“To us Viennese it’s all the same from whom we receive our bread whether his name is Stalin, Churchill, or Hitler. What matters is that we can live. When I quarrel with someone and see that I can no longer carry on, then I stop and do not continue the fight until everything is destroyed. The Fuehrer in his speech said that he would destroy us all. The Fuehrer has said that this war will be fought until one side will be annihilated. Every child knows that we are that side, unless the Fuehrer will come to his senses before then and offers peace to the enemy.” The court found the defendant guilty of having attempted to undermine the German morale to such an extent that he was deemed to come within the special Emergency Decree authorizing death for impairing German defensive strength. Contrast the foregoing case of the Austrian taxi driver, resident of a country occupied and annexed by illegal aggressive acts, with that of Mrs. von Brincken, a German Nazi, who was indicted in August 1944 for having made similar statements in a conversation with friends at the seashore. When the man who had rented her a beach chair became angry about the careless way in which his chair was treated, Mrs. von Brincken was alleged to have said: “Well, don’t worry, the Russian commissars will be sitting in them next year.” She was also vocally indignant to her neighbors because her 17-year-old daughter had just been drafted for labor assignment in the country, and said: “It would do the farmers no good; they would only get more work and more worry since the girl could not do anything but eat.” Due to the intercession of both her husband, a colonel, and a notorious SS general who was a friend of the family, she was released with an admonition. Such judicial discrimination with death as the forfeit, is explained by the defendant Petersen, a lay judge at the People’s Court from 1941 until the end of the war (_NG-396, Pros. Ex. 176_). “The sentences of the People’s Court can be understood only if one keeps in mind the intent underlying the penalties. This was not primarily that of imposing punishment in accordance with normal ‘bourgeois’ conceptions of crime and punishment, but rather of annihilating an opposition which could become detrimental to the German aims.”