But the very perversion and brutality of the Nazi penal system may lead us to think of it as aimless cruelty, which it is not. Fanatical, ruthless, and even unbalanced as the German leaders might have been, they were never purposeless. Law and justice were destroyed for a reason. They were destroyed because by their very nature they stood athwart the path of conquest, destruction, and extermination which the lords of the Third Reich were determined to follow. The Nazi Special Courts, double jeopardy, the flouting of the letter and the spirit of the law--those things were not ends in themselves. They were methods deliberately adopted for the purpose of causing death, torture, and enslavement. Now that we have traced the steps in the conspiracy, it is timely that we examine the murders and other atrocities which were its intended and actual outcome. COUNTS TWO AND THREE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Two facts stand out when we study the crimes charged in this indictment. First, the diabolical novelty presented by the designed use of a nation’s system of justice and its machinery by the governing power of that nation, as a weapon of destruction--an instrumentality of murder, kidnapping, slavery, torture, brutality, and larceny. Second, the mass character, and therefore the enormity of the crimes committed by these defendants with this new weapon--this headman’s axe fashioned from the scales of justice in a forge, stoked with national greed and racial bigotry and hatred, fanned by blasts of directed propaganda and shaped by the calculated blows of designedly infamous legislation, controlled and dominated courts, and a studied effort to make ineffective or to eliminate completely, the defensive aids customarily enjoyed by defendants in the courts of civilized nations. These facts in turn have the definite effect of confusing and dulling the minds of lawyers and laymen alike, so that they do not clearly understand either the right and the power of this Tribunal to try these defendants under international law or the simple standards by which their crimes can be measured and judged. It follows, therefore, that we should now pause at the threshold of this trial to make clear the authority under and by which we act, and the time honored standards under which we shall assert and prove the guilt of these defendants. A concise review of recent history will be helpful and therefore proper. On 30 October 1943 Prime Minister Churchill, Premier Stalin, and President Roosevelt issued their Moscow Declaration. That part which is pertinent to an understanding of what we do here reads as follows: “The above Declaration is without prejudice to the case of the major criminals whose offenses have no particular geographical localization and who will be punished by the joint decision of the Governments of the Allies.”[40]