The Eichmann and Sassen interview, O.65 file 86

… and asked for guidance in cases of uncertainty. Naturally, my section issued this guidance, either approving it or rejecting it, depending on the circumstances. The standard for a positive or negative answer was read from the applicable basic laws, decrees, police ordinances, or orders and directives from the RF or the Chief of the Sipo [Sicherheitspolizei, Security Police] and SD [Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service] that lay before the individual officers handling each matter. Only on the basis of such laws and orders could a subject officer work and decide at all.

I believe there is no government official, no Police Chief Inspector, no Government Assessor, and no Government Councillor who ever worked out a decision at a central authority and submitted it to his desk officer for signature, or to his desk officer for initialling with a request to pass it through official channels, that is, for the Chief of Office to initial it, or, if it was more fundamental, for the Chief of Office to send it to the Chief of the Sipo and SD, or, if it concerned top-level matters, for the Chief of the Sipo and SD to send it to the RF for signature.

Such a matter within a German central authority would first have to be born. That was the official route to subordinate offices. It goes without saying that, when a section had jurisdiction, the desk officer in charge of the section was responsible for obtaining basic guidance, since he had to supply his subject officers with the necessary working material. He took such basic directives from collections of laws, decrees, police ordinances, and existing directives from his superiors.

These orders arose either from legislative bodies or from direct orders by my superiors, who had been approached by outside offices remote from the Sipo and, in turn, sent such orders through official channels to the responsible desk officer, with directions for compliance. They also arose because the officer himself wrote to his superiors through official channels, explained the situation in a memorandum, and, under another Roman-numeral item, put forward a memorandum asking them to take note and give guidance. Here, then, the responsible desk officer had in a sense prompted his superiors to take a position on a particular subject and decide how the officer should proceed in future.

Letters bearing file number IV B 4 also went to offices that said they had no orders to issue to them

Yes, that goes without saying. If I take the subject officer of a Commander of the Sipo and SD, except for the Einsatzgruppen, they had nothing to write; there was no correspondence there. It was a short process in that area, a general order without any query. There were no guidelines to observe, no provision for old and infirm people, no guidelines for bearers of medals and decorations from the First World War, and no guidelines about so-called kinship by marriage with members of the two confessions. There were no guidelines at all; they followed a summa-summarium order, and no written word was needed. Otherwise, of course, it was, and all these inquiries were written clearly in the right-hand corner beneath the heading under the proper file reference, insofar as it was my

jurisdiction was concerned, it was IV B 4, then came the file number with a dash and the year's last two digits. These outgoing documents weren't always initialled by the desk officer. Often his permanent deputy initialled them. When the matter fell outside the section's jurisdiction, the Chief of Office IV, my immediate superior, signed them out. When his authority wasn't enough, the Chief of the Sipo and so on signed them and sent them upward. This was the usual Schema F process in every central government office, no matter which Reich Ministry it belonged to, and no one could break through such a process. It was nearly the same process found in almost all civilized countries, with small organizational differences.

Apart from a fundamental directive to Glo…, signed by Heydrich but bearing your section mark, do you recall any similar fundamental directives, or similar or matching directives issued by an office chief that also bore the reference mark of your desk…?

In any event, something of such scope and of such a kind, not… There was once a time when the Chief of the Sipo and SD ordered that a letter not be sent to Glo… through official channels, but that someone should travel there personally and urgently and hand it to him, with the direction that he burn it after the task was completed. Glo kept the letter in his small wall safe. Apart from that, letters of this kind and scope didn't pass through my section.

I had nearly 200,000 files in my open registry and perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 in my secret registry. The small difference between the secret and open registries was because existing orders treated all measures tied to the deportation of Jews as secret Reich matters, so the enemy wouldn't be told about those measures in advance. The approximate number of files was given to me once by my registrar, Ustf. Martin, in Berlin, when he wanted to show me how necessary it was to strengthen the registry staff.

In other words, so long as your file reference or the section's is cited, but the order or directive bears your signature or that of your permanent deputy, one needn't assume that the initiative or issuing of the order came directly from your section, from your desk?

If documents went to subordinate offices without my signature or that of my permanent deputy, … would one then assume that the order didn't come directly from you or your permanent deputy, but instead from a higher office referring to your desk, at least…?

That is usually assumed, but it needn't be so, because the document's content comes from basic directives, from the

form of a law right up to an order or directive. In Office IV, the word “order” itself was avoided, and “directive” was used instead, because much of the office consisted of civil servants, and such people can't be ordered; they are directed. In principle it's the same, but it is tied to the whole criminal-law position of a civil servant, for example in contrast with a military person. A military person can be governed by orders; a civil servant can't be ordered, but receives his directives. I can't give a civil servant a directive unless he has the needed written basis in his applicable collection.

Such material can also be given to him by me when he is [unclear], if the matter is small and doesn't exceed the section's scope… Not always. If, for example, the matter was entirely clear, say the Nuremberg Laws were before me, I simply drew on an implementing rule for a paragraph and decided and signed on that basis. But as a rule it always said: “It is communicated, it is ordered, it is requested, in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws, that such-and-such be done.” As a rule, that was no longer done; the law was cited and they were told. That gave the State Police headquarters written backing from my central authority and left it, in a sense, covered.

Just as I was covered with my superiors because I always had to keep my collection up to date, which lay with my subject officers partly as a working collection, but was also kept in the registry and could be pulled out for consultation at any time. There were subject officers who had to keep these matters in their heads. So a matter like this could bear my signature if the understanding I passed on was already present in a collection ranging from a law to a police ordinance. But only then could it bear my signature, or the signature of a desk officer and his permanent deputy, if its content didn't exceed the scope.

There had been an exhibition in Berlin, [unclear] Paradise… Sabotage acts had occurred. The Criminal Police assigned to investigate, or the Sabotage section of Office IV led by a Criminal Councillor, found that Jews had been mentioned in some connection. I received the order to summon the head of the Israelite Religious Community in Vienna, Dr. R. L., the two heads of the Religious Community in Prague, Dr. Weizmann and Dr. Edelstein, to Berlin, and Dr. Eppstein in Berlin. There were probably a few more. I was to receive them on a certain day at my office. When they were there, I told Müller. He came to my office, and I stood a little apart from the row of Jewish officials.

A few steps from me, Müller took up position and read a declaration, in substance: “Since it was found that Jews were also involved in the sabotage of the exhibition at [handwriting], I have summoned you here on the RF's order to inform you that four or six officials of the Jewish Religious Community of Berlin have been sentenced to death. The Berlin State Police Headquarters had by then found these Jews and taken them into custody. As far as I remember, they were Jews who had already come to the State Police's attention, and whom, for some reason, the State Police Headquarters, under the existing regulations, in any case

and these Jews were then taken to Oranienburg concentration camp and killed there on orders of the RF.

It would have gone beyond the scope of my desk. It wasn't my place, in my own authority as desk officer, to tell the Jews about an RF order to carry out a death sentence. It would have been the same as if I had signed the letter I was ordered by the Chief of the Sipo to write to Glo. That wasn't my place; I couldn't do that. In that situation I was a letter writer or letter carrier. The desk officer generally occupied a buffer position between those above and those below.

For it is now also clear that the writings that appeared in 1945 portray me, the former desk officer of Office IV b 4, as the murderer, as the mass murderer, and I have never killed a single Jew. No one from my desk, from the criminal-assistant trainee up to the government councillor, or from an SS [Schutzstaffel, Protection Squads] man up to the Standartenführer, has ever killed a Jew, killed anyone at all. No one in that circle, myself included, has ever issued an order to other offices to kill Jews. The section reference mark may have appeared at the top, but I received the order to draft and work out the letter. It was signed by the Chief of the Sipo or the RF, depending on the circumstances.

Leaving aside your personal relationships, knowledge of, and acquaintance with Heydrich, do you believe, when we consider the hostile image of Heydrich, that utterly cunning, cold… Do you believe Heydrich could have had a particular intention in this order, for example, to include your section reference mark?

No, I don't believe that. Where would the Chief of the Sipo and the SD have ended up if he had had to write all the letters himself? I had to draft many letters to all the Reich ministers and to all people of equal rank to him, when it concerned my area of responsibility. I was summoned; he threw the outline at me in clipped words. I made little notes at lightning speed. At first I needed them; later I didn't, because after years of working with a chief, you know the whole milieu, even how he addresses each minister. You picked all that up through the milieu and routine, so an outline was enough to draft a letter. The longer the collaboration lasted, the fewer changes were needed, whether for stylistic reasons, because the factual argument wasn't worked out firmly and precisely enough, or because it went too far in the other direction, too exact and precise…

Those were all changes that occurred at the beginning, later hardly any, and much depended on the man's mood. Müller was an unassuming spirit. Müller's letters had to be official, correct, and factual, without any personal touch.

After the declaration of independence, the actions against the Jews in Croatia were carried out by the Ustasha…

Did we have a Jewish affairs desk officer in A?

Yes, Adolmeid [not typed]. A was Hstf. A came to me to report. A's position in Croatia was almost the same as that of my Hstf Richter in Budapest. From Croatia, I believe, I had nothing to transport.

Or, it was said that initially the actions against the Jews were undertaken by the U…

were handled; three labor camps were set up in Croatia. In 1942, with the approval of the Croatian government, the clearing of these camps began.

And was A sent to Croatia for this purpose?

And for transporting the Jews to the Reich territory or to Poland, and so on? That's what's being alleged?

I wouldn't deny that. If I had the adviser there, it was the position of a judge in Bucharest, although I don't remember ever sending a transport of Jews out of Romania. So I wouldn't deny it so categorically in regard to Croatia. I know precisely what A described to me: that the Ustasha, acting on its own authority, carried out the extermination of the Jews in the Croatian area. He told me how repulsively they did it. I would almost say that in Croatia we arrived at a double solution: the Ustasha handled it on its own, and we also transported the Jews from the Croatian area to the Reich. Could that be right? Yes.

If we transported them, these Jews from the Croatian area certainly went to Auschwitz, because Auschwitz was the collection camp for all transports, with few exceptions. I believe no transports were sent to the General Government. The camps under Glo were supplied from what was found in the General Government, I believe…

Is it known to you that Croatia had a so-called Military Zone No. 2 under the Italian military administration? There was, in name only, an Italian prince-king of Croatia, who was never actually installed.

And are you aware that both the Ba… of the Croatian head of state and the Italian military government in Military Zone 2 put up strong opposition to deportation?

It isn't known to me, but it would be possible. In almost all countries, apart from a few exceptions, one could find an oppositional attitude at certain times, Hungary for example. But this opposition usually lasted only a short time; through changes and exchanges of personnel it was soon put back into normal channels. But one thing I know, and that is certain: the deportation effort, as they used to say at the time, had not met with much success.

He did not succeed in leading significant numbers of Croatian Jews out of Croatia. That fits the remark that the opposition was great. Now the opposition in Croatia wasn't about protecting the Jews there; they wanted to preserve sovereignty over Croatian affairs, so they preferred to give the order to their own Ustasha rather than hand Croatian Jews over to the Germans for transport out of Croatia. A told me repeatedly how radically the Ustasha solved the Jewish question.

Is it known to you that, within the Italian military administration in Military Zone 2, the Italians demanded that Jews born and settled in Zone 2 be protected against deportation in every case?

Yes. I know that A had difficulties with the Italians…

Was anything ever mentioned to you at the time in this connection about whether Frau Ba… or someone like that was supposed to be Jewish?

No. A was a clever fellow. I believe A was from Danzig and knew how to get into circles from which he could obtain and receive genuine intelligence material. He always described the matter to me very well, which is why I remember that he spoke about the difficulties he had with the Italians. But the Italians caused difficulties not only for the Germans but also for the Croats.

Are you aware that the Italians had all the Jews in their zone registered in order to delay matters?

I don't know that, but that would be quite in keeping with the treaties…

Did you also deal with the political attaché in Agram, Helm, in the deportation of the Jews?

No, I hardly think so, unless A had some substantive dealings with Helm. A was left to decide with whom he discussed his official difficulties.

It was said that after Helm's involvement, from March to May 1943, deportations were carried out in smaller groups.

That is possible. The task of the officer for Jewish affairs was to copy as closely as possible all the applicable decrees, directives, and laws he received into the area for which he was responsible. That was his task. To achieve it, he had to make contact with every possible office, German as well as Croatian, always with the permission of his immediate German superior in his work area.

You know nothing of Helm's involvement in the deportations?

No.

Is it known to you that the attitude of Ba… changed fundamentally from 1944 onward and that, among other things, he gave the International Red Cross permission to inspect the Jewish labor camps?

As for mid-1944, I don't know that, but why should Ba… have acted differently in his area than the RF did in his territory? The RF did the same thing when he had the Bernadotte negotiations conducted and, so to speak, had Jews from the concentration camps loaded into the white Swedish buses and handed over to the Swedes. Why should the Ba… of the Croatian state have acted differently? In the end, it wasn't about the RF putting himself in a milder light. I assume that Ba… couldn't have intended to move himself into a more favorable light through mitigating measures or actions. These concessions were nothing more than a business transaction to open talks with the enemy, much like the deal that unfortunately fell through: 10,000 winterized trucks for 1 million Jews, with the promise that the trucks wouldn't be used on the Western Front.

Now, regarding the Jews protected by the Italians, are you aware that they were concentrated on the island of Arbeth?

I have a dim recollection that A once wrote in his reports that the Italians were concentrating Jews on an island.

that after the collapse, when we of course occupied the entire territory, these Jews either fled to the Yugoslav partisans, to southern Italy, to Bar… [not typed] and so on, and only some were seized and destroyed by us. That was after the collapse, after we had occupied all the territories the Italians had held. In July 1943, when the collapse came, I was in France, and I also drove through the Riviera. I received an order to go to Paris, but I then drove to Paris over the Alps and down to the Riviera, where I approached several outposts of the commander of the Sipo and SD, including a Kommandeur. I still can't say what assignment I had, but I know that along the way I found several large camps where disarmed Italian troops were concentrated.

Perhaps the assignment was to take charge of the Jews previously protected by the Italians, so that I was to clarify that German units would take these Jews over as quickly as possible into the Croatian area. Perhaps. I don't know. It can't be right: Croatia and the Riviera are worlds apart. Then the assignment was a different one. The order is dated June 1, 1942, so this can't be right.

The guidelines developed over the years. They began with the RF's demand that we allow the Jews nothing beyond what German nationals from the German western provinces were allowed at the time through France: 50 kilos of baggage, and so on. Before that, during emigration, they could take away entire four-room and five-room apartments, and so on. When outright deportation began, the personal element was carried over at first from these guidelines; the material element naturally fell away, and it took roughly the following form. The deportation guidelines were about one and a half typewritten pages long. I can't reproduce them fully today after so long, but I think I can give the main points by saying this.

In territory where partisan activity wasn't expected, an age limit was set. But it wasn't set by years; it was based on fitness for transport. Only people fit for transport could be loaded. In the Reich and in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, no one could be evacuated if one spouse belonged to a Christian religious community and was a non-Jew under the Nuremberg laws, meaning they lived in a privileged mixed marriage. The holder of a bravery decoration from the First World War couldn't be evacuated, nor could anyone wounded in the First World War. A number of other groups were also excluded, but I can't recall them offhand. For the transport, it was ordered that loading take place in a humane manner

and that any avoidable hardships were to be avoided. The transport trains had to be equipped with the necessary food and drinking-water supplies. The transports had to be fitted with the necessary sanitary receptacles, and each wagon had to have a Jewish transport orderly, marked by an armband. At junction points where a longer stop was planned anyway, orders were given to replenish the drinking-water supplies and empty the sanitary containers. People with infectious diseases of any kind could not be evacuated.

How many people were normally allowed into such a wagon?

What was prescribed, what was written on the doors of the covered R wagons, was about 48 men. If 50 or 60 came in, that didn't matter, because the 48 men were counted with full baggage. This 48-man rule was written on the basis of a very old law, from a time when each soldier had a great deal of baggage, including a knapsack and other things that took up a lot of room. During the last World War, for example, a soldier's marching pack was much smaller, so more than 48 soldiers could have fit, and as a rule did.

Other factors also had to be considered: the length of the transport, the climate, the time of year, and whether it involved only men or women with small children. All that was to be taken into account, and it was taken into account in the Reich territory as well. What wasn't taken into account caused a great deal of friction between German and Hungarian offices and led to complaints from the receiving offices through the Hungarian Gendarmerie.

Were the wagons, once loaded, sealed?

That actually wasn't done. No, it wasn't done at all. Perhaps one cautious escort officer or another had the wagons sealed, but I know nothing about it. It wasn't part of the regulations, because a guard of about 30 men with one officer was enough. Above all, orders had been given that at the larger stopping points the water supplies were replenished and the sanitary containers emptied. The Jewish transport orderlies, who had to be marked by an armband, were allowed to step outside the wagon to tell the transport leader about any incidents and complaints.

Can you tell me what the food supply for such a transport train looked like, or what the norm was?

I can't say what was handed out in each instance. It was put into the wagons wagon by wagon; in any event, it couldn't be cooked. There was bread, for example, and probably sausage, cheese, or margarine. The transports weren't under way for weeks; at most they were on the road for three days. Don't forget that all these transports were arranged on the basis of a timetable conference at the Reich Transport Ministry. The trains had to keep a normal timetable; they couldn't simply travel however they pleased.

After Brandt flew out on May 15, did he first try to obtain from you a temporary suspension of all deportation measures? In vain?

Naturally, because I had the RF's order to continue the deportations forcibly. But the deportees were put to work and were no longer sent to physical extermination, because the RF had given the corresponding orders to the chief of the responsible main office.

After he was gone, about twelve days later, on May 27, 1944, the deportations were carried out in a more intense way. It seems the German deportation command was under Wi?

Generally, it doesn't matter which counties these deportations took place in. But it is quite possible that, if the Hungarian Gendarmerie carried out intensified roundups in a county under the direction of the Hungarian Interior Ministry, I would send Wi, my best horse in the stable, to support the local man I had there, and then put that local man under Wi. Wi had always been senior in rank…

In the last week of May and then at the start of June, were one or two trains sent out daily? Did a train consist of 45 wagons and carry about 3,000 people on average? So, 80 men to a wagon, I told you. Twenty-one square meters, four people per square meter?

In June, we certainly never put 80 people in a wagon. The loading did not take place under the authority of German offices in the Hungarian area; the Hungarian Gendarmerie under Lt. Col. Ferenczy was solely responsible. We had absolutely no right to object. Can you imagine a Hungarian lieutenant colonel who had a regular regiment above him taking orders from a German captain?

After one or two trains had been sent out daily, and that pace wasn't fast enough for E., did he seek six trains a day, so that they agreed on four trains?

That is possible.

At that time Kastner came to you accompanied by Hansi Brandt, Joel B.'s wife, and demanded an immediate halt to the deportations, which you rejected bluntly. Do you remember ever seeing Frau Brandt?

I don't remember seeing Frau Brandt, but I certainly won't deny it. Everyone and anyone came to me, and I can't remember. I wouldn't remember Frau Kastner either if she hadn't come to me so often with her husband and if I hadn't had the unusual episode of having to have her sought out. The word "brusque" may fit the author's sentence nicely, but I never treated Kastner brusquely. We can all testify that the negotiations with the Jewish political functionary took place in a conciliatory way.

Kastner himself writes about this. We will come back to it later; he denies it.

If I negotiated brusquely, I wouldn't ask a visitor to take a seat before an official body, and the visitor wouldn't be allowed to smoke. That makes it clear enough that the negotiations were never conducted in a brusque tone; I had negotiating partners before me. If I were summoned today before a [handwriting] central authority, I wouldn't allow myself to smoke.

I would even regard it as a special act of courtesy if the [not typed] official representative with whom I had to deal asked me to take a seat and did not leave me standing before his desk.

On May 27, the Hungarians arrested Kastner, Frau Brandt, Schulungoffenbach, and his wife? Through your intervention with the Hungarian police, they were placed under the Gestapo [Secret State Police] and immediately freed? Is it known to you that Kastner was arrested too?

It has completely slipped my mind.

Now, for these people's freedom, did the German envoy in Budapest intervene at your instigation or at your request?

We had no German envoy in Budapest, nor a chargé d'affaires. We had a Reich Plenipotentiary.

The envoy Veesenmayer then gave Sztójay, the Hungarian prime minister, and Peter Hein, chief of the Hungarian Gestapo, the order to hand the people over to the Germans immediately. Is that right?

That may be right, because [not typed]. As I told you before, I moved heaven and earth to get my wife back. That's right.

Yes, but this also applies to Kastner himself. These Jews had been caught by the Hungarian Gestapo because of forged documents and so on.

It was a [handwriting]. In truth, the Hungarian colleagues wanted to find out what the Jews paid the German offices, in other words, to get at the financial transaction. That was the reason; LE [László Endre] himself told me that.

On June 3, a telegram from Brandt arrived from Istanbul, and Brandt also demanded that the deportations stop? Eichmann refused, on the grounds that Brandt had to return. The agreement with the Jewish organization said that they would accept your offer. On that occasion, Kastner brought up about 800 certificate holders who were to travel through Germany to go abroad. These 800 people were listed, and an order was then given to bring the requested people from the provincial ghettos to Budapest. But without Kastner's knowledge, they later withdrew that order.

No. All the provincial ghettos were cleared; only Clausenburg remained untouched as a large community. Kastner then made his point to them, and they said to him, "I can't bring any Jews to Budapest now. I have to go to the Hungarian minister [not typed]; he will raise the Braun-Weiss matter with me in some unpleasant way, and I can't do anything." Kastner then told them, "You have always said that you keep your word. In keeping with our agreement, you telegraphed to Clausenburg, didn't you?"

They replied, "Yesterday I took back the order by telegram. Is that clear? I have no time for you." To that I have to say it is fabricated. First, it wasn't 800 Jews but 700. Second, the 700 Jews were placed under the guard of members of the Florian Geyer Division, which was subordinate to Becher, to protect them from any attempt to seize them. The 700 Jews listed by K. did not go through Germany; no transport ever went that way. I wouldn't have been allowed to do that, because the German Gauleiters themselves would have raised a storm…

They went via Romania to Palestine. 2. I never spoke with a Hungarian minister named [not typed]. I never spoke with any Hungarian minister at all. I spoke only with the two state secretaries as the highest authority, except once, briefly, at a luncheon, with the Hungarian prime minister, Sztójay. K never told me that I hadn't kept my word. There was no reason for that, because the Jewish side never made any kind of [not typed] declaration that the deal, the agreed deal, was complete and that I could now send the promised 100,000 Jews away.

That isn't the point. The point is that you had promised him 700 or 800 Jews from the ghettos…

Where he got the 700 was of no importance to me. He described them as 700 young people. However Kastner got those 700 young people, he could take them from anywhere in the Hungarian area. He could even have taken them from the German area. He could take them from wherever he wanted.

The point is that they had promised to give him these people, wherever they came from, but left only the Clausenburg ghetto untouched. They later withdrew the order for the 700, whereupon Kastner appeared before them, in the presence of Groneid, Will, Hunsche, and Novak, and, according to Kastner's account, had a very stormy argument with them. They then told him, "I have withdrawn the order; there is nothing more to be done." Kastner understood that if he couldn't make them relent, he would appear to the Jews as the loser in this game, as a traitor.

Kastner then said, "Will you bring these people from the provinces to Budapest?"

No. I said no, and it remains no.

On these questions, which are dealt with in the book's account of J. B., I have the following to say.

1. In principle, it is a mixture of truth and fiction.

2. In detail: I had the [unclear] of the RF throughout the negotiations with the Jews. Their aims were: a) to clear the Hungarian area of Jews; and b) the RF's possible material interests in the motorization of the 8th and 22nd SS Cavalry Divisions. I had no need to haggle over this; it would have been too much trouble. I always favored brief negotiations. The negotiations with the Jewish officials lasted, depending on the scale, five minutes or half an hour, perhaps a little more, but never two hours. Looking at the matter today, while I am not in a position to give an exact account of the course of the discussion, I am surprised that the other side is able to do so…

You wrote it down right away…

I have this to say: whenever Kastner approached me about a contingent of Jews to be taken abroad, which he did often, I approved it, so to speak, off the cuff, and let him settle the details with Gromeid. I said it was a mixture of truth and fiction, and that is true insofar as one sentence still comes to me today, namely… then I would have to guard the camp… I had little personnel, and a few men from the Florian Geier group, under Becher's command, actually guarded these 700 Jews. Becher had assigned them to the duty. That is correct.

What seems clear to me is that the author wants to conjure up a suspenseful moment here, and bring the finesse of the Jewish negotiators to the surface like a grease spot on water. In reality, all these negotiations were much more sober and much shorter. Dr. Kastner would never have made remarks like the ones you just mentioned to me, not out of fear, but because his personal decency would have forbidden it. Kastner was what people call a well-brought-up man.

If that is still not enough explanation from me, I must set the author straight. Almost anything said here is conceivable, but one thing is inconceivable: that one of my Hauptsturmführer officers, in a conference with opponents, would have said to me, "But look, Adolf…"

1. The phrase "But look" comes from a J. B. raised in [not typed]; it also belongs to my way of speaking, but never to the way of speaking of someone raised in northern Germany.

2. None of my subordinates would ever have dared, even if I was on familiar terms with him, to call me by my first name during a negotiation.

But he doesn't say "But look…" He says, "I believe, Adolf…"

Then that one word falls away, but the word Adolf alone… It is inconceivable that a subordinate in a conference… I have nothing more to explain.

In Klausenburg I never maintained a concentration camp…

This isn't about the concentration camp; it's about a ghetto…

I don't know about that. Those are all matters handled chiefly by the Hungarian gendarmerie, which registered and concentrated the Jews of their country and…

This isn't about the Hungarians; it's about the 700 people you promised would be taken out of Klausenburg, out of the ghetto.

Where he got them from didn't interest me. He could have taken them out of the camp as well; it didn't matter where he wanted to get them from. Among those 700 he could have had, God knows, any kind of people, perhaps some who had killed German Wehrmacht personnel in Poland. I never checked them. Where they came from was entirely secondary. He could have taken them from anywhere, is that clear?

In Jewish circles, K. was later heavily reproached for spending too much energy on rescuing these 17,000, the so-called Bergen-Belsen transport. You can confirm, so to speak, that K. really kept getting on your nerves over the matter?

Yes, that's right.

Were you already aware then that all of K.'s relatives and friends had found shelter in this transport?

I didn't know that. He could put anyone he wanted into the transport; he decided that himself.

But why was it immaterial to your office whether influential Jews, dangerous to the Reich or otherwise, got out?

The extent to which these [not typed], dangerous Jews could really have become dangerous to us in the relatively short time before their full striking power took effect, and the extent to which the 10,000 trucks we hoped for would actually be allowed to enter, was for the RF to weigh. The first would have taken a long time; the second we would certainly have had. The trucks would have rolled; everything else had to be subordinated to that.

I mean, with this mass of Jews who were present, it would have been a small matter for the German officials themselves to select those considered harmless, so as to reach the number of [blotted] Jews to be released while still taking precautions.

The really influential or dangerous Jew also had enough connections and relationships. In the general chaos in Hungary, he crossed the green border anyway. On the Hungarian side there was, after all, a legion of Magyars who took pleasure in getting one over on the Germans by letting their opponents slip across the green border. There was also a legion of Magyars who had no idea and who, for money and kind words, opened up these possibilities. The country had been too open in every direction throughout the war, giving an agile Jew the chance to flee across the green border.

Should I then, of all people, check the 700 people K. named to me? In reality there were certainly more than 1,000 who had gone off to Palestine. Should I still check them and thereby bring trouble on myself with the Hungarian gendarmerie? These were things that happened, so to speak, at night. It was, so to speak, a gentlemen's agreement between K. and me.

Do you know what became of this K. transport?

I think K. took his people to Palestine via Romania.

They are supposed to have arrived in Switzerland in April 1945, that is, [too faint] months later…

… and specifically at the time when Becher was in Switzerland?

You say one transport? All 1,800 arrived in Switzerland, and they arrived there only in April.

You lost sight of them?

Yes. What did a transport of 700 or 7,000 Jews matter to me by comparison? I had orders to comb Hungary from east to west, and I didn't need to exert much effort. On the contrary, Dr. L. E. kept pressing me to take more from him each day than Pohl took from me. Once I had the people, they were a burden to me between the departure signal at the loading station and the arrival signal at the terminal. I was responsible for that interval. What happened before or after was beyond any influence of mine; I no longer had official responsibility for it. My duty was to take the Jews from the Hungarians and deliver them. If L. E. demanded more from me, speed was what mattered to him; for me, what mattered was the number of wagons and transport trains I received from the Reich Transport Ministry…

Brandt says that about a quarter of the Jews survived the war?

One quarter is probably too low, when we see how many supposedly gassed Jews are still walking around the world today. It is thrown in one's face like sarcasm: "That one is gassed too? That one ought to be gassed too…" You see only gassed Jews walking around today, enjoying better health than the rest of us…

If Brandt says that a quarter of the Jews survived, that means 125,000 were sent to extermination and the rest are still alive. I reckon 500,000 Jews of Hungarian citizenship were evacuated. A quarter of that is 125,000. If we calculate very, very generously, it may be that 125,000 were sent to physical extermination and the remaining 375,000 are still alive today. And that is the truth.

But how could they have been sent to physical extermination if the RF's order had already arrived in April?

Exactly. The RF did not rescind that order until the end of the war, no, no. I won't commit myself to any number; I only want to make a comparison, and it may well be that Brandt means the reverse. Very few Jews of Hungarian citizenship were sent to physical extermination; no one knows how many. One would have to ask the people at the concentration camps.

But the RF's order to stop physical extermination dates from April 1944? From the time the 10,000 trucks were running…

So this stop order was never rescinded before the end of the war?

No.

You arrived in Budapest in March? So there was only one month for physical extermination?

If you calculate the lead time each authority needs, including negotiations with the Hungarian authorities, you would have to be a bureaucratic magician to have settled such difficult negotiations within fourteen days, something practice has never yet confirmed. So I say that if you claim that at most this quarter was sent to physical extermination, then that physical extermi…

… must have been carried out under Hungarian direction? It could not have happened on the German side, because the Reichsführer order to stop it was already in place.

You know that April 25 has always seemed very early to me…

No, it may well be right. Brandt flew to Istanbul on May 15, and he had already been negotiating with you for weeks beforehand…

Yes, that's right. On April 25 you had your last meeting with him. That means you had previously received the RF's instruction about the 10,000 trucks. So it was probably ready for decision around April 20. In other words, weeks had passed before the whole matter had progressed that far.

So if you had already begun deporting in April, if the operation could already be running in April, it follows that these people could not have been sent to physical extermination.

Arithmetically impossible, yes…

How else could it be, if it is arithmetically impossible?

I tell you, Hungarian Jews, don't fixate on one quarter or three-quarters, which I just assumed. I only wanted to prove to you that it is unthinkable that Jews of Hungarian citizenship are actually alive.

Before you went to Budapest, no Jewish transports had departed?

No, no.

The Hungarians also handed no Jews over to the Germans?

No, no.

So the Hungarian Jewish population was untouched, unless the Hungarians themselves carried out some physical extermination?

That is beyond my knowledge…

There are also some [not typed] accounts from the Hungarian side, from 1941, 1942, and 1943, saying that 1,000 Jews perished at one point and 2,000 at another. But you only heard about that, too?

Why should the Jew Brandt, as the author of his book, lie any less than Jewish mentality calls for? For more than 2,000 years, it has always played the eternally persecuted. It is always innocent, always the injured party, and the blame always belongs to someone else. In shifting blame onto a third person, the Jew has gone so far over 2,000 years that he not only assigns to that person what he had to do for reasons of self-preservation, but also lays on him what he never intended and never carried out.

Why should Brandt be different? He is the son of a half-rabbi. The more he plays on pity, the more he joins the chorus of all Jews who, represented by Goldmann, demanded from Germany, now rich again, and received around 13 or 18 billion marks. The Jews' tendency, will, and aim, represented by Goldmann, is to keep pushing the number higher and higher. The economic fiasco Israel continually experiences, and the adventures it has undertaken, cost an unbelievable amount of money.

According to their own Jewish accounts, they scrape together 50 million dollars a year from the world. Germany gives this state 250 or 270 million dollars a year, five times what international Jewry can raise in a calendar year, and that is still too little because the country cannot live. So this man, too, was undoubtedly influenced to play on the tear ducts, to tear open the West German DM [Deutsche Mark] purse still further and get more billions of Deutschmarks, because they can calculate, purely mathematically, the end of their days.

It still annoys me today, time and again, whenever I have to read such banal lies, or when third parties tell me these lies and believe them as well…

I can only say again that what the author says here about a quarter has turned everything upside down. As I already said, don't mix me up with that quarter … the quarter is the other way around.

It is, so to speak, thanks to the whole history of the negotiations, thanks to the delays, and to the genuinely low brutality of an RF, that all the Jews with Hungarian citizenship are still alive. Ask any Hungarian; he will confirm it. Ask the Hungarians who came after the last uprising in Hungary. You mustn't ask the first refugees, because they were the Jews. Those who came last were the proper ones, and Jews were mixed in among them. What does the Hungarian [handwriting] consist of today? Of Jews. What was the uprising in Hungary? An uprising against its own Marxist Jews, who occupy positions of influence in enormous numbers. Look at the last Hungarian uprising and compare it, proportionally, with our deportations of Jews…

Call as witnesses to this statistic the Hungarians who fought, but who fought as Hungarian patriots.

Do you remember the name of the small holding camp where K. kept the people he had selected? Columbusgasse?

No, he had a place of his own where he housed these fellows. I mentioned earlier that I also posted guards so that they could escape any possible intervention from the Hungarian side, since we were, after all, dealing with a sovereign Hungarian government.

When Brandt stayed away longer than expected, did you say to K.: “If Brandt doesn't return in three days, I'll start the mills in Auschwitz again?”

The word “mills” I heard from K. for the first time. I wanted to stop the death mills in Auschwitz? No, the extermination machinery… The word “mills” doesn't come easily to my tongue. What kind of fool do they take me for, when I spent weeks negotiating with a man I sent off, believing he would return from far-off Constantinople within three days? That would be an insult to my intelligence. Besides, it wasn't up to me whether any extermination machinery should be started or stopped; that was solely the RF's authority.

Kastner then asked you in mid-June 1944, when there was no word from Brandt, to hold back 100,000 of the people in Hungary designated for transport, to keep them ready in case the Brandt operation succeeded. The Javada would immediately provide 5 million Swiss francs as an advance. You accepted this proposal from Kastner, but you said that 100,000 couldn't be the number. You could send a dozen deportation trains with about 30,000 Jews to Austria and put them on ice there. But we can't take those 30,000 from the Ka… or Transylvania, because the Jews there are more valuable and more fertile. “I have no interest in keeping them alive.” The 30,000 … from the Hungarian heartland.

But the money, the 5 million francs, you had to put on the table. Then 18,000 people were sent in six trains to Strashof. But the 5 million francs were never paid to the Germans, never paid at all. In the end it was handed to SS-Ostf. Becher, and Becher had no idea it was for the people at Strashof. He assumed it was for those at Bergen-Belsen, who then traveled to Switzerland…

Do you remember such a proposal from Kastner involving 100,000 Jews?

No, that's out of the question. But you did then send six trains with about 30,000 Jews to Strashof; they weren't supposed to consist of people of reproductive age.

In other words, was I supposed to send nothing but old sacks to Strashof? No, not like that. They were valuable Jews who weren't of reproductive age. I combed Hungary from east to west and didn't give a damn where they went, because they were put on ice, yes indeed.

What Brandt either doesn't want to remember or can't remember is that a man who handled intelligence matters at the BDS [Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Commander of the Security Police and SD] may have told him what the Hungarian Gestapo may have told him, so that they could get their foreign currency. Why didn't he bring up these negotiations? Because these people perhaps owned nothing or perhaps lacked influence. And I am supposed to have said all that, I, the representative of the German Gestapo… He throws everything together in one sauerkraut pot.

There was talk only of 100,000; that's what I said. As soon as the telegram came, the matter was settled. Then there was no more talk of over 100,000. Whatever else came of it, a few million in foreign currency of every kind, I don't know. Surely the people who squeezed the foreign currency out of him had boasted about it themselves and threatened to tell the wicked Eichmann, and so on.

I already told you that when Becher had difficulties with Kastner, he brought in some business officer to bring the matter to a successful end. He behaved like a jumping jack and shouted in a way utterly unbecoming an SS officer: “If you can't fulfil this, I'll ask SS-Ostf. E. to have another 10,000 Jews gassed.” After Kastner left, I took Becher aside, reprimanded him, and told him he wasn't a member of the Gestapo and had no business meddling in this. I'd report it. Perhaps Müller wanted him for that reason…

You see, Becher was a cool businessman. Later I began to have doubts and asked myself: Was he trying to secure an alibi for himself with Kastner through this whole affair? Or was he trying to lull me into a sense of security with this performance, having first agreed the whole act with Kastner? The latter seemed likely to me; I told Müller that as well.

But that's a big one, for an SS officer to…

Yes, that's a big dog, and that Wau-Wau was running around free in Germany after 1945, barking that he had helped so-and-so many Jews.

Kastner personally got him out of the clutches of the SS pursuers at the time.

Do you still remember those 18,000 who came to Strashof?

No. Strashof is familiar to me; quite a few must have ended up there.

There is a fairly general version that says you basically found this deal, Jews for trucks, repugnant, that it disgusted you, and that you acted only because you'd received an order to do it. You took the corresponding measures, but at bottom the whole action was repugnant to you, and you wanted to carry out this entire policy toward the Jews with iron consistency. In that sense you had the direct support of your superiors, but you both also had to submit to the RF's order, and you did so, even though your heart was never in it…

So, in other words, we would have preferred to kill them?

This is what I have to say: at heart I was with no enemy at all. If I had followed my heart, I would have preferred every enemy of the Reich dead rather than alive, because only a dead enemy of the Reich is good.

In particular, when I received an order, I always carried that order out, by the hangman, and I'm still proud of that today because I fulfilled my oath. I have nothing more to say.

Do you remember any conversations or remarks from which one could conclude that this deal was repugnant to you?

No. Why should it have been repugnant to me? In that era, every person had a best friend, and mine was in the SS Cavalry Division. I knew how he struggled and did his best to defend his few square kilometres. I told you how I got him grenades, how I celebrated his birthday with him, and how we got to know each other as young commanders. Wherever I could help him, I did. His division had been treated like a stepchild, probably because it lacked material resources. Do you believe that if I had received an order from the RF to motorize the 22nd and 8th [not typed] with 10,000 trucks, I would have let the million Jews go where the pepper grows, as long as I could give 5,000 trucks to my friend's division? I never asked my heart, and I had no right to ask it. I had to ask Germany, not my heart, which amounted to the same thing…

Can you tell me what Müller's attitude toward this deal was?

Just as cold as mine: if we could exchange a number x of enemies of the Reich for military advantages, any deal was worth carrying out. And I'm convinced that, if necessary, we would have given them 2 million for those 10,000 trucks. I would have bargained out whatever could be bargained. That is another proof that the Jews had not been burned up; they were there. You have no idea what either side could have gained from this, Jew or non-Jew.

Did Kaltenbrunner, in the course of that friendship, ever open his heart about this deal?

Yes. What benefits the people is right; that was our feeling. Kaltenbrunner was also an order-receiver…

…and carried out his orders in the same way, only from a higher level. Müller was an order-receiver and carried out his orders from a middle-high level, and I carried out my orders from a subordinate level, viewed only as a matter of office and group structure. If we had asked ourselves each time whether something was right or wrong, we could just as well have pulled a sleeping cap over our heads and gone to sleep (good night). Unfortunately, others did that, and that is why we did not lose the war.

When Brandt was in Constantinople and was supposed to return, but was arrested, the Davada had made plans to send Bader to Budapest. They are said to have obtained a visa for him, which the German Embassy in Constantinople handed to Bader, but when he was supposed to leave, he made excuses and did not go. Brandt attributes this to the fact that even Mosch… and Ben… forbade Bader, as a Palestinian citizen, to make the journey. They wanted the negotiations moved from Budapest to a neutral place. That took time and was put off, and finally they were sent to Budapest by the diplomatic post of a neutral country. Brandt says this tragic delay, for which the Jewish agencies alone were responsible, cost several hundred thousand people their lives…

Not their lives. They were probably transported to Auschwitz, but kept alive there.

Do you remember this version, that you could support us in our interests, truthfully, of course?

Do you remember whether you took any steps to obtain a visa for an emissary who was supposed to return to Budapest in Brandt's place? Do you remember anything else about this Bader?

It's possible that I spoke with Kastner about it; we were talking about it all the time. Anyone who came, anyone who came in connection with the matter, would have received free entry and safe conduct…

On July 7, the interim agreement arrived in Budapest, and Kastner and Mrs. Brandt immediately told Becher about it. Becher said, “Himmler will accept it; I'm going to Berlin to push it through.” Eichmann then said to Kastner, “Send a telegram to Constantinople at once. We are ready to negotiate. Name a delegate.”

Do you remember anything about this story, this agreement? Had Becher already become so actively involved then? Did he, so to speak, take the lead in the matter out of your hands?

Did he want to? He couldn't, but sometimes, because of his own incompetence, he overstepped the limits of his authority.

Do you remember that, in the next negotiations, Becher, accompanied by Kastner in Lisbon, was to represent the SS?

I don't remember that.

Were the deportations stopped immediately after this agreement?

No. They continued until the Hungarian province was free of Jews.

Do you remember when it was decided that Becher would travel to Portugal to meet the Jewish delegates, accompanied by Kastner? Do you remember whether you approved it or rejected it?

No, that would have exceeded the limits of my authority anyway.

Wouldn't it have been possible for Becher to receive permission directly from the RF…?

No. Then I would at least have heard something about it. After all, he was never an official.

But he did travel to Switzerland on the RF's orders, to negotiate with the Jews…

But that was much later, when the RF was negotiating with Bernadotte. Becher was brought into the Bernadotte negotiations only at the margins.

Around that time, or shortly afterward, it became known that Brandt had been arrested by the Allies. Becher is said to have become frightened about entering Allied territory?

I believe the following. All these detailed matters were handled by Ostf. Grom on my instructions. He knows much more about them because he only had to keep his head free for these things, whereas I was interested only in the fundamentals. The small details at the margins didn't interest me at all, not in Hungary either. Perhaps I signed off on some things and so took note of them; that's how it happens that I know some things. But for everything subordinate, one has a permanent deputy.

My task in Hungary had been to make sure that we weren't the ones taking the Jews away from the Hungarians, but that the Magyars asked us to take them. My task was to see that the listing, the rounding-up, and the loading were done by the Hungarian gendarmerie, not by us. In that respect my mission was a Jesuitical one, and getting to that point naturally required many conferences. The details beneath that horizon were the job of my permanent deputy. So when you ask me about one matter or another, they still seem inconsequential to me, and I can't give you a full answer.

Do you remember whether Hauptsturmführer Klages had an adjutant named Kraus?

Hauptsturmführer Klages was a desk officer with the commander of the Sipo and SD in Hungary. Desk officers with a commander had no adjutants, anywhere.

Do you remember the Hungarian lieutenant colonel Garseli?

No.

Is it true that Klages was shot by Hungarian officers? Around August or September 1944.

No. During my time in Hungary, no important man of the Sipo was shot.

And you know nothing about the Israeli paratroopers Klages negotiated with? About a parachutist who posed as a negotiator in the Brandt affair?

You mean the dropping of enemy agents? Yes, that also happened in Hungary. Klages was responsible for it; it was his department…

But you know nothing about it?

No.

Now it seems that after the Allied landing in Normandy, after the fall of Paris, and after July 20, the Hungarians began to waver, and the Jews immediately took advantage of this.

… and, among others, ecclesiastical dignitaries protested sharply against the deportations, including Rotha, the then Apostolic Nuncio… Now it appears that on July 26, 1944, Roosevelt also took a step with Horthy. Horthy convened a Crown Council that same day, and The prime minister was instructed to put an immediate end to the deportations…

Nonsense…

That happened on the same day that Eichmann, the opponent, summoned the head of the Hungarian Gendarmerie, Faerenzie, and State Secretary L.E. to a meeting to work out a plan for evacuating about 200,000 Budapest Jews. You came to it immediately and decided that between June 5 and 12, within a single week, they would somehow all be sent to Auschwitz. The Jews were to be moved into houses marked with the yellow star as preparation for the next stage of the evacuation. The Hungarian prime minister didn't dare openly oppose Eichmann in order to carry out the Crown Council's formal decision.

Eichmann then told Kastner, 'I am clearing out the Budapest Jews. About 30,000 Jews will remain, not very valuable human material.' He continued, 'If you wish, I can take them all to Austria. They will be held ready for the transaction you promise will take place in Istanbul, though I don't believe it.' Meanwhile, resistance in Hungary grew sharper. Even the leaders of the Hungarian Gendarmerie refused to provide troops for the deportations. Horthy couldn't give direct orders, but powerful groups were forming inside the Hungarian government.

Under Horthy and his son's influence, they were breaking with the Axis and working against Eichmann's Jewish commando. Eichmann was forced to carry out partial deportations illegally. Even on July 14, after deportations had long been forbidden by the Hungarian authorities, he tried with B. to smuggle 15,000 Jews from an internment camp out of the country. The Jewish Council immediately notified Horthy's Cabinet Chancellery, and the train was brought back. It was only a sham success. A few days later, Eichmann had the members of the Jewish Council summoned to his headquarters and kept them there until late evening.

In the meantime, the whole camp was transported away, and another camp was also liquidated. The prime minister feared Eichmann more than the Reich Administrator. But Eichmann now felt Hungarian resistance everywhere and became more yielding. He demanded the surrender of Jews employed in Hungarian labor service. That demand met a wall, but the Hungarian minister wouldn't negotiate. When he heard of Eichmann's plans to begin deporting Budapest on July 15, he promptly called up all the men of Budapest for labor service to keep them out of German hands.

What do you have to say now? I have two questions to ask. When did Horthy leave the country?

In October.

When was the first V-1 fired?

On June 7.

And when does Brandt say that Hungarian resistance had eased because of me?

At the beginning of July. When the first V-1 was fired at London, I came to Dr. L.E. in the morning. He showed me a Hungarian morning paper saying that the retaliation had begun, and he reveled in the words, 'Victory is ours…'

It wasn't only that the senior Hungarian government officials in question showed signs of wavering. The opposite was true: E. and B. now believed in final victory with even greater force. I was careful not to tell E. even an iota of what I knew from my pessimistic outlook. In any event, work went on with increased zeal, and I would have had to be superhuman to carry out technically what the State Secretary in the Hungarian Interior Ministry wanted and demanded of me. I know that I once wanted to move against the Jewish ghetto in Budapest.

After the Hungarian Gendarmerie had combed through eastern Hungary, I naturally moved westward and wanted the western Hungarian counties cleansed as well, in accordance with my orders. I don't believe the Hungarian prime minister feared me more than his Crown Council. As I already said, he once invited me to lunch with Winkelmann and Fesemeier, but the invitation wasn't sent directly to me; General Winkelmann took me along, so to speak. I received no official state invitation.

I spoke with the Hungarian prime minister before and after lunch, and I remember clearly that, figuratively speaking, he laid Hungary's guilt at my feet for my efforts. That lunch must have been around this time. In Hungary, apart from protecting my night's rest, for which Winkelmann had about eight Schutzpolizei officers seal off the house where I was privately staying, nothing was done for my personal protection. If circles of the Hungarian Gendarmerie or the Hungarian Army had already taken an opposing position at that time, I ask myself, given the centuries-old famous Hungarian bravado, why didn't they simply kill me?

At that time, the Reich Police Office in Berlin had very few people who could be spared. The author mentions that the Hungarian commander of the Hungarian Gendarmerie, Faerenzie, had also begun to waver…

No, no. He only mentions that you had called a meeting with him and with E…

I have only a marginal point to add: the author is inaccurate here. Faerenzie wasn't the commander of the Hungarian Gendarmerie. He was a desk officer in the office of the commander in chief of the Hungarian Gendarmerie. I already said at the beginning of this volume that I wanted to move against the Budapest Ghetto, and that I discussed it with Faerenzie and E. I could never have done anything that B. and E. hadn't ordered. It also would have been technically possible to include those 12,000 houses marked with the yellow star, though I can't remember it. These are details again.

But this meeting took place after the Reich Administrator had already banned deportations?

That's impossible. B. and E. were State Secretaries, officials who could never have acted, and never would have acted, against their government. What good would my wishes, even against their government's intentions, have done if I hadn't received troop contingents from the Gendarmerie? In other words, it wasn't me, but them.

But what do you say about the deportation transport on July 14, said to have taken place with B's agreement, involving 15,000 Jews from an internment camp and followed by Horthy's order to bring these people back? Surely that is something you still remember?

Were they brought back?

Yes, yes.

To my knowledge, Horthy never intervened. I never did anything against the Hungarian government; otherwise I would have had a second brake on my leg, Fesemeier. Before I took up new matters with E., I always obtained a no-objection certificate from the senior SS and Police Leader, as well as approval from his superior, the Reich Plenipotentiary, Dr. Fesemeier. Once I had that approval, it didn't have to be in writing; a verbal assurance was enough.

I knew that the action would cause the Reich no harm in foreign policy, and I agreed to Dr. L.E.'s wishes. After consulting B., the Hungarian Gendarmerie set the matter in motion, but only after I had coordinated it, that is, obtained the no-objection certificate for myself. I would never have obtained such approval from Winkelmann or Fesemeier if Horthy had opposed it forcefully. Unthinkable. The Foreign Office would have hit the RF over the head…

It doesn't say 'forcefully' here. It says that the Reich Administrator issued the order, but then wavered in carrying it out because even his prime minister wasn't really willing to go along with it…

Then it wasn't a ban on deportation…

Wait a moment. It is quite possible that the Reich Administrator wanted it, that the prime minister wanted it too, and that they had even reached a decision, but then said to themselves: In the end, the Wehrmacht is here. We must proceed carefully there and, above all, watch out for this Eichmann, because he can cause us trouble, just as Fesemeier reasoned from the Foreign Office's point of view. The Hungarians could reason in exactly the same way from the actual balance of power and say: If we impose an absolute ban with harsh measures, the Reich, which still has far greater means than we do, could simply crush us.

It does me great honor that a Hungarian prime minister is said to have been afraid of me. It does me great honor that Horthy may have been cautious in his wording because of the evil Eichmann. Even so, I must say that my office did not go beyond the position of a desk officer, and I was never in a position to give orders to Müller or the RF. I couldn't even sway my kind-hearted friend Kaltenbrunner, with whom I had a personal friendship. I couldn't do that. That's Jewish nonsense. I have nothing more to say about it.

It's not about what you could or couldn't do. It's about how perfectly logical it is that Horthy and the prime minister were afraid not of you, but of your office… They told themselves: That's the Reich leadership of the SS; that's the commander of the replacement army… Watch out, children.

What official position did I have in Hungary? None at all. Aha, so you see… Do you know to whom I was subordinate in Hungary? To the Commander of the Sipo and SD. And to whom was he subordinate in turn?

The higher SS and police leader, who in turn had to answer to the Reich Special Plenipotentiary, Fesemeier. As confirmation, I will give you the following. The commander of the Security Police and Security Service, to whom I was organizationally superior as a desk officer of the Gestapo Office, and to whom I could issue instructions in my sector once my department chief had signed them, called me once. Now I had a personal, cordial relationship with Dr. Geschke. He called me and said, 'Come over, put on your steel helmet. I have an official order to give you.' He said it partly as a joke and partly as my superior in the office.

In Hungary I held two roles at once: on one hand as a desk officer in the Reich Security Main Office [Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office], who issued himself his own detail orders, and on the other as a desk officer of the Sipo and SD in Hungary, as leader of the Sonderkommando Eichmann, as it was called. This was, admittedly, a weaker version of what Heydrich was at a higher level as Deputy Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia. From a security-police standpoint, he issued his own orders for Bohemia and Moravia. Geschke ordered me to come to him. I came from the army, and for as long as I was in Hungary I had taken this subordination upon myself in every respect.

I actually strapped on my steel helmet because I had an official order to receive. Geschke slapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Man, that's not what I meant…' I said, 'Duty is duty and schnapps is schnapps.' An order from the Reichsführer: 'You are to go immediately to an [handwriting] area, and there remove 10,000 ethnic Germans and others from the Russians' reach. Understood?' I have told you this so you can understand my official position as Sonderkommando Eichmann. No Hungarian office had even the faintest idea of the personal connection I had with the commander of the Sipo and the SD.

Since the Sonderkommando was large, it required its own large building, while the ordinary Sipo and SD desk officers, with five, six, or eight underlings, could naturally be housed in a few small halls or rooms inside the BDS building where he was based. That is why I think the author used that name out of ignorance or malice, or because at that time the name Eichmann suited him as an eye-catcher, with a ban on naming anyone else. A B. or an E. would never have taken orders from me. Faerenzie, an excellent Hungarian officer from crown to sole, would never have let me order him around. Faerenzie treated me as an equal comrade, but nothing more.

But the issue is whether it was Horthy rather than E.

No, no, my deportations continued to my satisfaction. With that, I had carried out the Reichsführer order; everything else did not interest me.

Is it known to you that in those days, during the first week of July, the gendarmerie barracks were partly occupied by troops transferred from the interior to Budapest, Hungarian troops, and that the Hungarian gendarmerie moved out?

But I know that Jews from the Budapest ghetto up to age 45 were conscripted for labor service. I know that; that is known to me.

I fought against it, but I wasn't the originator of that resistance, because B. had already done so hours earlier. I came to E., half questioning and half astonished: 'Tell me, what are you doing? Are you making difficulties for us? Don't you want to continue?' E. was beside himself, possessed by fanaticism, and I had to bring him to his senses over the Jewish labor-service men. For weeks afterward he could do nothing but shoot, shoot, and shoot. I believe Horthy fell soon afterward, and then the labor-service obligation was abolished. Only then did E. …

And it may be that, among the many stumbling blocks facing the Hungarian government, this too played a part in hastening Horthy's end, because E. and B. had such influence in the Hungarian Interior Ministry that I can't tell you now, any more than I could then in good conscience, what the interior minister's name may have been. I can't tell you what he looked like, especially since I don't know whether I ever saw him. He must have been very inactive if he agreed to such rapid action by B., and especially to the bold drive of a man like Dr. L. E.

Of this deportation story that you've brought up again, do you know nothing?

I didn't bring anyone back in Hungary. I brought people back only once in my life, and that was in Denmark. Perhaps a few dozen or a few hundred were brought back quietly; that's quite possible, but these are matters of absolutely no fundamental significance.

It appears that you carried out the sweep of eastern Hungary on 1 July and caused corresponding unemployment?

That is quite possible.

Then on 1 July you began clearing western Hungary, about 30,000 Jews?

Correct.

Then you tried to enter the capital, entered the suburbs and took these Jews to the brickworks?

Yes, they were concentrated.

On that same 8 July, when the Hungarian gendarmerie had received orders to leave Budapest, the text of an [not typed] agreement arrived in Budapest. The Jewish side's offers in the agreement were then used by Becher to arrange a visit to Himmler and press for a temporary suspension of the gassing of Jews. Wouldn't this mean that the Reichsführer order to halt physical extermination had somehow been lifted again?

No. It would instead mean that my memory hasn't entirely deserted me, and that I may have been right when I told you the deal involving 10,000 trucks came later than April. If that isn't so, then the other thing you told me is a lie. One of the two is a lie. It is beyond doubt that Brandt arrived in Constantinople on 15 May 1944. On 19 July 1944, 'The Times' in London carried the whole story of Brandt and the trucks.

The Gestapo had nothing to do with this agreement. I tell you, it was an agreement Becher made with the Jews, not us, not me. I know about it, not in detail but in broad outline. We didn't make it; Becher did, doubtless with the RF's approval, but only in his capacity as Reichsführer SS. I didn't negotiate this agreement or draft it.

No, that isn't being said either. The agreement wasn't signed by the Germans. It was simply an agreement proposed by the Jews, to which the Jews were to state their position. Becher then immediately proposed going to Berlin to press Himmler to bring about the temporary halt to the gassing.

That's nonsense.

Now, can it be true that the last official deportation train left the country on 8 July?

Yes, that may be correct. It was high summer. I was in an [not typed] place that E. had already left. I had a liter of milk given to me there, and I paid the manager for it. E. laughed at me afterward. The whole estate had been at my disposal, he said, so why had I paid for a liter of milk while in the forward area? I came to a second courtyard under Becher's control, formerly probably a stud farm. He had a Hauptsturmführer there as a horse expert, and a servant wearing white thread gloves brought him his lunch. I had my people quartered there too. When I objected to being given lunch during the war by a servant in white gloves, he took off his gloves and slammed the food down with his bare fists. It was summer, and then I moved on to the Romanian border.

I moved on into the Neuarat area and came back in early autumn… I then returned to Hungary. It may be that the transports no longer took place in July, because afterward there was nothing more.

So it appears that you deported 434,000 Hungarian Jews from 15 May to 8 July in 53 days?

That is improbable. I would have had to transport 10,000 Jews every day, Saturdays and Sundays alike. I would have said 300,000; the number was high.

They all went to Auschwitz.

They went to Auschwitz, but some also went to Burgenland and some to Strashofer. Only a very small first portion was sent to physical extermination, insofar as it wasn't fit for labor service; everything else was held back for the trucks. Compared with the Jews from the General Government, although I wasn't responsible for that, the Hungarian Jews fared best of all Jews in all countries.

After the shock of 20 July, it seems you tried again to begin deportations in the capital.

Yes, I was always at it, always trying to carry out deportations from the capital, but office and technical difficulties had to be taken into account. It is hard enough to load a train, even with oxen or sacks of flour, because you have to get the needed loading staff together, and they have to be willing to work. How much harder it is to load people, especially when difficulties are expected. I was always trying to get at the Budapest ghetto, and L.E. was too, but the difficulties were too great. You must not forget that as time went on, whenever the chance perhaps became favorable, I couldn't get transport trains, either because there were no trains available, because they were needed elsewhere, or because the line wasn't in order.

On 21 August, on the Rhine… bridge at Sant Marg., Himmler met the Jewish delegate Sani Meier, long before the Bernadotte story. On 25 August, after the Hungarian government had sent the German government a note a week earlier demanding the withdrawal of a Jewish commando, shortly before Horthy's fall, do you still remember that?

No.

On the evening of 25 August, Wi summoned Kastner and told him, 'You've won, Kastner. The state is withdrawing.' The RF wanted to avoid Hungary's defection, so he ordered the Jewish commando to withdraw but left the Gestapo in Budapest. The Jewish commando withdrew, and Eichmann went back to a country estate in the province.

Well, in summer 1944 I moved to E.'s estate, then Neuarat, 10,000 ethnic Germans, and back to Budapest, where I took up my post again. … I never cleared the post; Gromeid ran it while I was away.

So Kastner won.

All nonsense, poetic license.

Did you give Kastner permission on 1 September to travel to Switzerland?

That's quite possible. I always gave my Jewish negotiating partners the opportunity to travel abroad whenever they thought it useful for achieving their aims; it was in my interest too.

Do you remember that he was to travel to Switzerland with Hstf. Gruesse?

No, but I enabled so many Jewish functionaries to travel abroad that I can't remember each one individually.

When the Slovak partisan uprising broke out at the end of August 1944, the Jews also took up arms, whereupon you immediately asked Berlin for permission to liquidate, deport, and transport the entire Jewish population from Slovakia…

By that time nothing more was being transported, neither from Hungary nor from Slovakia…

Do you know nothing at all about a Slovak partisan uprising?

No, never.

Shortly before Horthy's fall, a General La… was appointed; he replaced Stau… as prime minister. Weren't E. and B. dismissed at that time?

No, never. E. was State Secretary until 24 December 1944. I heard, but have no confirmation, that he was later even supposed to have become foreign minister in the government-in-exile, but I don't know exactly.

What was the name of the Hungarian commander with the embrace scene and so on? Fa…

Fa…, yes, that's what he was called, Field Marshal Fa…

Now during all this time the position of the Hungarian Jews was changing. They were more or less in the Hungarian ministries because the Hungarian government was using them to make contact with the Allies about capitulation, and Kastner was even asked to go to the Russians for negotiations, accompanied by a Hungarian Communist who spoke Russian. Kastner refused. During this period the Regent Horthy received the Jewish community president, Court Councillor S. Stern, in an audience at the Castle at the end of August 1944.

Does the name Stern mean anything to you? Stern was probably in Hungary what Dr. R.L. was in Vienna.

I had dealings with him a few times too; he was insignificant.

Then, on 15 October, the Hungarian capitulation was read out.

So during all that time, July was the Volksdeutsche matter, and in August, September, and October you lived there on your country estate?

Country estate, well, at the stud farm that was under Becher's authority…

Then you must have felt that your trade, so to speak, had been shut down…

I had largely evacuated Hungary, and then I received a specific assignment concerning the 10,000 Germans…

But how could you, as head of a section, simply sit around in Hungary for weeks without a task to carry out?

As I already said, I went to Berlin every month. I went then too, left the command at the estate, and went to Berlin. I stayed in Berlin for eight to fourteen days and then came back down when the time was right; the journey took only a day and a half…

Now, on 15 October, the Hungarian proclamation to lay down arms was issued. At one o'clock the counterattack came, and the Regent was taken prisoner. After that the Arrow Cross carried on Jewish policy in their own way and dealt harshly with the Jews in the capital. Two days later, on 17 October, Eichmann returned to the capital and immediately summoned Kastner. You then said to Kastner: Now you see, here I am again… You must surely have thought that the story of Romania and Bulgaria would be repeated.

They apparently forgot that Hungary lies in the shadow of the Reich's ruins and that our hands are long enough to seize the Budapest Jews too. Now pay attention: this government works according to our orders. I will immediately make contact with Minister Ko… The Budapest Jews will be transported away, this time on foot. We now need our transport means for other purposes. Does that not suit you? Are you afraid? Don't come to me again with your American fairy tales. Work is being done here, quickly and briskly.

Kastner turned to Becher in panic. Becher refused to oppose the new course and said, 'I can do nothing. Your friends weren't even able to get me a Swiss entry visa.'

So you were somehow back again?

Yes, I came back. As far as I know, I couldn't accomplish anything more productive.

Yet on 8 November the deportations resumed from the Budapest Ghetto: 10,000 people, mostly women. Those who stayed behind were shot. They spent the night under the open sky.

When was the foot march?

In December…

When did the Allies destroy the western railway line, so that we could no longer travel?

In September or October.

Could it have been in November?

No, because that was what caused the foot marches…

That's it. After the Allies destroyed the Budapest to Vienna railway line, rail transport was no longer possible.

E. wanted the accelerated withdrawal to continue and opposed every interruption. Somehow this led to the foot march. And they let the Allies know: Your own allies will pay for it if you destroy the railway stations for us.

You set the first foot march in motion on 9 November. On 17 November, Juettner is said to have issued an order, and those who were on the road were sent back. People say the end of this foot march was the first success of the Swiss negotiations between Becher and S. Meier…

The foot march? Yes, because they were against it too, and then that came together with Juettner's matter, and the RF said: Enough with the foot march.

No, no, no. The Jews went from Budapest to Vienna, but they didn't get very far because the Lower Austrian Gau authorities received them, and they had to dig anti-tank trenches… [not typed]

Then the protest came from Juettner and from the Jewish negotiator in Switzerland who was negotiating with Becher. The order is said to have come to stop this foot march, or to send various groups back. Is that right?

That must be the same matter about which Winkelmann once told me he could do nothing. On that I have the following to say…

When the Budapest to Vienna route became impassable because Allied bombers had smashed it to pieces, someone came up with the idea: all right, the Jews can march. So we drew up the plan together and made the same number of Jews march each day as we otherwise would have loaded onto trains. The Hungarian gendarmerie rounded up the Jews and escorted them across Hungarian territory. At the border, the German gendarmerie took them over. Each such transport was accompanied only by one of my officers, assigned to the respective Hungarian gendarmerie officer. Under a kind of General Staff plan, the marches covered longer stretches at first, but the daily distances grew shorter as the marches continued.

Supply depots and drinking-water depots were set up accordingly, and they moved along the Budapest to Vienna road. If you tell me that many Jews were said to have been left as corpses along the way, I would have heard about it often enough at the time. I heard nothing of it. Naturally, one Jew or another fell out on such a march; that is entirely understandable, because on what march does nobody fall out? Once they reached the Austrian border, they couldn't be taken onward at first. The Lower Austrian Gauleiter received them, clearly not on his own authority but on the order of some defense commander, and they had to dig anti-tank trenches…

But then you somehow stopped this foot march and, on 25 November, started another one again, with renewed energy. On 25 November Becher, whom Kastner had bypassed because of this foot march, went to the Reichsführer. Although he had nothing concrete to show from Switzerland or from his negotiations in the Near East, he nevertheless persuaded the RF to issue the decisive order: to stop the extermination of the Jews at once, blow up the gas chambers, and make the concentration-camp commanders personally responsible for respecting Jewish life from then on.

In other words, the Himmler order we have dated to April took effect only then. So Brandt must have been presenting a concrete result from one of his negotiations to world public opinion and Jewish world opinion. It is quite possible that Kastner, Brandt, or whoever it was therefore tried, through their willing instrument Becher, to get the RF's consent to stop the physical extermination.

I was there. Becher wasn't alone with the RF. On 25 November? I no longer remember the dates. I went with Becher to see the RF two or three times. The RF said: I will give Pohl the order to stop…

When? That's the question. When?

The author is lying. Think about it: that was the very last impact we made at all [unclear]. In October, the Russians were already blasting the neighboring house to pieces. By then everything had already stopped, which is why the impact is still so vivid in my memory. From that moment it stopped. Apart from a few weeks, the Russians hammered the suburbs. By the time the first shells hit Budapest, all evacuation had stopped. The 8 November foot march was the last remnant. Around that time, the RF had not issued a stop order.

If he had not given one by then, they would all have been [unclear]. But since many Jews of Hungarian nationality who were supposed to have been gassed are still alive today, we have circumstantial evidence that the date I gave you roughly coincides with the author's departure. That is when the RF gave Pohl the order to stop. Six months lie between those dates, from April through October. During those six months there were evacuations, sometimes forced, and sometimes with no evacuation at all for several weeks.

The author himself writes that I had disappeared for a while. These Jews are therefore all still alive, and Jewish cunning now consists in moving the RF order, by a simple change of dates, not to the first date but to the very last date there was, and that brings us to this devastating number of evacuated Jews. So where were we supposed to get one million Jews? We would naturally have had one million Jews, but what mattered to Kastner was that it was biologically valuable Jewish blood.

So the one thing you definitely remember is that the Budapest to Vienna foot march took place in two phases: it began and was carried out, then stopped for a time, and later resumed?

That is possible. I don't know. I can't determine the intervals now, but we discussed the way it happened before. I can't say how many days lay between them, but I know one thing: at one point there were around 10,000, 12,000, or 14,000 people on the trek.

Brandt says the following about the attitude and success of the Jewish organizations in Budapest: "We had neither followed the path of the Polish Jewish councils, who, for the sake of minor concessions, lost sight of the great goal and were finally forced to betray their brothers to the enemy. We did not imitate the heroic uprising of Warsaw. We had set ourselves a more modest task. We wanted to keep the last remnants of our people alive." Can you tell me what sense he meant this in? It would matter greatly to us. How could he mean that the Polish Jewish councils, for the sake of minor concessions, lost sight of the great goal? What can he mean by that?

I can only speculate. I had no responsibility at all in the General Government. I didn't arrange any transports, and I didn't take part in any of this. But I think I remember that, over time, it went on for years, certainly one or two years. The local offices made personal promises to each Jewish council. By promising freedom to them and their families, they got them to work. Then they kept the village communities, which had been put into ghettos in the General Government, calm and in line, so the agencies that rounded them up could list them and carry them away. They kept them calm. There were never any uprisings. That was the work of the Jewish elders' councils in the General Government.

Why, then, does he draw a contrast between the work of the elders' councils in Poland and those in Hungary?

In principle, it was the same. But I can only speculate here too. In Hungary, as in the General Government, German units rounded people up and carried them away. Lithuanian and Estonian units also carried out roundups and transports. As far as Glo is concerned, he mainly had some companies of Latvians with whom he operated in the Lublin district. These men had been hardened, and the Reichsführer must have known that too, because they had gone through a terrible school. I once spoke with one of these SS men.

One bitterly cold winter, I was driving across the country with Glo when we met some Latvians, or perhaps Lithuanians. 'Well,' I said. Glo told me, 'He has no relatives left, no family left. They were all murdered.' The man spoke German. He said he was alone and had sworn revenge. They had murdered his wife, his parents, and his brothers. He was the only one left after the great murder of the Jews up there. They had been Bolsheviks. You can imagine that the German police units that used these companies had some real daredevil material on hand.

And they probably also prevented any resistance from arising because of the whole operation. But be that as it may, apart from Warsaw there wasn't the slightest resistance. Now, in Hungary the German authorities didn't carry out the roundups at all. The Hungarian gendarmerie did. I don't think I'm wrong in saying that L.E., who was no fool and had copied these methods from the Reich, was a very active man. They rarely found him behind a desk. He spent whole days on the move, not only in Hungary but also in Germany and Austria. He copied the methods and adapted them to Hungarian law. I am probably right that L.E. told me the Hungarian gendarmerie, for its own convenience, made all sorts of promises to the elders. I don't know whether it kept those promises. Glo did, I know that.

In what way?

He had the elders gathered into so-called labor camps. He once showed me one. He was very proud of it. The Reichsführer had ordered him to design so-called police settlements, and in Lublin he was to build a model. Glo had a guesthouse there, a large, two-story building, long and spread out, with technical staff working there. He had whole labor camps like that, Glo did. The whole place was laid out rather like a monastery, enclosed by barriers and guard posts. He had a whole series of such designs ready. They hung on the wall when the Reichsführer visited, so he could decide which plan to approve. The SS stations in the East were to be arranged that way.

That was one of Glo's tasks. It was a very large task. The German population in the East was to do its shopping there. There was a hospital and a doctor. Everything was included. The post kept in constant contact with smaller outposts, which also kept in constant contact. A network was planned across the East so the police would have secure quarters, could be moved quickly around the country, and the population, wherever it was, could find shelter there at once. Glo was given this work, and it kept him very busy. He had many workshops operating in Lublin, and he put Jews to work there. I saw at least a few thousand working there. Not only Jewish council members, all sorts of people.

There weren't so many Jewish councils in the General Government, let alone in the Lublin district. That was how he kept his promises. I don't know how much the Hungarian gendarmerie did. Perhaps it gave these Jewish councils free passage into the Budapest ghetto. It must have done something, because there wasn't the slightest difficulty in rounding people up in Hungary, just as there hadn't been in the General Government. As Brandt says, the Polish Jewish councils, for the sake of minor concessions… So I have to say that in Hungary, in my view, it was done the same way. Otherwise, how could the Hungarian gendarmerie have worked so effortlessly?

Of course the Hungarian gendarmerie worked more hurriedly. I was once sent to Pohl in Berlin. Actually, I wasn't ordered there: Pohl asked Mueller to have me come in, and Mueller told me to go to Pohl because he had some factual questions to discuss. Höss had complained about the condition in which Jews were arriving in Auschwitz. If Höss had simply sent them into the gas chambers, why would he have complained to his superior about the condition of the transports, with a few corpses lying in some wagons because they had been given too little water or too little food?

That would not have concerned him if they had simply marched into the gas chambers. And why would Pohl have wanted me to come to him, to tell me about these complaints in rather blunt words and say that this had to stop at once? I told him then that I wasn't responsible. It was the affair of the Hungarian authorities and the Hungarian government. I can say that we didn't take over the transports. I told E. that too: we would no longer accept the transports. I told the advisers for the individual counties that the escort unit wasn't to leave until the transports were equipped to the WVHA [SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, SS Economic and Administrative Main Office]'s requirements.

Do you remember Höss expressing to you, or to Pohl, his superior, that he wasn't at all in agreement with the way these foot marches were carried out?

Höss had nothing to do with that.

But he saw it?

It is possible. At the beginning, some people were gathered for anti-tank ditch construction, but that only became clear later. He may not have agreed with it. I wouldn't have agreed either, but it wasn't our task. The Hungarians could do what they wanted in their own country. If E. had had a reason and wanted, for example, to have 10,000 Jews on the march shot in the street by his gendarmerie, no one could have stopped him. The Hungarian government was sovereign. We had to restrain ourselves and be very careful because Hungarian national feeling had turned hostile. They were anxious that the so-called ally would not go too far. How often I had to hear E. say, "Yes, you know, this will be very difficult for me, because they guard their sovereignty jealously."

So you don't remember Höss saying to you, "I saw the foot march and I wasn't at all in agreement with it"?

It's possible. Höss always grumbled on principle. In that case I would have done the same, because whenever I received a transport or had a camp, I always found something to complain about. If I had nothing to complain about, I would look for something, so I could get an excess of this material into the camp, because I never had enough of [handwriting]. He never had enough. He never had enough medication or other things. He had to grumble constantly. He was obliged to. But you can see from that, if they were all

thrown into the oven, it could have been all the same to him.

Was it possible to work out from the statistics how many Jews of Hungarian citizenship were still alive? Is a number known?

No, 220,000 were announced, but the number was doctored much further downward.

Around December 10, 1944, the Bergen-Belsen transport arrived in Bregenz. That is the transport whose beginning …? And…

Where were they kept all that time?

They moved from camp to camp. They were waiting.

Wait, was this the group of prominent Jews Weinberg had gathered around himself?

No.

Those were the 700 young people Kastner had picked out, young people. Some others were included too, such as his entire family, including his wife's father and mother… and so on. Kastner was then with Becher on the trip to Switzerland. The agreement was that 20 million Swiss francs would be deposited, and then they would cross the border. The whole group had already arrived, but the 20 million still hadn't been deposited. The transport went to Gromeid…

Krell, Becher's adjutant, had received an express order to hold the transport back if the promises about the 20 million weren't kept. Even so, although nothing had been deposited, the Jews were allowed into Switzerland, and Kastner was allowed to see the 136 Jews who had left Budapest months earlier. There he met his friends, his wife, and his father-in-law, and found that the Brandt family wasn't among them. On Eichmann's orders, Gromeid had held back the three sisters and the old mother shortly before the train left.

I know nothing about that.

Could it be that, in the course of the statement you made to Brandt, you told him, "Well, my dear fellow, you aren't going with your family. Your family isn't going with you. I won't take it out on your family, but it isn't going with you"?

No, I most certainly didn't order that. I couldn't have stopped it anyway if they had crossed the green border somewhere else. The Hungarian borders weren't guarded by us. On one side there was the front; on the other, the non-front side. Anyone who wanted to cross the green border could get across at any time. Jews were crossing in a steady stream. I couldn't have stopped Frau Brandt or anyone else unless I had locked them up. No one could say that even one family member was under guard while Brandt was away.

No family member had been placed under a police reporting requirement. That's a common way of restricting people, so you can bring them back under control every few hours. We never did that. Those would have been the most basic conditions for any security. A hundred percent guarantee would have meant taking them into custody, perhaps special custody for prominent people. Even that wasn't done. Why, then, would I have arranged to remove these people from the transport?

I can imagine that it was fairly indifferent to me. It was completely indifferent to me whom Kastner included in there, and it was just as indifferent to me whether he had also included his own relatives.

While Kastner is negotiating at the eleventh hour in Switzerland [not typed] Kastner can stay in Switzerland, but he does not want to. He wants to go back, because he wants to help the last remnants of his people out of the gravest danger. It is further established that at that moment he could already count entirely on Becher's support, and that he therefore wanted to persuade Becher to preserve the Jews still remaining in Reich territory from destruction.

Becher and his people got themselves ever deeper into this operation, human lives against goods. Becher made it his own affair. Although the SS economic council had to give up hope of obtaining any serious return from the Allied side, Becher carried on. The moment came when Becher was no longer concerned with any return at all for the Jews. He wanted to link his name with the scattered remnants of this people. In the last months he manages to push everything through with Himmler, and Himmler transfers to him control of all the concentration camps.

Becher mentions an order of Himmler's to all commandants of the concentration camps to hand the camps over to the Allies without a fight. There are rumors that the whole camps are to be blown up. One part of the SS is charged with this task, and at its head stand Eichmann's immediate superiors, Kaltenbrunner and Müller. Becher drives from one camp to the next to carry out Himmler's order that they be handed over without a fight. He also goes to Mauthausen, where the commandant is preparing a mass killing, that is, he wants to load elderly Jews onto old Danube barges and then sink them.

An agitated scene takes place between him and Becher. The commandant declares that Kaltenbrunner has taken over the southern sector and that Himmler has nothing more to order him. Becher gets his way with Kaltenbrunner, so that the Jews were spared. He sends Kastner with Gromeid to Theresienstadt and the other camps to secure the handover to the Russians without a fight. In Theresienstadt a fight could never have taken place. Now tell me, what do you have to say about these various findings?

Well now, I did not know the details, but it was clear to me that Becher had received special assignments from the Reichsführer, and do you know why Becher may have received these assignments? My guess was that Becher shared with the Reichsführer and exploited that accordingly. Becher once told me on a drive to the Reichsführer [not typed]

Once an SS man has been let in on the personal and most delicate matters of a chief, it follows that such a man speaks to his chief in an entirely different tone of negotiation than someone who dealt with his chief only officially or on the business itself. And I would say that Becher's negotiations with the Reichsführer were of two kinds, one when a third person was present, the other when he was alone with the Reichsführer. How else could he have obtained command over all the concentration camps? I don't know, because I had nothing to do with the camp economy. But it is entirely possible, because I was myself an ear and eye witness that Becher had a very easy way of speaking with the Reichsführer and could in any case influence him.

Do you still remember that from your side, or from Müller's, any

suggestions were made about what would have to happen if the Allies advanced and a concentration camp lay nearby

No, I know nothing about that at all. It is quite possible that Müller settled these matters with the responsible offices. On the other hand I know that around that time the roads were clogged with camp inmates, because the camps under pressure from the enemy were being moved further and further back, partly into the camps that still lay in safety, where overcrowding was then added on top. On my journeys I saw some of these huge treks creeping wearily along.

I don't know whether the guards were wearier than the rest, but they crept along so wearily that not even the last man was capable of thinking about resistance. But of the blowing up, or of the Danube barges, I know nothing. Müller would have had to tell me that if I had been responsible for it. I was only responsible as far as the railway station to which I had to bring the Jews. What happened to them after that was no longer any concern of Department IV B 4. We were not informed either, nothing.

So in other words, and it is even said here that Becher handed the Bergen-Belsen camp over to the English, even against the will of the military command posts. These are all things that you neither deny nor confirm?

No, I can't. It is also entirely human that at the end, and not everyone is made that way, they should want to buy themselves a life insurance policy, and buy it from the enemy side, because the Jews were the enemy side. I have said that repeatedly and I believed it. It was a guiding thread for me as well, because Chaim Weizmann had declared war on the German people.

One gets the impression that at the end, in the last months, in Hungary too, Becher carried off your area of authority at a run?

He did too.

In what sense?

He had been trying from the beginning to get these matters out of my hands somehow. He couldn't. He could not issue a state police instruction, because he would have run into granite everywhere, at every police office. No official would ever have accepted an order from him, and even if he had been an Obergruppenführer, the little official would have stood to attention and said yes, but he would have done nothing, because he would not have dared. The little official had no cover from above. He may only accept an instruction that is to take effect in his own area of authority if he knows that the man is his superior. But nobody accepts even the smallest order from an outsider.

You have the example of the SS Brigadeführer in Vienna having the synagogue set on fire in front of me, and how I come upon it just as a typewriter is being smashed to the floor. I called the Brigadeführer to account, and he had to put up with it, although I was only a Hauptsturmführer. Normally he would have had to have me [not typed]. In that case I stood before him as the man charged with the official negotiation. Becher, on the other hand, never received an office. But if you tell me that at the end the Reichsführer placed the whole camp system under him, then of course the camp commandants' offices will have had to follow his instructions, and they could then have put the corresponding note in their files.

But Becher was fiddling about everywhere. He conducted negotiations with the Jews, so that I asked Müller whether he was entitled to, and he had been entitled to. The blame here lay with the Reichsführer himself. He was often rather flighty in his decisions, and it could happen to you that you were with him in the morning, drove off, and the next day or a few days later someone else came and told him the same matter in a different way, and then he ordered the opposite of what he had told you. The Reichsführer also often decided individual cases personally, and by deciding an individual case he would flatly overturn some general order he had issued.

It was extraordinarily difficult, precisely because of the Reichsführer's varying decisions, and so Becher knew how to get first one concession and then another out of him. The negotiation with Becher alone already meant a decentralization. I had no control whatsoever over what Becher was negotiating with these people, with Kastner and the rest. Conversely, Becher had no control over what I negotiated with those people, because I was not bound by any decree to submit all my measures and all my talks to Becher in copy for the record and for his information. He was not bound either, so it was a matter of feeling each other out. Kastner in fact had an easy game, because he could have played the two of us off against one another.

But it was so that I had a very proper relationship with Becher and the two of us did not make life difficult for each other. I had nothing to object to in Becher, and if I hear today that he had the Reichsführer's order, then I must even say that in the end he cannot be blamed for it, if I formed my judgment of Becher differently, since I could read about his conduct only in the enemy press [not typed] and drew my conclusion from that. As I said, he worked together with the enemy. If what Brandt writes here is correct, then Becher was in the right. Some cases are correct, I know that for certain. Economic advantages, we negotiated those with the Jews, that is correct.

But in what way did it show itself that he was trying to take various areas of authority away from you, or took them away?

In his quarters he had gathered Kastner and Kastner's staff around him, and we had arranged to meet at a set time in his conference building. Sometimes he came to me, sometimes I went to him, to discuss various matters, possibly even with Kastner, and I told you that a piece of theater was staged for us at that time. [not typed] A face flushed deep red. Gassing ten thousand more Jews. [not typed]

That went against the grain with me, because I was annoyed, first, that he was telling the enemy something here that did not fall within my area of authority at all, and second, that he was allowing himself a measure, that he was anticipating a certain state police requirement for me, because I too would never have told the enemy such a thing. He was interfering here in state police authority. He even overstepped it, in that in his incapacity he attributed to the Gestapo office measures that absolutely do not fall within that office's field of work. And that may well have been the real reason why Müller wanted him in Berlin at all costs. Müller's intention was to arrest Becher and lock him up.

Did no incidents with Becher occur then?

No. I did say to him, don't you know that this is not our job, how could you say such a thing. In that form I must have said it to him.

The tone between Becher and me was exceedingly comradely and polite.

Can you sum up briefly once more. It seems that in December 1944 things in Budapest went up and down quite a lot, and that you practically lost control over Jewish affairs. What can you still say about that in summary?

I'll tell you frankly, I lost control. I lost more than that. I was bound to lose control at the moment when nothing could be evacuated any more, and had not been for a long time, and with that my authority for everything else lapsed, because I possessed no authority whatever for measures in Hungary. Nothing was being registered or loaded any more, nothing could be sent off any more, there was no timetable left either, the trains ran irregularly, the Russian was shelling into Budapest. At one point he pushed quite far forward as far as Csepel, was thrown back again for a short time, then came in again and drew the ring around Budapest ever tighter. I remember only one more thing, that around that time in Budapest Becher was taking a great deal of valuable material out of Hungary, silver and so on. Where he took it I don't know. He handed it over to the Jew Mosche Schweiger.

Do you remember that on the second or third of December that special camp that existed there, where Kastner put his emigrants, in the Columbusgasse, was surrounded by the Arrow Cross men, and that shots were fired at these Arrow Cross men from inside the camp, whereupon a considerable reprisal was carried out, and Kastner then hurried to you and the Jewish leaders came to you and asked why all this was being done, and you answered them, yes, that is a real mess, weapons were found among you, men fit to fight, what are they doing there, the front is close by?

No, nothing known to me. I had nothing to do with it. I was waiting daily for my order of recall.

On what day did you leave Budapest?

On 24 December 1944 at three in the afternoon.

Is this picture authentic?

That is a portrait of me as a young man. The head might almost be right, although I don't recall ever having rolled my eyes like that. The collar, in any case, and those enormous buttons, I did not have made for myself in my youth. Nor do I recall ever having worn such a dreadful tie, because as far back as I can think I never favored the loud checked pattern. In any case the lower part is all bluff, and the upper part I don't know. It may be from some youthful portrait they found and then photographed.

Here you have the report of 22 June 1944 about this Brandt matter.

With that we have brought the Hungary chapter to a close.

The first measure against the Jews resident in Greece is said to have been the order for forced labor of the male Jews. Are you aware of that?

No. Did we have a military commander in Greece?

Yes.

And did we have a supreme office that represented the civil interests of the Reich?

Yes, it was a Greek government.

Roughly the same relationship we had with Slovakia, or

Was it freer?

No, it was not freer. Slovakia was a protectorate, whereas Greece was occupied territory.

Can you tell me whom I had down there?

We will come to that later. Perhaps you remember the conscription of the Jews for labor, if I tell you that it was lifted in return for a [blotted] payment of a contribution, against 200 million from [not typed]

Paid to whom?

To the occupation authorities?

I know nothing of that. So that was 1942.

It is possible that your office was not involved at that time, and was only brought in during 1943, when you sent Wulf to Greece for the deportations. Wulf as an emissary of the Eichmann office.

I never had a man by the name of Wulf.

Your people never worked under cover names?

No.

This Wulf had the task of preparing the Jews for the measures, after which Eichmann himself came on a visit.

Never was there. And I was in Greece the first and last time in 1937. Never again did I set foot on [blotted] soil.

What you say here is very interesting, because it bears on the truthfulness of the book in several respects.

I must reject it flatly, because I never set foot in Greece. I also never had an adviser by the name of Wulf, and I had no SS leader by the name of Wulf. I cannot always recall offhand whom I had in one place or another, but when a name is given to me, then I know at once, and the person is present to me.

What is claimed is this. After Wulf's preparations you came to Greece, and Wi stayed there to carry out the measures.

It is possible that Wi was in Greece. Did we have a state police office down there, or something of the kind? There was a commander of the security police down there. It is possible that this Wulf was a desk officer in the commander's office, who of course was not under me, but who perhaps obtained his instructions from the Reich Security Main Office through his own superior office in the security service. What the individual desk officers were called in the various other offices is naturally beyond my knowledge, because as a rule I had nothing personal to do with these people. Personally it was no concern of mine, because they drafted such a letter for their chief, and it was the commander who wrote to the Reich Security Main Office, not the desk officer.

But it is expressly claimed that Wulf was in the Eichmann office.

That is exactly as accurate as the claim that I was in Greece. You must dismiss it as an invention.

Are you familiar with the [off the sheet] ghetto in Greece?

No

It is claimed that this ghetto was filled and emptied by turns through transports in and out, and that 42,835 people, the figure is given exactly, were carried away in 16 trains to be killed.

Where to?

To Auschwitz, to Poland.

To Poland as well, into the General Government?

That Jewish transports were carried out from Greece, that I know, and that was when Wi was down there. Though I am of the opinion that Burger or Brunner was down there. I would almost say that Burger was down there first in Greece and that I then sent support to him.

Yes, Brunner was down there, Anton Brunner, yes.

Now I recall it too, and then I sent Wi down to him as reinforcement. But who carried out the transports down there, that is, who did the registration and the loading, that I do not know. In any case I had, apart from the [not typed]

The man was called L. Brunner, Anton Brunner.

Anton Brunner?

In the book he is named as Anton Brunner.

But his name was Alois Brunner, Hauptsturmfuehrer.

In the book he is only called Anton Brunner.

I did have an Anton Brunner, but at the end he sat in the administration and realization office in Prague. He was a civilian.

This will be Alois Brunner, of course.

They took nothing down with them but their personal kit. They had no orderly, no men, they had nothing at all. So who carried out the registration down there, that I no longer know. Perhaps the Wehrmacht did it, or the order police. Did we have a commander of the order police there?

Yes, I believe so. The last one from the order police was Schiemana.

Schiemana? I do not know him.

He was a higher SS and police leader. The [not typed] and the freight cars were made available by the Wehrmacht. Does the name of the chief rabbi Kroetts mean anything to you, who was chairman of the Jewish council?

The name is dimly familiar.

He played a large part for the Eichmann office in the deportations, in that he positively canvassed among the Jews to get them to agree to be resettled to Poland, telling them that land would be allotted to the Jews in Poland and that they would have advantages, and so on. It would have been in the year 43.

Perhaps it was an invention of the offices that carried out the registration and the loading, or else there could have been a kernel of truth in it, because there was a time when I actually wanted to create a Jewish territory here in the General Government. In the Lublin district, and it began with the settlement of 2,000 Jews from Moravian Ostrava. We wanted to build a Jewish reservoir then, and I had difficulties with Frank of Poland, the General Government, who objected to Jews being brought into the General Government. But it seems to me the time is somewhat too far advanced, 43, my efforts lay a good deal earlier, so that this probably was an invention on the part of the registering authorities.

There is confusion about Koretts. He was held in Vienna for some months, and it is claimed that during that time he was prepared for this task.

[too faint] possibly the subordinate offices did it. I know nothing about it. I would not want to deny having heard the name Koretts. Koretts is not an unusual name, and it is possible that I am confusing the sound of it with something else.

These Jews, who were promised that they would be taken to Poland and allotted land there, came to Auschwitz and were killed there.

But then where does it come from that we had so many Jews of Greek citizenship afterwards?

Those are the claims the book makes. Among other things it is also claimed that the neutral representative of the International Red Cross was prevented from bringing food to the train.

As I said, Greece was far away. I no longer know, I never set foot in it. I had one adviser down there and no other staff. How, with whom and where he got his way, that was his own business. I know that some transports rolled out of Greece.

Did they travel overland? Yes. By way of Yugoslavia?

That does not appear from it.

Do you know anything about negotiations in December 1943 between Herr von Datten of the Foreign Office and a Spanish diplomat, to the effect that the Spanish government would be prepared to take in Spanish Jews from all the occupied territories?

No, that is unknown to me.

Perhaps you remember if I tell you that in February 1944, 367 Spanish Jews were released from Bergen-Belsen by way of Spain. They then went to North Africa and received the right of transit from the Spanish government. That was the result between von Datten and the Spanish diplomat Dias.

The following is possible here. When you tell me they were released from the concentration camp, that is not necessarily proof that I must have known of it as the desk officer of IV B 4, because at that time there was a standing order from the Reichsfuehrer that a Jew who was in a concentration camp could no longer be released. A detention order, which was laid before the desk officer every quarter year, no longer took place. But in Office IV we did have a protective custody section, and this protective custody desk was headed by a criminal and government councillor.

So it would be entirely conceivable that Legation Councillor von Datten approached the Reichsfuehrer through the Foreign Office. That the Reichsfuehrer instructed the chief of the security police that the Jews of Spanish citizenship should be released from the camps, and gave Pohl an instruction, and that the chief of the security police passed word on through official channels to the head of Office IV, and the head of Office IV gave his protective custody officer instructions for the Economic and Administrative Main Office, that such and such Jews were to be handed over on such and such a date to such and such a person.

Because we must draw a distinction. In the camps, with persons of that kind, whether Jews or not Jews, who were delivered through the state police offices on the ground of some offense, under some existing article, there was a proper detention review date, and there it was decided whether he stays in or whether his corrective measure has come far enough that he can be released.

And on the other hand the Jews committed later, the Jews committed by wholesale procedure on the order of the Reichsfuehrer, where no index card was made out for the individual any more, because it was left to the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office to deal with these groups at its own discretion. That is, to put them into aircraft plants, into the rest of industry, or also to bring them to physical destruction. So that no longer concerned the protective custody section, and it no longer concerned the other desk officers either. So I must

explain this to you, so that it can be understood that I as the desk officer of IV B 4 need not necessarily have known of this measure. Perhaps I was informed of it for my information, but for me the matter lay so far on the margin that I can no longer remember it, because I was not the responsible authority for it. Years earlier I had been the responsible authority for it, namely while emigration was still permitted. Then I did have the order from the Reichsfuehrer to arrange emigration possibilities for all Jews committed to the camps, and for that we set up a separate section of our own in Vienna.

But with the start of the war that was forbidden by the Reichsfuehrer, and from that time on I had nothing more to do with persons who had once been in a camp. So that was a question that concerned only the Foreign Office and the Reichsfuehrer himself. Of course the offices for carrying it out as well, such as the SS Administrative Main Office and the Reich Security Main Office. The Spanish ambassador will have approached the Reichsfuehrer away from the office. Those are the sorts of things that were done with a handshake, or following some reception. Everyone was looking for a suitable occasion to get something done.

But it is an example of his deciding differently in individual cases, although he had himself given the order that nothing was to be done. And if anyone had acted against the order, it would have been called punishable.

Does it appear from your material that these 300 Spanish Jews came into the German sphere of power from Spain?

No, that does not appear.

It says here expressly that Spain had declared itself willing to take in all Jews of Spanish citizenship from the occupied territories. So are these Jews who were picked up in the course of the registration?

Apparently, yes.

Or are they Jews who emigrated decades ago?

When the registrations were carried out, our guidelines read that Jews of foreign citizenship are to be exempted from them. In France, for example, I could not have Jews of neutral or in any way allied countries loaded up en bloc under the wholesale procedure if they did not agree. That would not do. I could never have a Jew of English citizenship taken to Auschwitz. They were treated separately.

Then how did these Spanish Jews come to be in the camp?

Perhaps by mistake. Because you see, those were guidelines, but depending on where it was, mistakes were made as well. I am convinced, for instance, that in the General Government no distinction was made whether the Jew was of Polish citizenship or was stateless or held Swiss citizenship. I would guess that it was fairly immaterial to the responsible offices in the General Government. That will have been the case here too, because it is not Germany alone that is spoken of, but the whole occupied territory.

In what year is this conversation about these Spanish Jews supposed to have taken place?

The conversation between von Datten and the Spanish diplomat was on 22 December 1943. On 7 February 1944, 367 Jews were released from Bergen-Belsen and received the Spanish transit visa.

This date is one more reason why I cannot remember it, because from January 1944 to about March 1944 I was sitting about 100 kilometers from Berlin in a forest, and had the task of building a village in which the [blotted]

was to be, and from there, when Mueller took over the matter. It was a small barracks town that I had built up there, a barracks for the office chief IV, barracks for the individual sections and so on. There he carried the order of the RF out to me in the forest, that I was to prepare myself for Hungary with immediate effect, and he imposed the duty of silence on me. I was not even able to say anything about it to my deputy. I then soon marched off to [handwriting], and in [blotted] itself I was cut off from the world, I was not allowed to leave the camp, because Hungary was being prepared in secret.

Was your section brought in at all on this matter of the Spanish Jews?

I never heard anything about it. Perhaps, perhaps not. It is also a fairly incidental case. Even if I had been in Berlin, my permanent deputy would have carried it out automatically, because it was an isolated case. I dealt only with cases that had fundamental significance.

Do you know that as the last transport out of Greece, in August 44, the entire Jewish population of the island of Rhodes, about 1,240 people, was transported away?

I cannot tell you that either, because I was not in Berlin the whole of 44. When I was in Berlin, I concerned myself with the Hungarian matters that had to be pushed through there, because I was in Hungary from March 44 until Christmas Eve 44. That was when I pulled out. I should have pulled out on 22 December, because that was when the office of the Higher Police Leader and of the Security Police marched out of Budapest. I still had things to do, and I wanted to spend a few more hours with my friend Zehender. I had nothing to do in any case, whether I now settled myself in Oedenberg and waited there idly for the order that came from Berlin, or whether I stayed in Budapest with my friend Zehender, who commanded the 22nd SS Cavalry Division.

I have already told you what worries and what fear the police went through, because for a time I was counted as missing. I really did come out of Budapest as the last man of the Sipo, with my driver, and the road we passed along afterward, the stretch from Budapest to Rat, was already under Russian fire. The great column of trek traffic, which for days on end had streamed without a break out of Budapest in the direction of Vienna and blocked the road down to the last square meter, was no longer there. The road was as if dead, deserted.

So if you ask me now whether a transport left Rhodes in August 44, I cannot tell you at all, because I was in Hungary in unbroken succession from March 44 until Christmas Eve 44, and I came to Berlin only to put my Hungarian business in order. I did not involve myself in the affairs of the section, nor could I have involved myself, because then I would have had to work my way in again. Even if I am the desk officer and have been posted away, I cannot, when I am in Berlin for a few hours or a few days, sit down at my desk and start governing there again.

I had no idea at all about the background to things. For that I would first have had to work through the files, and I had no time for that. My permanent deputy Guenter certainly gave me an outline in broad strokes of the events of the past weeks. I believe that in any case, because my interest in the matter was too great, and his interest was too great to spoil things with me here, to play the high-handed prince here. I was not entitled to any [blotted] authority, because I could too easily have decided against it, when one is away so long from a central authority.

That is also why I know so little about Greece.

But the involvement of the Eichmann office in this transporting away of the Jews from Rhodes, that really the entire Jewish population was transported away.

Yes, that is possible. It is clear, Greece was to be cleansed, and now they make it easy for themselves and say Eichmann office, yes.

It is claimed that 2 men from the Eichmann office, Anton Brunner and Wi, paid a visit to the commander of Rhodes, to Lieutenant General Clemens, who then took over the practical side of carrying it out.

Well, I can only congratulate my Hauptsturmfuehrer on that, they had success there. Of course it is clear that they describe themselves as the Eichmann office. In Greece they are not going to say Section IV B 4, that was perhaps simpler. I had already been sitting in the section for a long time, that was Mueller's strength, to keep his people so long that they were ready for a pension or no longer fit for duty, because as an old criminal investigator he told himself that the longer a man is in the service, the better a specialist he is in that field.

Once a man has been in a section that long, and before that section had to run the work in the individual central authorities, then through the press alone the name Eichmann had detached itself into a symbol, provided with the usual epithets. In any case the name Jew, in the territories in which a German [not typed] moved in, was hopelessly bound up with the name Eichmann.

So it comes about that although I was not serving in Berlin, the name Eichmann office clung to my section, and my Hauptsturmfuehrer and my people operated as such too, because it is quite clear that these people had no reason at all to say to the military commander of Rhodes, for instance, yes, our previous chief and his permanent deputy Guenter has now [blotted]. To make the matter short, they said the well known word Eichmann and told the military commander, our chief Eichmann has the instruction to transport the Jews away. Although I know nothing exact about any of it, because I was not serving in Berlin myself.

And with that we want to close the chapter on Greece.

As you know, no deportations at all were carried out from Altengarten. The deportations were carried out only from Bulgaria, out of the occupied Greek and Yugoslav territories.

Dannecker was down there.

In which year, on 22 February 43.

That cannot be right, he was in Paris then. I cannot quite recall it, but it will probably have been 44, because in 43 Dannecker was in Paris, since I was in Paris myself.

Is there not the possibility that he was posted away with a special commando for only a short time?

No. Perhaps I can help you. Did we still have much to say in France in 44? I do not think so. That is why Dannecker would have been superfluous. And Dannecker was a very hard nut. Once he had received an order, he kept boring away until the order had been carried out. A report saying an order has not been carried out I never heard from Dannecker in all my life. I always put Dannecker where it was delicate and where somebody had to push things through, and I take it that if I had Dannecker down there, this matter in Bulgaria was in the year 44.

On 20 May 1943 a meeting took place in Berlin to drive the Jews out of Sofia within [not typed].

Where is the meeting supposed to have taken place?

In Berlin. The commander of the Sipo was Otto Hofmann, and the whole affair became a failure, because 2,000 exemption certificates were issued by the government for 6,000 Jews, demonstrations by the population in favor of the Jews took place, and Hofmann had to content himself with a failure.

If a meeting is supposed to have taken place in Berlin, that the Jews were to be resettled into the flat country, then I have to object here that this perhaps happened, but dressed up dramatically, such a meeting will never have taken place in Berlin. It is just as untrue as when the author claims I was personally in Greece, or that I had a case officer named Wulf, for instance. This is a matter that does not touch the slightest Reich interest, whether the Jews are now sitting in the flat country or not. The responsible office holder down there decides that at his own discretion and does not first ask the central offices in Berlin.

But Bulgaria was a friendly country at that time.

Then the commander there could have negotiated with the Bulgarian government all the more.

Do you know that Bulgaria had a commissioner for Jewish affairs, named Belle?

No. Bulgaria played no part at all where I was concerned, and I take it that all of this happened in the year 44.

Out of Bulgaria, out of the Greek and Yugoslav parts occupied by Bulgaria, 11,000 Jews were taken. They came to Auschwitz and were killed there, in Treblinka and Auschwitz.

So these deportations are unknown to you?

It is no longer familiar to me today.

With the authors it is always only, they came to Auschwitz and were killed there. I ask myself, how does it come about then that these Jews were found afterward?

So beyond that you know nothing further about Bulgaria?

Not at the moment.

It is claimed that Dannecker helped in the arrest of 20,000 Jews. Besides that it is claimed that the German envoy exerted great pressure on the Bulgarian government in the matter of the Jewish question.

Yes, that is right. Yes, I had sent Dannecker down, but Dannecker had nothing to do with the BDS. Instead he was to keep close to the German envoy, and if one says that Bulgaria had a commissioner for Jewish affairs, then either Dannecker, with the clearance certificate of the German envoy, will himself have stood at this commissioner's side with advice, or on the basis of Dannecker's paperwork the German envoy will have stood at the side of the responsible Bulgarian office in the Interior Ministry.

Roughly the guidelines were given that we had approved in other countries and handed over with a recommendation, so to speak for kind observance, because it was an approved procedure, in the keeping of which one meets the least resistance and by which one will achieve the smallest possible number of [not typed]. It was the task of the Jewish adviser that a) the foreign offices should force the Jews on the German Reich, and that before the eyes of the world face should be preserved. Face preserved means here that the Jews were not beaten into the wagons like cattle, but that all of it goes on in a humane manner, according to the principle avoidable hardships are to be avoided.

Do you believe, looking back, that that succeeded?

As regards Hungary I know it, otherwise Hoess and Pohl would not have shouted. And they would not have branded me the scapegoat, when I could do nothing about it. Naturally [unclear] gave back this reprimand aimed at me, and I also arranged with the Hungarian government to approach my superior of the Fesemeier office here, Fesemeier, and to say that I had nothing to do with it, but that they had now, the other way around, been made aware of it and would step in energetically, because in the end it was Fesemeier who had the unpleasantness.

Naturally I am otherwise not convinced that the French police, for instance, always went about it very humanely with the Jews they concentrated near Paris. I know only one thing, that the blind obedience of the German Order Police, and as a rule that of the SS members too, saw to it, apart from a few cases, that this matter was steered and directed into the channels that were wanted. In the whole General Government no risings of any kind occurred either. The transports that came from Greece, France, Hungary and so on, those the world public saw, and there one had to keep face.

Were you informed that difficulties were made on the part of the Bulgarian king?

No, that is unknown to me. I suspect that all of that took place in the year 44, when I was not in Berlin.

When was the first transport out of Slovakia to Auschwitz carried out? Would it have been possible at all for transports of Jews to be carried out from Slovakia before Slovakia was independent?

No, impossible.

When was the film ball in Vienna that ran under the patronage of Hin?

On that same night the preparations were made for making Slovakia independent.

That same night I drove away from the film ball with Slovaks who then became members of the government.

In the autumn of 1939, we were wearing the dress cords on the uniform for the first time.

When was the march into Prague?

In March 39. The declaration of Slovak independence came immediately after.

Good, so it went there, Wi; the envoy Ludin was there [not typed]

Don't you remember that the Slovaks made a transport available voluntarily?

Either 42 or 43.

But hadn't Ludin long been envoy by then?

41, yes. In Slovakia we had no adviser at a German office or at a Sipo office; there had never been one there either.

We had an adviser for the Jewish question at the German legation. Wi was not subordinate to the Sipo, he was directly subordinate to the German envoy. I visited Ludin myself 2 or 3 times and I had to set out the guidelines in person, in the most exact detail, the guidelines we were ordered to follow by the RF. Ludin then certainly prepared the ground with the Slovak government here without much difficulty.

In September 42 I was at the Slovak Interior Ministry with Mach for the 2nd time and had to pay him a courtesy visit. I knew Mach from the time when he was not yet a minister, and it was not difficult for me to speak with him about the practical problems either, especially since there was no need whatever to keep to any compulsory order of negotiation fixed beforehand by both sides. On this 2nd visit, in the evening, the [blotted] orderly had brought him the report from his Prague representative that an assassination attempt had been carried out on Heydrich. I left for Prague in the early hours of the morning.

Before this 2nd visit I had, on the occasion of my 1st visit to Mach, a discussion with Disso, with the clergyman, with the state secretary. When I spoke with Disse, that may have been some months before September 1942, transport trains were already rolling. It was not that I initiated the discussion with Disso; rather Disse wished to speak to me, and Ludin told me so. Disso wanted a binding assurance from me that Jews living in mixed marriages, so far as they were Catholic, or baptized Jews, would remain untouched. The rest he offered me with the greatest willingness, which in itself surprised me very much at the time, since he was there in his priest's cassock.

That is why I still remember this discussion very exactly. That was at the beginning of 42.

And the first transports rolled after that?

Yes. Wi had no trouble, and it suited Wi, who as a man had a tendency to phlegm because of his corpulence, although he was an excellent negotiator and his strength lay in negotiation. It suited him that he found in Slovakia a field that consumed so little labor, where he had Ludin, to whom he only had to drop a few hints, and Ludin, whenever some small stoppage arose, dashed off at once to the Slovak office. They then ironed out the difficulties immediately, and the Slovaks hurried to set up the transports on an assembly line, and I remember that we had difficulties with the Reich Transport Ministry, because we with the timetable

could not manage at all in places. The whole removal out of Slovakia was not run consecutively one after another, as it was in Hungary for example. In Slovakia we had stoppages to record and these often ran to a good many weeks, and I also still remember that [blotted] was the only one of the Slovak government who made no direct large difficulties, but who kept raising formal difficulties again and again.

Have you read anything similar?

Yes, but very much that contradicts it. Their statements go much further than what the Jewish literature brings out.

It is claimed that after the first transports the [not typed] came, that volunteers were made available by the Slovak government, and that already in July 1942 a revolt of the Slovak government against these deportations took place. The only driving force in this matter is said to have been Mach.

Yes, yes, at the beginning everything was fine. They would have been glad if we had taken all the Jews away in a single night. Then, once Schantzki was caught up in his ministerial routine, and what a difference there is between a so-called time of struggle and a time behind a desk in complete calm, he naturally developed misgivings, because he heard the many voices working on him, and perhaps also feared disadvantages of an economic kind for Slovakia. Schantzki was among the people who made difficulties for me on the part of the government. Mach was always the one who then got the thing rolling again.

How did Disse here, for example, lodge such a sharp veto or make difficulties, as may have been very easy in Hungary (Horthy)?

Disse never made difficulties, and that may also be the reason why his interior minister had no cause to put the brakes on a problem of his own accord, one that, seen from his ideological and political standpoint, he would rather have had solved yesterday than today.

Are you not mistaken when you speak of transports running continuously?

By continuously I mean transports out of Hungary, where I don't know how many marched off daily.

You may also be wrong when you speak of interruptions lasting weeks. After the revolt of the Slovak government in July 42, an interruption of over 2 years took place, and the transports only rolled again in September and October 44.

One moment, how many were transported out of Slovakia at the beginning then? Slovakia was combed through from east to west as well.

It is generally said that about 90,000 Slovak Jews came out of the territory earlier, and that after the war 28 to 35,000 were still there, so one estimates 60,000 Slovak Jews.

A mistake was made in Slovakia, and the Slovak government made it. The first thing done was that the city of Pressburg was cleared of Jews.

Do you know of the particular event that the Jewish quarter of the city was destroyed in August 1941?

No.

Do you know that a Jewish statute was issued by Mach on 10 September 1941, that all Jews were to be treated alike?

No, but it is quite clear that every government where we had the Jewish advisers first had to bring about a legislative regulation of its own accord. That was in fact the precondition

for such a country to be able to hand over Jews of its own nationality to a foreign country, seen in terms of international law and constitutional law.

You spoke of interruptions lasting weeks, but the Jewish literature speaks of an interruption of over 2 years, from July 42 to September 44, and indeed on the ground of the revolt of the Slovak government against the transports, after it was learned what was happening to the Jews. At first only the first voluntary transport for Auschwitz is spoken of, then the revolt of the Slovak government, and after that an interruption of the deportation until September 44, which then rolled on an intensified scale.

In September 44 Wi had not been in Pressburg at all. One moment. Wi went back to Pressburg when the evacuations in Hungary stopped, in order to set them going there again. On the [too faint] of July, yes, Wi became unemployed in Hungary and went back to Slovakia, and there he then finished off the Jews in Slovakia, and there they were combed more out of the east, because partisan groups had already formed there.

Here they had done it the other way around at first, combed through from west to east, but we were not the ones responsible for determining that; the Slovak government was responsible for that. They wanted to have their capital free of Jews first of all, because these authorities that were to be housed there, the Slovaks from Prague who sat in the government posts and were now being pushed out by the Czechs, needed living space, and this living space had to be provided by the Jews cleared out of Pressburg. Hence also the first transport, which they served up to us like sour beer. That was the reason.

And Wi finished off the last remainder, when the partisan groups were already at work in eastern Slovakia, groups that were made up to a relatively large percentage of Jews as well. And then the Wehrmacht pricked up its ears too, and all the offices pricked up their ears that had allowed a little hesitation to prevail in the meantime, and they now gave the offices a free hand. But here too the seizure was not carried out by the German personnel, but by the central Jewish office of Slovakia.

Do you know that Wi was assigned to the central Slovak Jewish office as an adviser

No, that cannot be right, because Wi was adviser to the German envoy, adviser for Jewish questions at the German legation in Pressburg. And if I am not mistaken, Wi thought a great deal of himself for having managed, as an attaché of a sort, which is the official position he held, to obtain a diplomatic passport. I mention that last point only so as to be able to prove credibly that Wi really was active as an adviser at the German legation. My official channel in Slovakia, when I was there, was to approach Ludin at once and first, as the chief of this man who served under him as attaché.

It is of course quite clear that the good interior minister Mach, who was a formal counterpart to L.E. in Hungary, except that in Hungary it was a matter of 2 state secretaries while here the interior minister concerned himself with these matters personally, that given the extraordinarily good relationship Wi had with Mach, Mach made extensive use of Wi's advice. But it is equally clear that the Slovak offices, whose leading posts were made up of old Linkgardists, kept a very jealous watch here too over the inviolability of Slovak concerns.

But to dispose of your question, it is of course unthinkable that Wi and Mach on the one hand, Wi and the Mach apparatus, did not have the closest connections and relations, which worked out in practical terms, even though Wi in his official mission was never attached to a Slovak authority but to a German authority. That I would like to put on record as a matter of principle.

Year 41. In order to begin with the measures against the Jews, did Eichmann turn to the Foreign Office, namely to Rademacher, in order to arrange through him that the German diplomatic representation should make representations regarding deportations of Jews in Slovakia? Is that correct?

Yes

The negotiations led to the date being declared too early, and Jewish labor camps were created in Slovakia?

Yes, correct.

These labor camps were then later used as assembly camps for the deportations.

Yes correct.

On 10 March 1942 several thousand Jews were deported.

That was the very first transport. The labor camps were set up beforehand, and the first to fill the labor camps were the Jews who came from Pressburg; they had to make living space.

The other reason was that the Slovak government wanted to have the Jews work for itself, and so it was urged that the labor camps be left in Slovak territory instead of deporting them. Probably also, certainly, the status was not yet settled that authorized Slovakia, or rather the Slovak government, to place its own nationals under a foreign state. For such legislative work always devoured an immense amount of time before it was finally passed by all the central authorities that came into question, whether they were in charge of it or involved at the edges.

Do you further know that on a request from Himmler the Foreign Office asked for 20,000 Slovak Jews to be deported, and that Disso agreed to that

I cannot really recall it, but that lies entirely within the framework of what was wanted and aimed at

Do you know that Slovak bishops raised a protest against it?

No, I know nothing about that.

And that Disso agreed to it anyway.

I already told you, the impression I had of Disso made me stop and think, how it is possible that a clergyman is so interested in getting rid of people, and I said to myself, he is simply a politician and not a clergyman.

On the basis of these negotiations about the 20,000 Jews, about 17,000 Jewish workers, that is, Jews fit for work, were then transported away from the Serett camp to Auschwitz and Lublin. Do you know about that?

Yes, not [blotted] the 17,000 specifically. I know that transports went out of Slovakia continuously. It may be that the destination station was called Auschwitz, but I do not know that the destination station was called the General Government. I cannot say at the moment. I do not want to deny it, because it was a matter I had no say in, one that was determined by Pohl alone, or rather by his inspector of the concentration camp system, Brigadefuehrer Gluecks. And here in Slovakia too I got the loading times from Wi, the times the trains would be ready, and after that my Hauptsturmfuehrer Novak drew up the timetable with Reichsbahnrat Stange. The trains were then routed the way the SS WVHA wanted them, not the way we wanted them, because we had no capacity to receive anyone. Pohl alone had that.

So the 17,000 apparently went to Auschwitz. Now it says further that 11 family transports followed, about 10,000 people, to smaller places in the Lublin district, and that among them there were 7,000 children alone.

That is unfamiliar to me.

Burger is supposed to have carried out the family transports with women and children.

The Secret State Police Office was not responsible for which groups of people were driven out of Slovakia. That was a matter for the Slovak authorities. The German Reich government declared it would take over all Slovak Jews, just as it declared itself ready in principle to take over all Jews in the other countries. Which groups were then brought to the evacuations, and by what guidelines the registration was carried out, was left to the individual countries, so far as we did not carry out the registration ourselves. It was also left entirely to the Hungarian government which groups they evacuated.

So there is the possibility that 10,000 children?

Yes, that possibility certainly exists and I would not rule it out, because this matter was left to the discretion of the Slovak government.

You will remember that the great ghetto uprising was in February and March 1943? We have established, on the other hand, that the high point of the extermination operation was probably in the year 1943. There are in fact indications that the ghetto uprising in Warsaw worked like a spur to the extermination operation. What I need from you now is a denial or a confirmation of this thesis. I would like to learn from you whether any suggestions were made from your section on the basis of this uprising, or else whether you know, from discussions with Mueller or other leading people, that you can reconstruct how in the state of mind of that time a sharpened act

was an answer to physical extermination, to this event in the Warsaw ghetto, where after all the Jewish readiness to fight against the Third Reich had taken on a dangerous form. Now tell what else you know about the reaction this uprising set off, so that we can then conclude from it how far this uprising set off sharpened measures.

I can confine myself to one thing, something the Reichsfuehrer-SS is supposed to have said. I must say first that one day I received a photograph album through official channels with my section, and that before I had it, the Reichsfuehrer-SS had already seen it, and that he had even initialed with his own hand the covering letter attached to this photograph album. This photograph album had been produced by the Gardefuehrer [not typed], and this photograph album consisted of many dozens of pictures, in the manner of war correspondents, and the phases of the fighting were depicted there.

I still know today that the units that had to put down the uprising were surprised by the toughness and by the good weaponry that faced them, and I still know today that we, the Schutzstaffel, and other units of the Wehrmacht as well, had to record a disproportionate casualty figure. And I still know that the Reichsfuehrer-SS is supposed to have said, I do not remember exactly whether it was Mueller or Kaltenbrunner, that if we had intervened in time and sharply and comprehensively, this valuable blood would have been spared. I cannot say today any more, perhaps you can help me with the number of the losses.

Several thousand men.

So that I said to myself, I could not imagine at all that ghettoized Jews could fight like that. And when this uprising, [blotted] Strop, as the last authority, had to be put down, only then, after the losses in blood were so high, were they forced into this ruthless action, which probably every unit in any other country would have put on the agenda as well.

The harshness of this measure can quite well be compared today with the French offending in [not typed]

Perhaps not so sharply down there, because down there one is not dealing with such great masses of people in a relatively narrow space.

The [not typed] are direct ghettos, Arab ghettos, exclusively workers' quarters with their little back alleys.

Now I recall that in the course of these great losses in blood that the German Wehrmacht had, an order went out to the office of the General Government to comb through to the last corner ruthlessly. And that, I believe, was also done, so that in the General Government the Jewish question was in fact no longer to be recorded after some time following the Warsaw fighting. There was no Jewish question there any more for want of people.

And one of the most important measures had also been that Gle, perhaps out of caution and out of worry that something similar could happen to him with his numerous factory-like concentrations, where a thousand and many thousands of Jews were working, carried out the liquidation on the basis of this sharpened order, so that Gle too, for a time after the uprising, had no more Jews to record in his area for labor purposes, who would otherwise have survived the war just as the Jews did who were employed at the Heinkel works or at Auschwitz, and as many others did in the concentration camps, who admittedly more

because they did not live in the ghetto either and were also uncontrollable here as regards what they did, but rather because what they did was regulated by the hour and they were under supervision. The Jewish labor squads at Gle, for example, were not, because he had the mass of the guard personnel, and here the Jews were gathered more in a kind of ghetto style, but not in the concentration camp style we had in the home territory. That was the first measure.

Certainly and without doubt the Reichsfuehrer-SS let himself be guided by these lines of thought, and it was not for nothing that he set the whole weight he had in this sector, the handling of Jewish affairs, in march toward Hungary with me at the head, because he wanted to comb through Hungary with tremendous speed before the Jews could properly come to their senses and organize resistance. That is also why the instruction was to comb through Hungary from east to west, so that the dangerous eastern sector stayed shut off.

As regards the Budapest ghetto one must say again that something similar could have happened, but now it must be established that the Budapest ghetto was itself under the leadership of the Arrow Cross, whose mentality was quite a different one from the mentality of, say, the German supervisory bodies in the Warsaw ghetto. The Arrow Cross man still had something of the revolutionary go-getting spirit, the airs of a go-getter, that we had gradually shed after 1933. And that is why we did not have to have these worries about the Budapest ghetto, because if these people had noticed the slightest thing, they would certainly have intervened with a consistency, out of worry, naturally, in view of the events in Warsaw.

That alone also explains the speed with which the Hungarian gendarmerie proceeded, because it was after all a factor of order in Hungary. The state secretaries L.E. and B. feared nothing more than that Hungary might become a playground of wild uprisings here. That was in fact the consequence of the Warsaw ghetto. If this beacon had not hung like [not typed] not only over the German security authorities but also over the Hungarian security authorities, the one thing or the other would certainly have died down along slower paths.

I need not add what a sacrifice it was for Germany to place the rolling stock at its disposal, because there was no wagon that was allowed to stand empty. But evidently it had been more important to the state leadership of both countries first of all to get factors of unrest out of the world. Admittedly we had large starting points in Hungary, but the measures were only too justified, and had such a measure been taken in Poland, it would certainly not have come to this bloody uprising. To the advantage of the German Wehrmacht units concerned, and admittedly to the advantage of the Jews themselves as well.

Do you remember whether the leading German officials who were responsible for the Warsaw ghetto had to bear any consequences after the uprising, that is, were punished or even [not typed]?

I know nothing about that. This matter would have been the General Government's own, insofar as it was a question of officials. If it had been a question of SS members, I would certainly remember something. Whether local punishments followed I do not know. It is quite possible that one or another was called to account, as a matter of course, by the security authority for slack conduct of duty, because that was the usual thing.

Do you remember any proposals that went out from your section in this period and that referred in some way to the Warsaw uprising, to drive any measures forward with more energy?

I had only one single occasion after that, through the large-scale operation in Hungary. I was sent to Warsaw on official business to look at Warsaw, to put it in Mueller's language for once. My dear Eichmann, go up there, look at how far it can go. So I was sent to Warsaw on official business and had myself shown around there. They showed me the nests of resistance that they could only clear out with concentrated charges, they showed me all the main battle positions, so hard had the fighting been. I have seldom seen a part of a city as destroyed as Warsaw. I never forgot that while I was in Hungary.

Budapest was always a great worry to me too. I did not keep that to myself, I told my subordinates as well, and I pointed out to them what could happen to us in Hungary. But I was covered by Warsaw insofar as I knew that in the east, and that would have been still more terrible than an uprising in Budapest, behind the back of our [not typed] front there was a partisan area of thousands of square kilometers, who would not have had to pick off the individual Wehrmacht member, but who would have blown up our lines of communication. A large part of the rolling stock for our troops went through Hungary, and that would have been affected.

I do not know, they would have had to shoot me if, although I had been sent to Warsaw, I had fallen prey to a criminal carelessness and had not had eastern Hungary combed through with that speed and had not worked on the Hungarian offices with that speed. It was easy for me, because I had people there who came three-quarters of the way to meet me. It could also have been the other way round, and then I would have had to work like a berserker. And had there been an uprising, it could have led to a collapse of a large part, because we see how exactly these Jewish uprising movements in fact worked.

But what I want to come to specifically is whether you do not remember from that time that you planned any operations, for example in France, or Denmark or Holland or in the southeast as well?

The advisers for Jewish questions were instructed, instructed in the sharpest measure, to set everything in motion to get the remaining stocks of the Jews still resident there handed over. That was arranged, because only so is it explicable that so much time had to pass for the fear to grow so great, on the Slovak side as well. The beacon of Warsaw, the partisan area of eastern Slovakia, until they then declared themselves ready to transport away the remaining Jews by an accelerated procedure, so far as they could still be registered. From Warsaw a chain stretched to the last thing possible, that is, until it was no longer possible to operate at all. It went with the sharpened registration of the contingents in order to avoid a second Warsaw.

So is it exaggerated, or does it correspond to reality, if one were to say that at least in the execution, not in the concept, of the protective measures for the Reich, or of the hostile measures against the Jews, Warsaw worked like a [not typed]lyst, which there where there was still doubt or lukewarmness

No, he even had circles that pestered us constantly with representations, because perhaps consciously or unconsciously they wanted to obtain exemptions from deportation by way of the clause, we need the workers, we can't meet our armaments quota. They intervened forever and always, and they suddenly went quiet, because these offices too couldn't and wouldn't afford any longer, through forced interventions, through matters important to the war and matters not important to the war, to take on the danger that one day it would be proved against them, if you hadn't intervened back then and declared your quota unreachable, then this or that uprising wouldn't have happened. That then stopped completely.

Could you list these offices briefly? The ones that went quiet with their efforts after the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto

Inside the country it was the whole armaments industry, mainly the directors of these big works. From the Speer Office these interventions came in continually. But these interventions also came from the Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, from Goering himself. All of that then stopped. If we merely said the word, yes, will you take on the responsibility that there won't be another Warsaw uprising, the appetite for intervention was gone and faded away. And it didn't work that way only in the Reich, it worked that way in the other countries too.

My advisers had a leading entree in all the countries where they were working. I can't say it offhand. With Warsaw we could operate, and it was operated with, like a traveling salesman selling an article who has a special advertising attraction to show and then sells more easily. That's how we could make our own office apparatus understand great difficulties or a great deal of idling. I had to do it as well, I was required to point to it, because I myself didn't want to and wasn't allowed to and couldn't take on the responsibility, on security grounds, because after all it's the Security Office that's responsible for that.

Do you think Stroop had this photo album made to shine with his heroic deeds

The photo album was certainly made by Stroop to prove to the Reich leadership, in black and white, the consequence of handling the Jewish question too loosely. And this photo album didn't set out along the official channel and wasn't laid before the responsible desk officer and case officer to give them a nice picture book here. No, that was quite clearly intended by the Reichsfuehrer, to say to his masters, look, there you have it. That was the reason this album circulated.

Do you have any idea from whom, in the earliest years of your section and later too, when the occupation of Poland made it necessary to work toward some practical solutions, from whom the idea of forming ghettos came at all?

Yes, that comes from me. But you know, the ghetto idea is an old one.

Do you know who your great adversary was in the forming of ghettos?

No.

Heydrich

That surprises me very much. It's like this, I don't want to say I was the originator of the ghetto idea, that would be too much honor. In the General Government we did have ghettos, we took those over, they were already there, and they were then tightened. We found that the ghettoization by the Jews themselves

was an extremely fortunate one in terms of surveillance, that we only needed to take this state of affairs over and save personnel. Of course you mustn't fall into the mistake here of laying out large ghettos as in Warsaw. I certainly didn't think of such things, because in practice such ghettos never existed either. There were Jewish ghettos with 30, 40, 50,000 Jews, but not more. For the first time a large ghetto was then drawn together in Litzmannstadt.

It was a third of a city district of Litzmannstadt, and around 200,000 Jews lived there. You say the great adversary was Heydrich. I've never heard anything of that. The Jewish old people's home Theresienstadt was in fact called the Jewish ghetto Theresienstadt at first, and the deputy Reich Protector put it that way too. Only later the Reichsfuehrer no longer wanted the word Jewish ghetto Theresienstadt, and called it the old people's home Theresienstadt.

When did you first propose taking up the forming of ghettos again in complete form?

Theresienstadt was the beginning

Theresienstadt goes back to your suggestion?

Yes, it came about like this. The word ghetto hadn't come up yet. Heydrich ordered me to him in the presence of his State Secretary Frank. I've promised that in a few weeks the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia will be free of Jews, the press people put that in the paper. Now Heydrich began to get uneasy, because he saw what he had brought about, so he had me come and told me all this. Something has to happen, Eichmann, a proposal. I came unprepared, because I hadn't been told beforehand what it was about.

Now I sat there and was supposed to make a proposal to my highest chief, and so I made the proposal, the only one I knew how to make. Ogfr., give me a [blotted] with the necessary land, then I'll take all the Jews of the Protectorate in there, in a kind of ghetto. Then Heydrich said to Frank, which town comes into question, what do you propose? And old Frank said Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt consisted of Wehrmacht, several thousand Czech [blotted], all kinds of craftsmen, as it is in a small garrison town. Heydrich then said the Wehrmacht there will be marched out.

The other residents living there were fully compensated, and there was never a complaint about it either. Then Theresienstadt was, my people whom I sent there took over the things from the [handwriting] of the Wehrmacht, which still had its offices there. With that Theresienstadt was free, and with that the ghettoization began. That's 1940, the first time a ghettoization arose on Reich soil. In '39 we marched into Poland, Heydrich wasn't yet chief and Reich Protector then, and we already had ghettos in Poland too, but there the idea didn't need to be born, because it was already there.

Found among the Jews themselves and kept on, they were then concentrated still further, that is, more Jews were moved in with the Jews, and the thing was now sealed off for guarding, partly with barbed wire, with walls, and partly the houses were pasted over, that is, closed up with masonry. In the small towns in Poland it was often the case that the percentage share consisted of the Jewish population. In the hinterland sat the Poles, the farmers and so on, but in the small towns, that's where the Jews sat. And these Jews were then assigned into these ghettos from all regions.

Say, from your knowledge of Jewish physiology, would it be right to say that the protest against the idea of the ghetto, and against the restriction that follows from it, basically the social restriction, self-restriction, came mainly from assimilated Jewry, and that on the other side believing Zionist Jewry had nothing at all to object to in the idea of the ghetto itself, or even welcomed the idea, because it protected Jewry, so to speak.

The father of ghettoization was the orthodox Jew, and it had to be the orthodox Jew, because in the East, where in earlier times the main pogroms took place, it was orthodoxy. In German lands, where there were ghettos in the Middle Ages too, it was orthodoxy, because Zionism didn't exist at all around that time. There were a few assimilated money changers who came and went among the princes, and at that time the individual territorial princes gave themselves over to the same convenience, this ghettoization set in motion by the Jews themselves, because it also seemed quite practical, because here they were among themselves, they wanted to stay among themselves too, and the non-Jewish part had its peace, because at nine in the evening the Jews closed their ghettos.

It came out of the Jews' need for security. The assimilated-minded Jew, if he had any preference for living in a Jewish ghetto at all, if he had the choice he didn't live in a ghetto, that matched his whole outlook. So if he was forced by us to live there too, then he was very unhappy. The one who was happy about it was the orthodox Jew and the Zionist, because the Zionist felt it not on the ground of protection, but because the Zionist leadership recognized it as a wonderful training for getting used to communal life.

That's why these two groups were in favor of it, and not one little word of complaint or grievance was ever heard from the Jewish side about it. Dr. Eppstein from Berlin told me once that Jewry would be grateful to me for having given it the chance in Theresienstadt to get to know communal life, and that this was a wonderful school with a view to the future life of these people in Israel.

It matters insofar as, toward the non-Jewish public, it's partly made out by the Jews as if the first measure, or of the various measures taken on the German side that led to ghettoization, shut the Jewish community out, so to speak, from the community of the host country, and so led to a

Of course the assimilated Jews felt it that way, nobody else, unless it was the non-Jew, who couldn't feel his way into this Jewish mentality at all. The non-Jew may have seen a very unpleasant coercive measure in this. The Jew didn't, because since medieval times he had felt comfortable and happy in his ghetto. And I believe the closed unity of Jewry could never have been bred so high if orthodoxy, which after all provided the leadership, hadn't pressed for ghettoization since the earliest Middle Ages. We do have the parallel if you look at [not typed] today, or look at the settlements.

The Story of J. B is the first book on the subject that I've read. It gives, first, in general terms, after I'm supposed to have said the thing about the 5 million Jews, and since otherwise not a single witness could be dug up out of the former German Reich association, which housed 70 million, perhaps they didn't want to dig them up, and I'm now the only German to whom this statement has been falsely attributed, international Jewry now naturally has to present me in whatever way is just possible, so that the credibility toward the public and toward history is all the greater. That's why there comes, not only in this book but also in other tomes on the subject, this [blotted], on the one side the bloc of the Reichsfuehrer, which here more or less fights with the other bloc, Kaltenbrunner, Mueller, Eichmann.

So although these fights never took place, these fights have to be screwed back into the realm of fantasy, into the opponent's waves, but these so-called power struggles between the SS groups, as the opponents call them, likewise prove that with all force, after my superiors were either hanged or have gone missing, and I'm the only one still there, they want to single me out, even above the Reichsfuehrer as my highest chief, only to keep up this 5 million thesis, a thesis that has already been overdrawn today by 60 percent. And from that comes the everlasting hammering in, the everlasting pounding in, that I not only deported, as was mine to do by virtue of office, but that I also killed, because that belongs to the opponent's case.

My comment on the book The Story of the JB [Joel Brand], written by Alex Weisberg, I'd like to divide into two chapters. a) fundamentals b) particulars. It's a mixture of fiction and truth, and in fairness I have to admit that the percentage of truth predominates. On the cardinal points, though, the author has spoken against the truth, because first, I wasn't responsible for the liquidation, and neither was Office IV of the Gestapo. Second, I only had deportations to carry out, and the Gestapo Office wasn't concerned with anything else.

Third, for the concentration and registration for the transports in Hungary, for example, it wasn't I who was responsible but the Hungarian Interior Minister. Fourth, there was no bloc formation of an SS, that is H.H. [Heinrich Himmler] and Kaltenbrunner. Fifth, the 5 million killed Jews is a lie. This book isn't a factual account that could claim to be correct. I miss some label on one of the first pages saying novel with a historical background, that would fit, but not as a factual account.

The author has left this way out open for himself in his preliminary remark, where he expressly states, the objection arises that it's impossible to reconstruct a conversation correctly after a decade has passed, the objection is justified, but it applies just as much to conversations that took place 10 years ago, direct speech makes no claim to reproduce word for word what was spoken, it's nothing but a form of presentation, the shortest one I could choose. It's a Jewish refinement, so to speak, because behind this declaration in the foreword the author can take every argument that might be flung at him, everything that's uncomfortable for him, and reduce it to absurdity by pointing back to his preliminary remark.

From this it follows that the subjective standpoint dominates, that the wish is often the father of the thought, and that in the postwar years it seems very understandable to read things heard and read afterwards back into the time when it all happened. Brandt hasn't the intellectual stature of an Alex Weisberg, who had nothing whatever to do with the matter, to tell things here that he supposedly saw coming at the time in prophetic foresight.

No, he read that after the war, carried it back, and then foisted it on me as though it had been settled in the negotiations and conferences. Take the 5 million, which Brandt mentions several times in his own way, a figure whose true sense was twisted in my mouth, a figure that at that time wasn't up for discussion at all, a figure he heard about afterwards and then, trailing along behind, put in my mouth. It's sheer nonsense, it is a propaganda statement.

And not with that alone. Others raised this figure as high as 8 million.

What made me uncanny to the Jewish functionaries in Budapest consisted mainly, I suppose, in my incorruptibility. If that's the reason I was uncanny to the Jewish political functionaries, then I can only be sorry that more Germans weren't uncanny to the enemy, because incorruptible I was and am, always, toward my enemies.

When it's imputed to me that I was a believer in the fairy tale of the Wise Men of Zion, which Brandt points to here several times, with an eye to the Englishmen who bring forward proofs of truth and so on, and toward his own Israelite racial comrades, I have only this to say. Either it's ignorance in the judgment of the JB, or it already fits the author's presentation in a way that compels his proof. The Jewish political functionaries of all people must have known it, and do know it, from hundreds of discussions. They had a hundred opportunities to admire the so-called Turks fastened to the wall in the office of my permanent deputy.

A not inconsiderable part of them was even produced on my commission, to their own free design, by the technical department of the Israelite Religious Community in Vienna. The Turk of the organizational structure of international Jewry hung next to the Turk of the Israelite Religious Community, which handled the emigration of the Jews out of Austria. It was made in the years 1935/36 by the graduate engineer Mildenstein, who around that time was briefly my superior officer on the desk. I worked then on the specialist field of Zionism, produced [handwriting].

Technical and practical help with the making of it was given by informants out of Palestine, Jewish literature, results of negotiations with Jewish political functionaries and so on. I took over this body of thought as a study, which lasted a good three years, in its full content. It shows not only a far-reaching decentralization and the Jewish party tendencies running off in all directions, but also the ideological quarrel of the individual Jewish groups and large groups among themselves. Out of interest I set out this Turk, or rather my own view of these things, in pictorial form. I come here to the sketch I made, as an answer to Brandt, that I am supposed to be a believer in the idea of the Wise Men of Zion. From this also follows my factual difference with Streicher, who held the opposite view and stuck to it.

The author judges just as wrongly when he says, against better knowledge, that I was the one commissioned by the Reichsführer with the liquidation. His own comrade-in-arms Dr. Kastner knew better, because he said to me during the early summer of 1944, shut down the extermination machinery at Auschwitz. Since I knew that he was fully in the picture through his own apparatus, and was informed by Becher besides, I officially told him, as a further courtesy, my

area of responsibility, and that of the WVHA. He then said I could raise it with the Reichsführer. But I wasn't competent for that, and my competence would have got nowhere in any case.

A word about [off the sheet]. It astonished me to find that even in circles where I didn't expect it there is evidently confusion about who was competent for what. [off the sheet]

On this I state as a matter of principle. First, until 1941 measures could be taken in the concentration camps only when the Chief of the Security Police, or his desk officers, passed on the Reichsführer's basic decrees under the underlying laws, or the implementing provisions belonging to them, from the Chief of the Security Police and the SD to the SS WVHA. Only then could anything be undertaken by the commandant's office of the camp, apart from exceptions, which were regulated.

Second, at the end of 1941 the Chief of the SS WVHA received directives on the treatment of Jews from the Reichsführer directly. Or I expressly leave the case open, since only a single instance was known to me, from the Chief of the Security Police and the SD personally, standing in for the Reichsführer. It was the case [not typed]. These directives ranged from extermination through labor deployment to the partial release of Jews, as for example that whole Kastner contingent and so on.

Third, the order of desk IV B 4, as I understood it, read "deport", with the exception of the General Government, occupied Russian territory, the Baltic countries and Romania. As for Romania, I have to admit truthfully that I wasn't competent for it. I had forgotten that over the years.

Where the concentration and registration was carried out by men not in German uniform, IV B 4 was competent only for taking over the transport trains and running them as far as the handover at the destination stations named by Office IV. Hungary is finished now.

The desk reference number was brought in without anyone being consulted. What matters is knowing how much insight you and your subordinates had into areas of competence that ran under another reference number, and how it was the other way around. Insight into your own area of responsibility?

For instance, when you had to put a transport together, when a deportation was to go ahead, how far did you have to reckon with Höss's extermination capacity in order to run your transport efficiently.

In what way were there points of contact there?

First, I had to keep up a continuous connection with Höss, that is [handwriting] with the 1A of the Inspectorate of the concentration camps who was competent for it, with Liebehenschel. Third, through the continuing discussions with Pohl.

In the same way my subordinates had to deal with Höss's case officers or with Liebehenschel's department. In the same way the chief of Office [blotted] and Müller kept contact with the Inspectorate of the concentration camps, Glücks, and likewise the Chief of the Security Police and the SD with the Chief of the WVHA, Pohl.

Discussions went on there continuously, because before I could begin with the practical side the timetable had first to be drawn up with the Reich Transport Ministry, and the reception capacity of the Auschwitz camp had to be secured. The people there had to be able to plan roughly what they could take in over the coming months, and had to know accordingly how much human material I intended to send them.

There were doctors posted to Auschwitz by the WVHA who gave their judgment on who among the people delivered there could work, because the bulk of them had to work, and whoever couldn't marched inevitably into the gas chambers. I knew that too.

So the doctors were quite clear about it, that anyone who wasn't taken for labor automatically marched into the oven?

Yes, quite clear. Everyone in Auschwitz knew that. It had been no secret.

On the account of the Night and Fog decree I have to say that the Jew Brandt is a man who is without doubt better informed than I am myself, because a Night and Fog decree concerning the treatment of Jews didn't exist. The Night and Fog decree that I do know of was the responsibility of an entirely different desk. In any case it had nothing to do with the Jews. We rode roughshod over those brothers in broad daylight.

Holders of protective passes were exempt from the deportation. These holders were quickly made citizens of other states and so became holders of these passes. The country of San Salvador, for example. 12,000 Jews.

A Baron Dieter von Wi [not typed], who is supposed to have been the commander for Czechoslovakia, is wrong. Isi von Fleischmann, raising everyone to the nobility. Wi was quite simply the adviser on Jewish questions at the German legation in Pressburg, nothing more than that.

An SS Obersturmbannführer Brunner never existed. There was an Obersturmführer. Hauptsturmführer Wunsche is mentioned too, that's right, he had been a government councillor with me in Hungary.

Page 86. Frau Kastner or Frau Brandt, which of the two got the bastinado? He always writes only about his own wife, never about Frau Kastner.

Now I've become confused. Could it after all have been Frau Brandt who was with me, the one I took to be Frau Kastner, since she came constantly with Kastner?

After Brandt flew off, Kastner appeared at your place repeatedly with Frau Brandt, and neither Brandt nor Kastner mentions even once that Kastner appeared at your place with his own wife.

So if it was Frau Brandt who got the bastinado, then I have to correct myself.

What matters is the characterization you gave of this woman, and now it matters whom it applies to, whether Frau Kastner or Frau Brandt. But it agrees to a large extent with these accounts, because Frau Brandt came to your place with Kastner after her husband's departure on 15 May.

It turns the stomach of anyone who knows the matter to read here over and over that they marched and were gassed, that everything that marched out of Hungary marched inevitably into the gas ovens. That is of course nonsense of a rare kind, it is a deliberate untruth, because the Jew Brandt knows even better than I do how many of the so-called gassed enjoy the best of health today and file the largest restitution claims in every country on earth.

But that is a general refutation, and it is so high in percentage terms that out of the general refutation a question of competence gets picked out as a special case. Because there exist more Jews of Hungarian nationality who are supposed to have been gassed than there are such as were in truth killed.

I believe we could get approximate figures through a refugee from after the last Hungarian revolution, one who doesn't belong to the first wave of refugees, because the first wave were Jews. The present Hungarian Gestapo is after all almost exclusively in the hands of Jews, and only in subordinate positions has a Magyar been put in. That's where the hatred of the Magyars in the last uprising against the Hungarian Gestapo comes from too, because it was surrounded from top to bottom by the sweet smell of garlic, because these Jews have been cooling their temper on the Magyar people for twelve years now, from 45 to today.

So I ask myself, where do all these Jews in Hungary suddenly come from, where have they come from? A real Hungarian freedom fighter ought to be able to give exhaustive information on that, better than I can.

Compare a little Upper Bavarian village. Formerly 20 Jews, today 40 Jews. Well now, where does that come from then, they just weren't gassed after all.

Page 89. Philipp von Freudiger, president of the Orthodox Jewish community. Summoned before me? A red-haired Jew with a stubble beard. A few days after he had been summoned before me he made off across the Romanian border with others of like mind. I made no further inquiries either, let them run.

Further, the Weiss and Becher business with the aeroplane to Lisbon is right too.

Page 90, not entirely clear. Gold and jewelry had to be handed over. But to whom?

Here it says under point 2 that the Jewish bank accounts were blocked, assets were [not typed], the Jews had to submit an inventory of their entire property, gold and pieces of jewelry had to be handed over at once. That is supposed to have been in the negotiations between Wi and Philipp von Freudiger.

But quite apart from the fact that my Hauptsturmführer Wi had no authority at all to make such direct agreements with Jews of Hungarian nationality, and that this must have been the business of the Hungarian authorities, I have to remark, when it says here that gold and pieces of jewelry had to be handed over at once, then to whom?

The [handwriting] affair was taken as the ground for an atonement payment of one and a quarter billion Reichsmark, and further the handing over of all art objects was ordered, of precious metal, precious stone, art objects. The handing over of electrical appliances, furs, woolen clothing so far as it could be spared, and so on.

But that applied to Jews of German nationality, whereas I am speaking about Jews in Hungary. In any case it is not my Hauptsturmführer's business to meddle in internal Hungarian affairs. There was no such thing.

But how, in your opinion, did it happen then?

I can't explain it to myself. Those are points that touch on what happened in Reich territory. Perhaps he copied them out to fill pages. Wi has no right at all to speak here for the Hungarian horizon. Wi had the job, 48 hours before I was in Budapest, of smoothing my way, that is to say the

[not typed] to establish, to summon the sheikhs, the question of quarters and so on. But after that Wi no longer had any yardstick that could be described as the Hungarian horizon. All he had left was the county horizon.

On page 100. Why does Brandt reproach us Germans, when they had it as easy as no country had until then under the gag-cup of the hated Germans, why did other countries not take the million off their hands. Were we supposed to take them all off their hands. Fifty families a month is what England took off their hands. If a people is already so wretched that no country on earth wants them, then they must not assume that we Germans will simply swallow them. We did the utmost possible and we advertised a million Jews like sour beer, but nobody took them. We did the utmost possible up to 1939 and we even put our own mark at risk to get the Jews abroad.

On page 102, that is correct. I had the Jewish point in Budapest, so far as they negotiated with my office or with me, issue protective passes, which they had to show to all German and all Hungarian authorities and with the help of which they could escape any harassment and obstruction. I had to do it because of the Hungarian Gestapo, because of the gendarmerie in the individual counties, and because of the various German authorities.

On page 104. It is untrue when Brandt says that I was the head of a main department in IV B 4 in the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin [not typed]

One, I was not the head of a main department. IV B 4 was a section. Two, I was not Himmler's plenipotentiary for this area. I was the plenipotentiary of the [blotted] SD. The Gestapo office was not competent for the extermination. The Night and Fog operation is completely wide of the mark. Nothing was carried out in the greatest secrecy, we had nothing to shy away from. How else would the deal of ten thousand trucks for a million Jews have been possible?

How could I say to Kastner that the Gestapo is not competent to shut down the extermination machinery? The Reichsführer is competent for that, and they were carried out by Pohl as head of the WVHA. I could say something like that to Kastner with a clear conscience. Kastner was also informed from other quarters. How often I asked Kastner and Brandt too, what are you interested in, do you want this or do you want that? Which valuable human material? Besides, the whole world knew it, so to speak.

On page 114. When Brandt says I had said, I cannot sell you all the Jews of Europe even if you raise ever so much money, not yet now, perhaps that will come one day, but I can let a million Jews go. The man contradicts himself. I told him that I cannot give him all of them yet, not yet now. He should have spared himself that sentence, then his gassing stories would have been far more credible.

On page 122. Himmler is said to represent a far more humane position than Hitler. Reference to the bloc-forming between the SS Reichsführer, Becher and consorts on one side, and Kaltenbrunner, Müller, Eichmann and consorts on the other side.

On page 125. Further deals and a possible additional handing over of the Jews, and so on, again a proof that not all of them were gassed.

On page 131. And so on and so forth. SS Obersturmbannführer Klages, it had been an SS Hauptsturmführer Klages

On page 142. Correct, the evacuations had to be forced, but of these forced evacuations, once the negotiations had been set in motion, none were gassed.

When the author claims to the English on his journey, as the reason why, after five million Jews had already been killed, a further million would be released, he says, one, the people foresee the approaching catastrophe, they seek to obtain a pardon for their crimes, they have loaded countless crimes upon themselves against all the peoples of Europe, but no guilt weighs on them like that against the Jews. On top of that they must know one thing, they ascribe an enormous power to us [not typed]

On this I have the following to declare. One, those responsible did not foresee any enormous catastrophe from which they would have had to hide, at least not at that time, in order to beg for fair weather from the opponents. That was far from us. Nor did we load any crimes upon ourselves. We did nothing other, even after the armistice, than what other nations have done to German blood in a far more hideous way.

The fairy tale of the Elders of Zion does not count either, that is a trick the author trades with. Peddler. No, the truth is quite sober and ice cold, as follows. In the whole deal the only thing that mattered to the Reichsführer was the ten thousand trucks for his two SS divisions. In principle what did the million Jews matter to him, it was his divisions he was after, that was the whole focal point of this deal.

On page 216. Lord Moin, question mark, who had said to JB, how do you imagine that, where am I supposed to put the million. A short time later he was shot, exactly like Bernadotte, once again a [blotted], and Kastner, by the zealots of Zion, as a special correspondent from a newspaper in Tel Aviv once called them.

So presumably Frau Brandt, in which case Brandt must be grateful to the German authorities that he still has his wife alive at all.

On page 153. Regarding my work. That I would have withdrawn an order that had been given, by telegraph. One, I do not recall having withdrawn a single order during my whole practice. I preferred to let it be carried out even if I realized afterwards that it was wrong. Two, I neither issued an order by telegraph nor withdrew one by telegraph. Three, I never bellowed.

On page 256. That Kastner had wasted too much time on the 1,700 Jews. Kastner did not waste too much time, rather Brandt had difficulties with his speeches with the English. In the period between 15 May and [too faint] July 1944.

On page 2 [too faint]. What he writes there is the [blotted] of lying. It may be that 434,000 Jews of Hungarian citizenship were deported to Auschwitz, but that they were murdered there, that is a flat lie. The question remains, how many were killed and how many are living today, cheerful and lively

On page 285. Becher is credited with having said, I will propose to the Reichsführer that the gassings be stopped. We have shown our good will by letting a group of 31 Jews from Bergen-Belsen travel to Switzerland.

The following. There is a contradiction here. Pages earlier the author states, in the negotiations with the English, that Eichmann was in a position to stop the gassings, that I was competent for the gassings and for the deportation, that a word from me would suffice. Now it is the Reichsführer who is in a position to do it if it were proposed to him.

On page 289. Becher had to admit that Eichmann was right, that it had only been a Jewish bluff. There he spoke the truth. After the first fourteen days or three weeks in which this business got going, I told Kastner frankly and freely that Brandt was a crook who had got himself to safety and that the business would never come off. I told Kastner plainly that the deportations were being carried out under forced pace automatically. For the [blotted] it had been a [blotted] bait. The first truck did not matter to us at all, we only wanted the promise. Brandt had imagined that I, Eichmann, would have given away even one Jew on this bluff. It may well be that this was very unpleasant for Becher. Between Becher and me there was a proper comradeship, but we did not cross each other's path on duty.

On page 292. Regarding the foot march. This foot march was not made because Eichmann in Budapest began to rage, but because the Allies, on Brandt's advice, destroyed the roads and railway stations on the Budapest to Vienna stretch with their bombs. All his racial comrades should still be thanking Brandt today for this foot march, for betraying them abroad as a spy, so to speak, and instigating these bombing raids.

What is more obvious than that he now has to answer for this to Jewish Hungarian blood.

On page 293. [not typed] or does that not suit you, just do not come to me with your American fairy tales. This "Gell" is a Jewish operetta "gell", it does not suit me at all, made up and [not typed]

I would now like to end the whole matter. The picture that is being hung on me here I have put to various people who have known me for a very, very long time, and they say that I can never be that. Rolling of the eyes of the 175 [not typed] no, I reject this picture. One could do a photograph of the ears, but only a criminologist could do that, these fine points are too exact. Let us close this unpleasant chapter.

Heydrich's visit, on 10 April 1942, a visit to Pressburg, discussions with the State President Dr. Tuka?

No, that is not known to me, it is possible but I was not brought in.

Among other things it was also about the Jewish deportations? Following this discussion with the Slovak government, the Slovak government addresses a request to the German government, that the relatives of the 17,000 Jews deported earlier, who were deported to Auschwitz and Mei [not typed], should also be sent there in order to reunite them with their family members? It must be known to you. It is claimed there that you first refused, but then travelled to Pressburg yourself, conducted negotiations there with old Tuka, and that you then agreed with him to raise the family members, together with those already there, in the district of Lublin, to 35,000, in the year 1942?

With Mach I spoke repeatedly, I can no longer remember the individual details.

I must remind you that it was a matter of 1 [not typed] 000 Jews?

For me a political horizon was decisive, but not a paltry [too faint]. With Tuka I never spoke and never saw him in person either, only in pictures. With Mach I negotiated repeatedly, with Mach I also wanted to work in terms of numbers, and did work, as reinforcement for my adviser whom I had in Pressburg, Wi, who worked with the envoy, and where the envoy could no longer step in with Wi, there I stepped in.

At the beginning you refused to take these people in at Lublin. Only after these negotiations, in May 1942, after Heydrich's visit on 10 April had been conducted, were you in agreement to take the remaining family members in with the others at Lublin.

So I would have shown myself a very hard head against a matter that my chief had already approved anyway? Fine, after this repetition of the whole state of affairs, if the Slovak government asked me, I will probably have done the thing. Only I can no longer say today whether they were taken over or not.

The important thing is the following. You remember the deportation of the 1 [too faint]? It is now about the family members.

My fundamental declaration. If the Slovak government asked the German government

… to take on the Jewish relatives of already evacuated Jews as well, then I can't imagine that even a single office of the Reich government would have vetoed it. And I would have been the last man who wouldn't have received them with open arms. There would have been no difficulty in taking them in either. I already had ways of accommodating them.

The matter then went through in order. Between 15 May and 30 June a further 52,000 were sent off, and with that the total number reached [blotted] thousand. They all went to Lublin, and then came the Stapo [State Police] about the deportation of the Jews.

Of these 52,000, 284 were left after the end of the war.

That isn't really possible. Certainly the number may have been small, because Glo was careful after the Warsaw business and did what he could to get himself breathing room. He was right, I'd have done it the same way.

After that Dr. Tuka asked Wi to have an official Slovak inspection of the Jews in Poland carried out, and to that Eichmann, questioned about it by Wi, at first gave evasive answers. Do you know about that?

Yes, vaguely, because in those years Kunz and Kinz wanted to travel to the places the Jews had been sent to, and here it wasn't only the interest of the individual governments that mattered. Even the International Red Cross asked for a permit. So I know exactly that I constantly had the hardest work on my hands, reporting upward to get clarity about what I now had to set in motion officially. It wasn't only Slovakia. France and the other states were the ones who all at once felt concern for the Jews they had offered to the Reich government like sour beer, and now wanted to make sure of considerate treatment.

When did these concerns of the governments come out especially strongly?

They always came up when the transports were going flat out at a forced rate, because the evacuation actions were a matter of curves. I have the curve charts in front of me, and every evacuation had its own curve, steep at first and then falling off. But as soon as that curve had been passed, the various countries approached the German Reich government to inquire after the well-being of the people they had handed over to us, and they proposed commissions.

It's quite clear, through naming the various receiving stations, through drawing up the timetables, it had all been so varied that it was simply impossible to chase after a few thousand Jews in some district or other, especially as these transports were loaded by the various countries without any personal papers being sent along. In general 50 kilos of luggage.

But I could finally manage to put a stop to this rampant petitioning by the various governments for commissions to be sent, by proposing to the RF that a commission of the International Red Cross be set in march to Theresienstadt, and that Mueller and I would receive this commission and, once they had crossed the border between Saxony and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, would give them a free hand to negotiate and speak with all the Jewish offices of this camp, wherever they pleased, without our being present.

Did the thought occur to you then, because the camp Theresienstadt gave little occasion for criticism, would you also have been ready to invite a commission to Auschwitz?

I was only responsible for the camp Theresienstadt, because the countries made a mistake and the RF was a Jesuit. The country governments appealed to the RF SS

… appealed to the RF SS, and the RF passed this business on to his police, to the Gestapo, and that office was responsible only for the camp Theresienstadt. Had the RF passed this whole file complex on to the WVHA less jesuitically, then a visit to Auschwitz and so on would probably have been unavoidable, because nobody abroad could have guessed that an office or main department outside the police had anything to do with this reception or classification.

So they more or less fell for it, and the International Red Cross alone sent a commission to Theresienstadt three times. On the first visit my chief received this commission and passed it on to the Jewish [handwriting]. On the 2nd and 3rd time I had to receive them myself on orders and then handed them on to the Jews after greeting them, and there they could talk and negotiate with them for hours without my being there, however they liked.

Is there any documentation that members of the Red Cross visited Theresienstadt at the time, or that they tried to have an exonerating effect?

Yes, I read it later in the papers. Dr. Dinar was the name of one of the commission leaders, I think. The last one still asked me whether the Jews were allowed to smoke. I told him no, it's officially forbidden but they smoke anyway. But the Swiss exoneration, which they gave after a very clear report on what they had found there, was robbed of its force by the fact that people said from the start, yes, yes, Theresienstadt was only a showpiece, it was only propaganda.

However that may always be declared, it's of no interest to the German police. We had no other camp like Theresienstadt, that was the camp of the German police. The RF was a very proper Jesuit, to his credit. You don't always have to tell the enemy the truth either. I always kept my promises to the opponent, even when it went against the grain. That's why I can't stand it when people say I had withdrawn my order by telegraph. I never did that, but by telegraph, I wasn't a post office clerk after all.

Do you know of a case where you entered into such a promise where it also went against the grain for you?

I have no example, I didn't keep records of them deliberately. I can only give you one example that should characterize the whole conduct of my department, that I didn't shrink from apologizing in uniform in front of my officers to Dr. R. Lowenherz for having given him a slap in the face. The slap had been wrong, I apologized. It was at a time when we still had long years to go until the end of the war.

But I don't quite understand that you apologize for a slap in the face given in error, and yet speak of the 15, 20, 30,000 Jews here as a trifle.

We had no personal hatred against the opponent, the whole thing was a political matter. If I had staged something on my own judgment, that would have been wrong, it wasn't my place. I was neither a reckoner nor a judge. The orders I received on the basis of ideological understanding in a global sense were carried out as the order stated and as the law stated. It wasn't my place as a private person to work off my spite in any way on a single object, on a single individual, that didn't

The enemy was global and was treated globally. I had no right to give this prisoner a slap in the face. No personal act against our opponents was anybody's place. (Examples already given.) The order stated that avoidable harshness is to be avoided, and quite apart from that, to deal out a slap in the face to a prisoner while wearing a uniform is not very honorable.

And so all personal acts in this field are not honorable, but that they have to march off into the wagons globally, are carried off, are taken toward a fate that we don't know, that nobody knows, that even the receiving station doesn't know, that is something quite different, that is ordered, that lies within the meaning of the legislation.

But reports have come down that you were present at loadings, for example at the one where you

I was present at not a single one. My time didn't allow me that. At no transport, neither at the departure nor at the arrival. Witnesses for this would be my accompanying staff, or the people I had on the spot who were charged with the business.

So you never kicked a Jew in the [not typed] or shouted at him or shoved him. Never?

The only one was Dr. R.L. with the slap in the face.

Regarding the commission, the [not typed] of Pressburg paid a visit to the head of state Tiso and informed him that the Slovak Jews were being killed in the Lublin district. Wi told you about this visit on the occasion of his visit to Berlin, whereupon you declared that an inspection was completely out of the question, the Jews are being killed there, there is a secret order of the Fuehrer to exterminate the Jews slowly. To that [blotted] Wi declared the following to you: God grant that the enemies do not repay like with like. And thereupon you answered: Don't be sentimental, the Fuehrer's order has to be carried out.

The whole thing stinks of a statement got by torture. Second, that I'm supposed to have said such a thing to Wi, and that Wi was supposed to have said this thing to me, that is improbable. A camel through the eye of a needle.

If I had said that at all, then I certainly would not have said the Jews are being killed there slowly, then I would quite certainly have said the Jews are being killed there as fast as possible. But the Fuehrer's order spoke of a massive forcing.

On top of that, the Nu or Luzius may have intervened, Wi perhaps told me that, possible. But such a statement is impossible in service terms, because I would have jumped clean out of my tracks and would have asserted official untruths. It really does surprise me very much if this Luzius approached in Pressburg in that way, that on the whole complex the Hungarian bishop's representative [not typed] the then Bishop Muench, who after all at least twice a month promised, never raised such a question.

That wasn't his job at all at the time either, it was the job of this Luzius. He was the representative of the Vatican, who had the assignment from the Vatican to draw the Slovak head of state's attention to

that Jews handed over by Tiso to the Germans were being destroyed there.

You may be right, but here's the thing, I in no way took up any massive representations from the Roman Catholic Church, at any rate not such that they occupied me. So why should such a measure by the papal Nu or Luzius in Pressburg have drawn such a long tail of declarations behind it? Especially as I tell you that it's impossible that these sentences alone don't fit ordinary usage.

I hardly believe that it would have burst the bounds of service: Don't be sentimental [off the sheet] confusion.

Wi would never have dared to say such a thing to me. No, made up, lied, nonsense.

But one thing is certain, following on from that, from 1942 to 1944 no more deportations took place out of Slovakia. Reason?

Slovak resistance.

What was it based on?

That is beyond my knowledge today.

Was it based perhaps on the knowing killing of Jews, the refusal of the commission?

Possible. So, and now the following. After Stalingrad the brothers spoke differently. What began then was not a reconsideration on grounds of humanity, but on grounds of reinsurance. After Stalingrad I had the greatest difficulties in all the districts there were to work on. I want to put that on record expressly. People couldn't do enough, they could invite me, a small desk officer, to ministerial discussions, invite me to discussions outside the service, to private dinners and the like.

After Stalingrad these gentlemen considered, not all of them, how they could now turn it to their advantage, since the scales of winning this war were tipping heavily against the Axis powers. It was clear that the handling of the Jewish question was a welcome occasion for them to throw their resistance into the scales here. They did exactly the same thing much earlier, which the Jew JB doesn't reproach Becher and company with directly, but insinuates, that in order to have a good exit so to speak, at the last minute he threw the whole weight of his personality into the scales here to save what could be saved of the Jews here, so as to be able to lay them out as a trump card after the 8th of May 45.

Those people did the same much earlier, because if I, the little man, was already saying in 1940 that we'd lose the war if we carried on like this, then those people, who had provided themselves with ministerial agents at the individual governments, certainly had just as wide a horizon as I had. Their horizon probably went much, much further.

It surprises me at all that they let it come so far, but that isn't my business.

There's also another explanation, Kastner with Wi from this period, namely Wi had promised to stop the deportations of Jews out of Slovakia if 50,000 dollars were paid in this case.

The following. Wi is the one who first said anything about my alleged remark about the death of 5 million. (Comment already given on JB's book.)