“Such a revelation would give the prosecutors and judges the security that righteous men feel toward insane criminals and monstrous evildoers. This trial has been put on too hastily, with too much governessy indignation and idealism and on a very flimsy legal basis, and the hoped-for revelations will make it look more like an act of justice and not just a superfluous humiliation, a process of revenge wreathed in embarrassing cant and carried out against inferior losers by men who just barely won, and who might be accused of the same crime tomorrow, since they too had failed to prevent what had happened from happening.

•

“However, the expectations are not realized. The evil won’t be grasped. The defendants of Nuremberg cannot be made to fit the proper dimension and proportion in regard to the crimes they are being tried for. No dolus can be demonstrated. Their crime is that of mediocrity.

•

“They are a representative average. The incarnation of everything that John and Stella hated about the bloody fucking middle classes; everything that today is hated, despised, and blamed by itself for the betrayal of the dream of man in the name of bourgeoisie. Their demonic quality is that of utter lack of imagination. Their perversity is the fundamentalist attitude toward rules and regulations. They merely did their duty. They remained true and loyal to their Führer through thick and thin and night and fog, that’s all. It never occurred to them that they were dangerously behind the times, and that in the world of relativity, they were practicing the unconditionality of the virtues of medieval vassals. As average Europeans, they drew their models from the dumping grounds of history. They learned how to obey in silence. They signed thousands of death warrants in their bureaucracy and were responsible for running it smoothly. That was their job, and that was what they got paid for. They can cite this fact. This too is law. It was valid for their accusers and judges too. They have nothing to reproach themselves for.

“They have insisted on this for nine months. Was it not naive to expect that now, at the last moment, they might admit to being artful scoundrels, and that, in their last words to the public, before a noose around their necks cuts off any possibility of further utterance, they might reveal something of the secret of how the evil nesting in souls erupts suddenly and leads to the annihilation of the world?

•

“One of the concluding speeches has already been given. Amid an embarrassed silence in the courtroom, Göring, the first to speak, has cast down a bit of nasty, bumptious cant. He was plainly nervous, annoyed and muddled. Even he, who, with his occasional vestiges of personality and authority, had maintained something like the dignity of a gang boss and something like gallows humor, now seems pathetically second-rate and humanly shabby. His words are cheap rhetoric. Whatever the court decides, he sullenly barks, he leaves the actual and final judgment to history: the future youth of Germany will pass the just verdict on him and his comrades. Period. He sits down again, fat, pale, disreputable.