natural wickedness of mankind.

“The natural wickedness of Hitler forced Judah to defend herself.

“Mr. Public Prosecutor, you are surprised by Judah’s declaration of economic war against the Third Reich? But what was she to do? Judah had no tanks or soldiers like Hitler. Judah could use only the power of trade and international relations to fight him. It is not customary in law to condemn the individual or people who are placed in a position of legitimate self-defense. You accuse the diaspora of refusing to help the Jews to leave Germany. This is not true, or at least, it is only partially true, and a declaration to this effect by the World Jewish Congress in 1938 was in no way binding on all Jews. The declaration was in any case a question of simple common sense: what was the good of signing an agreement which would only strengthen the economy of the adversary? And since the great nations refused to take in Jewish refugees, can Judah be held responsible for events which, between 1933 and 1939, had escaped her control and were eventually to make a martyr of her?

“The only guilty party for the woes of the world at this time was anti-Semitism, Mr. Public Prosecutor. We find it everywhere. It initially found hysterical expression in National Socialism, and its final expression was in the refusal of the great nations to harbor the German Jews. It is surely self-evident that Judah cannot be simultaneously victim and guilty party! The guilty parties were Hitler and the powerful and wealthy countries which, ignorant of their own true interest, tried to avoid war by sacrificing the Jewish people, a stupid miscalculation, since the war took place all the same, with the consequences we all know.

“Let us return to Hitler. He is the real culprit who was responsible for all Judah’s distress, and I hope that this court of justice will confirm the sentence of 1946, and declare him to be the greatest criminal in history.

“Gentlemen, from 1933 on, the war waged by Hitler against Judah must inevitably have destroyed my client, if history had granted him enough time to complete his work. The real genocide which he was preparing was contained in the Nuremberg laws, and not in the expulsion of German Jewry, in which he was, in fact, only partially successful up to 1938. What was the real significance, gentlemen, of the numerus clausus for doctors, advocates, lawyers, teachers and musicians, professions in which the Jews always excel? What did it really mean to be forbidden to sit on aesthetically well-placed benches; to attend cinema and theater performances, concerts; to enter public gardens, forests, hot-spring resorts; to possess a car, a driving license, and a telephone, all of them measures which Himmler intended to enforce, in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws?

“On September 15th, 1935, Hitler convened his parliament of bleating sheep in Nuremberg, a city where no parliament had sat since 1543, and he asked it to vote a law on citizenship and a law for the “protection of German blood and honor,” laws which were to achieve abominable celebrity as the so-called Nuremberg Laws. Allow me to quote my coreligionist Eliahu Ben Elissar:

In the words of Léon Poliakov (Le Bréviaire de la haine [Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1951], page 5) these were sacramental measures, easily distinguishable from the profane measures represented by the first anti-Jewish laws. The latter merely instituted a discriminatory regime to the detriment of a minority — a regime of which history can offer many examples, and not only in the case of the Jews; — the original motives for this discrimination were economic or religious. But the sacramental laws of Nuremberg were not so much designed to lower the status of the Jews as to give divine status to the Germanic racial community. The status of Pariah, inflicted on the Jews, was a useful and extremely dramatic way of fixing in the collective and the individual conscience of the Germans the notion of their racial superiority which was congenital and unalterable.[6]

“Hitler knew this, and he was thinking far ahead when he told his parliament immediately after the vote: ‘Gentlemen, you have just passed a law, the significance of which will only be understood properly after many centuries.’

“Hitler knew, gentlemen, that anti-Semitism takes a long time to develop before spreading with the rapidity of a cholera epidemic. In 1935, Europe was in throes of Fascism. Italy, mother of this system, was on the point of providing herself with racial legislation, based on that of Hitler. Spain was approaching civil war, which was to bring Franco to power. France had not yet completely forgotten the Dreyfus affair. England, whom Hitler was courting with the aid of an advantage, our naval agreement, had in the past treated her Jews very harshly and had finally expelled them. Was it not a great temptation, gentlemen, to follow Hitler on the path of intolerance and to celebrate a great reconciliation with Germany at the expense of the Jews? If Hitler had remained in power, the Nuremberg laws would have infiltrated their poison into the bloodstream of all European legislators; then it would have been America’s turn and then the turn of the whole world. He would thereby have achieved in a peaceful manner a final solution which he could only partially attain by violence. By these laws the Jews were isolated from the rest of the world. I quote:

In the long run, the new laws meant that the Jews were to be condemned irremediably, and that by definition they would never be able to free themselves from their Jewish condition. This was the basic difference between traditional anti-Semitic legislation, which was no longer enforced against a Jew as soon as he had been converted, and the Nuremberg legislation. Hitler needed “his” Jews, and certainly did not wish to let them escape from their Jewishness. The Jews were no longer simply to be excluded from this or that profession, as had been decreed by the profane measures, or rejected from this or that social group. The sacramental measures excluded them from German society, before excluding them from the whole of civilization.[7]

Gentlemen, it was in Nuremberg, this accursed city, that the greatest of crimes was committed against Judah, but it was also in Nuremberg, nine-tenths of which was destroyed by expiatory bombardments, that ten years later the victors of World War II finally annulled these laws and punished those responsible for this monstrous legislation!”

President Schoepf: “Mr. Advocate, you are not the Public Prosecutor! Please confine yourself to your client’s case!”

Adv. Hollander: “I beg your pardon, Mr. President, but I am not digressing from my subject. The Nuremberg laws caused Judah immense distress by trying to deprive her of all basic human rights; prior to the reality of total genocide, they represented moral genocide. Hitler wanted to degrade the Jews to the level of animals, although he was very well acquainted with the history of this people, one of the most intelligent and courageous in the whole world. There can be no excuse for this!

“I have finished, gentlemen. I trust that the tribunal will render justice to Judah and her allies by recognizing the validity of her declaration of economic war against the Third Reich, and the refusal of the diaspora to help with the emigration of the German Jews.”

The President adjourned the session and everyone had a light lunch on the spot to save time.

It was necessary to publish a preliminary judgment before nightfall since most of the jury were to return home the following day to celebrate the New Year with their families. Finland was far away, and Kittila Saronen was most impatient to return to her children and her “lottas.” Half an hour later the session was resumed and the President asked Counsel for Hitler to address the court.

Adv. Kleist: “Mr. President, gentlemen of the jury, we have analyzed in detail the anti-Semitism of my client between 1933 and 1939. I plead legitimate self-defense, because he knew of the plan of aggression, set out in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and he saw this plan being put into operation in Austria and Germany, long before he himself came to power. Hitler did not attack the Jewish people, he merely made his own people aware of the Jewish danger, and in the process gave proof of exceptional moderation. Since the end of the war, Jewish propaganda has tried to incriminate him at the lowest level. Consequently, I must examine his case within the context of history, the only thing that can explain his position.

“Gentlemen, the Jewish problem has evolved in the same way in every country in the world, and in the course of every century. This cannot be denied, and today it is not even discussed, for the simple reason that since the disappearance of Hitler the Jews prefer not to mention it. They also prefer not to mention the Protocols.

“Allow me to quote a historian who has made a very relevant analysis of the matter at hand: Mr. de Vries Heekelingen. He says:

First stage: Installation. The Jews arrive in a country in which no one is prejudiced against them. They are welcomed more or less cordially. In antiquity, and up to the 17th century, the host nations were sometimes even happy to receive them.

Second stage: Consolidation. The Jews are tolerated or enjoy preferential treatment, thanks to which their situation improves.

Third stage: Apogee. The Jews attain great wealth and credit. They also produce many scholars. In certain sections of the population there is a nascent feeling of irritation, envy, and hatred.

Fourth stage: Resistance. There is a period in which riots, struggles, attacks alternate with periods of calm. The irritation of the people is generally contained by the clergy and the government.

Fifth stage: Open hostility. The people are in a state of exasperation, they break down all barriers and massacre the Jews, or else the authorities throw them out of the land . . . and the cycle recommences elsewhere.[8]

“There is only one country where there is no longer a Jewish problem: China. The first Jews are said to have established themselves in China under the Han dynasty (200 B.C., 226 A.D.). In 1329 they inhabited Houen-Ché, where their religion was called Tiao Kin Kiao (the religion which extirpates the nerves). The Jews have almost disappeared from People’s China, which has given Mao Zedong a freedom of movement which could enable him, if he wished, to become master of the world instead of Judah.

“Gentlemen, when my client came to power in 1933, he found Germany in the fourth stage, the stage of resistance. He, therefore, naturally proceeded to the fifth stage, that of open hostility. It was not necessary for him to favor the process of evolution, he merely went along with it. He wanted to expel the Jews from Germany, while retaining part of their possessions, since the country was poor and was being subjected to economic war by the diaspora. Was Hitler thereby committing a crime against humanity? In that case, almost every head of State in history can be called a criminal! The Pharaoh Merneptah was the only man who allowed the Jews to take with them the fortunes they had extorted from his subjects. He evicted his Jews, just as Hitler did, because he was the victim of a sort of mystic-racial war in which Yahweh played the part of the World Jewish Congress.

“Mr. President, I shall not quote from Mein Kampf, but from Exodus 12:

And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; And there was a great crying in Egypt; For there was not a house where there was not one dead. And he called for Moses and Aaron by night, and said, rise up, and get you forth from among my people, both ye and the children of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as ye have said. (Verses 30 and 31).

Here, Mr. Chairman, is an episode that up did not take place in the Third Reich, thanks to my client’s mistrust!

And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; And they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: And the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians. (Verses 35 and 36).

“Gentlemen, in such circumstances, I can very well understand why Pharaoh sent his terrible SS troops after the Jews, who were then swallowed up fortuitously by the Red Sea! The Jews had walked off with the dynasty’s exchequer! But this was the last occasion on which they were to be allowed to take their capital with them after being expelled from a country — with one exception, National Socialist Germany, although within reasonable limits.

“Since time immemorial the Jews have always been driven out eventually from the country which had initially welcomed them, and they were always constrained to abandon their possessions. I have here, Mr. President, a most impressive list of expulsions, drawn up by Jewish historians, and therefore, surely credible.[9] After Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Titus, Hadrian, and the destruction of Jerusalem, followed by the dispersion, the Jews of Alexandria were expelled in 515 by Bishop Cyril. Although the Koran owed a great deal to the Mosaic religion, Mohammed expelled his Jews to Syria and to Mesopotamia. Jewish Mesopotamia was destroyed by a majordomo of Baghdad and the survivors took refuge in Spain in 1040. In 970 the Kingdom of the Khazars, converts to Judaism, was destroyed and its inhabitants pushed back into the Crimea and into the islands of the Caspian Sea. In Europe, England had been the first kingdom to expel the Jews. John Lackland, and afterwards Henry III, were content to put them to ransom, but Edward I threw 10,000 into prison, hanged 300, and exiled 16,000, some of whom perished at sea while the remainder spread over the continent in 1290. The Jews were only to return to England in the time of Cromwell, in the 17th century.

Meanwhile they had had a brilliant success in Spain, during the Caliphate of Cordova, and also during the domination of the Almoravides, but on March 31st, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic pronounced sentence of total banishment, even in the case of the Marranos who had been converted to Christianity in very suspicious circumstances. Those who took refuge in Portugal were dislodged by an ordinance of December 4th, 1496, which gave them the choice between exile, baptism, or death. In Italy, Pope Pius V decreed in 1569 the expulsion of all Jews from his State, with the exception of those in Ancona and in Rome. After being recalled by Sixtus V, they were again expelled by Clement VIII; The Kingdom of Naples expelled the Jews in 1541, Genoa in 1550, and Milan in 1597.

The Kingdom of France took third place in the medieval anti-Semitic campaign, immediately after England and Spain. Philip Augustus, founder of the French monarchy, taxed the Jews and transformed their synagogues into churches, expelled them from the country in 1182, recalled them in 1198 and taxed them again for the benefit of the treasury. Good King Louis the Saint had all Jewish books burnt in public in 1242, just as Dr. Goebbels did in 1933; but he left it to his son, Philip the Fair, to expel the Jewish minority on July 22nd, 1306. They were given one month to leave France, and were forced to abandon all their possessions, movable and immovable, together with their debts, which were put up to auction. They had already been expelled from Italy in 1240, from Maine and from Anjou in 1288, from Dauphiné and from Franche-Comte in 1349. In the 15th century, the climax of anti-Semitism was reached in Europe. A brief summary must suffice to show the course of events at this time.

The Jews were banished successively from Cologne and Freiburg in Brisgau in 1424, from Speyer in 1435, from Mainz and Strasburg in 1438, from Augsburg in 1439, Würzburg in 1450, Nuremberg in 1498. They had already been banished from Bern in 1427, from Geneva in 1490, Thurgovia in 1491 and they were to be definitively banished from Zurich in 1500.

You will object that these were barbarous days, Mr. President. So be it. Nevertheless, I am amazed that so much unanimity should have prevailed in the world at that time with regard to the expulsion of the Jews, although in every other area there was flaming discord, rivalry and conflict!

Why?

It was not just a fleeting moment of history. In other times, supposedly less barbarous and much closer to our own, we see no change in the attitude of Europe with regard to the Jewish problem. In 1745 the Empress Maria Theresia of Austria had them expelled en masse from Bohemia and Moravia and if, in 1778, the Alsatians did not throw their numerous Jews into the Rhine, or expel them, it was only because Louis XVI had Judge Hell put into prison. For the first time in history, a non-Jew had to purchase the liberty of the Jews with his own. This could, I suppose, be called progress; but it brought Louis XVI to the guillotine and benefited Judah who, thanks to the revolution, was to recover her freedom and immediately began to undermine Europe, right up to the advent of Hitler.

This monarch was to renew a tradition, several thousand years old, and he was to try and solve a problem with which the whole world had wrestled from the days of the Egyptians up to the kings of France. Just as the Pharaoh before him, he was placed in a position of legitimate self-defense vis-à-vis the same people, who were harbingers of the same peril. The so-called crimes against humanity, for which he was condemned by the so-called court of international justice in Nuremberg, can only be considered crimes by the Jews, which is of course easily understandable. In 1946 they pleaded their cause by proxy, because for us millions of non-Jewish people, the Jewish cause was never our cause, and because the Jews constitute only a tiny fraction of this humanity which they claim to represent — to my mind, an extraordinary claim!

I have finished. I ask the tribunal to recognize the position of legitimate self-defense in which my client was placed from 1933 on, and to acclaim the moderate character of the action which he undertook against the Jews of Germany up to the start of the war. It was a model of wisdom, compared to the traditional forms of the struggle which since the origins of history, all princes, all kings and all emperors have waged against the Jews in an attempt to rescue their subjects from an absolute and cruel domination which Judah alone dared to claim since the days of the Biblical Scriptures up to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the authenticity of which I also ask you to recognize.”

President Schoepf: “The session is adjourned. Members of the jury are requested to reassemble at 2:00 p.m.”

The members of the jury left the hall one by one and I remained behind in the company of a journalist, Yvon Jean, who represented a youth periodical.

He said to me: “How can one judge the history of Hitler’s Europe in three sessions? It’s ridiculous!”

“Just a moment, you are not tuned in to the right wavelength. This session concerns only the relations of Hitler with the German Jews between 1933 and 1935. During the Easter vacation, the tribunal will investigate the question of responsibility for the outbreak of World War II. Later, Hitler will be called upon to answer for Operation Barbarossa and for alleged Nazi war crimes. I do not think that either the President or the Prosecutor will consider the great events of history to be indivisible. They do not wish to fall into the Manichean trap which marred the first Nuremberg trials in 1946.

“Are you referring to the Nuremberg ghetto?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Because the whole gaggle of jurists which met in 1946 was in fact just a Jewish delegation.”

“Are you anti-Semitic?” I asked.

“Of course I am, just like half the other editors of French journals.”

I replied, “Anti-Semitism betrays an inferiority complex. I am free of such a complex, because I both admire and fear the Jewish people.”

“What about the members of the jury?”

“I do not know. They have just read the Protocols. There are two possibilities: They can either laugh at this apocalyptic literature, or they can take it seriously, in which case they are going to be very angry . . .”

The young man began to write his article. I was reading a novel when the jury returned. Their deliberations had lasted for less than an hour. The President was in his seat and read the document which he had just penned with the assistance of his assessors:

“Having read the documents produced for this debate;

“Having heard the pleas of Counsels for Judah and for Hitler;

“Whereas the Court of Justice assembled here in Nuremberg must pronounce judgment only on a limited period of the open conflict between Hitler and Judah;

“Whereas Hitler tried to expel the Jews from Germany and help the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and Baltic peoples to solve their own Jewish problem by the same method, instead of having recourse to their traditional pogroms;

“Whereas Hitler was thereby merely exercising his rights as a sovereign head of State, elected by the majority of his people and operating within a framework of governmental legality which was recognized at the international level;

“Whereas despite the inevitable incidents and a certain amount of material distress caused to the interested parties, the expulsion of the Jews from Germany was undertaken in a spirit, differing radically from the one which for a period of three thousand years dominated the racial purges, undertaken by all peoples of the world;

“Whereas from this point of view, Hitler could actually be praised for his humanity if he were to be compared with Nebuchadnezzar, Vespasian, Titus, Hadrian, Cyril, Mohammed, John Lackland, Henry III, Edward I, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Clement VIII, Philip Augustus, Louis the Saint, Louis the Fair, Maria Theresa of Austria, etc.;

“Whereas in 1933 the Jewish diaspora occupied a strong economic position in the richest States of the world, and could therefore have helped resettle the Jews who had been expelled from Germany;

“Whereas far from offering help, the diaspora on the contrary declared a war of boycotts against Hitler as soon as he had come to power, and even went so far as to oppose the solution of a Jewish national home, which had been accepted by him;

“Whereas the great democratic nations, had they wished to reconcile their actions with their declarations, could easily have absorbed many more Jewish refugees from Germany and from Eastern Europe, than the number which they actually did accept;

“Whereas the Nuremberg laws, which are criticized by Judah, tried to separate the Jewish and the German peoples according to biological criteria which correspond to reality, and not according to religious criteria which in no way correspond to reality;

“Whereas the Jewish people could, in the same way as other peoples, have found in these laws a definition of liberty which could have given them normal and desirable living conditions in accordance with natural law;

“Whereas, by refusing this choice, Judah would appear to prefer the status of a people within a people, possibly with a view to dominating others, if we are to accord an objective value to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which have often been quoted before this assembly;

“But whereas the connection between these documents and their influence on the facts of history have not been sufficiently proved;

“And whereas the open struggle which began in 1933 between the German and the Jewish peoples is no more than a classic episode in the history of mankind:

“For these reasons the court declares that no judgment can be passed at this stage of the conflict, which is still in the process of development;

“The court dismisses the case against Hitler and Judah;

“The court orders that further information should be gathered about the book which has here been quoted, and which is known under the title of Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”

Night had fallen, and the session of the tribunal was at an end.