Ethics of a Nazi judge
But, as he explained after the war, that machinery was set in motion by Hitler, whose will was law in the Führer-State: mass murder had become ‘technically legal’. All he could do, he said, was to forge ahead with prosecuting the perpetrators for ‘illegal’ killings and lesser crimes, in the hope of somehow throwing sand in the works. He even sought an arrest warrant for Adolf Eichmann – but only for embezzling a pouch of diamonds.
.. Whoever takes so much as a mark of it, is a dead man. A number of SS men – there are not very many of them – have fallen short, and they will die, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette or anything else.
.. Morgen had reached the limits of his judicial powers. So he did the only thing he could think of, by bringing some of the perpetrators to trial on other charges. He found that Maximilian Grabner, chief of the Gestapo at Auschwitz, routinely killed prisoners in the camp jail when it became too crowded. Of course, Morgen realised that these murders paled in comparison with the horrendous crime he had uncovered, but that crime had been ordered by Hilter, and so prosecuting ‘illegal’ killings such as Grabner’s was all he could do to interfere.
.. Thus, when Morgen reported the mass extermination to superiors, his ‘most emphatic and most crucial advice’, he says, ‘was that the SS members who participated in the gassing were thereby so corrupted that they would in future prove no longer serviceable as normal soldiers or even as citizens, and furthermore that the leadership of the state was destroying its own moral foundations with these monstrous crimes’.