| Nizer, Louis, (1902- ), U.S. lawyer, author. Active in areas related to arts, copyright, plagiarism, etc. Author of courtroom reminiscences and book on Rosenberg Case. (Geoffrey Wigoder (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Judaica, Len Amiel Publisher, New York-Paris, and Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem, 1974, p. 455) |
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Nazi group leaders must be the first to be punished. Proof of their guilt is abundant. The armistice terms should simply declare them guilty. It would be farcical to try Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Streicher, Ley or other mass murderers. They have written the evidence of their guilt in blood on every pavement in Europe. The dossiers of the United Nations are bulging with data of their unsurpassed brutality. A trial tribunal should permit them to be heard on the questions of proper identification and the extent of the punishment, but no more.
Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 95. |
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Those condemned by name in the armistice should include the Fuehrer, the members of his cabinet, the Gauleiters, and the members of the High Command, governors of the occupied regions, and the leading bureaucrats in the state, municipal and Nazi Party organizations. These would number approximately five thousand men. Death penalties should be demanded.
Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 96. |
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Next, the leaders of German mass organizations should be indicted and tried. The Gestapo and Labor Front have about 75,000 such officials. In additions, there are about 75,000 subordinates who organized and taught the S. S., the Peasant Front and other such organizations. This entire group of about 150,000 men were the whole-hearted fanatical Nazis upon whom the ruling group relied. Death penalties should be sought against each of them.
Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 97. |
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Every German officer above the rank of colonel, including corresponding ranks in the Air Force and Navy, every member of the Gestapo, S.S. officials, and members of the German People's Court and of the German Reichstag, should be indicted and tried. Every German official, no matter how subordinate, who at any time gave or performed orders for the execution of hostages or the murder of conquered nationals, should be indicted, tried, and the death penalty sought. In addition, the armistice should provide for the complete dissolution of the Officers Corps of the German army as well as of the army itself. Those among them who have violated any criminal or international law should be tried, and appropriate severe penalties imposed. Any administrator, no matter how subordinate, who participated in the plunder of foreign countries, all directors of the German Steel Trust, of I. G. Farben or of the other German cartels, who, as we shall see later, participated in the conspiracy against world peace should be indicted, and appropriate severe penalties imposed. Irrespective of rank or position, every soldier or civilian should be tried, against whom charges are filed involving any violation of law. It is only by such thorough methods that the backbone of Nazism and Prussianism can be smashed and the danger of future aggression reduced. Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 97. |
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It may be contended by those finicky about judicial propriety that no injury could come from a public trial [as compared to summary execution] and that it would avoid criticism against the "absolutism" of the procedure [of summary execution]. However International Law is still to be molded on these critical problems, and it would have a salutary effect if the rule adopted were suitable to the heinousness of the offenses and the public anxiety for swift and certain punishment. The enormity of the crimes announced by the criminals themselves and the existence of millions of witnesses, make the requirement of proof an empty formalism. Since the purpose of the procedure is also to deter future international crime, any lumbering, awkward ritual to prove the self-evident would only cause contempt rather than respect for law. There is a point at which solicitude for a possible innocent victim of a severe rule becomes mawkish over-caution. We must be concerned with the dictates of common sense. The ordinary man and woman must feel the majesty of law, the directness and practicability of its procedure, and its avoidance of routine ceremony. Only then will the thirst for retribution be directed into healthy legal channels. Otherwise, frustration may set in motion forces of violence far more serious than any legal unorthodoxy. Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, pp. 95-96. |
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First, that all plants and machinery which produce war material be scrapped, removed or demolished. Second, that the machine tool industry, steel mills, power houses and important "heavy industries" be destroyed or taken from German control. While physical operation could be left to Germans, international trustees should determine personnel of management, contracts, investments and foreign arrangements. [...] Third, that stocks of metals, oil or other strategic war materials in excess of normal domestic consumption be removed from the country and never replenished. Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 193. |
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Others, stirred to consuming hatred by German brutality, suggest that they be destroyed as a race by eugenic sterilization. They argue that if compulsory serum treatments are justified by their benefits to the community, sterilization of the German people might similarly be considered a protective measure to immunize the world forever against the virus of Germanism. They point out that the surgical procedure is simple, painless and does not even deprive the patient of normal instincts, or their gratification. Vasectomy, the operation on the male, simply requires a slight incision since the sperm duct lies just beneath the skin. The operation takes only ten minutes to perform and the patient may resume work immediately afterwards. Ligation of the fallopian tubes, the operation which renders the female sterile, is more difficult but not much more dangerous. There are about 50 million German men and women within the procreation ages, and it is estimated that twenty thousand surgeons performing about twenty-five operations daily could sterilize the entire male population of Germany within three months, and the entire female population in less than three years. At the normal death rate of two per cent per annum or one and a half million people yearly, the German people would practically disappear within two generations. We reject this proposal but not because of German protests. They have forfeited all right to protest, for they themselves set this precedent. It is estimated that in Germany 300,000 people have been sterilized and in Poland 700,000 people. They [the Germans] have not been beyond the abolition of education so as to make populations slave-fit, the physical and mental corruption of the masses by pornographic and drug incitation, and the systematic extermination of whole peoples. Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, pp. 4-5. |
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Caesar wrote: "Their whole life is composed of hunting expeditions and military pursuits; from early boyhood they are zealous for toil and hardship. Those who remain longest in chastity win greatest praise among their kindred; some think that stature, some that strength and sinew are fortified thereby. Further they deem it a most disgraceful thing to have had knowledge of a woman before the twentieth year." Psychiatrists will find in this observation fruitful material for their studies of the root causes of German sadism and of the inferiority complex which seeks to express itself through conquest and domination. The well-known tendencies in Germany towards homosexuality became public knowledge when Hitler justified his purge of Roehm and his adherents on the ground that they had been guilty of practices of degradation which corrupted the governing circles. Hitler's and Hess' own "aestheticism," Goering's abnormal practices (as determined by a Swiss court), and the evil conduct of the Streichers and other Nazi leaders, fit well into the characteristic pattern of bestiality. The study of psychotic behavior is still in the exploratory stages, but Caesar's report on the training begun ages ago by the German people to deny and invert normal instincts as part of the tribal custom may be a significant clue to sick German conduct. It is possible that German cruelty and blood lust is traceable to sexual inhibitions? Is there significance in the pornographic tendencies of the Germans fed by such official documents as Streicher's Stuermer? Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, pp. 18-19. |
| Millions of little cogs. |
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There was the Kaiser before Hitler, and Bismarck before the Kaiser and Frederick the Great before Bismark � indeed, two thousand years of Germanism to account for. Under each ruler millions of Germans fought fanatically, heroically, sacrificially. Theirs was not conduct induced by compulsion. Theirs was a will to execute a program and a readiness to die for it. The vaunted efficiency of German aggression depends on millions of little cogs acting in perfect coordination which involuntary compliance could not possibly produce.
Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 13. |
| Twice in one generation. |
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[N]o people can be innocent who have twice in one generation burst forth in aggression against all their neighbors, near and far. How is it that one spot on the surface of the earth, no larger than Texas, should so persistently explode and ravage the world? And what were the toasts, the slogans, the anthems, the battle cries of this people? "Der Tag" � when Germany will rule the world. "Deutschland uber Alles". "Tomorrow we will rule the world." Rule the world! Rule the world! No people who can thrill to such a mission are innocent victims of wicked leaders. Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 17. |
| Charlemagne's maddening refrain. |
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Other leaders had waged war because "from their youth up war is their passion." Plunder and the gratification of conquest were the driving force. But Charlemagne decreed an objective. It was not modest. He sought to conquer the world, a refrain which has since run through German existence with maddening and devastating persistence. He fought a war every year. His brilliant gifts were devoted to annihilating his neighbors and robbing them of their possessions. Germans followed him with fanatical devotion for the same principles which inspired them to follow the Kaiser and Hitler in our generation.
Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, pp. 23-24. |
| A cult of mass murder. |
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The Germans have developed a philosophy which makes a religion of war and a cult of mass murder. They consider it their mission to subjugate all other peoples to slavery. They exclude the doctrines of the sacredness of human life and liberty and substitute for it the ideal of war. The unique phenomenon of Germanism is that its conspiracy against world peace is not mere gangsterism or nihilism. It is an intellectual movement, if you please. It is supported by a philosophy carefully devised, nurtured and inculcated into every citizen.
Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 27. |
| Wagner incites lynching. |
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Only in Germany could a great artist like Wagner immerse his talent in blood lust and supply an emotional incitation of German mass murder. The significance lies not in some particular theory, but in the association of cultural and intellectual thinking in Germany with mob standards. Lynching is thus raised to the level of national policy.
Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 28. |
| The greatest indictment of a people in all history. |
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Never again must we be deluded into misplacing responsibility for German aggression. It is not the leader of the day, whether he be Charlemagne, Barbarossa, Frederick Wilhelm, the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Bismarck, the Kaiser or Hitler, who wages war against mankind. It is the German people. Conditioned by centuries of false indoctrination � of a mad philosophy, of an absurd "soil-blood" racial theory, of a mystical paganism, the German people have ever been arch-conspirators against civilization. They have deliberately plotted to destroy it and subdue all mankind to serfdom. They have given their brains, their energies and their very lives through the centuries in fanatical devotion to this task. They have used inhuman and sadistic methods to achieve their psychotic national desires. They have ignored all civilized standards and restraints, and have made barbarism an ideal. They have distorted nationalism into a ritual of international murder. This is the greatest indictment of a people in all history. But it is the truth. Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 52. |
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Suppose Hitler had possessed an infinitesimal part of Napoleon's, or even Frederick the Great's, administrative capacity, he might have created a "new order" in the conquered territories, which might have given the semblance of security, peace, and a little justice. Then millions of exhausted, disillusioned people might have accepted their conqueror and eased his problems. Instead, his one-track mind, devoted to butchery and terrorism, fanned the dying embers of resistance, so that constant revolution and anarchy burned the heels of the oppressor.
Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 51. |