By his systematic and indubitably extremely cunning propaganda policy, Dr. Goebbels brought about step by step a constantly increasing isolation from foreign countries which made it more and more impossible to form a truly objective judgment about other countries and questions of foreign policy. It is true, treaties with foreign countries were heralded with much publicity as proof of the desire for amicable cooperation with other nations. Considering these circumstances, were men, even those in higher positions, as for instance, Dr. Rothenberger, who did not have the slightest insight into matters of foreign policy, to show less confidence in the National Socialist leadership of the state than evidently was manifested by the foreign statesmen who concluded treaties with the Third Reich. Suspicious events were not discussed by the press and the public and thus escaped public attention and judgment to a large extent. Insofar as dangerous practices of national socialism were still discernible in domestic and foreign policy, they never appeared as naked facts before the German public as is stated by the IMT verdict but were exhaustively “disguised” in comments rendered harmless or even excused and justified as the results of alleged intrigues by the opposing camp. Without wishing to deny that there exists a certain predisposition on the part of the German people for the reception of authoritarian wisdom, bad though it may often be, one cannot get around the fact, that, based on the circumstances described above, the process by which Germans, even those on a higher level, arrived at an opinion and judgment, of necessity moved and was bound to move along certain lines. The question as to knowledge of certain criminal acts and developments, or better yet, the question as to recognition of the criminality of certain acts and developments can therefore be judged psychologically correctly only on the basis of all the conditions and contexts prevailing at that time. That applies particularly to wartime, which in all countries produces special exigencies and places the strongest emphasis on certain desirable facts while suppressing undesirable ones. Retrospective observation which, in examining facts, does not put itself into conditions existing at that time, projects into the past, knowledge and opportunity of knowledge gained later. Applied to this trial, the above-named method imputes to the defendants a knowledge, an awareness of the criminality of circumstances, which they did not have at that time and makes demands on their faculties of perception which they could never have satisfied under the circumstances then prevailing. _VII. Principles of the constitutional state: “nulla poena sine lege,” “nullum crimen sine lege”_