It might have been thought that, after the purge of Jewish and politically dissident judges in 1933, the permanent subjection of the judiciary to dismissal for political reasons in 1937, and their complete subordination to the Reich Ministry of Justice in 1939, Hitler would have at last obtained a suitable judiciary for his most extreme purposes. Apparently, however, pre-Hitler legal training sometimes had the unfortunate effect that even trusted Nazi judges failed in their decisions to measure up to the ideology and expectations of the Third Reich. At all events, something like a crisis in the German judicial system occurred in 1942. On 26 April 1942 Hitler made a speech before the Reichstag in which he reviewed the effects of the hard winter of 1941–1942 and exhorted the German people to even greater sacrifices in order to achieve victory. In the course of this speech, Hitler made certain remarks about the German legal profession and the administration of justice which had an immediate and pronounced effect. Hitler said (_NG-752, Pros. Ex. 24_): “I do expect one thing: that the nation gives me the right to intervene immediately and to take action myself wherever a person has failed to render unqualified obedience and service in the performance of the greater task which is a matter of to be or not to be. The front and the homeland, the transport system, administration, and justice must obey only one idea, that of achieving victory. In times like the present, no one can insist on his established rights, but everyone must know that today there are only duties. “I therefore ask the German Reichstag to confirm expressly that I have the legal right to keep everybody to his duty and to cashier or remove from office or position, without regard for his person or his established rights, whoever, in my view and according to my considered opinion, has failed to do his duty. * * * * * * * “Furthermore, I expect the German legal profession to understand that the nation is not here for them, but that they are here for the nation; that is, the world, which includes Germany, must not decline in order that formal law may live, but that Germany must live, irrespective of the contradictions of formal justice. To quote one example, I fail to understand why a criminal who married in 1937, ill-treated his wife until she became insane and finally died as a result of the last act of ill-treatment, should be sentenced to 5 years in a penitentiary at a moment when tens of thousands of honorable German men must die to save the homeland from annihilation at the hands of bolshevism. “From now on, I shall intervene in these cases and remove from office those judges who evidently do not understand the demand of the hour.”[34] Immediately after Hitler’s speech, the Reichstag adopted the following resolutions: