You, your Honors, are called upon to bring the principles of “self-defense” and of “necessity”, “this great law of defense” to their common denominator, to apply them to the Sievers case and thus insert them into the unwritten rules of the international relations of public and political law. The Anglo-Saxon legal way of thinking and the principles of natural law will give you valuable support in forming the verdict. Now I can turn to the specific case of Sievers. In order to judge his actions the following questions are of a decisive importance: Was there a German resistance movement at all? Did the Hielscher group belong to this resistance movement? Was this group to be taken seriously and what were its aims? Was Sievers a member of this group and what were his tasks? What was his attitude in performing these tasks? Were there also other possibilities for him? It has frequently been maintained that there was no German resistance movement. But _the German resistance existed_. I must, however, confess that the question “Where was this resistance?” readily suggests itself to such people as are not acquainted with the internal conditions of Germany, above all during the war. I must also grant the fact that scarcely more than Stauffenberg’s plot with its staggering consequences came before the public. He who puts such a question completely misjudges the conditions under which the whole resistance movement had to work against the Nazi Government. He forgets that up to the fatal date of 20 July 1944, he had also no idea of the group round Stauffenberg. I am therefore all the more forced to give a concise exposition of the situation which in the Third Reich everybody opposing the Nazi Government had to face. From the very beginning it was the aim of the authoritarian government to get hold of every German man, every German woman, all children, and old men in order to bring them up in the spirit of the new method of government. The totalitarian striving for power did not stop short at personal freedom. It removed professional and economic organizations, cultural and social institutions, some of which were reestablished in another form, subject to the control of the Nazi Government.