When the five Potempa murderers were sentenced to death in Beuthen in August 1932, an article by Alfred Rosenberg appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter entitled 'Mark gleich Mark, Mensch gleich Mensch', in which he argued that legally also man does not equal man nor deed equal deed; see Hard, Alfred Rosenberg. This maxim of National Socialism had been given one of its most impressive statements in 1935 in Der Untermensch, a tract published by the SS Head Office. This says:
'That as the night rises against the day, as light and shadow are eternally hostile to each other — so is the greatest enemy of man commanding the earth man himself. Suburban man — that biologically apparently completely identical creation of nature with hands, feet, and a sort of brain, with eyes and mouth — is something quite different, a fearful creature, more than a stone's throw in the direction of man with features resembling a human face — but mentally, spiritually lower than any beast ... subhuman nothing more! For all is not equal which bears a human face! Woe to him who forgets this!' (quoted by Poliakov and Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden).