The Eichmann and Sassen interview, O.65 file 87

It was the time when the offices of the Sipo [Sicherheitspolizei, Security Police] and the SD [Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service] had to fight some of their hardest battles with the armaments industry offices, because those offices stood up for the Jews in the factories and arranged the certificates that made them exempt from being drafted. In laborious individual proceedings the Stapo [State Police] and the Stapo regional headquarters then showed in part what the situation really was here, and separate correspondence had to be carried on with the Reich Security Main Office [Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office] over single Jews, and we in turn had to approach the armaments people, or Minister Speer, and they in turn had to approach their Gau district office to get Jew x or y released.

Now one director had been very stubborn, but Mutschmann wanted his Gau clean of Jews too, since the initiative for this did not really come from the Stapo or the local Stapo regional headquarters. They were driven by the Party offices, here by the Gau leadership, because every Gauleiter wanted to report his Gau to Bormann or to the Fuehrer as free of Jews. It was exactly the same race as when the factories could not hurry fast enough to report to the German Labor Front that the plant was one hundred percent in the Labor Front, and then they got something awarded that they were allowed to carry on their flag or [not typed].

In short, Mutschmann took this director, had a placard hung round his neck and had him marched through Dresden with some sort of police escort, and written on it that he was the greatest protector of Jews in Dresden. After that Mutschmann succeeded very quickly in making Dresden completely free of Jews. That was the time when the Jews in the individual armaments industries, where they had made themselves indispensable, were now prised loose in individual cases, but then came to armaments industries that were attached to the individual concentration camps. The WVHA [SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, SS Economic and Administrative Main Office] had various armaments branches and they were put into those.

Now I must remark that all the decrees, regulations, laws and so on that concern the Jews go back to the initiative of the individual police offices, of this or that Party office, of this or that other administrative office, and one gets the impression that no central control of the Jewish question existed.

That is exactly why we once had a difference of opinion. Nobody is really able to believe that the Jewish matter was not centrally controlled, because everyone imagines, as it has also been described in the literature since 45, that a Jew-pope sits up here, and he now has everything on his strings and supplies everything with the relevant papers, regulations and orders, perhaps still obtaining them from his immediate superior, but otherwise directing it all centrally like a spider in its web. The man who was an official believes that, the man who stood in uniform believes that, the people believe it, the enemy believes it and the world believes it.

The world believes it just as most of our earth does, so far as they concern themselves with the Jewish problem, and they believe that international Jewry is led just as tightly, that a spider sits up there in the web and now steers, leads and directs everything. The one is exactly as great a piece of nonsense as the other. With us in the Third Reich too the Jewish question was in no way centrally controlled. The collection of laws that the Jewish lawyer Dr. Blau compiled here is downright proof that it was not so.

Rather, each central authority issued some Jewish regulation of its own. Yes, it went so far that whenever AH had once again made a speech in which he denounced Jewry with particular force, and when was a speech ever given, from 1939 up to his last speech, in which he did not deal especially with this international enemy, promptly a week later one could note that some central authorities or some Party authority again issued some new supplementary regulation, did something.

I have established here that although the Reich Citizenship Laws were issued in 1935, three or four years later it occurs to somebody, hold on, we have forgotten to lay down in law that Jews are forbidden access to the Hitler Youth, and years later an implementing regulation to the Reich Citizenship Laws was issued. It was like that everywhere. Two or three ministers talked with each other, a minister with a Gauleiter, some Reichsleiter with another plenipotentiary, and in the course of the conversation they came round to the idea that the Jews would have to be excluded from this sector as well, or that I would have to take this matter into my own area of competence.

So it was discussed and settled over a small glass of cognac, an exchange of letters followed in which this arrangement was confirmed, and the central authority concerned issued a decree that laid down for the subordinate offices that this is how it is to be handled here. A typical example in this collection of laws was the meeting between the RF and the Reich Minister of Justice Dr. Therak, where some matter was dealt with. I believe the handing over of the Jews from the penal system into the custody of the concentration camps of the SS [Schutzstaffel, Protection Squads] WVHA.

It concerns the reporting of the Jews released from the criminal justice system to the Gestapo [Secret State Police].

Yes, and now the following. Exactly as it happened in the sector of legislation, that is, law, regulation, decree and so on, they had exactly the same decentralization in the [not typed] work. Nobody can ever say or claim that the Gestapo Office, the Reich Security Main Office under Mueller, had the matter centrally in hand. Or that I as his desk officer IV B 4 had it centrally in hand, because even the hostile literature notes it in one place, I for example had officially nothing to do with, and was not competent for, the work in the field of fighting the enemy in the occupied Russian territories, the General Government, Lithuania, Estonia and so on.

I also had nothing to do with the [not typed] operations in Hungary and in the various other countries. There the local [handwriting] forces did that. It is hard to believe, but on the basis of evidence one can establish that the Reich Security Main Office was not always the office in charge here. We were, as I was once able to explain to you very clearly, we were the maid of all work. Only where the matters were taken out of our hands on the basis of an instruction, a directive, an order from a very senior superior, there we simply had to look on.

Of course that is not to say that in the General Government and in the occupied Russian territories the forces of the Sipo and the SD did not have their hands in the solution of the Jewish question. Of course they had them in it, the Waffen SS came in as well and the Wehrmacht in part. No, the Reich Security Main Office, the section IV B 4, had nothing to do with it. Instead other local higher commands were ordered to do it by the RF, without any duty to report to the Reich Security Main Office, IV B 4.

Without any supply of directives from the Reich Security Main Office. These directives were given in the form of orders from the RF, because as desk officer IV B 4 I was never allowed to give an order. That would have contradicted the whole principles of a police authority, of a central authority. I was only allowed to furnish the local offices of the Gestapo with directives, never with orders. You cannot give an official an order, you issue an instruction to an official. Whereas the Einsatzkommandos in the occupied Russian territories, they were militant, they had to take orders.

In the General Government it was something in between (example with the book gone through, with the relevant documents, letterhead with Waffen SS). These were caught up in it as well, whereas for instance the Wikingruf claims the opposite, and anyone who reads the Wikingruf will not believe it, but here we see it in black and white. And if you ask an honest man of the Waffen SS today, he will be able to confirm it to you. I remember, there was a member of the LAH [Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler] here once who openly admitted that his unit was deployed in such Jewish affairs by the LAH, in the occupied Russian territories.

Within the Reich territory, how was the division there between Sipo and the Ordnungspolizei? In my opinion various orders and decrees were not a matter for the security police at all, in this case the Gestapo, for instance that Jews are forbidden to visit cinemas, theaters and so on.

The precinct captains watched that, or it was done through the duty to report that had been imposed on them.

The wearing of the Jewish star?

Watching that was of course the business of the Ordnungspolizei, that is, of the responsible precinct captain. In Austria that was called the Kommissariat, and there the [not typed] inspectors and senior [not typed] inspectors were active, and in the Old Reich they were called precinct captains, and there it was the sergeants and police senior sergeants. Then finally there were the agents of surveillance, and the arrest was not the exclusive task of the Sipo, of the local Stapo or of the Stapo regional headquarters. In the towns the precinct captains saw to that, and in the countryside it was the rural constables, the gendarmerie.

It says here that the supervisory authority of the Reich Association of the Jews was the Reich Security Main Office, a special office of the Gestapo?

That is right. That was me, that was the desk IV B 4, I was the supervisory authority.

How did the Reich Association of the Jews in Germany come to be founded, has that been discussed already?

No, I cannot say exactly. When I was still in Amt VII in Berlin, the desk IV B [not typed] had long existed. At that time the desk was staffed with a Sturmbannfuehrer Langer, he was active for a long time, and he was followed by a Sturmbannfuehrer Lischka. He was followed by SS Obersturmfuehrer Eichmann. So when I took over the desk IV B 4 in the autumn of 1940 as section head, with my permanent deputy Sturmfuehrer Guenter, the Reich Association of the Jews was a body that had been set up long before and worked well. In the years before, under these two government councillors I have just named,

the Reich Association took shape and form. The legal permission was laid down that such a Reich Association could come about at all, and the Chief of the Security Police was designated as the supervisory authority. Further new regulations kept being issued for this Reich Association. It was a Jewish institution, exactly as I created it in 1938 in Vienna with the Israelite Community, or in Prague with the Israelite Community. There it was the decree of the Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of the German Reich, and here it was the decree of the Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia that approved the founding.

The supervisory authority in Vienna was the Commander of the Security Police and the SD, and in Prague it was likewise the Commander of the Security Police and the SD, and in the Old Reich it was the Reich Security Main Office. The head of this Reich Association in Germany came just as his colleague Dr. R. Loewenherz did, or the Prague men Dr. Weimann and Edelstein. They came often daily, or a [blotted] times in the week, and gave their report here and asked for a decision, and the decision was passed to them.

I had made it my practice that whenever one of them came to me to collect his ruling, or told me his measures and orders, or put his proposals to me, and I either approved or refused them, every such discussion was taken down as a [blotted] note by the Jew, who had to send me a duplicate as soon as possible after the discussion. As a rule it was done this way, so that there was not so much unnecessary running about, that at the next discussion he always handed me the file note of the earlier discussion, which I then went through briefly with him, and I made my marginal remarks at once on what had been settled in the meantime and what was still especially worth noting.

The original the Jewish side had to file in its own records. I remember that in Vienna Dr. Loewenherz had built up a whole ring binder of such file notes, and I saw it once when I visited the Israelite Community. That began when I still held the rank of an Obersturmfuehrer and ended when I held the rank of an Obersturmbannfuehrer, by which I mean to say how many file notes were in that binder. There may also have been two or three ring binders.

Of course I also made it my duty to call discussions in the building of the Israelite Community in Vienna or in Prague, and then, sitting there next to the office director, surrounded by the desk officers and department heads of this institution, I conducted and led the discussion in the presence of some particular case officer of my own office. That was a purely factual working conference. So what I want to say is that the supervision lay with the Chief of the Security Police and the SD.

Who was the head of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany?

Dr. Eppstein.

Did you have a closer relationship with him? Did he come to you often?

Yes, I had known Eppstein for a long time. I dealt with him when I was still in Office VII, and here, still as the case officer for the Zionist world organization, I had a great many questions to ask for my own instruction. A district secretary named Kuchmann summoned Eppstein. He was an official of Section IV B 4 in the Gestapo office, with whom I had nothing to do at that time, because I was still

under Six, in the office for scholarly evaluation, and there I then talked with Eppstein, or also with the Chief Rabbi Dr. Beck, whom I had brought in as the case required, about the subject area. With Beck it was mostly about questions of orthodoxy, about Orthodoxy, and with Eppstein I talked about current practical questions of Zionist politics. How far I was of course being left in the dark by the opponent for reasons of his own, that I knew precisely how to judge, because I had the reports of our informers and agents, which I only wanted to check through the Jew, and the other way round I had the Jew checked through the reports of our informers and agents.

That was the game of the SD, a double means of control. That is where I got to know Eppstein. He was an exceptionally adroit and well brought up, educated lawyer. Eppstein, exactly like Dr. Loewenherz, had nothing whatever servile about him. Instead his speech was free and open, and one could say courageous, even though he knew that these Jewish negotiating partners never came to the slightest harm either. So far as I had dealings with them, I instructed my guards and my outer offices always to arrange the visits of these Jewish functionaries so that the men concerned had no waiting time.

They came, they were treated politely and obligingly by the guards, they then came up to me, they were not escorted much, since they were regular visitors, they took a seat, and we negotiated as one does among gentlemen, because they knew me, they knew my attitude through the conversation, which also reached into [handwriting], since that is unavoidable when one negotiates a long time with the opponent. Then they also got a personal contact. I to them and the other way round. There was no more trembling in the knees, that was no longer any uncertainty. If I understood how to read from their faces, then they understood just as well how to read from my face, especially since I never came with underhanded thoughts.

They may have let caution prevail at the start, but later they knew exactly that in the course of the negotiations they could say everything, for how else could I have run such a matter as the supervisory authority if I could not also hear the truth? How else could I have expected fruitful work from these Jewish functionaries had I not met them with an open visor? They also knew, and I have never made any secret of it, that I have no prejudice at all against the individual Jew. I know no hatred against the Jews. I do not belong to the views of the Streicher idea. Instead I see the necessity of the struggle and the inevitability of the struggle, but on the political sector.

It would surely go without saying that on the part of the Reich Security Main Office, people would be installed as presidents of this Reich Association, or of the Central Office in Vienna, who were outspokenly compliant tools for the Reich Security Main Office?

Anyone else would probably have done it that way, and it was also done that way locally. The local Gestapo posts or Gestapo regional headquarters desk officers, over the years they of course exchanged their material that was put before them by the Reich Association of Jews as the local representation of the Reich Association, people they could get along with somehow easily. But that is wrong. In the subordinate offices it may be that this would not work out that way, because they are supplied anyway by their Jewish head office,

with instructions and guidelines. They are therefore only executing organs. But suppose I had installed a Jewish office director in the person of a Dr. R. Loewenherz who said yes to everything I said, or even said "At your command". If in the person of Dr. Eppstein I had had a man who had said yes to everything, or in Prague, then this Jewish body would have been a pigsty where no swine could have found its way about any more. It would not have worked, and then the offices attached to the Jewish agencies would probably have needed ten or twenty times the staff. As it was, one had a clear shop.

The Israelite Community consisted of around 400 Jewish officials. They had their own [blotted] register, birth and death registers, which is why they also had office directors. I protected them from encroachments. (Example of Kristallnacht.) I want to tell you about the internal treatment of the Jews in Germany, about the support for those who had now been pushed out of the areas of life of the German people and who would doubtless have fallen into criminality to a certain percentage had they not received at least enough support to fill their stomachs, to be able to buy themselves a pair of boots, to be able to buy themselves a pair of trousers.

All that was managed by the Community in Vienna through the welfare department. I had to raise the money for it, that is, raise it by making it possible for the Jewish functionaries to travel out so that they could carry out their begging tours to England, where they scraped together and collected foreign currency, which was also sent on to them continuously, which they then offered to the [handwriting] in Vienna, and which they could convert into Reichsmarks at up to twenty times the [handwriting].

The Reich Economics Ministry once jumped on me because I was endangering the international rate of the Reichsmark. The rate at the time was 2.50 or 2.[too faint] to 1 dollar, and I was selling the dollar at 20 Reichsmarks, among Jews of course. The Jew had to pay 250 dollars in the country of immigration, so he had to pay 20 times 250 dollars, 500 Reichsmarks, instead of 6 00 Reichsmarks. The difference first cost the Community itself, then it pocketed the difference from it, or else, if they were given the dollars, they pocketed the whole 5 000 Reichsmarks.

Out of that the apparatus paid its employees, out of that it paid the welfare, out of that it paid for the emigration of the Jews without means. So if a compliant man had been in the leading position, whether in Vienna, Berlin or Prague, then they could not have stood up to the enormous mass of work at all, with the thousands of agents that had to be dealt with in the course of 24 hours. Even if I had had to put police personnel on it, this personnel would not have been in a position to carry it through, because in the end one has to be a specialist there too.

And the harder the head in each case was, the better he had his shop in order. And if you now have a man of stature sitting in some position, and if this man knows from the start that he and his whole family and his whole clan are in [not typed] for the supervisory authority, and of course thereby for all subordinate authorities as well, then this man is as a rule, in his office and in his negotiations with the supervisory authority, the man of that stature, and then he wants to set it out plainly.

So according to your assertion, Dr. Loewenherz, Dr. Eppstein and the representative in Prague were compliant tools?

No, they gave me their contra. They had their ifs and buts. They had to.

Can you remember concrete examples in which they gave their contra, where you can show that in practice the negotiation was between equals?

The [handwriting] example:

How did the Central Office for Jewish Emigration come about in the first place? You know that a tax clearance certificate was needed for it, a certificate of good conduct, and so on and so on [not typed] A series of papers had to be produced that were needed to obtain a passport. Some of these papers that had to be produced had a relatively short life. The tax clearance certificate, as the hardest one to obtain, was valid for 6 weeks, after which it was invalid. If the Jew, who had to wait at the offices anyway until the rest of the public had been dealt with, finally still got a chance to speak to the counter official, then he was lucky.

As a rule he had to come three or four times, and finally his turn came. Once he finally had this tax clearance certificate in his hands, he then had to queue up just as often by a similar route and then be told, Jew, wait, according to the mood of the counter official. The result was that the 6 or 8 weeks' life of the tax certificate had long since run out, and he had to start again from the beginning, and in the meantime other papers became invalid again. Then Dr. Rottenberg and Dr. Loewenherz came to me one day and said to me, Obersturmfuehrer, this cannot go on. What are the Jews still supposed to do in order to be able to emigrate?

And they described to me what I have just described to you, and they said to me, if it is not possible here to give the Jews preferential treatment, then you will not get rid of the Jews although the Jew is willing to emigrate. After that I thought it over and discussed the difficulty with the Commander of the Security Police and the SD, Dr. Stahlecker, and I said to him, if we could bring together all these counter officials who have to be approached, all under our control in a building that the Security Police gives me, then they go down as if on a conveyor belt and drop off ready with their passports. It is good for both sides.

I had the luck to have a superior like Stahlecker, who took the matter up at once and the same day went with me to the Reich Commissioner [handwriting]. [handwriting] was all fire and flame, and the same day the Reich Commissioner's decree came about. That is an example. A man without stature would have come crawling and would have whined. Yes, he would perhaps have wanted to gloss the matter over and so on and so on. No, the office director was no compliant tool in the hands of the Security Police. No, he was a man of stature who came forward, demanded and wished. Loewenherz had a bit of the streak, the temperament of an Austrian, while Eppstein was the gross type of a bold, tersely expressive Prussian lawyer, and an ice cold lawyer at that.

Can you tell me a similar example involving Dr. Eppstein, like the one you just told me about Dr. Loewenherz?

Another Viennese example.

A lawyer of the Austrian Jewish Community in Vienna came to me once, in the days after the Reichskristallnacht. He was serving in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He said to me, Hauptsturmfuehrer, "Wild Jewish lout attacks harmless German lion." I was sitting at my desk. The officials simply came in like that, to discuss some particular special case, and so this man came in and told me that as a good, nice joke. Now if I, who after all embodied the SIPO, had been some rabid Jew-devourer, hardly anyone would have dared to say anything like that to me here in the office, where my permanent deputy Hauptsturmfuehrer Guenter sat across from me. I wasn't even alone, the two of us worked in one room.

Dr. Eppstein always came running whenever the guidelines for carrying out the evacuation weren't followed exactly somewhere in the transports, through local shortcomings. He, the meticulous lawyer, had his prescription in the form of guidelines for the evacuation. He had those. If he found some failure here on the part of the local offices, he came running and reported it to me, giving the place and sometimes also the official's name, and asked me to put a stop to it before it set a precedent.

Do you have a concrete example?

No, that happened continuously, and I'll tell you the following

No, what interests me is only whether these people were installed as [blotted] of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, as [blotted] of the Jewish Communities, and whether they were compliant tools of the Reich Security Main Office.

But now we know how it was.

And now, what was the further course of these people?

Dr. R. Loewenherz, over the years, one did sometimes exchange a private word, these people did also have private worries once in a while, and Dr. Loewenherz said to me quite early on: Obersturmfuehrer, you promised Dr. Rottenberg that he may emigrate to Palestine once he has spent a certain time as head of the Palestine Office setting the thing up here, and once the shop is running, so that a deputy of his can take the matter over. You have now kept the promise and permitted Dr. Rottenberg to emigrate to Palestine.

Now I ask for myself as well, when my task here is finished, would you promise me to let me emigrate to England? In the year 1939. And then I told him: Herr Loewenherz, I promise you, you can emigrate to England, but for the time being there's no question of it. Work here and do the job here, because as director of the Jewish Community you are put in charge of a shop with 400 employees, and I wouldn't know whom to take in your place

An interposed question. How did you come upon the person of Dr. Loewenherz?

A few days after the reunification I had orders to come to Vienna, to get the emigration going there. Since I had been in Berlin as the desk officer for the

Zionist World Union, I was of course the sought-after expert on emigration questions, whom the Chief of the SIPO had at his disposal. So I came to Vienna and spoke with a police detective, Dr. Ebener, who was still lugging around the Austrian commissar's uniform with a heavy sabre. That same Dr. Ebener who was later to become the permanent deputy for the Stapo regional headquarters in Vienna. The Commander of the SIPO and the SD, to whom I was assigned for command purposes, was [handwriting].

I first had to lay out my program to the Commander of the SIPO and the SD, I told him how I pictured the sequence of things, he approved it for me, I put it in writing in the form of a memorandum, had it signed off, and now had the authority of the superior of the Stapo regional headquarters Vienna, that I was to proceed in this way and no other, and the Stapo was instructed to accommodate all my wishes here and to give me facilities and so on. As the first thing I restored this Jewish organizational life, which had been smashed in those days, and only to the extent that I needed it for the emigration of the Jews from the Ostmark.

I had to have a proper, hard-hitting Jewish central instrument, which I had to provide with a head, and the most important thing there was the person of the head. I therefore asked Dr. Ebener to have some formerly imprisoned Jewish leaders of organized life in Austria brought to me out of custody. They came to an office room of the Hotel Metropol. Dr. so-and-so came, Dr. so-and-so came, one was too old for me, the other was too slow and too frail for me, the third had been too polite and too servile for me, and then came a man who had already been active as an official of the Israelite Community.

And then I negotiated with Dr. R. Loewenherz, coming to the personal details, questioning him factually on what he had done, and all the usual stories, and I came to realize that in his worry and his distress he told me untruths in some cases, he didn't know me after all, and thereupon I slapped his face. But I already told you that. In my whole time in the Jewish work I attacked a Jew only one single time, and that was Dr. Loewenherz, who received a slap in the face in the first hour of our acquaintance.

And so I appointed Dr. Richard Loewenherz in that same hour as director of the Israelite Community. I sent him back to his cell with a notepad and pencil and gave him the task of describing to me, first, the organizational skeleton he had in mind, and second, the functional course of things, whereby I dictated my intentions and my ideas to him in telegram style as guidelines. And thereupon Dr. Loewenherz marched back to his cell, whereby I had given instructions that he was indeed to remain in custody, but that he no longer counted as a prisoner.

I just wanted to make sure quickly and without delay whether the man also had the intellectual format to be able to run such a large apparatus. The next day I had him brought to me again, read it through, discussed it with him, was astonished at the content, which corresponded entirely to my idea and also corresponded entirely to what I had discussed with the Commander of the SIPO and the SD, who after all approved essentially everything, because in the essentials he was not clouded by any [blotted], whereas I, coming from the SD, was already automatically equipped for these things.

I had him released at once, sent him home, whereupon he also told me that his watch had gone missing, that he hadn't got his watch back and something else had gone missing too. Thereupon I spoke with Ebner, he must get his watch and his things back. I then heard nothing more about it, probably it was all put in order after that.

And so he became director, and he then got all his fellow Jews released and built them into the Community, and that isn't to be held against him either.

Loewenherz has now come through the war. Where he is today I don't know, probably he'll be in England with his married children.

Was he in Vienna for the whole of the war?

Yes, I never heard that anyone attacked him.

Dr. [blotted], a Kommerzialrat, in the First World War [handwriting] as an administrative major, had already worked his way toward me very early on, together with a surgeon Neumann, a well-known Jewish doctor, a leading authority, and asked here for Jews who were imprisoned. And because the apparatus of the Israelite Community was swallowing official upon official anyway, I gave him a few cases, and soon the word went round about him that he was the man who had connections to high places, and that as a result of these connections Jews sitting in prison could be released. Now Storfer was a wealthy man who never took a penny from his fellow Jews.

Having now become confiding through these matters, the Kommerzialrat Storfer came to me every other moment and then also managed to make friends with Dr. Loewenherz, and shuttled back and forth between Dr. Rottenberg and Dr. Loewenherz, and I must say I had a certain soft spot for this Kommerzialrat Dr. Storfer, which my permanent deputy Guenter could not understand. Storfer brought me a book that his army chief, a field marshal or the like, had published, and which was illustrated, and on one page it showed a photograph of this Storfer as an administrative major of the Imperial and Royal Army.

This Storfer had a very pleasant and decent way of negotiating, and I never turned him away, he had been useful to me. Not that he betrayed anyone, he carried out such special assignments, he told me about difficulties that would arise out there with any of our own offices. He was in a manner of speaking [blotted] an informer, but not for Jews, rather an informer whom I could put to work and who could give me information for our own apparatus. Because he learned it from the Jews who were being dealt with out there in practice far more easily than the non-Jewish V-man did.

That went on for years with Storfer. While I was now in Hungary, Guenter, who was never particularly well disposed toward Storfer, somehow, apparently influenced Ebner. [handwriting] Storfer had certainly done something stupid, Storfer was afraid because I was no longer there, so he entertained thoughts of escape, Ebner got wind of it, Ebner conferred with Guenter, and thereupon Storfer was committed to the Auschwitz concentration camp. I recounted that during my stay in Hungary I was in Auschwitz twice and spoke with Hoess, and Hoess said to me, here I've got a prisoner

from the Stapo headquarters in Vienna. He fills my ears with his complaints every day, that he is a special associate of Obersturmbannfuehrer Eichmann and that he had guarantees, and he wishes and asks that the Obersturmbannfuehrer be notified at once, that he came here to Auschwitz without the Obersturmbannfuehrer Eichmann's knowledge. In any case I first had a separate cell assigned to him, and he had to sweep the yard. Unfortunately he was then shot on Guenter's orders.

And exactly the same thing happened with Dr. Eppstein. Since Theresienstadt had a very lax administration, I needed a very hard hand. I needed people who were hard enough to organize a shop through, with such mass apparatuses, and I needed people who also had guts, because only in that way could I recognize the truth. There was some occasion or other for it, so that I sent Eppstein, who at a Reich Association that had already become insignificant had nothing more to do, to Theresienstadt, to take over the entire administration there.

On the Council of Elders sat Dr. Beck, then the Austrian General Sommer, and so on and so on, and Eppstein had been the head of the whole thing. They had 150 men, their own police, and while I was in Hungary I came through Prague, and Guenter had Eppstein transported to Auschwitz and had him shot there. He couldn't stand Eppstein either, he had been ill disposed toward him.

I would not like the name Guenter to be mentioned in the book, because Guenter is still alive and I don't want to harm him, because Guenter was a man of a bee-like diligence with files. He could read through 300 or 400 individual files in hours of detailed work, he could dictate his 50 or 60 letters daily, he had been a burrower who with his Thuringian thick skull was able to push through the thickest walls here too. He had a thick hide, which was once beaten black and blue by the blue state police, and probably as a consequence of his hard rise in the NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers’ Party] during the years of struggle.

I believe he was beaten about the body during [blotted] years when he was running around in good health, and out of that mood he probably forbade himself any personal approach. He wouldn't let Jews come nearer than three paces to him. His conversations and his sentences with the Jews lacked any personal note, his instructions came out in barrack-room fashion, and even if something was unfortunately said, it was still short and hard. He could hardly bear contradiction. He was my permanent deputy from 193 to 1945. Why he never got out beyond this posting I also cannot say. He had been an extraordinarily reliable man.

There may have been complexes of some kind that led him, precisely during the one longer absence from the office, when he was running the business as my deputy and had the full powers, without asking me, because after all I wasn't there, I had been posted to Hungary, to rid himself here of the people with whom I had worked all those years. That is the vexation for me, because I worked together with Eppstein from the beginning of 1935 to 1943, that is roughly 8 years, and with Dr. Storfer I worked together from 1938 to 1944, that is 6 years. All that happened in the summer of 1944 while I was in Hungary. He also had Weimann and Edelstein from Prague bumped off for me. He had all my Jewish functionaries during

So they turned my whole apparatus inside out while I was away.

What reason did Guenter give for these measures?

Guenter gave me this as his reason. Look, we're now at the beginning of 45, or the end of 44 [unclear], you know how the situation stands, you were right with your pessimism, you worked the whole time with these Jewish functionaries, they know too much, and that's why I let them die. My answer was: yes, my dear Rolf, there are a hundred others who know exactly the same thing, it's all been recorded in the files at the Jewish religious communities, at the Reich Association, everywhere. What's the point? The entire staff of these people knows just as well as Eppstein himself, as Stauffel himself. I don't see the sense of it.

Besides, I promised these people that they could emigrate and that they could stay free, and you know that when I promised the Jews something, then I kept that promise too. I know you take the opposite view, that you can promise an opponent whatever you like and break it at any time, that you can swear an oath and give your word of honor and break it at any time. Yes, I said, I can break an oath toward an opponent, but I cannot fail to keep a promise to an opponent I personally promised something to, and who works alongside me, and then out of gratitude give him a bullet in the neck. That won't do.

But what was I supposed to do now, it was too late. Of course Mueller will have approved it for him, I do assume so. Guenter won't have done that on his own authority. He will have reported it to the head of Department IV in the form of a consultation, and will have served up his worries and his reasons in such a way that Mueller approved it.

But what concerns could he have expressed to Mueller?

The concern that the Jew XY had worked here alongside us for so long and had exact knowledge of the personnel of the Sipo and so on.

In the end that is an argument for the opponent, that every minor official like Guenter, a deputy, has the power of life and death.

He did not have it. That is exactly why I say it is unthinkable that Guenter also gave the order for the decision he took on his own. No, that had to go through Mueller. He was not master over life and death.

But if, as you say, he served it up accordingly to his superior, then he achieved the same thing as if he had decided it himself.

But it was the end of 44, the Russian was already pressing on Vienna. 44 was a different time from 41/42. In 44, toward the end, some things had already loosened up. Admittedly there wasn't much left to do in our field, so he was still settling such leftover matters.

No sooner am I out of the house than they do here whatever they like.

You always invoke the existing laws, and here they are.

Yes, I do say it, end of 44. You must not compare the actions at the end of 44 with the actions that took place in normal, orderly times. I count those as lasting until 20 July 44, then the times were normal, and from then on it went by giant strides toward chaotic conditions.

No, my counter-argument, when Vienna was still a fortress, when the betrayal came to light, the

that the officers from the military district command committed by passing news to the Russians about weak points. When these people were caught they were not put against the wall straight away. Instead a normal court-martial hearing took place, and only then were they hanged. So even in a case like that it could have taken its normal course. And such examples are seized on with delight by the opponent, and with them the proof is given against the Gestapo that arbitrary rule prevailed there.

If one takes these cases that happened at the end of 44 as the argument,

then all I can offer as proof is that in 41 volumes I have described everything that was normal, and now I can state nothing else.

Of course that is an arbitrary act.

But you will have to grant me that right and law are not tied to a particular time.

My state of agitation then was quite a different one from today. I had seen, incidentally, that I had given the Jews my word and could not keep it. Because here I was affronted in so far as they ruined my own apparatus for me, because they ruined my section for me, where there was no arbitrary rule, and that was the only arbitrary act. That is why I gave Guenter a piece of my mind accordingly, and toward Mueller as well. I said it to him in exactly the same way.

Did Guenter know about your promise?

Yes, of course he knew it.

Did you not then start proceedings against this man for breach of discipline?

No, I could not do that, because I had been posted to Hungary, and my permanent deputy moved up during my absence, which ran from 19 March 44, barely 8 days, that was when I was in Mauthausen concentration camp, until the 2nd or 3rd of January 44, when I took up my official duties in Berlin again. Guenter moved up out of his post as my permanent deputy to acting desk officer in the absence of the desk officer.

But there is one thing I don't understand. First you describe Guenter as a person who let off steam in petty procedures. How is it that you then name such a man as your deputy, especially as you first said he had been a reliable man. He was not reliable, if he knows that you gave promises and he does the opposite of it.

I'm no clairvoyant. First, it was not within my competence to choose a permanent deputy for myself. There was no such thing. He was given to me as permanent deputy. I did not know Guenter at all when he came to me. Guenter came from some SS leadership school. He wore a red-bordered arrow here on his left arm, Braunschweig. That was a senior SS leadership school where he was serving. Then one day in Vienna I was assigned 2 Guenters, one an Untersturmfuehrer and one an Obersturmfuehrer or Hauptsturmfuehrer. I didn't know them at all. I got the Hauptsturmfuehrer as my permanent deputy, although I was an Obersturmfuehrer at that time. When I was ordered to Berlin in 1940 as desk officer, the same decree, of which I had no idea, laid down that Guenter was to be my permanent deputy. The Chief of the Sipo and the SD ordered that personally. This whole transfer happened after Heydrich the

or did you not ask Guenter directly, did Mueller approve that for you?

I can no longer recall that today. I believe it of my superior, whom I still hold in high regard today, and I think him capable of doing it, because it was not agreeable to him, since he knew my way of negotiating with the Jews, of dealing with the Jews. And it may be that Mueller was glad to play this trick on me, because if I had been there he would certainly have been talked out of this intention again and again in the course of consultations, by argument. Anyone who knows Mueller could well suspect him of finding such a proposal of Guenter's quite convenient.

With that you would of course be supplying the opponent with even more arguments for being able to claim that arbitrary rule prevailed on the part of the Gestapo. Because if the minor official Guenter has the intention, and it is even done with pleasure as you claim here, and it is approved by the chief of the Gestapo, that people are dispatched to their death without their having actually incurred any guilt, other than working loyally with you for years, then those are wonderful arguments for the opponent to speak of arbitrary rule and to prove it. And it is of course to be assumed that other cases,

You know of no other cases?

No, in my time there was no arbitrary rule in my section.

But it is possible that similar cases occurred in other sections, which get blown up and magnified and so on, and that this is how the Gestapo comes by the reputation it enjoys today.

Let me tell you something. What I am saying now is of course theory. If it were possible to set up a body of Jews and also non-Jews to work through every single minute of work in the time when I was desk officer of IV B 4, in the time when I was head of the Eichmann Commando in Hungary, in which I was head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, in which I was case officer and later desk officer in Department VII, if they were to work through my entire working life from the year 1934 to 1945 exactly, and stayed factual and stayed exactly with the truth and judged objectively, then let me tell you something, then such a body, which is supposed to convene in order to convict me, would have to acquit me. Because during my time in office there was no arbitrary rule in my section, in my office. Where I came across such few individual cases, since of course I could never vouch for my people, I stepped in at once and without mercy.

As I stand here, I always reported such incidents, and Mueller was grateful to me for such reports. So who ordered such things? Not I, and Mueller not either.

Did Guenter have the authority to address requests of that kind to a concentration camp?

Not requests. He had to direct a decree to the SS economic and administrative office, and Mueller must have signed it. It is not possible otherwise, because as desk officer I could never have written to Hoess, here, do away with the Jew XY for me.

One moment. You said that had been settled in a discussion with Guenter and Hoess?

Of course, naturally, as probable as that is, but it first had to be put in order in the files.

And Guenter must have done that through official channels. What he then did, how and in what form, is another matter. That is a consequence of the approval procedure laid down in the files.

You must not forget, it was a time in which people were being killed in the concentration camps one after another.

When did this happen?

It was in the second half of 44, or in the last phase of the year 44. I can't give you the exact date. Because when I came to Auschwitz and Hoess told me about it, I said, well then have Storfer brought to me, I want to speak with him. And then Storfer came to me beaming with joy and I said to him, well my dear fellow, what are you doing here? And he said to me: Obersturmfuehrer, I did something stupid, I wanted to flee because you were no longer there, and then I got frightened and they caught me, but you know I never did anything.

I then said to Hoess that Storfer had always been decent, that he had worked together with me, and I also told Hoess that Storfer had never betrayed his own Jews. That was not something you necessarily knew even when you worked together. He mattered to me and he had been a good colleague to me, because as head of a Jewish central office I was of course bound up with all of them. I had Jewish officials sitting there too, so I had to work with them and they with me.

It was a special position, that as an employee of the Sipo and the SD I could give directions to the Reich finance officials and the economics ministry officials and so on. And I said to Hoess, give him light work and decent food, and he promised me that, and Storfer was very grateful to me. And I said, I want to speak with Hoener about what can be done here so that they get out of this place again. Hoess knew that, he had been present, the three of us spoke together.

And in that time, when I discussed these things, one has to know, once a man is in a concentration camp, you get in relatively easily but you get out terribly hard, because against that stood an order of the Reichsfuehrer that whoever is in a concentration camp may not be released. That was a basic order, and that is why it was so hard to get anybody out. So I thought to myself at the time, well, nothing much can happen to Storfer, that bit of sweeping the yard doesn't amount to much, he gets decent food.

Yes, he said to me: Obersturmfuehrer, it is terrible, I sleep in a room where a few hundred people sleep, I get palpitations, I have never done anything like this, can't I be somewhere, even if it were only a corner. And so I said to Hoess, let him sleep in some corner where he can sleep quietly and alone, arrange something and let him march out with his broom when he feels like it and let him sweep up here.

And Hoess did that too. He was not the brutal camp commandant that people picture with a bulldog face. He had been the father of a whole crowd of children, he had human understanding for human troubles, he had the orders that bound him. And had I, by the chance of fate, had to fill the post of a commandant of a concentration camp, I would not have acted differently either, and had I received the order to gas Jews and to shoot them, then I would have carried out the orders, and I have already said once,

And Guenter would have had to do that through official channels. What he then did, how and in what form, that is another matter. It follows from the approval decision as it was fixed in the files. You must not forget, this was a time when people were being killed in the concentration camps one after another.

When did this happen?

It was in the second half of 44, in the last phase of the year 44. I cannot give you the exact date. When I came to Auschwitz and Hoess told me about it, I said, well then have Sterfer brought to me, I want to speak with him. And then Sterfer came to me beaming with joy, and I said to him, my dear fellow, what are you doing here? And he said to me: Ostf, I did something stupid, I wanted to escape because you were no longer there, and then I got frightened and they caught me, but you know very well, I never did anything [not typed].

I then said to Hoess that Sterfer had always been decent, that he had worked together with me, and I also told Hoess that Sterfer never betrayed his own Jews. One did not necessarily know that even when one worked together [off the sheet]. He mattered to me and he had been a good colleague to me, because as head of a Jewish central office I was after all held to account for everything. I had Jewish officials sitting there too, so I had to work with them and they with me. It was a special position. That as an employee of the SIPO and the SD I could give directions to the Reich finance officials and the economics ministry officials and so on.

And I said to Hoess, give him light work and decent food, and he promised me that, and Sterfer was very grateful to me. And I said, I want to speak with Ebner about what can be done here so that they get out again, out of this outfit. Hoess knew that, he had been present, the three of us spoke together. And during this time, while I was discussing these things, one has to understand, whoever is once in a concentration camp gets in relatively easily, but gets out terribly hard, because set against that was an order of the Reichsfuehrer that whoever is in a concentration camp may not be released.

That was a basic order, and that is why it was so hard to get anyone out. So I thought to myself at the time, well, nothing much can happen to Sterfer, that bit of sweeping the yard does no great harm, he gets decent food. Well, he said to me: Ostf, it is terrible, I sleep in a room where a few hundred people sleep, I get palpitations, I have never done anything like this, could I not somewhere, even if it were only a corner. And so I said to Hoess, let him sleep in some corner where he can sleep quietly and alone, arrange something, and let him march out with his broom whenever he feels like it and let him sweep up here.

And Hoess did that too. He was not the brutal camp commandant one pictures with a bulldog face. He had been the father of a whole pile of children, he had human understanding for human worries, he had the orders that bound him. And if by the chance of fate I had had to fill the post of a commandant of a concentration camp, I would not have acted otherwise either, and if I had received the order to gas Jews and to shoot them, then I would have carried the orders out, and I have already said once,

I am neither grateful nor ungrateful to fate that I did not get such a post, because I cannot piss against the wind anyway. For we were bound by our oath to obey orders, and that I did. I was always a proper SS officer, one who was used to obeying. Another example. I set up Theresienstadt, and you know what Theresienstadt was. At first it was meant to be a collecting basin for the Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, but was then converted into an old people's home.

Now during the time when it was still to become the collecting basin, so that the deputy Protector could keep the word he had once given the press, that in two months the Protectorate would be free of Jews, he said to me, Eichmann, now I have promised this and now something has to happen. You know Heydrich in his impulsive manner. Well then, one of the first measures in the first weeks, I had been in Berlin at the time and was only in Prague for a quick visit, and I find out that the commander of the SIPO and the SD in the Protectorate area of Bohemia and Moravia had issued an order that in Theresienstadt, publicly, three or four Jews were to be hanged on the gallows, and that in Theresienstadt, and that while Theresienstadt was being founded.

I can no longer describe the facts to you exactly. In any case the supervisory authority was the commander of the SIPO and the SD in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and responsible for the handling of matters was the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague, my Hstf. Guenter, the brother of my permanent deputy. And this Guenter had established that some Jews had hatched or wanted to hatch this or that piece of filth, so that the commander of the SIPO and the SD ordered the public hanging here in Theresienstadt.

You can imagine the panic that broke out among the Jews already brought into Theresienstadt, who had after all been promised that they could now build up their own territory in Theresienstadt and so on. On one occasion when I visited Theresienstadt the Jewish functionaries gave me hell, and I explained to them at the time, I naturally had to cover for the commander in front of the Jews, well, if one offends against the laws in such a form, then I cannot help either, then the local commander simply steps in.

But I can assure you that in future no justice will be carried out here. I also expect, though, that in future the Council of Elders sees to it that such a thing does not occur again. And I then approved for them down there their own Jewish police, to grow to a strength of up to 150 men. You can now say that this too was arbitrary rule. If one wants, it can fall under that heading too. But the commander for Bohemia and Moravia, Dr. [unclear], in the same year as the Chief of the SIPO and the SD became deputy Reich Protector, 41,

Were the Jews at that time in the Protectorate not subject to the ordinary courts?

Yes, they were subject to the courts of the Protectorate Government, and the Protectorate Government reached an agreement with the administration of the Reich Protector that it would resettle the Czech population in Theresienstadt, compensate them and settle them elsewhere. In return the Czech Protectorate Government would hand over all the Jews in the Protectorate area to the administration of the Reich Protector, because he had assured the Protectorate Government that they would go to Theresienstadt.

Now Theresienstadt did not have as much capacity to take people in as there were Jews in Bohemia and Moravia, and so the Reich Protector was able to order that those parts that found no place in Theresienstadt should be sent off to eastern concentration camps. So from the moment they came to Theresienstadt they were subject to the commander of the SIPO and the SD, who had a permanent detachment of five to six men of his office staff in the town. Outside, Theresienstadt was guarded by 15 to 20 gendarmes of the Czech Protectorate Government, that is to say one man for every few kilometers.

These unlawful acts of the Jews, were they committed in Theresienstadt itself?

Yes, they were committed in Theresienstadt itself, and as a deterrent example the punishment was carried out in Theresienstadt itself. It was not right in that respect, and I was told I was right when I said at the time, if we want to build something up here in Theresienstadt, then we must not begin straight away with executions, the people will take fright.

But in what form did you want to punish the people who had committed unlawful acts?

Then one would have had to take these people to a concentration camp, but not hang them in Theresienstadt. I was against that. For the order of the Reichsfuehrer did state that such people were to be transferred to a concentration camp, and Theresienstadt was not a concentration camp, and that was an error of the commander of the SIPO and the SD. He probably thought in ignorance that it is a concentrated camp, therefore a concentration camp, and carried out executions in it, and that did not exist.

This Theresienstadt was in a certain sense also placed under the Reich Security Main Office as regards supervision, because I had founded and set it up and was now moving away from there, since I had been transferred to Berlin. And from Berlin I gave the injections, after which the Chief of the SIPO and the SD, my superior, became Reich Protector and asked me for practical advice on what was to be done, after he had made that promise to the journalists. And I proposed it to him, and that is why I was entrusted with the setting up work.

For the detailed work, since I still had my shop in Berlin as well, I proposed Guenter. Guenter was subordinate to the commander of the SIPO and the SD, and so the commander of the SIPO and the SD was the supervisory office for Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt was not a concentration camp according to the will of the Reichsfuehrer. He even made it into a showpiece and coined the name Jewish old people's home. No further execution then occurred, not one. It stayed as I had told the Jews, you will no longer be punished by German offices, punish yourselves.

On what grounds was Seidel then sentenced to death?

The Jews themselves spoke for Seidel. All the people who did duty in Theresienstadt, whom I had put in place, whether that was this Seidel or [not typed]. In any case these people were sentenced to death and had only Jews as witnesses for the defense, and they all spoke for Seidel, and I read it myself, that the Jews did not understand why Seidel and the other people who lived in Theresienstadt were sentenced to death. It was simply a justice, it was also an arbitrary rule. There is arbitrary rule everywhere at some point, is there not? I now have nothing further to say about it.

If you had to conduct a trial today, about the whole complex of questions we have now been discussing for some time, and you were the prosecuting counsel, whom would you call as prosecution witnesses in order of importance, and whom would you bring in as witnesses for the defense if you had to conduct the defense?

In answering your question I have the following to state. As prosecuting counsel I would, on this complex, if I had the powers, have summoned AH and the Reichsfuehrer, both of them for the overall events. Then, for the police side, the police implementation, the Chief of the SIPO and the SD. Then, for everything that happened after the police registration, the head of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, Pohl. I would then have all the department heads and desk officers

Then for the Reich Security Main Office I would have the head of Office IV summoned, all the Einsatzgruppen chiefs in the East, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government and the head of Office VII, SS Brigadefuehrer Dr. Sicks. Then, from Office IV B 4, the desk officer Eichmann and the desk officer for protective custody, and further, for the legislative part, the head of Office II and his department heads or desk officers concerned. Beyond that I would then have summoned all the SS and Police Leaders of the General Government, the commanders of the SIPO and the SD in the occupied territories or territories we influenced, and all the Jewish advisers in the various European countries.

And with that I believe we would have covered the SIPO side. I would then have summoned from the Economic and Administrative Main Office the inspector for concentration camp matters, SS Brigadefuehrer Gluecks, then the office head in that Main Office who was responsible for the administrative work, all the concentration camp commandants, and all the desk officers who formed the link between the camp commandants and the inspector of concentration camp matters. Then the Chief of the Order Police and with him the operations officer responsible for providing the transport escort detachments, which had to accompany the deportation trains as far as the transfer stations where they were handed over to the Economic and Administrative Main Office.

Further, from the German circle, the Gauleiter with their case officers, insofar as they had anything to do with the work of removing the Jews from the Gau. Further the Reich Foreign Minister and with him the state secretary concerned and the department heads and desk officers concerned, to clarify the negotiations of the German Reich with the various [unclear] states, so as to bring out the part played by the Foreign Office in obtaining these countries' agreement to the removal of the Jews.

Further the Reich Economics Minister with his department head, desk officers and state secretary concerned, on the one hand as those responsible for removing the Jews from the economy, and on the other to clarify the disposal of Jewish property to [blotted]. Further the head of the Chancellery of the Fuehrer, for the first period Rudolf Hess and then Bormann, with his permanent liaison officers to the Chancellery of the Fuehrer and to Office IV of the Reich Security Main Office and the Foreign Office and the remaining central authorities, for on his instructions he was in a manner of speaking the hammer of

had to force his way through for the Gestapo wherever objections of principle were the order of the day, the objections of principle to a solution in this or that field, right down to exempting Jews from military service so they could work in the armaments plants. I would even have the armaments minister summoned, and he would have to answer for why, on what scale, and under what conditions he employed Jews in the armaments industries.

Then I would summon the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, to clarify what part he played through his responsible desk officers in the mental preparation, that is, the shaping of opinion. I would also summon Reich Interior Minister Stuckart with his responsible section head and state secretary, with his desk officers for general legislation, and if you like, also every member of the Reichstag who voted for the laws, the Reich citizenship laws and so on, even if only as a formality. That would have been the first rank of them.

Outside the Reich, all the state officials in the various countries who worked together with the Germans, and where they existed, the officials of the party organization as well. That is what I would do as prosecutor, and I would set down one [blotted] trial here.

That this was not done, and that they were taken one at a time, at a period when the material was not yet understood at all, was a mistake. Whether it was a mistake for the other side or a mistake for us, history may decide. It was a mistake, and I have my own definite view about this mistake, but that is of no interest.

So much for the prosecutor. Now the defense.

So the trial is now running.

Chief witness for the defense: history. I would call before the court a person who is an authority in this field, and I would further call before the court an authority on the disastrous effects the Treaty of Versailles had on the thinking and the conduct of every German and nationally minded person, because it was out of that attitude that men like AH, HH [Heinrich Himmler], Goebbels and so on came, and I am among them, so several million of us altogether. Added to that were the rest of the 75 million who had to support the 7 million unemployed, who themselves had a little too much to die on and already too little to live on. The high point was 1933.

Versailles brought the question to a head: in 1933 would 75 million Germans be Communists or National Socialists. Versailles allowed no other solution any more. That is also the chief witness for the defense for the whole circle of people I named before, the ones I would have summoned as prosecutor. It is still very hard, in the year 1952, to find witnesses for the defense in person, because in twelve years the influencing and the propaganda have so worked on the part of them who would have come into question at all as a defense witness, insofar as he has not died a natural or an unnatural death in the meantime, that some of the people simply want to know nothing more about it and want to remember nothing at all.

That is still the best factor in it. But a great many of them, who in 1945 and 1946 would still have been ready under the pressure of the occupying powers, since every pressure sets off a counter-reaction, those do not exist today. Good living and the democratic re-education have borne their fruit there, so that today, as a defense counsel, I would not know, apart from [not typed] whom I could still bring forward today as a defense witness who would then really stand by the matter.

In 1945 I would have had all my subordinates. Today I am not so sure any more, because some of them will be serving with the new police again today and will not come into question at all as defense witnesses, if they keep their pension entitlements in view. Another part of them may have had to lead a hard life in the meantime, curses the time and the stupidity in which he became a Nazi, and if something now gets in his way today, then it is humanly understandable that he vents his anger here.

One could try, if the Jew Loewenherz is still alive, to bring him forward as a defense witness. I would even bring forward Dr. Kastner as a defense witness. I believe that if I had to bring Jews forward as defense witnesses today, I would do almost better with them in 1952, however sad it may sound, than if I brought forward my own people from those days as defense witnesses. Of course I would have to bring all my superiors forward as defense witnesses, but if the trial takes place today, I have to say they are no longer alive. That is my fate.

As prosecutor, which Jews would you bring forward, or rather charge?

Yes, I would have to charge the ones I would also have to bring forward as defense witnesses. Dr. Loewenherz, Dr. Eppstein, Dr. Rettenberg, the two leaders of the orthodoxy in Prague, Dr. Beck, the whole Council of Elders in Theresienstadt, I would charge them all, although they only did their duty, toward Jewry as well. They worked with the Gestapo, cooperated.

They probably got the utmost possible for Jewry, but they also made it comparatively easy for me on the other side, because if I had not had this Jewish apparatus at work, and it is not the individual person, since behind them come the separate organizations with the Jewish employees and officials, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Hungary, I would have needed a hundred times the staff and I still would not have managed it. I could probably have got it clear as far as staff went, but that alone would not have been enough. These people would have needed years to become familiar with the material. Nothing would have been solved, neither the emigration nor the deportation.

That is not right. Evacuated was what the word itself said. When groups of people were evacuated, those were Poles, Gypsies, Jews, ethnic Germans, they were evacuated, people were also evacuated to Theresienstadt. Evacuated or deported is exactly the same thing. Deportation is the deportation to a concentration camp. Later on there was no more evacuating. Later on a person was no longer evacuated to Theresienstadt either, people deported. Only with the ethnic Germans did one speak of an evacuation, and later that was given the paraphrase "resettlement".

With the Poles too one spoke of a resettlement. A distinction probably was made, but that does not mean that deporting and evacuating are to be equated with killing. Not even the word final solution of the Jewish question is to be equated with killing, because that had been in use for so long before 1941, when this operation was begun at all. The Madagascar project went under the heading: final solution of the Jewish question.

The project with the district of Lublin, the attempt at the first settlements of the Jews, the attempt to obtain large areas in the General Government that were to have been designated as a Jewish reservoir, also went under the heading: final solution of the Jewish question.

The six transports I had sent to unoccupied western France under pressure from the Gauleiter likewise went under the heading: final solution of the Jewish question. So one sees from this that relatively harmless things ran under the final solution of the Jewish question for years. It was then kept on later as well, when it really was the physical final solution, but here too a distinction was made, between those who were now destroyed in the concentration camps and those whom the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office held back for work in the armaments plants.

Special treatment was killing.

But it was not applied only to Jews. Every desk had special treatment. It had been, so to speak, a decree of the Reichsfuehrer. It was not said here that he will be hanged or shot, but rather that he will be given special treatment. I also assume that it was a consideration the Reichsfuehrer worked out with his legal advisers, because he was pulling certain groups of people out of the sphere of the Reich Minister of Justice, and he perhaps told himself here that one can hardly hand down a judgment here that says shoot, hang or kill, because the Jews have after all been placed outside the law. So the word special treatment was coined by some lawyer or perhaps by himself.

I know that the word meant killing in every case. No other cases are known to me at the moment either. But it also happened that prominent people in a concentration camp came under special treatment, and in that case it was meant to signify that they did not live in a hut but rather in a kind of villa, and lived in considerably better conditions than the other inmates.

If the physical destruction had in fact been begun, and if from then on it says final solution or finally solved, does that then have to be understood as killed.

No, in no way. After 41 the words final solution of the Jewish question by no means only meant that killing was now going on here. It is clear from the statistics: far more stayed alive than were killed.

Can one say that the subject area "Jewry" was only separated from the Freemasonry desk at the end of the year 1936?

About that time, yes. End of 35, beginning of 36.

Can one say that priority in the Jewish question lay exclusively in the hands of the party and its propaganda apparatus?

Yes, up to then, yes.

How long did you work under von Mildenstein?

34 from the troops to the SD, until [handwriting], around that time a general shake-up. We had [handwriting] a head of office who as chief of staff had a lawyer, a Hauptsturmfuehrer, who gave a lecture every week on criminal law and on civil law. Around that time Mildenstein visited the Freemasonry department where I was serving, the seal collection, and he tried to awaken my interest in his newly set up Jewish department. I was glad about this change, agreed, and the transfer to this other department followed at once, and as a desk officer I had the Zionist world organization to work on.

I worked under von Mildenstein from about summer 1935 until 1936, because it must have been around that time that von Mildenstein moved to the Speer office. He left for the USA on Speer's behalf to study road building. For a few weeks more the department was run by the senior desk officer, who then went over to the German armed forces, and in his place came Wi, and it then became a proper department, the desk officers were promoted to section heads. In summer 1937 Wi was replaced as head of department, and in his place came the SS Oberscharfuehrer Hagen, a confidant of Dr. Six, who worked together with him, and with whom I then went to Egypt and Palestine in the autumn of 1937. In the winter we then had the preparations for the Ostmark, and in the spring of 1938 I went to the SD Oberabschnitt Vienna.

Concerning the general difficulties, [not typed] Mildenstein wrote a number of essays on world affairs, and with them called on Himmler to involve himself more strongly in this question, in order to seek the solution of the Jewish problem in Germany through emigration on a large scale. Are these writings known to you?

No, I have heard nothing of them, but I would like to believe it. At that time, as the desk officer under Mildenstein, I worked on the Zionist world organization, and the first book I took up was by Adolf Boehm,

"The Jewish State." It excited me a great deal at the time, and it was the main tome I used, alongside newspaper clippings, brochures and so on, in order to [unclear]

I had to work not only on the Zionist world organization but on Orthodoxy as well.

So I produced the first guidance booklet on the Zionist world federation. The booklet ran to about 30 or 40 pages. It was then printed and sent out to the training officers of the SD main sectors and SD sectors, so that the people out there would know their opponent in the most exact detail. A second booklet I produced was on "the [not typed] of Israel" as the bearer of Orthodoxy.

A third guidance booklet I then also produced on the "[not typed] Zionist world federation."

In these guidance booklets I proposed at the time the greatest possible support for the Jew in his emigration efforts, and where no such efforts existed, to promote them by every means. Because at the end of all these SD guidance booklets a work program had to be given to every Jewish desk officer in the SD sectors and main sectors, telling him how he was to conduct himself. In this way the individual SD sectors were steered, aligned in the same mental direction toward the same goal, and the head of the SD sector could [handwriting] his Gauleiter accordingly. And not only that, he could also brief the remaining representatives of the individual central authorities accordingly.

Under that stood the greatest possible promotion of emigration. Now you have to understand that such guidance booklets never went out with the name of the officer who prepared them. Admittedly these booklets carried my desk officer's mark in the covering letter, next to the book number, but that mark traveled along only as long as my office chief was willing to let it travel, because it did not appear on the booklet itself but on the covering letter, and that covering letter changed very quickly, already once the booklet moved on to the Chief of the Security Police.

If these are the booklets that are named here as memoranda from me, then I can certainly remember them, because these desk officers sat on their subject just as I sat on mine. But of any separate memoranda I know nothing, though I have to add that I need not know anything about them either. But [blotted] that was how it was, after the closing of the lodges, which was mostly carried out by a completely disorganized crowd after they had drunk alcohol, without any expert knowledge at all

so it went in the Jewish question too. The Party held primacy

Do you know a brochure said to have been issued by the Jewish desk, with the title "The Jewish World Organization," 1938?

Yes, that is what I just told you about. The Jewish world organization, under it fell for example the Zionist Federation for Germany, the [not typed] Israel, the New Zionist Federation, and so on.

Did you compile this brochure?

No, not the brochure. I only had the part on the world organization.

When did this brochure come out?

1938

Then it came out very late, because I finished my guidance booklet long before I traveled to Palestine.

This brochure was issued under the pseudonym Dieter Schwarz. This Schwarz is supposed to be Heydrich?

I don't know that either.

But the authors were Professor Sicks and Herbert Hagen.

Then that is right. Then they published these things later, after the SD sectors had them, and so made them available to the general public. How far my material was revised I don't know, because I stayed factual, we had to stay factual.

The proposal for a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna is your proposal?

Yes.

Heydrich was most strongly involved there in person?

You can't say that. At the beginning he knew nothing at all about it, because I made this proposal to Stahlecker in Vienna. He took the matter up at once, and when the thing was running to general satisfaction and it was then going well, Heydrich came to Vienna after [handwriting] and he spent a whole morning looking the matter over, and after that I was ordered to Berlin

How would you describe the operation and the personality of Storfer and Professor Neumann?

I sent them both abroad, Loewenherz as well, to look for emigration possibilities and to raise foreign currency

How high would you put the number of Jews who emigrated from Austria before 1939?

In almost a single year 100,000 Jews emigrated after the Central Office in Vienna was brought into being. It was the first well organized emigration, in cooperation with German and Jewish employees. It may well have been 206,000 in all, something like that, I don't know exactly any more, the work went on like a conveyor belt, as I already said. I came to Vienna in March 1938. At the start of my activity I had many difficulties to bridge, so it was almost the summer of 1938 before the shop was running properly, and it must then have been the beginning of 1939 that we had the first 100,000 together. The emigration in Vienna went on into the years 1940 and 1941.

I had by then already been in Prague with Stahlecker as an adviser when the

German troops marched into Warsaw. I had already been there over a month. At that time I was carrying out a double function there, first as personal adviser to the commander of the Security Police and SD, and second as head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which I had set up in Prague on the Vienna model. After it was established I was ordered to Berlin. Stahlecker stayed on there, was later sent east as head of an Einsatzgruppe, and fell outside Leningrad. At that time I then traveled constantly between Berlin and [blotted]. In Vienna at that time sat Guenter, a brother of my permanent deputy. That was in 1939 and by then I had hardly any contact with Vienna. In any case I have the figure 206,000 or 210,000 in my head, something like that.

From Prague, how many got away?

I can't say, but well over 100,000 as well, although the war broke out a few months later, because I still remember a figure of 97,000.

Is it correct that Heydrich's involvement in the Jewish question was limited until the summer of 1939 to Austria and Bohemia and Moravia, and that in the Reich territory he had nothing to say?

Yes, he did have a say in his police sector, not in the economic sector, there it was the Commissioner for the Four Year Plan.

At the founding of the Reich Security Main Office, when was the founding?

It was before the war.

At the founding of the Reich Security Main Office, at the organizational bringing together of the SD, Stapo and Kripo [Criminal Police], Heydrich called Eichmann, who stood in the highest favor with him, to Berlin and handed him the Jewish desk IV D 4 in the Reich Security Main Office, with the task of building up a similar organization for the whole Reich territory as in Vienna and Prague?

That is only conditionally correct. Heydrich was in Vienna, and soon, a few weeks later, I received a teleprinter message telling me to come to Berlin with my deputy. We had been with Mueller, Mueller told us how we were now to come to Berlin, I had my reservations because of Prague. Fine, we went back and thought we had won, because we did not want to go to Berlin behind a desk, but a few weeks later a teleprinter message came saying we had to report for duty in Berlin.

I went to Mueller, Mueller told me so, he went with me to Heydrich as well, and Heydrich told me that alongside my work as a section head under Mueller in IV B 4 I was to set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin on the Vienna and Prague model, and here the Reich Association and so on. Well, that did not work in Berlin. I did set it up, but it did not function, because by that time there were already [handwriting] immigration possibilities. The countries closed themselves off, and Bohemia and Moravia and Austria could get rid of their Jews by way of emigration.

Although the Jews wanted to emigrate, and the central offices offered the necessary help. But the countries abroad, instead of reducing the sums that had to be shown, screwed them up higher and higher. They also issued no more affidavits and no other immigration papers, and they made difficulties in other ways too.

How high would you estimate the number of Jews remaining in Poland up to 1 September 1939?

3 million.

Eichmann, after he had taken up his post in Berlin, formed the plan

One moment, that is not right, I was transferred to Berlin in 1940.

Eichmann formed the plan of deporting the Jews from the Reich territory, from the Protectorate and from Austria to Poland, on the assumption that the Polish territories would sooner or later be an independent state again. So he quickly organized a transit camp in Nisko on the [not typed] and wanted to deport the Jews from Vienna, Bruenn and Maehrisch Ostrau there. Is that all correct?

Yes, that is right. I still did that under Stahlecker, at that time I had nothing at all to do with Berlin. I said to myself, now we have Poland. In my whole activity I was in a certain way inspired by the book "The Jewish State" by Adolf Boehm. Somehow through this book I also had the wish to help here, not for the Jews, but that the solution lies here for this problem, to make the German people free of the Jew.

to bring about a solution between Jewry and Germandom, and on the other hand to give the Jews a homeland in this way. Homeland had been a catchword of the Balfour Declaration.

Now in Stahlecker I had a superior who listened to me, a man who was extraordinarily lively and active, who was also somewhat ambitious, and everything that was a new idea, one can also say a creative inspiration, that is what he looked for. The whole life of officialdom runs by the book. The officials get transferred, or they have been in place a long time already and stay there until they die or reach pension age. New ideas are hardly ever born, unless through the poring over of implementing ordinances, decrees, and draft laws that the minister [unclear] calls especially creative. But when it comes to political solutions of a new kind, people have generally been tight-lipped.

Stahlecker was not, and he was not when I put to him the proposal for a central office for Jewish emigration, and he was not either when I put to him the proposal: now we have vast [unclear] in the East, we can break out a territory here the size of a German Gau, the head of it toward the Reich will be the Chief of the SIPO and SD, and all the Jews will be settled here, with their own schools and administrations, with only the supervisory authority being the Chief of the SIPO and of the SD. Stahlecker was enthusiastic about it. He will doubtless have reported it to Heydrich, because I received the authorization, and not only that, Stahlecker drove out there with me himself.

I came to the San [unclear]. I saw a blown-up railway bridge, wide, endlessly wide country from horizon to horizon, lightly formed like a plateau, the San, that mighty carrier of water, in front of me. As a fallback for the first moment I had the village of Nisko, a larger village, right on the border between the Russian sphere of interest and the German sphere of interest.

I thought to myself that the terrain was ideal. I drove back, made my terrain sketches and descriptions, and Stahlecker got into the car. We drove off together, we looked at everything, and then we drove to the [not typed] line. A GPU [State Political Directorate] commissar received us, and after we had talked very pleasantly for a while, we then got a Siberian rifle [handwriting] orders to escort us through the Russian corridor so that we would be spared any possible unpleasantness, because we were driving in full uniform. And so we came back onto [blotted] soil that stood under German control.

I drove back and now had Jewish craftsmen assembled, 2000 of them, naturally along with the rest of the personnel. I took my rabbi, Dr. [blotted], along with me. He was given a certain amount of administrative work by me here. And after I had the best craftsmen in Mahrisch Ostrau, I had the best specialists and workers assembled for me from Prague and also from Vienna, possibly also from the Altreich, though I would almost deny that. And so I had material assembled from Theresienstadt, because we had a great many barracks there, and I now had a few trains put together with the 2000 people, among them also [blotted] veterinarian, [blotted] asked me that his son not have to work, but be allowed to be his adjutant. Good, I approved it.

The Jews did not work under our direction. They worked under the direction of the various Jewish caseworkers and specialists, and I had only told [unclear] how I pictured the settlement in building terms. I rode over the terrain with him and explained to him how I would like it. And Nisko was to be the first strongpoint in this whole district, which I believed and hoped I could win for myself. I wanted to bring further transports in with material, and with the material bring the people there, so that the settlement could go out from there, from that radiating point, spreading out in all directions. The San was the border. That was the Jewish territorial border.

And just when the thing was finally getting going, K.H. Frank ruined it for me.

To these transport trains from Vienna and Brunn [not typed] Eichmann also quietly attached Jews from Stettin and Pomerania.

That is unknown to me, but I would not have found anything wrong with it either.

The proclamation of the General Government as part of Reich territory, and a protest that the Governor General, Frank, wrote to Goering, put an end to this activity of Eichmann's in December 39.

Yes, and he did give an order, and he gave it to the commander of the SIPO and SD, through his Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Krueger, that I was to be arrested on entering the General Government. Streckenbach told me that over a small cognac, and so as not to cause any difficulties I stayed the night in Krakow and drove back the next morning, and then made my reports. But the state of things must already have been such that the other side had won, because I myself never again got the order to go to Nisko on the San. On the contrary, after a year, once there was no hope left, I had the camp on the San broken up and had the Jews driven back again, to their places of origin or to Theresienstadt.

This transit camp Nisko on the San, did you set that up yourself?

Yes, but it had been no camp. If you picture this country with its boundless expanse, it was perhaps 50 km where nothing stood. Then somewhat further on there was a town, Radom. Later on it was the district of Lublin. I did want to have this whole district. I wanted to make this town of Radom the capital of this Jewish territory, and it would have consisted of the whole district of Lublin. And from experience I first set myself down at Nisko on the San. I could not tackle Radom yet. That would have needed large administrative decrees to resettle the Polish population living there, and that alone would not have been enough either. Instead I took the thing on from below and first of all just sat myself down there. Here I needed no decrees and no ordinances. But unfortunately it then did not succeed for me as I had thought it would.

It was very much to the regret of the Jews, because we wanted to achieve a political solution with it. That is another example.

But surely you could not have drawn up this plan, worked out down to the smallest detail, or even carried it out, without your superior being informed of it?

Through the example of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, Stahlecker knew that with a proposal from me there always had to be something behind it. I had a certain credit with him. Stahlecker was no pen-pusher who wanted to know everything exactly down to the smallest working out. He did not concern himself with that. He liked being everywhere, he hovered above things. Heydrich was exactly the same. Heydrich and Stahlecker could have been brother and sister. Stahlecker had confidence in my work, because of the really successful setting up of the Central Office in Vienna. He knew that I did not just talk that way about something. On top of that came the crucial point, the political solution. And that was an important point in the political solution, namely to bring the Jews there, to give them a territory in this district of Lublin.

Eichmann turned again to his emigration plans, in which he now had to reckon Polish Jewry into his calculations. It was clear that Palestine would never be in a position to take in the roughly 3 1/2 million Jews from Germany, Poland, Austria and Czechia.

That would mean that if the 3 million Jews for Poland went away, only half a million would be left over for Germany, Austria and Czechia?

Yes, that can be right. Deduct the ones who emigrated, then it can be exactly right.

On top of this came the fact that, on Italian influence, the founding of the Palestine Jewish state is regarded on the German side as undesirable out of regard for the Arab demands. All the same, up to the end of 1940 there was still emigration from the Reich to Palestine. For instance in September 40 transports from Danzig by way of [not typed] the Danube [blotted] to Romania. Only in 1941 did Himmler forbid emigration to Palestine. As a country to receive a mass intake, Madagascar was considered by Eichmann.

This was not an invention of Eichmann's. Madagascar had already been discussed more often as an emigration area, by Theodor Herzl. In 1937 the French government had sent a commission there, which also included Jewish representatives, to examine the possibility of settling the island with Europeans. The first victory over France in May 194 gave the idea a new impetus. Quite generally people expected the war to end soon. In a detailed memorandum Eichmann proposed the island of Madagascar as a settlement area, supported by Heydrich.

I worked it out for Heydrich, not supported by him.

This proposal met with the agreement of Himmler and Hitler. Eichmann was commissioned to work out an exact plan. For this he got hold of documents from the French colonial ministry in Paris, in particular the annual reports of the governors general and the findings of the commission mentioned above.

I had even been in Hamburg, in the Tropical Institute, with Dr. Ra [not typed]. I worked all of this through down to the smallest detail.

At the same time he brought together experts from shipping for consultations.

That too. I had an expert at that time named Schlie, a Reich German, that is the same man who rocked the funny ship, who could gain land that way. I had him. But above all I worked through the emigration advice office of the Reich Interior Ministry, which a ministerial councillor headed, and which of course still framed its views according to the law passed in the year 1 [not typed]. There I also got the names of the necessary technical experts and worked with them as well. But more important still than that was that I drew up a clean body of law for the settlement.

The transports were to be organized as a joint undertaking of the Hapag and Norddeutscher Lloyd, taking various European ports of embarkation as a basis. On the conclusion of peace, France was to be forced to hand Madagascar over as a Jewish colony, and the European states were to be called on to join a convention [not typed] to attach themselves.

The following conditions were needed for this. First, in the individual countries the Jews had to be retrained from the intellectual occupations they preferred into manual trades. Second, Jewish property had to be preserved as far as possible up to the resettlement, so that it could be used for this purpose. Third, the drawing up of an exact Jewish statistic for all countries.

The resettlement operation was to be directed by a neutral office in Berlin. Goering was to take over the formal chairmanship of the resettlement staff drawing on the whole of Europe, while the Chief of the SIPO and SD was to be charged with the technical execution, the latter meaning Eichmann in practice. Eichmann worked on this plan from 1940 until the summer of 41. In 1941 this Madagascar plan was even still the subject of discussions in Berlin which Eichmann held with his commissioners in the individual countries.

These discussions were mostly about the state of the retraining and its further development. To prepare the Madagascar plan, from August 1940 Eichmann began sending commissioners into individual countries occupied by or allied with Germany. These were either attached to the individual commanders of the SIPO or the SD, or added as assistants to the police attache. In Slovakia and in Romania they carried the title of adviser.

Such commissioners were sent out in the order in which they were commissioned: France first, then Slovakia, Holland, Belgium, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria. The sending of detachments to Greece, Italy, southern France and Denmark had nothing to do with the Madagascar plan and is therefore dealt with later. Eichmann gave these commissioners the guidelines set out above, which were not rescinded until the spring of 1942. The central organization planned by Eichmann was not created at first. People wanted to wait for the end of the war.

But in order to fix the Chief of the Security Police and SD's coming jurisdiction over all these resettlement problems, Goering, in his capacity as chairman of the Reich Defense Council, issued a decree in the early summer of 1940, which with the [not typed]

Yes, that's right, that happened in connection with the Madagascar [too faint]

With that Eichmann held the right [not typed]

Yes, that's right.

In this decree the word Final Solution appeared. The Madagascar plan ran under that heading. Later the term Final Solution took on a completely different meaning and was used by Himmler and Eichmann as a cover word for the biological destruction of European Jewry.

With reservations [not typed]

Eichmann did this deliberately, to deceive other agencies that had been let in on the resettlement plans, by keeping to the word used up to then for resettlement.

That isn't right, because Eichmann didn't give birth to that. That was born higher up.

What did this gesture mean before that?

That they weren't shut down only because of the Madagascar project. We wanted to have them at all, we wanted to plant ourselves in there. Once you're inside, you'll see further. The same went at the time for the General Government. That I came off worse there is hardly my fault.

But Mueller, Heydrich and Himmler came off worse as well.

Naturally, quite clearly. But I believe Frank regretted it badly afterward, because Frank was pushed into a business later that he didn't want at all. He didn't want any Jews in the General Government, he wanted to be free of Jews, and I only wanted to pack one district of his full of Jews. Later he had the whole Final Solution business, and he was the one steering it. Just as he bit me out of the General Government, he had to take others who then did the Final Solution for him. Whether that was any pleasanter, I don't know. The thing itself would have gone differently if Nisko on the San hadn't been torpedoed by Frank. Whether he torpedoed it himself, or whether it came from somewhere else, I don't know. For Frank it was a big fight at the time, against Heydrich, against Himmler and against me too.

In Poland the handling of all Jewish problems lay in the hands of the Higher SS and Police Leader and the SS and Police Leaders under him with the individual governors. Quite generally the sealing off of the ghettos had been carried out with their own administration. Into these ghettos, in ever greater measure,

armaments plants, especially naval outfitting, had been moved. The situation of the Jews as regards food, clothing, housing and so on varied completely, according to the attitude of the SS and Police Leader. Up to the summer of 1943 Eichmann concerned himself very little indeed with the Jews in Poland. He confined himself to issuing general guidelines on the forming of ghettos, the installing of Jewish councils of elders and the like. In the occupied territories and in the countries allied with Germany where Eichmann's agents were at work, the main weight lay on preparing the Madagascar plan. Individual measures that sprang from the local initiative of the commanders of the Security Police and SD or of the military administrations are deliberately left aside here, since only the broad line of the development is to be set down.

One is mostly inclined to see in Himmler an ice-cold, cynical politician. This view is certainly not right. Himmler was by his whole bearing a mystic who paid homage to his world view with religious fanaticism.

That isn't far off the mark.

While on one side he consulted astronomers and turned to other sciences, out of the SS there grew a kind of religious sect with its own forms and customs, in which crude materialism mixed with hazy [not typed] notions. Not only was personal performance recognized, but promotion was tied to the number of children, to leaving the church and to other things.

And he had to be a believer in God. If he wasn't a believer in God, he could of course also leave the church and be an atheist, but then he was shut out. Atheistic lines of thought were not welcome.

Against the world of the subhuman Himmler demanded the sharpest measures, and so the concentration camps came into being. Humanity in Himmler's view was Christian softening of the spine. Praised be what makes hard. To seek the solution of the Jewish question in emigration or in a colonial settlement was in Himmler's view no solution, only a shifting of the problem, the more strongly the thought of German world rule took hold of him.

That I'm hearing for the first time.

Certainly he agreed to the Madagascar plan, as Eichmann has stated, only out of regard for world opinion and from political motives.

I don't recall having made any such statement. I would have taken such a statement as a breach of subordination.

But do you hold it possible

No, no, I don't hold that possible.

Do you hold it possible that a dead Jew was much dearer to the Reichsfuehrer than a living Jew on Madagascar?

No, in no case. Whoever writes that has no idea of the truth.

That the Reichsfuehrer inwardly was thinking of a destruction of European Jewry is shown by the events after the outbreak of the war with Russia.

Yes, I said that already, everything changed then.

He as well as Heydrich, Mueller and Eichmann were determined to deal Jewry a blow from which it will not recover, as Eichmann put it to Richter in 1945 with cynical frankness.

If I said that to Richter, then it was surely only something I had heard. It is completely false that at the start of the Russian campaign Himmler, Heydrich, Mueller and Eichmann decided on the extermination of Jewry. Decided isn't the right word anyway. The Reichsfuehrer was given the order, it wasn't his idea, and I still remember exactly the moment when I was told the Fuehrer has ordered the physical destruction. I heard the words physical destruction for the first time in my life. That's how this situation stayed with me. I've forgotten a great deal, but that moment I'll probably never be able to forget. Neither Mueller nor Heydrich nor Eichmann nor anyone else had anything to do with it.

This business was decided directly by the Fuehrer and the Reichsfuehrer. On that the Reichsfuehrer gave his necessary orders, certainly to the head of the Economic and Administrative Main Office as well. The Chief of the Security Police perhaps together with Mueller, since Mueller stood in direct contact with the individual Einsatzgruppen chiefs, perhaps the two of them gave birth to the word "tank ditches". Because when I was ordered to Heydrich, a ready-made plan was served up to me, on which I was to inspect and report to him. He told me that [not typed] had been given the order by the Reichsfuehrer to use the Russian tank ditches to shoot the Jews there and then level the ditches, and that I should go there and report to him how far the work had gone.

With this statement I give the lie to the author's construction. And I come to it because the author says I supposedly told Richter it would be a blow from which Jewry would not recover. I don't want to deny that sentence outright, because I can't recall it, but if I did say it, then I heard it and passed it on that way to my staff.

The destruction of Russian Jewry was carried out by mass shootings, and the so-called Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police were charged with carrying them out. Ohlendorf's testimony in Nuremberg carries this out. In this Commissar Order Eichmann saw a chance to destroy the rest of Jewry as well.

Complete nonsense.

In agreement with Mueller and Heydrich he began in the autumn of 1941 to deport Jews from the Reich territory, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia to areas where the Commissar Order was in force, especially to Riga and Minsk.

The logic or the argument of this author is to be dismissed as sheer nonsense, because I wouldn't even have had the chance to look there for the only way of solving the problem. My job was to send the Jews into the concentration camps, after nobody would take them any more and the Reichsfuehrer had stopped all emigration at the start of the Russian campaign. The order came that whoever sits in a camp has to stay in it until the end of the war, nobody could be released, and that the Jews were all to be transferred into the camps. It was completely a matter of indifference to me where the Jews went.

As far as I was concerned they could have marched to Madagascar, as far as I was concerned also to Glo… to be gassed, as far as I was concerned also to Auschwitz, also to Riga. It was completely a matter of indifference to me, because I couldn't determine where anyway. My timetable man had to sit down with the responsible man in the Economic and Administrative Main Office each time, and that office told me the reception stations. Or if the Economic and Administrative Main Office was supposed to have been responsible to me for Riga and Minsk, it is very easily possible that the Reichsfuehrer himself fixed the reception stations, because the Reichsfuehrer had the mania of meddling often down to the smallest details and made life administratively hard for you that way.

At this time no Jews are being destroyed outside Russian territory. They are being destroyed on Russian territory, on the basis of the Commissar Order.

Of course Jews were killed in the General Government in 1941.

In Riga was Eichmann's friend Stahlecker, chief of the Einsatzgruppen. This deportation to Riga and Minsk was meant to bring them in this way under the effect of the Commissar Order. This deportation answered to Eichmann's own private initiative, as he himself has admitted.

Nonsense, more I can't say. With Stahlecker I had nothing more to do from the moment he marched off from Prague. I had nothing to do with him either officially or privately, we never exchanged a single letter.

On the other hand Theresienstadt was built up at this time as a model ghetto. From this alone the whole development is marked out step by step. From the summer of 1941 Eichmann began to concern himself in ever greater measure with Jewry in Poland.

That's rubbish, I had nothing at all to do with that. For me Poland was finished after the Nisko project and after the commander of the Security Police in Krakow told me he had orders to arrest me. After that I bothered about nothing more. I went there another two or three times to Glo… as a postman, but nothing else. I had no jurisdiction and no authority.

Several times Eichmann carried out mass executions in Poland on Himmler's order?

No, I did not carry out a single execution.

His relationship became especially close with the Higher SS and Police Leader in Lublin, the former Austrian Gauleiter O. Gle [not typed], whom Eichmann already knew from Austria.

Yes, I knew him from Austria, but I had no close relationship with him.

According to Eichmann's own statements to his subordinates, Gle [not typed] was the first to use gas chambers for the mass extermination of people.

Yes, but why does one never mention the subordinates?

Gle had set up large labor camps in his [blotted] area. As Eichmann said, this procedure of Gle's was less conspicuous than the mass shootings, since various police units had refused to carry out the executions of women and children. On the other hand, for the removal of the traces of the executions there was a separate detachment, which was formally subordinated to Eichmann.

At the moment when the retreat began on our side, I was ordered to Mueller, and Mueller told me that the mass graves in the East had to be cleared up so that they would not fall into the hands of the Russians, and that within the next few days a Standartenfuehrer Paul Globel would report in Berlin, that he had been commissioned by the Chief of the Security Police, and that he was coming with his own detachment. Globel had earlier been an Einsatzkommando chief, and before that he was head of an SD district somewhere in western Germany. He went on to say, I don't know where I am supposed to put him, so I am placing him under you for supply purposes. I received the order, and some time later a big, coarse, farmhand of a man reported to me.

He introduced himself in a permanently hoarse voice, using rough words. The fellow hadn't five pennies' worth of manners. Obersturmfuehrer, you are to look after me in supply matters, my task is none of your business, where can I find quarters, I also have my own people here, three or four men, just as arrogant as he was himself. As I said, I was nothing more than a supply service for him. His work did not interest me, and I also had no idea how things went there. He had his own maps and worked entirely independently with his people. I had already had clashes with him once before, which I have already mentioned. The detachment was called only "Kommando Globel."

After the start of the war with the USA, in November 1941, Hitler's decision came, to order the biological destruction of Jewry.

[not typed]

In August 1942 Eichmann showed Wi an order of Himmler's, dated spring 1942, for physical destruction. Is that right?

No, I never had an order from the Reichsfuehrer for physical destruction.

Certainly the order of [blotted] was given some time earlier, since the deferment of Jews fit for work formed the main subject of the Himmler order.

If that is so, I don't want to deny it, because the Reichsfuehrer very often interfered in individual matters and may very well have written to the Chief of the Security Police and the SD. It should be noted that in the deportation of Jews from the Reich territory or from anywhere else, not from the General Government, because I was not responsible for that, Jews fit for labor deployment were to be exempted.

That such an order for physical destruction can be pieced together may be established on the basis of Eichmann's statements to Wi, Richter and Gromeid. First, the Madagascar plan was finally dropped in the winter of 1941 to 1942. The reasons for this were of an ideological kind.

Rubbish, the military situation, nothing else.

Second, until the deportations from Europe and the mass exterminations began in the summer of 1942, there were preliminary stages, which were set off by the commissar order.

That is possible, yes.

Third, the radical change was not recognizable until the summer of 1942. It was carefully camouflaged and explained to the public as resettlement to Poland, and at the same time as intensified antisemitic propaganda.

Possible.

Fourth, of the biological destruction, Himmler on his own initiative or on Pohl's suggestion deferred the Jews fit for work, since he wanted to use them as labor slaves in the big plants. He also wanted these labor slaves to carry out other work projects, the planting of a forest belt to improve the climate.

Yes, that is right, the suggestion came from some [blotted] or other.

From March 1942, in possession of the corresponding orders, Eichmann began the deportation and destruction of European Jewry. Auschwitz and several camps near Lublin were set up as extermination camps. The order of the individual countries had not been particularly laid down by Eichmann. He took his time, since the destruction of Polish Jewry and the deportation from the Reich evidently seemed to him more urgent.

No, he had to take his time, because he could only carry out his deportations if, a) in the territories outside the Reich or in territories not under Reich control, the legal preconditions had been created and passed, and b) the Reich Transport Ministry made the necessary transport trains available, and c) the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office [off the sheet]

Until the autumn of 1942 Eichmann also kept the final solution secret from his staff. This was all the easier because they came to Berlin only very rarely, when they were ordered to by Eichmann. Only in November 1942, at a meeting in Berlin, did he inform individual subordinates of the extermination [off the sheet]

Rubbish. If my shorthand typists wrote that down and my junior staff knew it, then I had no reason not to tell my advisers, who after all held the rank of captain and were out in the field and had to know what was going on so as to know how to conduct themselves.

In January, Eichmann was to send his deputy Guenter to [not typed] to negotiate in northern Greece. The military administration was planning to form a ghetto with labor deployment of the Jews [off the sheet] within the framework of the Organisation Todt?

Possible.

In February 1943 Wi received the order to go to Salonika, at the same time as Brunner and [not typed]. Since the military administration accepted Brunner's proposals, he carried out the deportation from Macedonia from the end of March until the middle of May.

Possible.

After the deportation in Macedonia was completed, Brunner, who enjoyed Eichmann's highest favor, was sent to France with his detachment to step up the deportations there, since Eichmann accused the commander of the Security Police, Dr. Knochen, of sabotaging his measures.

That is rubbish.

Brunner was active in southern France and in the formerly occupied zone. At the same time as the transports from Macedonia, several transports came in from Bulgaria, namely from the formerly Greek territory of [not typed]. These had been arranged by Dannecker, who was working on Eichmann's behalf at the police attaché's office in Sofia.

That is all possible.

After the capitulation of Italy in 1943, Dannecker was sent by Eichmann to Rome. Despite various efforts by Himmler with Mussolini, the Italian government had not joined in the deportation, and in the Salonika case had even repatriated its Jewish citizens to Italy.

Yes, that may be right. I already told you that I had great trouble and difficulties down there.

Dannecker, and from 1944 Bosshamer, deported several transports from Italy, however [not typed]

In September 1943 Eichmann sent Wi to Athens with the order to deport the Jews from southern Greece without delay. Until January 1944 this order was not carried out, and in the early part of 1944 several transports took place.

That [too faint]

In [too faint] detachment to Copenhagen

to deport Danish Jews. Most of them fled to Sweden. Several hundred were arrested, but were not taken to Auschwitz, instead to Theresienstadt. They owe this to the courageous intervention of the Danish king.

Yes, that is right.

So by the spring of 1944 deportations had taken place in almost all the countries that stood under German influence. Only two countries had so far been spared Eichmann's measures, Hungary and Romania. Romania did not join the deportation to Poland even up to the end of the war, while Hungary's turn came in March 1944. The further the war went on, and the clearer it became that a German victory was out of the question, the harder Eichmann pressed for the deportation and the destruction to be carried through to the last. For this reason he also went to Budapest personally, with a detachment to which he had ordered most of his staff.

That again is not right. I was ordered, by the Reichsfuehrer or by the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, to go to Budapest personally.

Concerning Eichmann's pressing for the deportation.

When I was pulled away from the building site I was running, so many kilometers east of Berlin, which was for housing the Gestapa [Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, Secret State Police Office] Office IV, when I was moved away from that building site on the order of a superior, then that certainly was not my own wish, because I was ordered to. But if I was ordered, see the example [off the sheet], and then to Berlin, then of course I take the best men of my staff or of my office with me, to make things easier for myself. That is what I did in the Hungarian case as well. I took everything with me that had practical experience.

Only Brunner stayed in France and Bosshammer in Italy? Guenter stayed in Berlin. The deportation of the Jews from Budapest did not succeed, because this operation, though prepared in secret, was betrayed in time, and Horthy forbade the operation at the intervention of neutral diplomats.

Yes, wanting to pick this matter apart today, after twelve years. I put my levers on Budapest more than once, not just once. At the beginning I of course had the difficulties, the resistance, but later it was the transport problem.

It was a lightning operation, that is clear, because I could not proceed otherwise. I had the order to see to it that eastern Hungarian Jewry could not come forward as partisans, and I could only do that by a lightning operation. That is also why I began there, although it would have been more convenient and more productive for me, I could have come up with numbers, I would have had it much easier, if I had been able to begin in the west or in the southwest, where our SS divisions were, for example. I could also have put the lever straight onto Budapest, to exploit the element of surprise. I had the order not to let any partisan formation come about, so I had to comb through from the east, which was the hardest for me, not only because I had to send my people into completely unknown areas, not only because I [not typed] and B.

to ask, to let the gendarmerie first develop its activity in these areas. How far-flung and scattered this territory is, how impassable, and how attractively compact and inviting Western Hungary then lies before you, how invitingly the Bohemian-Moravian region lies before you. Western Hungary I still knew from peacetime, I had been quite at home there. It was downright temp [off the sheet], but the order bound me to let no partisan formation arise [off the sheet]. How I did it was left to me, so I had to, whether I wanted to or not, forgo immediate advance laurels, to put it crudely, and had to sacrifice a few weeks. But I said to myself, that will come right in the end. Anyone would have started in the west, anyone would have started where the least resistance was offered him. Jewry, however, had not been prepared for that, and that is why I had the success.

The efforts of the representatives of the [not typed] Distribution Comitee, running in Budapest since spring 1944, then led in October 1944 to an order from Himmler in which the Final Solution [too faint]. The last operation Eichmann still carried out, although he was informed of the state of affairs under Himmler, was the deportation of the remaining Jews from Slovakia.

That is of course nonsense. I could not do such things on my own judgment at all. I only did such things when I had them in black and white in my files.

Brunner, who had returned from France, was sent in September 1944 to Par [not typed] and deported in the greatest haste the Jews he was able to seize. But even after Himmler's decree halting the physical extermination, Eichmann was still not satisfied. The decree forbade [blotted] only the extermination of the Jews, and so he set about using Budapest Jews as labor [too faint]. In December 1944 he had to break off this activity too, since Budapest was encircled by Russian forces. From February 1945 Eichmann's section was in complete dissolution. He himself went underground with part of his staff at the collapse in May 1945.

Possible, but all that belongs in the chapter of a mixture of fiction and truth.

Finally, the reasons why Eichmann was able to have such success with his operation as a whole. First, Eichmann possessed the fullest confidence of Himmler, Heydrich and Mueller. His position of trust was preserved absolutely even under Kaltenbrunner's direction of the office. Second, on the basis of Goering's decree in the summer of 1941, Eichmann could smoothly eliminate objections among the offices.

Yes, because the Chief of the SIPO and SD was familiar with the tasks of the solution. That is corr [off the sheet]

Third, with regard to the occupied territories and the allied countries, [blotted] Eichm [off the sheet] was in no way hindered in his activity by Ribbentrop and the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office had subordinated itself completely to Eichmann's initiative.

Fourth, the Reich Transport Ministry, despite all the difficulties in procuring transport material, always gave Eichmann preference in providing the necessary means of transport. The whole deportation stood or fell with the provision of the transport trains. That showed itself quite clearly in the case of Greece and Hungary. Fifth, Eichmann's staff were used to carrying out orders blindly. It was impossible, by appealing to the reason of these people, to move them to a quiet sabotage or to a slowing down, which given the rapid development of the war would have meant the rescue of thousands of people. Eichmann's personal influence over these mostly wholly primitive people was too great.

Here the author is wrong. Many of my staff had been Regierungsraete: Bosshammer, Wunsche, Suhr. Wi was one rank above me, Wi was certainly no intellectual nonentity. You know, when the man who gives orders himself obeys, and is used to turning the orders he receives promptly into action, then I should like to meet the subordinate who does not do the same. That is just it, that is the leadership principle we had, and that is in itself the duty of every officer, that he conducts himself most correctly, that he lives most correctly, in his private life and all the more so on duty: sober, clear, matter-of-fact, brief, to the point.

Then the idea of torpedoing the business cannot arise among these people at all. Naturally I had held my outfit in an iron grip, and yet I was popular with my subordinates, because I had a personal contact with the men, not out of opportunism. I talked with them in their regional speech, as far as they came from Bavaria and down that way, I made music with them for years on end. There was nothing about me that was the stiff Prussian sort. If one of these men, from the rank and file up, voiced objections, then I took them in.

If they were well founded, the matter was settled for me. If they were unfounded, then I will certainly have said, hold your tongue, you do not understand this. As far as I was on familiar terms with them, and I was with most, because I had already worked with them for years, I could do it without incurring any breach of service discipline here. On the contrary, the more open the answer was on a matter that did not suit me, the more harmless it was then taken from the other side.

On the basis of numerous investigations it must be established once again that Eichmann, although covered by orders from Hitler and Himmler, bears a decisive personal share in this deed, in the decimation of European Jewry, and must be held fully responsible for it, since there were other ways of getting around the Hitler order.

Quite clearly, there were other ways, I could have sabotaged. But then I would have been not a scoundrel but a swine, a swine that had indeed sworn an oath to the flag and an oath of service, but that would then have had to fall in with the ranks of the criminals of the 20th of July.

But on the other hand you would thereby agree that your personal share in the decimation of European Jewry is indisputable.

Yes, I did transport them, and had I not done that, then they would not have come to the butcher.

I had the order to deport.

So that is your position on this.

Yes, that is my position. At most I could still say I did not want it, I wanted no deportation, I wanted an emigration. And had the foreign countries, which could not do enough to denounce the German measures, spread their arms at least a little and drawn them in some measure into their zone of protection and taken them in, then not half a deportation train would have been assembled by me, for want of numbers. Then I would not have needed to order a single timetable conference at the Reich Transport Ministry, then I would not have needed to visit a single concentration camp to sort out those fit for labor deployment from those unfit for it.

The foreign countries did not do that. That is, after Versailles, the second great guilt of the foreign countries. The further guilt of the foreign countries is that in the end we gave them a chance again, and the Reichsfuehrer said to them, take them off our hands, but you will not get them for nothing any more, now give us goods for them. For the third time the foreign countries turned the offer down, and so the trains had to roll.

And you accept this responsibility gladly?

So far as it is a matter here of the police measure, namely the registration in those areas where I, that is the SIPO, was active, where I then provided the transport trains and they then departed, or in those areas where through my advisers I brought the governments concerned to hand over to the German Reich the Jews of their nationality, and I could then take them away after their own police had registered them, for that I stand, of course, as having done it. I did not sleep during the war years.

Resistance to Eichmann was offered only by Wi and, in Hungary, by the Eastern Jewish [too faint]

But I never noticed this resistance. This book is a mixture of fiction and truth, and I have to state that there is a great deal of truth in it, but also that the author did not go into the matter thoroughly. I do not know in what year this tome was written, because otherwise he could not in his childish inexperience have built my humble self up into so mighty an office as he has done. I always knew how to get my way, that is why I was in that position, that is why I was in the higher police service in the higher career track. But as regards my competence I am here credited with matters for which I was in no way competent.

I only say that this author too had to indulge in such a portrayal, meaning to say, that the explanation imputed to me, of the death of the six million Jews, should gain credibility. For it is quite clear that if he were to reduce my sphere of duties to what I really held, there would be a great many circles that would say, for one thing, the man cannot have known that, and for another, he cannot possibly have killed six million Jews. It is physically not possible at all, if you work out the time. But since the author here attributes to me an official apparatus and grants me powers so vast that I never had them at my disposal [off the sheet]

then of course one can say, this man with such vast influence, even over the Reichsfuehrer, yes, it really is credible that he killed the six million Jews. That is probably what the author took as his basis.

Now your most spontaneous reaction.

Three quarters rubbish, one quarter truth.

This report is by Wi.

What is truth. Do you know what truth is. I know it, you do not.

How was he interrogated?

One cannot grant the report a technical correctness.

No, one cannot, I told you that. The inevitability is [off the sheet]. But I hold Wi to be far too shrewd not to have brought my relationship, in which I stood to the Chief of the SIPO and SD and in which I stood to the Reichsfuehrer, back to the sound, normal measure of that time, if he had been able to testify freely. Now I told you earlier already, without knowing it, that today there would probably be nobody left at all, because today everyone speaks purely from the subjective standpoint, with an eye to what can I gain by it, if he is incriminated, what can I earn by it, if he has material things as his aim.

You will not get anyone today. I am convinced that if you were to ask my closest colleagues of that time today, then they would run me down, because they can only improve their own position that way. But I tell you that I am not like that. I would be a scoundrel if I were to run down the Reichsfuehrer today, if I were to run down the Chief of the SIPO or the head of Office IV, and not my colleagues either. I know that this incriminates me today. I did not do it then and I do not do it today either, and that is my stubbornness.

As my personal feeling I can only tell you that in my view this report came about absolutely under no direct, immediate compulsion or torture or the like. Instead I read a single motive out of this report, a single motive force, not the general washing clean, because that plays no very great part with the intellectual man, such as Wi is, whom I am now slowly coming to know as well. He has one basic motive and it is a very primitive motive: he hates you like the plague.

Why should he hate me? [blotted] was once my superior, that is right.

Yes, and that is why. He suppressed that for years, and he did not ask either whether you could help it, he sees in you only the object.

Otherwise all this would probably have fallen on him, this nimbus. It is a [off the sheet] nimbus, but let us put it this way, in today's negative sense, he would in a way have gone down in history. It is possible. Although I did contribute something, just as I did then, because I had everything, only I had no diseased ambition at my disposal. I once said that to Mueller too, and he thought a man ought to be ambitious. It was about the transfer into the civil service career, and I wanted at that time to wait for the end of the war. That may well have been around 1942. It is possible, but it then comes out of a spiritually primitive nature, if he acts out of this motive.

No, it does not need to be that at all, precisely because he is an intellectual man

it is these emotional impulses that then use the whole intellectual technique to make room and air for a primitive stirring of feeling, and that is the case with Wi. He suppressed this envy for years. With the end of the war, with the defeat, with the gallows in sight, this hatred, this envy, turned into a perfectly plain hatred, all the more because he was the one who got caught and Eichmann was not. That is the only way to explain how so intellectual a man as Wi. lets himself be led into saying that, and it is not the sort of thing a man says under pressure or under torture: "I will answer for it that I bring you Eichmann alive or dead, if you set me free, if you [off the sheet] let me live."

That is whimpering.

It is very plausible, the way you put it, but I don't know how I can put it into a form that would be humanly [off the sheet], since I never had the slightest difficulty with Wi. I never made difficulties for him either. We had been good friends. With Cremeid it was exactly the same. Although with Cremeid I did sense a few things, that it was hard for him, an office head used to working on his own, for me to be giving him the orders here and to press him into the blinkered policy of a government agency, because the one answerable was not him but me. He was used to being answerable, and so Cremeid allowed himself various high-handed acts, and I told him so once as well.

With the resettlement that might have been possible, but in a police apparatus it doesn't work, because I have to answer for it. We were both the same age and stood in the same service rank. He did, however, apply himself and asked to go to Hungary with me. I left people the greatest possible freedom as far as it could be done, and [off the sheet] it was Wi. himself who [blotted] asked me to take him out of Slovakia and to take him along to Hungary. His particular hobby-horse, he said, and what he would look forward to, was carrying out the de-Jewing of the Hungarian aristocracy, and beyond that putting the whole assimilated Hungarian Jewry under the magnifying glass, and he did that too.

What did he mean by "putting under the magnifying glass"?

Picking them out and working on them. He did do it, after all. He was the one who introduced me to L.E. [László Endre] He turned him up, because Wi. belonged with Cremeid to the advance detachment. He opened up those lines that then became the ruin of Jewry. How does the man come to impute things to me today which he, although he was my superior for a year and a half or two years, and must know at least as exactly as I know them, to impute things to me that in truth I could never have been allowed to permit, because I would have been put right at once.

There is no police apparatus in the whole world where the desk officer can somehow override the chief of a country's police, and what chief of a country's police lets himself be influenced by a desk officer. The police chief of a country perhaps has 500 or 1000 desk officers at his disposal, the Reichsfuehrer perhaps had 5,000 desk officers at his disposal. Would he then have let himself be influenced by one desk officer? I don't think so. Or would the Reichsfuehrer have let himself be influenced by a regimental commander? Is there any parallel there?

Becher?

Becher had a wholly personal relationship with the Reichsfuehrer. If Becher is told the bedroom secrets by the Reichsfuehrer, and has the commission to pick out a fine present, and in good taste picks out a very fine heavy gold chain, and then tells me about it as well, then the Reichsfuehrer picked the right man for it anyway, because if I have so ticklish and delicate a bedroom mission, then I keep it locked away and petrified inside my heart. So the man crept up here, saw how he could get at such things. But I only had a standstill relationship with the Reichsfuehrer, nothing else besides. I had the same with Heydrich. With Kaltenbrunner it wasn't like that, and with Mueller it worked out from the daily work as not like that, so you can't drag Becher in as evidence against.

I don't understand any of it, the watch decree either. I don't understand any of it.

Bed secrets are secrets because they bind you to the bed, and the bed is no sounding box.

The founding of the Reich Security Main Office must fall before September 1939 and meant the drawing together of the SD, the Stapo and the Kripo. After this founding, then, Eichmann was brought by Heydrich to Berlin and was handed over into section IV B 4 in the Reich Security Main Office. This meant, then, that Eichmann was practically detached from his previous formation, and that was the SD. So he was taken out of the SD and seconded to the Gestapa, whereby the SD in this case belonged to the Reich Security Main Office exactly as the Gestapa did. Until then the two marched separately. The one was a pure Party matter and the other a state matter.

In my view you probably did not take part in the law for the restoration of the professional civil service in the so-called Old Reich, since the law was already issued in 1933. But when you took over Austria, this law was, so far as I remember, extended to Austria as well. To what extent were you brought in to carry through the law for the restoration of the professional civil service in Austria?

Not at all. In Austria I was occupied with no other measure in the field of the Jewish question than the pure emigration complex. Everything else was negotiated and discussed between the Hotel [blotted], later Gestapo, and the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with Germany.

But with that you are confirming that you were somehow involved, because besides being head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration you did hold the post of Jewish desk officer with the Commander of the Security Police and the SD.

No, I did not hold that with the Commander of the Security Police and the SD. I held it as desk officer in the SD main district. But I held office in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration and had nothing to do with anything other than Jewish emigration.

I was given nothing else to deal with, neither legislative matters, nor personnel matters, nor any other things in the field of the Jewish question.

It must have been someone else, but I don't know.

That surprises me, though, because around that time I was working in another SD district in Austria, and within the framework of this law we had the task of assessing officials, that is to say of establishing whether they were Jews or not.

That never came to me. It never passed through my area of work at all. I had only Jewish emigration, nothing else.

In your later work too you had nothing to do with this law?

No, not in the later Protectorate either. In the Protectorate it was done by a desk officer of the Commander of the Security Police and the SD, an old Austrian Regierungsrat, who then became Oberregierungsrat.

And with the law on the revocation of naturalizations and the withdrawal of German citizenship, which was also issued in 1933, you had nothing to do with that either?

I did have to do with that later, when I took over section IV B 4 in 1940. Then I had the part of the work that also counted towards the [not typed]. I did have an area of work covering the withdrawal of German citizenship, that is the establishing of hostility to people and state, and out of that came the withdrawal of German citizenship, and from that in turn the property as well, that is the confiscation of the property and the handover to the Chief Finance President for the purpose of seizure, and the publication in the Reichsanzeiger. But that was only from 1940 on. Until then I had nothing to do with it.

In these laws the so-called exceptions keep coming up, people with decorations for bravery, those wounded in the First World War, the participants in the First World War. Were these things actually observed for as long as they were in force?

Yes, as long as they were in force, yes.

How long were they in force?

Well, that is to say, in part they were done away with, as it were, through high-handed acts of public offices. The traces were sometimes overstepped here, but then this matter was put right again. Only in that sense is it understandable when one says they were done away with later, because these groups were later taken to Theresienstadt. Take the example of the Austrian General Sommer. He was brought to Theresienstadt and had a so-called prominent person's accommodation here.

He did not live in the barrack-like collective quarters but in a small house, and to my knowledge he came through the war. The public offices held to these instructions strictly, which is not to say that exceptions didn't occur here and there, but those do occur everywhere. But I must add this: we all stood in the events of the war, and we were all brought up to a heroic outlook and had learned to have respect for all those who fought and bled for the German Reich. Yes, we also had respect for the enemy who took wounds for his fatherland.

And we could not act any differently with the Jew either, if we held that view. I said already that we also had Jewish SS men, who had taken part in the fights for the NSDAP in the hall battles. We didn't rebuff these people either. Afterwards we smoothed the way for them so that they could have a decent, quiet life. We respected the Jewish front-line fighters of the First World War just as much. We also had a Jewish holder of the Pour le Merite, by the name of Bergtold or something like it.

So these Jewish SS men were sent abroad

No, they were treated as they wished and given what they wished. They were not harassed. They were not shipped abroad, but on the whole they went gladly, so that they would finally have peace, in so far as they had not shot themselves, and so on. But they could do what they wanted. They were left undisturbed.

At my office I had an Untersturmfuehrer who then found out that he was a quarter Jew. He wanted to kill himself. I stopped him from it. He then went to the Luftwaffe, where he fought fantastically, and as I have been told, he has played a large part again in the new national movement in Austria now after the war.

How large do you estimate the number of Jewish SS men to have been?

It was small. By the Aryan certificate a few more, admittedly. You can't fix any percentage there. In Austria there were probably more than in the Old Reich.

But if I absolutely have to name a figure, then I have to say around 50, for the Reich and Austria. That holds for SS men, while with the other parties there were considerably more. There it runs into the many hundreds. Some of them were old fighters who only came upon it through ancestry research, that they were of Jewish descent.

Had the majority of the SS men taken the extreme solution, suicide?

Yes, most of them, if they were officers. A few cases became known to me, mainly in the years 37 and 38. In Austria it was after the Anschluss, when people began to carry out ancestry research. In German cases too, of course, and it sometimes took a very long time and ran into the year 1940. But the way was smoothed for these people. They had their wishes and their wishes were granted. I had an SS Oberscharfuehrer whom I had brought to me myself, although in general I did not take up individual cases.

We talked about his case. He was not downcast. He only said: "Bad luck, Obersturmfuehrer. It was a fine time, but that's how it is now, I can do nothing more about it." I asked him what he wanted to do. He was a musician. I gave him [blotted] hours to think over what he now wanted to do. He came back then and wanted to go to Switzerland to found a band there. Good, I said. He had money. If he had had none I would have got him the money for the journey, but he didn't need any.

He got a passport, the border [too faint] crossing points were instructed by me to let him through, all in ord[too faint]. He now comes to Switzerland, evidently didn't trust the business, and goes over the [too faint] border, and when he is then called out he doesn't stop. The other man shoots and hits him, and the man is left lying dead. I got a report at once. Everything was taken down exactly, but there was nothing more to be done. The border posts were not at fault.

Do you recall whether one of these former Jewish SS men, inside or outside the European sphere, may have worked against the Reich out of bitterness?

No, not a single such case is known to me. The case I have just described was a man of the most decent disposition, he had been a full Jew. He was an Oberscharfuehrer. What else were you supposed to do, I addressed him as "my friend," and at that the Jew withdrew, it was about a comrade from the old hall brawls

You had nothing to do with the Editors' Law?

No, about all these laws I have to tell you something basic. Up to the year 1940 I had nothing at all to do with them, because while I was still in the SD Head Office I had been the desk officer for the Zionist world organization and for Orthodoxy. If drafts from some ministry holding the pen went round to other ministries under the circulation procedure, then it could certainly happen that a part of these regulations and implementing orders, laws and decrees also went round the SD Head Office, and reached the responsible department head here through the distribution list. In that case the department head carried out this countersigning, but not the desk officer. He was set up for a Jewish political matter that lay in research, and at that time that was the SD Head Office. How far Ohlendorf's Office III held the pen

For this work it is of the highest importance to be able to build up the origin of the Jewish people, Eretz Israel, to get billions out of Germany as so-called reparations, to hammer a guilt consciousness into the German people, which suits the Jewish cause morally, but which on the other hand is also important because the monies that are to come are also meant to be a kind of atonement money, and the higher the sense of guilt, the more easily one can demand these monies. So the basis of all these efforts and of all these successes is in the end the legend of the 6 million murdered Jews.

It is of the highest importance for us to examine this thesis closely, both in its origin and in its meaning. There are of course 2 Jewish theses, if one looks at it closely, in conflict with one another. The first is the well-known one by Bu [not typed], which speaks of more than 6 million. The other is the far more serious work by Reitlinger, "The Final Solution." In that work the claim is put forward that these 6 million can never be right, that the figure must lie at around 4 million.

Neither Reitlinger, nor Bu [not typed], nor the Israeli government has even come close to trying to give a listing by name of these 6 million murdered. Yet one knows exactly how to list what damage was done to individual Jews in the Third Reich, it is itemized down to the hair, but no attempt has yet been made to give this listing by name of the 6 million Jews, not even leaving out the vague factors such as Jewry in Russia, about which Israel and Jewry can easily claim that it cannot be counted, so by name still less.

But even for European Jewry this compiling of the names has not happened, because one works only with large numbers. It is claimed that before the war there were so many, and after the war there are only so many Jews left, so the rest has disappeared and the Germans murdered them. No account at all is taken of migration, of the migratory movement of the Jews. One simply says that in Belgium there were so many Jews before the war, after the war only so many were left, so the difference between the two figures must be the number of Jews from Belgium murdered by the Germans.

If we now draw the conclusion, after a listing of the victims by name, and if on the other hand we see with what exactness the Germans worked, that the murder was carried on with the most meticulous bookkeeping method, but if on the other hand one sees the uncanny quantities of documentary material which, there is no other way to put it, were passed to Jewry by people from the Third Reich and afterwards, then it does not seem so mad at all to compile a listing of the victims by name.

These victims are after all the basis for claims, demands and so on, which cannot be overlooked. So if one makes the demand for a listing of the names, it would already be a good attempt in this direction if the records kept exactly before the war by the Jewish organizations, Jewry, in Holland or France, were used, so that one could then say precisely, these are the victims who fell here and there. That would at least make the thing somewhat more credible. But if we take the core of this

matter, the 6 million murdered, then one has to establish that this thesis is drawn only from a single remark of Eichmann's, who is supposed to have said [too faint] if it has to be then I will leap into the pit laughing, because with me there are also 5 million enemies of the Reich. But here Jews has been said instead of enemies of the Reich. The chief witness for the statement is Wi [not typed].

Wi was handed over suspiciously fast by the Allies to Czechoslovakia, and I say suspiciously fast, because through Eichmann's absence he was in the end an absolute crown witness, and it is incomprehensible that Jewry did not press for him to remain available, all the more since he had after all declared himself willing, probably out of old personal resentments against Eichmann, to talk freely and to say exactly what people wanted to hear. So it remains, as I said, incomprehensible that this man was handed over to Czechoslovakia so fast, when one could say with deadly certainty that he would be hanged at once behind the Iron Curtain.

In other words, what has been done? This thesis has been put forward, but the crown witness for this thesis has all the same been silenced at once. In the first detective story that came to hand such a circumstance would immediately arouse suspicion, it would be a clear ground for suspicion. The further statements, such as those given by Hoess and others, who said he had killed 2 million Jews in his camp, are even doubted by Jewish authors and presented as gross exaggerations. Hoess too is no longer here, and yet his 2 1/2 million are eagerly figured into the thesis of the 6 million.

So one has to come to the conclusion that something here is not right. First, despite the submission of extensive documentary material, no attempt has been made at a listing by name. Nor is there any document or other record in existence, only a single sentence from Eichmann, and the crown witness for this sentence, who was at the same time the crown witness for Office IV B 4, Wi [not typed], was got rid of very fast, pushed practically into the grave. But personally I would like to remark on this that I do not believe Wi is really dead. He is probably being held in reserve, as long as there is no certainty about Eichmann.

Third, on the strength of this thesis and of the general acceptance of this thesis, demands are being made whose end is not to be foreseen and whose end could have an almost tragic meaning for Eretz Israel. It is probably for this reason hardly to be expected that a listing by name of the victims of Nazism will be drawn up for the time being. From this it also follows clearly what tactic is to be followed, namely the constant demand for such a listing, because only on this basis will it be possible to make this thesis of the 6 million questionable to a wider and wider public.

How far Ohlendorf was involved here in the countersigning, that I can no longer make out today, but I would like to believe that his apparatus held the pen and was responsible within the SD Head Office, as for instance Office I or the later Office VII, for the scholarly evaluation and study of the opponents.

When I was then transferred away from the SD Head Office to Vienna and Prague, I had nothing to do with this matter either, insofar as what is at issue and under discussion here is the legislative side, because here I had to concentrate exclusively, in the truest sense of the word, on emigration alone.

When I was then transferred back to Berlin in the year 1940, this time to the Gestapo, then of course, whenever new implementing regulations were born again here from some central authority, by way of circulation, these offices went first to our Office II, that is Legal Affairs and Administration, as it was called, and from there I too received these matters for countersigning. That was my only part in these affairs. As I have already said, apart from the draft law concerning Madagascar I did nothing else myself in this field.

The initiative always came from the responsible central authorities.

Yes, that is how it is

The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, generally known as the "Nuremberg Laws." Who had the initiative in that?

At that time I was sitting in the museum of Office VII, and in a museum one learns nothing of what goes on in practice. My work, under the museum director Richter from Berlin, was to arrange and order my seal collection and to record it on cards. We sat quite separately and had nothing to do with what the SD was doing. Occasional visitors came to us from the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls and so on, who wanted to see the museum.

But I do believe that these two laws came about on the strength of a discussion at the highest level between Goebbels, Goering, the Reichsfuehrer and the Fuehrer, and that Frick was brought in, precisely because he had to build this matter up, through his state secretary Stuka [handwriting]. I also believe that what gave the impulse to these matters was, for one thing, the constant propaganda hammering by Streicher and also by Goebbels, and that the Fuehrer's Chancellery was involved here in an objectionable way.

The Fuehrer's Chancellery had to be brought into every piece of legislation. But the question remains, did the initiative come from the Fuehrer's Chancellery or was it only given the matter to handle?

These things were all enacted at a time when I had nothing whatever to do with them. It was only in 1940 that I had to do with the consequences of these laws.

Do you recall any cases that would illustrate your work in this area?

By that time, 1940, the big clearing up in the individual cases was already finished. From 1940 on it was only a matter of mopping-up actions by the individual State Police offices and State Police regional headquarters. The way things then went was that a State Police office or State Police regional headquarters would report

that, in the case of Jew XY, although he has a young rascal over 18 years old in the family, a German housemaid is employed. The Jew was thereupon taken into custody under the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, and instructions are requested as to whether the Jew is to be transferred to a concentration camp under the decree of the Reichsfuehrer-SS of [not typed]. That came to me, and it then went either to Regierungsamtmann Woern or to Police Chief Inspector Mees, depending on the Jew's initial letter, because one of them handled a to k and the other k to z. Then it was looked up which regulation applied [not typed] [off the sheet].

Dachau concentration camp. Finished. Letter note concerning Jew XY: 1. [not typed], what I have just said. 2. To the State Police Headquarters Munich, concerning Jew XY, with reference to a letter of [not typed]. In answer to the letter referred to, it is advised that Jew XY is to be committed to Dachau concentration camp under the decree of the Reichsfuehrer-SS No. [not typed] and under the Law [not typed].

The last item can be dropped if the protective-custody desk registered the matter itself for automatic re-submission, and with that the case was settled. That is the bureaucratic handling, the ex-handling of this case.

Don't you know of any special cases?

No, no special cases.

Do you remember any cases in the opposite sense, interventions on behalf of prominent Jews? Influence from higher up to take them out of prosecutions under the Reich Citizenship Laws or the Law for the Protection [not typed]?

Yes, that happened constantly. Those were the so-called interventions, but I can't remember individual cases. They came down from Goering himself, through the General of the Waffen-SS Wolf, right up to the present Provost of Berlin, then the pastor Krueger, and in between we had dozens and hundreds of intervenors. Intervening was actually forbidden, but what are you to do when the Commissioner for the Four Year Plan intervenes, an SS general intervenes. Then you can't be more papal in court with the other people than one has to be in such cases.

And how did you behave in such cases?

I didn't dare tie myself up with Goering, and Goering never rang me himself, nor did his office ring me. Goering discussed these matters with the Reichsfuehrer-SS, and the Reichsfuehrer-SS then sometimes came along with things he had just ordered the opposite way. I had got into a wrangle with [blotted], but Mueller put that right again. I did admonish the pastor repeatedly and asked him to stop intervening. I gave him three State Police warnings, and when Krueger still hadn't had enough after the third State Police warning, and I told him I would now have to order a transfer to a concentration camp if he intervened again after the third State Police warning, and he did it again, I had him committed to a concentration camp without further ado, and then [blotted]

never let him out again, however much his wife pressed me. She once caught me personally on the telephone as well. She booked a long-distance call from Magdeburg and got me on the line. I gave her a negative answer, though, and left it to her to turn to the Reichsfuehrer-SS. She will have done that too, but Krueger stayed sitting in the concentration camp until the end of the war all the same. Krueger was an ordinary pastor who had a hobbyhorse, the care of non-Aryan Christians. Had he stuck to that, since those people had taken up a kind of special position, then it would have been fine.

But as it goes, and Krueger certainly didn't see this either, that is why I gave him those many, many admonitions, which one could almost read as forbearance if one didn't know the facts. I had to do it because I knew that in a matter like the care of non-Aryan Christians it too often happens in practice that circles of people from the relatives of these non-Aryan Christians are also caught up in it, through a man like that, people who by law are not to be moved into a privileged status at all. Is that clear?

I came to Vienna, the Central Office was set up and so on [not typed].

Now I had indeed seen that I had all the competent officials sitting here on a production line, together with the Jewish functionaries of the Jewish Community in Vienna, that the paperwork side ran in order, that not one document went missing on me without the others being issued too. Then it turned out that the immigration countries were making their admission rules harder and harder. The amounts of the so-called show money were raised each time. In short, the countries made every effort to keep the Jews off their backs. We made every effort to get the Jews out as fast as possible, and the Jews helped the authorities in it, and so we supported one another in this way. Now that took a great deal of money. If North America, for example, demanded show money of 250 dollars per head, other countries had even higher show money. The money had to be raised.

I did this here not knowing that a law existed here on assistance in foreign-currency matters, because you have to understand that at that time I did not have a single lawyer sitting at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration who could have helped me with it, or a single lawyer who knew the body of law as such. I didn't know either what had been enacted in the meantime, I didn't bother about it, and I simply went stubbornly head first through the wall and did one thing. I went to the foreign-currency office in Vienna.

A Reichsmakrat Wolf sat there, an open-minded, unbureaucratic gentleman, and I described my troubles to this man and said to him: "Look, here I have obtained the papers for Jew XY, there I have the difficulties with the countries, these people keep raising the head money on me and won't take the Jews, I send my people out, Loewenherz, Storfer, Rette berg and so on, to raise foreign currency. I have the currency now, I want to give the Jews the currency as show money so they can march out. But I want, because I have to maintain the Jewish Community in Vienna with its 400 officials and

employees. The Jews who have been thrown out and pushed out of the German living areas are sitting here practically on the street. The medical aid of the welfare office of the Jewish Community needs help, needs money. They are allotted no funds by the state. What am I to do? I am supposed to bring the Jews to emigrate and I am handicapped. Give me the permission to sell the dollars or the Reichsmark to the Jews inside the country at whatever rate I can get for them, and up to whatever amount the Jew still has at his disposal. If it is a Jew, for example, who still has over a hundred thousand schillings, then I will sell him 500 dollars or 1000 dollars for 100,000 schillings." I got the permission. Whether he then asked the Reich Economics Ministry I don't know, that was no business of mine. I dictated my file note and was covered, as they say.

So I said to my friend Loewenherz, here, flog the foreign currency, hand it over, deliver it to Wolf. But there it isn't collected, there it is only deposited, and you dispose of it. So you can say, I have 10 families here and each family now needs 500 or 1000 dollars in show money, that makes 10,000 dollars of show money, but you have 10,000 dollars lying with Wolf, you can dispose of that, and you must furnish me with proof that you exchanged the 10,000 dollars not for 30,000 marks but for 300,000 marks, in one case for 600,000 [blotted], that was the highest case.

Then Loewenherz came to me once. He had another Jew who still had money and who was prepared to pay 20 marks for one dollar if only he could get the dollars, he wants to get away at all costs. I approved it, so the thing went through in order. But when that then happened, it came out and there was a row. The Reich Economics Ministry had taken the position that Eichmann in Vienna was undermining the value of the mark abroad, and a great steamroller was started. It ran through Heydrich against the Reichsfuehrer-SS, he was alarmed.

But I got not a single reproach from my superiors. I still remember that Heydrich laughed heartily over this prank and encouraged me to push through ruthlessly wherever it was necessary. That pleased me very much. My superiors then ironed the matter out, with the result that Eichmann's tactic does not undermine the value of the Reichsmark. What the Reich Economics Ministry undertook against it I naturally do not know. That is as much as I have to say on the chapter of assistance to the Jews in acquiring foreign currency.

In the Jewish legislation Upper Silesia had a special position. There was an agreement between Germany and Poland under which the minority was to be guaranteed a certain protection up to a fixed date. Were you concerned with that?

Yes, I can tell you more exactly about that. In 1937 I slipped on the parquet floor while holding a yellow pencil in my hand and came down on my right hand in such a way that I broke the hand in two places. I was then put in plaster and got myself into the habit of making my signatures with the left hand and writing what I had to write with it.

I had been a case officer at the time. I still remember that Dannecker sat next to me as case officer for his assimilation-minded Jewry, and we were amusing ourselves over the clumsy writing with the left hand, when the order came that I was to report to Sicks. I went with Wi to Sicks. That was just the time when Wi was changing over with Hagen, Wi wasn't really doing anything any more, and Sicks gave me the order to proceed to Breslau without delay, and for the time being for a period of 8 days, in order to discuss the whole business there with a Jewish-affairs case officer, Untersturmfuehrer Roesner, at the SD Oberabschnitt Breslau. I took extensive material with me that I was given, and I had to explain to him how it was now to be done and how he now had to observe things, because until then nothing at all was allowed to be done, until 15 July 1937.

I reported at the office, which was headed by a Sturmbannfuehrer XY. The Sturmbannfuehrer XY kept me waiting three days, and I was an Oberscharfuehrer at the time. The first thing was that he thundered at me and told me, if you have come from the Reich Security Main Office as well, with the aim of spying me out here, then I'll have you put against the wall (friendly gentleman).

Then I said to him: Sturmbannfuehrer, that is foreign to me, nobody has given me the assignment to spy you out here, I come here with the instruction to instruct your desk officer for Jewish affairs and to give him the equipment so that from the moment the Reich laws come into force here, in the East Upper Silesian area, he is given the possibility of being sound in this field. A further order I do not have. He then rather went around it. On the way out I had to salute with the left hand, I still had the right hand bandaged. I met one of his Hauptsturmfuehrer and was then taken to task by him over this business. In a word, they made difficulties upon difficulties for me in the SD Oberabschnitt in Breslau.

I got through those 8 days after a fashion. I [not typed] Wi a letter every day, since there was no way of checking there, because this Sturmbannfuehrer had been known as all-powerful. After 8 days I cleared off punctually, without having been able to settle much there at all. I reported all of it. Proceedings were brought against this man, he was ordered to Berlin, and in his presence and in the presence of an Obersturmfuehrer Albrechts from the personnel department, with Streckenbach also present, I was examined as a witness and had to say everything.

The man was then removed. Much later I met him again, I was already an Obersturmbannfuehrer by then, he was still a Sturmbannfuehrer, on some contract or other, and he then tried to ingratiate himself. He said, but we know each other, and I only said, yes, yes, we know each other. And with that it was settled, I had nothing in mind for the man.

I remember this business very well, because through the handicap on the part of the head of the SD Oberabschnitt I did not really get anywhere on the substance here. Roesner too was full of reserve towards me, and they more or less tried to keep me occupied at the office without my getting my business across in any way. Which is also why a total reshuffle of personnel followed. More than that I can't tell you. What I mean to say is that here the Reich government had prepared the ground quite considerably long before the laws came into force in the Upper Silesian area. I was there before July 1937, because at the end of September I went to Palestine.

The regulation is within my recollection, but I had nothing to do with it.

Because at that time I was working in Vienna as head of Jewish emigration. But in Vienna we had a property matter that was under the control of Fischbeck, the property transfer office [off the sheet], and there [blotted] this matter was recorded centrally. Later on I had nothing to do with it either.

The compulsory identity card, introduced in 1938.

I had nothing further to do with that.

The decree on carrying out changes of family names and first names, of 17 August 1938.

This matter was also put before the SD Head Office, and I believe before Department VII. Who wrote the names down, that I don't know. At the time I was only very surprised at the really exhaustive selection of these names, some of which weren't current any more at all, which had been dug out of the oldest period, from the time of the Jewish kings. Several parties must have taken part in drawing up this list of names. First, the Chancellery of the Fuehrer. Streicher will have gone to trouble and made haste to report names to Berlin here. Without doubt the Jewish associations themselves will also have been called on to name names. I can imagine that the Jewish Reich Association was called on to name names.

Who was responsible for drafting this law?

The Gestapa was certainly in charge there, and Six's department too, but only as a participant. Department IV, uncertain. I believe I can dimly recall that Stbf. Lischka, my predecessor as the desk officer for Jewish affairs in the Gestapa, even showed me this list. That is why I believe it isn't unfamiliar to me. But as I said, I had nothing to do with it, because at that time I had the Central Office in Vienna.

The atonement payment by Jews of German citizenship, over one billion Reichsmarks. Were you involved in that?

No. I was involved in the whole affair, the Reichskristallnacht, only to the extent that I let a number of Jews camp and sleep in my office under the protection of the guards, and the next day they went home again. That was the only thing I had to do with it, and I tell it because this whole Reichskristallnacht ran contrary to our wish, to our aim. And the Jews must have recognized that, for how else would they have fled to the offices of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD? They crawled into the lion's jaws, so to speak, and they must have known that the Security Police and the SD were against it. That fast it must have become known to them, faster even than to me as an office head, because I knew nothing at all. I had received no instruction, no order, nothing at all.

Hinkel's order that Jews are excluded from attending cinema, theater and public concerts and so on. Did you have anything to do with that?

I had nothing to do with that. Hinkel did that within his own competence. Only the following. When I was running the central office in Vienna, Hinkel came one day in person

Hinkel, with party number 9, as he introduced himself everywhere, the man who wrote the book "Einer unter Hunderttausend". He looked the shop over and was thoroughly delighted. He was accompanied by a Stf. Roth and a Hstf. Kualkofski [not typed]. In the period that followed, Roth and Kualkofski came to me in Vienna very often, less because I could have been of help to them on the way to reaching their goal than because they recognized my office as a welcome source, where they could [off the sheet] everything that concerned Jewish matters in Austria, better even than at the Stapo headquarters, because with me a Jewish flow of callers pulsed.

When I tell you that for a run of weeks we got a thousand Jews a day fully ready to leave, that means at least two thousand Jews could march up daily, the one group to file the application to obtain the passport, the others to collect the travel passport for signing. As a rule, though, it was more than two thousand Jews a day, because at that time I demanded of Loewenherz that he provide me with at least twelve to fourteen thousand Jews a day. We had luck then, we had foreign currency, foreign countries took people in, so there was a coming and going all day long.

Into this now pushed party comrade number 9, Hinkel, with whom in the course of time I came to have an extraordinarily cordial relationship. Hinkel was a man who in his own field was stubborn and intolerant and recognized nobody except Goebbels. He valued the Reichsfuehrer, he was after all an honorary Gruppenfuehrer, he was one of the first to have an SS dress coat made for himself, and at that time he had arranged the film ball in Vienna, which took place in the rooms of the Burg. I was invited to it as well, and at gatherings of that kind such things were then arranged and fixed up.

On the same night I drove with a few Slovak officers to a place called Engerau, together with other men of the SD district office, to discuss details there, because at that time a little revolution was starting there. I believe it was around the time when Slovakia was making itself independent and cutting itself out of the territory of Czechoslovakia. It must have been at the time of the 1938 film ball. Beyond that, though, I had nothing to do with Reich culture administrator Hinkel. He will have described his affairs, or his assistants Roth and Kualkofski.

The Fuehrer's order to SS Gruppenfuehrer Heydrich on the solution of the Jewish question, of 24 January 1939. The Fuehrer assigns Heydrich the task of "bringing the Jewish question, in the form of emigration or evacuation, to a solution as favorable as possible under the circumstances of the time."

That was the Madagascar project, and there, in presenting this Madagascar project, the Chief of the Security Police and the SD had himself given all powers for Jewish affairs by Reich Marshal Goering.

Oddly enough, in 1939 the following decree was issued on the law of the Hitler Youth. Jews are not admitted to the Hitler Youth, persons of mixed descent may be members. This decree is dated 23 March 1939.

The Jew, that is clear, but the person of mixed descent was courted by us. The quarter Jew of today was the German blooded man of tomorrow. And that was a considerable number. You couldn't handle blood in such a way that you simply threw out the baby with the bath water. We needed them, the half Jew too, if the half Jew was not a Jew in the sense of the legislation, that is, if he was not circumcised

if he did not belong to a Jewish religious community, then he counted as a Jew in the sense of the legislation. But a half Jew as such was also fifty percent German blood, which tomorrow was already seventy five percent, and by the next generation it was full blooded. Hence the clause that persons of mixed descent could also be members. Persons of mixed descent in the Hitler Youth, that may well have offended many a party comrade and not seemed comprehensible. But one has to have a standard, after all, in order to be able to sort such great masses into certain channels.

Hence this business. And you also can't offend people like that. How many persons of mixed descent were there in the armed forces? There were even officers. That would have been a jab into the hornets' nest like no other. It isn't the case that everything was neatly thrashed out by a sledgehammer method. No, it came bit by bit, as it happened to work out with the Jewish legislation. Nothing at all was prepared long in advance, the way people would like to have it.

On the issuing of a decree to the Reich Citizenship Law, did you take part or not, given that the Reich Association later came under the Reich Security Head Office? This decree came out on 4 July 1939.

No, Lischka still did that, my predecessor.

The confiscation of radio sets, II, B 4. Which section was that? The decree of 29 September 1939. At that point the Reich Security Head Office existed, and Department II at that time was legislation, so Department IV was involved in this matter only at the margin.

Yes, Department II was responsible for legislation.

Exceptional law for the Jews in Germany. Did the Reich Association of Jews in Germany have the right [blotted] to issue decrees for the Jews?

Yes, the Reich Association had that right, but of course only when these decrees had been agreed in advance with the responsible desk in Department IV and had been approved. In practice it went like this. The head of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, Dr. Eppstein, went before 1940 to my predecessor Prof. Lischka and put his request to him, or else it was inspired by the Gestapo and worked out by him and submitted in extract. After 1940 it was submitted to me by [blotted]. It was approved or rejected. If it was approved, then it was a lawful decree of the Jews in Germany, valid and binding for all Jews under the Nuremberg code of law.

So the emigration levy decree of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany was issued on 2 February 1940. That means this decree was already agreed with you.

No, I only came in the autumn of 1940. Just as the Israelite religious community in Vienna likewise fixed an amount, exactly the same applied to the Reich Association in Germany. Only in the Altreich it was handled a bit more formally and more tightly, whereas in Austria, that is, in the Ostmark, the thing was carried out in a somewhat easier way, in that Dr. Loewenherz came to me, put it to me, and I then said to him, yes, yes, do it that way. Then Loewenherz ordered it.

In the Altreich, Eppstein first had to make the pilgrimage to the Stapo with the exact draft. There it was chewed over in official fashion, and after weeks and days the man got the papers back and had to change them on some points. It was more fussy, more difficult, it was more bureaucratic. In the Ostmark and in Bohemia and Moravia, by contrast, the thing was worked out roughly by rule of thumb, and the responsible heads here could proceed fairly freely at their own discretion, and he knew that in any case he had the cover of his supervising authority.

How did the order come about that all members of the German police had to see the film "Jud Suess"?

I can only imagine that Goebbels, who set the thing going with Veit Harlan, was concerned here to find as large a response as possible, and with the man he got on with well and matched ideologically, he tried to recruit that man's mighty corps as viewers too. To me myself at the time, when I

…watched the film, it was not known to me that there had been any pressure from above. I read it here for the first time in the collection of laws, that any pressure was exerted at all. Perhaps it was in the individual branches of the SS or the SA [Sturmabteilung].

In the police above all.

I know nothing of that. I had so many police officials of junior and the most junior rank, nobody was forced. I am convinced that most of them did not go at all, because most of them probably shied away from the expense. I am not aware that any pressure, not even a recommendation, was ever expressed. I could imagine that through Dr. Goebbels' agreement with the RF [blotted] this thing was recommended here to the sections of the general SS, to the black SS and the SA, perhaps by the training officers. More than that I could not wring out of it with the best will in the world.

Were you informed about the Führer's decree on the confiscated assets of enemies of the Reich, of 29 May 1941?

Yes, I dealt with it. I was not involved in drafting it, I somehow took it over. It came by mysterious routes finally to the end station where it was to be handled in practice, and then landed with my section. For this purpose I had Regierungsrat [blotted], whom I had to take over from the chief of Office 4, and after he was transferred to France as commander of the Sipo and SD, I had the man who had already been working with me for a long time as an assessor and then became a Regierungsrat, Wünsche.

Him I then put in charge, and as his helper [blotted] I gave him Regierungsrat Bosshammer. This business dealt first with establishing hostility to the people and the state. Once that was established, the confiscation of the assets was pronounced, all of that by my section. Then the whole file was taken to the Reichsanzeiger for publication, because bound up with it was also the revocation of German citizenship.

Then the file was given in duplicate to the Foreign Office, or rather the Foreign Office read it in the Reichsanzeiger anyway, as did the various heads of mission in the various foreign states. Then the file was at the same time handed over to the chief finance president with the request to collect the assets. Publication took place every 14 days in the Reichsanzeiger. That was the practical course. We could of course not establish who in Munich, Stuttgart and so on had made himself guilty of activities hostile to the state. The responsible Stapo and Stapo regional headquarters had doubtless, on

…the strength of their cooperation with the SD and the SD main districts and so on, established that the Reich President's emergency decree for the protection of the state, the various other implementing provisions together with the supplementary laws, were to be applied to such and such a person in their district. Thereupon a comprehensive file was opened. If the man was still on Reich territory, which was rarely the case, he was summoned.

If not, every inquiry that was possible was set in motion to carry the burden of proof, and then this extract was sent to Berlin with the request for revocation of German citizenship on grounds of hostility to the people and the state, and the request for confiscation of the assets by the chief finance president. We in the section did not have to examine the person or the personal side. There the last instance was the Stapo or the Stapo regional headquarters, unless an appeal was lodged against it here. In my section we had only to establish whether the legal basis for the case existed. The person was of no interest at the central instance. The matter was simply passed on, as I described at length at the beginning.

In the Reichsanzeiger, under what file reference was it entered?

For all cases IV B 4, my section.

The decree of the Delegate for the Four Year Plan to SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich concerning the total solution of the Jewish question, of July 1941, that is, at a time when you were already sitting as a section head in the Reich Security Main Office. With reference to the Führer's decree of 24 January 1939, Heydrich is charged by Göring with making all the necessary preparations of an organizational and material kind for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German spheres of influence, Europe. Heydrich is to submit an overall draft. What do you know about these two things?

So many years have passed that I could not call these matters to mind straight away a few weeks ago, but now in the meantime I have read some things. Around that same time I was building and rummaging about at the Madagascar project. You know it was a thing I did not handle in some quiet cell. It was a thing that moved all the central instances and mobilized them, because I drummed them together once or twice a week. There were 20, 30, 40 section heads at the meetings of the various central instances. And here Heydrich, who had a very receptive mind for matters touching the priority of the Sipo, saw

…here, just as in Vienna and Prague at the Jewish central offices, a second opportunity to extend his powers. This Madagascar project, over which all the instances had until then been fighting and scrapping, he simply took up with Göring, and had himself given a general power of attorney here for the final solution of the Jewish questions. What was meant by this decree was the Madagascar project. And Göring had himself here a special report, or overall draft. That was this Madagascar draft. After the plenipotentiary section heads of the central instances sent to me had signed it off, it was passed on as a ministerial draft through the chief of the Sipo and SD to the individual ministries, naturally first to the Reich Marshal. My address always read: To the Reich Marshal G., subtitle Delegate for the Four Year Plan. But that is not important at the moment.

So by the overall draft you understand the Madagascar project?

Yes, the Madagascar project.

And not, as one might read into it, the physical elimination of the Jews?

No. There was never any draft demanded for that at all, nor given. I would have had to know that too, because I was just as surprised as anyone else.

Did an answer then come to this overall draft to Göring?

Heydrich was then appointed as delegate with the [not typed]. In any case, from that time on no central instance could speak into Heydrich's arrangements concerning the Jewish question in any way, or make any objections or lay down any rules for him.

Yes, but this overall draft refers only to the Madagascar project, so the answer would have to refer only to this project?

Yes, that was how it was set up. He was charged with the total solution of the Jewish question, on the grounds of the Madagascar project. That one day this Madagascar project would fall through and other directives would be issued from a high and a higher vantage point was not known at that time. But Heydrich, and Himmler too, derived from this instrument of appointment the rights to do and to leave undone everything further from then on, because it had doubtless not been given definitively for the Madagascar project alone, this instrument of appointment. Rather the Madagascar project had been the occasion for Heydrich to procure himself such a general appointment.

Do you not think it was a trick by Heydrich and by the RF as well, to lay such a humane project before Göring, knowing that Göring is somewhat soft on the Jewish question, so as to derive a general authorization out of an answer?

I do not think so, because at that time it was so, that we had the island of Madagascar, and this whole solution was too fine and elegant for any crooked ulterior motive to have had a place there. No. Even with all the seriousness of hammering through the very many difficulties, no, I cannot imagine that.

Yes, but if you speak that way, with corresponding seriousness, if the Reich Marshal already had corresponding staff and something was laid before him, then it must have had substance.

It was such a convenient and cheap solution, in which not only the willing party, the German Reich government, but also the party affected had gladly promised its cooperation, since for him it was already a familiar undertaking, and to a certain extent for those of conservative outlook it meant a duty to help here.

You never had sight of the letter of reply from Göring?

No.

The one from which Heydrich then derived the general authorization, you never saw that?

No. But it was communicated to me that he now had the general authorization.

Following on from the submission of this Madagascar project?

Yes. The whole Madagascar project with its many paragraphs and so on, that was the overall draft, together with a [not typed] and a conclusion. Because the letter to Göring I doubtless drafted myself, there was no other, and it must also carry the file reference IV B 4. And I also dimly recall that I did it. It was a monstrous piece of work.

Is it not possible that this decree came afterwards, in that it says Heydrich may take the whole range of measures of an organizational and material kind

Of course. After the whole Madagascar project had been submitted, Göring appointed Heydrich, that is the chief of the Sipo, for the overall implementation, that is the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe. But by final solution a physical solution was never intended. Never. Because if Heydrich had really planned that, then he would not have said to me one day: "The Führer has ordered the physical

ordered the destruction of the Jews"… So what was the whole appointment for, then? The whole job would have been pointless anyway, the whole Madagascar business. Isn't it possible that Heydrich put the corresponding suggestions to the Führer

Heydrich to the Führer?

After he [blotted] him with the final solution of the Jewish question, the Madagascar project had to be dropped for foreign-policy reasons and another solution of the Jewish question had to be found. Heydrich, as the man appointed to it, put a corresponding proposal to the Führer.

I am not sure whether that was Heydrich. Perhaps it was some other Reichsleiter.

Might it not have been Bormann?

I don't know.

You did after all work with Heydrich on this matter. It is perhaps possible that you yourself once answered Heydrich in this direction and Heydrich passed it on to the Führer?

No, that is wrong. I don't even believe that Heydrich did it. I would reject that flatly. Not even the RF. I would rather believe here that some arranged people, who have no conception at all of the gravity of the task, Reichsleiter, the ones we had, I will name no names at all, that they said it to the Führer there. If anyone said it to the Führer at all, because one never had to fit the Führer with a special backbone before his speeches, so that he would speak particularly sharply against the Jews again today.

He did that on his own, and if you follow his speeches, it would be a job for a psychiatrist, and if you note the increasing vehemence here, and we could always establish that he had no adviser for the draft, for the making of his speech, then one could take from this piece of evidence without more ado that this order must have come to the Führer himself at some hour. I said once before, I knew Heydrich; the way he told it to me was such that he too had not reckoned with a consequence like that. He will also doubtless have noticed with me that at that moment I had no idea at all of the scope of it. These are words and sentences that are heavy with content, which at the moment they are given one does not even measure. One can measure them only afterwards. The load, heavy as tons, can only be measured later.

Wasn't it Heydrich's job, after the Madagascar project fell away, to put new proposals for a solution of the Jewish question to the Führer? And your

task as a colleague of Heydrich's in the Jewish question was after all to take a position or make proposals and the like. Did Heydrich never say to you, "what can we do now, since the Madagascar project no longer holds"?

Heydrich never did that a single time, nor did Müller. I myself gave birth to my individual matters, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration and also the Madagascar project. I also gave birth to the project of the Jewish state in the Lublin district, but I gave birth to nothing more than that. That came to us, to the Sipo, from outside, and that is the physical destruction. The Sipo had nothing to do with that.

Now the man charged with the Jewish question, after he had had to drop the project he was appointed for, surely had to put forward new proposals?

But there you know the civil service badly. Heydrich was no civil servant. He was a creative nature, and as such he certainly did give thought to it: what do I propose, now that the other thing has gone wrong. If he had had only this one task, then he would certainly have given thought to it. Since he had other tasks besides, he did not give thought to it, because in those days he was Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia. And I remember very exactly that it was precisely on account of this Hermann Göring proposal that I had to travel to Prague several times.

Now the date: he was appointed in 41. When Heydrich told me that Globocnik was to draw on the anti-tank ditches on the Russian side for the physical destruction, that then means that we must have been in possession of the anti-tank ditches. From that I conclude that after the double battles, Minsk-Białystok, at least 8 weeks must have passed. More must still have passed, because I was sent there, after this report to Heydrich, drove to Minsk, still saw remains of T 34s. Out of one of them I dismantled a small electrical [not typed] for myself.

The booty units had long since done their work, because of the many 400 or 600 tanks that are supposed to have been left lying along the route, according to the Wehrmacht report, I perhaps saw 400. So clearing units were already at work. Not one single corpse was to be seen any more. So let us say 8 or 10 weeks. So Heydrich sent me to Globocnik to report to him on how far Globocnik had got with his work.

Right, so Heydrich got his appointment in July. In July the Madagascar

project was no longer current. That can be established very easily from the whole business in France. It must have been around this time, and then this other matter came.

The only question now is who put it to the Führer.

Not Heydrich. He was in Prague at that time as Reich Protector.

But that has nothing to do with whether he did not also give thought to it in Prague: what do I propose now?

What do you think, how often did the deputy Reich Protector worry about the work of the Sipo? How often? Just to give an idea of the scale of time in those days.

I cannot say that.

Half a day a week. For the whole Sipo.

I don't believe that. He needed time for the signatures alone.

You don't believe it. Then I must say you were lucky to have been in the SD. His office chiefs were responsible for the signatures. The deputy Reich Protector, in his capacity in personal union as head of the Sipo and SD, signed personally only in quite important cases. Otherwise everything was signed in Office IV, Müller, at that time.

In Office IV, but I can remember very well that we got a lot with his signature. Besides, he did take time when I was with him in Prague…

I was with him in Prague too.

But that does not say that he was not racking his brains: what am I to do with the Jews, now that I cannot send them to Madagascar.

Within 4 weeks

But one can arrive at a solution within an hour, find a way…

Then you will have to ask a clairvoyant. Now I have slowly had enough. This is supposed to be a factual debate.

But the point is that Heydrich may after all have asked once, what can I do now…

But I have said, it is not like that, and that I assume at all that Heydrich had nothing whatever to do with the whole final solution.

Now that the thought had sprung up in the Führer, out of his own head or from another quarter, that there is no other solution than the destruction

of the Jews, that he then asked Heydrich, what do you think, there is now only this one way left, and that Heydrich said yes. Or did he simply give him the order

The Führer, yes indeed, that I do believe. Read the speeches through, ask a psychiatrist, and you will notice that I am right. I can say it only from my fingertips, and now the experience of the years is added to it, and I must tell you again, neither Heydrich nor the RF gave birth to the physical destruction of the Jews. That I tell you, and take the Führer's speeches as evidence for it and have them examined on this point by a psychiatrist. And you will see that the tests of the psychiatrists, with so many speeches on record, are as a rule correct.

One moment. These tests have been carried out by the enemy side a hundred thousand times already. They have examined, analyzed and put together everything down to the smallest detail. Nobody has yet given the psychiatrically and technically responsible explanation, that is, given direct circumstantial proof, that this idea was born directly of the Führer and passed on. Besides, one does not need to be a psychiatrist at all, one does not need to work in the so-called teams at all, to know that at bottom the physical destruction of the Jews does not correspond at all to the Führer's nature. Absolutely not.

Then why did he describe it years beforehand in his speeches, precisely and nakedly…

Speeches are matters of propaganda. But apart from that, at bottom it is only a question of who beside the Führer. So let us assume the thesis that the Führer gave birth to this idea, that he gave birth to it alone, that there were no influences that helped him in any way in the timing and in the matter. I don't believe that, because a man like the Führer in particular must have considered: if I give the order for physical destruction, then I must also make the necessary apparatus available. So I mean, who could have contributed to this inner decision and to turning it into an order?

Not Heydrich and not the RF. Perhaps the political people.

Do you not think, then, that if he has to put himself the question of the apparatus for the purely technical side, he must appoint the man who is to be charged with it?

In the second place, of course

No, in the first place. I can't give an order without knowing whether the means to carry it out exist.

But the initiative has to be there first. Who gave the initiative.

We aren't clear about that

But you know the Fuehrer well enough not to believe he'd issue an order before the apparatus for killing people was ready.

Of course not

So he'd have talked it through with the RF and Heydrich before he issued the order.

Yes, the RF gave the order to Heydrich, that's perfectly clear.

But for me the primary thing is, who was the initiator?

Yes, we aren't clear about that

But it ought to be possible to establish? Who is it supposed to have been. By my feeling, neither the RF nor the Chief of the SIPO

That's why I come to the idea that Heydrich, as the man charged with Jewish questions, had to propose solutions, and once the one solution didn't work he had to propose another, and from that I conclude it came from Heydrich or Himmler.

Now let's be melodramatic. To issue an order simply to bump off defenseless people corresponds to a categorical imperative of the circumstances, but it also can't be conceived by a person capable of setting aside all sentimentality and saying, that is a task [not typed] that has to be carried out.

Now tell me, do you know anyone inside the Reich Security Main Office, inside the political organ, who was a colder dog than Heydrich?

No

Since that time, since your conversation about this order, if you've thought about Heydrich since then, do you consider it possible, or impossible, in precisely this cold, purposeful, calculating but at the same time energetic man, do you consider it impossible that such a man would come to such an idea? If there were no other solution left? Is it so impossible that Heydrich came to this idea, is it so impossible that Heydrich, out of loyalty to the Fuehrer, took this whole complex off his hands, and there isn't the slightest proof that such a Fuehrer order ever existed at all, in writing

No, it's just as you say, Heydrich was a cold dog, and the RF, where his own people were concerned, was likewise without any nerve. But I tell you that neither of them had to reckon with SS members alone here, but with their own officials, and that wouldn't work. And I tell you the initiative must have come from the political sector. Must have. And I tell you the initiator is probably, in my opinion even quite certainly, to be looked for in the Goebbels-Bormann sector.

Once the Fuehrer, from this vantage point, once everything had gone wrong, and Goebbels and Bormann were present at the dozens of discussions about the Madagascar project, once he was listening to these advisers more, he hardly listened to the RF, and Heydrich was at the Fuehrer's rarely, more than rarely. I recall only a single occasion. Now that the Fuehrer had made up his mind on this order, he naturally fetched Heydrich. That's clear. Because you mustn't forget that in this administrative field the RF was always the second authority, until the time when he became Commander of the Replacement Army and Reich Interior Minister.

He was a Reichsleiter, but not a minister. He was also a State Secretary, but that means nothing at all in such matters, you could just as well have fetched Stuckart, because he had even been the RF's superior, he was First State Secretary.

No, no, it's just as I said, of course the RF was charged with this order. What did the RF say? He'll have said, it's the only solution, my Fuehrer, we've tried everything. Perhaps he put it in telegram style. In part he heard it through me, he had summoned me to him several times, in part he heard it through the running reports.

What did he hear from you, that this is the only solution?

From me he heard the difficulties. The RF will have been summoned to the Fuehrer, the Fuehrer will have told him the opinion of his advisers, the RF will have told the Fuehrer it's the only possible solution, because we've exhausted all the other possibilities. The RF knew about the exhausted possibilities: a) through my reports, through the running reports, c) through his office chiefs, and through the Chief of the SIPO. He perhaps also knew it from the other heads of the German central authorities. So Heydrich, when he summoned me to him, could say, the RF has informed me that the Fuehrer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jew. Globocnik was charged, and so on, and so on. The assignment to inspect the Russian anti-tank ditches. With that I can close the matter, the rest I've already said.

that Goebbels is supposed to be the father of this idea of destruction, on all the evidence available there's nothing of the kind at all. Goebbels' private diary was found. In this private diary there's a first hint, in mid-August 1942, that Goebbels knew about the destruction operations. Around the time when the Fuehrer order is supposed to have been given, before that time, during it, and immediately afterwards, there's only a single suggestion of the kind in the Goebbels papers. Bormann is of course a possibility, although I think the picture one generally gets of Bormann is that of a creative, resourceful man, and that he, faced with a decision as epoch-making as the destruction of Jewry, that the man somehow comes to the idea. I think we're on the wrong track with Goebbels and Bormann.

Then who ordered the Reichskristallnacht?

That's something that came from the Party.

Yes, but that's the first, the first big thing that shocked us

But a Reichskristallnacht and something so far-reaching

That's a small step. We stand outside the law, and there it's a small step. Better said, it stands outside the normal official standard. The Reichskristallnacht stood outside an official standard, and the physical destruction of a people also stands outside the official standard. So if outside the official standard, see the Reichskristallnacht, there's an originator, then if in case B the originator isn't known for a physical destruction, since that too stands outside any official standard, I have to tell myself that the indications point, for me, speaking in terms of my office, more to the one side than to the other.

I'd have had to find a note somewhere in some file, or I'd have had to take it into my own files, if it had been a SIPO matter. Because I had a file for everything in these sectors. And without a file you simply couldn't do anything, and nobody would have done anything. Everyone from top to bottom, down to the smallest pen-pusher, would have asked for the file.

That has nothing to do with it, the point is that it was suggested to Hitler by the RF or by Heydrich. But when I think of Bormann, if you tell me Bormann said that in 1944, then I believe it, because at that time Bormann's influence on Hitler was a disastrous and a great one. Whereas in 1941 Bormann's influence on Hitler was still vanishingly small, while the RF's had always been great. Bormann's decrees about the Church were all hard, but that was all much later.

At this time Bormann was still more of a minor Party official. I rule out your suppositions about Bormann and Goebbels, but it's hard to rule out Heydrich and B. [too faint] entirely, as against the other circle of people in the Party. Heydrich came to Hitler fairly often as Reich Protector, at that time he was directly subordinate to him, and it's absolutely possible that he made Hitler a proposal about it.

No, Heydrich isn't the initiator. That's my opinion, and not because I was his subordinate. He's dead, it can neither harm him nor help him.

Yes, claro, but do you know anyone harder than Heydrich?

In carrying it out, no.

Name the inner circle around Hitler at that time. The Wehrmacht is ruled out. Goering drops out. Goebbels probably not either. Which of the Reichsleiter? Bormann? No, unlikely

Bueno, then it was Hitler himself. Heydrich and Himmler weren't the initiators, no, that's my conviction and I can say nothing else. By the state of the facts, by what I knew of my highest superiors, no. Heydrich was no actor, he always spoke openly, he never hid anything from me. I was on very good terms with Heydrich. Then he'd surely have said to me, at last, Eichmann, we're there, now we've managed it, now we've cleared away all the [not typed] from the ministries, now we can finally do as we please. That's how Heydrich would have spoken to me. But Heydrich didn't do that

Or do you think he didn't do it because the thing was a bit too much for him after all?

No, I noticed that Heydrich had had something new handed to him here too. I was astonished as well, and Mueller noticed it too, when I said to him, this won't do, we can't carry out the Jewish question this way. No, no, no, no, the SIPO couldn't have given birth to something like that. No, Heydrich didn't propose it

Let's start once from the Fuehrer's standpoint. If the Fuehrer toyed with this idea, then he'd at once have seen the executing organ before his mind's eye, and will have asked himself, whom do I entrust this to? And do you think, on the other hand, that the Fuehrer, who always held the ethic of comradeship very high, and who knew that carrying out his orders demanded whole men, men who could simply step over everything

and only for the fulfillment of a task important for the Reich, but at the same time could also take a hideous task upon themselves, and do you believe that he, out of this comradely ethic, has now seated himself on the throne so to speak, and said: I give you the order, Heydrich or the Reichsfuehrer, you carry it out, and that's the end of it?

No, I don't believe that either. It will probably be that the Fuehrer summoned the Reichsfuehrer to him and then discussed the matter with him. Yes, at the bottom of his heart the Reichsfuehrer was a soft, kindly man. Nobody knows that. Only someone who was able to deal with this man knows it. The Reichsfuehrer cannot have given birth to that. Sometimes I became confused about this man. Take the watch decree. How I am supposed to make sense of that, I still don't know today.

Bueno, about this watch decree you say "how disgusting." Let's turn the clock back 20 years. Now somebody comes along and says to you, "Jews, men, women and children, away with them." You would probably have said exactly the same thing then, "how disgusting"?

Yes, but back then there was no emergency of the people and the state either. But it does not ease a people's distress if I hang the property of a hanged man on a particularly deserving officer as a decoration.

That's true again. But it is much too important for us to establish how this order came about. Because we must be clear about one thing. The physical annihilation of Jewry, as it was ordered and as it was carried out, does not correspond to the German [off the sheet] spirit or the German mentality. [blotted] one cannot say that it is characteristic.

It is typical of the German spirit when that same opponent has first slaughtered defenseless German women, children and old people.

In what form?

With the bombing raids.

But we did the same thing ourselves.

But not in this form.

Heydrich said the same words, that the men had to be [off the sheet]

then came the year 43, the bombing raids on Berlin. What I saw there defies all description. Then I said to myself, the Fuehrer was right after all with the annihilation order, this opponent must be annihilated. Before that the thought never came to me like this, but once I had seen all this misery, then yes.

Yes, it went against our mentality, but only up to a certain point in time, and after that no longer.

Yes, but that was November 43, so two years afterwards.

Yes, that makes no difference, good leaders have to foresee that. [handwriting]

But how far can one say that foreign countries knew about these annihilation operations, and they did know it, so that they said to themselves, now we need have no moral inhibitions either.

That is not my task, to judge that.

If our air force had been armed well enough, then we would probably not have had these raids on Berlin. I understand your hatred over these raids, I lived through it too, but seen in principle it is un-German. The enemy airman does his work in a hygienic way somehow, he drops his bombs from 5000 km up. But shoving the people in.

The Security Police did not do that. The Security Police is comparable to some commodore who flies against some German city with his squadron. Was he sentenced for crimes against humanity? Why is the Security Police sentenced, we didn't kill anybody. Exactly like the ground personnel who loaded the bombs, in just the same way we only transported the Jews away. In many cases it was the auxiliary forces of other countries. We had nothing to do with their further fate.

But you knew what happens to these people?

But not all of them were killed. But as a member of the Security Police I had my duty to do, to load them. Anything further did not interest me. And the Security Police had no other activity to take over. The rest was the task of the WVHA.

But it was precisely the troops of the Security Police and the SD that had the task to carry out in the East, the one you said this about: that won't do, these shooting operations.

What the Einsatzgruppen did in the East, we were not responsible for that. That was a direct order from the Reichsfuehrer. The office had nothing to do with it, not even by way of reporting, not even that.

But we don't want to confine ourselves to the office, we are talking about the matter in principle. And when we say it does not correspond to the German spirit, and the way you then make the comparison with the commodore as far as the task of the Security Police in the various territories is concerned, but [blotted] with the exception of the way the Einsatzkommandos came into play. But these Einsatzkommandos cannot be compared with the commodore at all. In my view they had the most un-German task of all.

No, they are comparable to the parachutists who were dropped. They were not under the commodore either. They got their order directly from the Reichsfuehrer, these Einsatzgruppen chiefs. We, the office, got different orders from the Reichsfuehrer.

Yes, I said as a comparison, the enemy air fleet that flies in to murder women and children has a different manner. It does not know, its bomb hits or there is a dud among them, or something of that kind. The member of the Security Police who had the loading done here, with his own forces or with the forces of other countries, he did not know whether these Jews would now be killed or whether they would be sent to labor deployment or anything of that kind.

But other air fleets dropped paratroopers, and these, they knew this, had a quite specific assignment to carry out, to kill X or to blow up the works XY with 10,000 men and so on. That is surely comparable to the Einsatzgruppen. They were deployed in the East, quite specific orders were given, from the same chief who, just like the commodore, gave his orders to this troop. So here it was passed down by the Reichsfuehrer, on the one hand to the Einsatzgruppen chiefs and on the other to the chief of Office IV.

Yes, but I don't know whether the comparison applies.

These Einsatzgruppen chiefs in the East did not only fight against the Jews, they also fought against the partisans.

Yes, but that is not really what we are talking about.

But they did everything in the East, the Einsatzgruppen chiefs.

But we don't want to talk about that at all.

Yes, but if you don't want to talk about it, then it still has to be said that I had nothing to do with these Einsatzgruppen chiefs in the East, and that has been officially established.

Yes, but we do want to talk about whether it corresponds to the German character, because according to your theory and according to your view it would be exactly the same if, after a raid on England, the English were suddenly to shoot down the German prisoners out of hatred.

Doesn't that fit with Morgenthau?

That was after the war.

How, after the war?

One moment, no German internees were killed.

Why, because they were themselves afraid of the pig they had slaughtered beforehand. Otherwise they would have done it.

Whether they would have done it or not, we did do it.

Yes, but they wanted to turn us into a nation of goatherds, which in practice means genocide.

But that was a plan that never came to be carried out.

That's no concern of mine. What was decided was decided.

Not decided. That was proposed by a Mr. Morgenthau. It was not an order. It was a personal plan worked out by Mr. Morgenthau, but Morgenthau had nothing to do with it, because he was Secretary of State for Finance. It had been a privately worked-out plan of Morgenthau's. It was talked over from all sides, and they said there is only one possibility of smashing Germany, and that is to take away its economic potential and make of it a [not typed] state. And that was in the year 1943. But there was not even a draft law, let alone that one of the states, in this case the USA, had made this plan known as its own plan.

Yes, but in practice they did let us feel it.

But where did they shoot and gas?

They let us starve. Gassing and shooting is then far more humane.

Now, you absolve your conscience in various matters.

I have no need whatever to absolve my conscience. Number one, I state that here and now.

You justify your measures by the experience you had in Berlin, and against that I have set the point that the English could just as well have done the same thing on the grounds of the bombing raids, according to your theory. At that time there was no talk at all of a Morgenthau Plan.

But they did do it.

When the business of physical extermination was begun, there was still no talk at all of a Morgenthau Plan.

I said that earlier already.

On the contrary, the talk then was still of the Atlantic [handwriting], which was very humane. That was the political aim at the time. There was no talk at all of a Morgenthau Plan.

Yes, this plan was very humane.

So I say, in closing on this controversy, I stand by it. First, the RF is not the initiator in this direction, and of course neither is his head-office chief Heydrich, nor indeed any of his head-office chiefs. The initiative must have come from a third quarter. Then I have in no way to justify myself, and I have in no way to unburden my conscience. I have no need of that. I feel no oppression and no

sense of guilt in me. For me, as a German who had sworn his oath to the flag, it counted as the self-evident and most elementary duty to do his duty toward people and fatherland. And I did that duty by carrying out and obeying the orders I received, and by having to lend force to those orders as far as I had to work them out in detail. Where I am to be connected with what happened in the physical extermination of the Jews, I have admitted it freely and without evasion. But [blotted] what does admitted mean? I have nothing to confess. I said so there. Where not, I do not take upon myself these things that are no concern of mine, and not for the reason that I cannot expect it of my subordinates, even though as a kind of berserker I could say, take the whole filthy mess on yourself and everything is settled. I do not do it, and with that I have said my piece. [blotted]

When you received the orders, did you give thought to their sense and to their execution?