On March 10, 1965, while the question of extending the statute of limitations on Nazi murders was before the West German parliament, the German weekly Der Spiegel published a conversation between Karl Jaspers and Rudolf Augstein on the issues involved in this question. What follows is an abridged version of that conversation (translated from the German by Werner J. DannHauser). The specific question of the statute of limitations was settled on March 25 by a compromise which makes the prosecution of newly discovered Nazi murderers possible until December 31, 1969 (see “Nazi Murders and German Politics” by David Schoenbaum in the June 1965 COMMENTARY). However, the Jaspers-Augstein discussion remains relevant, partly because it deals with the general problem of responsibility for Nazi crimes, partly because it sheds light on the moral failure of the Bundestag in evading that problem through the March 25 compromise, and partly because Germany will have to face—or evade—the same issue again in 1969.

Karl Jaspers, one of the founders of existentialism, is among the most influential of contemporary philosophers. RUDOLF AUGSTEIN is the publisher of Der Spiegel, Germany's largest weekly news magazine.

Augstein: Professor Jaspers, in our conversation let's not even consider the question of whether it is juridically possible to extend the statute of limitations. Likewise, I propose that as far as is possible we leave aside the question of the expediencies of foreign policy, or of political expediency in general. After all, the trials against Nazi criminals are only apparently juridical acts; actually they are political acts that are transacted according to the rules of the penal code.

In another connection, you yourself have said about these war crimes: they are crimes that were determined by the political will of the state, and therefore they are dissociated from the personality of the individual perpetrator. That seems to me to get to the heart of the problem.

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Jaspers: If you will permit me, I would like to begin by arguing the proposition that it is impossible to distinguish law and politics as two absolutely separate spheres.

Everywhere in the world, law is based on a political will, the will to self-determination. For that reason, law has two sources: this political will, and the idea of justice. The idea of justice is claimed to be an eternal idea, possessed by no one, which must be approximated.

In a time of great events, when a change in the condition of the community is at stake, one speaks with reference to justice. Otherwise, one always speaks of law as positive or established law, which is supposed to be absolutely valid.

Positive law, recorded in statute-books, applies to the state in which it has been produced; in that state—in free states under what is called the rule of law—it is binding. In every case, the law is valid only within the framework of the currently existing state.

When decisive turning-points occur in history, then law is created out of the political will—as, for example, in the 17th century, with the help of the English jurists—and something is done which activates, transforms, or even overthrows, the existing legal order.

At the moment in which a turning-point in history, a revolution, is experienced, effected, or desired—at that moment positive law is no longer absolutely valid. Once again, rather, the question is: what is to be valid? There is a new decision as to what part of eternal justice will now be recognized as law.

Now, it seems to me that for Germans the Nazi state signified a turning-point such as they never experienced before. The continuation of life after the Nazi state presupposes a spiritual revolution, an ethical and political revolution on a spiritual basis.

Only if we are resolved to recognize that continuity was interrupted in this case—I am not now speaking of all those continuities that nevertheless persist: here, at a point decisive for ethical and political consciousness, continuity was interrupted—only then do we create the presupposition for the political order we now desire. In my opinion, this is the only presupposition that permits one to talk reasonably about politics today.

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Augstein: That's clear to me. But let us keep the following in mind. At the conquest of Jaffa, 3,000 prisoners surrendered to Napoleon because he had promised them safe conduct. But then he did not give them safe conduct, nor did he have them shot; rather, he had them cut down with bayonets, in order to save powder and lead. And many of these people had their families with them, women and children, who were also cut down with bayonets. Nevertheless, in those days no one would have thought of holding anyone except Napoleon himself responsible for this massacre. Whereas today—because of the number and nature of Nazi crimes—it seems altogether customary and correct to arraign anyone who executed an order to shoot women and children.

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Jaspers: But shouldn't one make a most essential distinction at this point? The Napoleon story corresponds to many others of the past. It is the case of a state, as represented by Napoleon at the time, committing a crime. But the state as a whole was not a criminal state.

The decisive point is whether one acknowledges that the Nazi state was a criminal state, and not merely a state that committed crimes.

A criminal state is one which in principle neither establishes nor acknowledges the rule of law. What it calls justice, and what it produces in a flood of laws, is for it a means to the pacification and subjugation of masses of men, and not something that the state itself honors and observes. Such a state attests to its principles by the wholesale murder of peoples who, according to its decision, ought not to be entitled to exist on earth.

The basic principle that the Nazi state was a criminal state has consequences that must be elucidated; otherwise, in my opinion, there can be no clarification of all those problems we are talking about.

Everyone in Nazi Germany was in a position to know that it was a criminal state. However, there is no denying that most people did not make this clear to themselves. As to them, in most cases—though not in all—I speak neither of criminality nor of moral guilt, but only of political liability.

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Augstein: Today all men—or let us say all men of good will—see that it was a criminal state. But at that time it took a certain intellectual sharpness and intellectual courage to recognize it as such and to draw the proper conclusions. After all, there were enough things to lull the population to sleep. There were treaties and alliances with foreign states. There were the Olympic games. There were those constant admonitions by the churches to be loyal or even the admonitions to cooperate. There were those blessings over weapons.

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Jaspers: These are all incontrovertible facts, unfortunately.

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Augstein: From there we come to the point which to me personally seems most problematic.

I ask myself whether the state we have now founded can legitimately punish these crimes. After all, it must give us pause to think that, as far as I know, not even a single judge, not even a single public prosecutor of the Nazi era, has ever stood trial in a criminal court. Law was violated a thousand times—a hundred thousand times. In spite of this, the juridical perpetrators have not stood trial.

When one further reflects about the officials that this state has put up with in its ministries—when one considers the fact that Globke, Vialon, and Hopf were all honorably employed over the years, or are now so employed—then this state's legitimacy appears in a worse light yet.

And when I further consider the fact that the other states—including the state of Israel—also the Jewish organizations—have consciously accepted all this, then the repute of these states and organizations, too, is called into question.

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Jaspers: I don't gloss over any of this, but I want to assert one basic principle: the presupposition of all our criticism is the existence of the Federal Republic. Prior to all criticism, we must answer this question for ourselves: do we want this state or don't we want it? If we don't want it, it follows that we prepare for revolution, for high treason. If we do want it, then we must do what we can to improve it. And this means not only to expose the countless examples of what is bad in particular, and of what even today is bad in some fundamental way; it also means to observe what is good, to render it prominent and to encourage it.

An example: a few days ago I chanced to read that Federal President Luebke refused to confirm the appointment of a certain Herr Crefeld as Federal judge. Why? Because Crefeld's past, his participation in the drawing up of commentaries on Nazi laws, had disqualified him, according to Luebke's judgment.

Luebke wanted to force a fundamental decision. As Federal President, does he have the right to check into the ethical and political quality of a judge who has been appointed; or is it his duty to sign, without regard for the man's past? He claims that as President he has the right to check. Excellent. That can open up a new era in the spirit of the Federal Republic.

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Augstein: If I may come back to what you said before—that what matters is to make a new beginning with our state and as it were break off the bridges to the criminal state—this leads us to a further argument that is advanced by those who are opposed to the extension of the statute of limitations.

One hears things like this said: it won't do for only the Germans to be punished, and unto the seventh generation at that. A prominent spokesman for this view was the former Federal Minister Strauss, who said that it was “a shock to mankind's sense of justice and a falsification of history, because it then appears as if only the Germans committed war crimes.”

In any case, I think one has to come to terms with this argument, which undoubtedly expresses an opinion that is current in Germany, though it may seem an undesirable one to us.

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Jaspers: The argument would not be undesirable if it were correct. But it fails to recognize the radical difference between war crimes and crimes against mankind (Menschheit). War crimes are crimes against humaneness (Menschlichkeit)—all those atrocities which are perpetrated against the enemy. A crime against mankind is the claim to the decision as to which groups of people are permitted or not permitted to live on earth, and to execute this claim through the deed of wholesale murder. Today one calls it genocide.

Basically, genocide signifies the execution of a judgment that another group of men, a people, is not to live on the earth. Anyone who makes a claim to this judgment and executes it, is a criminal against mankind. Such actions were taken against Jews, gypsies, and the mentally ill. All who have grasped this (Hannah Arendt first of all) today declare with express conviction: no man has the right to judge that a people should not exist. Anyone who on the basis of such a judgment plans the organized slaughter of a people and participates in it, does something that is fundamentally different from all crimes that have existed in the past. He acts against a principle inherent in being human as such, in the acknowledgement of what it means to be human. Mankind cannot live together with human beings who engage in something like this.

To put it differently: just as in particular states the state attorney prosecutes murder on behalf of the public interest, even when the victim's next of kin do not lodge a complaint, so should there step forth a court of mankind when any group of men slaughters another group. On behalf of the public interest of mankind, men who do or have done this, and only such men, must be punished by death.

The opponents of capital punishment can make a very good case. Likewise its supporters. But it seems to me that even the opponents of capital punishment can be for capital punishment for this crime, which exists in a wholly different dimension.

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Augstein: Unfortunately, the crime of genocide has often been committed in the course of history, even if not on such a scale and with such consistent and deliberate planning. If the reports are correct, the Chinese are wiping out the Tibetans.

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Jaspers: I doubt that the crime in its unique sense has often been committed, I know of no example. Whether it is taking place in Tibet—that is possible. I do not know. But the recognition that we are dealing with a fundamentally new crime—that I consider the prerequisite for judging the question of the statute of limitations. That question finds its self-evident answer once one is clear about four questions that are intimately connected with it.

First question: What kind of crime? Administrative mass murder, a new crime without prototype in history. This crime presupposes a new type of state, the criminal state.

Second question: On the basis of what law will a judgment be rendered? On the basis of the law uniting all men into one, international law.

Third question: Where is the legitimate tribunal for the application of this law? So long as no tribunal of mankind with proper jurisdiction exists as an institution, the tribunals are the courts of those states which recognize the authority of international law within their own jurisdiction.

Fourth question: What punishment? To the unique crime against mankind there corresponds, after the abolition of capital punishment, the exceptional restitution of capital punishment.

Up to now these questions have not been definitively clarified. To a great extent, we still approach them with the concepts of former times.

But let me come back to our actual situation. Herr Augstein, you wanted to leave foreign policy aside during our inquiry into the question of the statute of limitations. You are of the opinion, as I am, that in this case it would be extraordinarily pernicious to act expedientially. Therefore, let us not go into any arguments from expediency.

But there is another side to what comes under the heading of foreign policy. It is part of being human to heed the serious opinion of human beings in this world. There are already passages in Aristotle according to which the consensus of peoples is not a matter of indifference. A consensus, to be sure, does not necessarily make something true, but it deserves consideration because it may lead us to a truth binding on us.

Today, when we see that the whole Western world is unanimous on this point, we must ask: How did these people arrive at that? What is at the bottom of it? It is probably an awareness of the uniqueness of the crime against mankind of which we spoke.

And now there are before us two pronouncements from two significant tribunals. The French National Assembly has decided for France that crimes of this kind, just because they are of this kind, are in no way subject to any statute of limitations.

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Augstein: . . . and has granted amnesties for the abominations of the Algerian War.

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Jaspers: That is certainly questionable. But still, it is not a matter of crimes against mankind.

Further: the Advisory Assembly of the Council of Europe has recommended that its member governments decide that there shall be no statute of limitations for these crimes against mankind. Obviously, both spoke up in the face of the events in the Federal Republic. They are pronouncements which express what almost the whole of Western mankind thinks.

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Augstein: Professor Jaspers, it seems to me you are arguing for an important distinction. Men like Strauss say: “What happened during the expulsion of the Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia should at least be known to the conscience and consciousness of the world.” Now if I understand you correctly, you think that it is qualitatively not the same when a race or a people is destroyed, its right to life contested, as when in the train of outrages, however violent, arising out of an unjust war, people are expelled, perhaps even under conditions that cause many of them to die, perhaps even if many are murdered. That is still not the same thing as the clear intention to extinguish whole ethnic groups. Have I understood you correctly?

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Jaspers: Completely.

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Augstein: But one hears it said: granted, the National Socialists perpetrated these crimes, and we, in part, executed them.

But what about the Soviets? Didn't the Soviets assume the right to destroy whole peoples, or to transplant them under conditions that are tantamount to destruction?

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Jaspers: That, of course, has to be tested and judged from the same point of view. I do not know whether it was that way. I do not preclude the possibility. But “the others too” is a diversion of no account. After all, I cannot make light of my deed, let alone justify it, because others do the same thing. In my opinion, these investigations about what the others did, do not enter the question for us. We are not engaged in a trial of other states, but of ourselves. We desire self-purification.

I think it is conclusive that such terrible things as Dresden, such terrible things as saturation bombing in general which the English engaged in. . . .

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Augstein: . . . or Hiroshima . . .

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Jaspers: . . . Hiroshima—that these things are not on the same plane as genocide. When one considers that there were countless English prisoners of war in Dresden, that the English showed no consideration for who was there, then one sees that it was something horrible. But it was an act against humaneness and not a crime against mankind. The principle is different. I hardly need repeat that.

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Augstein: No. When we look at all the horrors and acts of terror that Stalin ordered, we still find that he never professed to want to wipe out a whole group of human beings. Thus he never decreed that all Lithuanians had to die, though he transplanted the upper classes into regions where many of them died, so that one could almost speak of genocide. I would, however, say that what he did in the case of Katyn—namely that he had the Polish officer corps murdered—comes very close to the crime we are discussing.

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Jaspers: I hold Stalin to be capable of anything. It could be that here is something that would be identical to a crime against mankind. But it has nothing to do with our present problem, that of the statute of limitations in the Federal Republic.

The parliamentary debates about the problem of the statute of limitations are now before us. I confess that I look forward to this event with the greatest expectations and with no small concern. Extending the statute of limitations by ten years, or tricks like shifting the starting point of its application, or other tricks, would be ways of evading the issue. There can be only one opinion: no limitation whatsoever, Anything else obscures the problem.

Parliament is the last hope. Once, in 1933, we said: it is simply not possible that we should be ruled by a group of careerists who are selected by party bureaucrats, and whose professional business is politics, one business among other businesses!

The German people looks to its parliament. Is it a parliament or isn't it?

For the mere professional politician the whole business is not materially relevant, only somewhat annoying because of all the talk about it. For the thinking German it is a revelation of the fundamental convictions of his state.

America protects us against dangers external and internal (such as a Putsch, in which case, according to treaty and a happy limitation of our sovereignty, America is entitled to intervene). That is why no genuine awareness of responsibility is arising in Bonn. It is never a matter of life and death, but all too often apparently only a matter of business, advantage, and career.

That it finally is a matter of life and death for all—this is never made clear.

Blind feelings and mindless emotions are good for nothing, to be sure. But without passion in clear reason, no human truth is possible. As regards the question of the statute of limitations, a clear emotion, communicated conceptually, is today spreading through the West. Germans like Nevermann (the Mayor of Hamburg) are taking part in this. They think more clearly than many of the people who castigate as emotional those ways of thinking that they do not like, while not infrequently their own alleged objectivity is nevertheless guided by private aversions, fears, desires—by bad emotions that they cannot see through.

Thus I hold [the forthcoming decision of parliament] to be an event of the greatest consequence for the inner condition of all of us who are members of the Federal Republic. How it will happen and in what spirit, and with what clarity of expression, will be a gauge of our present political being. If the Germans don't stand up as men and women who really have the will to found a new state, after the fearful things they did or suffered to be done—then it is almost cause for despair.

We will not despair, for there is still a chance. There are the many silent people in the country. We belong to the Western world. In spite of all things that are subject to attack, there is such a thing as conscience.

If we do not get into step with the harmony that today can be felt to exist from America to all the European countries, then we will once again isolate ourselves morally. Notwithstanding all the amenities of diplomats and statesmen toward one another, and all the amenities of individual relationships, there will be a new wave of contempt for us.

When I remember the whole series of events by which we made ourselves impossible in the world, and how, after the terrible time of our complete despicableness, we have, so to speak, now become possible again after only a few years—that is something that could be undone again by one event incomprehensible to the world. During this session of the Bundestag, something will happen along the lines of revealing what we really are. Do you understand what I mean?

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Augstein: I hope that I understand you. But let me add something here that seems important to me. If we assume that everything you have said is both incisive and persuasive, we must nevertheless ask ourselves: will there be an encroachment of the rights of the accused if the statute of limitations is extended? I do not now mean this in a judicial sense. Thus I do not mean that a man—though one might discuss this—who has committed murder has a claim to have his deed considered superannuated after twenty years. I mean something else. I mean: could it be that society, in order to liberate itself from the crimes it has committed, picks out a few individuals who were only a shade guiltier than the others, and—to use an old image—sends them into the desert as scapegoats?

Consider the case of a state secretary in the ministry of transportation, of whom some freight cars are requested, and these freight cars were destined to take Jews to be gassed—is that man guiltier than the majority of the people?

The man received an order by chance, and by chance he carried it out, as any other civil servant probably would have; to be sure, he assisted in these administrative massacres. In Munich, fourteen nurses are now being tried for murder because they followed the order of physicians to give injections to patients—as part of the euthanasia program; they were fatal injections.

So I ask myself: are we doing an injustice to individuals, in order to liberate ourselves from guilt?

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Jaspers: That is certainly a legitimate question. And basically, in a general way, it is easy to answer: every man can only be accused and condemned as an individual, and not for his membership in an organization.

The real point of view must always be: what did this man do? There are extraordinary differences in the degree of participation in the murders; also in the knowledge of them.

Though today there are many who lie their way out of things by saying that they knew nothing, there are undoubtedly people who didn't really know about it, but who did have dark forebodings that something terrible was happening.

I remember an old Jewish woman of eighty who lived in Heidelberg. She was to be deported, and she had a few days' time until the departure of the transport; she took her own life. Then came the Gestapo man, and when he saw that she was dead, he stepped to the window and said with genuine emotion: We didn't want this to happen, surely.

I am firmly convinced that this Gestapo man had no knowledge, at least not yet, in the year 1942.

Everyone obviously had forebodings of something uncanny happening, and knew that it was a matter of life and death. I myself did not learn of the full extent of the systematic gassing until after 1945.

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Augstein: Nor did I.

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Jaspers: Nor did you. Obviously, what I know makes a difference. In the case of a single individual it is very difficult to determine specifically. It is difficult to distinguish one case from another.

But in cases where people acted in connection with the machinery of the state and knew what was happening, the official nature of their activity is no mitigation of their guilt, since it was a criminal state. Here there is a parting of the ways. Every human being with a conscience could be expected to have that minimum of conscience that would enable him, even in that connection, to recognize a crime.

Each of them knew: this is a crime. They must have realized that the state itself was a criminal state at the moment that state issued an order to commit a crime. And in the future there should be international legislation so that everyone will know: if I participate in such a state by murdering and organizing murder, I can be sure of one thing—that if this state does not conquer the world and ruin mankind, I will be killed.

One cannot recognize it as an excuse that a man acted in the name of the state. He rendered service and collaboration to a criminal state.

But then again you are right if you now say that there are great differences in the kinds of service rendered. These cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Here I would make the first decisive distinction. The sadistic murderers, so to speak, the individual murderers, violated even the instructions given by Hitler himself.

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Augstein: That is the simplest problem.

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Jaspers: Yes, it is only that during that time it rarely happened that a man was punished for these acts. Nonetheless, one can make this distinction. That is relatively simple.

But it is only a small part. All the other acts are connected with what one calls sovereign acts of state (Hoheitsakt), or else with acts committed under the pressure of orders (Befehlsnotstand). In my opinion, neither of these concepts can ever be recognized as an excuse. Sovereign acts of state are no excuse, because this was a criminal state; nor are acts committed under the pressure of orders. There is no known case of anyone who had refused to murder or to participate in murder—of saying: I don't want to do this, give me another assignment—of such a person's life being in danger. One risked one's career and comfort. One could be sent to the front.

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Augstein: Well, perhaps his life was in danger insofar as he would be sent to the front. Naturally this was a factor for many people. But let us stick with our imaginary state secretary in the ministry of transportation. If he had said: No, I don't want to put these trains at your disposal, for that you will have to find another state secretary; then he would perhaps have been drafted and sent to the front. That would have been possible.

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Jaspers: As an aside, may I tell a story that is related to this? A friend of mine, who in 1934 refused to take the oath to Hitler and was dismissed from the civil service, had been a reserve officer in the First World War; now he was to be drafted again. He reported in and he had the good fortune of dealing with a reasonable officer, one not personally known to him. He requested that he be drafted as a simple soldier and not as an officer. He declared that he did not want to evade the common destiny of the Germans but that he could not resolve to give orders. He was not drafted, heard nothing further, and remained unhampered throughout the war.

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Augstein: To continue. In what way is the imaginary state secretary different from a field marshal in command of an army group who shuts his eyes when police and SS units shoot down all the Jews in his zone?

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Jaspers: That is very hard to say, Herr Augstein. One must create legitimate distinctions, which up to now we do not have to a sufficient extent.

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Augstein: Indeed, because there is something peculiar about this. The more a man was a National Socialist, and the more stupidly he was a National Socialist, and the more narrow-minded he was, the more grounds he has for vindicating himself today. It is coming to the point where one takes it into favorable consideration that a man believed in the orders and slogans of the Führer. There are already such verdicts, and even, I believe, from higher courts.

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Jaspers: This argument is still a kind of half-affirmation of the national greatness of 1933. Psychologically, it makes sense to designate such belief as belief. But where psychology stops, that is to say where one begins to take Man seriously, there is no such thing as belief in National Socialism; there is, rather, ethical confusion or corruption.

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Augstein: There are decisions, even decisions confirmed by high courts, which declare this or that judge to have been blinded by the doctrines of National Socialism and by the legal thought of the time—and this was then taken as sufficient reason for terminating the proceedings against him.

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Jaspers: In that case the joke told in 1933 still holds good. There are three qualities: intelligence, decency, National Socialism. Of these only two ever go together, never all three. Either one is intelligent and decent; then one is not a National Socialist. Or one is intelligent and a National Socialist; then one is not decent. Or one is decent and a National Socialist; then one is not intelligent, but feeble-minded.

This joke is not merely a joke; it points to the claims of conscience. If I do not hold these people to be, so to speak, intellectually unfit and thus draw the conclusion that they are unqualified for most occupations; if I do not treat them as though they were really idiots; then I am not justified in deducing any mitigating circumstance from their inferior knowledge and their so-called belief. It is not a belief that deserves toleration if it is translated into actions.

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Augstein: It seems to me that the Federal Republic has been most negligent in creating respect for moral laws and that it continues in this negligence to this day, so that only an extraordinary moral exertion can put a stop to it.

I would like to make this clear by way of an example. We have a Federal patent court in Munich, whose presiding officer was Ganser. During the time of the so-called Government-General,¹ this man annulled a verdict that acquitted a woman who had taken in an 18-month old child and kept it alive. The child was sent to the gas ovens; the woman who had taken it in was sentenced to death—because of the intervention of this man who annulled the verdict of a special court that, God knows, was anything but hypersensitive.

This man was presiding officer of the Federal patent court in Munich until January 31 of this year [1964]; presumably he will get a full pension. That proves to me that we are moving in a zone of moral darkness, and that nothing can help us but an act of purification . . . for which it may already be too late.

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Jaspers: I can only admit how numerous these absurd cases are. But you, in turn, will admit to me that there are also irreproachable judges in Germany—too many of them to count. There are verdicts that have condemned these murderers to life imprisonment.

There is the youth of Germany. When I speak to the young people, at least to individuals among them, I have great hope. I think it is simply forbidden to us to despair. So long as we exist, we have hope. Despair would mean that we acknowledge that we are living in an age in which mankind will in all probability perish, or at least that Germany as a spiritual and ethical force has been lost forever.

What role does the Federal Republic play in world history today? What are its possibilities and duties? How do things look from the perspective of this broad horizon? What can we be if we do not want to be the small remnant of a degenerate population, a remnant used up by history as a mass of capable workers, capable managers, capable soldiers, capable scholars—all of which in itself does not amount to anything?

If we really still want to be something that would be in keeping with our thousand-year past, then we must judge what we do from the perspective of this broad horizon, and in our judgment we must see what is good and encourage it.

After all, those who are making progress on this road—hopefully there are more than a few, only I don't know very many—are often driven to sorrow because they cannot gain any solid contact for their convictions in public life.

But of course public life includes more than just parliament and the government. Where there are human beings who want existence to have a meaning and an importance, who want it to be somehow linked to the ground of things and not to signify something superficial and empty, these human beings must find each other for common thinking, for acting in common. Today they seem to disappear, each one isolated by himself.

But I will not now go any further along this way. In connection with the statute of limitations, I want to make one further point. The situation seems to me to be such that the concept of the crime in question here, genocide, has not yet been sufficiently recognized by us in principle and not yet been sufficiently carried over into the judicial awareness.

Further, it is difficult for German judges to render judgment because the demand is for them to create new law. The great judges of 17th-century England, to whom I drew attention a while ago, were such creators of law.

Today the judges in Germany are being subjected to excessive demands, as the saying goes. To me it seems proper to be subjected to excessive demands. It is part of being human to be subjected to excessive demands. Otherwise the best of which a man is capable is never realized.

Excessive demands are being placed on the judges, namely, what they ought to accomplish they can accomplish only if they have the qualities of creators of law. And with these qualities, if they have them, they can rely on this sentence in the Constitution: “The universal rules of international law are a component of the law of the Federal Republic”—international law supersedes national law.

But where is international law to be found? After all, it is not codified. The universal rules of international law, where are they? If one acknowledges international law, one must constantly deliberate on, and appropriate, the most significant documents of international law and of international agreements.

Creative judges could rely on these provisions and could thus explain why they impose the heaviest penalty, which in Germany is life imprisonment, on actual accessories to murder.

Will we or will we not participate in the unanimous conscience of the West? Will we treat even such things expedientially, indecisively, with tricks, with ulterior motives? Are we laying the foundation for a new mendacity? Or will the seriousness of our political will appear simply, plainly, persuasive in its clear language, in the parliament that represents us?

¹ During the Nazi period—Ed.