The big folly of this trial is that it lacks the two men who are to blame for anything which is criminal, namely Hitler and Himmler… Karl Doenitz

The trial can only end in a mistake because it is founded on one. How can a foreign court try a sovereign government of another country? Could we have tried your President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Secretary Henry Morgenthau, or Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, if we had won the war? We could not have done so and would not have. And trying that went on would have to be done by the nation itself and the courts set up there… Karl Doenitz

The Trial of the Germans : an account of the twenty-two defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg  compiled by]Eugene Davidson  Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri Press, 1997  Softcover. Originally published: New York : Macmillan, 1966. x, 637 p., [40] p. of plates : ill. ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 595-616) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding. VG/VG

Is to accept the leadership of a crumbling country a crime? Is to prevent the Russians, the natural enemy of Germany, from obtaining our arms and manpower a crime? In Russian eyes it probably is. But I’m referring to the eyes of a westerner. I knew that we had to capitulate and I wanted it to be to the Americans and British, and not to the East. I’m not even accused of war crimes in the sense of the atrocities. It’s clear they have no case against me. I came into a powerful position in 1943. How can I be accused of a conspiracy? Karl Donitz

It was my dream, and probably the dream of every one of us, to bring about a revision of the Versailles Treaty by peaceful means, which was provided for in that very treaty… Hans Frank

By the fulfillment of my legal and moral duty I think I have earned punishment just as little as the tens of thousands of dutiful German officials who have now been imprisoned only because they carried out their duties… Wilhelm Frick

Moreover, there is this completely false trial. I would participate wholeheartedly in a trial if it were to determine the guilt for 5 million murdered people and the guilt for the atrocities. But I see in this trial endless other things brought out and I have the feeling that in the shadow of the guilt of these murders the German people shall be considered guilty of everything, and in the shadow of this guilt the Americans, English, French, and especially the Russians will want to get rid of their own dirty linen… Hans Fritzsche

But ignorance of the law is no excuse. A person is guilty even if he breaks the law unknowingly. I shall be perhaps the first of the defendants to get up on that stand and admit that I am at least partly guilty… Walther Funk

We will go down in history either as the world’s greatest statesmen or its worst villains… Hermann Goering [1937]

I have been reading about the problems of youth. You know, with all the criticism that was levelled at von Schirach, it is forgotten that he did a fantastic thing with Germany’s young. He kept them busy, he kept them out of trouble. In those years we did not have to concern ourselves with the worry of youths taking drugs, getting involved in crime, and sexual permissiveness. We did not have burning of national flags and draft cards. We had a healthy youth with healthy minds, all pulling together to build a nation. That is what we need today. We need to get them back on the right track… Prisoner number 7 [Rudolph Hess]

Alfred Jodl

Ernst Kaltenbrunner

If this war is not fought with the greatest brutality against the bands both in the East and in the Balkans then in the foreseeable future the strength at our disposal will not be sufficient to be able to master this plague… Wilhelm Keitel

Konstantin von Neurath

Franz von Papen

Erich Raeder

in a few years even you Americans and the rest of the world will see this trial as a mistake. The German people will learn to hate the Americans, distrust the British and French, and unfortunately, perhaps be taken in by the Russians. That will be the worst calamity of all. I hate to think of Moscow ruling Germany or Germany becoming a territorial possession of the Soviet Union. The Allies should take the attitude, now that the war is over, that mistakes have been made on both sides, that those of us here on trial are German patriots, and that though we may have been misled and gone too far with Hitler, we did it in good faith and as German citizens. Furthermore, the German people will always regard our condemnation by a foreign court as unjust … Joachim von Ribbentrop

Alfred Rosenberg

Fritz Sauckel

Hjalmar Schacht

Some of the defendants say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. Totalitarianism is a system that destroys man’s morality. If you take a saint and give him that kind of power, he will change into a devil or Hitler… Baldur Benedikt von Schirach

Arthur Seyss-Inquart

Albert Speer

Julius Streicher