1947-07-19, #22: Doctors' Trial (Adolf Pokorny's personal statement)

THE PRESIDENT: The defendant Pokorny.

DEFENDANT POKORNY: Your Honor, during this trial I have often asked myself what I should have done at the time in order to record my tru motive for this letter I had written to Himmler, but I believe that at the time when I dispatched this letter, I could not do anything else but to talk to the people in whom I had confidence and of whom I know that they would not betray me and confide in them my true reasons If today, this letter, which is against me, may seem objective, then this is a fact with which I must bear, although to the end I must say in correspondence with the truth that not surface reasons were the cause for my writing this letter, but that letter was written because at the time I had heard facts about Himmler's plans, and, because at that time in my position standing lonely and slandered because of my family implications in a small town in Czechoslovakia, I felt that I was able to take the action described.

I retain the hope that you, my judges, will draw your conclusions from my conduct and the situation in which I found myself at the time, and will come to the conviction objectively that the true motive was a different one than that which is shown by this letter, and that you will not sentence me but will believe me in what I have not only told you, my judges, but others previously during my interrogations and, before that, what I have told my friends, at a time when this present situation had not arisen, in order to clarify my motives as being true.

With this hope I am looking forward to your judgment, and in that connection I am thinking of my children who, for years now, have lived under the protection of an allied power and who will not believe that their father, after everything that he has suffered, could possibly have acted as an enemy to human rights.