The Eichmann and Sassen interview, O.65 file 85

From which main thesis shall we proceed with this book?

The following: various ideas, various possibilities that have occurred to me, to set them out one by one and as precisely as possible. They can then [off the sheet] serve as a kind of leitmotif. In my opinion, there is no point in trying [off the sheet] to trivialize the matter, nor in exaggerating it and speaking to please the opponent. Is there a middle way that would serve the truth at the same time [off the sheet]? In the end, it is all about examining the truth and, insofar as the [off the sheet] of the objective … it is ultimately about examining the truth, about investigating the truth.

I believe one possibility would be to portray the German [off the sheet] people before and during the war as a people [off the sheet] that had achieved its unity through Bismarck scarcely 50 years earlier, with a temporal difference… In the First World War it saw all the opposing forces united against it; through the unspeakable hardship after the First World War, the Jews were undoubtedly the beneficiaries of the German people's hardship.

One need only recall the mortgage stories and the expulsion stories of the farmers in the north of the country, which slowly but surely formed an annihilation campaign [overtyped] of the (handwritten) small and upper middle class, all of whom became victims of Jewish interest-rate policy. The reason the interest-rate question found such a wide response in the NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers’ Party] program. Precisely in the postwar [off the sheet] period of the First World War, a political and economic regression took place, through which many efforts toward unity, painstakingly established through Bismarck (handwritten), were largely reversed …

This people [off the sheet], after the seizure of power in '33, had one leg on the path toward the development of a … realization of the national program [abbreviated], and the other on the path to war. Through the development of the war, this people was suddenly (handwritten) called to leadership tasks for which it lacked experience, and for which that complex of experience values that gradually [off the sheet] condenses into a certain technique was lacking. It isn't learned in crash courses; it is the result and sediment of many generations, of the bitter experiences of generations.

The German people, without this complex of experience, was placed before a leadership task for which experience and forces were utterly lacking. As German [off the sheet] influence spread across Europe through military development, and [off the sheet] as Jewish legislation had been proclaimed in Germany since 1936, there were still so many disturbing gaps in the practical execution of that legislation. On the other hand, in the modern Reich, which the Third Reich was, a problem had to be solved while observing laws and regulations and a certain distribution of power within the state.

All this led to great difficulties within Germany. Even Germany's efforts [off the sheet] to solve the Jewish problem within Germany [off the sheet] through emigration, by involving foreign countries, produced no tangible results. In hindsight [off the sheet], it becomes very clear that foreign countries, which [off the sheet] later became enemy countries, had from the outset kept this whole Jewish question [overtyped] as a weapon in reserve and had sought by every means to prevent this

weapon, for example, would be rendered ineffective through a solution of the Jewish question, precisely at the moment [off the sheet] when a war was to break out, a war that had to break out for political and economic reasons, and when the Jewish problem could be the strongest weapon of the opposing side. That the opposing side had assigned the Jewish question this function is almost certainly something that became clear to the authorities and the leadership of the Third Reich only in the very last stage of the war.

When I say that the enemy side spared the Jewish question, the Jewish problem, as its most important weapon as much as possible, and therefore avoided every solution with stubborn deliberateness, a distinction must also be made here between the propulsive enemy front, the dynamic enemy front, and the static enemy front. I would like to take this parallel a little further by stating that, in this context, by the static enemy front I mean those great and small powers that stood hostile to the dangerous experiment of the Third Reich for political, democratic-parliamentary [off the sheet], and economic reasons, and which [meaning unclear] used these political and economic antagonisms against the Third Reich.

Among the great powers, in 1939 one could readily count England, America of course, and, to a lesser extent, France. From this static enemy front I would exclude the Soviet front from the outset, because it represents a chapter of its own and posed at least as strong a challenge to the just-described static front as National Socialism and the Third Reich. This static enemy front, where it was already clear before 1933 [off the sheet] that, under the threat of a Bolshevized Germany, it could for a moment rise to a reasonable, more or less willing welcome of the National Socialist seizure of power, because it believed National Socialism would be an impregnable wall against the Bolshevik process, soon showed that the traditional antagonisms still held the upper hand.

The development within the Soviet Union may have contributed to this in no small measure; one need only recall the great Kula…[not typed] extermination campaigns and the great trial of 1936. These made such an impression abroad that the Soviet Union had to contend with great internal difficulties and was thereby, in a sense, neutralized, in a sense prevented from taking part in the international power struggle. It soon became clear after 1933 that traditional hostility, including England's, remained.

As before the First World War, England feared on the political front that the appeal of a united Germany, of the German people [off the sheet] renewed by National Socialism, would disturb the balance of Europe, held together by the Bak policy [too faint] of France-Czechoslovakia [off the sheet], England-France-Poland-Romania-France, now with [overtyped] art and Flugwerk [meaning unclear]. Above all, England's traditional hostility in the economic sphere soon became apparent. In this economic war, England would somehow become the underdog and sooner or later be outstripped by Germany.

To this static hostile front, of course, France also belonged, with its efforts to remain a great power and its glaring failure to conjure from Germany's defeat a life insurance that would make effort and work unnecessary for France. France, where after '35, after Dardieux was replaced by Blum, the Popular Front government naturally used France's traditional hostility toward England [off the sheet] and put it in the service of the struggle of left-wing, more or less [too faint] forces against this clear expression of a renewal of the Right, which the damaged “ational.” [too faint] represented.

These Popular Front forces used this traditional hostility to turn it into a solely political one. One can hardly speak of economic antagonisms toward Germany on France's part, because France was economically an absolute zero, is, and will remain so, and France could in no way feel spurred on by Germany's economic rise. The whole Back policy [meaning unclear] naturally fits into this traditional enmity, along with an attempt by part of it to gain importance through an encirclement policy around the Third Reich, though it had no real importance.

The small democratic parliamentary states also belonged to this hostile static front, states that in any case followed in the wake of the large democratic parliamentary states: Belgium with its military pact with France, Holland with its traditional parliament…[not typed] and its tendency, probably begun shortly before the World War, to orient its public economic and political life more and more toward England, just like the small states in the Balkans, which, although arising from different circumstances [off the sheet], nevertheless allowed themselves to be made into instruments by the great powers in the encirclement struggle against Germany, just like the Scandinavian states [abbreviated], Switzerland, and so on. This static hostile front, which already represented the coming war against Germany in potential, found a…[not typed]

He said this man was in truth the darkest figure of this century, and especially because he, as the witnesses probably said, had recognized the outcome of the war clearly a long time beforehand. That is given back word for word. I read the thing in captivity, in a small pamphlet, "The Nuremberg Trial".

What is your fundamental attitude to the Jewish question with regard to our people? If you had had a free hand, how would you have attempted a solution, and in this connection that means a political solution?

My attitude: there we have to go back into history at least far enough, so far as the German people is concerned, to the time of the Middle Ages, namely when the German rulers of the small states came into financial difficulty very often through their way of life, and Jewry, which was frequently confined to ghettos, [not typed] I mean here a living together, a separation, an extinguishing; [punch hole] seen from the present.

Now, knowing it out of history, a living together with this people, which for 2,000 years has lived in dispersion and was prevented from following certain fields of life, concentrated on particular branches, that is for example trade, and also the intellectual professions. And when I then saw that this [overtyped] within the German people, with 1932 as the reference date, controlled at an unheard-of percentage those fields that were of vital importance for the German people, and sat in their key positions, then I said to myself that there has to be a separation.

And it was not I who said that [overtyped]; the Party program said it, other national fighters said it before me, and on the other side Jewish leaders said it too. Now, since a solution was absolutely necessary, because that is what our Party leadership said and later the leadership of the German Reich as well, I said, and I believe along with me all those who had a small word to contribute here, that such a solution could only be a political solution.

But a political solution only means smashing shop windows, it does not mean killing, it does not mean dragging them off into slavery, but rather a clean separation [handwriting] from the territory of this people to which I for example belong. Probably there are in other countries just such minds who wish for [punch hole] such a separation. But such a separation had already been taken in hand before the national A [not typed], and there the driving factor was not the German. Here the driving factor was the Jew himself, the Zionist, for the first time under [not typed] Herzl, the pioneer of territorial separation altogether.

That is to say, if you had had the say in your sector, that is, if you had had to carry a solution through, what would you have done in practice then?

If I had been able to carry the solution through and had had the full authority, then I would have done what I had already attempted in the first steps. Namely, first of all to give the Jew a certain self-administration, an administration of his own, so that he would get into administrative training, in order to be able to maintain and lead himself as well. I saw, and see it today too, that the Jewish question can only be brought to a final solution when land and soil is put under the Jew's feet, and that is a task for the politicians.

How did you feel about your task personally and as a human being, that is, as you were able to carry it out with the means at your disposal, under the assumption [off the sheet]

At that time I also thought personally: first, I was an officer, was a soldier, was sworn in, and had to obey the orders I received. I was sworn in twice. First with the troop [not typed]

Here we were loaded onto trains on the day Hindenburg died, and we were sent to Munich, and there we swore the new oath to A.H. The oath was of course voluntary. The second oath to the SD [Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service], in the year 1934, in the autumn of 1934, when I was ordered from the troop to the SD. And for the third time when I was ordered from the SD to the Gestapo [Secret State Police] Office. I was [off the sheet], always sworn to A.H., but the two later service oaths were oaths of secrecy and that I would follow the orders of my superiors [not typed], here however with the addition of secrecy.

Only your attitude to your task. You said that as an officer you felt about it in the first way.

Second, my attitude. When the Jewish question was first transferred to me in the SD Head Office, and from 1940 into the Gestapo Office, I did not of course work on it as a head of cattle acting under orders. On the contrary, it delighted me enormously, it gripped me, that I was allowed to work on these things, because you must not forget that I had a chief, Heydrich [not typed], that under him I was given every opportunity to occupy myself with matters of religious scholarship, that I studied religious scholarship for two years, and that he also sent me to the Near East, which served me very well in perfecting my knowledge.

I learned Hebrew, badly enough, but in any case I could read all Jewish newspapers without effort, and so I was glad to be able to handle exactly this subject. It really is uncommonly attractive when you sit in a central authority and can help in the solution of a problem that weighed so heavily on my people and that weighed on the Jews themselves as well.

You once said that if you had been a Jew you would then have been a fanatical Zionist.

Yes, I said that to Dr. Josef Loewenherz in Vienna, with whom I had countless conferences, and to Dr. Kastner as well. I said to both of them that I could not imagine anything else, given my whole disposition toward the national idea. Namely, that if I were not a German but a Jew, I would be the most committed Zionist they could imagine.

It is claimed that you yourself carried out mass shootings in Poland. Is that correct?

No, I never carried out a single shooting, neither in Poland nor anywhere else in Europe.

How far did your authority go in the physical actions?

In the whole solution of the Jewish question in this sector, which was ordered in the year 41, my task was solely the police registration of this group, which was described as the enemy because through the mouth of the spokesman Dr. Chaim Weizmann, over Radio London, war was declared on the German people. So I instructed the police contingents in the individual districts or in the individual Gaue of the Reich, according to a timetable that was drawn up by my transport officer, who settled it in cooperation with the Reich Transport Ministry, to

register the contingents and place them at those destination stations named by the Chief of the SDHA. That ended the Gestapo’s responsibility. Full authority doesn’t exist in a government office. Rather, everyone in an office, whether low or high, from a Kriminalassistent up to the Chief of the Security Police [Sicherheitspolizei, Security Police], has to issue instructions and orders under existing laws, regulations and decrees. There was no third possibility and there is none. In a government office nobody can do whatever he wants. He has to do what he is ordered to do, and such orders and instructions can be issued only when a relevant law is cited.

And was this body of law on which your work rested the Nuremberg Laws No. 35?

No. That was a Führer order. Heydrich, the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, told me that the Führer had now ordered the liquidation of the Jews. At that time this was law. You know that the Führer’s words had the force of law, and that applied to all German members of the Nazi national community.

You weren’t brought in to work on the Nuremberg Laws?

No. At that point I had nothing at all to do with the government office.

Now please repeat it exactly, word for word, as far as you can [not typed].

It was in Berlin, in my office on Kurfürstenstrasse. The war was drawing to an end. Everything was lost, finished. I either summoned all my officers, or it came out of a meeting. These were more or less my last days in office. Taking my leave formally, I said that if it had to be so, I would gladly and joyfully jump into the pit knowing that five million enemies of the Reich had jumped in with me. I know I spoke these words very harshly because I felt extraordinarily happy at the time. If I had to go in and bite like the dogs, at least I wouldn’t be alone in there. That was how I felt, and I told my men. With that, I had in effect left the stage.

Are you certain that you used the words “enemies of the Reich” and not “Jews”?

No. I had no reason to use that. I didn’t hate only the Jews. In those days I hated everything that threatened the German people.

Nor the word “human beings”?

No, “enemies of the Reich.” To me, “enemies of the Reich” was like the word “devil” to a clergyman.

Did A.H. speak to you about the Jewish problem, or did he give you any instructions about it?

The Führer? No. My office was far too junior for that. At the top of the chain of superiors I dealt with was the Reichsführer. I was summoned to him three or four times. Apart from one occasion when he was based on Prinz Albrecht Strasse, I was always called to his field command post. Otherwise it was Heydrich, the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, then his successor Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and then my immediate superior, Heinrich Mueller, whom I dealt with several times a week.

I had no other superiors.

Did Himmler speak with you about this problem or give you any instructions? Do you therefore know his position on it?

Yes, I can say that. First, Himmler repeatedly spoke of the harshness of the struggle the German people had to wage against their Jewish opponents. He said this struggle had to be fought because never again would we be strong enough in leadership to defend ourselves against such a dangerous opponent. I don't believe the Reichsführer himself ever dwelt on this in his programmatic remarks to his subordinates. He did speak to larger groups about the general rule. With individuals, I would say, he hammered in order after order in his impulsive way.

He jumped from the hundredth thing to the thousandth and often left the general level to seize on some small, ridiculous individual case and make a personal decision. This trait of the Reichsführer was known to many in our office and often caused us difficulties. His position was clear to me. Harshness where harshness was necessary, but where it could be avoided, it should be avoided. I repeatedly put this view in writing in my orders. In implementing regulations or action orders, which always had to be issued in writing to subordinate offices, I again and again pointed out that avoidable hardships were to be avoided. The police itself also tolerated no excesses in its actions.

From your personal dealings with the Reichsführer, do you know whether he regarded the later combination of police and SS [Schutzstaffel, Protection Squads] duties as fortunate or unfortunate? Police duties and Waffen SS duties.

I can't say. They were of course linked. It was one corps with different fields of duty. If the chief of this corps, the Reichsführer, considered it useful or expedient, he certainly combined the commands deliberately. In the same way, he assigned me, who came from the troops, to the Gestapo Office, although I wasn't a civil servant. I refused to become one when Mueller once approached me about it. On the contrary, I see this whole matter as a temporary posting, and I want to return to the troops when the task is complete.

When did the term “Final Solution” first appear, who introduced it, and what did it cover?

I no longer know exactly whether I coined the term “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” or whether it came from Mueller. I can't even say that. When I read The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl, written by A. Boehm, he spoke there of the solution of the Jewish question. Soon afterward, when I was given the Zionist association as my subject area in the SD Main Office, I had already begun to mark files “Re: Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” The Reichsführer's aim was to bring about a final solution. The term “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” has nothing to do with physical death or the death of a person. This file heading, “Re:,” continued to be used by the SD Main Office from 1935 through 1945. It wasn't a term created separately.

To your knowledge, did Hitler already hold the view at the start of the war that a German victory would automatically mean the physical annihilation of all European Jewry?

No. Nobody had ever thought of that. I am convinced that Heydrich, who was a very cold man and very much in control of himself, that even he shuddered inwardly at the words "physical annihilation." He told me this in a manner he otherwise never used. He was normally brusque and forceful, but here he spoke in a softer, more conversational way, never in the form of an order. One could perhaps infer that he too was surprised at the time.

All the offices had intended to get the Jews out of the country, and even during the war a series of attempts was made to detach the Jews somehow from the body of the German people. But it may well be that, once victory kept moving further away from us and Adolf Hitler committed himself more and more in every speech, he gave this order one day. He must without doubt have given it to the Reichsführer, who must have given it to the Chief of the Security Police and the SD. The Chief of the WVHA [SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, SS Economic and Administrative Main Office] will have received the remaining directions personally from the Reichsführer.

Did Hitler concern himself directly with the Final Solution, did he intervene directly, and did he give orders directly?

No, never. What he communicated to the Reichsführer, I naturally don't know. The Reichsführer intervened directly and looked at the matter himself.

Did Hitler or Himmler look at the camps?

No, never. I would know that for certain. It would have gone around like wildfire.

Was the Reichsführer in the other camps besides Auschwitz?

I don't know. I do know that the Reichsführer and Glo[not typed] got on very well. They were friends, let us say.

When the attack on Rath took place on Nov 9, 1938, that same day this [not typed] happened.

In your view, who had a hand in it?

Who it was I can't say. Official Reich offices in any event did not. I do know that neither the SD nor the Gestapo initiated anything here. On the contrary, they were shocked, because under the Reichsführer's directions [unclear] they had built up bodies such as the Jewish religious communities and equipped them for emigration. The group of Jewish political officials was constantly being sent around by us, in this instance by me, to collect foreign currency and find immigration possibilities.

We had tried to let this Jewish functionary system run with as little disruption as possible, since we were building the organization with the aid of these Jews. We were speechless when these bodies were smashed just like the shops. Such mob actions did not suit the character of the police. The SD was an extended arm of the German police. These excesses certainly did not meet with Joseph Goebbels's approval, since the officials of his ministry with whom I dealt at the time were shocked by these measures too. It must somehow have been directed and steered. I have

[not typed] really no idea. Perhaps it came from Ley. I witnessed it in Vienna. My office was on Prinz Eugen Strasse, and I had the Central Office for Jewish Emigration there. That evening, when the affair seems to have begun, several Jewish functionaries came to me. They asked me to protect them, and I offered them the office. They spent the night there, while my guard stood outside the palace day and night. When I went to the Israelite religious community, which was already in flames, I found, unfortunately I must say, a senior General SS leader. I saw him or one of his men slam a typewriter from the religious community onto the floor.

I was outraged and confronted the Oberführer, which led to a quarrel. I was a Hauptsturmführer at the time and had taken on an Oberführer. The affair came to nothing, like the shooting at Hornberg, except that I got these men out of the religious community building and stationed several criminal police officers there until the commotion ended. The extensive card index at least remained intact. It listed emigration possibilities. We were dealing with a thousand people a day, and you can imagine that the card file wasn't small. Otherwise, I would probably have needed weeks or months to rebuild it.

This card file was kept in the Jewish religious community itself. You didn't have it in your office?

No. Preliminary work such as obtaining foreign currency and corresponding with foreign missions in Austria, the Ostmark, or abroad was done entirely by the Jewish functionaries. That was why I had assigned them. They were decent people, largely Zionists who wanted to emigrate anyway. I only handled the official side, meaning official clearance for each person's departure by the agencies that had an interest in it: the economic offices, police offices, currency offices, and so on. I handled the official work needed to issue a passport. Delegates from Vienna's Jewish religious community also sat at this assembly line. They checked each Jew's questionnaire. The Jew passed along the assembly line and came off at the end with a passport in hand.

The other side says people were admitted abroad only because the papers were forged or incomplete.

No, that can't be. They were regular passports, the kind that would have been issued to any one of us traveling abroad. The only difference was that the first page bore a “J” three centimeters high and three quarters of a centimeter wide. This marker was governed by a passport regulation through administrative channels, which gave it a legal administrative basis. The rule was sent through the Foreign Office to the [not typed] representatives of other countries accredited in Germany, with whom we had diplomatic relations. They therefore had to accept a regulation issued by the Reich, just as we had to accept other countries' passport regulations.

Is it correct that this proposal for the “J” came from the Swiss side?

No, I don't believe so.

[not typed] People with a J were then not allowed across the border.

Yes. I remember that the urge to emigrate was so strong that Jews often crossed the border illegally. I remember that the Foreign Office had difficulties and that [not typed] were exchanged here. I believe instead that the Foreign Office ordered this “J” requirement. We in the police didn't order it.

Where were you on July 20, and how did you experience it?

I was in Hungary, sitting in Budapest, when I heard about the attack on the Führer. We made no defensive preparations. We were fortunate to have such good and influential friends in the [not typed] and the government that not the slightest danger threatened us from that quarter. Nor did we have to worry about German military offices. As I later heard, members were arrested in other countries, but we had good contacts with the military too. The day passed in Hungary without incident.

Did anyone in your office know anything about a planned conspiracy of that kind?

Yes. We held one, sometimes two, so-called desk officers' meetings each week under Müller. About twenty desk officers attended. Müller raised matters of general interest, and the officers often brought up matters they couldn't discuss with their chiefs. One naturally heard a great deal. Likewise, an officer could give the head of Department IV a talk of general interest at these meetings if it mattered to everyone. We repeatedly heard from the case officer for the national opposition, SS-Standartenführer Hubenkoden. I believed the matter was in the best of hands.

If a man like Hubenkoden was handling it, that had to reassure us. I was astonished that anything like this could happen. I had long been a pessimist. The papers I received on my desk each day told me about moods and efforts within the Reich, although I had no responsibility for them and couldn't intervene. Out of this pessimism, I repeatedly said that before we dealt with the opponent assigned to me, we should first put the proper number of our own German countrymen against the wall so that there would finally be quiet in our own stable.

What impression did the victory parade in Paris make on you?

That had been the beginning. It was when Bock took the salute at his troop parade. Around that time, we met every Thursday at Müller's private apartment. Hubenkoden, I, and three other comrades attended. We were five department heads from Department IV. They were harmless evenings with chess and the like. We discussed official duties calmly, just among ourselves. I believed I could voice my concerns there. Around this time, I really began to become pessimistic.

Out of that fear for Germany, I said to Hubenkoden: I am very pessimistic. I believe that if this goes on, we will lose the war. I also spoke of conditions inside Germany, since H. was responsible for them. H. disagreed with me and fixed on the word “pessimism.” We National Socialists of all people mustn't be pessimists, he said. We had a small dispute. I answered, word for word: we, who sit on the green wood, have every right to pessimism. Without it we would never have the strength or means to confront, judge, and condemn an opponent who publishes pessimistic ideas. Of course, I can't share such pessimism with a third person. I share it only here on the green wood and only from fear for the Reich. Müller intervened. He partly agreed with Hubenkoden and partly with me, and that settled the matter.

You said to Hu. that, in your view, it was necessary, or rather justified, to put 500,000 Germans against the wall to win the war?

Did I say that to Hu.? No. I said it to Müller on that occasion. I said that first we would have to put 500,000 Germans against the wall. Only then would we have the right to mow down the enemy. As long as we did not, or were not allowed to, we had no such right. I made this point to Müller repeatedly, including in later years. Müller said neither yes nor no. With a quiet, fatherly smile, he said: yes, yes, Comrade Eichmann.

Whom did you have in mind among the 500,000?

All the saboteurs, all that rabble, as we saw on July 20. I gathered it from so many things: the Rote Kapelle, the press review, T.U., and whatever else there was. Some of these T.U. sheets were also sent to me. They set out a conversation in telegraphic wording. One T.U. might contain three, four, or five matters. Anything that concerned me was marked under IV B 4. The folder then passed through the different sections, and each person had to take out his own part. Over time, the picture became clear. Man, there is so much trouble in the country. Why doesn't it finally come crashing down? Knowing this more exactly was the task of Office III under Ohlendorf. Even Hu. drew on Office III's reports.

Office III gathered and worked over the information, identified types of opponents, and passed them to the Gestapo for [not typed] treatment. In the same way, one had to draw on the findings of Dr. Six, who dealt with research on ideological opponents and did it as academic work. Of course, he too had eyes and ears everywhere. He knew who led this or that institution, and who this or that person was. I needed only half of it because I came from his shop. I came from research on ideological opponents, from Six's office. He had been my superior for a long time. When I was sent to the Near East, Six was my immediate superior, until I took over the Central Office in Vienna.

From then on my direct superior in Vienna was Dr. Stahlecker. Later, while still based in Vienna, I set up the Central Office in Prague. For a short time there I answered to the chief of the Security Police and the SD in Prague. It lasted only a few months. Then I was ordered to Berlin in the autumn of 1940, where Mueller became my immediate superior.

Keyword Palestine. When and why did you travel to Palestine? It is said that you gave the order to make contact with the Grand Mufti. Is that true? Is that why you went to Palestine?

That is nonsense, of course. This is what happened.

I told you that I had struggled with Hebrew for two and a half years. At that time I watched legal and illegal immigration into Palestine. I knew that colleagues in Schellenberg's office had close contact with the Arabs. It was around the time when Mussolini styled himself the Sword of Islam. I wanted to know whether Jews in Palestine were keeping themselves artificially in the minority, although their number had already passed that of the population living there, or whether it was close to doing so. Jewish officials had told me that they were only waiting for a numerical majority so they could take possession of the country. I wanted to find out when the time might come to set up this new Jewish state.

Since uprisings down there were common, I assumed the Jews must have secret militant organizations. By chance, a Jewish newspaper landed on my desk and I read an article about the Haganah. It spoke of a Jewish armed force and of a man who had lived in Palestine for a long time, a Mr. Pol… He was a good friend of SS Untersturmfuehrer Mildenstein, who was then my department head for Jewish affairs. At the Reich Security Main Office I heard that a Jew from Palestine had arrived in Berlin and was said to be active in some Jewish militant or political capacity. Or I heard that he was in a neighboring country. In short, I went through Dr. Six, and Six through Pol, to have an invitation sent to this Jew as my guest in Berlin.

May the name Pol… be given?

Yes. He was only a simple informant of mine.

This Jew came to Berlin, and I made him a guest of the Reich Security Main Office. I met him several times. We ate at the Traube and spoke about this and that, but the man wanted to draw me out. He told me interesting things. I wrote up what he said for my superiors, and Heydrich rated it good. That showed Heydrich was interested. When he was not, he ran his blue pencil across the whole thing.

I accepted the invitation that came to me through this man. In the autumn of 1937, I traveled with the then SS Oberscharfuehrer Hagen, a colleague of Six, through Poland, Rumania, and Syria to Palestine, intending to continue to Egypt. There had just been several bombing incidents in Palestine…

I came to Haifa. The German News Bureau representative had meanwhile been injured in a car crash. Dr. Reichardt received me in Haifa. Since Palestine wasn't favorable ground, I obtained permission to go ashore only with the greatest difficulty, and then for just one day. Landscape descriptions.

I then traveled directly to Alexandria. My companion and I spent three days as guests of young Arab lawyers. A certain Henry Lakasch had traveled with us on the ship. His father had been president of the Arab lawyers. Dr. Reichardt awaited me there, along with a certain Mr. Genz, the local German News Bureau representative. Through Dr. Reichardt, my former Jewish guest from Berlin came from Cairo too. We met one evening at Mena House. Various proposals were made, including a German airline. The matter wasn't very fruitful.

Dr. Reichardt gave me, as a gift so to speak, a mail sack from the Mandate aviation company that Arabs had stolen. It held several important letters addressed to the High Commissioner and a senior judge. We passed the letters to the Foreign Office. On Sept 1, 1939, when war broke out with Poland, they appeared on the front page of the Voelkischer Beobachter. They didn't interest me at all because I wasn't responsible for that subject.

What did the documents say?

They dealt with cooperation between the Mandate authorities and official Jewish bodies, to the disadvantage and harm of the Arabs. That is why they were made public. The Reich wanted to show that other powers were outmaneuvering the Arabs in some way. I didn't meet the Grand Mufti. The German News Bureau had planned a visit to the then King Abdalla. They had already obtained a chess set for me and warned me that I had to lose the game because that was the custom.

I didn't reach the Grand Mufti. There was great unrest down there at the time and bombs were being laid. I tried a second time because I had again arranged to meet my former Jewish guest from Berlin in Haifa or Te… I went to the British consulate general in Alexandria. Although I showed a Berliner Tageblatt writer's pass, the official responsible said, "I'm sorry." That ended the matter. I had started the trip at a time that became as unfavorable as possible while I was still on the outward journey, something we couldn't have known beforehand. In quieter times it would have been better, and I could have studied much more closely.

When did you meet the Grand Mufti?

I met him when he was an official guest in Berlin. He came to Berlin for treatment of an eye ailment after ending his stay in Italy and going to Germany. Here he stood under the protection of Office VI, later Schellenberg's office. The office had its guesthouse at Wannsee, and…

There was once an evening to which the Grand Mufti, other Arabs, and all the other desk officers whose duties reached into Arab affairs were invited. My duties reached into that area, so I was included. Immediately afterward three Iraqi officers were assigned to me for briefings. One was said to be a nephew of the Grand Mufti. I later heard, though I am not entirely certain, that he was the man who later killed King Ab… The attacker was shot dead at once. I was told that this man had been there with two others, and that the nephew was intended to become the Heydrich of the Near East after a German victory.

Abdullah was shot in 1952?

I read that the Grand Mufti's nephew was said to have done it. It was in all the newspapers, and at the time I was told it was the nephew. They were Iraqi majors. Since I knew one was said to be the nephew, I put it together afterward: aha, that was him; now he is gone.

Well, the three had been with me for briefings. I had orders to open everything to them without reservation. Every safe was open to them. I let them go through every area handled by my desk, and I spoke at length with all three. One spoke good German and another spoke broken German. This wasn't a social gathering. It was an office introduction meant to prepare them to transfer my apparatus, a desk like mine, into a future greater or smaller Arab empire. They went through other offices whose duties touched their area too. If one of them was meant to be the Heydrich of the Near East, he was the intended future head of the Security Police for this Arab empire. Perhaps another was meant to handle the Jewish question there. All three were interested in everything. They learned eagerly, received every file from me, and had each process explained to them.

Wi… says in his account that in Aug you were commissioned to draw up a Madagascar plan?

The word "commissioned" is wrong. I said before that I was a living file rack. I acted under orders, but I had thoughts of my own because I lived in this subject. Otherwise I would have been an assistant, just a cog, something mindless and dead. When emigration stalled, I began thinking about it. We will discuss why it stalled later. Various attempts came to mind, including Theresienstadt and the Lublin district. Herzl writes in The Jewish State that he tried everything. He approached the Sultan and wanted to negotiate with Kaiser Wilhelm. Herzl stirred up heaven and earth for the Jews, and in his distress Madagascar came up too. Herzl fell out with the especially right-wing Orthodox, who all insisted on the Holy Land, Eretz Israel.

The First World War gave them a homeland in Palestine, which made the other ideas, including Madagascar, obsolete. Only in our own time, amid our shortage of land and the need to solve the problem, did the Madagascar idea return. As the IV B4 desk officer in the Reich Security Main Office, I put it to Heydrich after first presenting it to Mueller, and I received permission to set the useful steps in motion. France had been defeated, and Madagascar was a French possession. Representatives from the central agencies then attended a series of meetings.

The Foreign Office had a spokesman, the Fuehrer's Chancellery had a spokesman, the former through von Thadden, the latter through Reischauer. Every other office whose duties touched the project was involved too, because each agency guarded its powers closely. I believe my office held at least fifteen to twenty large meetings on the Madagascar project, with roughly twenty to twenty-five people at each one. I had lawyers draw up a bill for moving and settling Jews on Madagascar. It was to be called Jewish territory, where Jews would supposedly rule and live freely, though under the protectorate of the Greater German Reich.

I thought this would help Jews not only in Germany but throughout the part of Europe under our influence, because we could have transported them to Madagascar in large numbers. I asked the head of the Reich Office for Emigration Affairs in the Interior Ministry for figures on the climate and the island's capacity. That office had long advised Germans who wanted to emigrate. They weren't satisfactory; they were extraordinarily satisfactory.

I still remember that Madagascar was to be divided into an upper and a lower zone. One was said to have a very good climate and the other a somewhat worse one. The details, I said, would be left to Jewish self-government and a Jewish Madagascar government. The collection of clauses ran to about 80?, perhaps 100 or 120, and work had already begun on implementing regulations. The bureaucratic obstacles were enormous. After weeks and months, the draft was finally ready for the ministers and was circulating among state secretaries for their initials. Then France was no longer available to us. The course of the war made Madagascar unreachable. There was the uprising, de Gaulle, and something at Dakar, I believe. We suffered several setbacks, and Madagascar lost its value and had to be abandoned, to my regret even today. At that time I was still entirely absorbed in the Madagascar idea.

Which French witnesses can confirm the Madagascar plan? Which French politician or official was contacted to carry it out, or was no one contacted?

Naturally the Vichy government was contacted. Legation Councillor von Thadden, the Foreign Office desk officer, attended every meeting, and the Foreign Office had to initial every draft. The project moved step by step. The Foreign Office had to state that it had no objections on several major points. As a Gestapo officer, I took those initials to mean that agreement with Vichy existed. No central authority could dispose of a territory without negotiating with the responsible officials. Once the Foreign Office initialed a matter as unobjectionable, I assumed it had covered every aspect within its area.

You didn't contact them yourself?

No. Just as I had to bring my own matters into line with the offices responsible for them, I assumed I didn't need to concern myself with the Foreign Office's contacts. Its initials alone were binding for me.

The German proposal for a peaceful solution on Madagascar would be more credible if you had learned, directly or indirectly, which French or Vichy offices discussed it. Do you know?

I know only that the Foreign Office had an office in Vichy? and that Legation Councillor von Thadden took the matter up during the meetings. His rank was too low for him to decide it personally. He carried it into the Foreign Office, which contacted its permanent representative in Vichy. That representative then told the Foreign Office what Laval, or whatever the man's name was, had said.

Did you learn that these talks were conducted directly with Laval, or with Champaitre, or with whom?

With Laval. The other name is completely unknown to me. I know that the Foreign Office negotiated with Laval about the Madagascar project because von Thadden told me so. He said the matter then went to Reischauer, who supposedly had authority as the Fuehrer's deputy to initial it at once or refuse. He would accept or discuss it only after consulting Vichy. Von Thadden never gave me any name other than Laval.

Darlan, the admiral?

I know the name, but he never played a role in my talks.

Was the French fleet meant to carry out the transport?

For the transport, some man worked out how much tonnage we would need altogether to move the Jews to Madagascar within a short time, because th [off the sheet]

The transfer was supposed to proceed decently so that the Jews arrived fit for labor. Madagascar wasn't meant to be a ghetto or concentration camp, I said, but a proper protectorate government like Slovakia. Everything had therefore been settled through the responsible central agencies. This wasn't to be a coup by a Waffen-SS detachment, a reckless U-boat crew, or steamers towing people to Madagascar. It was to be an orderly legal arrangement approved by every central agency and by the island's current ruler through a treaty. I was ordered to involve every office concerned, which explained the unusually large ministry gatherings and the number of desk officers at the meetings.

Were you ever introduced to Hitler? Did you speak with him?

No.

Given the post you held, didn't it embarrass you that you were never introduced to Hitler?

No. In the civil-service hierarchy I was only a department head. Above me came an office chief, a main-office chief, a Reich leader, and then Hitler.

But the importance of your tasks and your success in some actions could have led Hitler to receive you or have you introduced to him.

No. The Jewish question was so pressing and prominent, and Hitler spoke about it so often, that the Reichsfuehrer-SS, the chief of the Security Police and SD, Heydrich and later Kaltenbrunner, and my immediate superior involved themselves closely in its details. That made my post difficult. Other desk officers could follow laws, ordinances, and decrees. I had to look in every direction for an individual decision or precedent from one of my superiors, such as Heydrich, and make sure I didn't undo it through another action.

Because my superiors dealt with the details so closely, there was no reason for me to be introduced to Hitler. They could bring the details to him. On Jewish matters, only Heydrich, later Kaltenbrunner, and Heinrich Himmler went to Hitler. Gruppenfuehrer Mueller was never introduced to Hitler on Jewish affairs or anything else. Unlike the early Nazi movement, when there had been personal comradeship, Hitler was unreachable to us.

Was Mueller ever introduced to Hitler?

I assume he certainly was while he was still with the Munich police. Later, I don't think so. Mueller never mentioned it. Mueller was a diligent file man, and I was the same as his subordinate. Neither of us had the unhealthy ambition to be introduced to Hitler. Subordination, duty, our oath, and orders made me immune to that sort of ambition. We quietly and modestly did our duty as soldiers of the Third Reich.

Who do you think decided to put Eichmann in charge of carrying out the measures for the Final Solution?

I had handled Jewish affairs since 1935. From 1935 to 1945, I dealt with them in the Altreich, the Ostmark, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and many areas where Germany exerted influence. I had a thousand meetings with Jewish and non-Jewish bodies. I was known everywhere and dealt with every detail and basic question. Foreign newspapers placed on my desk taught Jewish organizations that, apart from Streicher stories or tax matters, Jewish affairs in the Reich were the business of the 'Tsar of the Jews.' The Pariser Tageblatt started that idea. People would say, 'Eichmann did that.'

How did it start?

A Paris newspaper ran what I remember as a front-page editorial titled 'The Tsar of the Jews' in spring 1939. It said I had held sway in the Altreich and the Ostmark and would now pursue the same activity in Bohemia and Moravia. If those Paris scribblers had known how beneficial my activity was for Jews and how much Jewish blood the Reich had preserved through the task I was ordered to perform, they would never have written it. Bunglers wrote it.

How often did you see the Reichsfuehrer-SS and speak with him?

I saw Himmler and spoke with him once when I was still a junior NCO, at a Yule party in 1934. I had number 59, the fifty-ninth bone moving in the SD body. We were a small, sworn group. Heydrich was our chief. Max Brand, later police president of Graz, was my immediate superior, and Professor Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch was my intellectual teacher. I handled the first three degrees of lodge Freemasonry and kept a collection of seals. The party took place in the Freemason card-index room. Himmler arrived late with his…

…wife. I saw her for the first and last time. She struck me as a South Bohemian farm woman. It was a pleasant, intimate evening and we sang folk songs. Walther Darré, the Agriculture Minister, sat beside me and gave each of us a book. I asked him to write his [not typed] beneath it. That was the first time I spoke with Himmler. I had seen him more often because he or Heydrich personally showed Gauleiter, ministers, and Reich leaders around.

Did Himmler discuss Jewish affairs at that gathering?

No. No Jewish affairs were discussed then, only ideological questions. Himmler tested the inner firmness of the people in those posts.

When did you speak with him a second time?

The second time was during the war.

Were you invited to give a lecture?

No. I was summoned three or four times during the war. One summons came while Himmler was still at Albrechtstrasse and Wolff was his adjutant, perhaps shortly before the crisis over Poland. We still followed civilian customs. The other meetings took place at his field headquarters: a former Russian cadet school near Minsk or Kiev; Special Train Heinrich in a forest in the East; and an old castle northeast of Berlin. The castle meeting came in April, a few days before what I date as the major air raid on Brixlegg on Apr 17, 1945. I remember the date because I was supposed to die that day.

What did you discuss shortly before the campaign against Poland?

Himmler always wanted numbers, above all the emigration totals. He wanted to know whether the Reich offices or foreign countries were causing difficulties. That was generally everything he wanted from me until he prohibited Jewish emigration by order.

Do you remember how that conversation developed, point by point?

I remember it very well because it was my first conversation with my highest superior. It was a very civilian affair. Himmler sat while I made my formal announcement and remained standing. I was either an Obersturmfuehrer or Hauptsturmfuehrer, a minor rank. He asked how many Jews had emigrated. No, that isn't right. I was already in Austria and Bohemia. It was before my posting to Berlin, while I was a Hauptsturmfuehrer. I must revise that: it was probably before the crisis with Russia, because I had already founded the Vienna Central Office for Jewish Emigration, and likewise the Central Office…

…for Bohemia and Moravia. I can't recall whether Theresienstadt existed yet. Himmler still lived under civilian official conditions, and Wolff was his chief adjutant. Himmler wanted the exact number of Jews who had emigrated and the main countries receiving them. I worried he might think I was inflating the obstacles to make myself look better, a junior officer overcoming nearly impossible difficulties.

I told him every country put up a barrier to Jewish admission while claiming it was willing to accept Jews. Jewish officials traveled abroad on my orders and under our control. Some returned full of hope. I claimed that Löwenherz had found 3,500 possible places in the United States, but that only 500 or 600 proved real and applicants still needed proof of funds in foreign currency.

Himmler was interested. I thought I was speaking boldly because I didn't yet know him or speak freely with him. I said it surprised me that Jews in the United States kept writing about German persecution while, as I put it, their country wouldn't take even one Jew from us despite saying it was open. The conversation lasted about ten minutes, perhaps a little longer, with nobody else present.

Himmler never had anyone present, except Müller at the second conversation. No, I must correct myself again: Becher attended the third, and I was alone with Himmler at the last. I was formally summoned four times. At a separate conference in Breslau, Himmler greeted me with, "Ah, Eichmann." That pleased me greatly because I lived for the Reich. I respected, honored, and revered Himmler, and I still do today.

Did Himmler make any notes during the first conversation?

No. He never made notes or read from anything. He spoke briefly and abruptly, always friendly and confident. Unlike Heydrich, he spoke like a father with his son.

Did your second conversation cover the same subject?

I made the second report with my immediate superior when Himmler was near Minsk or Kiev. I flew there in a courier aircraft. An admiral and other senior officers sat on boxes in the plane. Müller was already there. We stayed in a freezing former Russian cadet school furnished in the SS natural-wood style. One morning I walked the security lines with Müller. The abbreviated phrase about my being the only close acquaintance of the Grf. isn't fully secure. Müller was checking whether the security arrangements had any shortcomings.

I accompanied Müller while he examined the security lines. He pointed out defects that had nothing to do with my duties and didn't interest me. He ordered tighter cordons and controls around Himmler. After lunch, Müller and I were summoned. We discussed only Jewish affairs. Himmler finally stopped emigration then, so the meeting must have taken place in autumn 1941.

I remember smiling at damaged words that seem to refer to Goebbels's lies, which I had believed too. Instead of starving people, I saw farm boys and girls who looked very healthy. The meeting lasted perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes.

Himmler asked for a full overview of Security Police activity across the effort to solve the Jewish question. I told him everything, including some matters I seem to say I had mentioned before. I spoke more freely because my chief was there, I held a higher rank, and I was used to dealing with senior Reich offices.

I didn't have the number of Jews held in concentration camps. A separate section in Office IV handled camp matters, and I had nothing to do with that. But I then said my office decided requests from regional State Police headquarters to transfer a named Jew to a camp. The local office received an order invoking decrees, including the Decree for the Protection of People and State.

Camp totals and care weren't assigned to my section. Another Office IV section kept watch. Its head judged whether a local police request had merit. I said the decision wasn't left to one person's opinion. The laws, orders, or decrees decided. No person decided.

He had then ordered, as item 111 in the order, that the file be submitted again to review the detention date in a quarter or half year, and then this section within our own office had to send me this file, so that I would observe the detention-review date and now determine whether the inmate had been in there long enough or not. So in practice the matter was handled this way: the local Gestapo head was written to, under the detention-review date such and such it is requested…

That office then asked the responsible commandant's office of the camp whether XY can be released. They answered, the Gestapo office answered me, and then I ordered again, the person concerned is to be released with effect from … Or the application is granted that the named man be left another half [not typed] in the camp for improvement, and then the file was submitted to me again… (Viva, Anta [off the sheet]

The second meeting with Himmler covered what the Security Police had set in motion, what it had achieved, and what it hadn't achieved. I blamed Jewish resistance and resistance from world opinion, meaning nations Germany couldn't command.

Did the phrase Final Solution come up during this second meeting?

The word Final Solution came up as a matter of course all the time, already in Mildenstein's years, 1934, when I took over the Jewish desk… no, it was the beginning of 35, when the Jewish desk was founded, that is the desk in the SD-H [handwriting], that is the desk for research into the …, it was not yet an ex… desk. Scholarly research has existed only since 1935; since that time the term Final Solution has existed, and that has nothing to do with the physical Final Solution.

Did this briefing include any discussion of gassing or other means of physical extermination?

No. Not a word.

Did it come up at one of the next briefings?

About these things with the RF? No, not a word… at one of the few briefings, yes… and that was already the next briefing and the one after next… that was the briefing when I was ordered to the RF with Becher, but by then I had already been in Hungary.-

How was it discussed?

At the first briefing it had been, We give you Jews, what do you offer us? At the second briefing, We have offered you, what have you given us? In truth that was the third and the fourth briefing with the RF, as seen from me. The first I still had at the Julfest then, the second I had with Müller somewhere in Russia, the third and fourth I had together with Becher, and then at the end came the fifth.

So at the second one came the question, We offer, what do you give?

Or rather at my third ordered briefing. At the first audience with Becher.

Between the first and the second the RF had stopped the liquidation of the Jews by order to Pohl, nothing more was physically destroyed, because we had big business in prospect then, that is big projects, because we had big worries, because the war was drawing to a close, we had a shortage of material [not typed] and in O, O the RF wanted to motorize two divisions, and that from one day to the next.

How did Himmler put his order to Pohl to stop the physical extermination of Jews? Did he give reasons?

I can't say that, because I don't know how the RF used to deal with his main office chiefs… I imagine that the RF either had Pohl come or telephoned Pohl, but I imagine rather that he had him come, because he had Müller and me come too. He will have said to him, Pohl, keep all the Jews, I need them.… I discussed some things with Müller, we will send the Jews abroad. … Pohl, we will keep the Jews and then give them away and motorize our two divisions, it will be a good thing… Pohl, who also had to see to the equipment, that will certainly have been oil on the fire for him.

The RF will have spoken with Pohl just as impulsively as he spoke to me on the occasion of the last visit, my last briefing, when as my highest superior he struck me on the thigh and said, we will get a better peace than the Hubertusburg one, we will have to [off the sheet] ssen, but it will be better. It was on the occasion of my last [off the sheet] shortly before Apr 17, he wanted at least 100 of the most prominent [off the sheet] who were within our reach kept very properly in a safe place [off the sheet]

Himmler was negotiating with Bernadotte and thought he could use the 100 prominent Jews in his plan. I believed he summoned me to harden me and secure my loyalty once more. I based this on a remark Kaltenbrunner made at Altaussee. Kaltenbrunner said Himmler would welcome knowing that I was in the mountains and would not surrender while he negotiated with Eisenhower. I said Kaltenbrunner gave me those words verbatim. From them I inferred Himmler's reason for summoning me. I couldn't believe 100 Jews alone carried much weight in such broad talks. I then recalled huge columns of white vehicles and said that Himmler released thousands of Jews to Bernadotte from Auschwitz. I treated my task as one small part of Himmler's plan and linked it to Hitler's later removal of Himmler and appointment of Hanke as SS chief.

Did Himmler name any of the 100 prominent Jews at that last briefing?

No. He left the selection to me and didn't know whom I would choose.

Did you suggest anyone? Did you have a list ready?

Yes, in Theresienstadt we had a whole number of very prominent Jews, and also in the camps a whole number of very prominent Jews, I believe Leon Blum was still there… it was a wealth of names, I had a few Austrian generals who were Jews, I had a whole lot of people who had also in part been former Reich ministers, [too faint] were, it was a wealth, I could easily have brought the 100 together.

Can you recall anyone else with certainty?

I again named Léon Blum, the former French prime minister. I said the group included people known beyond Europe, though most were known within Europe. I gave no other name.

At the last briefing shortly before Apr 17, did Himmler speak about Hitler? If so, how?

Not at the last briefing, as far as I knew. I placed it at the next-to-last briefing in Hungary, with Becher present. I recalled Himmler saying he could not tell Hitler about the trade. I guessed Hitler would have chopped off Himmler's fingers because Hitler had ordered the killing and Himmler had lifted it. I said Himmler couldn't tell Hitler he was bargaining Jews for 10,000 trucks.

I mean, don't you remember that at the last briefing the RF, who after all

… already in negotiations with Bernadotte, that he came to speak of it for some reason, or that he perhaps had a premonition of what could happen afterwards, that he would be cast out, and so on?

The RF said, I was never so optimistic, never yet. We will get a better peace, and so on. And one thing I tell you, Eichmann, if I have it to do again, then I would set the concentration camps up on the English model. There I made a big mistake, I must set them up on the English model. I could make nothing of it, because I never ran a concentration camp, I could picture nothing by it. At the time I thought of the Boer concentration camps of the English, but perhaps he was also thinking of the whole English police order. I don't know.

So you don't know what he pictured by an English concentration camp order?

No.

And where he had made the mistakes? He didn't indicate that more closely?

No, he had made mistakes, that he said.

Did he put it that way, if I had it to do again, or if I have it to do again?

If I have it to do again, then I will do it that way. And he said it in a nice, soft manner, so that in any case it was to be understood from it that these concentration camps must become more elegant, more refined, better behaved. That is how I took it in my own mind.

Did he ever mention the name Bernadotte to you?

Yes, he mentioned it to me, and he also mentioned it when I was with Becher at his place the last time. That must have been in the autumn of 44. I am quite sure that the name Bernadotte fell there. The RF in any case had prepared the whole affair long in advance.

When were the preparations for the Ardennes offensive?

In November.

So around that point in time, when the offensive had not yet taken place, it was around Christmas, 12/16/44.

So shortly before that the RF sat in the special train Heinrich. Becher and I were ordered there. A Bavarian Stf. was the train commander, he entertained us and greeted us, he inspected my fingernails to see whether they were free of nicotine, otherwise I would have gotten a glass of water with lemon, otherwise the RF would have imposed a smoking ban for a quarter of a year. And in the anteroom of this carriage there was a senior SS leader who worked like a coolie in a circle of general staff majors in Wehrmacht uniform and of SS leaders. And he said to me, somebody said to me, whether it was the train commander or another commander, he said to me, there they are cramming for the new offensive that the RF will lead.

So that is what a cramming offensive looks like. And we went past, because we had to go through into the office of his carriage. The RF then invited Becher and me to take lunch or dinner, I no longer know exactly. It was a Mitropa dining car and a Mitropa waiter served in Mitropa uniform. I asked myself at the time whether the man belonged to the RF's staff and to the SS, and he did belong to it. Instead of the uniform of the orderlies, he wore the Mitropa uniform. There sat in this carriage about 18 to 20 majors of the general staff, the rest were made up of SS bigwigs, and we sat there as one is accustomed to sit in a dining car. That was the exact point in time of my last discussion with Becher at the RF's.

Did you ever negotiate with Bar [unclear]?

Yes, I spoke with him once. Bar [unclear], who was in Poland, who had the anti-partisan fighting. Also a former Higher Police Leader.

You had no official dealings with him?

No.

No, but isn't the Warsaw ghetto under his direction?

Strop had had an album made, photographs with war reporter shots. I got it from the Commander of the SIPO and the SD in Krakow, I believe. In any case I got it from above. It showed hard fighting. And the RF got it into his hands, because it came marked with HH. It was burned at my place later. With Bar [unclear] I had nothing to do, in Hungary not either, because in Hungary there was no anti-partisan fighting at all, there was none.

After April 25, 1945, once the affair between AH and the RF was known, did you still have contact with Kaltenbrunner?

With Kaltenbrunner I had contact for a long time yet. The days of the 7th, 8th and 9th of May have sunk out of my memory, because I had a shock then. I gave orders like an automaton, but what and how I no longer know. I can still remember some of it, that my men wished to separate from me, and I granted that wish.

I came back from Tyrol with the order of the RF, the 100 prominent Jews and so on, by way of Gauleiter Hofer, who no longer received me, but where I came on strongly. It was about the places at the Brenner. I then came back to Salzburg and met Guenter at the State Police in Salzburg. He reported to me that during my absence he had received an order from Mueller to take himself off to Salzburg with the founding files and to deposit them somewhere there in the mountains.

The founding files are the files of the then Prussian Minister President H.G., where a secret State Police was set up for the first time, and so on. I then drove on to Linz. At the time there was a terrible bombing raid there, in which a friend of mine, a Dr. Bifrater, was killed. He was Inspector of the SIPO for Upper Danube. On the way there I spoke with him once more. Then I drove on to Prague. There I visited Karl Frank, who told me you can't go any further here, in Berlin there is nothing left, Mueller, Kaltenbrunner is no longer in Berlin, the Russian has broken through there somehow.

Kaltenbrunner is in any case no longer there. So I could not pass on the RF's order. I then telephoned Kaltenbrunner and arranged with him that I would come down to Alt Aussee and make my report to him there. From Prague I went back to Alt Aussee, made my report, and I visited him again on the last day. His adjutant Scheidler announced me, as a formality. Kaltenbrunner sat there in a proper set of ski gear and was laying out patience. He said it's all sh…, the beard is off. Those were the last words with my dear old friend Kaltenbrunner.

No comment about the RF's conduct, nothing, nothing at all, apparently no one knew [too faint]

I only found out much later myself.…

Before that the SS and the SA had bitten the dust. For us their skulls were beaten in, and for us they went to the penitentiary. That is why I am an intolerant fanatic. There I am incurable, and there I will stay incurable, when it comes to Germany.

Do you know what stands behind the police registration actions, everything that is behind it?

The technical part, the difficulties, only within the police, let alone the difficulties from the other central authorities.

… my wife also reads the Bible, I let her read. I once tore a Bible to shreds and threw it away, and my wife was unhappy about it. And then she took a second Bible, we still had one, and at some point I tore that one through as well, but only into 2 parts. And now my wife reads in the 2 parts, and I have sworn to myself to let her read, so that she is happy. Perhaps it is much better that way. I wish my wife and my children everything much, much better than what I have. I do everything for my wife, exactly as I did everything for Germany, and my family is after all only a little piece of Germany.

Mueller once said to me, if we had had 50 Eichmanns, then we would have had to win the war. And I was proud.

That had been on the same day, in my section, because it was one of the few sections that had not been bombed out. I drove my subordinates like dogs after every incendiary bomb and bomb, and of course I went along too, and we repaired the damage at once. My office was the only one still intact in Berlin. But I already told how the Stapo [State Police] headquarters moved in later and pushed me out. They said to me, the beard is off.

And there was a section head, the name has slipped my mind, and we had 100 of [unclear] here, and letterheads, and where it doesn't fit you can have them made up again at any time, and each of the gentlemen can now state his wishes, where he worked in the last years, he gets certificates drawn up, he gets service orders, in short something he can use as camouflage. And you could see it. There were perhaps 30 of us section heads. You could see how the crowd now pressed in on the uncle who was noting all that down.

So that in that relatively small space, where I was making music with my subordinates, my Assessor had played the piano, I played second violin, my corporal or sergeant Glaser played first violin, he could play much better than I could, and although it was not a big room after all, there was still so much space at the back that Mueller and I stood there alone. And Mueller said to me, well, Eichmann, what about you? And since I had come back from Hungary I no longer carried the Walther, but the Steyr army pistol. I had got hold of 2 pistols, one I carried in my bread bag or my baggage, and the other I carried on my belt, because it took the same ammunition as my submachine gun,

namely 9 mm, and so it was simpler. And so I said to Mueller, Grf., I don't need that, you see, this is my certificate, and if I don't know any way out any more, then this is my last medicine, I don't need anything else. And that is the truth. Of all the section heads of the Gestapa in Berlin I was the only one who [unclear] them anything about these false certificates. And Mueller will have thought to himself, he was the right one after all, and he certainly did not deceive himself in me, and I was proud of that before myself. That was meant to be a look into my interior for you, because you don't know me, not from the inside, and that is what matters, not just the outside.

And if you are such a fanatical nationalist that you [unclear] also a mysticism, there is mysticism, a doctrine of faith, a worldview in the folkish life, that comes into play with you as well, perhaps you don't give it out that way.

I loved him dearly, that is the old, exceedingly amiable, endlessly clever Prof. Schwarz [unclear], from Kiev, who served with us as Stbaf. That was a mystic. This man simply could not live any other way, that was mysticism personified, and even so I revered him dearly, he was my superior and my teacher in the RSHA. But I also saw what a childishly disposed, unsteady absorption in mysticism a person can be turned into. I think nothing at all of mysticism, I keep to the order of the day. We have to see to it that our descendants live decently, and with that the beard is off.

I have to forge my weapons according to the strength of the resistance. And with that I am at the end of my Latin, that is what my whole life is about, and that is what my whole way of thinking is about. And if everyone thought that way, then everyone would only need to think a hundredth as much and we would be better off. Fitting into the whole, because in the whole lies the folkish, one blood. For that we gave everything, everything, our youth, everything, and our freedom too, and others gave still more, even their lives.

And that is why I can't stand it when people say to us, what could have been worse, still worse, than National Socialism coming to the helm on January 30, 33? Then I turn into a swine. And only because I controlled myself did I take my leave of the ladies conventionally.

And I told the Jewish political functionaries often enough that personally I have no hatred at all against a Jew, personally I never had a bad experience with a Jew. And when I went from being a military officer to being a political officer, I was held to carrying out the orders that were given to me. Now, I belonged to those people who carried out orders without reserve, in accordance with the oath to the flag. But I also belong to those people who think about things. I do a job either doggedly, and then it certainly won't give me any pleasure.

Or I do a piece of work when I am able to grasp its necessity or its sense, and then I will do it gladly, and the time will fly by for me. And so it had been with the Jews. When I received the order back then, to move against the guest of the host people in a helpless, unprepared way, I thought it over, and once I recognized the necessity I carried it out with that fanaticism which one expected of oneself as an old National Socialist, and which my superiors doubtless also expected of the man [unclear] appointed to it.

And they certainly saw in me, from their experience, the suitable man for it, and I say that today in 1957 to my own disadvantage. I could have it easier: I could say it was an order, I had to carry it out in accordance with my oath to the flag, and otherwise I wore blinkers. No, that is cheap humbug, that is a cheap excuse, and I cannot answer for it before my own inner morality. So I have to state plainly that after I had carried out the first orders blindly, I then took pains to penetrate into the material. For fate had given me a mental horizon that evidently made me capable of it.

You know, every policeman has his own methods for making inquiries. I know that in the first years after 1945 I was wanted by the police. I don't even want to speak of the Allied police, that goes without saying. No, that afterward I was also wanted by the police of my homeland and by the police of the country where I lived some time as a guest. I also know that after five years, if the wanted man has not been found, he is struck off the wanted list. I am long since not wanted any more, that much is clear. In the first Nuremberg trial, the way our highest leaders were treated, that Judge Jackson summoned my Hauptsturmführer Wi., whom I had had in Czechoslovakia, as a witness, and that he told the fairy tale there about the alleged five million Jews I am supposed to have done in, and then Jackson said

No, no trial was held against me, they couldn't hold one either.

In [unclear] I was sentenced, because I, and I say this to you now as a long-standing expert, since I have after all spent half my life as a policeman, because the points are evidently of such a difficult nature and the file weighs hundredweights, so that a conviction of mine in [unclear] cannot simply be carried through, all the more since the other side promises itself material capital out of it

In the framework of the proceedings against the Gestapo and the SD, was a particular responsibility pushed onto you there, or were you, because you were not present and only the two, Höttel and Wi., not named any further?

Yes, what I know from the meager newspaper reports, if I am named there, then only because all these people, and I would perhaps not have done it differently, since I was not there, referred everything to me and talked their way out of it like that. And when that goes on for years, it was after all such a long time,

And when every one of them now talks his way out onto me like that, then a legend forms, and the journalists and the like pick it up, and then the thing gets blown up. Now my superiors are unfortunately all dead, or they are missing, that is, they were hanged, or killed themselves, or are missing. Missing is really only one of them, and that is my immediate superior, Gruppenführer Müller.

Was a reward actually offered for your capture?

Yes, as far as I know, Wi said, if what the newspapers reported is correct, that Wi said his life would be spared only on the condition that he brought me in dead or alive. And second, I read the following, and it amused me greatly. A man who is today a high rank in the Israeli army, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, drove to Alt Aussee with a commando.

The newspaper writes the following word for word: "We tracked him down and he was surrounded by several very fierce guard dogs, and when we had beaten him down with cudgels and knocked him senseless, we packed him into a jeep and took him into a forest clearing. Meanwhile he woke from his faint, and we asked him, are you Obersturmbannführer Eichmann, and thereupon he said [unclear], yes, what do you want from me? And thereupon we struck him down. He died remarkably decently." That was the newspaper item. But I am still alive today. That appeared in the Upper Austrian newspaper in the years, I don't know any more, it was the communist-socialist paper, but the name has slipped my mind, and I kept the cutting a long time but then burned it after all.

On whose initiative was the yellow star then introduced?

Yes, it is a pity that I have no comrade from that time with whom I worked together, because I have come to realize in the meantime, after keeping myself from all such thoughts for years, that I have forgotten a great deal. Yes, regarding the yellow star I can recall the following. But I tell you only what I know. That there was a prior history, that there were negotiations in my section, that I know too, but where and who and how, that I no longer know. Whether Reischauer played a part in it I also don't know. In any case a police ordinance was in preparation, and it dealt with the marking of the Jews.

It was a police ordinance of the Chief of the German Police in the Interior Ministry. Involved in this ordinance was of course State Secretary Stuckart. He was at that time the highest authority within the administrative struggle over an ordinance at all. The police were after all subordinated to the Interior Ministry. Naturally I was also involved in the marking of the Jews, because as the responsible desk officer for Jewish affairs within the Gestapa [Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, Secret State Police Office], within the Interior Ministry, I at least had to add my signature to it, since without my initialing the thing could not go through, for bureaucratic reasons.

Was it supposed to be a moral pressure against the Jews, or for purely organizational reasons

No, it was about the German mentality, which always takes up the cause of a hard-pressed man as soon as it sees him hard-pressed. [unclear] In order to make him hold back here, as it were from the state's point of view, so that he would be embarrassed, so that he would be afraid to go on sympathizing with Jews here and to keep associating with them and so on. Yes, and now I know it, it came from the Propaganda Ministry. Streicher, when he heard of it, brayed with delight, and I still remember Der Stürmer today. I believe a whole issue dealt with this subject.

But there is a version that this order for the yellow star came from Canaris.

No, in no case. I know the man personally. But be that as it may, in any case the police ordinance was through and with that the administrative part was settled. One day I received, from the Propaganda Ministry, that some firm [unclear] had ordered it, by the meter

and so I handed out the bales fresh and cheerfully, and they went off with them, and by the ordinance a date had been fixed by which every Jew had to wear a Jewish star. In what year that was I can no longer recall. There had been a Jewish lawyer in Vienna, and he said to me, Herr Hauptsturmführer, I wear this star with pride. He impressed me, he was an idealist, and I then let him emigrate soon afterward. And I said to Löwenherz, if I should be in a country where the German is outlawed and where he is marked, then I will be proud to be allowed to wear such a thing, "German", and they will surely only be jeered at by fools. But see to it that you raise the emigration figures, bring me foreign currency into the country, and then, once your people is settled, you will [unclear] also be able to live as a people. That is what I said to Löwenherz.

Now to the subject of how far your powers went and how far you had to do with the physical extermination, or with shootings where you were present.

Now, it was like this. Gruppenführer Müller, my immediate superior, squatted forever and always in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse on the second floor and never stirred from his desk. But he knew everything that happened within the German Reich itself and everything that happened step by step in the territories occupied by us and influenced by us. Müller sent me around. I had been a traveler, a traveler, a state police agent [unclear], just as I had once been a traveler for oil and petrol for five years.

Shortly after Heydrich informed me that Globocnik had been given the task of killing the Jews and burying them in the anti-tank ditches thrown up by the Russians, he sent me to the Warthegau. Where that was I no longer know, in any case it was not very far from Litzmannstadt. There, according to Müller, Jews were supposed to have been gassed or were to be gassed. I always say in advance, Müller did not give such orders, he had nothing to do with it.

But he wanted to know everything, although he had nothing at all to do with it. Müller was a precise official, and if he did not get it all presented to him at once, concentrated and in detail [unclear], he grew impatient. I drove to Litzmannstadt. Where I went I don't know, probably it was the Stapo headquarters there, and whether Gromeid was already in Litzmannstadt at that time I also cannot say at the moment. I then drove out to the place they named to me, and some fellows or other had been at work there, and there were also a hundred or maybe even a thousand Jews there, and they were made to get into buses. But that meant nothing at all, they were normal buses, only with high windows, and they got in too, the windows were closed, and I was told that during the drive the exhaust pipe is led into the interior of the vehicle and they die at once from a chemical process.

Carbon [unclear] monoxide

The doctor who was there told me I should look through the peephole. There was a peephole from the driver's seat, perhaps five centimeters across, and inside there had been a light bulb. I saw that from outside, because this little pane of the peephole was lit. And there I refused, I did not want to see it.

So they were hermetically sealed?

Yes

And how many went into one bus?

About [unclear]. And I did not look in, because I was seeing and hearing something like that for the first time. My knees went weak. It was around the time of autumn 41. Yes, so the buses drove off. I was told at the time the thing would take three minutes, the doctor told me that, and the buses drove about fifteen minutes. Müller told me on my return that I should have timed it, but I told him I could not see through. I said to Müller, it can't go on like this, you can't do it this way. But he gave me no answer, he only looked at me in a fatherly, well-meaning way. I never really knew where I stood with Müller. He as good as forgave me for not having looked through the peephole, however odd "forgave" may sound. I drove out there and arrived, and there hell opened up before me for the first time

The vehicle maneuvered, backed up and came to a pit that was perhaps two meters deep. The doors opened, and some Poles who were there jumped in and threw the corpses into the pit. One Pole jumped in there. It shook me badly at the time when I saw it. He jumped in with a pair of pliers in his hand, opened the people's mouths, and whoever had a gold tooth, he pulled it out and put it in the sack he had tied around himself. After a long time I came out there again, and the head of the Stapo headquarters said to me, or it was at the office of the Inspector of the Security Police and the SD, we will show you the spot where you were many months ago. Good, we drove out. There I saw a plantation, a small pine plantation, all nicely peaceful, like a small young wood

Bueno, that had been my first experience in this field, and my knees were to go weak a few more times. Certainly, I had also worked toward the solution of the Jewish question, but not like that. Certainly, up to then I had not yet seen any burned Germans; Germans who had shriveled together like mummies. Up to then I had also not yet seen the swollen, pleading eyes of a German married couple, that I was supposed to shoot them in an air-raid shelter in Berlin, and I could not shoot them, and I said to my sergeant, if you can do it, then you shoot the people.

If I had seen all that around that time, it would have been much easier for me, because in myself I am a very sensitive person, I cannot simply look at something like that, I get a trembling of the nerves. But one good thing I was given by nature, I can switch off and forget very quickly, without wanting to. Then [unclear] Mueller told me I should go to Minsk, Jews were being shot there, and he wanted a report.

So I go there, and the head of the Einsatzkommando, I believe, had been there, and I told him what assignment I had, and then he said to me, that works out well, because tomorrow 5,000 are coming up. So I drove out the next morning, but they had started early and I only came in time for the end. Now I want to tell you how it happened. I come up, I was wearing a leather coat that reached down to my ankles, it had been very cold, and then a group of Jews came, that was the last one. They had to undress down to their shirts, and then they walked the last 100 or 200 meters up, they were not driven, there were men there as a detail from the Waffen SS, and then they jumped into the pit.

So I stood there, it was so striking, how the people jumped into the pit without any resistance at all, and then the marksmen standing around blazed away into it with their 0890 [unclear] rifles and machine pistols. And why has this scene stayed with me so lastingly in my memory? At the time I had children of my own, and then I saw a Jewess who lifted up a small child, perhaps one or even 2 years old, and at the same moment, as I still wanted to say, don't shoot, hand the child over, at that same moment the child is hit by a shot and that was the end of it.

I saw that from so close by that afterward, in the house, I saw the brain spatter sticking to my coat. My driver then helped me get it off. Then I drove to Berlin. You must understand, my drivers did not like driving with me, because on a 12-hour drive, from Berlin to Paris for example, I left at 8 in the evening and was there at 3 in the morning on the dot, on this long drive I would speak perhaps 10 words or 20 words. On this return drive too I did not speak with my driver, I was thinking. Not that I now somehow condemned National Socialism, after all the [unclear], no, I was thinking about the meaning of life altogether.

At the time I said to Mueller, word for word, after everything I had seen, [unclear], the solution is clear, it was supposed to be a political solution. Now that the Fuehrer has ordered a physical solution, it must be a physical solution, fine. But the way it is being done in Minsk and the way it is perhaps being done elsewhere as well, that will not do, because our people are inevitably being trained into sadism this way.

We cannot possibly put a bullet into the brain of a woman who cannot defend herself, holding a child out toward us. That is not how we solve the Jewish question. But this time too Mueller was like a sphinx. Then I was sent to Lemberg, I came there and I saw a piece of ground,

Which points, in your view, are lies?

I read repeatedly that my Hstf Wi, as a witness in the 1st Nuremberg trial, testified against me, less against me as a person than to the monstrousness of it. He said that, first, I am supposed to have said in front of him and in front of several other officers of my section that I would leap joyfully into the pit because I had killed 5 million Jews. Second, I read that Wi testified that I am supposed to have shown him a written order from the RF from which it emerged that the Fuehrer had ordered the physical destruction of the Jews. Third, Wi is supposed to have said that I was responsible for 3 factors, that is, that the whole Jewish business was divided into these 3 factors up to 1945: a) emigration, b) concentration, c) destruction.

To that I said, as to point 1, that I cannot have said the word Jews, because the figure of 5 million bore no relation to the figure known to me as physically destroyed. Rather, I declared, I will leap joyfully into the pit if it must be, in the awareness that 5 million enemies of the Reich have leapt in along with me. All in all, I had brought only so and so many to emigration, and with the concentration my section had nothing to do at all, with the exception of Theresienstadt, and that was 10,000.

A figure of 5 million would have been absurd, my section never handled such a figure. It is true that 4 1/2 to 5 million Jews were dealt with, but as emigration cases, as people concentrated in ghettos, and as people handled in the camps by the V and W main office, that is, either killed or brought to labor deployment, and the statistician Korherr did write that up and set it out and gave this report to the RF SS, that report which then came back with the notation taken note of, destroy the file, HH. And I then burned it myself.

And if I had really said it that way in front of my subordinates, then I would surely have said Jews to them, and not enemies of the Reich, because we handled nothing other than Jews. But in that case it was about enemies of the Reich. The Jews interested me only in terms of registration, not in terms of destruction. I did not even know who was being killed at all, none of us in the Sipo knew that, they could just as easily be coming to the Heinkel works to do labor. But my subordinates would probably have taken me for a megalomaniac, because they probably knew it much better than I did. My transport sheikh alone, Hstf. Novak, who constantly had to negotiate the trains with the Reichsbahn official Stange,

Now then, as to the claim about the signed order, that is a flat lie, because only a fool could even imagine that the RF would issue an edict in which he sets down in writing something like this: My dear Eichmann, the Fuehrer has ordered the physical destruction of all Jews. That can only have arisen in the brain of a sick CIC Jew. The truth is in any case that the RF never set down a single line about the physical destruction of the Jews in writing. I know that he only ever dealt with Pohl of the VWHA orally. I never received such an order, and still less can any of my Hstf of that time have been given knowledge of such an order.

Neither in writing nor orally?

No, neither in writing nor orally. Heydrich told me personally that the Fuehrer had given the order, and that the RF had charged Globocnizz with it, but that this matter would in future be handled not by the police but by another main office under the RF. The third point, Wi is supposed to have testified that his superior, SS Obstbaf. Eichmann, had to carry out three phases of the treatment of the Jews: a) emigration, b) concentration, c) destruction.

On that it is to be stated that I carried out the emigration, that I carried out the police registration, in places where [unclear] large masses had to be transported, to destination stations that were made known and imposed on me by the head of the Sipo and SD, and that with c), the destruction, not only I but the entire Sipo and the SD had nothing to do, except on the basis of individual special orders of the RF on the part of the Einsatzgruppen in the East, which had to carry out the measures on their own responsibility, but with which the Gestapa, and in particular section IV B4, had nothing to do, and was not even kept informed about it. Consequently Wi, who belonged to section IV B 4 in the RSHA [Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office],

Can you briefly repeat once more what became unclear to you at the interrogation of Grinspan. Was he acting on someone's orders, or did he act on his own account at the time?

The final interrogation that I conducted with the Jew Grunspan showed as its end result that there were evidently no men behind this young Jew, but rather that he carried out this deed on his own initiative. How far such a statement can still be checked remains open, because this Jew had lived for years in solitary confinement and, although no purely physical harm came to him, was in himself no longer to be taken as fully sound for the purposes of proceedings. The matter was closed with that, and it was also already too far out of time.

About the testimony of Hoess at Nuremberg concerning the 2 1/2 million Jews who are supposed to have been liquidated in his camp?

Yes, there are two possibilities. I knew Hoess because I valued him very highly as a very decent comrade, he did his duty as any other would have done it too, he was a model family man, he was a bearer of the Iron Cross from the 1st World War, he sat several years in the penitentiary for National Socialist activities. It was Hoess who once told me that the RF had looked over the whole destruction operation and had declared that these were battles which our coming generations would no longer have to fight

You heard that from Hoess, not from the RF directly?

Yes, from Hoess. If you ask me about the 2 1/2 million Jews in Auschwitz who are supposed to have been physically liquidated there under Hoess, then I must answer that I consider this figure highly implausible. a) because the capacity alone speaks against it, the capacity of the camp; b) because I never had that many Jews sent to Auschwitz at all.

I was not the only one sending them to Auschwitz, there were also other command offices of the Sipo that had people sent to Auschwitz, but if you add it all up, this figure of 2 1/2 million cannot have come about, because after 45 the so-called Auschwitzers sprang up out of Auschwitz like mushrooms out of the forest floor after a rain, and hundreds of thousands of Auschwitzers today enjoy the best of health, because they were put to work. There are 2 possibilities, one that I consider very likely and one that I consider very unlikely. The first is that Hoess will have testified under pressure, exactly as my Hstf.

Wi must have done, because the circumstantial evidence speaks against it. The second, against which the whole clean bearing of Ostbaf. Hoess speaks, is that he, as was then customary, dressed the figure upward to a certain extent. Now one can of course say that at those times it was opportune, but one can also say that a man, after a complete collapse, then tries to put himself into the role of a martyr in order to bear his sufferings better physically, and that he then took things upon himself here that others might have carried out on their share. But I do not believe that, because his correct and clean conduct of life and his character speak against it.

And what do you say to the statement by Ohlendorf that in the East he liquidated 90,000 Jews with his Einsatzkommandos?

Well, Ohlendorf was no windbag, he was a very quiet, orderly, consistently working office chief, chief of Office III in the RSHA. I am not able to say anything more exact about the activity of the Einsatzgruppen in the East, because in an official capacity I never had anything to do with the matter. But perhaps what I just touched on with Hoess applies here to some extent as well, our readiness at that time to take on as much as possible in order to relieve others. I would like to close the matter with this. Had they caught me at the time,

I always had the luck to be just a nuance cleverer than the CIC [Counter Intelligence Corps] officer questioning me, but if they had caught me back then, I would probably have taken a great deal on myself that did not belong to my account at all. In the expectation that a) my life is confused anyway, which would not have been so bad, because I would have given it for Germany, but because b) I might have been able to dampen the hatred and vengeful feelings of the opponents, to paralyze their resentment and their craving for further victims, and could thereby have brought other comrades into a kind of safety. That is the only way I can explain the statement of Hoess to myself, and also that of Ohlendorf. That fits exactly the character of the two of them.

Please tell us something more about the life and career of Heydrich, and also about your personal relationship to one another.

Well, Heydrich as a person: curt, slightly nervous, personally not free of vanity, an excellent comrade also toward those, toward the subordinates of his colleagues, who in a certain way worked to strengthen his position. Yes, that is how I came to know him. I got to know him personally when he inspected me in 1939 at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, and he acknowledged the organization as I had set it up, he called it a prime minister's office in miniature.

After his visit he ordered me to Berlin through the head of Office IV, Gruppenfuehrer Mueller. That was my first personal contact with the Chief of the Security Police and the SD. In the period that followed I naturally had a great deal of contact with him, I had to give him presentations on my area of work, and as President of Interpol he repeatedly had me prepare papers, because they were addresses that he had to deliver. I had to [not typed].

No, wait, I had contact with him even earlier, when I had to give a weekly lecture on ideological opponents at the SD school in Bernau, before district leaders, before other Gau main office leaders, before the students of the war academies, before general staff officers down to the rank of major, and so on, because there were continuous courses at Bernau and I had to give my lecture every week, and there it repeatedly came to encounters with my later immediate superior. Heydrich led a very orderly family life. His wife lived, when she was not in Berlin, at the family seat on the island of Fehmarn.

I already said that he did not lack vanity, and it even went so far that he, against the order of his immediate superior, in his capacity as a major of the Wehrmacht, obtained a Luftwaffe uniform and got into a fighter aircraft and shot down two or three Spitfires over the North Sea and won himself the Iron Cross First Class. And I still remember it today, when I was ordered to see him one day about some matter, he received me as a major of the Luftwaffe, with the Iron Cross First Class, and I congratulated him. He then made the first and only joke of his life, that he here regarded me in a certain way as of equal rank, because at that time I was

Sturmbannfuehrer, that is to say major, and of equal rank as my superior.

It is claimed in places that his dashing manner was a certain [not typed], because he had Jewish blood in his veins.

Yes, I heard that too, but it is all a lie and slander. Heydrich came from the navy, he was, I believe, a lieutenant at sea, and he had already been assigned to signals work in the navy, and then kept to that direction and committed himself to the intelligence service, and then rose beyond those small beginnings to become Chief of the Security Police and the SD.

Do you know when he joined Hitler?

No, I do not know that. But the very fact alone, that he was a typically Nordic appearance and was married to a Frisian woman. No, it is impossible, although appearance is never decisive. But it would certainly have leaked out, just as it leaked out that the Fuehrer's diet cook had a certain Jewish family connection, and I was then able to establish afterward that she was only a thirty-second part Jewish. In the same way I would certainly have received such an inquiry assignment through Mueller, to establish something regarding Heydrich's origin. Or he would have looked into it himself and I would have learned of it somehow.

Can you tell us something more about Mueller?

The word Sphinx for Mueller is right, because even I, who was with Mueller for a presentation two or three times a week, who for a long time, like my other comrades, met every Thursday evening in Mueller's private apartment, so that over a small cognac and a game of chess we could talk out all the personal troubles and also those of an official nature, for which there was no time in the day's work, even I can say heartily little about Mueller. I know that he came from middling to higher civil service circumstances, that he came from the Bavarian political police, that he was a great silent man. I always compared him with Moltke. His mouth was eternally shut, at most a small twist of his lips into a smile, of recognition, or of mocking disbelief, depending on the situation.

He was an extremely cautious man, lived in the most modest way, and was an always orderly, correct and well-disposed superior. He had only one weakness, that whatever happened was always recorded in a file note and incorporated into the registry. He was a bureaucrat, and through him I was inevitably held to becoming a bureaucrat myself, and I felt extraordinarily happy and comfortable under his direction. Ideologically he was one hundred percent aligned with our idea, I was never able to see any difficulty. And when he once offered me to transfer into the civil service, I told him that it would be all the same whether I did the work as an official

or as an SS officer. I do it out of idealism and not out of materialism. When the war is over, then you will certainly get me a position as police president, preferably in Linz or else in Graz, and with that I would like to end my life. And at that his lips twisted again into a slight smile.

And now the question, how did you reach the rank of Obersturmbannfuehrer?

I have not thought about why I did not get beyond it, but rather about the question that has been raised on this point in various books. Why I was not promoted beyond Sturmbannfuehrer is quite clear, because I was pressed into an office, and this office knew established posts, and no ghosts. We were about thirty desk officers in Office IV. A desk officer is a Regierungsrat or Oberregierungsrat, equivalent to Sturmbannfuehrer or Obersturmbannfuehrer. The next step up is department head, in the rank of an Oberregierungsrat or a criminal police director, or precisely of an Obersturmbannfuehrer or Standartenfuehrer. So if I had somehow been proposed by Mueller for promotion while I was a desk officer, there would have been a row among the twenty-nine others.

They were civil servants, some of them were waiting on pensions and all those things. There would have been discord of every kind, obstructing the work. In an authority, however hard a man is set to work, nobody can be promoted as long as he holds that established post. When I came back from Hungary, my permanent deputy, Sturmbannfuehrer Guenther, congratulated me on my promotion to Standartenfuehrer, that is, in April 45. I never heard such a promotion pronounced by my superior Mueller, and therefore I never took note of it. Nor have I, unlike some other comrades after 45, ever made use of it, except at this moment. Because I never adorned myself with feathers that were not mine.

Did you not ask Mueller about it?

No, I worked out of idealism, not for material gain. But even if I had not seen it that way, it would have run against every etiquette and all decency, had I now gone to Mueller and asked him about it. No, that was not possible. That did not exist. One had to wait until the promotion was pronounced, or else you commit a faux pas. But I did give it thought, because the other side played on it. In Jesuitism, for example, there is this: it lets its members, insofar as they have certain tasks to perform that go beyond a certain frame, appear as insignificant as possible. It is also a means of covering up, so to speak. But perhaps the other side means that with it. No, that has nothing to do with it. Had I held the established post, I would have been promoted as well.

I could not have achieved more than I was [blotted] as a desk officer in Office IV, and therefore could not be promoted higher either. However sorry the other side is about it, because they would prefer it if they could point to a higher rank, since I have read in all the tomes on the subject that they made me a Gruppenfuehrer. The newspapers in Austria wrote only of General Eichmann.

That sounds more like music, because now, after all my superiors had died, gone missing or been hanged, a next victim had to be found, so that this building could be kept standing, the building on which thirteen billion in restitution were founded. And it is also quite clear to me that the Jewish side, up to now at least, had no interest at all in tracking me down, because I did not live nearly as concealed as people imagine. The longer I stay silent, the more smoothly the billions are paid for a thing they should not be paying for.

If it comes out what a relatively small rank I was, if it comes out how the enemy propaganda has fixed itself on this rank, because this small rank had to spend years in conferences and discussions with Jewish functionaries, in order, compared with the physical extermination, to concern himself only with emigration or with Theresienstadt, then there are two possibilities: either they [not typed], or they revolt here and the Old Testament hatred breaks out, the hatred I have been warned about. And despite the warning I must tell the truth, because until now a historical lie has been peddled, and because until now no one has dared to oppose this historical lie. For the sake of the truth alone, I speak today into this recording drum.

And what can you say regarding Kaltenbrunner?

Well, Kaltenbrunner was Heydrich's successor, though a very weak successor. That should take nothing away from Kaltenbrunner as a human being. Far warmer feelings and a far greater inner connection bind me to Kaltenbrunner than, say, to the cold, cool north German Heydrich, although I valued the latter very much and he valued me too. Kaltenbrunner and I knew each other as children already. Old Kaltenbrunner and my father were business friends. When in 1931 the Gauleiter for Upper Austria gave one of his fighting speeches in the Maerzenkeller in Linz, Gauleiter Bolleck, I was there too. Bolleck was an old first lieutenant from the imperial and royal army, then married in Linz and became an official of the Linz electricity company.

And after that speech Kaltenbrunner, who was an SS man at the time and working in law in his father's chambers, said to me, you belong with us. And with that I came to the SS. We then had a few hall battles to go through, once in the Volksgarten, where Bolleck was to speak, and two thousand [not typed] Bolsheviks were in front of us, who had filled the hall since four in the afternoon. So only Bollek with twenty-five SS members got permission from the police to enter the hall, although the hall had been rented by the NSDAP. I belonged to it then as an SS man too, but I must say to that, we came

…never beyond the number of 25 SS men, because Linz was either red or black. So we went in, and Gauleiter Bollek's speech was short and painless. It ran: "My German fellow countrymen…" and nothing more, and then such an uproar broke out that all I could still hear was Kaltenbrunner shouting, onto the [not typed] because the Bolsheviks pushed their women out in front, and the breasts of those women were exactly at the height of the podium, and behind them the drunken and bawling shipyard workers and so on. With our boots and our shoulder straps, which were reinforced with lead knots, we had nothing else to do but protect our Gauleiter from the onslaught, and we came away with casualties.

The later adjutant of the Reichsführer, at that time Scharführer Brauer, had his kidneys beaten in, and he was then driven off to the hospital by the volunteer fire brigade. We then simply withdrew, after the Volksgarten had been smashed up down to the last glass and the last mirror. That was a further encounter with Kaltenbrunner. Goering came to Linz and visited us there, and Kaltenbrunner always marched behind as an SS man. Later, long after I was already in Berlin, Kaltenbrunner had to conduct the struggle in Austria under C, as chief of the Austrian SS.

And when Kaltenbrunner was appointed by the Reichsführer as Heydrich's successor, and greeted his leadership corps, he came up to me with the words: Well, Eichmann, how is it going, everything in order? As a matter of fact it has to be said that in the period that followed, whatever my immediate superior Mueller wanted to push through with Kaltenbrunner, he also pushed through without difficulty, on account of his forcefulness, although Kaltenbrunner favored only a single office chief, and that was Schellenberg. A man with whom Mueller had no particular connection, and about whom he held no particular personal opinion.

Now your personal opinion about Kaltenbrunner's relations with Schellenberg.

Well, I already said that the only office chief Kaltenbrunner favored, to my own office chief's chagrin, was Schellenberg. And once when Mueller was [blotted] for a longer stretch of time, whether he was on leave or something else was going on, I no longer know, the deputy office chief at that time was Standartenführer or Oberführer Schellenberg. (During the war.)

So we desk officers, if we had consultations, and that was the case two or three times a week, we had to turn up with our bundle of files and first settle matters of principle in the form of consultations. Before we could fall back on the relevant regulations or decrees, it was often the case that one could invoke this or that law or this or that decree. And so there were many questions of a fundamental nature that had to be settled. I remember that one day I came to Schellenberg with a request for a consultation on a matter, and he decided it in such a way that I

told myself, Mueller would not have decided it that way. And I let the matter rest and only took it all up again when my chief, Mueller, was back. Admittedly there were things that had to be decided at once, and those I decided as though I had spoken with Mueller, because I knew him and I knew his decisions. After years of working together you know how your superior decides certain things. And when Mueller came back I told him as much, that I had stopped going to Schellenberg for consultation altogether. I either put the files aside until his return, or, so long as it was not a matter of principle, I decided them myself. At which he told me I had been right.

Which matter was it that Schellenberg decided differently from the way Mueller, for example, would have done?

Yes, I still remember, it was a matter that did not… So I laid the matters out and I named the decrees, the regulations or laws that were to be applied here, on the basis of the work done by my jurists or my police chief inspector or my government official. And Schellenberg gave me a decision that fell completely outside the frame, as though this were not a matter of opponents but of some sort of friends, where you simply have to close ten eyes, assuming you had them at all.

But since the decrees and so on existed, and since they had been violated, one obviously had to intervene with police measures and could not simply close ten eyes as one pleased. I also heard complaints from other quarters. Mueller's rightful deputy would have been the man then senior in service rank, the department head, the criminal director Hu [not typed]. Why Kaltenbrunner did not appoint him as deputy I do not know, but the next times round it was of course Hu [not typed] who was the deputy.

For he was a policeman, whereas Schellenberg was set over us in Office IV, that is the executive office, namely the Gestapo, as acting office chief, a man untroubled by the least expert knowledge of police work with all its decrees and regulations, but a purely political intelligence uncle who bribed some agent or other with money or money's worth to pass him some occurrence abroad. Naturally we could never take him seriously for our specialist work, and we were glad later on when, doubtless on the strength of our intervention with Mueller and his in turn with Kaltenbrunner, the deputy later on was a specialist and not a professional dud like Schellenberg.

Which incident was it then that outraged you so?

Those were wrong decisions one after another. I cannot, when I have a legal offender in front of me, see him through the eyes of an intelligence man who then tells me, never mind what the fellow has got up to, if he is useful to me,

then I pay him another hundred pounds on top and then I have my advantage too. That may do in the intelligence business, but never in executive work inside the territory of the Reich.

And what you laid before him surely had to do with Jews?

Yes, with nothing else, and it was in fact a punishable matter, and Schellenberg evidently did not want these regulations or decrees applied, and I opposed that. I was bound to, on grounds of state alone.

Do you not know whether this temporary taking over of the office by Schellenberg caused critical voices about his person to be raised at all?

Raised out loud, no. They inoculated themselves into our official hearts, because from that time on we no longer took Schellenberg seriously. From that time on he was reduced to absurdity. He was no longer respected as a man inside the Sipo. He may well have been good at gathering intelligence abroad, but in any case he had not five kreuzer's worth of understanding for a matter of police administration. Whether he did it deliberately or only out of personal ignorance, that I am not able to say.

Did Schellenberg or his intelligence apparatus help your section anywhere, whether in a search or…

No, the opposite was the case. Not a week went by without Office VI applying to have the Jew X, Y, Z exempted from all the measures the Reich government had decided on against the Jews, on the grounds that they were to be used as informants. At the start that was believed too. Later I began to have misgivings, I put them to Mueller as well and he shared them. My permanent deputy, Guenter, was angered green, black and blue, and quarreled constantly with the people from Office VI, so that the responsible desk officers of Office VI grew sharp-eared and grew cautious.

It took a while before we got to the bottom of it, because the people from Office VI thought themselves cleverer than the so-called stinking officials of Office IV, and believed they could read our tolerance and our accommodation as stupidity. They grew more presumptuous in their demands and I cut across their plans. My inner balance was not in the least [not typed] when I let Jews of a Zionist persuasion emigrate, because first, I knew these Jews, and second, I knew my goal.

I had my political goal and not the goal of covering myself personally, as certain members of Office VI did when they were in a manner of speaking creating a pension for themselves in case the war should turn out badly. Even so, as a constant pessimist I did have a foreboding of how the war would end, and I said so often to my subordinates. That is why I could see through people much better than if I had been an optimist.

That is also the reason for the controversy I had with Hu [not typed], because if we are not pessimists, then we can never see through our people.

But you must also know for certain that Schellenberg drew on rather large information services for the victory in the West, quite apart from the organization of the [not typed] in which the English intelligence captains, West and Stevens, were taken prisoner.

Yes, Knochen got the Iron Cross First Class for that with us.

But that operation was largely planned by Schellenberg. Apart from that, even at the time there was already talk by way of rumor…

Yes, around that time they had still been good. Later they carried to both sides. I can prove that to you, because to Mueller's annoyance, to my annoyance, to Guenter's annoyance, they were forever trying on such a large scale to buy Jews free, and it was demonstrated to them that this Jew brought them nothing but money at most.

But you probably know that Schellenberg spied out France, and there above all the air force business, that is the French air force, somehow outstandingly well, and in fact by the middle of June or July the rumor was already going round that he had deployed a great many Jewish informants in order to prepare the Western campaign in terms of information. Do you have any evidence of that?

No. I have only proof that the nearer the war came to its end, the more Jews Schellenberg's office demanded from me.

But how could they still demand Jews, when after the beginning of 43 there were hardly any Jews left?

Yes, there were still plenty there, and there were still a whole series of Jews living there through interventions of one sort or another by the commissioner for the Four Year Plan, or through other interventions, and we had to prize them out and comb them out in laborious detail work. And Schellenberg took Jews out of France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, wherever he could only get them, not he himself, his desk officers or department heads…

Can you give me a few names, in Holland for instance?

Yes, Hoettel for instance was one such, although he was only an underling. The same Hoettel who behaved so crookedly at Alt Aussee, so that the peasants said the first man to be hanged, if they could ever hang anyone again, would be Hoettel. Hoettel also pushed his way into the same lie, as the [blotted] testified.

So in other words, the attitude toward the Reich that Schellenberg showed later, roughly from Stalingrad on, you have no closer proof of it from your contact with his office?

Only the increase in the demands that I hand him Jews. Even the simplest clerk in my section saw through the thing and read it as insurance against any unpleasantness that might come. A certain security, in case the war ended badly.

Can you give any figures on that?

Well, it may have been 300, 400 or even 500. And what annoyed us most was that they sent these Jews abroad behind our backs and only told us afterward. Technically they could do it. They gave the Jew a passport, had an official of Office VI take him to the border, and then he was out. They didn't even have to do it from Reich territory. They could do it from France too, from Paris, or from Holland or from the other occupied territories, and from there the Jews went on into neutral countries.

I always said, trust anyone in Office IV, but watch out for the people from Office VI. Too many opportunists and adventurers had gathered in growing numbers around the section heads in Office VI, who were in part really harmless. They outmaneuvered the real section head, who in his own way was genuinely upright and a proper member of the RSHA. He just didn't know it, because the other man was cleverer. They let themselves be outmaneuvered, and that is what I hold against them.

Apart from Höttl, you know of no one by name?

No, not at the moment, but others will certainly come back to me.

Did Göring stand in any superior relationship to Heydrich? And in which fields?

As the original head of the Gestapo, Göring was [blotted] not only Heydrich's superior, but Himmler's as well. Heydrich also accepted Göring as his superior, because here, as Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan, he could put his oar into every branch. I wrote Göring a good dozen letters for Heydrich, where Heydrich gave me the key points and afterward signed the letter. He always chose the heading "Herr Reichsmarschall" and never "My dear so-and-so," which he otherwise liked to do. For instance "My dear Ley." To Goebbels he wrote "Herr Reichsminister." He gave nothing away, that vain Heydrich. He always worked out very carefully how best to open. He was an ice-cold egoist, and nobody was more fastidious about style than he was. Kaltenbrunner, by contrast, was a peasant who signed whatever was put in front of him. Not Heydrich. Now and then he corrected the text as well.

And to Keitel he wrote "My dear Keitel." Also "My dear Funk." When he wrote "My dear," then there was an agreement of purpose. When he was distant from someone, he wrote in a distant way as well, to Goebbels too. Perhaps the reserve lay in the fact that both were ice-cold people, and neither let the other come closer than three paces. But Heydrich was like that with everyone, only not quite so with the people he worked with daily, and I think Goebbels was just the same. Today people have rather lost sight of all that

Belgrade ghetto

If you ask me today, I can't tell you at all how many ghettos there even were. What does ghetto mean anyway? We took the name over from the Jews. We crowded them together here into one space that may have looked something like a ghetto, in order to isolate them, in order to put a stop to partisan and gang activity, and because we were always short of staff, in order to keep masses under control with a small outlay of personnel. When we didn't do it, then it was those governments we were acting in agreement with at that time, for instance the Hungarian, the Croatian, the Slovak government and so on.

In the individual ghettos it may have looked partly worse, partly better. It depended, first, on the intelligence of the so-called Jewish Council of Elders or of the Jewish ghetto leadership, and second, on the intelligence and the means of the man in charge of guarding it at the time. That is also why in some the supply situation was better and in others worse. Where it was worse, local friction possibly arose. Warsaw is in itself an exception, because the Warsaw ghetto leadership was in the closest touch with the first Polish underground leadership, led by General [unclear].

A colleague of mine from the section worked on him and then brought him to Berlin, where he declared himself ready to work together with the Germans. Here the Jewish Council of Elders of the Warsaw ghetto let itself be led astray. It believed the victory fanfares of the Polish underground army, struck too early, and had to pay for it. It was war. Had the Jewish Council of Elders in Warsaw kept its nerve and waited and struck at a moment that would have been strategically better, it would have brought greater glory to the militant leadership of the ghetto than it did.

Did you know the head of the Jewish Council of Elders at that time, who was the president of the Polish state bank, a highly intelligent man

For me that is like a confirmation. Jewry is split into dozens of views, in intellectual terms and in party political terms, like every other people, and from that recognition too I concluded early on that only a political solution can bring about a final solution of the Jewish question, nothing else. These are the smallest examples, but we have an abundance of examples. How could it be otherwise? It would be against nature. It is a people like any other. It has only crystallized out through the several thousand years of its existence, into a crystal that unhappily weighs on the host people of the moment and works upon it.

The Jew himself could live highly respected by us in some distant country, only as far away from us as possible and not so near. That is the bad part, that they of all things annexed by force the so-called homeland they had to leave two thousand years ago because they rebelled against the Roman authority. That is contrary to history, because if I give up a country for the span of two thousand years, then that country is given up. That is quite clear. Then these gentlemen must look for other countries.

We did offer them Madagascar or similar territories

But they will always come into conflict with the Arab peoples, because two thousand years can't simply be brushed aside. In that time other peoples became settled and rooted in the soil, and whoever can reach back over such a long stretch of time is the true owner.

Do you recall whether any suggestions went out from your office, at a time when German interference in Romania was still limited? Either by way of the Foreign Office or directly, seeking some occasion for setting up a ghetto in Bucharest, for instance, or

In Bucharest I had Hauptsturmführer Richter sitting there. He was the same as [not typed] in Pressburg, as Dannecker in Paris, as Burger in Athens. What the men I sent achieved there with the local governments, for instance with the Romanian government, I no longer know today. In any case it is certain that every one of the officers under me at that time was given the most precise guidelines to take with him.

They went out as advisers on Jewish questions to the legation or German embassy concerned, or, as in Paris, as adviser on Jewish questions to the Commander of the Security Police and the SD, and here they had to push through exactly what the Reichsführer laid down in general terms, the Chief of the Security Police and the SD in particular, and what I as the responsible section head worked out in detail. One man had difficulties with a government, that is by way of the minister, that is the minister had difficulties with the government experts concerned. With another it went smoothly and without a sound.

In principle one thing was achieved everywhere, that a concentration was carried out everywhere. In many cases the governments at first resisted releasing the Jews for evacuation as well, because the laws of the country spoke against it and new laws first had to be forced through. That too was a task of the Jewish adviser concerned, to put such a matter to his local superiors until this goal was finally reached, namely the final release of the transports in accordance with the order, since this order came from me, and I had mine from the Chief of the Security Police, and he had his from the Reichsführer. That is the straight line.

The difficulties were very great. How could it have been otherwise, that only a fraction of the Jews in those countries, which were ordered to undergo the so-called clearing of Jews, could actually have been evacuated to Reich territory. That is probably why the Reichsführer finally said to himself, before we let a resistance movement in Hungary be strengthened as well, by the half million Jews settled there, who would certainly have had no small influence, we will send the master down, he is to do the thing himself. They sent me down, and the end of it was that Dr. Kastner said it was a misfortune for Hungarian Jewry that they had sent me of all people to Hungary, who had known how, thanks to my organizational ability and my capacity to push things through, to transport away half a million within so short a time despite the difficult transport situation.

A question in between. Do you know whether Schellenberg requested of your office that any Jews be taken in 1940 for Syria and Iraq

No, never requested

Now did these representatives you had in the various countries, who were subordinate to the ambassador, have any direct connection that made it possible for them to get around the eventual resistance of an amb-

[not typed] the resistance of an ambassador against an energetic approach to solving the Jewish question, in other words, could a deputy of your office go over the ambassador's head? It is striking that all the actions launched in friendly foreign countries [blotted] led to no success, so that the Reichsführer said, now we want to send the master down so that it will be ruled out from the start. That does suggest that the ambassadors as such gave no very enthusiastic support. Did your people have any way of overcoming this resistance from the ambassador, or of exerting an influence that could be set against the ambassador's?

Yes, and I did it by gathering these men of mine around me at fairly short intervals. The judge in Bucharest got a teleprinter message telling him to report to me. With Richter that happened about every [not typed] months, twice, once. With Wi [not typed] once every two months. To Paris, to Dannecker, I went myself, or I ordered him to come to me. In short, I ordered these men, who were under me and for whose practical effectiveness I was responsible, to report at whatever intervals seemed opportune to me.

If I saw difficulties whose cause lay in the foreign-policy area, that is, in any occasional resistance, conscious or unconscious, intended or not intended, on the part of the German embassy or legation, then I questioned my subordinate deputy and made a memorandum on the matter. I asked the legation councillor at the Foreign Office, von Datten [handwriting], and I talked the matter through with von Datten. If it was a minor affair, von Datten and I settled it in one form or another, so that a simple note from the Foreign Office in Berlin instructed envoy XY to handle the matter this way or that and to report execution to the Foreign Office by [not typed]. Once that was done, the matter went into the files.

But if these were matters of principle, for example that the country in question lacked the legal basis for giving a security authority a corresponding order for concentration and for handover to German authorities, then of course a quite different route had to be taken. That route was for Legation Councillor von Datten to send a corresponding report to his department head, through him to his group leader, and through him to his state secretary, and for the state secretary, no doubt after consulting his minister, either to reject the matter or to accept it.

If there was a danger the minister would reject it, then thanks to my constant contact with the Foreign Office I had grasped the matter very early, and I myself, through Gruppenführer Müller, the chief of the Sipo and the SD, and where the difficulties were very great up to the Reichsführer, had partly prepared the corresponding letters to, in that case, the Reich Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, in which the matter was put to him in advance, the matter that his own people would have laid before him within a few days anyway, so that he could not decide otherwise than in the Reichsführer's sense. For in these cases the Reichsführer rested on and invoked Führer orders, which even a von Ribbentrop could not evade. That is how I tried to torpedo this business, and so the Jews are right in themselves, truthfully, they set a Jesuit on it who was un

[not typed] who was tireless, who always let his fire play wherever he sensed the least resistance. I was no ordinary order-taker, or I would have been a fool. I thought along with it. I was an idealist.

And when such a fundamental matter was a legislative matter, those were probably the hardest cases, they were then put forward in this way. It was now the task of the Foreign Office to exert corresponding pressure. They could exert the pressure, not politically but economically, and then they had to throw something into the scales to push a Führer order through. As a rule everything was pushed through. Only then, in the individual countries, as in Romania for instance, these people were filled with a political softness, or perhaps also stuck in a double hardening, so that they put off a thousand bureaucratic difficulties which they could really have settled with a stroke of the pen.

That was the art and the skill of the adviser, that they kept the envoy so hard at it that the envoy went after the corresponding protocol officials in order to get at the foreign minister there, so as to put it to him as forcefully as possible. Killinger and Ludin, those were really very decent people as far as we were concerned. Beyond that, there is no doubt about it, Ludin was blunt, more robust, more brutal. Killinger was the elegant one, and my man Richter often had cause to complain about him, although Richter enjoyed the greatest esteem from Killinger, as is also mainly noticeable in the fact that the Jewish advisers enjoyed the greatest esteem in every country, for they were really the extended arm of the Reichsführer. One word from the Reichsführer and they might have been removed from their post.

So you have the impression that the ambassadors and envoys all thought somehow the way you did, because you counted as the dangerous people, behind whom [not typed]

Yes, naturally.

Do you know of any cases where these deputies of yours stood in a warm human relationship with the respective ambassador?

A human relationship, I hardly think so, but a very shrewd one, serving the moment, a personally useful relationship, yes. Some of my Jewish advisers had not seen that, but I saw it very well, and Müller saw it just as I did, though we let ourselves. The junior captains we had there, since none went above the rank of Hauptsturmführer, we left in their belief, because they were to carry out their mission. If there were difficulties of a fundamental kind, then I was sent out anyway. But I never went to Bucharest, and I do not know why.

Had [not typed] been down there instead of Antonescu, not a single Jew would have come to Germany. He would have refused to send a Jew to Germany. He would probably have handled them down there differently from the way they were handled by generous Germany. Quite differently, much faster.

In which countries was the cooperation between your representatives and the local officials smooth and positive?

It was completely smooth in Slovakia, where Wi [not typed] was, completely smooth. I myself spoke once with Disse, with the head of state, the Catholic clergyman. It was more of a courtesy visit that I paid to Disse, after I had Mach

[not typed] had gone to see Mach. [not typed] At Mach's urging I then had to pay this visit to Disse. Disse was an antisemite. He was not a politician where the Jewish question was concerned, he simply had an aversion.

Unlike me. I am no antisemite. I am opposed on political grounds, because they rob us of the breath of our life.

It had also gone smoothly in Romania. That the people there released a few tens of thousands to us for transport and then made difficulties again over a further ten thousand, that I call delaying resistance and hedging your bets, because you could never know there what might be coming. It was also completely smooth in Athens. It was the opposite of smooth in Copenhagen. I can wind the matter up by saying it was actually smooth everywhere. In France it went splendidly and without any difficulty. So it was relatively smooth everywhere. You had to work everywhere, that is quite clear. The only difficulty was really only Copenhagen.

Concrete cases where the German envoy or ambassador sabotaged your policy of registering the Jews, directly or indirectly, you know of none?

No.

Did you have anything from [handwriting]?

No, in no way at all. He did what Oberg demanded of him, and Oberg was Knochen's superior, and Knochen was my old comrade, the one I grew up with in the SD.

But Knochen did not belong to IV B 4?

No, Knochen is really a Schellenberg man, but I personally had a very close contact with Knochen, and that helped over a good deal.

About your representatives abroad. You know that a great deal was said and written during the war and then after the war about a systematic robbery of valuables and so on belonging to the Jewish nationals in question, carried out from the offices of your deputies, with or without the cooperation of other police offices or of diplomatic offices. Did it ever happen during your term of office that representatives of your office had to be recalled on account of some excess?

No, not one single time. They had no opportunity at all. In the individual capitals, or in the cities where the individual governments sat, the ones we were on neutral friendly terms with or lived alongside as comrades in the war, I had one deputy for Jewish questions. The man had three or four orderlies and one or two typists, at the very most. He had no more staff than that.

Two. He had no executive powers. He could not issue orders to his own police, where it was a matter of an occupied country, and still less could he give orders to the police of the friendly or pacified nation, as was the case in France for example. He had no power at all to carry out house searches or anything of the kind, that falls under executive authority. So enrichment by that route falls away entirely. What would remain is that one of my former captains had gone somewhere and simply appropriated something of monetary value, or that he had dealt with some Jew in order to fleece him in a business-like way and to exempt him from measures of some kind if he made this endowment over to him, would

I am still very glad and happy today that I sent such people from my department abroad, men for whom I would still put my hand in the fire, every one of them. In my entire term of office I did not hear the slightest complaint even once, and you can be sure, and this may be the best proof, that these men of mine stood so much in the public limelight that every wrong move they made was registered somehow and would sooner or later have become known through some channel either to me or to one of my thirty colleagues in Office IV. Whether through the resistance movement or through the other branches of the state police [not typed], if there had been even the slightest thing.

They were all across the board exceedingly modest, decent, unassuming people. In their outlook they were very orderly and correct minds. I believe that apart from Wi they were all married.

Here is an example. A Jew of German nationality has somehow managed to smuggle himself out of Germany and arrives in France. Did your deputy Dannecker then have police power over him? Could he arrest him, or did he have to call in the help of the higher police leader or of a police office of the occupied territory?

Well, I do not of course know the exact dividing line between the commander of the Sipo and the SD and the French security authorities, but as far as I know from practice it is this way, that every [not typed] measure by the commander of the Sipo and the SD required an agreement, a conformity, on the part of the French security authorities. That is why the French security authority also kept its liaison officer with the commander of the Sipo and the SD.

If I had been commander of the Sipo and the SD in Paris, and a Jew had escaped, a woods-and-meadows Jew is of no interest of course, so a Jew on a scale that mattered to the Reich, and had come to France, then as commander I would have had him arrested preventively through my own people. But I had no authority whatever over this person and had to comply with French law. So in that case I would have had to inform the competent police prefect in Paris at once and ask him, after I had set out the case on the record in such and such a way, ask him to release the man for lack of interest so that he could be sent back to the Reich. That is how I would have done it.

But was it within the powers of your representative Dannecker to arrest such an escaped Jew of German nationality?

No. None of my people had the slightest [not typed] powers, which is precisely why they were called only advisers on the Jewish question, and an adviser has no [not typed] powers at all. [not typed] power belongs only to the man who is charged with it, but if he is called an adviser he has none. None of the advisers I sent abroad had [not typed] scope. Had he been with me in my department inside the Reich, he would of course have had [not typed] full powers. But once he was seconded as an adviser, the [not typed] garment fell to the ground.

So by and large, in the occupied territories as in the friendly foreign ones, the cooperation with the diplomatic representations resident there and so on

[not typed] went off without friction. But did you still have anything to carry out in neutral foreign countries, even if only in the way of informational missions?

In neutral foreign countries, no. My territory was the countries directly involved in the fighting.

And you also couldn't, for any operations, our own or enemy ones, wouldn't it have been important if a certain cooperation had existed, purely for information, between Schellenberg and your office?

No, there was none.

For instance, wasn't Schellenberg obliged to pass on to your office that in Portugal, for example, an operation was under way that intended to pick up Jews from the occupied territories in order to ship them somehow to Palestine, or to get them to emigrate to North America? None of that ever came to your ears?

No. What use would that have been to Office VII?

Couldn't Office [handwriting] have been of use to you?

No, not to us. Every member of the office wore blinkers, and blinkers leave you a certain angle, and that angle is called my task, and this task angle is then subdivided into sections. Not even the section next to mine, its area of responsibility interested me, I was responsible for that. But if I happened to be consulted in passing, then the section head concerned, before it went to the office chief for signature, wrote out the countersignature of any other section head involved, that is, noted it down. IV B 4, for instance.

And then, if I agreed, I countersigned; if I did not agree, it had to go back to the section and they had to revise it accordingly so that both interests were safeguarded. Of course there were many matters that concerned both Office VI and Office IV. In that case the section head of Office IV, when submitting something to [not typed], also had to take the interests of Office VI into account, through the countersignature of the responsible section head. But as regards your question, nothing of the kind occurred.

We became mistrustful because of Office VI's secretiveness, and we withdrew like a snail into its shell, contrary to the openness between officials that was handed down to us within an institution. And all that perhaps carried us so far that we imputed negative things to them, although they wanted positive ones but couldn't carry them out, because they hadn't involved the other branches, and the other branches were already shooting at them from the outset. Office IV and Office VI could have worked together much better than they did, thanks to Schellenberg.

Can you remember your office passing important information to Office VI?

I handed the information material over to Office VI in the form of one body that did the thinking, namely with the adviser, who was abroad after all, he worked together with them. Because not only was the adviser for Jewish affairs attached to the commander of the Security Police or to the German envoy there, but the corresponding section head of Office VI was there as well, and the task of these people within this office in Athens, Bucharest and so on was precisely to work together. They had the file lying in front of them.

Because among ourselves nobody made any secret of matters classified as secret Reich business, when it was a question of fighting the enemy.

Do you perhaps remember any incidents where, from your office, you came upon connections of an international character, or connections leading through the occupied territories to foreign countries, from Office VI?

No, that was Office VII's task, that was not my task. My task was [not typed], not research. Just as Ohlendorf had to do research at home, so Six had to do research at home and abroad regarding the ideological enemies. It was Office VII's task to report any cross-connections to Office VI as well as to Office IV.

But I mean, if through the registration of a Jew Goldenstein you came upon the existence of an organization that had its seat in Lisbon [not typed]

Individual cases yes, those were dealt with singly in the files, only matters of principle were not.

In this connection, did you come upon the trail of any Jewish connections regarding the 20th of July?

No.

Which Jews were exempted from these special treatments, and to what degree were they exempted? Which Jews were exempted from all the regulations altogether?

Those were all the privileged Jews of mixed marriages, those were the holders of decorations for bravery from the First World War, those were all the wounded from the First World War who could prove it. There were Jews who had earned merit for the national cause. In very few cases those were also particular leading Jews of the economy who had in any case served the Reich.

What became known in your office, for instance, about this strange situation whereby Dr. Hirschfeld, who throughout the whole war remained in his post in Holland as the great economic man, and who in the year 193[too faint] was even given the German Eagle?

About these individual cases I know nothing.

Do you know further names besides Milch, not military men but civilians? Who were exempted somehow on account of outstanding achievement?

All of these were gathered together at the end in Theresienstadt, because they had to be protected from any seizure. This gathering began soon after Theresienstadt was set up. The Reichsfuehrer ordered a ghetto for prominent people. I can no longer give the names today.

So there were no Jews who, for instance, had distinguished themselves in the First World War, or had been wounded, who were not registered and were allowed to stay in their homes? That did not happen? Right up to the end of the war?

Yes, that happened too. There were even Jews exempted from wearing the star.

Do you have any names there?

No, those were collective categories, those are many, they come under the police regulation. One quite particular police regulation stated which Jews were to be exempted from all

measures to be exempted from. There are thousands. Naturally, there were some Gaue where the Gauleiters were especially radical. They ordered the transfer, and those people came to Theresienstadt only at the very end, and only if the German-blooded partner had died. If the German-blooded partner was still alive, he had to remain in his apartment, because no German-blooded partner was sent to Theresienstadt. If the German-blooded partner had not died, the Jew was not regarded as a Jew, but as a privileged mixed-marriage partner.

Do you remember the contents of the police ordinance that specified these measures?

No, I don't know the number. I already told you the exemption provisions. Theresienstadt was not a concentration camp; it was in no way under any German bayonet. Rather, from Grand Rabbi Beck to Murmelstein, Theresienstadt was exclusively under Jewish leadership; we didn't meddle in it at all. We sealed it off with Czech gendarmerie, but we couldn't seal it off completely, because the highway from Berlin to Prague ran right through Theresienstadt. We supplied them with truckloads of food every week or every fourteen days. We had a fight with the Gauleiter of Saxony, Mutschmann, and with the other local-group leaders, because the Jews were better supplied with food than the German population.

Did the Jews in Theresienstadt have no war work to do?

Of course. They also worked for the armaments industry, and were paid by the armaments firms. It even happened that the Jews privileged by the police ordinance were misused by Office VI, which sought every V-man it needed preferably from Jewish circles.

Do you know where Schellenberg deployed these Jewish V-men?

What was the actual number of Jewish V-men in service?

The number is very high. There may have been several hundred or even several thousand, all German Jews. They were also deployed throughout the occupied territory. They were smuggled out, most of them to Lisbon, because I had to certify their harmlessness so that they could then get a passport to Lisbon.

Do you believe they actually supplied intelligence for Schellenberg?

Not at all.

Don't you think it was possible that these Jews carried out important espionage work abroad or in neutral countries? Are you aware that suicides occurred among a significant number of the Jews who were to be transported?

Apart from a normal number, which is minimal among Jews, I know nothing about it; among Germans it would certainly be higher. As for suicides before the general registration, they were numerically very few.

Hoess testified, among other things, that the instructions for mass extermination in Auschwitz

for the most part had been signed by you?

By me?

Yes.

Not a single letter. I simply couldn't order another main office to do anything, because that office was subordinate to a different office chief, while I in turn was subordinate to another main-office chief, and both main-office chiefs were subordinate to the RF. I was a desk officer in the Reich Security Main Office; I couldn't order or command a desk officer belonging to another main office. At most, if I had done such a thing, it would have had to come down through the Chief of the SIPO and the SD, through Pohl, to Hoess.

Such a thing is unthinkable because administratively it is impossible. At most, the Chief of the SIPO and the SD could have told the Chief of the VWHA, 'The RF recently told me that this or that Jew is to be killed.' The Chief of the VWHA would then have asked the RF whether that was correct, and he would have issued the instruction. How could I, as a section officer of Office IV, have given an order to a section officer of the SS VWHA?

So there is a certain intention behind this, to make you liable for the mass exterminations.

That's precisely what outrages me. It is a parallel to what they dictated to Wi; there were three phases, and for all three it was the…

So could you explain more closely how Huertel came to know your false name and so on?

Yes. After several camps I was taken to the large collection camp at Weiden in the Upper Palatinate. My Ostf. Jenisch was brought in with me. After some time, the North Americans called for the so-called labor companies, and I volunteered for one. I left as a platoon leader, having passed myself off as an Untstf., and came to Camp Oberlagstetten in Franconia. My Ostf. Jenisch went with his unit to a labor camp in Beckendorf on the Danube. I entered Camp Oberlagstetten as Lieutenant Eckmann around August 1945 and remained there until early January 1946.

In the meantime, the CIC interrogated us in Ansbach, where we had been taken. When I could roughly calculate that the administrative process, if any suspicion at all had been raised about me, might come back to Ansbach or Oberstetten for further processing, I decided to have myself discharged. Since there were, I believe, nine or eleven officers in the camp, I naturally couldn't strike out on my own, so I asked the camp leader, Sturmbf. Opperbeck of the VuWHA, for an officers' conference.

Did he know them?

I should add that I did not reveal myself to Opperbeck during all those months, until around Christmas 1945. Around that time, when I began making preparations for my escape, I told Ostf. Opperbeck my name, rank, and position. He said to me, 'My dear comrade Eckmann, I have known that for a long time. Your Untstf.

Jenisch told me in confidence, but because you had not said anything to me about it, I kept the matter locked in my heart.' I explained to him why I needed to leave and asked him to convene the meeting so that I could obtain my fellow officers' approval for my departure, because it was an unsatisfactory code of honor that an officer could leave only when all his fellow officers agreed to such a departure. Under some circumstances, there was reason to fear that the guards might resort to reprisals, or might have done so. The officers' conference took place. Without revealing myself to the individual comrades, I explained to them why I needed to leave.

In what form did you describe it?

That I was being persecuted because I had been politically active. At that time not much was asked. Opperbeck, as camp leader, simply sought their consent; it was just a formality. I could never imagine that in an SS camp, if one of the SS leaders saw the need for a departure, that need would be refused. I then told both Stbf. Opperbeck and an Oberstf. who was in his camp. I can name him without concern: it was Ostf. Freiersleben, with whom I became quite close and friendly. I told them both that

…who was staying in Egypt at the time, could be reached. I believe I have already described how I went into hiding; I can skip all that and pick up in either summer 1946 or summer 1947. Around that time I was in the wooded heathland of the district of Celle, where I found a whole stack of old newspapers whose articles, among other things, dealt with me. The articles ran under headings such as 'Mass murderer Eichmann, where is the mass murderer? Where is Eckmann?' and similar ones. That made me suspicious, and I said to myself… It made me suspicious when I read the name Eckmann.

I read literally that the notorious mass murderer Eichmann, who had last been staying under the name Eckmann, Lieutenant Eckmann, at Camp Oberlagstetten, had fled from the camp, the date matching exactly, and that he was trying, as they wrote it, to make his way to Gross [blotted] by hidden paths known to him. Then I told myself that it was clearly high time to leave. I wondered where the CIC could have got the name Eckmann. I see two possibilities. First, my Obersturmführer Jenisch, who absolutely could not be induced to change his rank or his name. At that time it was prudent to understate rather than overstate, let alone to remain what one was.

This Obersturmbannführer Jenisch was, in human terms, a somewhat resilient mind, but he was useful in administrative work, and he may have been questioned at the camp Deggendorf, or wherever else he ended up, especially since, I must say, he had the audacity to list his unit as SD. The second possibility, which seems very unlikely to me, is that after my flight the CIC interrogated Obersturmbannführer Opperbeck and that Opperbeck may have told himself: the man has long since disappeared behind the seven mountains, so I can tell the truth now. What use is all this talk if, in a few weeks, the CIC proves the opposite of what I tell them under questioning? And above all, the camp I led would have suffered unpleasant consequences.

I think it very likely that the CIC learned about me through Sturmbannführer Jenisch, who, in his Lower Saxon thick-headedness, could in no way be induced by me to change his name or rank and, as I have described, even entered SD as his service assignment on the questionnaires. That is how the CIC came to know all about me, and how it also learned my name Eckmann. Because I had assumed that this was possible, I took precautions early: when I left Camp Oberlagstetten, I immediately took the documents I had prepared as Otto Henninger, and from 1946 to 1950 I was able to live in the Lüneburg Heath as Otto Henninger without any difficulty. I think that deals with the matter exhaustively.

I am coming back to this matter now. This is my story about it. You see, it is just as I became aware of it through a newspaper article, while I was, so to speak, living underground and dependent on whatever reached me. Dr. Hoettel, who was living freely and had daily access to all the outpourings of the daily press and literature, could naturally have formed a picture of what happened much earlier than I could, since I always received these things late. So it is quite possible that Hoettel, you told me he wrote it in 1952, used these reports from the German press in 1952, when revising his book or adding a note, and connected them with the statements he had treated exhaustively in the first edition of his book. Is that clear to you, Comrade S.? And so, to help you understand this possible connection, I have described this background at somewhat greater length.

Did you know Reiner?

Reiner was… wasn't he a higher SS officer? … No, the one who was apparently picked up together with [not typed] south of Klagenfurt at the beginning of July 1945, and later still in…

Who was Reiner? Wasn't Reiner a Gauleiter? … A Gauleiter, I believe… You see, Reiner was a Gauleiter. Where was he Gauleiter? He can't have been from Carinthia, Styria, Tyrol, Upper Austria, or Lower Austria… Yes, no, I wouldn't rule out Lower Austria. Reiner must have been an Austrian Gauleiter, if I remember correctly… He was, indeed, but he must somehow have travelled with [not typed] and been picked up, or have received an assignment, and … I can't think of it at the moment. Tell me, what do you have to say about the possibility that Obergruppenführer Müller is now in Russian service?

Yes, you see, Comrade S. If I may interrupt you, Heydrich apparently became aware of Müller through his in-depth study of the Russian police system.

Yes, you see, Comrade S. I could say that Bolshevik communism and National Socialism are, in many respects, what we used to call first cousins. I don't know whether you know that expression. In fact, we had various things in common, but I wouldn't want that to be seen as dominant in the case of my former superior. Rather, Müller was a criminal investigator and only a criminal investigator, more a policeman, and only then did everything else come in.

In any event, I never got a different impression of him. In my eyes, he was an ideal National Socialist and could be addressed as such. I once said to Gruppenführer Müller, when questions about promotion or salary became pressing on my part: 'Gruppenführer, look, I don't work here for the wages. I work for ideal reasons, out of idealistic motives. I have no ambitious aspirations at all. I don't want to be ambitious. I want to fulfil my task and help us accomplish it…'

…that we all wanted to accomplish… So I may put it this way: I can still see him before me today. I cannot say I laughed at him; I looked at him, and I had an inner connection and inner contact with this man. I could speak with Müller in a way I could not with even my closest so-called confidants, men of equal rank and comrades I had known for years. When you ask me what I thought of it, whether Müller might have gone over into Russian service, I must counter that if the Eastern side had assigned my former chief an international criminal-police field of duties, I would let both my hands be burned before I would fail to believe that Müller could have accepted such an offer.

It accords completely with this man's behavior, for he was an expert. You must understand: there were only two Reich Criminal Directors, only two who worked their way up from the bottom, and in my eyes there were no more thorough criminalists than he and Nebe. When I learned from my friends, after the events of recent times, that in the Soviet zone all sorts of SD members whom I had long believed dead had reached relatively high specialist posts, whether from the SD or from other branches of the NSDAP, I must tell you that I cannot reject such a question out of hand. Does this discussion satisfy you? Had you expected something like this?

Can you tell me this: on 1 August 1944, the various German operations were expecting about ninety thousand Jews from Hungary. The next day, 2 August, you were supposedly summoned by Himmler. Does the brickworks at [not typed] mean anything to you? Was it supposed to be operating again as a reception site, a collection point for Jews from Budapest? On 21 August the Diplomatic Corps lodged a protest with [not typed], and on the 25th it was decided that the Interior Ministry would again take control of the Jews in labor camps. On the 26th, your Einsatzgruppe…

I wasn't an Einsatzgruppe. I was a Sonderkommando. They called it Eichmann.

Had the Einsatzgruppe Hungary left? And you yourself had parted from them on the 23rd in a state of deepest depression. Were you then probably supposed to travel to Romania? On the 29th, the head of government, Steue, was dismissed and General L… became head of government. What can you say about these questions?

It is as I already said: the entire library published from the unhappy days of 1945 to today is a miscellany of fiction and truth. If you ask me whether reception operations took place again at a brickworks, and so on, I must tell you that in Hungary it was not German police offices that were in charge, but the Hungarian executive authorities, made up chiefly of the Hungarian Gendarmerie, Arrow Cross formations, and so on. What they carried out locally, in Hungary, was outside my knowledge, although I was informed after the fact of one event or another.

…not through. I had heard from quarters that the Hungarian government was not obliged to tell the Higher SS and Police Leader, or even me, everything it carried out or intended to carry out in the sphere of domestic policy. Which camps the Arrow Cross organizations set up, which camps the Hungarian police established in the individual counties, and which camps the Hungarian Gendarmerie established in the individual counties, occupied or dissolved, I do not know; it was none of my concern. What mattered to me was that the Hungarian area be cleansed of those elements which, according to the Reich leaders above me, could become a first-order partisan area through the continued presence of this group of people.

What mattered to me was to have this group handed over to me by the Hungarian government. That was my order, because with the few people I had I could never have carried out even one registration operation. No, for me it was a bureaucratic handover and takeover, although this bureaucratic process had to be expanded: first, I had rolling stock brought into Hungary from the Reich Ministry of Transport to take up this group of people for transport; second, I assigned, I believe, 30 Order Police men to each train as guards and sent the trains directly to the reception station ordered for me.

What local arrangements and measures the Hungarian circles, whether police, gendarmerie, or Arrow Cross, undertook to achieve this goal, namely to fill the empty trains brought into Hungary by the Reich Ministry of Transport, did not concern me. It did not interest me, and I was not involved in it in any way, since Hungary was a sovereign government, even though it had made certain agreements with the German Reich government; in any case, those matters were outside my area of work. When you ask me, and tell me that at the time I had, so to speak, liquidated my Sonderkommando, that is not right.

I cannot remember the date. As I told you, it must have been late summer or early autumn, when, for lack of more people deportable from Hungary, I was almost unemployed and received the order, in the area of Neuarat, on the Romanian border, to remove 10,000 or 12,000 ethnic Germans from Russian control and deport them into the Reich, whether they wanted to go or not. I believe I have already told you about that, and I don't know whether I should repeat it all. That, as you say, was my so-called withdrawal to Romania.

I did not enter Romania itself; I was only at the Romanian border, because Neuarat is right on the border between Romania and Hungary. There I carried out the assignment, namely I set the transport in motion to secure the ethnic Germans, who at that time were crying murder and mayhem and later probably lit a candle of thanks to the Virgin Mary in their churches because I stood firm and removed them from the area. Today, they probably receive Reich support and pensions, like all those people who can or cannot prove ownership, insofar as they are unfit for labor service, and receive their support with regard to burdens [off the sheet].

from circles who were affected, years later I once met a small circle of those people … how grateful they were to the man who had forcibly taken them away at the time. I did not identify myself; I noted with inner joy and satisfaction that this work, for which I had been sent to the Hungarian-Romanian border, had not been fruitless. This work had, for the moment, also been crowned by the fact that, on that occasion, although under orders, I was nevertheless able to withdraw a small Wehrmacht [too faint] from the Russian grasp, since the Russians soon occupied that territory again.

May I ask you to answer the questions now coming in as briefly and quickly as possible?

On 2 November 1944, did Soviet troops enter Budapest?

Yes, perhaps, at that time anyway.

Are you visualizing that? On 8 November, so six days later, did a total expulsion of the Budapest Jews take place under your command, with a march to Straßhof, 180 km away, in Lower Austria? On foot? This foot march, do you remember it?

I will answer right away; please continue asking.

This chapter is intended, and that is its importance, to provide clear proof of the now open struggle between Himmler, Schellenberg, and Becher on one side, and Kaltenbrunner, Mueller, and Eichmann on the other, in connection with an attempt Becher made on those same days in Zurich, Switzerland, to speak with certain authorities of the American WRB [War Refugee Board] and obtain a pledge from the American foreign minister concerning the payment of 20 million Swiss francs. To put the matter in the right time sequence, does this agree with it?

I have the following to say about it. First, I refer back to what I said at the beginning: everyone crowds to the feeding trough and takes what now appears opportune to him. Second, what you have just told me is ridiculous, stupid chatter, and fibbing, from people who wanted to make themselves interesting for opportunistic reasons or even wanted to wring personal advantages from the post-1945 period and claim them. Here a kernel of truth has been taken as a pretext to claim as much exculpatory material as possible for the frighteningly large circle of people who, as I see with growing horror, divide it among themselves.

During my deportations, that is, the departures I carried out of the Jews from Hungary whom the Hungarian [unclear] had placed under my authority, the Allied air force bombed the railway station at Guer, a railway junction, along with many other stations on the Budapest-Vienna line, so that for weeks no transport at all was possible along that route. I then, in order to show the Allies the hard fist this time and, so to speak, tell them that it was no use, even if they smashed and bombed my routes to the Reich, had 10,000 Jews brought from various eastern counties to Budapest and had them sent on from there, because I had a railway…

transport from there could no longer be carried out, let them march on foot from Budapest to the Lower Austrian border; for that I had the order of the Chief of the Sipo and the SD. It is clear that I could never have issued such an order myself. I made the proposal for it, and I admit that. I had to admit it, because otherwise they would have smashed all my railway stations, and I was responsible to the RF that, insofar as Jewish contingents were concerned, Hungary would not become a large partisan area. Evidently the RF had learned from the terrible events in Warsaw and recognized the frightfulness of an enemy resolved to do anything.

So I had these Jews, about 10,000 in number, march the 240 km to Vienna; however, subtracting the stretch from Vienna to the Burgenland border, not Austria but Burgenland, that comes to about 180 km. I discussed this plan with the commander of the Hungarian Gendarmerie, who passed the details to his responsible desk officer, the lieutenant colonel of the Hungarian Gendarmerie, Faerenzie. The daily marches were divided up; at first they covered more kilometers each day, then they were reduced, and I believe the head of the column must have reached the Hungarian-Burgenland border in 10 or 12 days.

At the respective overnight stations, supply depots had already been set up by the Hungarian Gendarmerie. It was arranged that, in sanitary and hygienic respects, everything that could be done in wartime was done. We were all living on [unclear] and no longer had much expectation of a comfortable standard of living. Despite this great hardship, made worse by the traffic chaos caused by the destruction of the most important transport arteries, everything that was at least halfway possible was done to secure the trek of these 10,000 to the Burgenland border.

Are they already speaking of 14,000 women alone?

No, they cannot possibly say that; it is nonsense. Two thousand were set out on the march each day, and they then formed a marching block. I once drove along the route myself. The commander of the SD in Budapest personally drove along it; so did the Higher Police Chief in Hungary, General of Police Winkelmann. The Hungarian State Secretary B. personally drove along it; so did the State Secretary in the Hungarian Interior Ministry, Dr. L. Enderle. SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Hauttner? Possibly as well. Certainly many others also drove along the route. I can tell you today that I saw two corpses along the entire route; they were old Jews.

It is clear: where wood is planed, shavings fall. Did no shavings fall when much larger contingents of Germans from the East set out on the march after 1945? Were supply depots, sanitary facilities, and hygienic facilities set up for these Germans, as a matter of concern, after they had completed the day's march? Who did that? German thoroughness did it. With few exceptions, these Jewish treks, as I called them, arrived. I do not want to commit myself at all to 10,000; it may have been 15,000 or 1,000. In any case, I can state one thing definitively: there were certainly not more than 20,000; the time is too long

It may have been under 15,000, but let us not argue over a few thousand more or less. These contingents arrived there. They were not evacuated there, as had originally been agreed with the WVHA and as had been discussed in the full schedule…

To take them to Auschwitz?

No. They were taken in there by the local Kreisleiter and Ortsgruppenleiter and then had to support the German women, German children, and German elderly people, for only they were still at home. Those people had already been working for some time, digging with spades into the Burgenland soil to dig an enormous number of kilometers of anti-tank trenches. So these Jewish treks were put to work there; the Gauleiter of Lower Austria saw to their provisions. One has now linked the true event itself to something that seemed opportune to these fortune hunters, as I would call them. Perhaps they also reckoned that those involved were dead, or that, since they had to eke out their lives as U-boat men, they would keep silent.

Now the time has come when people are talking about it, and I am increasingly pleased. The Jewish ghetto of Budapest: as you once told me, there were supposed to have been 70,000 there, and I laughed off that number and told you there must have been 200,000. The intention had of course been to deport this ghetto, but I had the order to get through from east to west. What was in the Budapest ghetto was, in light of the experience in Warsaw, placed under the strictest control and therefore could not endanger us as a partisan force. For even the first germ of a revolt would, as I say, have been smothered at lightning speed.

I also know that the Arrow Cross, with Dr. L. Enderee at its head, would have been ready sooner rather than later to liquidate this Budapest ghetto in an unparalleled bloodbath. The RF did not authorize this because it would have taken place under the eyes of such a broad public that it would have been outright harmful to Reich interests, quite apart from the fact that no one would have been helped, neither the Jewish nor the non-Jewish side. No, by that time I was no longer considering deporting the Budapest Jewish ghetto; the transport situation in Hungary had become catastrophically bad, so deportation was technically no longer possible.

The statements from the various offices that you just named to me in telegram style, along with their efforts, which I gathered from your account had even included approaches abroad, seeking in some secret-service fashion to claim great laurels, are completely fabricated. The deportation of the 200,000 Jews from Budapest was no longer intended; it was no longer possible to exploit the presence of 200,000 Jews in Budapest for business, because Jewish circles would have told themselves that deportation was no longer feasible, that a march of 200,000 or even only 100,000 people along a route

of almost 200 km, let me tell you something, dear comrade S… I have dared many things, but a march at that time, under the most chaotic conditions, involving such an enormous mass of human material, would not only have been madness, it would have been super-madness. They would all have perished along the way; they would not have died, they would have perished, because at that time I could no longer set up supply depots or make any provision at all.

This was the time you named here as the alleged date after which someone, I believe me, or someone, had entertained the idea of transporting these masses on foot. It is sheer madness, technically impossible. Ask anyone with practical experience of dealing with masses under the most adverse conditions. I think if you wrote to my colleague General Z… or spoke to him, he would agree with me not only for collegial reasons but on purely professional grounds. But you do not need to go to Z…; ask Tito's experts, ask the experts who were in the Czecho. area after 1945. They can all say the same.

Wasn't it stated, not in court but to Kastner, that 1,200 people, including 80-year-old women, died during this seven-day march?

I tell you, that would have been about 10 percent. The figure, the percentage share of losses on the trek I had carried out, carried out on an order I had received, was a fraction of 1 percent. Because at that time a foot march like that had to be prepared with the utmost care, and it was prepared with such care that you cannot imagine it. It took me more work than if I had sent 100, no, 500 transport trains to Auschwitz. In Hungary it was not only the Sipo or the SD that had been sent there; Hungary was a European stage, the mirror of neutral foreign countries, and the mirror of our former enemy powers.

Against that backdrop we had to save face, and since we were already being described as thorough and comprehensive, we had to set an example here. You have smashed our transport routes; we are carrying out this whole affair in the most elegant form. That was the tenor. It did not matter whether there were 10,000 or 15,000 people; it was so incidental that I do not even know the number anymore. The important thing was to make a demonstration to the enemy that the bombing of the western route, that is, as seen from Hungary, did not impair our will and intention, because they…

…these routes were bombed so that the Jewish transport might be prevented; that was the leitmotif.

How do you know that?

I established that. I received it through the Higher SS and Police Leader, to whom I appeared daily to report while I was in Budapest. I did not ask for the corresponding responses; that would have been presumptuous, since I was too low in rank for that. I received Winkelmann's response in a fatherly, benevolent way. It may also be that Fesemeier told me these things. I know one thing: Fesemeier was an extraordinarily fearful man whenever matters arose that could cause us harm, even in the slightest, because Fesemeier had been a Reich plenipotentiary who walked on triple rubber soles and foresaw calamity before measures were even set in motion that might cause it. That was Fesemeier.

Were there also small children in this deportation?

No. It was march-capable personnel. The order was to put march-capable personnel on their feet. What the Hungarian Gendarmerie understood by 'march-capable' did not concern the German authorities, because the German authorities were not involved and we were not responsible for it; it would have been interference in internal affairs. I had advisers in the counties, including the Hungarian gendarmerie lieutenant Faerenzie. My advisers had from me the orders that Gruppenführer Müller gave me, supplementing them down to the detail. I formulated and passed on the RF's orders, and that order also said, in the Hungarian region, that avoidable hardships were to be avoided. I remember precisely that for this undertaking I demanded that only march-capable personnel be put on their feet.

From what age does one speak of being march-capable?

March-capable personnel ranges from 16 to 50, 56; under some circumstances one can go up to 60, depending on physical fitness. A 40-year-old can have an infirmity and not be march-capable.

Is it known to you that SS Ogrf. Hüttner, together with Hoest, had the assignment of supervising the march and reporting their observations?

Yes, I still know that. I remember that Hoest drove along this trek route. It wasn't only Hoest; several other people involved did so as well. I would like to name them, but I can't recall the term the WVHA used for them: [blotted]. They drove along this trek route. No doubt some took an interest because Jews were, after all, a pretext for a pleasant official journey to a country that had until then remained hidden to them. That was often a reason people liked to travel, and among other things it was also a…

…It had originally been planned that the trek would remain on German soil and be placed at the disposal of the SS WVHA, so that the political leaders could take it in for anti-tank ditch construction. That wasn't foreseen as such; it was improvised, I might say cleverly, by us Gauleiters, who supported the hard-working German blood at that border in the excavation of anti-tank ditches through welcome drivers…

Hüttner mentioned in his official report that, before the end of the war, about two-thirds of the way to Budapest there were columns of Jewish women, some up to 60 years old; many could no longer go on and lay on the road. When did he submit this report?

Around that time…

Is that proved, or is it a lie?

I don't know. Winkelmann told me, that is, Hüttner, that he was powerless in the matter and would be grateful if I could undertake something.

He told me that Eichmann was responsible…

That was me too; I had the order for it. I admit to that.

I mean, what do you say to this report?

I can't understand it, because it makes a mockery of the truth. It would have made my superior Müller tear his A… open, as he used to put it, if I had suffered a fiasco in that matter. I myself never heard even the slightest reproach from the very sensitive chief of the SD, Dr. Kaltenbrunner. I emphasize that and want it written down. I never heard the slightest reproach from Winkelmann either, who was himself a very sensitive man. None of these people can say that they were put under pressure by the Ostf. Eichmann, because in rank and official position I had to click my heels before them. If they wanted to make me into a Caligula, I must say that choosing a date before 1945 was very unfortunate.

These gentlemen strike themselves in the face with their own fist if they now claim that, before the end of 1945, I mean before the end of our war in 1945, not the end of the year, I let myself be tyrannized in some way by an Ostf., by a Sonderkommando leader Eichmann, by a desk officer, because nothing else can come of it if they tell me, 'He could do nothing about it.' I never in my life had a written special authorization from the RF; I never had a written special authorization from the chief of the Sipo. I had nothing special or extraordinary, only my rank and my official position. I always worked at 100 percent, I thought the matter through above all, and in giving orders I was certainly not lukewarm.

…I say that too; [too faint]. It would serve no purpose, but I admit that I carried out my duty exactly and correctly, so Müller once told me: 'If we had had 50 Eichmanns, we would automatically have won the war.' This was not meant, and did not refer, to the loss of the enemy's blood substance; no, it referred to hard power of enforcement and unconditional fidelity in carrying out received orders. And for that reason, understand me, Comrade S… I cannot understand at all that there were German officers who interpreted and construed the orders they received to suit themselves. So we had to lose the war. And you can also understand my defeatist and pessimistic attitude since the parade of Boks on the Champs de L… in Paris.

On 2 November, a few weeks later, you are said to have expressed your outrage furiously about certain men who could not judge whether people who had been on the road for seven or eight days should be considered fit for work, because various contingents could somehow return to Budapest. Do you remember anything along those lines? It might indicate that a certain surveillance mandate from Hüttner and Hoest had somehow come to your ears at the time.

I can tell you that I know exactly that, at that time, shots were fired by Kunz and Kinz? Who fired them I no longer know today, and it doesn't interest me at all. Hüttner? It may have been him too; I no longer know. Shots had come from so many quarters that I simply don't know. You can include Hüttner too; it no longer plays any role. There were so many places involved; I had been dealing with it for weeks. Only one thing: the RF never called me to account or reproached me; neither did the chief of the Sipo, nor, as I told you earlier, my immediate superior Gruppf.

Müller. Nor did the people I dealt with in Hungary, namely Winkelmann; he even congratulated me on this elegant execution. The Reich plenipotentiary, Dr. Feaemeier, congratulated me on the elegant execution. Dr. Enderle congratulated me on it too. With Enderle, I must say, I even drank to it with him. It was schnapps made from horse's milk, mare's milk. I drank it for the first time, which is why I still remember it. [handwriting] In any case, I drank mare's-milk schnapps that day and still remember the story.

What those people called it was [handwriting]; the word came back to me then. I considered this mare's-milk schnapps, made at the farm of my friend Dr. Enderle, excellent, although I had never drunk it before. I now associate these thoughts with it and can remember clearly. I also know that [too faint] fired across, and I know that may be right. Furious isn't the right word, but when I speak with my sonorous voice, which I

…could sometimes put on, here with the force of my conviction and the force of my legal position, I could mark and denounce injustice, whether the man was a Gruppf. or Ogruppf. In the heat of the fight, despite my very disciplined subordination, I would not say that I let myself be carried away. No, I felt obliged, in the most emphatic and clearest terms, to assert the principle that what was claimed was wrong and is wrong, if that was indeed the case. These people, who stood higher than I did in rank and official position, would never have tolerated such a tone from me, I emphasize it, a tone, if I had not been able to prove to them with state-police precision that what they had just presented as something they had heard, as a rule, was false and incorrect. Have I expressed myself clearly? Yes… good.

I am now getting into the same rage I fell into at that time, perhaps not so much today as then. Today a certain indifference has been added to my whole manner of expression, so that I can no longer demonstrate the power of conviction with which I probably did so then. But you will be able to put it roughly: why did they then bring no case against this little Ostf. and little desk officer in the Reich Security Main Office and temporary leader of the Sonderkommando Eichmann?

Why did they not bring proceedings against this little man? At that time, proceedings could be brought against high and highest ranks for the smallest trifles. No one could have done it more easily than the Higher SS and Police Leader Winkelmann in Hungary; it would even have been easy for the commander of the Sipo and SD, Standartenführer Geschke, to bring proceedings against me. Why, I ask myself, did they not only fail to do that, but congratulate me on the elegant solution to this problem? Why? Have I said enough about it?

Do you remember whether several groups, a certain number of sick people, were brought back to Budapest from these foot transports?

That is quite possible. I said that I demanded this from the Hungarian Gendarmerie. I must explain first: I demanded from the advance command of the Hungarian Gendarmerie that it set the daily marching distance and arrange places to receive them at the end of each day's march. Naturally, these were not supplied in the form of Pullman mattresses, that is clear, because at that time even an Eastern Front fighter could camp for days without a warm sip in his stomach. And if you tell me that I had taken the view that these Jews, on arrival at the destination, would be taken over by local authorities of the NSDAP in the territories of Greater Germany and immediately put to work, you surely can't imagine that the man who arrived at 10 o'clock already had a shovel by 10:15 and then, at 10:20, had already made the first spade stroke

[off the sheet] had to be obligated and was obligated, and then the work equipment was [blotted]. Anyone who is involved in the practical work knows that a very long span of time passes before the first shovelful of earth is dug out. In any event, more time passes than 100,000 Eastern Front fighters, and Western Front fighters too, had available to catch their breath between arrival and immediate deployment in combat. More time could pass, for example, between the rounding up of German women, children, and old people in areas from which Germans were rounded up and driven out after '45 and their being put to work. Here it went, so to speak, quick-quick. And who will tell me today that this was a crime against humanity?

Here I can only say one thing: when, at that time, it was already clear that our opponents included the Jews, who, through the mouth of their supreme superior, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, had declared war, and when we heard that corpses of German women and girls had been found, with only the bottoms of wine bottles still protruding between their thighs, my dear comrade S…, at that time there was no more fibbing. At that time we were no longer virgins who worked with kid gloves. At that time it was ordered, calculated, and carried out. I want to make that clear in this context, because we let ourselves be guided by the examples the enemy gave us; they determined the harshness of our measures.

Do you remember whether a larger number of sick people were brought to Budapest and then threatened with a summary court?

That is naked monkey-arse. First, the transport was not my responsibility; responsibility lay with Uncle Ferenczy of the Hungarian gendarmerie and his adjutant, Captain [handwriting]. Furthermore, I have never in my life threatened anyone with the words 'summary court' or 'court-martial', or threatened anyone with proceedings at all. Least of all my closest confidants, whom I am still inclined to call bosom friends. I am tempted to say, only once, no, twice, I had men subjected to proceedings: the Obersturmführer who beat Jews black and blue for me in the cellar, and my driver, who stole a toilet lid at the office.

Can you remember receiving a telegram from Becher in Switzerland at the end of November, confirming that the first five million francs had been deposited, but that the freeing of 1,368 Jews from Bergen-Belsen had to be carried out?

Becher never sent me a telegram from Switzerland; that would be news to me. I am an old travel-uncle; the longing to go to Switzerland again would probably have seized me, since I could easily have done so. I was free to slip into any territory in our European corner, and I would certainly have found official backing for doing it. No, that would have tempted me if I had had to go to Switzerland for Becher at that time. He may have done it without my knowledge; that is also possible, I don't know. But it is quite possible that Jews from Bergen-Belsen were freed.

I already told them, I freed for Dr. Kastner every contingent of Jews he named to me; it didn't matter to me whether it was 1,000 or 10,000 Jews.

It was shortly afterward, when Allied bombs struck the Budapest-Vienna line, chiefly its railway junctions, so that all rail traffic was impossible for a long time. That may serve as a point in time. On closer thought, the impatience of State Secretary Dr. L. E., for whom everything concerning the solution of the Jewish question in Hungary was moving far too slowly, was the factor that triggered this foot march. It was prepared by the organs of his gendarmerie units, in particular by State Secretary Ba and desk officer Ferenczy, and was accompanied by Hungarian gendarmes.

But since, despite the Hungarian government's forceful will, all such matters of fundamental importance also needed approval from the German offices leading on them, and a matter that would draw the world's attention needed approval from the head of the competent central office in Berlin, I must surely have submitted it to my immediate superior in a written memorandum asking for acknowledgment and directions. A matter of such importance could not have been handled otherwise. Throughout my assignment in Hungary, I drove to Berlin for briefings about every four weeks, at most every six, in a 3.4 Mercedes provided to me and fitted for fast night travel.

When fundamental orders arrived during that time, I was summoned several times by teletype to Müller in Berlin. My immediate and direct superior, Heinrich Müller, was as cautious and pedantic a bureaucrat as I was. He was no less careful than I was to use the convenient official channel to obtain a direction. This was called 'covering oneself.' I mention this because I once heard, in connection with one of these questions, that I always covered myself; I believe some author meant that in a book.

I want to explain the word 'abdecken.' It was not covering toward the outside, toward the enemy or neutral offices, but covering oneself before one's own superiors, against any possible so-called Stunk. 'Stunk' is as much a set phrase as 'abdecken', meaning trouble with German and non-German central offices that could have brought unpleasantness for the Reich. Hence the constant requests for acknowledgment, decisions, and directions. I can say that even the ever-cautious Müller, and his immediate superior Kaltenbrunner, who was often anxious and sometimes even indecisive, did not decide this themselves; they in turn sought the decision from the RF.

Thus the word 'Abdecken' is explained in its true meaning. The fact that a supreme decision existed regarding the setting out on foot of 10-5,000 Jews is clear today from the fact that no office could prevent or even stop this march. Once the last Hungarian central office, through L. E., and a very high office, a central office in the German Reich, had issued its direction, it also became clear that even the senior police chief in Hungary, Winkelmann, could do nothing. I can only say that in these matters it was less about the 10, 15, or 18,000

Jews, although Dr. LE [László Endre], or Dr. Jenen [unclear] in the Hungarian Interior Ministry, was always pushing with the greatest impatience for the so-called forcing of the solution of the Jewish question in Hungary and never let me rest. I don't mean that in a hostile sense, but in a friendly one, because he was one of the best friends I ever had. Essentially, it was about telling our enemies at the time: it does you no good to bomb or destroy our railway junctions on our way to the Eastern Front; your own allies, the Jews, will have to bear the inconveniences.

They are your allies, after all, because through the words of their spokesman, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, they declared war on us. In other words, leave these things alone and do nothing that benefits neither you nor us. As far as I remember, the Hungarian gendarmerie never again had to organize a foot march; apparently, this example did the job. To conclude this so-called foot-march matter, I must also say that I can no longer state with absolute certainty whether this Jewish contingent was seized by the Hungarian gendarmerie from some county in Hungary or from the Budapest Ghetto.

I believe, however, that nothing was transported out of the Ghetto except the contingent Dr. Kastner diverted, by age group, for the purposes he considered useful to Eretz-Israel. I can't swear that no Hungarian agency somehow obtained people from the Ghetto without the knowledge of the German offices to fill some transports. With that I would like to close the chapter on the foot march.

Gross must have been a man who worked with Kastner and Brandt, a Jew who worked with Brandt, a man whom Kastner deployed just as he deployed Brandt. I even believe that Gross was once at my office.

It seems you obliged Brandt or Kastner to take Gross along, because Gross was connected with your office and had to go along with Brandt as a kind of lookout?

It is possible that Gromeid or one of my other men played intelligence games with Gross. By play, I mean the intelligence game, the game within the secret services. But I was head of the office, I was the commander; I had no idea about the details in which my subordinate organs became involved and then disengaged. I was brought into the game only when fundamental decisions were involved; none of my subordinate officers could make a decision of a fundamental nature, because that was reserved for me. Of course, I could make such a decision only when it did not exceed the horizon assigned to me; otherwise I too first had to obtain instructions, to cover myself before my own superiors. That explains why I can't tell you today whether one or another sourpuss, whom I've long since lost sight of and barely remembered even then, played some role, because I had my people…

So I did not check them in detail; they were all case officers, each responsible for his own area.

Does the name Schindler mean anything to you?

No, I once had a Latin professor named that, but he had nothing to do with it; he died long ago.

The head of the workshops in the Krakow Ghetto?

I had nothing to do with such people.

What do you know about parachute agents who are said to have dropped over Hungary, during the uprising in Slovakia, and those of the Haganah?

I have absolutely nothing to say about that, except perhaps one thing, which is admittedly not confirmed, but what… My constant warning … Roman Senate … In any case, I believe the Haganah should be watched more closely than it is now. That was also why I courted this man from the Palace Office back then; it was why Heydrich had me accept the invitation I received to the Near East; it was why I became more closely involved with Zionism as a whole, not the main reason, a secondary one.

The main reason was emigration. I feared that down there, at that time, with Mussolini as an ally against the sword of Islam, some kind of trouble might be stirred up. Later, the circles that interested us were precisely those with whom we had a very close connection. It doesn't surprise me that the Haganah came to the aid of its Hungarian remnants here, with Allied help, at the last moment, when there was no longer anything to fear.

Mosche Krauss?

No, nothing.

Moscher Schweiger?

No.

The leader of the armed underground movement in Hungary?

In Hungary there was no underground movement until December 24, 1944, at 3 p. m. Until then I myself had been in Hungary, and no Jew dared raise even a single knife, let alone a firearm. That was the reason the RF sent me personally to Hungary, so that the kind of thing that happened to us in the General Government could not arise there. By December 24 at 3 p. m., nothing was left except the small units that had to shut themselves in under the RF's order; there were no police offices left. The Hungarian Gestapo was gone, the Hungarian government was gone, and it had been gone for days, because I stayed until 3 p. m. and then left with my driver. I had moved my office to Oedenburg long before. Until then, nothing had happened.

Kastner is supposed to have told you that he faced the greatest difficulties and resistance from Mosche Kraus, secretary of the Palace Office in Budapest?

I recognized the leaders of the Palace Office very early on. I already told you about Dr. Rothenberg from Vienna; he was such a leader of a Palace Office. As for the leader of a Palace Office, just read Adolf Boehm's "Der Judenstaat" today. Yes, those are the ambassadors and envoys of today's new State of Israel. I attributed heightened political significance to them, and…

I did quite well with that, because if Dr. K. had reported such a difficulty to me, I would certainly have radioed immediately; that was my métier. But let me suppose that Dr. K. had encountered even the slightest difficulty in the Hungarian area, or in the area under our influence, when it concerned achieving the goal assigned to me. That was what I needed Dr. K. for. Then I would have smoothed out those difficulties for Dr. K., just as I tore his wife from the clutches of the Hungarian gendarmerie. When a woman has been given such a bastinado, one does not readily let such an object go again, I can imagine. I fought for that woman then because I needed Dr. K. So if Dr. K. had come to me with difficulties involving some Mosche Kraus, I would simply have locked up that M.K.

Did K. ever speak about difficulties he had with the Jewish offices?

Yes, a great deal, but never about those offices, that is, about difficulties at offices I could have rolled over like a tank. Rather, he once formally gave up when he told me of the loss of his wife, of his hopelessness, loneliness, and abandonment, that he was without any help or support from international Jewry or from his friends abroad, Jews or non-Jews, and that, apart from the very few truly courageous people in Eretz-Israel, there was nothing here that could help him.

I can say that K. never came, perhaps at the beginning a few times until we warmed to each other, as one comes to the feared Gestapo potentate. Rather, he came to me, spoke his mind, sat down, smoked, and brought his wife along. If you could dissect that and put it into the right psychological channel, you would say: when two opponents negotiate like that, neither is afraid. They negotiate and bargain; that is a political matter.

The name of the Abwehr agent Dr. Rudi Setlascheck?

Could he have been from Dr. Geschke's office? He also had connections with Dr. Geschke, but perhaps I can help you: the Gestapo conducted proceedings against the entire Abwehr station in Budapest, the military counterintelligence station?

Yes, I don't know about that… But a major proceeding was conducted, among others by Klages, and the entire Abwehr station in Budapest was exposed, or rather expelled from the country to Vienna and from there into the Reich.

Was that connected with the cross-connections between these Abwehr stations and Kastner and his group?

Kastner and I controlled the situation in the Hungarian area absolutely; pardon the word, but let it serve to clarify. I played with many German and non-German agencies, as did Kastner. When K. wanted to take 600, 1,000, or several such contingents of Jews abroad, he could negotiate with whomever he wished, but he got them out of the country only after he received the final word from me. Conversely, I could negotiate with whomever I wished in Hungary; everyone would have made me every possible promise, and they undoubtedly made the same promises to K., but the final assurance, that I would really have peace in Budapest, that I would really have peace in the…

individual counties, so that I would not experience a Hungarian Warsaw; Kastner offered me that. Therefore … everyone played with everyone. Kastner and I were sovereign in this small sector of Hungarian affairs. Today people cite a thousand names; those thousand names have fallen into oblivion, because they were all people who were either involved in the principled matter or used such a principled struggle to harvest benefits for their own sector: (a) foreign exchange; (b) intelligence, in the form of information, smuggling people out along the same routes used by their own agents, or personal safeguards.

Brandt said that Wi had made an agreement with the Jewess Fleischmann, head of the international children's [not typed], at the end of 1942. He demanded 50,000 pounds to stop the deportations in Slovakia; the 50,000 pounds were paid to him, but apparently, unlike his later financial negotiations, they went into his own pocket. The only fact is that Wi kept his promise during these negotiations to stop the deportations. Is it possible that Wi achieved through a back channel that an order was issued to stop the deportations from Slovakia?

That is completely new to me. After a long pause had passed and no Jewish transports were taking place from Slovakia, Gruppenführer Müller sent me to Pressburg after I had reported to him that it seemed to me that difficulties of a fundamental nature were emerging in Slovakia. I set out and spoke with the Slovak Interior Minister Mach, and on that same day, that evening, the Slovak Interior Minister told me that he had just received word from his representative in Prague that an assassination attempt had been made against Heydrich.

I visited the German envoy in Pressburg that same day and put a knife to his chest, telling him that the Sipo chief wanted efforts set in motion immediately and without delay to remove the last Jews from Slovak territory. I told the Slovak Interior Minister the same thing, in rather blunt words and without any diplomatic courtesy, as ordered. I told the German envoy in our discussion, before my meeting with Mach, that I had conveyed this to him; it was not our first meeting, because I had known Mach from a time when he was still far from being Interior Minister, and therefore I could speak with him quite differently from the way Ludin [unclear], the German envoy, could have spoken.

Perhaps I discussed the matter with Mach even more briefly and clearly. If you tell me that Wi is supposed to have received 50,000 pounds, there are two possibilities: either the source you got it from is lying, or Wi had become disloyal, which I find hard to believe. I must ask myself what a man in our position at that time would do with an enormous sum of 50,000 pounds; it would be baffling to me… I must also say that I knew nothing of any receipt of 50,000 pounds or any order to collect it.

I had nothing to do with producing counterfeit pound notes, although millions and many millions in pound notes were later printed by us in Germany. Nor can I assume that some other office had an interest in collecting a measly sum of [unclear] pounds and selling a matter of principle for it, because such a thing would have become known and the Jewish question in the many European countries would have been [off the sheet] and would have…

…pushed onto a track, which was practically impossible to work on any further.

What do you say to this sentence? The negotiations were under way, and various difficulties the Jews were having caused a deadline to lapse, Wi's deadline, a particular deadline [not typed], and then the following: Wi showed that he wasn't to be trifled with and sent 3,000 people to the gas chambers; two days later this Jewish woman had all the money…

Either the source they got this from is lying, or Wi must have bluffed to such a degree that, given his intolerance, I wouldn't even want to credit him with it. I had no right, no authority to send even one Jew into even one gas chamber, nor any right to shoot even one Jew with a pistol, beat him down with a cudgel, hang him, or do anything of the sort. How much less right did a captain subordinate to me have?

It is also mentioned here that in 1943 Wi proposed, on the basis of $2 million, to halt deportations throughout Europe except in Germany and Poland, and that the Jews desperately searched for the money but couldn't raise it…

Don't go on. The source is lying, shamelessly. Suppose, then, that one of my captains were to demand $2 million in return for halting deportations from the European area, excluding Poland and Germany. If the commissioning office wanted to accept this whole arrangement, which would have meant a loss of face within our then allied states, let us accept all that. But never, never can they tell me that Jewry wasn't willing, or wasn't able, to raise those paltry $2 million for such a multitude of people, who would allegedly have been saved from deportation, when later it involved entirely different sums and much less was raised, as Becher in Hungary shows.

Yes, yes, but that is precisely his thesis: in 1942/43 the $2 million couldn't be raised, and therefore Wi made the counterproposal to halt the deportations for $200,000 a month.

First, Wi never had any right to that. When a matter had been settled ideologically for us, it was never sold in opposition to such a matter… That it was sold later, I know; that was what Becher achieved with the RF in exchange for foreign currency. At some point, somewhere, it was 10,000 trucks with trailers, winterized, in exchange for one million Jews. That made sense even to me, because it was about sparing German blood substance. I never got involved with dollars or foreign currency, because money meant nothing to me.

Winterized trucks for the East, fine, I agreed to that. It was worth fighting for and throwing myself into it with my whole self. I said once before that I had Kast, with several suitcases of foreign currency, unloaded at the responsible foreign-service fellows, at the Gestapo, not the Hungarian Gestapo. I mention this to emphasize how every office in Hungary had been eager to squeeze everything possible out of the Jews, to pinch and wring them under…

What you are saying now is this: Wi had no right, no order, no assignment for it. I've never heard of anything like that; it wouldn't have been hidden from me, because the matter was ultimately arranged among us so that not everyone could bungle around without being called to account. In other words, I checked my men as far as I could and as far as I was required to, to see whether they kept to the right path. I checked them… exactly as I know Müller always had me watched and checked. That was quite all right with me, and I wanted it that way, because someone who does what is right can let himself be watched. I am only annoyed by this jumble of lies, which is so primitive, and I wonder how he can put such a primitive thing before the public.

That would have been at two dollars per head, and he says here that Scheu… refused the money. Wi had Berlin start the extermination machine again… the transports went to Auschwitz, Majdanek, Trebl…; we Volksgenossen had to go into the gas chambers because Sammi Meier and [not typed] could only pay two dollars per head after the war. Perhaps the Allied foreign-exchange rules required that. The advance of $57,000 that Wi had received from the Jews for this deal, this $57,000 advance, Baron Dieter von Wi gave… to the commander of the SD and [not typed], because the deal did not come to a conclusion.

Wi wasn't a baron; he wasn't noble. He wasn't commander of the Sipo either; he was my agent, an adviser on the Jewish question in Pressburg, at the German envoy's office. That was his official title.

Brandt repeatedly tries in his book to make clear that he was the actual Jewish representative in negotiations with the German offices, and that only after he fled did Kastner take his place. That is all the more remarkable because the book appeared in '56, when Kastner was still alive, and this false claim by Brandt, in your view a false claim, that he was the real operator, the principal actor, surely could not have been refuted by Kastner. Or do you have any other explanation for why Brandt gives himself importance at Kastner's expense?

I said before that Brandt was Kastner's underling. If he insists in his book on claiming the opposite, I have this to say: Kastner and Brandt were closest friends, that is certain. After Brandt had spent several years watching his friend stand in the pillory of public opinion in the new State of Israel, fight for his life, and fight as a member of [handwriting] for the party he belonged to, Mapei, and after the trial Kastner brought against himself apparently failed to show the goal he sought, his friend Brandt stepped in.

Brandt, who could prove that he had been active abroad throughout this period, had fought here, in the truest sense of the word, for one million Jews, fought with Jewish and non-Jewish offices, fought with the minister of the [handwriting] Orient of the English Empire, fought with every possible economic [not typed] and with luminaries, the man, therefore, who could prove an alibi…

…for the Jews living in Palestine. So the man stepped forward, took his friend Kastner under his protection, because Kastner had involved himself with Gestapo matters in an intelligence service, turned the tables, and made himself Kastner's superior. Conveniently, Kastner now had countless ways to evade responsibility, as a mere recipient of orders or something similar. That could be an explanation, although one must bear in mind that the gravest Jewish accusations against Kastner were made precisely when Brandt was away.

The most serious accusations therefore come from the period when Brandt was away and, according to Brandt's version, Kastner had become responsible. We had kept in constant contact between Kastner and Brandt. If I had sent the second-in-command abroad instead of the chief, it would have been all right. If I had sent the second chief, F. Brandt, abroad, your conclusion wouldn't hold. When I send the chief abroad, he has a substitute.

The substitute can only do what the chief had previously given him as guidance, or what the chief then gave him by correspondence, through the technical route the Jews had at their disposal, which I don't know. Another parallel, though it didn't apply to us: when the head of a department in an office was detached, his permanent deputy, whom he always had, was put in his place and authorized to carry out the measures necessary during his chief's absence, without having to consult or ask the chief. In an institution that now operates illegally, the ways and means are entirely different from those in a legal apparatus.

What can you tell me about your office's involvement in carrying out the Night and Fog operations?

I know the Night and Fog decree, but I don't recall offhand what it says. It has nothing to do with Jews. Was it a decree from the RF, or one dating from Heydrich's time? I believe the Night and Fog decree concerned Communists, the National Opposition, and similar groups. There was no Night and Fog decree for Jews, nor was one needed, because the Führer had ordered the physical liquidation of this opponent. No Night and Fog decree was needed for that.

Brandt says that on 25 April 1944 he was ordered by you to your office and that they spoke there for the first time about one million Jews in return for something from the Jewish side. You had already cast serious doubt on this date.

I rejected that… The fact is that it was precisely B's birthday, and for that reason… I have rejected this date and must reject it, 25 April 1944. That was one month and almost exactly one week after I first set foot on Hungarian soil. Consider the amount of initial contact, negotiations, and organizational work needed even to obtain a first general authorization, that is, even the Hungarian government's wish to take over the Jews. Only a specialist can…

…form an idea of the work required, for example, to bring the Hungarian executive organs into position where the first Jewish registrations could be set in motion. Only a specialist can imagine how much work it meant at that time to get the transport trains delivered to the right place. I had to free German Order Police guard contingents, who in their regular rotation had to move their service from the loading station to the unloading station and return again.

When you speak with a specialist, a police specialist, no matter what country he comes from, he will tell you that the run-up time to the first transports, a month and a scant week, was already a witch's job, possible only when various components met on the same line, for example, when people who were looking for each other found each other, like Dr. L. E. and me. We were fortunate, and our opponents unfortunate, that the constellation was such that the first state secretary had the executive branch under him, the second had the legislature, and no third person had to be consulted.

In what country did that exist at all? Even taking that into account, a run-up time of five weeks is so short that there's no more to say. But if you now tell me that after the first transport I had already proposed such a deal, that contradicts all reason, because a matter first has to get moving before possibilities and [blotted] can be brought into the calculation at all. A deal involving 10,000 winterized trucks in exchange for one million Jews was something I couldn't even dare to consider in my official position; the idea wouldn't have occurred to me.

It could have occurred to me, it would have occurred to me, and perhaps it did occur to me, I don't know anymore. On the basis of the orders received from the RF, that is where they were negotiated. As proof that the date cannot be right, I would also point out that this deal fell during the period when, to use Kastner's words, the extermination machine in Auschwitz was running at full speed and the RF had halted the physical extermination. That was when the deal was negotiated, 10,000 trucks for one million Jews. That was therefore the summer of 1944. Brandt is wrong here, he is wrong.

He left on 15 May 1944…

If he left on 15 May, I would have been wrong across the board. Then… there really is nothing else to say except that I myself originated the whole thing, as astonishing as that sounds to me today, because I wouldn't have thought it possible that I had overridden a matter of principle. But if he left around that time, and I had not yet been with the RF, then I offered it to him on my own initiative. I must then withdraw everything I have said, even though, 13 or 14 years after the event, it goes against my understanding.

I don't know: did I originate the deal, did it arise from the interplay of forces, or from an order of the RF, or somehow… Then I must tell you frankly: I originated the deal. I must also stand by that, and I state it here equally clearly. Then I must also say that it no longer seems strange to me today that the RF received me so often afterward and continually expressed his goodwill toward me. It would, however, be the first time I had made such a far-reaching decision here…