The Eichmann and Sassen interview, O.65 file 88

So then, on a decision of the RSHA [Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office] which Eichmann passed on by telephone, these 4,051 children were taken from their parents and brought to the camp Dran [not typed]. The camp Dran is known for the fact that the shipments to Auschwitz went out from there. The French then also agreed that 3 to 500 children could be added to every transport to Auschwitz.

And most of these children were in fact deported from Dran [not typed].

About matters concerning children I know nothing.

No staff of any kind was put with the children in the sealed cattle cars, which at that time were filled with the old and the sick, but somehow they had to get into the trains. A survivor of these transports describes it this way. Sometimes it happened that a room full of hundreds of children, seized by an uncontrollable panic and horror, no longer obeyed the adults calling to them. They were not able to bring the children down, they had to call in [not typed], who carried the screaming children down in their arms.

In Roettke's deportation files a note dated 11 November 1942 was found, saying that Belgian railwaymen found 25 bodies of children, aged 2 to 4 years, in the empty cattle cars coming back from Auschwitz, children who never got as far as the gas chamber. Question. You, or rather your office, were responsible for the transports up to the handover at the destination stations. What do you have to say now about these conditions?

That I have only learned of it today, that I know nothing about it.

But one is responsible for every kind of ignorance as the head of an office?

Fine, then I am simply responsible, nothing can be done about that. You can see for yourself that I had Dannecker relieved. From that alone one can see that people were not satisfied with his work. How the train was then unloaded at Auschwitz, I cannot help that. Whether the people died on the way out, I do not know, nobody knows that. I was responsible only for the registration and for the transporting.

Yes, but here, that was no orderly loading

I have already said once in the Hungarian case that although the Hungarian government the

[off the sheet] the guidelines for registration had been made known, but the authorities often did not keep to these guidelines, which brought me complaints from the WVHA [SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, SS Economic and Administrative Main Office]. If the offices charged with it in France did not keep to the guidelines, then I have to say that a supervisory authority can do no more than issue guidelines to be followed. For as far as members of the Sipo [Sicherheitspolizei, Security Police] and the SD [Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service] are concerned, every one of them has sworn the service oath, and the service oath also takes in that instructions and demands are to be obeyed.

It cannot be my task, sitting in the central office, to inspect every single transport train here in person on the spot. It is the task of the subordinate offices to keep to the instructions of the offices above them. I have to say, because I am speaking for Department IV, that on our side everything was done in a purely bureaucratic way, according to the orders and instructions on hand.

But it must surely also strike you in the central office that of the transports from France only 70 percent arrive alive at the destination?

70 percent

Of the transports from Holland 80 percent arrived, of those from France only 70 percent.

The figure for Holland I am also hearing for the first time, only 80 percent

After the raid the trains left as promptly as if on a timetable. Between 19 and 28 July there were 8 trains, in August 13 transports. The Gestapo [Secret State Police] statistics have survived. They show an average of 1,000 persons for a transport, with variations down to 149 on the one side and up to 1,089 on the other. It is possible, with the help of a fragment of the Birkenau daily roll call for the men's camp, to trace the tragic end of the great raid.

According to which, of the transports from France, only 70 out of 100 came into the camp.

I must consign this matter too to the realm of atrocity stories

One more proof. With the transport that arrived on 20 July, the admission of 475, and of 512 to 599 and 370 Jews from France was recorded in the Birkenau men's camp.

The admission or the taking over?

The admission

The others were probably killed because they were not fit for labor deployment. I would like to put the weight on the word. Taking over or admission? Into the camp Birkenau, which belonged to Auschwitz, a number X was admitted, that is, admitted. But the transport, the handover of the transport, is not described at all.

But the witness Jenny Spritzer, who arrived on 21 July at the [not typed] camp, noticed nothing of a selection

That is exactly where the diabolical thing lies. Where does this Jenny Spritzer live? Then she would be a good witness, they brought her in deliberately. They should not have put that sentence in, for the name says it all. Here they want to paper over their lies for the hasty reader who is not familiar with the details. Here they have a witness. Here it has to read, he speaks of admission figures, the author knows perfectly well that the persons admitted are the ones fit for work, who are attached to a work process.

Before that came the decision, fit for work or not fit for work, and the latter were liquidated in accordance with the order of the Reichsführer, through the WVHA. So that the particular atrocity is supposed to have its beginning already in France, and so that the widest possible circles of the SS [Schutzstaffel, Protection Squads] can be drawn into these matters, he brings on a pseudo witness, Jenny Spritzer, who now expressly claims that she heard nothing of a selection.

Between 18 and 16 August one can gather from the fact that only 128 and 140, and 182 and 115 men were admitted to the camp, that the transports contained many children.

There he says again what I have just said. The author gives himself the lie, page 361 of the book, The Final Solution by Reitlinger. He also tries to draw the Sipo into the whole story, in order to bring the SS on in a sweeping way, but he counted on the stupidity or the superficiality of the reader, or he was himself that superficial, and now I have to put up with this revision. But I say the following for general information. Even if it had been so, I would still have had to reject the responsibility of the central authority, because for that we had the Higher SS and Police Leader locally, the commander of the Sipo and SD with his staff. Those men had their instructions and their orders, and with that I close this matter as far as I am concerned.

By the end of August 25,000 Jews had been deported from France, none from the unoccupied zone, only very few from the provinces, almost all from Paris. On 14 July Roettke had to cancel the transport from Bordeaux, because the French police, which was arresting only stateless Jews, was not able to produce more than 150 Jews. After all the effort Eichmann had put into the transports with the Reich Transport Ministry, he was outraged at this fact. Nothing like it had happened to him before, the affair was disgraceful. He did not want to report it to SS Gruppenfuehrer Mueller straight away, since he would only disgrace himself. One would therefore have to consider whether France should be dropped altogether as a country of removal.

Here again a number, IMD 7 S [not typed] (?)

That could be the run of a naval minesweeper on some grid square in the Baltic.

Can you not remember your annoyance? Is this matter not known to you?

No, it is not known to me.

But [blotted] have admitted that you had a great deal of annoyance in France.

I had annoyance everywhere, in France quite particularly, but with Dannecker

In August 42 Roettke's efforts to carry out the deportations of Jews from France were then continued on an increased scale.

I said even then, France has always been a rotten egg.

By the end of August about 7,000 and by the beginning of September roughly 9,000 Jews had been arrested and taken to Dran [not typed].

Roettke expressed the hope at that time that he would deport 52,000 Jews from France.

Have you never heard of the problem of the naturalizations after 33?

Yes, of course, that was also part of my discussions with Knochen and Oberg.

This hope of removing 52,000 Jews was surely illusory at the time.

Is anything known to you about the removal of Leo Blum?

Where did he go? To Oranienburg. He had a little villa there.

Here it says: On 23 September [not typed] telegraphed to Eichmann, Gluecks and Rudolf Hoess, the butcher of Auschwitz, that the brother of the former French prime minister has been deported with today's transport.

Nothing of that is known to me. But here people throw telephone calls and telegrams around.

We did not deal with one another by telephone or telegram, we could reach each other with the help of a teleprinter, or when it was really urgent there was a flash teleprinter message, or there was the usual normal business correspondence. Anything else was unknown, and especially not when secret Reich matters were involved.

Regarding this matter of the naturalizations, do you know of a visit by Roettke to Laval?

No, nothing of that is known to me. And I believe that Laval would never have received Roettke, just as little as he would have received a Dannecker. He would probably not even have received me straight off, because the German envoy was there for that. Now the German envoy at that time does not deal with a Roettke, he deals with the Higher SS and Police Leader, and in his absence with the commander of the Sipo and SD, but never with a desk officer. Laval would have been lowering himself into the deepest basement.

Then he left you very much in the dark, because Roettke was with Laval, a date is even given. He wanted to bring about the revocation of the naturalizations since 33.

The commissioner for Jewish affairs in France, the commissar [not typed] prepared the draft of an ordinance and put it to Laval. That then dragged on from 42 into the middle of 43, and Roettke pressed Knochen at regular intervals to start an operation that would bring Laval to the revocation of these naturalizations.

About that nothing is known to me, no.

Finally, on 14 August 1943, Roettke succeeded in obtaining a conversation with Laval himself.

I want to put in a safety bolt for myself on the assertion I have just made, because it is an assertion, though one that matches the practice. Whether the French commissioner for Jewish affairs could certainly get access to Laval, that I cannot judge. And now I reckon it this way, that it was either in the interest of the commissioner for Jewish affairs to take Roettke along with him, or that Roettke brought him to the point of taking him along, if the commissioner for Jewish affairs had to report to Laval.

I would not want to deny that. The first is the usual practice, the second would be an exception.

Now the conversation took place at a really unfavorable time. By then the German troops had occupied the unoccupied parts of France, but

besides, in Laval's eyes Roettke was no man of any importance.

That is exactly what I told you just now, it would have been understandable if Laval had thrown Roettke out.

For that reason he was anything but accommodating to Roettke. He told him that he was over

that is, the commissioners for Jewish affairs, that he was furious because they had drawn up the drafts in which women and children were to be stripped of their citizenship. Laval then mentioned to Roettke more or less in passing that he had lost his own copy of the draft. Before a new draft could be put to the council of ministers, three months would have to pass so that the Jews could make their changes, even if 30 Jews should have the right to do so. Without all these conditions being met, Laval said, the French police could in no way support Knochen. Besides, the Italians would have to be asked.

After this very embarrassing conversation Roettke did then have to report that he would need more German police.

So it is true after all, the commissioner for Jewish affairs took him along.

Roettke had no authorization for that whatever. That is a lapse which is not to be laid at the door of the RSHA. It falls in the first place on the commander [not typed]

What is typical of this book is the unclear [blotted] here it says, undated record, translated by Poliakoff (?), who is the author of the other book.

In my opinion Roettke should have reported the conversation with Laval to you.

He did not do that. If that were so, it would also be a lapse by Knochen and a lapse by the Higher SS and Police Leader. For how, as commander of the Sipo and SD, can I allow some desk officer, a subordinate, to go to the highest authority in the country, the one I have to negotiate with? No. When for instance I was in Slovakia and spoke with Tiso (?), Tiso had asked to speak with me, with me who came from Berlin,

But there I first went to the envoy and discussed everything with the envoy, and then, once I had settled it with the envoy, I went to the Slovak interior minister, and after I had been with him I went with him together to the head of state. That is how it goes.

But you did not inform Berlin of it beforehand?

I do not know that. Perhaps it was written to me through the Foreign Office that the head of state wished to speak to me.

It cannot be done any other way, they could have locked me up, for what harm might I have done. That has to be settled first at the central offices. What a stink it would have caused in Berlin at the Foreign Office if they had learned that a desk officer of the RSHA was holding a conversation with the head of state of a friendly nation.

So in answer to your question, whether I would have notified Berlin, I must tell you that I am convinced it had been prepared long in advance. Besides, a head of state cannot simply receive whoever he likes whenever he feels like it. A protocol has to be observed in one way or another.

Of course.

But the conclusions drawn from it are interesting. The author presents Laval as a main factor who plays a part in the failure of the final solution of the Jewish question in France.

This author probably wants to tell the reader from what a lofty vantage point he views the matter. He is not even in a position to state one side of the truth accurately.

But we see from the conversation between Roettke and Laval, fact or not, that the measures against the Jews in France did fail.

Yes, I always said so.

Now a very important matter in France is the Italian intervention.

About that I am not in the picture at all.

Is it not known to you that people have already spoken of the Italian military authorities in Croatia, Tunis and Greece, who protect the Jews wherever it is possible?

Yes, I even believe that Italian officers married Jewish women.

Has it not been reported to you that the Italian military administration [off the sheet] the French police

…when they wanted to take measures against the Jews in the [blotted] Italian-occupied zone, stepped in and protected the Jews? Were you not told about it? In Nice [not typed]

I can no longer remember it today.

Were you also not told that the Italians did not keep their promise to take measures against the Jews, that they did the opposite?

But how many Jews can there have been there? That region can't hold all that many.

Yes, but the Jews fled there, because they knew the Italians would protect them.

In any case it hasn't stayed with me in any lasting way.

It even says here that the Gestapo assumed most of the Jews had fled into the territory occupied by Italy. The Gestapo, who is that in this case, Eichmann?

It could just as well be Knochen.

Does the name Los [not typed], the head of the Italian police in the occupied territories, mean anything to you?

No.

Then you are badly informed about the cases that occurred there.

General Bastanini [too faint] orders issued to General Ambrosius, clear and sharp [not typed]

This last maneuver put Himmler into such a state that he [too faint] sent Heinrich Mueller to Rome. On 27 March 43 Mueller learned that Los [not typed], the Italian police chief in the occupied zone in southern France, had driven into the occupied zone some days earlier, but Knochen's inquiry about [not typed] came to nothing.

On 6 April Knochen was so desperate that he turned by telegram not only to Eichmann but also to Schellenberg. He had heard from the Gestapo in Marseille that the Jews were positively streaming into the [blotted] zone.

If he did that by telegram, I can't know about it either, since I never received telegrams.

But someone must surely have reported to you that the Jews were fleeing into the [blotted] Italian zone, because they were protected there from the reach of the French and German police.

This flight of the Jews was evidently financed by the director of the French-Italian bank. Los [not typed] surfaced and disappeared again. Mueller demanded that he be brought to Berlin. But Los [not typed] could not be found until May, when Roettke learned from the Gestapo in Marseille that the former police chief of Bari, which is what Los [not typed] had been earlier, was living in the uniform of a general in the villa in [not typed]. He was the head of a commissariat for Jewish affairs, and his assistant was Donardi, that bank director, a half-Jew, living at such and such an address [not typed]

[not typed] that about 50,000 Jews were living in the Italian-occupied zone [not typed] That is why it surprises me very much that you were of the opinion that only very few Jews lived there.

How large was this zone, then?

The whole of the Alpes-Maritimes, the city of Nice with half a million inhabitants, with its surroundings, and Renopel [too faint]

Then when the Italian army capitulated, those Jews must have been within our reach again.

Do you remember nothing else about the matter?

No, but I think this is being considerably exaggerated. Embellished with a certain poetic license. Whatever may be true about it is certainly, seen from the horizon of the Reich, so slight that it was not at all important to the Reich, and I no longer remember it today either. By that I don't mean to say that I still remember everything of importance to the Reich.

You then also sent Anton Brunner to Marseille, to carry out big raids on the Jews.

When?

Although the German army only occupied Nice on 1 November, the plan to bring the Jews back from M [not typed] had made no great progress. Only 2,000 had been taken there, and the rest were able to scatter into the mountain villages.

On Roettke's character. Roettke's declarations mostly proved to be empty threats. Brunner did not manage to get a raid going without the help of the French police. The whole Jewish registry was destroyed when the Italians pulled out, so that the good Brunner was reduced to hunting for Jews in the street.

Yes, I know that, that's right, I still recall it.

When Eichmann turned up in Nice with the German army soon afterwards, he was very disappointed at how small the haul was, but he soon recognized where the explanation lay.

They were in the mountains.

He learned that 15,000 Jews were staying in the mountains, in the mountains of the principality of Monaco.

Yes, that's right, I drove through Monaco myself.

And what did you arrange there?

In Monaco itself I could do nothing. Taboo.

But on 23 September the German consul in Monaco received from the Foreign Office the instruction to get the Sipo access to the principality.

Yes, that's right, but it came to nothing.

But the consul was only able to find 1,000 Jews, who had been resident there for years [blotted], yet Eichmann would not give way and kept pointing out that there must be 10,000 to 15,000 Jews there.

Yes, that's right.

In July 44 the consul informed the Foreign Office, von Thadden, that most of the 1,000 Jews, after Eichmann had come on the scene, had escaped to Switzerland, to Spain. There remained 45 Jews, who were all under special protection.

Yes, that is all correct, word had got around and all the Jews left Monaco at once.

What do you take to be the reasons that the planned final solution of the Jews in France failed so badly?

Two reasons. First, Dannecker's lack of stature. Knochen being taken up with other official duties. Second, the resistance of the Laval government, which slackened after an initial burst, and perhaps grew more cautious and trod more quietly because of the reverses suffered by our arms. Those are my reasons.

Do you remember anything in figures, how many Jews were deported?

By feel I would put the number at around 40,000.

A list was found in Roettke's office, and according to that list 45 trains departed. The author estimates the number at 65,000.

So if 75 trains are supposed to have departed and the author arrives at 65,000, then that means there were trains carrying under 1,000. And that there are supposed to have been trains under 1,000, that doesn't really make sense to me. From the standpoint of timetabling I wouldn't want to endorse that. So he says 65,000, I say 40,000, so let's say roughly 50,000.

What was the Gestapo's program in France for the resettlement? The point of it?

What I am saying now applies not only to France but also to the other countries, insofar as Germany had an interest for reasons of security. The Jew had been proclaimed an enemy of the state by the lawful German government of the Reich. The government must have had its reasons why it sought to eliminate this enemy as a matter of priority. Once the order to eliminate an enemy of the Reich had been given, that order had to be carried out too. What grounds the government of the Reich had for seeing in this enemy a threat to the people and the state had been the government's business. We, as the police, had to act accordingly.

We have spoken about that so often already. France is what interests me. Can you give nothing more definite in figures?

When I told you earlier that the fault also lay on our side, that the result was not achieved, but named the resistance as a second point, let me explain that further. The further you come from the middle of Europe towards the west, the greater is the influence of the Jew of assimilated outlook, as against the other Jewish political tendencies. The French citizen sees in the Jew, who had at least outwardly renounced all Jewish ties and now lived and worked as a citizen of the republic, no Jew, no menace, no danger, no enemy.

He sees him as one of his own kind. It is very hard, in such a country, to make the assimilated part of the people, the Jews we recognized as an enemy, credible to him as his own worst enemy, because the practice of life tells him the contrary. So from Petain onwards, by way of Laval, down to the last French peasant, or as far as the mountains of [not typed], it made it a sort of duty for him that he should keep these [too faint] French citizens out of the reach of the [not typed].

There lay another difficulty

That the French police took part only hesitantly and [too faint] lies along the same line. The further east you go, seen from the middle of the Reich, the more willing the people were as a rule, that is what practice says, to throw out this parasite here, as people used to say, because the opportunity was favorable to rid themselves of it. There was one single exception, in the southeastern part, and that was Hungary.

In Hungary the proportion of assimilated Jews had been disproportionately large compared with the other eastern countries. So the German Reich government also feared that something similar could happen in Hungary as had happened across the whole West. France is not the only example. The fight in Holland over the Jews was just as hard and stubborn, even if not quite so [not typed] but on the whole it did not carry through. In Belgium the same. When they began in Hungary they still had the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto as a warning signal.

So the RF said to himself, and I thought about it myself when after years of work [blotted] behind the desk I came into the rough reality of practice, that now he had to go out himself to scoop out Hungary. Hungary was very hard, because the assimilated Jew there was grown together with the host people, intermarried with it, related to it by marriage [not typed] and because at such a stage it is really very hard first to hammer through the legal foundation and then to climb over from there into executive implementation.

You always have to bear in mind that these are sovereign or half-sovereign countries with their own executive, which will not be talked into even the slightest executive step by the occupying power, or only with great difficulty. And so it only goes with drive in the first seconds, hours or weeks, and once those first seconds are missed you have to reckon with a growing resistance that takes a great deal of the strength you should have been concentrating on getting your own business done.

How many Jews in France did you reckon with?

I can no longer remember exactly today, but a multiple of what was not only registered but also calculated in a verifiable way. A multiple, in any case never ever 40 to 50,000.

What do you say to the figure of 300,000?

Yes, I would well accept that. Because however many Jews were shipped out of France, at least in the years from 1939 to 1940

Jews [blotted] out of the German Reich and emigrated

It is said that the Gestapo was completely in the dark about the programme. Did the people arrive there with records, or were they really groping in the dark and had to get their records only once they were there? How was it?

Essentially yes, without records. The run-up time was far too short, in every country. As a rule we had to go by the Jewish yearbooks, and then they added a small percentage who were not entered in the Jewish books but who counted as Jews under our laws, and then you had roughly a figure. Our reference point was the statistical Jewish yearbooks.

So the claim that the Gestapo was completely in the dark is correct

Yes, in France at any rate, yes.

So once more about the Jews who were deported and destroyed. So there were fewer than 65,000, and of those 2,800 came back after the war.

The list found in Roettke's office dated 1 July 1944, they say there were 75 deportation trains. Normally a train of 20 wagons carried 1,000 Jews, but many later transports were much smaller. The figure given above is not final, but it should be corrected downward rather than upward.

I told you I have 40,000 in my memory, so I am not entirely wrong after all.

Is it correct that because of the difficulties in numerically recording, registering and concentrating the Jews with the help of the French police, they simply took Jewish orphanages and so on to meet the quota figures?

That did not happen.

On the basis of an order for a big raid, 10,000 Jews are to be recorded [not typed] raid

No, no, what kind of an order is that, are to be recorded, only an inadequate mind can have given that.

You have admitted that Dannecker was an inadequate mind.

Under the later labor-service obligations you got all sorts of people, but they did not exist yet at that time.

The children's matters again. Dr. Hoellers writes here, who lived through it all in Drans [not typed] and in Auschwitz, that in July 1944 the Paris orphanage and the Rothschild old people's home were emptied. Roettke's files contain a report that something similar had happened earlier, on 6 April 44.

[not typed] deportation procedure. Nothing known?

So the operation in France failed.

Yes, failed.

In this connection the author brings out the [not typed] of Laval.

Rightly so.

He writes: In France [not typed]

whom his countrymen shot as a traitor after the war.

In other words, assimilated Jews. Here the man has of course steered it into a different channel. I said it soberly and matter-of-factly.

He writes that only a quarter of the Jews living in France were taken to the Final Solution.

He was no longer a Jew at all, he was a Frenchman.

But the important thing is that Laval is the grand master in the victory of the Allies over the Germans. Laval threw sand in the Fuehrer's eyes, he did this and that, and Laval was a very shrewd French peasant who thought only of France. The whole European idea meant nothing to him. We lost the war when the Fuehrer shook Petain's hand.

When the parade took place on the Champs [not typed]

Not that alone. This desperate seeking by Germany for a friendship with this swinish France.

Wooing, not seeking. And second, Dunkirk. That was one of the nails that closed the coffin.

In all the measures you took on the Jewish question, did you never think about the effect on opinion abroad, in enemy countries and above all in neutral countries?

I can think of nothing other than how I can carry out the order I received well and as quickly as possible

That is not what I mean. Did you never think about it or have doubts when you received an order?

All right, you receive an order and you follow it on the strength of the oath.

But you do think about it, surely?

He was an enemy of the Reich.

No, I mean the effect of the measures on the mood in enemy and neutral countries abroad. Did you never think about that?

You cannot put yourself in my skin there, you never can, because you were in the SD to the end. But if you are in the executive today then it does not interest you at all.

So you gave it no thought?

No, in no case, it was completely a matter of indifference to me. I had been in the executive, I received an order and had to carry it out, and I told you once before, if I had had to arrest my own father, well, I was inside the executive.

I think you are misunderstanding the question. In intelligence terms, or as SD, you were somewhat predisposed to it.

Yes, I am

Now that becomes second nature in a person, so that when he takes such executive measures

On that I must also say that we practically had to report how the measures affected the mood of the Jews. But presumably Amt VI reported in just the same way on what the enemy countries were saying, what the neutral countries were saying, how it affected the population.

And these matters were at least brought to you through the intelligence service, so you must have thought about them.

For information.

So you did think about it after all.

Personally, nothing at all. Solution.

But if it was like that, in Sweden they are talking about this and that matter, in Auschwitz the Jewish transports end in this and that way, then you must have thought something about it

It's really nonsense, what I'm doing here now, whether on orders or on my own account, if the effect is that the neutral countries can be stirred up against us, again and again, precisely because of these measures. We're in a neutral war, and it matters that the few countries still neutral either stay genuinely neutral or come over to us and help us. And through the foreign news I have to hear over and over that precisely because of these measures, the ones being carried out by me, opinion is turning more and more against us, and that the enemy propaganda takes exactly these measures as its occasion to run the Third Reich down in the eyes of the world that is still neutral.

Now if I had been sitting in a position where I could have decided freely, such views of world opinion would have had to interest me, obviously. But since I didn't have the privilege of sitting in such a post, and since I was a receiver of orders in the truest sense of the word, it wasn't for me to ask. And I say it again today, where would we have ended up if every receiver of orders had asked himself whether what he'd been ordered to do made any sense and how far it might work out for Germany. Then it would have been a [not typed], and we might not have had to hold out six years against an enemy. We'd have had to capitulate after one or two years. I was in the executive branch, and I received orders, and I obeyed.

But it isn't a question now of thinking or not thinking. You got your order, you also carried it out, and if that hadn't been so, we'd simply have landed in a [not typed].

But the question is a different one. Whether, through your prior grounding in the SD, you didn't arrive at trains of thought whose reconstruction interests us at this moment. In other words, whether precisely through your SD training, without it affecting the execution of the orders you received, you didn't after all turn things over one way or another, that this and that is the operation, abroad they say such and such, right, not right, no, it has to be done differently, and so on.

You did think, after all, in your work, without orders [off the sheet]

For that I have to switch back to the year 1941. Only then did I think. But not for my own sake, that has to be said expressly, because it would be enormously easy for me today to distance myself by telling you a fairy tale about all the pious wishes I had. I don't do that, I have no right to it, because later I no longer thought. I thought in 1941.

Yes, when I was sent by Heydrich there, I didn't think quietly then, I thought out loud. Thought out loud in front of Mueller, in front of Guenter, and probably in front of my Regierungsraete as well. Namely I thought, and I said it repeatedly, that this whole problem should be solved in a political way. And I don't know whether you can picture the right thing by that, by what I understand as a political solution. By it I understand a separation without violence, through a legal ordinance that leads to the parting of the guest from the host people, or clarifies it.

That had been my whole endeavor, and that's also why, out of this idea, the notion of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration came to me. Out of this idea I then gave birth to the business in Lublin. I wanted the whole district. Out of this idea I then gave birth to Theresienstadt, because a piece of advice was abruptly demanded of me, a possible solution was hoped for, when Heydrich overreached himself here in front of the press hacks. And out of that idea I warmed up the old Herzl egg again with Madagascar, in such a way that I kept several German central authorities intensely occupied with these matters for several months.

That long I fought there, I wrestled, and there I wasn't even a National Socialist, if you like. There the relationship between the Jews and me was so watered down and so blurred that in the end they couldn't say any more whether it was a Jew or an SS officer. Because we squatted next to each other at the same work bench in the central offices. That was what I wanted. Then I still thought, then I could still develop a certain initiative, then I could still give birth to ideas that could then really be put into practice. But when the course of the war took on such dimensions that this ordinary civilian obstinacy could no longer be indulged, they decided otherwise from [off the sheet]

on high. From then on I only drew the orders which, whether they suited me or not, were to be carried out in line with my duty. I no longer had any thinking to do. Had I wanted to think, or had I wanted to look at the whole business in detail first, above all at those matters for which the Sipo and the SD, or better said for which the central authorities, weren't competent at all, perhaps other thoughts would have come to me out of purely human considerations. That's possible.

That's a different matter, that you carried the order out.

I've said it, I divided the business into two parts, and beyond that I can't take a position. I had to obey blindly.

But you did get the reports on how the measures were working out.

That didn't interest me at all.

But you got the reports, you read them and you thought something about them [blotted] and that's what we want to know now.

All I can say to that is that I probably thought to myself that the German Reich government was right.

That's what you thought?

Of course I will have thought that to myself.

I don't claim to know you through and through, but I know your thinking machine, that is, how you let a thing come at you, how you process it and how you put it out again. I do believe, to a certain percentage, but the belief is there, that it's possible for you, through a kind of, prompted also by the egocentric, simply to let a curtain down and to say, no thinking here, a pure act of will, nada mas. Only a small percentage.

But the greater part of what I suppose myself to know of you tells me it's out of the question that in the course of the war, especially as illustrated material not at all to your taste was occasionally put in front of you, very little of it (a journey on Mueller's instructions), that in your work, I won't say every hour, but at least once a day, you were suddenly away with your thoughts, not on carrying out an order received, but on the effect of it, whether that was in a human respect or a political one and so on. I can't tell those apart at all, but I'm sure of it, that you did what we're calling here now thinking about it.

If by that you mean thinking about it, if you remind me of the journey from Mueller, that I was an opponent of the killing, then that's right, I told him so.

But that isn't the only instance. These images you saw at the time, or these thoughts you had at the time, or these images that stand so vividly before your eyes even today, they stayed with you at the time as well.

I made no secret of it either.

Yes, but precisely because these images made such an impression on you, I'm sure that in all the war years, in the exercise of your duty, in the carrying out of your orders, you more than once connected some thought or other with the business.

Yes, my inner feeling, not my thoughts.

Yes, but I call that thoughts too.

Yes, my inner feeling. That was quite the opposite of my permanent deputy, for instance. Guenter was a man of ice-cold. In all the seven years of working together I never had even a fraction of a human relationship with him. He was so cold that in my absence he simply had my own people killed.

But how could you have such a man at your side? All right, he was assigned to you, but you can push such a man off in the course of time.

He was an outstanding administrative worker.

Fine, then I send him into the administration and let him do nothing but administrative work.

Why, the man did his work, only as a human being he was cold.

[not typed] when one causes suffering, that one feels suffering oneself, then it is justified.

But I said that already, it was so terrible for me when I saw it the first time that I then went to Mueller and told him word for word, this won't do. I was appalled.

At the inspection of those anti-tank ditches, I still remember how I was told, hermetically sealed off, how an uneasy feeling came over me [off the sheet]

And when I then saw how the young men of the Waffen SS were shooting at these Jews in the pit, I only caught the last volleys, something changed in me. My knees shook exactly the way they did when Hoess once showed me a thing where corpses were being burned. I trembled in the knees. I have said this before. I had to gather all my strength then, in front of Hoess's escort detail that was buzzing along behind us, because I had no escort of my own, so that I would not somehow keel over.

So that is a further confirmation that it is out of the question, with your mental disposition, that you simply carried everything out straight through without having given it any thought.

I am completely convinced that the first time you were in Auschwitz, that you were a

That I was an unhappy man, yes, that is true.

So there you saw the final destination station, after all that long time of efforts to solve the Jewish problem

Yes, yes, that is true. My only comfort in all the deportations was that I simply did not know whether he dies or not. That was my only support, that I was not responsible for it, that I simply did not know what happened to the people.

From these things you have now told us it does follow that you did give it thought

Those were my inner feelings.

And now you read the newspaper every day, you will have received still more reports, foreign periodicals, extracts from enemy papers and so on, and there you did give thought to how the measures I carried out are taking effect in enemy and in neutral countries abroad.

But that is secondary.

[blotted], it makes no difference whether secondary or primary, we want to know what you thought.

I said once already, weeks ago, that I once said to [not typed] that I took the position that National Socialism would never in a thousand years last a thousand years, that [blotted] was my position, that if AH were dead the Reich would break apart into the interests of the warlords and would collapse in itself exactly as every great empire in history fell apart shortly after the death of its founder.

By that I mean to say that such thoughts occupied me while I was burdened, so to speak, with work for the Sipo and the SD. And I tried to peel out the sense of it, why the harshness, when nothing lasts forever. And I said to myself, because I was still dragging along a remnant of Christian upbringing from my youth, what is this harshness for. And no order was ever more welcome to me, one I must have dictated dozens of times, than that avoidable harshness was to be avoided. Wherever I came anywhere near excesses, I stepped in.

Those were my thoughts, those were my feelings. What effects the orders of our highest leadership had or could have for the German people was not for me to take an interest in. Because as a pessimist from the start I said, primarily, it is all for nothing anyway. We want to try to build the house for our children as firm and as solid as we can, so they will not have it as hard as we did. We cannot do more, and the more generations follow after us and the longer, the calmer and the better it should be.

But I believe that you did think about it at some point, on the basis of the reports you received from Office VI and from Office III, about what the effects of the measures I carried out were on the public mood. There you did give it thought.

Let us assume now that we are in total war, everyone takes part in it in the place where he happens to sit, whether that is the front soldier or the civilian at home, and so on. That everyone gave thought, in the work assigned to him, to whether what I am doing now serves the winning of victory or what it is good for.

What influence did your operations have on the neutral nations, since it was important to keep them neutral or to draw them over to us? It was precisely the measures taken by you that got enemy propaganda running at full speed. Against us.

You keep confusing the matter, which falls into two parts. I had nothing to do with the extermination, only with the deportation, and that was the least of the evils.

Yes, but the thing ran on a conveyor belt

No, here there was one main office and there was another

Yes, but the thing was put together by foreign countries.

That is no concern of mine

Yes, but you must have given it some thought?

No. Who talked about the deportation during the war? People only talked about the gassing

No, people also talked about the measures in France and Holland.

Those are trifles

And then they were carried off, and propaganda was made about that abroad as well

I know what you want. What foreign countries may have thought about the physical extermination, and that I would have given thought to it. But it is no concern of mine, physical extermination. It was not my task, and not the task of Office IV either, and not of IV B 4.

What did you think the other day, when a murderer butchered [too faint] children and packed them into tin cans, what did you think then.

Well, I thought the fellow should be hanged and the parents of the children should do with him whatever they want.

Good, and by the same turn of your thinking, I will probably have thought, the whole filthy business is no concern of mine, I am only glad that fate spared me from being camp commandant of Auschwitz.

And I said that I am neither grateful nor ungrateful to fate, because if it had been so, I would have carried out the order as well. My task did not weigh on me. One has to distinguish very sharply here between the physical extermination and the registration in the individual countries.

Let us put it crudely for once, you were in fact the handyman for the concentration camps, you had the people brought to where they were killed.

Of course. But who was killed?

The old ones.

Not all the old ones, not if he was a specialist worker.

Let us say a higher percentage.

That does not interest me, I did not give the order. You can also call Reichsbahnrat Stange to account,

He did after all put the trains at our disposal. He was much worse, he was the one who first gave me the possibility of transporting the people.

No, no. You said that you were responsible up to the handing over of the people to the concentration camps. Let us leave these people out of it.

No, why? If you put such questions to me, then I have to point out that you are being inconsistent.

After I wanted to bring the matter to a solution on a purely political basis, and then saw the whole business being run onto a different track, for me, as my final piece of wisdom, a certain Jesuitical line of thought took hold, which put a blinker on my right side and left my view clear only to the left. I had to see to the transports, to the legal underpinning in the individual countries under our influence, so that they would hand the Jews over to us. And everything that happened to the right of that blinker I did not want to see, did not wish to look at, wanted to have nothing at all to do with. That is my picture of my own thinking.

On the matter of the deportation of children that was brought up yesterday, I have a few further scattered thoughts to express. One. Whatever SS Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker may have played down in his reporting, with regard to improprieties of every kind, the author has surely blown up. If it had really been as the author describes it and as it was read out to me yesterday, then I would have to be able to remember such a matter at least dimly. Because something like that does stay in the memory, or else, when one deals with it again, it is suddenly pulled out of the dark again and comes at least into half light, so that one can remember something. But I can remember absolutely nothing. I would say so if I could remember, because it would do me no good to deny something that my own people could under certain circumstances refute.

But by that I do not mean to deny it and say it never happened at all, because far too much has been described for that.

I mean by that that something must have happened there, but it cannot have been so terrible, otherwise I would have remembered it

2. But if it really is supposed to have gone as gruesomely as the author describes, then I have to conclude that Dannecker, and likewise the Commander of the SIPO and SD in Paris, and the Higher SS and Police Leader, let themselves be made fools of by the French. Who, as the author says, even cleared out the orphanages for them, and touted the children like sour beer. And these three had now fallen for this touting and had, to the malicious satisfaction, so to speak, of the French police, evacuated and deported a large part of them here, where from the outset they could count on the very greatest sympathy of world opinion, and that with skillful exploitation this must have led to the torpedoing of further deportation possibilities, and where they also got the French, who up to then had been in favor of a deportation, automatically turned against it.

3. That the reception camp, in this case, as is established, Auschitz, sent the wagons rolling back, so that in the Belgian area Jewish children's corpses were found in the wagons, that I have to consign to the realm of the usual atrocity tales about children that we know from the First World War, which also come from just this area. What is also interesting in this connection is that the witness can name nobody as a witness apart from one Jewess. On top of that, it would have to be established.

I do not believe at all that the trains went off directly and directly to the destination, they were loaded to capacity along the way, because as far as I can remember, the escort personnel always came back on regular trains. I would not want to claim it 100 percent, but 99 percent, that on the long stretches the trains never went back empty, that the [blotted] were in circulation somewhere and were pulled out of circulation again. That would have to be established, though, since I am not entirely sure.

4. You have found so many documents and papers, and now I ask myself, where have the documents gone that concern the children's matters, credible documents, of course. With that I have nothing more to say on this matter at the moment.

Can you tell me whether it's true that the responsibility for the gas chambers and crematorium buildings lay with Amtsgruppe C, after such buildings were requested by Amtsgruppe D

Inside the VWHA, that I don't know, I'm not informed about that

I'm seeing that for the first time. The RSHA had nothing to do with it.

Have you ever heard of an SS Ustf. Becker?

No.

He was assigned to a detachment for gassing vans?

In which area?

Kiev.

No.

I'm also hearing here for the first time that gassing was done up in the Russian-occupied territory, I always thought they had only shot people.

Isn't it stated who all these things were subordinate to?

He writes that to the SS Ostbf. Rauf

Rauf, Prinz Albrecht Str. 8

I know the name.

Teletype from Riga to the RSHA II D 3 a. GRS [Secret Reich Matter]. concerning S-goods.

Now, I don't know this matter, but if this letter, this document, weren't there, then of course all the world would assume that this business was done by the section that handled Jewish affairs too. But you can see from it that it isn't true at all. And there were, or rather there still are, other things that I actually know nothing about. We had nothing at all to do with the whole technical business. We only ever had, as I've said so often, the political solution in view. When that wasn't the case, we were of course brought in as well, IV B 4, but only for transport, for registration. The rest didn't concern us, and our work was in fact finished once we had the timetables drawn up, which were drawn up jointly with the Reich Transport Ministry, after I could tell the Reich Transport Ministry how many trains I needed, and that once named to me the office that

carried out the registration. That wasn't carried out by me, I never had the personnel for it, never, and for another thing when the reception stations were named to me by the VWHA. Yes, if my section had consisted of 2,000 people, then it would certainly be impossible for me to show that I had nothing to do with the registration. But I only had officials, and in Hungary a few men as a transport escort detachment. How the transports were put together, how they were fed, that was no concern of mine, although I gave guidelines here as reference points for the Hungarian gendarmerie. Whether they went by them I can't judge, I couldn't do anything, it wasn't within my authority to command. And I'll tell you something further, on your questions about why IV B 4 keeps turning up.

I've already explained that to you. But here you have in truth one more example, here is a completely new section that has never turned up before, which again is the one in charge, and it really is as I told you. It really wasn't any brushing off of responsibility on my part. No, everybody, every single one of them, meddled and got mixed up in these things, and everybody thinks he has to contribute something to the work wanted by the high leadership. They pushed their way right in. But today none of them want to know anything about it any more. Today the section IV B 4, that is, the Gestapo of Amt IV, is what's left over. Everybody else dodges away and tips the slop buckets on us, so to speak.

On closer reflection, does the name Rauf mean nothing?

No, I know that I heard the name very often. In the Prinz-Albrecht Str. that was the Gestapa [Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, Secret State Police Office] and probably Amt II as well. The traffic dispatch office and the Chief of the SIPO and SD with his adjutant's staff. House prison. House administration.

From the Baltic states, did reports actually reach you, or did you at some point get to see summary activity reports.

As far as I can still remember today, it was said that the matter in the Baltic states was solved on the spot. I never had anything to do with it either.

Of Latvia it's said, for instance, that in 1935 there were 93,000 Jews there. When the Germans marched in there were still 70,000 Jews in Latvia, the rest had fled with the Bolshevists. The Jewish Bolshevist rule had deported 33,000 Latvians, and up to Oct. 41 the special detachments, which consisted mainly of Latvians, executed 30,000 Jews

Yes, up there they settled their business themselves.

In Lithuania [blotted] in the year 1923 there were 153,000 Jews. 40,000 Lithuanians were sent to Siberia and that is said to go back to the preparatory work of the Jews, and 40,000 Jews were then killed by the Lithuanians

The revenge

In individual actions a total of 136,000 Jews were liquidated.

The leader of Einsatzgruppe A, SS Brigadefuehrer Stahllecker, mentions among other things that already in the first hours after the march-in, local antisemitic forces were induced to [not typed] against the Jews. As ordered

took the first measures on their own initiative.

Stahllecker never told you about this?

No, I never met him again. When he went off as head of the Einsatzgruppe I saw him for the last time. I had nothing more to do with him.

Then Stahllecker speaks about the [not typed] area, says that well over 400,000 Jews were counted at the time, this figure certainly set too low. Minsk had 100,000 Jews out of a population of 238,000. 19,000 were shot as partisans and criminals, the majority of them Jews. Estimated figures from the Wehrmacht up to Dec. 41. Then from Dec. 40 onwards Jewish transports were run from the Reich to Riga, Minsk and so on at short intervals.

Yes, to Riga, that is right.

20,000 to Riga and 7,000 to Minsk.

Minsk is new to me. That certainly happened on Heydrich's orders. The heads of the Einsatzgruppen certainly came to Berlin from time to time to report. They will have spoken with Heydrich, he will have had it presented to him, and Heydrich will then probably have told the Einsatzgruppen chiefs on his own initiative, [blotted] we will send you further trains as well, and so on. And so I then received instructions to let trains run not to Auschwitz but to Riga. After all, I had no railway stations to designate. An Einsatzgruppe chief or the commandant of a concentration camp would certainly not have put up with a desk officer simply unloading thousands of people on him.

No, I never saw that map. I received no reports at all about these matters. I heard of it for the first time when the statistician was collecting these things at my office.

IV A 1 is not me at all, that is an entirely different section. There you have another example, yet another section. I told you that I had nothing to do with the reporting by the Einsatzgruppen chiefs, and I never received any reports either. I believe that section IV A 1 was the section that collected all the reporting and was the liaison office between the chiefs of Offices IV, V, III and VII and the Einsatzgruppen chiefs.

Was that also under Mueller?

Yes. It is also an entirely different group, IV A, and I was IV B. I have said so often that there were so many offices that pushed their way into Jewish affairs.

From that one can really conclude that it was a muddle.

I would not call it a muddle. It would surely have been considerably more elegant and better if, for example, an office had been created by a Fuehrer order, a "Reich Commissioner for Jewish Affairs". Something like that was in my mind in Austria. There, after the Central Office was set up, I was aiming to obtain the practical authority and also the legal powers of a Reich Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in

the reunified Austria. From there the next step would have been Jewish affairs generally. I would have pulled this Jewish sector out of all the central authorities and set up an office of its own, a "Reich Commissariat for the Solution of the Jewish Question". Everything, everything, everything would have gone out from that office, and who knows whether it would not then have come to an elegant, political solution. Because today, with this solution, far too many offices had a hand in the game. They were loud in argument, took the most radical position and pushed it through.

A position of that kind I could never have adopted, on the strength of my many years of preparatory work in the field of the Jewish question, because it would have been ideologically quite alien to me. Perhaps Heydrich and Mueller did not put the harsh side of these matters under me in the first place, but put those things under others here. And you know, once that starts, it spreads in circles, exactly as when I throw a stone into a pond. Here every office really did, as I have already said, take the thing over for itself when it held the lead and the little sector "Jews" was involved. Lange saw it that way too, the first time, when he saw Dr. Blau's collection of statutes.

The letter is stamped with an incoming stamp of the Foreign Office, Domestic Department II, 1870 G. A distribution stamp has long since been printed on it, according to which the letter is to be circulated. That would be the text of a cipher-machine letter from the Reich Plenipotentiary in Hungary, Dr. Fesemeier, to the Foreign Office.

This letter proves, first, that I pressed for Jews of foreign nationality not to be caught up in the deportation but to be exempted. It is clear that Fesemeier, who after all sat behind his desk, or shuttled back and forth between his desk and the offices of the Hungarian government, was never in a camp and would never have known anything about it, had I not reported this fact to the Higher SS and Police Leader in Hungary, [blotted] so that he for his part approached Fesemeier, so that the Foreign Office here in a sense authorized a liaison man of the German legation to visit my command in eastern Hungary and, in these camps, together with the advisers I had placed at the disposal of the Hungarian gendarmerie, in these camps, Jews

to separate out Jews of enemy and neutral nationality and to house them in special quarters, and that Jews of foreign nationality are in general to be exempted. This letter shows quite clearly how sharply the Sonderkommando Eichmann distinguished here, and how hard we tried to exempt Jews of foreign nationality from it. Second, this letter proves that the deportation from Hungary only got under way in May, because it speaks here of Zone 1 and 2, and logically nobody would have started with Zone 4 and 5, but rather with Zone 1 and 2. It goes on to say that a timetable conference takes place on 4 May with representatives of the Reichsbahn, the Sipo and the Hungarian gendarmerie, and that four transports with 3,000 Jews each were to run daily.

Now I ask myself, it has always been claimed that trains ran as early as April, and I always took the view that this struck me as much too early. Now it is proved here that trains only ran in May, if they ran in May at all, because the timetable conference only took place on 4 May, and from the timetable conference, which always lasted three to four days, until the trains were actually made available, at least ten to fourteen days went by, if not more, so that at best one could reckon on after the middle of May. Something like that was still dimly in my memory too. I was misled by the book of J. Brandt.

So it is also proof that there really were trains with 3,000, which at four trains would then be 12,000.

That may well be, if I had the necessary wagons.

So four trains there and four trains back makes eight, with 40 men of guard personnel.

Yes, but I did not have those. The Chief of the Ordnungspolizei provided them.

So altogether you had about 300 at your disposal?

Yes, I would estimate roughly that.

How could one sum up Heydrich's character, what in your opinion is the essential picture?

So people would like to know what I think of Heydrich? I will try to say it in a few words. Cold, hard, brutal, a great organizer, very hardworking, extremely mistrustful, a friend only when it suited him, very shrewd, a man who walked over corpses. Character traits that in themselves are extremely un-Germanic. I have one thing in common with him, that I too was born in Halle an der Saale, and his father was my violin teacher. Admittedly I only got as far as "O Tannenbaum", and for that I got slaps from old Heydrich. I can in no way claim that he had Jewish blood, but one thing I do know, from my own knowledge from youth onward, that it was always said, the Heydrichs are not Aryan or have Jewish blood. That is roughly the whole of it.

Would you like to know anything more precise?

Yes, out of the experience, or the character portrait of this man, a great number of events or perhaps non-events are recounted, for instance the Bürgerbräukeller attack of 1939, which is supposed to have been organized by Heydrich.

I consider Heydrich, him above all, capable of any deed. He is such a calculating and ambitious man. But to believe is not to know.

Those are purely matters of feeling, but one thing I do know, that he always backed the man he knew to be a counterweight against his own opponents. Outrageously intelligent.

In your view, was it easy for him to outplay the RF?

I consider that absolutely possible, because he was so adroit and had such an absolute instinct for the moment. Certain things he wanted to achieve he served up to the RF at the right moment, and anyone who knew the RF knows it. If you wanted to tell the RF something that would stick, you had to whisper it behind a third person's back, and then he would turn round and say, "What did you say?" And then you had to defend yourself and say, no, I am not saying that. And then you were asked a second time, and then came the spontaneous decisions that often, precisely because they were spontaneous, would have been better not taken. A tactic that Obergruppenführer Wolff understood outstandingly, and it is really he whom I would crown as the intriguer.

Can one say now that Heydrich had a loyalty complex toward the RF, or had any loyalty at all?

I do not believe that the idea of loyalty existed for him at all, because for loyalty you must have a soul, and Heydrich was a soulless man. He did of course work together with the RF, but he certainly let that cooperation double his strength and his power and his position and the plans for the future that he undoubtedly had.

Was it his ambition to become the successor to the RF?

That I cannot know. It would also have depended on how he in turn stood with the Führer.

Is anything known about that?

No, I do not know. In that area he was very jealous and watchful, and I hardly believe he would have dared to work on the Führer behind the RF's back, because if that had come out it would have caused difficulties, and he probably did not want to expose himself to that.

Can one say that Heydrich was inspired by the SS idea as such? Or was he a pure policeman?

I consider him an entirely pure policeman.

Is that story known about the Navy, the daughter of a Navy uncle to whom he was engaged and whom he was supposed to marry, and whom he then did not want to marry, and where he is supposed to have said to the father, laughing,

Yes, you see, it cost me so little, practically, to bump off this girl, she cannot become my wife after all. And that he was expelled from the Navy for it, the old shipowner even got involved. And afterwards it was interpreted as if he had been thrown out of the Navy for Nazi activity.

[blotted] not known to me.

Is it known whether Heydrich maneuvered Mueller into the SS?

From my own knowledge of the matter I do not know that, but it was always said that if Mueller had not enjoyed Heydrich's absolute confidence, then Heydrich would have thrown Mueller out. That is quite beyond question.

Was Heydrich what the two of us understand by a [blotted] SS man?

No.

No, because his marked character traits have nothing to do with the picture we set up as our ideal.

That is clear, but on the other hand it was his task to take over the protection of the Reich against its enemies from within, and that was of course a terribly hard task, which of course could only be solved harshly.

What I cannot stand is that I collect material about people in order to get them cheaply into my hand, and that is quite beyond question from a certain rank upward.

until the man was finally in hand.

Yes, but that is a police task, one that is carried out even in a democracy.

Yes, but that it is done by blackmail. My dear friend, we know this and that about you, you are a swine, but we will not remove you, if you go along my line, then…

Is it not so? And that surely must not be. He is supposed to be a clean man, an untouchable one.

It depends on whether Heydrich really did that, on the basis of information he obtained and then by way of blackmail, including with his own SS comrades. Surely one would have to be able to check that?

That I cannot say.

How would you characterize the RF?

In itself that cannot be said at all in the short conversation I had.

But I would say: "Ah, two souls dwell, alas, in my breast." You really have to know first where he comes from.

He came from Bavaria, he was a teacher, hence the constant craving to be a pedagogue. He had enormous ambition. He could be unusually kind-hearted and helpful, but just as easily he could [blotted] decide things all of a sudden that went against any sense of justice. Uncommonly hard-working, a very great organizer, a very poor judge of men, and unfortunately an easy mark for anyone who told him what he wanted to hear.

There is a document, that is, a report from Pohl to the Reichsführer. And it was a very honorable matter to receive the Reichsführer's watch. Now, on 29 November 1944, Pohl writes on the subject of "distribution of watches to members of the Waffen-SS." To the Reichsführer, Amtsgruppe D, Oranienburg. Twenty thousand pocket watches [not typed]. Last year I placed the stated quota at the disposal of the Waffen-SS. The issuing of these gifts takes place in your name, to the most valued and most worthy members of this division. Then it goes indistinct again. I request your confirmation. Altogether there are at present with Arbeitsgruppe D under repair [not typed].

Now is that German, or SS-like, to take a watch off an enemy of the Reich, have it repaired, and then hand that watch to a man who has earned it?

To that I can say, the Old Testament is a very shrewd and instructive book. You will find a passage in it: Woe to a people in which a servant is made into a leader, or a maid is made a queen. And unfortunately our leadership lacked [not typed]. A sergeant is still not a commander, and it was on that fact that this crystal-clear nationalist outlook finally degenerated. The struggle of the individual Reichsleiter, Reich ministers and office chiefs, one against the other. And so they squandered their strength against each other instead of working together on real nationalism, on the old idea of the struggle, and furthering it, as they finally once did before 1933. And of course it is against the SS idea to hand out used watches from the concentration camps again as a gift of honor. Simply impossible. That is the only way I can explain it.

Now how is it possible that the Reichsführer, who could be finicky down to the smallest detail, who on the other hand was filled with the ethos of the soldier-farmer, filled with the ethos of the racially healthy and sensitive man, who put everything into it, including his schoolmasterly pedagogy, somehow to get the ideas

of purity and loyalty and so on into his head. Now how can it be squared in his mind that he tells himself, fine, we cannot throw the watches away, I will distribute them to my most proven officers. How could he, as a mystic, commit such an absolute baseness? How is that to be understood? And in the same month he gives Becher the order to bring him a gold chain, which was then given as a present to his girlfriend, who had just had a child. How is that to be put together?

Probably simply that inner greatness of soul was missing there too, or a lack of feeling.

Anyone can assume that he told himself, under the influence of the war, that you simply cannot throw such material away. But on the other hand I have to say, it is simply proletarian.

Isn't that also bound up with the petty schoolmaster's streak, to throw nothing away at all, to use everything, to waste nothing? Couldn't that be it?

Yes, naturally. In any case it puts the Reichsführer in an entirely different light, and it is almost impossible, at least for outsiders, to make clear to them in spite of such things how great the Reichsführer was. It is very hard.

The letter is from Pohl to the Reichsführer? Is it initialed?

Yes, it is reproduced here only as wording.

Yes, and now Glo [not typed]?

Glo [not typed] was Gauleiter in Vienna. He was removed because he went into the shoe shops himself and checked the prices, that sort of thing. I know him only because I later saw him in the Reichstag. He was a Reichstag deputy as well. Otherwise I don't know him any further.

Yes, but he claims the Reichsführer was in Auschwitz once or twice. And that he looked over the whole camp from the back and then said, those are slaughters our children will no longer have to carry out. In the year 1943. Is it even possible that the Reichsführer looked at it from A to Z?

Yes, I hold that to be absolutely possible, and the remark he made as well.

So it is after all possible to assume that the Reichsführer intervened in the solution of the Jewish question very largely on his own initiative. But what interests me is whether these were his own ideas, or whether they could also have come from Heydrich.

Yes, I believe that too, that it could have been suggested to him. But whether the watch business was suggested to him? I assume of a leader

that he does not let such a thing be suggested to him, that he throws anyone out who comes with such an idea.

What in your view would have been a solution for the Jewish problem?

Well, in any case not the solution that was adopted. I am very sorry that I have to say this. It displeases me and it also does not match my inner conviction that anyone is entitled simply to remove masses of people from the world in this form, because he holds the conviction that these masses are harmful.

But which solution then?

First of all I would probably have done what was originally demanded before 1933. All the Jews who [blotted] had immigrated from the East after 1918, under strict and firm control, and their property too, which they had grabbed for themselves in the meantime, whatever source it came from, I would then have put out of Germany and taken from them what they had acquired dishonestly. That would have been the first thing. Second, I would not have permitted the small percentage that the Jews made up in relation to the German non-Jews, I would not have permitted that small percentage to hold such a high position of power, namely in film, in the press, in the banks, everywhere in the key positions. I would have allowed it only in proportion to their numbers.

Yes, Jewish emigration was promoted, and only laughable numbers came of it, partly because the foreign states demanded very high advance payments, and there were very difficult emigration rules for North America.

The measures proposed above may hold for the time before the war, but in the course of the whole war the Jews from the other countries came in on top of that, and it is surely beyond question that the Jews were the driving force behind the whole resistance, not of a military kind, political resistance.

Now a completely open question. If the Germans have the right to annihilate a Jewish people because in their view the Jews are their enemies, then conversely the Jews also have the right to kill the non-Jews. That is clear. So in my view, if one man regards the other as an enemy, he has the right to fight him too. That is a primitive solution.

That is my view as well. But I also hold the opinion that a Morgenthau Plan, the plan was not carried out but it was on the

best way to being carried out, so people said to themselves, if we lose the war then the Jews will fall upon us. So let us begin to get rid of the Jews, to render the Jews who are in the Reich harmless somehow, and then on top of that the whole war. The Jews were touted around like sour beer at every corner and turn, and nobody would take them. In the very last months of the war Sweden and Switzerland did something. So what kind of solution was there then?

It goes against me personally, defenseless people, and even if it is my greatest enemy, defenseless people who have done nothing to me personally, only by their birth, simply to drive them into a gas oven. If someone has committed an assassination or the like, then I understand it when a man fires into the middle of it in the first rush of feeling. The Americans in Dachau too, since they found nothing else, took my picture and hung it on a tree and shot at it. Those are all first acts of reaction, understandable ones. But if I am now asked for a solution?

Yes, but it can hardly be regarded as a solution to let the Jews just be Jews and leave everything as it was, only keeping them under control. That would have taken an expenditure of manpower which in numbers [not typed].

I once talked with a Jew and with his non-Jewish wife. And his wife had said to me beforehand, yes, the Jews are wonderfully settled here in Argentina, because here they are Vivos too, and here a Jew does not stand out at all. But the Nordic countries, who had no feeling for this business sense and this worship of money, were of course outstripped by these intelligent, industrious people who pushed themselves forward at school, outstripped in business.

In part the means made no difference, lending money to anyone, then later forcing the farms to auction, in order to get possession of the farms, which were then taken over again by the family's own private [blotted] bank, so that [blotted] farmers carried thoughts of suicide and in part the farmers' wives took their own lives, because they were driven off their old soil in the postwar years of 1928 and 1929. That hardness, that craving for money, does not lie in the Nordic man.

Out of that came the hatred of course, and then the manner of it, when the Jew appears in masses he can be enormously insolent. Of course a great deal can be said in excuse of the measures. But I personally find the manner of it downright brutal, in that they were simply gassed like that. That is not chivalrous either, even toward my enemy.

It really is always the same single thing we are reproached with, the extermination of X million Jews in this manner. So we don't want to argue about law, that has been lifted clean off its hinges.

What can one say about the moment when Heydrich was shot and Kaltenbrunner took his place? Who was in the running then to step into Heydrich's position?

I'm not informed about the personnel situation at that time. I was in Russia then and so I couldn't take note of anything personally. But since I knew most of the gentlemen very well who played in that orchestra, I fully believe it was proposed by certain people to put an incompetent man in there and not another Heydrich, who after all was capable of anything, a political policeman. So [blotted] only after Heydrich, as the man Kaltenbrunner presents, that leaves only Wolff.

Wolff's intention in this was to have a willing instrument. No competition, because under Heydrich he had, and that was the only real competition for him

Perhaps this can also be connected with the fact that Wolff is a dark figure anyway

It would interest me very much why he was never brought into any Nuremberg trial. I keep coming to the same conclusion, and I hope I don't fall under suspicion of being a reactionary for it, but complete power demands an inner modesty, a crystal-clear cleanliness, and I would almost say a humility. And when I look at the leadership stratum as such, let's say the Gauleiter, Herr Ru [not typed] for example, it's impossible to put a man like that at the head of such a large Gau as the province of Saxony.

He may have been a good brassiere manufacturer, but no Reichsstatthalter. There, for example, the conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic went to him and said, Herr Reichsstatthalter, I need as always such and such a subsidy from the state treasury for my orchestra. Answer, why a subsidy, pay for it out of your own receipts. Thereupon Kemp said to him, but Herr Reichsstatthalter, we are propaganda after all, a great representation for Germany, we play abroad. Answer, stop it with the fairy tale, whoever orders music should

pay for it too. And those were the Dresden Philharmonic. And there are many more examples like that. The women alone, the way they threw themselves into the cars like a sparrow into horse droppings. I have nothing against a good cook, but as Frau Reichsstatthalter I do turn her down. Oddly enough, men in an elevated position cope faster than the women do.

And so, on everything you asked me, on how this or that could have been possible, all I can answer you is that the class was simply missing. Leading and carrying great responsibility has to be in the blood somehow. You can't simply say, from tomorrow you are this and that. He can be as diligent as you like, as capable, as brilliant, but one day he'll be thrown off the rails anyway. This Wehrbauerntum, wonderful, Darre's peasant law, wonderful, but then afterwards everything was overdone, everything suddenly began to swim. Suddenly in some district in Russia some commissar or other forbade people to kiss the dead. It has been an old custom for centuries. He forbade it because he thought it unhygienic. Another example.

Herr Frauenfeld and Herr Reichsschulungsleiter Schmidt, the torchlight procession of soldiers, 100 km from the front, only because Herr Schulungsleiter Schmidt wanted to drive to the town hall with Herr Frauenfeld like that. I broke in by radio, with the threat of making a report to higher authorities if the whole show was not dissolved within 10 minutes, and they obeyed my order, small and ugly.

Another example. Herr Koch arrived with a special train. 14 carriages, 8 of them Rosenberg's, the rest Herr Koch's. Rosenberg was Reich Commissioner for the Occupied Eastern Territories and Koch was for the Ukraine. They quarreled, they insulted each other, neither would go where the other was. Herr Koch, who as everyone knows used to punch railway tickets. I have nothing against that, but again the necessary class was missing. Nothing against ticket conductors, but don't make them Reich Commissioners.

Example. Herr von Karajan with the Reichsleiter. K. was in Aachen, a conductor. The Reichsleiter rings him up and says, Herr von Karajan, be so kind, your orchestra is looking for a trumpeter, do take on so-and-so, you would be doing me

a personal favor. Good, von Karajan has him sent over to audition. The trumpeter comes, blows so hard the flies fall off the wall, and so von Karajan can't use him. A short time later another telephone call from the Reichsleiter. Please, Herr von Karajan, take this man on. To which von Karajan says, I can't take this man on, he can't play at all. Whereupon the Reichsleiter says, but he's an old fighter. Whereupon von Karajan again, but he isn't supposed to fight at all, he's supposed to blow.

I tell these stories because somewhere in them I see the thread running through, I see the guilt. But if one wants to speak of guilt at all, then perhaps it can be put this way. Before 33, a man became a National Socialist only if he wanted to out of inner conviction. After 33 they all pushed themselves to the front. But then it was said again, those were [blotted] loyal old fighters, see the blowing and the fighting. As a result they were made this and that, Gauleiter and so on, and then they could fight all right, but they could no longer blow.

They could blow in the fight against communism [off the sheet], Marxism, brave in the hall battles, in the streets, some of them let themselves be beaten into cripples, anything you like, but that doesn't make them capable afterwards of taking up this or that post, and that runs right through the whole line. Otherwise it would basically have looked different. If they had not basically been small people, there would not have been this dualism either, between the Reichsleiter and the Reich ministers and so on. Example, Herr von Ribbentrop.

Now you might be entitled to put the question to me whether I always held this conviction, even back then, and if so, why I took part at all. But we were probably convinced that this water would settle one day and become clear. Unfortunately it went too fast, 33 into the leadership, 6 years later war, that probably says everything. But the hope that this would die out one day, settle or change, that was what kept us old National Socialists to the mark in our outlook, the bridging of the class spirit, the bridging of the caste spirit and so on. Apart from that, in the war there was no time at all to think about any of it.

Now another question. Do you believe that the solution of the Jewish question, or rather the physical extermination order as such, suited the Reichsfuehrer, so to speak? Or that it was inwardly repugnant to him after all?

Yes, it is strange that something like this was kept so secret. Did you know anything about it? About this gassing and extermination.

No. But then again, if you read the literature, it really wasn't so secret at all, because the Jews knew about it, for instance. The Jews spoke to prominent German officials, for instance, about the extermination mills in Auschwitz. In part, when something was running at full tilt in Auschwitz, you could pick up an identifying stench at 5 to 6 kilometers, and it was constantly being announced in the foreign press. Only it had also been announced beforehand, before there was any question of it at all, and that is why it is logical that people didn't attach so much importance to it.

I know, for instance, that the Einsatzkommandos in the East, which were partly manned by Waffen SS, in part carried out mass executions. But what I still remember from back then, from Kiev and from Lemberg, is that Hauptscharfuehrer Soffner told atrocity stories like that in the casino at Lemberg, where I still thought to myself, well, he's boasting mightily. And at Kiev I believe three or four thousand were reported, but back then all of that somehow ran under the heading of fighting partisans and so on. But at that time I absolutely did not know either that children were being killed there too. Still, it must be assumed that most of these people knew nothing.

But the thing is, these Einsatzkommandos, [blotted] Ohlendorf for instance, were subordinate to Heydrich after all, and I consider it absolutely possible, because I know the Reichsfuehrer could be very warm-hearted, very ready to help, that the main driving force was Heydrich. I consider it possible, I can't prove it.

Something else I don't understand on the Reichsfuehrer's part is that he put these concentration camp guards into SS uniforms, for instance. How can one blur an order like the SS. He simply put the men into the uniforms and then they belonged to the Totenkopfstandarte or otherwise to the SS. The same with the officials at the Stapo [State Police] and the Kripo [Criminal Police]. They were police officials. Today they were nothing, tomorrow they had a rank, perhaps Obersturmfuehrer, because they were Oberregierungsraete. But all of that lies in the ambition within the sphere of power. Take the SS court, the SS jurisdiction, in order to kick them right in the [not typed]. But properly speaking these people don't belong to the SS at all.

But that was Heydrich, his order was the men who stood in the service of the Reich.

He was an idealist. On the military side that was the SS, and the idealistic side beyond that was the General SS, and then came the general [not typed] services. Those services were done by people who also came from the SS, and with that he gave every single man the possibility of falling back. People also stood very well in the service of the Reich who had a hunchback and squinted and were 1.54 tall, and those were not taken into the SS.

Do you believe now that this extermination order came at a convenient moment for the Reichsführer? Or do you think he gave himself no headache about it?

Yes, but one should not tear something down before one has something better. And if one now wants to replace a religion with a fat-bellied local group leader [not typed] that is what the chickens do in the farmyard.

What would have interested me in the whole story was to know, out of your personal view, to get the figure of Heydrich outlined in such a way that the operation with regard to enemies of the Reich, first of all the Jews, was solved in just this manner, cleverly, with force used in part. But that does seem to me very difficult. On the other hand I do not believe that Heydrich undertook anything without being covered on the whole by the Reichsführer.

No, that is clear. He was too clever for that, and he could not push himself forward either. It did have to be agreed somewhere.

Heydrich was, guided by the right hand, a very suitable and capable police chief. Nothing is known about any conflicts he had with Canaris?

Yes, the gods may know whether they were together earlier, or whether he was even managed by Canaris earlier and then brushed off when he became inconvenient, the way he in turn wanted to brush Canaris off because he knew too much. All that was interesting but never cleared up.

There is no evidence for it?

This subject we are discussing here is so broad. To exhaust it one would have to have many people who were in the picture, because it was divided up very cleverly. What the one did not know, the other knew.

And the playing off of one against the other was also a great factor. It really was a bit too strong a [not typed] economy. There is nothing to be changed about that.

In general, on the particular appointments of Higher SS and Police Leaders in the various countries, Heydrich had no say?

Hardly. Well, he could raise an objection, he could bring counter-material, he could shoot against it. If the man had been very disagreeable to him, then he would probably have done it. But in general, as SS and Higher Police Leader, he was the highest in rank. He did not go to the commander of the Sipo, he went to him personally. But basically everyone, the commander of the Sipo too, the commander of the Order Police, the Stapo and the SD, had their own official channel.

The Higher SS and Police Leader could well put in a word, make a proposal, but he had no command authority of any kind. He also took no part in the proceedings, because those came directly from Heydrich to the commander of the Sipo. They did not go through his office. It is like this, that people believed the Higher SS and Police Leader had been a little Reichsführer in his own office. Not a trace of it. Only the General SS went through the chief of staff of the two senior district leaders [not typed] but none of the others.

And who made the proposal for the appointment of a Higher SS and Police Leader?

The Reichsführer did that, and in doing so he took care to take men who were skilled in dealing with the respective Reich governors and Gauleiters, who caused him no difficulties by making a stink in the individual territories, but who were also presentable, who were diligent and so on. But basically they were not professional policemen. Without exception they were also General SS.

Was that the case afterwards in the occupied territories too?

Yes, that was the case there too, naturally.

And they became Waffen SS generals after the 20th of July, because after that date the army's prisoner camps and in part other functions that the army and the Wehrmacht united were placed under the Higher SS and Police Leader, that is to say, for example, a Gruppenführer and lieutenant general of the Waffen SS and Police, and now they became Waffen SS lieutenant generals in order to hold a rank appointed by the Führer, so as to be able to carry out certain defined military tasks.

I, for example, am a lieutenant general of the Waffen SS, but seen purely militarily my highest rank was captain, perhaps major, that is in Wehrmacht terms.

A man like Hausser, for example, he was a real lieutenant general, or Steiner, whichever you want to name. Seen militarily, those were real soldier-officers who simply rose through the ranks.

Did you know Jungklaus?

Yes, what about him?

He was shot for cowardice before the enemy, first demoted and shot. He was Higher SS and Police Leader in Belgium.

And Rauter.

What about him?

He was shot by the Dutch.

It never struck you that Müller had a woodworking hobby?

No.

I did not build the air-raid cellar, I only made the design. Originally he wanted just a small foxhole. I made a small [off the sheet] air-raid bunker where he could have room with his wife and his two children. Naturally the four people had to stand here packed close together, [off the sheet] reinforced it accordingly, filched the cement for myself, and then had the men do it. It had just hardened properly when there was another terrible air raid on Berlin. A direct hit struck his house, which was half blown to pieces, but the Müller family was in the air-raid bunker and came through that raid splendidly.

And you were often in his house?

Yes, for a while even every Thursday with a few of my comrades. We also played chess then. I lost the games regularly, and I believe I never won a single one. He had the following tactic. It gave him a diabolical pleasure to let me come on so well at the start that by the end I became sure of winning. It was always the same. Again and again I galloped headlong into the whole business, I became sure of winning, and all at once he had me. I was checkmated.

Now I must say, I am a chess player who once, when I was younger, played very gladly and very much, but then from about 24 or 25 years of age I played perhaps one game a year, perhaps none at all, or all at once 30 games straight off. I am that sort of occasional chess player. But I cannot tell you whether Müller was a keen chess player. I do not know that either. But he was a clever chess player, and that does mean that such a man has a capacity for concentration and for planning and also makes a certain tactic his own. And a chess player as a rule gives back in the game, in life, what he is.

Yes, with me it came very early, namely with the [not typed] affair

So that was already the end of 39.

Stahlecker was already commander of the Sipo and SD in the Protectorate, March 39. We had several months' work in Prague there and in Bohemia and Moravia. Poland declared war on us in 39. The war was over at the end of September

In October I made that trip with Stahlecker, to pick out the [off the sheet] for us. I drove with Stahlecker in his car through the Russian corridor, and there we talked for a while with a [not typed] commissar. I can still see the man in front of me, a very tall, broad-shouldered fellow in a leather jacket, as a uniform, a brown leather jacket, and he stood there and in a manner of speaking ran the checkpoint at the entrance to the corridor. The corridor was several km long, about 2o km, and along the way we were gawked at by the [off the sheet] population. In a small village we had a breakdown, something was not in order, and so hundreds of these small-town people gathered around us. That was about that time.

Then came the assembling of the transports, from Theresienstadt the [off the sheet], from the Moravian Ostrava region the craftsmen, because I said to myself, in this [off the sheet] region I have the best craftsmen. Then they were sent to [not typed]. It was already winter, with snow. The setting-up work took several weeks, and following one of my inspection trips, to see how far it had come along, I came through Krakow, and there Streckenbach told me [off the sheet] he wanted to tell me a good joke, he was an always cheerful man from Hamburg, and the joke was that the Governor General had ordered that on setting foot on Gen Gov soil I was to be arrested by him at once. That must have been at the end of 39, beginning of 40.

Are you aware that on 12 Sep. 1940 the Warsaw ghetto was to be closed.

No, I don't know that.

It is interesting how Frank says in Lublin on 22 April 1941, who among us can demand, now that we have stood in struggle with the Jew for 2o years, that we still show any consideration. When the Jews in the world ask for pity today, that leaves us cold. On 9 Sept. 1941 Dr. Humel, head of office in Warsaw, records that the dangers of typhus are becoming ever greater for the Polish population too, and that 2 4o5 cases of typhus have been reported in the ghetto, but that the actual figure is much higher, and so on.

Besides that, a great many Poles have been found to have caught typhus, and that it is therefore important to press for the complete sealing off of the ghetto. Then an order of the [not typed] is issued, allowing Jews on the highway to be shot, which basically means imposing the death penalty for unlawfully leaving the ghetto. Was it like that with the ghettos at all, that permission to shoot was given?

I don't know that, because I never inspected ghettos. The only place where a restricted zone was set around the Jew, in my area of duty, that was Theresienstadt. But there the border police had no permission to shoot. And Theresienstadt was not so sealed off either, because the big Dresden-Prague motor road ran right through the middle of Theresienstadt.

But here it comes out that in Warsaw, despite bringing in a [not typed], only 45 death sentences could be passed. Of those only 8 had been carried out, because the clemency commission in Krakow had to decide every single case. A further 600 applications for sentencing are pending.

So a few things emerge from this. That is from 9 Sept. 41, so 2 months after the start of the eastern campaign, 2 months after the commissar order came into force. He goes on to say that from an estimated 2 1/2 million Jews who were said to be in the east, in Poland, he has now arrived at 3 1/2 million Jews. Probably these are Jews who have seeped through more and more. That is also made known from Jewish quarters, so that Poland became more and more a reservoir for Jews. That is not unimportant for the later calculation of the stated numbers of those destroyed. On the other hand there must also have been a large migration of Jews to the Russian side.

They piled up like swarms of bees, and the Russians gave them free passage at once if they gave them a watch. If I am not mistaken, Murmelstein told me that.

Have you any idea on what scale?

Yes, I once estimated it, 100-200-250 000, in that order of magnitude. But that was guesswork on our part, we had no control at all, they went across along the whole broad line. That was back then, still before the Russian war. Later, when the Gen. Gov. began with the Jewish measures, then you can imagine, when so many had already cleared out beforehand, just because it came to a

local concentration or to a ghettoization, how many Jews then migrated into Russian territory, where they now felt pressure behind them. Namely when the physical destruction began.

One moment, then they would have been in Russian territory, or rather in the zone of influence of the Einsatzkommandos, so out of the frying pan into the fire. If they now wanted to reach unoccupied Russian territory, then they would have had to [not typed] behind the Wehrmacht

No, in the period before that, there had been almost 2 years, up to June 41. What I am telling you about the 2oo or 250 000, that was the time of Nisko on the San, so shortly after the Polish campaign. So end of 39 to the middle of 41, that was when the figure was that I got told somehow. I believe we even carried it in our statistics. And I believe we put the figure there at 100 000, we didn't want to set it so high, that was safer. As for what crossed the border from the beginning of 1940, when the 2000 skilled workers were at Nisko on the San under the direction of [blotted], up to the outbreak of the Russian war, so June 1941, more than a year later, I don't know that, because the pressure kept getting stronger, the Jew could work out roughly what was still to come.

He, Frank, speaks though of an increase in the Jews. He gives no indication at all that Jews had migrated to Russian territory. Now there could be 2 explanations for that, that for his part he sees it as a shortcoming that Jews slipped through.

Yes, out of his border area.

Yes, but then I would say he was not responsible after all, it was not the Gen. Gov. after all.

Yes, but it was all his area after all, everything was subject to his decision, he was the sovereign authority after all.

But beyond the D-Line, was that not a matter for the Wehrmacht.

Wehrmacht, yes, quite right. But I believe we had no border troops at that time. But the Gen Gov did have something similar in Krakow, like a [blotted]. He could do nothing, there was no war, without the approval of the Gen Gov authority. You can see from that that he cared not a jot about it, he had after all given an order to arrest a member of the RSHA, a desk officer in the senior service. You see this high-handedness from that. Frank had a sort of, how shall I say, a beginning megalomania, delusion of grandeur, to have me arrested just like that, although it is only a single case. He liked to show off, in contrast to the Frank in B. u. M., who was an extraordinarily

modest man. Who did not incline to exaggeration, was sparing with words. He, this Frank, was a powerful speaker, liked putting himself in the limelight. I believe Streckenbach told me that when the Poland Frank set off, from his office to home or wherever, it was an enormous motorcade, with sirens and police, and so on, rather like an oriental prince setting out on a journey. If 2 1/2 million Jews were too few for him, he added another 1 million without further ado. The Jewish problem was taken up by the Fuehrer in every speech, and in those days everything pressed towards contributing something to the solution.

Just read the collection by Dr. Blau, there you see how everyone pushed his way in, how everyone also believed he had this and that as his own preserve. You see it too from the fact that Frank forbade me to set foot there and wanted to handle the matter himself. He obviously saw a competitor in me. If he had let the RSHA operate freely from the end of 39 to 41, if he had let the plan be carried out that I drew up and for which I had my superiors' approval, then Frank would have had nothing at all to do with it, for the whole question in the Gen. Gov. would have been solved completely bloodlessly. He would only have had to give me the Lublin district, and I had discussed that with the Jews, Murmelstein was enthusiastic at the time.

I had to start small then. If I had asked straight away for the city of Radom [unclear], I would never have got it, because it first had to be cleared of the Polish population. But now that I had established myself at Nisko on the San, it was a small Jewish state in the making, just as I also started small in Vienna with the Central Office, but all at once they wanted the central offices everywhere too. Nisko was a little village, and I believe the Jews were entitled to a restricted zone of 10 km by 10 km. I simply took all that for myself. The Jews were provided with horses, I had a Jewish veterinarian there, so they had animals too.

I also said to Murmelstein, here they must learn to ride and not just sit at a desk. Murmelstein got on a nag there for the first time. I rode myself too, there was not much to be done with vehicles. Murmelstein crawled onto the horse and sat there like a grease spot. I said to him then, well, Murmelstein, how is life on the back of a horse? Well, he was not delighted. But let me say why I am describing all this. If it had been a small piece of ground, then they would not have needed horses. Well, it was a piece of ground of 10 km by 10 km round about. That was the beginning. And I say once again, it would all have happened completely bloodlessly.

For it was to become an autonomous Jewish state in the District of Lublin. How we would then have employed the Jews, I thought about that too. That does not happen overnight either. I can't bring 1 million or 2 million or 500,000 Jews there in transports all at once, they'd die on me or I'd have nothing but epidemics. No, Nisko on the San, that's where the [not typed] specialists were, barracks were to be built there, it was to become a base, an industry was to grow up there. That's why the skilled workers came first, then you would have needed unskilled labor too, but it would have grown the way our big concentration camps grew, they grew to 100,000 and more and there had been nothing there before either.

Only it wasn't to become a concentration camp, but an autonomous Jewish state, that one in the District of Lublin, [blotted] as a Protectorate for the German Reich. That was to be a final solution of the Jewish question. And so today I can't clear Poland-Frank of being the initiator at all of this enormous destruction of Jews in his General Government, which he set in motion with his orders and with his people. Because of his short-sightedness and because of his frantic fear that anyone at all might meddle in his area of command. That is the truth.

Now when people came out of the General Government and made off eastward, into the Russian-occupied territory, they slipped through a barrier. Who was the barrier under, the OKW [Armed Forces High Command] or a central office for border-police matters in Berlin, or Poland-Frank?

When did Department IV get the border police?

Before the war

Fine, it doesn't matter further. But I was at the demarcation line several times and you mustn't imagine it was a hermetically sealed territory. Here and there you had a couple of fellows standing at the main crossing points, and then for 10 or 20 kilometers you saw nothing at all, neither of the Russians nor of anyone else. Nisko on the San, for instance, there had been a small Wehrmacht unit there when I came up.

It lies much further west

Yes, but you could get into the Russian territory there across the San, it wasn't sealed off so hermetically

But the question remains. Was Poland-Frank responsible for it, in which case he had reason not to talk about it at all, or was he not the competent authority?

I think he was competent, because it was his sovereign territory. There was no war on. The Reich Protector was competent too, for his Protectorate borders, so that not everything would come in from the Reich to

buy up the Protectorate, that's also why there were the transit permits and all those tricks. There the Reich Protector was competent, and of course he worked that out in the closest cooperation with the Reich Economics Ministry, because neither of them could have an interest in it.

Then on Oct. 17, 1941, at a government session, the following matter is discussed. The city of Lublin counted around 40,000 Jews in 1939. About 12,000 of them have been resettled in the course of time, but almost the same number has moved in again by today

From the flat hinterland

When he says "resettled" there, is that Globocnik, Oct. 1941

That's possible. In any case that was a measure of the General Government's own.

And it goes on to say that the Jews who moved in brought scabies and other diseases with them to a high degree, and were therefore carriers of these epidemics. There will only be a clarification of the Jewish question when the full transport away of all Jews can be carried out.

If Poland-Frank believed he could push his Jews off into the Russian-occupied territories, then he ran into the strongest resistance there, from Reich Commissar Rosenberg for the Russian-occupied territories. Nobody would take the Jews off anybody else, what is he supposed to do with them. Hence that drastic expression too, "liquidate them yourselves". That wasn't the RSHA, that was the Rosenberg office that said it, the office he wanted to hang them on. I reckon Heydrich let Poland-Frank be turned down flat. Do your own dirty work.

Then at a police session on 18 June 1942 there is discussion of the problem of the resettlement of Jews in Kraków. For carrying out such an action the provision of sufficient transport trains is necessary. Although a train embargo has been ordered for the next 14 days, he has achieved in the negotiations with President [not typed] that trains will be made available from time to time for the transport away of Jews. After the embargo period expires the Jewish action must be carried out on a stronger scale.

It is perhaps interesting to this extent, that even with the General Government's high-handedness the transport people still had to be brought in

Yes, you probably wouldn't even believe it when I describe the difficulties I had with the Reich Economics Ministry. It wasn't so simple when some Gauleiter who had gone wild suddenly wanted to evacuate 100,000 Jews. No, first the trains had to be provided. It was a central authority itself, the Reich Transport Ministry, and when they said no, and pointed to other orders

or embargoes, there was nothing at all you could do. There was only one thing you could do, keep kicking them or pestering them until you got a couple of trains, which were only a fraction of what you needed.

Did you generally have to do with such embargoes yourself?

Yes, Hauptsturmführer Novak can testify to how that little man was pressed by me, he was to procure transport trains, because I was being pressed from above as well, and Novak was met with a flat no from the Reich Transport Ministry. I often had to step in myself, Günther too, so that we got somewhere

Did these train embargoes take up a longer period?

Yes, often 4, 6, 8 weeks

Not 3 or 4 months?

No, within 3 or 4 months I did get something after all, but not always the full number of trains. That happened. I remember once when I got nothing at all any more and gave up. Fine, I said to myself, then Heydrich will have to do it himself, and I put up a submission. What came of it I no longer know today.

Do you have any idea what sort of average of embargoes was imposed in the course of a year, was it 1, or 2 or 5 or 8 embargoes?

No, I can't give you an average figure. With the beginning of the Russian campaign, that was the time when the rolling stock of the Reich Railway was made available almost without friction, and such requests were decided more often against than in favor

Can one say that every larger offensive meant a train embargo for your office?

Yes, you can say that, though it shouldn't quite mean that I couldn't still get 2 or 3 trains now and then.

You won't have got any trains before the western offensive

No

You won't have got any when the Norway and Denmark business got going either

Yes, difficulties there too

So in 1940, for most of 1940 you won't have got any trains, that is May, June, July, up to the end of the campaign in France?

No

Then straight afterwards?

Not so straight afterwards. There were still the supply trains then, until I butted in and said, the trains go out full, with food supplies, with ammunition and every sort of equipment, and with soldiers,

They have to come back empty, surely. Yes, Novak told me then, that's how it is, he had heard it from Stange, they get loaded up again in Russia straight away. And it was like that with honey, they had no containers, it stood there in bathtubs, was then loaded into barrels and put on board. The trains brought back all sorts of things from Russia, fodder grain and so on. They all came back loaded.

But why would empty trains coming back from Russia interest you?

Well, I could have put those to use somewhere in the Reich, where I had evacuation measures. Because the evacuations inside the Reich only ran from some place or other to Auschwitz, or. That's where I could have used them.

So now we have got as far as deep into 1940, the western campaign, then there were the preparations for the leap across to England, which are then given up for good in September. So it's quite possible that you could run normally in September, October, November, December 1940. But you were running relatively little then, only out of the Reich

Yes

Then at the beginning of 1941 you went over to transporting Jews from other countries too. But then in April 1941 came the Balkan campaign?

I don't think I really felt that one.

But I got nothing more after the beginning of the Russian campaign. For Operation Barbarossa enormous quantities of ammunition and materiel were brought up to East Prussia months in advance, into the forests. As far as I can remember, I got nothing at all then.

Then you probably got nothing at all from May or June 41 until after the first great double battles?

No

Did that last out the whole of 41, that you got no transports?

No, a whole year, no, I don't think so

So from May possibly to the end of the year?

Yes, toward the end of the year there was something again now and then, that could well be

Then Frank says on 2 Aug. 43, with us things stand quite clearly. If somebody asks what will become of the NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers’ Party], the NSDAP will certainly outlive the Jews. Here we began with 3 1/2 million Jews, and of them only a few [not typed] are left.

Everything was, let's say, emigrated.

That's a fine way of putting it.

But on 2 August 43 he states that 3 1/2 million Jews [not typed]

That's a figure where he wanted to report a success.

Then on 4 March 44 he said, in Krakow, that the military situation was not very good now. When someone mourns after the Jews with tears in his eyes and says, isn't it dreadful what has been done to the Jews, then you have to ask that person whether he still holds the same opinion today. If we had the 2 million Jews in full activity today, and the few men and women in the country, we would no longer be masters of the situation. The Jews are a race that must be wiped out; wherever we catch even one of them, that is the end of him.

There he suddenly goes from 3 1/2 million down to 2 million.

That fits with what I already said, reporting success, always dressing the figures up for those above.

Both things were said at a gathering of Reich speakers.

The figures could never be dressed up enough for those above.

Then it is said here, on the occasion of a picture of the entrance to the ghetto in Krakow, that it was to become a model ghetto.

That was on 20 March 1941. The gas chambers at Belzec, Majdanek, Auschwitz and elsewhere were not yet working. On 13 March 1943 the model ghetto was liquidated as well.

On 31 October 41 the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories writes to the Reich Commissioner for the Ostland in Riga and says:

Can a Reich Commissioner for the Ostland forbid executions of Jews?

Yes, certainly. It isn't clear to me who in the RSHA could have said that. Second, the Reich Commissioner was responsible for the occupied Russian territories, and the individual commissioners, and nobody in those territories could do as he pleased without the district commissioner giving his consent. If he entered a veto, nothing could be undertaken. This may have been the work of a single task group of the Security Police and the SD, or a task detachment subordinate to a task group. And if they wanted to settle the matter locally there, in accordance with an order of the Reichsführer, it must have been a general order, then this task group chief will have complained in Berlin. But the task group chief did not approach Department IV B 4; at most he approached Müller, though as a rule he approached the Chief of the Security Police and the SD.

Here he will have set out his difficulties and his successes as well. And so it may be right that he turned to the RSHA with a complaint, and that the RSHA then expressed its surprise to the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Russian territories, or something in that form. But from this affair one sees without doubt that, from a certain point at least, when the troops no longer had military operations but the civil administration took over more, that here nobody could do as he pleased any longer, not even on the part of the Security Police, as people sometimes generally believe.

Fifteen days later this commissioner answers.

I have forbidden the wild executions of Jews in Libau because the manner in which they were carried out could not be justified. I ask to be informed whether your inquiry is to be understood as a directive that all Jews in the Ostland are to be liquidated. Is this to happen without regard to age, sex and economic considerations? It goes without saying that cleansing the Ostland of Jews is an urgent task, but the solution must be brought into line with the needs of the war economy. Neither from the ordinances on the Jewish question in the brown folder, nor from other decrees, have I so far been able to derive such a directive.

The brown folder must be an ordinance from the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Russian territories to the offices under him.

That has nothing to do with us. I know of no brown folder.

Then a reply comes to that, on 18 December 41, from the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories:

Clarity on the Jewish question should meanwhile have been created through oral discussions. Economic interests are to remain fundamentally disregarded in settling the problem. For the rest, you are asked to discuss questions that come up directly with the Higher SS and Police Leader.

So that is clear proof that from October until 18 December 41 the RSHA pressed its case with Rosenberg, and that the Reich Commissioner for the Ostland is instructed that the Higher SS and Police Leader is the responsible authority. So the executive power of the Reich Commissioner is thereby restricted absolutely, and that of the Higher SS and Police Leader is widened in its place.

No, the Higher SS and Police Leader is attached to the Reich Commissioner. He can't do anything without the approval of the Reich Commissioner for the occupied [not typed] territories. Krüger in the General Government couldn't do anything either if he didn't have the authorization from the Governor General.

The Reich Commissioner for the Ostland writes on 18 June 43 to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories: From General Commissioner Kube.

Yes, the one who was murdered, by a bomb that his Russian servant had placed under his bed.

The attached secret reports have come in from General Commissioner Kube, and they deserve quite particular attention. That the Jews are given special treatment needs no further discussion, but that things occur such as those set out in the General Commissioner's reports of 1 June scarcely seems credible. What is [not typed] against that? One need only imagine such occurrences becoming known on the other side and being exploited there. Such propaganda would probably remain without effect only because listeners and readers would not be prepared to believe it.

You know nothing about that?

No.

Then there is a letter here. Page 193.

Ambassador Abetz [not typed]

I know nothing about it, but I could piece together roughly how it may have been. Either the Foreign Office acted on its own and instructed Abetz, or the RSHA approached the Foreign Office to say that the matter should now be examined on a question of principle, according to which [not typed] the de-Jewing of France in the occupied territories could be carried out. Thereupon the Foreign Office will have written to Abetz and will have passed these points, the ones you have just raised, to him for handling. For his part Abetz then passed the matter on to the responsible office, the military administration in Paris.

Then there is one here to the Commissioner of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD for France and Belgium, Paris office, for the attention of Hauptsturmführer Dannecker.

Subject: emigration of emigrants from Spain to America. Enclosed are copies of two confidential reports of the German Consulate General in Casablanca, letters of 25.3. and 8.6.42, transmitted to the Foreign Office, sent for your information. The conditions described in them are to be given attention from there as well, and to be countered so far as possible, so that emigration of that kind is stopped.

IV B 4 wrote that to Dannecker. Who signed it? Suhr?

My Regierungsrat. Now what can this be? There is no earlier file on it, it is a new matter.

It can be one of two things. First, emigration was forbidden, or second, it was a matter of property rights, that the Jews dragged a great deal of property with them on this occasion, because it strikes me as odd that Suhr handled the matter and signed it.

What interests me is that basically it was all the same to you how the Jews got away.

At what time?

On 10 July 1942.

But I had the Reichsführer's order forbidding emigration. Around that time it had not yet been eased; that only came later, when the compensation deals with the Jews grew in scale. At the start of the Russian campaign the Reichsführer had issued a rigid ban on emigration, and it was kept to rigidly. This date seems to me a little too early.

What is this?

That is the certifying stamp of my authority, of the RSHA in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, then the national emblem and beneath it Chief of the Security Police and the SD. That is the certifying stamp [blotted] of this letter, which was certified here by a clerk, nothing more.

Can you read the signature?

Not properly. In any case one of my police staff.

What does by order of Suhr mean? By your order?

No, by order of the RSHA.

Do you not know what figures were involved in the emigration of Jews to Casablanca and so on?

No, those can only have been very few. It is not very significant and can be checked at any time. Those were small matters.

But how so? There are tremendous numbers, thousands upon thousands.

But this is about Jews of Spanish nationality. How so?

No, the emigration by way of Spain to America.

That is something else. Yes, that is the illegal emigration, that is the bolting. As I said before, in every country where measures began, everyone bolted at once across the green border. Yes, those are enormous numbers.

Do you now know anything in figures?

Yes, so far as I know the statistician who worked for me worked out roughly the illegal migration, and that was a fixed item in our accounting.

But that doesn't come out of his report.

Did you study it carefully?

Didn't you have any definite figures?

Of course we had figures on the illegal emigration.

Yes, but I mean here specifically.

There were thousands, there were tens of thousands, not Jews now, who came out of Holland, Belgium, France, precisely through unoccupied France, into Spain and into Portugal, and into North Africa. Some of them then went on to England, to America and so on. So if that was already the case with people who were politically set against the Germans, and that's perhaps ten thousand, then there's no reason at all to be surprised that it was also ten thousand, perhaps even a hundred thousand Jews.

Yes, that's right too.

Because I know from personal experience, Jews I knew who were in the cinema business, and they simply went to unoccupied France. That was very early on, 1941.

I already told you about Hungary. I did nothing to stop this illegal emigration. What got away over Romania, that's [blotted] legion.

But wasn't there some figure available from that time?

We estimated it. Didn't I include it in the one thing I drew up statistically? The estimated number of those who emigrated illegally is known to me somewhere. That estimated figure wasn't just guessed at off the cuff, it was calculated somehow. It was a very high number, the illegal emigration overseas.

In figures?

Don't you have my handwritten report to hand, with the tabulation?

Now this number of those who emigrated illegally, [not typed] with the aim of staying on the European mainland, and of those who got away to the overseas mainland, that still keeps us very busy in putting the statistics together. We'll come to it automatically.

Have you ever heard of an institution called Hadamar?

No.

In May 1943 Mischlinge, half-Jews, all of them children, are supposed to have been housed there.

Where, in which country? Who writes that?

A head nurse. Almost all the children were healthy, only a few had skin rashes. The children were all killed by injections.

Jews? Half-Jews?

That I don't know.

When I came back from Hungary, around that time, I found a letter from the Personnel Head Office, or was it from the Leadership Head Office. In any case not from the RSHA, so it probably came from the Personnel Head Office, didn't it.

So this letter was now in front of me. It had been sent out to all SS leaders, and enclosed were 5 or 6 or 8 sheets in large format with printed questions. There may have been about 50 to 60 questions. And in this letter it said that the officer being approached would no doubt be astonished to be bothered with such a thing at this time of intense war, at a moment when, by order of the Reich leadership, really only work important to the war was to be carried out and everything else had to wait until the war was over. But it went on to say that the Reichsführer had satisfied himself of the enormous importance of it, and for reasons that were listed one by one, which I can no longer remember today, it was absolutely essential that each officer approached answer these questions exactly and send them back through official channels by a stated date.

Along with me, plenty of other SS leaders will have thrown the thing into a corner of a desk in the first flush of anger when they got it. But one was so used to an order being an order, all the more so with a deadline attached, that after a few days one took the stuff out again and set about filling it in.

On this questionnaire everything was set out, from birth onward, the parents' standing, number of children, married, family, promotion dates, award of the Reichsführer's death's-head ring, dagger, SS sword, work assignment, postings, foreign travel. In short, everything was listed in this questionnaire, so that the SS man filling it in stood there from the cradle to the day he filled it in, naked and bare, so to speak.

But how does one explain all that?

Even then one thought about how odd the thing was, but there was hardly any time, and besides it came from one's own organization. Afterwards, though, when I heard that the enemy side was informed about the whole life of every single SS officer, thoroughly and accurately, I began to have misgivings, and I said to myself that in drawing up this questionnaire, without a doubt, and the opposite would have to be proved first, though one can hardly prove it, that here, in drawing up the questionnaire, the SS office that drew it up, I have to say it unfortunately, without a doubt let itself be guided by enemy hands.

There is nothing else, because we had quite different, very important things, and under the order to put everything not essential to the war effort at the back of the queue, those got put at the back too. It was a waste of paper, it was a waste of the staff who then had to work the things through, and it was a theft of every SS officer's time.

You mean that a more senior officer then went to the Reichsführer

It can only have happened that some high rank in the Reich leadership made this business sound plausible to the Reichsführer. How, I don't know. Perhaps that the files of the SS officers had been lost in an air raid, and so on, and the Reichsführer let himself be lulled. With the best will in the world I can't picture it any other way. And I tell you quite openly and freely, as a personal assumption of mine, when I heard that all of it had fallen into enemy hands in such good order, I thought to myself that one really ought to look into whether the tattooing of the blood group of the SS men, prepared by one hand, wasn't somehow suggested as well.

That I would doubt, although I know from my own experience that in April 1945 it was proposed to the Reichsführer that in a rapid operation all 100,000 concentration camp inmates be tattooed, so as to create a certain confusion, so that not every SS man could be recognized by it at once. And that the Reichsführer personally refused. He didn't want to use tricks of that sort.

Measures against the Jews in Belgium. On 10 May 1940, that is at the occupation of Belgium by the German Wehrmacht, 85,000 Jews were living in Belgium, most of them in the cities of Antwerp or Brussels. On 28 October the occupying troops ordered the registration of the Jews. Do you remember that

No, but it will have been done that way.

Are you aware that no higher figure than 42,000 Jews could be established, although there were 85,000 Jews in Belgium.

Because they had fled. I wanted to tell you right at the start, in Belgium we had no success.

Yes, that may well be right, they fled. But it says here that a large part of them managed to evade the registration

Now a large part is played by the military governor, General von Falkenhausen, and the civil governor, Ekhardt Reeder.

Yes, I know about him, I had to write to him a few times on Heydrich's instructions.

Falkenhausen is well known, of course, a 20 July man

Yes,

Reeder always tried to hold his own against the encroachments of the Sipo. Do you remember any concrete cases?

No, not directly. I can only say it because on Heydrich's instructions I had to prepare a draft letter for Reeder a few times, in which he tried to settle in some form the [blotted] complaints he heard from the local Sipo offices in Belgium, and to push the Sipo interests forward.

Do you remember that Reeder and Falkenhausen always refused to introduce the Jewish star?

That detail I can't recall, but it would be entirely possible.

Reeder and Falkenhausen followed a policy aimed at winning over Belgian public opinion, but in doing so they had no scruples about giving up Jewish foreigners and Jewish refugees. And so Belgium is said to have been the first occupied country from which Jewish refugees were deported, namely 82 Polish Jewish families repatriated from Antwerp, and later a far larger number of Jews originating from Poland, in February and March 42, to be employed in the textile industry of Mo [not typed]

About that I'm also not informed, but it would certainly be possible

Do you remember what the Jewish camp in Belgium was called? Marling?

No, I don't recall it.

The deportation trains that left Marlin for Auschwitz from 4 August 42 were intended for a mass dispatch of the Jews without distinction of citizenship. And it was worked out by Eichmann's office

That I cannot believe

Which even complained later to the Foreign Office that its orders were not being carried out properly. As a result Luther and Rademacher initialled on 2 [blotted] December a sharp protest addressed to Werner Balken, the representative of the Foreign Office with Falkenhausen, which related to the fact that the native Belgian Jews had [blotted] not been registered

Yes, now I understand. I had set myself against being sent foreigners and no Belgian Jews. Because the Jews of foreign citizenship, under the

guidelines had to be exempted anyway, they weren't allowed to be deported at all, unless of course that

No, you understand that wrongly. Refugees and stateless Jews were deported, but Belgian Jews were not, and the Eichmann office protested against that.

Well, obviously. If they send me only stateless Jews or only Jews with foreign citizenship, but only so far as that citizenship extended to countries we had occupied and where we had an agreement with the individual governments anyway, or where it was a matter of countries from the east, that is from Poland, those could obviously be deported, they were not exempt from deportation. Naturally it annoyed me when I was sent only such Jews, because my order was to make Belgium free of Jews according to the guidelines issued. So the conduct of Falkenhausen and Reeder was directly contrary to the Reichsführer's order, so I had to act against it, so I had to call in the Foreign Office, and then the Foreign Office intervened in Belgium as described here. I would in no way dispute that the course and the path were like that.

Here it is stated that native Belgian Jews arrived at the Auschwitz camp for the first time on 3 August 1943. Until then there had been only one single mass raid in Belgium. On 3 September several hundred Belgian Jews were taken in furniture vans from their homes to the barracks [not typed] at Marlin. The Queen and Cardinal van Roy then intervened, and Reeder ordered the release of these Belgian Jews again. The attempt at a mass raid was not repeated after that.

That may be

Further privileged groups, 1,800, were taken in 1944 to Theresienstadt, Bergen Belsen and other German camps.

That I no longer know about. 1944, I don't need to know that at all any more, because for a large part of that year I was no longer serving in Berlin

Are you aware that the Belgian population helped the Jews a great deal?

Yes. Individual cases I no longer know, but I still remember that the Belgian population stood very much on the side of the Jews.

In any case, in the trial against Reeder and Falkenhausen that concluded in 1951, the Brussels court took the guilt of the two of them in the deportation of 25,000 Jews as proven, but did not hold them responsible for the later tortures and killings.

Yes, nothing further is said about Belgium, and you don't remember anything either?

I'd be interested to know what the man from the Sipo was called.

It isn't in here at all

Then there probably wasn't anyone down there. It was a very thin affair in Belgium. The only positive thing I can still remember is that I repeatedly had to write letters to Reeder for Heydrich, which he then signed.

Now we come to a country that kept its monarchy, its neutrality and its constitution despite German occupation. Denmark. Here the resistance against the pressure of Himmler and the SS was 90% successful.

That's true as well.

In 1942 the American press reported that the King of Denmark had threatened to abdicate if the Nuremberg Laws were introduced by the German side

That I don't know about

Here it is claimed that Rademacher served as an informer for the SS in the diplomatic corps

That is not correct in any case, in no way at all. Rademacher comes from the diplomatic career, he was, I believe, a legation counsellor first class

The first German envoy was called Cecil von Rendefink

I never had anything to do with him.

On the basis of this experience with the King, Rademacher gave him the instruction to find a suitable opportunity to point out that it would be wise if Denmark prepared itself in good time for a European settlement of the Jewish question at the end of the war at the latest.

Are you aware that in 1942 King Christian, when the Jewish star was to be introduced, declared that he would be the first to wear the Jewish star?

No, I don't know about that.

Do you remember that Himmler, when he wasn't getting through with the normal measures that had worked in every country, ordered the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller in September 42 to include the names of Jews in a list of communists and Danish resistance leaders whom he intended to arrest

That is completely new to me. I never heard it. I also had nothing to do with it

But where did the author get these things?

That is completely new to me

Rendefink's successor was the famous K. W. Best. Did you have dealings with him?

Yes, under Best the Reichsfuehrer, or Heydrich, demanded that the Jews of Danish citizenship be brought into Reich territory. That went back and forth, with the result that through the office of the Commander of the Security Police and SD, Dr. Rudolf Mildner, and I visited him once in Copenhagen, I believe 2,000 or 1,500 Danish Jews were then shipped out. Now on this crossing I believe a few Jews also jumped into the water and killed themselves. The steamer arrived, but where they went first I don't know.

You have the number wrong. There were only 202 Jews on the steamer.

Only 202? Possibly. In any case I then had to house these Jews in Theresienstadt on the Reichsfuehrer's orders. And then Denmark demanded the Jews back again. I traveled to Copenhagen once to discuss the matter there with the Commander of the Security Police and SD, so that I could give Mueller and Heydrich a proper oral report here and the next line of march could be settled. When I got back it was more or less the case that these Jews had to be sent back again. A few people died of natural causes, but only a few, and then of course the ones who jumped from the deck into the water.

It is explained here that Himmler expected he could count on K. W. Best, because Best had earlier belonged to the Secret State Police. But Best, who had left the Gestapo to escape Heydrich's clutches, was freed from his fears for his career by the death of his worst enemy [blotted].

I heard that once before. That was higher politics. I couldn't see through it, I couldn't make sense of it.

The author of this book defends Best a great deal.

I can well believe it. He attacks Heydrich, naturally.

At one point he writes that Best wished to lead a quiet life as Reich Plenipotentiary in a half-neutral country, and that this was why the report he sent to Ribbentrop in January 1943 was quite bold. Best proposed [off the sheet]

Yes, in Denmark there was no Jewish question at all. Whoever put the flea in the Reichsfuehrer's ear about de-Jewing Denmark must have been a bad adviser, because these few Jews in Denmark, who had to be hunted for with a magnifying glass, caused the German government more trouble and headaches than if a thousand times that many had been shipped away.

There were 6,500 Jews in Denmark altogether

I'm saying there was no Jewish question in Denmark.

There were 1,350 refugees from Germany, who up to then had been protected by the Danish government. Now Best made the proposal that if German citizenship were given back to these refugees, the Danes would no longer be able to exercise that protection. But Best, who was an excellent lawyer, knew for certain that this was not possible under German law.

No, that didn't work. Now it works again. I read in the paper the other day that all those Jews who lost German citizenship through my department can now apply to get German citizenship back, because in the meantime a law has come out in West Germany that makes this legal repatriation possible. But that doesn't happen wholesale either. An individual application has to be made, so that the incorporation into the German body is also carried out individually.

Only now, so long after the war, is it possible. But I already said about Denmark: first, it had no Jewish question at all. Second, we never intended to poke into it. Third, whoever inspired the Reichsfuehrer in this business was a bad adviser, and I may assume that this adviser acted either out of stupidity or on purpose. Fifth, it is also possible that the Reichsfuehrer came to it on his own, out of ignorance that in Denmark there really were only a few miserable thousand Jews.

And however hard I examine myself as to whether and how far I might have played an initiating role here, I have to answer in the negative, if only because with the tremendous mess that came out of this business I would inevitably have caught something dreadful over the head from some office or other, whether the head of Office IV, or the Chief of the Security Police and SD, or the Reichsfuehrer, since I was after all the lowest rank who ate along at this whole lump. It would have been very cheap to give me one over the roof here, but because I stood so completely apart from any spark of ignition, they weren't able to do it, and with that I have amply proved how inactive my department was in this field. Naturally, once the basic order was given, the instruction, I came in on it, then I had to work the matter.

They waited for an event on the strength of which one could move somewhat more sharply against the Jewish affairs, and this event was unrest brought on by a strike of the dock workers in Odense.

The thing was set off by the Swedish government passing on to the soldiers stationed in Norway the right to use the Swedish railways. [not typed] There was unrest and there were arrests, and on August 9 the Danish prime minister threatened to resign if the Danish courts had to open criminal proceedings against those arrested. Martial law was then declared, and after that the Danish resistance movement blew up the German-occupied Vorum hall. The strike then grew stronger, so that the next day all the Danish shipyards were on strike.

Then the government [not typed] resigned and General Hanneken declared martial law for all of Denmark. Danish government business was then in practice carried on by the ministerial directors, standing in for the ministers. Now Best thought this was a favorable opportunity for the deportations, and on September 8 he asked for police reinforcements and help from the Wehrmacht. Are you informed about all these matters, do you know or remember anything?

No, this business was finally too unimportant for it to have interested me much at the time, let alone for me to be able to bring up any recollection of it today.

On September 18 Rolf Guenther arrived in Copenhagen with a delegation from [not typed] and Eichmann's office. The Commander of the Security Police in Copenhagen, SS-Standartenfuehrer Rudolf Mildner, saw at once what the intentions were and that they would then be laid at his door. He flew to Berlin to get Kaltenbrunner to call the people back, but had no success with it. In the meantime Best tried to cover himself on both sides. On the evening the raid took place he promised Swe. to pass on the King's wish that the Jews in Denmark be interned.

Yes, Guenther went to Copenhagen and set some sort of operation in motion there. What it was and how, I don't know either. I believe he got the transport on its feet. Doesn't the author write that?

There was a transport, and it was explained that the soldiers who had been interned should be let out and the Jews locked up instead, to show the Danish soldiers that they were not the enemy but that the Jews were the enemy. It was also proposed that for every act of sabotage 50 to 100 Jews should be deported. Finally Best assured Ribbentrop that the deportations would begin as soon as the steamer Wartheland arrived in Copenhagen, and he complains about the lack of help from Hanneken.

Yes, they must have brought up quite a lot of guns to get those few

Jews out of Denmark

Aren't you aware that they even wanted to send Gruppenfuehrer Berger to Denmark to carry the thing through?

No, I'm not aware of that. There seems to have been some office that had a quite particular interest in getting these few Jews transported out of Denmark.

Berger was just the fellow with the idea of a Greater Germanic Reich. Might he not have hit on the idea that all the Scandinavian countries should be made Nordic-Germanic?

Possible, that it came from there.

Because the idea of a Greater Germanic Reich comes from Berger.

There must have been some office, because we ourselves laughed at the enormous effort that was needed for those few Jews, who were then sent back again on top of it. But we, my department, we washed our hands in innocence, because we did nothing other than transport, orders are orders, and transport back again according to orders.

Now this raid had the following non-success. 284 Jews were arrested, of whom 50 were released again as privileged Jews, and only 202 Jews were brought onto this steamer Wartheland. Occasional arrests raised this number to 470, but more than 6,000 full Jews and 1,376 half Jews were smuggled across the border into Sweden.

Well, that was always the reaction to our appearance.

Best was less successful in his efforts to wrest a few Danish Jews from the clutches of Eichmann's office. There was, for example, a 102-year-old Jewish woman, and Best applied, after she had come to Theresienstadt, that this woman be released and sent back to lift the mood.

Yes, I recall it, and that was done.

No, it wasn't done. It says here in a report [not typed] of October 25, that the RSHA absolutely disapproved of it, because it would make an impression of weakness among the Jews if some of them were brought back to Copenhagen.

But they were all given back again.

There's nothing about that in this book.

But I would have let myself be crucified for it, that these few Danish Jews had to march back again

But they did come back after all. I still remember how angry I was about that idiot who sent these old people on the journey at all.

That was probably Guenter's operation?

It doesn't matter, even if it was Guenter, he got his knuckles rapped just the same, because I still remember quite exactly the filthy mess and the dressings-down there were over sending these old sacks on the journey at all. With regard to Denmark we did nothing but disgrace ourselves, and I was always against sticking a thorn into a country for nothing whatever. It isn't worth it at all, over a couple of thousand Jews you can count on one hand.

Do you remember that the Swedish envoy asked that Sweden be allowed to take at least the children?

That is not known to me, but it would lie absolutely in the nature of the intervention of that time.

It was naturally rejected. And indeed by the Foreign Office.

Later all these deported Danish Jews came to Theresienstadt.

Yes, I still know that, much to Eppstein's annoyance.

And otherwise you know nothing more about Denmark.

No. Even today I can still be annoyed at the idiocy of deporting those old sacks back then.

But said today, in the sum of it all, where planing is done, shavings fall.

But I must nevertheless add that I am not certain Guenter carried out this operation with the old people. Perhaps it was another idiot after all.

Is there anything else you remember about Norway?

There I know practically even less than about Denmark.

Are you aware that there was a Jewish reception camp at Berg near D onsberg [not typed]?

No. Norway is a black cloth, I know nothing at all about it.

Do you not recall that in Norway all German measures against Jews were carried out?

How many Jews were there?

In Oslo 1,700, there were very few.

You must excuse me if, when I can often remember 20,000 or 30,000 Jews only very vaguely, I then no longer remember 1,000 or 2,000 Jews at all.

Is the name Korherr known to you?

Because a Dr. Korherr reported on Jewish matters to Himmler?

Unless that was the statistician? No.

Another Korherr I did not have.

In a general raid only 725 Jews were discovered at all [blotted], and this raid was carried out mainly by members of the Qu. [not typed] Part [off the sheet].

Yes, perhaps it is the statistician after all?

Yes, that can only be the statistician.

Do you recall that a transport took place with the steamer Donau of the Norddeutscher Lloyd from Belgen to a German port with the destination Auschwitz?

No, I have no memory of that at all.

A second group was then deported in March 1943. Only 43 Jews deported from Norway survived the war.

I do not mean to say, when I do not remember, that I hold it to be untrue. No, I simply do not recall it any more. Just as I cannot grasp that anyone interfered in these countries at all.

Do you know nothing of the negotiations, in the Norwegian case too, about the applications of the Swedish government stating that it was prepared to take in the Norwegian Jews?

No, I can no longer remember these Nordic matters. I can only condemn that anyone poked into them at all.

It is also interesting that Herr Weizsaecker rejected precisely these applications of the Swedish government, and reported on it to Ribbentrop besides, and declared that such a plan had no prospect.

Weizsaecker, the man of the 20th of July. Now that lies entirely along the line.

This Swedish proposal to take in Jews must surely be known to you somehow. It must have matched your original picture of what you wanted regarding emigration, and now there were the many difficulties with the receiving countries. It must have suited your wish, and you must surely remember it?

Yes, but the number was so small.

Yes, but it is about this matter. And I can well imagine, because it matched your original picture of what you wanted, that you will remember this matter, because precisely in that period, when nothing at all could be done with any government,

that this proposal must have been like a flower in the desert in your eyes. That was 1943.

Even if that were so, at that time the ban of the Reichsfuehrer stood. It would not have been possible at all.

Yes, but the Reichsfuehrer ban was also such that not entirely. Look at the Hungarian case [off the sheet], and I seem to remember dimly that you did speak to me about it once, and that it was quite clear to you at the time, and that it was precisely this intervention by Weizsaecker that shot right across the efforts which your own office supported. And that your office then did not want to start a war with the all-powerful Under Secretary of State. So in that sense, for me to remember something would not be uninteresting.

You mean that Weizsaecker set himself against Jews marching out of Norway to Sweden, and against the Danish Jews too, whom Sweden wanted to take in. Against all that Weizsaecker set himself?

Yes, the author writes here: in agreement with his conduct otherwise, Weizsaecker refused to discuss the question at all.

Because we have some other cases too where Weizsaecker was always against the Jews. In the Italian case we then see that he did something different.

So Weizsaecker was against it, and so against our intentions. Good, one can put it that way. It was all the same to us at that moment where they went. We had to make Norway free. If they marched off into neutral Sweden, that would have suited us. If they had gone a few years earlier we would have been glad, or if Sweden could have taken 30 or 40,000 off our hands a few years earlier we would have been glad. We would even have paid for it.

So one could already say here that Weizsaecker, if it is true that these Jews came from Norway to Auschwitz, which I do not know, if that is true [blotted], then certainly a part of them will not have survived the war, perhaps all of them. But in any case Weizsaecker would then have set himself up here as the murderer of the Jews. For we would have let them go.

That is what you meant? That is right.

The first time the enquiry came from Sweden asking to be allowed to take the children, Stenkraft set himself against it.

Why?

Now another matter. Up to now it has emerged from our study that the registration of the Jews in the Reich territory and in all occupied territories, and their transport away, was the sole and exclusive field of work of your office.

Registration and transport? No, that is not quite right. In very many countries the registration was not my task.

You mean the bringing together. Yes, that is right, there you are correct.

I mean transport now.

But that has nothing to do with registration. The deportation, the transport.

That was exclusively your field?

Yes indeed.

Norway belonged to the occupied territory. You will not have transported people by ship every day?

No, so that was already an extraordinary matter, something that fell outside the normal daily business. You ought to be able to remember that?

[blotted] Denmark yes, because a couple of old people jumped into the water on me there. Norway I cannot recall. If Sweden had taken them in, we would have handed them over gladly. If there was shooting against it, then surely only in order to make further difficulties for us.

How does the matter between Norway and Denmark look in time, what was done first?

They ran at roughly the same time.

That cannot be. Is no date given for when the Donau sailed, for instance?

She sailed on 26 November 1942.

Now if the Danes sailed before the Norwegians, then Weizsaecker will have laughed up his sleeve and said to himself, now I will play the same filthy trick on them with the Norwegians. For the difficulties with the Danish Jews were unbelievable. One can hardly believe that the few [off the sheet] hundred Jews from Denmark caused us more trouble than the whole Hungarian evacuation.

[off the sheet] but the status was quite different with the Danish government.

[off the sheet] I have said it many times, I do not know who the unlucky fellow can have been who bumped into this wasps' nest, which did not interest us in the slightest in terms of numbers, because in the Scandinavian states there was never a Jewish question.

[off the sheet] and if the Norwegians came after the Danes, then Weizsaecker was able to play his [handwriting] game here to the greatest perfection, and then it fits exactly that he sabotaged the taking over of the Jews from Norway by Sweden, in order to make fresh difficulties for us. Nothing else

You never had anything to do with Reich Commissioner [too faint]?

Yes, he was written to fairly often. I had to draft a few letters for the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, addressed to [too faint].

He was a Gauleiter?

Yes, he was Reich Commissioner for Norway.

Yes, I remember. I flew back from Copenhagen to Berlin at the time, it was a four-engined Condor, I think. It was one of my trips up there to have a look at what was going on, and travelling in the same aircraft was Gauleiter [blotted], who turned up at the Copenhagen airport, and the military commander Hanecken appeared at the airfield as well, to see the Reich Commissioner off officially. On that occasion I saw these two gentlemen, but I spoke with neither the one nor the other. Because at that time I had no wish at all to talk to anybody, since I had a nasty stink on my hands that other people had cooked up, and now I had to work out how to get it settled and cleared up again.

What did I discuss with Mildner in Copenhagen at the time? Well, first of all I looked into whether it was true that some of them had jumped from the ship into the water, whether it was true that the Jews really were that old. The birth registers had to be checked, and all these things, and all these things I had to discuss with Mildner on the spot. I, who never had to deal with individual cases, now had to concern myself with this here. That is why Denmark still rings horribly in my ears afterwards. Apparently Mildner was also very glad that he finally had a desk officer from the Reich Security Main Office in front of him, because I can imagine that Mildner, that his [not typed] had melted away under him too, since he was sitting in Copenhagen hearing nothing for days on end and probably trembling for his position and his life, after the world press

He did go to see Kaltenbrunner.

Mildner had been [blotted]. I still remember

Yes, because of the arrival of your people.

I did come up later to put the matter in order.

and he had been amiable and friendly, and the stones fell from his heart by the hundredweight, that he now had someone in front of him who came from the

central authority, to which he was answerable in his reporting, and to which he could now hand over everything, so to speak. And I then tried to put the matter in order, and I believe I can recall that the Jews then travelled back. I made that proposal.

The author does not give that here.

I cannot swear to it, but I think that is how it was.

Now there is another matter, that not only Weizsaecker but also the Reich Commissioner was opposed to emigration, or to the Swedes taking over the Norwegians. In 1943 he complained that the Swedish consulate was very liberal in issuing naturalization certificates.

Yes, Sweden was known for taking these people very much under its wing.

Otherwise you have nothing further to say about the Scandinavian business?

No, I have said everything there is to say about it in principle.

And you had no further conferences with Best?

Yes, I called on Best too in Copenhagen. I cannot now place this conversation with Best, because I cannot even see the room any more. Certainly I went there with Mildner. I can only give it back as a feeling. Best will perhaps have said to me, well, now see what you have got out of it, I said so right away.

And I will have said, Gruppenfuehrer, it was an order of the Reichsfuehrer, we had to carry it out. And I believe I can recall that the first proposal to bring the Jews back to Denmark came from Best, because it was the only alternative still left to us to save face, since too much nonsense had been committed for us to have been able to maintain the situation as it stood.

I myself supported the return, which at first struck me as something monstrous, something that had never happened before. And I believe I can recall that the Jews from Denmark, apart from the few individual cases who died of natural causes, actually were taken back again. In the meantime I had housed the Jews very well and properly in Theresienstadt, to the sorrow and distress of Dr. Eppstein, so that they would be preserved for me and would therefore stand under my control.

I have nothing more to say about it.

We have discussed several times that the Italians acted as protectors of the Jews in Greece, Croatia and in the part of France occupied by the Italians. From September 1943 the picture naturally changed, since Italy was in practice treated as an occupied country.

What measures in Italy can you remember that were taken from your side, from your office?

Did I not send Bosshammer down there?

The name does not appear here.

Was he not in Verona?

In Verona what comes up is Sandberger and the unavoidable Dannecker.

Italy was just as much a failure as Belgium, as the Nordic states. It was of no interest to me. I can tell you that I remember nothing whatever about Italy.

Jewish sources give 15,000 Jews who perished, out of 57,000 in all. In Italy no more than 57,000 Jews, and the 15,000 are supposed to have all been deported, to Germany?

Yes

I will not deny it, but I cannot recall anything.

Are you aware that in Rome, when Rome was occupied by German troops, 8,000 Jews fell into German hands?

No

Are you not aware that Himmler, in this case your work, intended to deport these 8,000 Jews to Auschwitz?

No, what year is it supposed to have been?

In September 1943, after the occupation of Italy.

When the plan came up to deport these 8,000 Jews found in Rome, on 30 September the well-known Bishop [too faint], director of the German church in Rome, drew the attention of the city commandant General Stahlem to the fact that the Pope might possibly speak out against the deportations. Whereupon the latter decided not to carry out Himmler's orders without the express agreement of the Foreign Office.

Do you remember this matter?

No, nothing at all.

Now Weizsaecker turns up again. He was by then already ambassador to the Holy See, and Weizsaecker and his deputy always stressed that he had always warned the Jews about deportations and the like

What is certain is that he passed a copy of Bishop Judall's protest to the commander of the Security Police, to Obersturmbannfuehrer Kappler. And Kappler believed this warning came from the Pope himself, and the whole thing was a bluff by Judall.

I recall nothing of that.

Then Weizsaecker writes to the Foreign Office that the Pope, although by all accounts pressed from many sides, had not let himself be carried away into any demonstrative statement against the deportation of the Jews.

No, I cannot remember anything.

Now it is stressed again and again that the Jews were warned in good time to look for hiding places, that many were kept hidden in monasteries, that many fled to the south, which was already occupied by the Allies.

At what time was all this?

In the autumn of 1943.

And when did the deportations start rolling?

They started rolling in October. Then it says fewer than 1,000 of them were arrested on 18 October, of whom 615 arrived in Auschwitz on 22 October.

That may well be right, I cannot remember it any more.

And from then on the Jews were said to be like hunted game in Italy. A chief witness, Max [not typed], reports that altogether 1,127 Jews were brought from Rome to Auschwitz and that only 15 of them returned.

Can you also remember the shooting of the 350 hostages?

I got that from the newspaper, I had nothing to do with it. Only long after the war did I learn of it through the Kappler trial.

Are you aware that after the occupation of Italy Jews were arrested at Lago Maggiore and drowned there by the police and the SS?

No, I know nothing of it.

Occurrences of this kind were rather frequent. But this irregular murdering was then replaced by a systematic extermination. At the beginning of October Martin Sandberger, formerly commander of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, took over the direction of the Gestapo in Verona, while the apparently indispensable Dannecker became Jewish commissioner for Italy, in October 1943.

I cannot recall anything. Perhaps it is possible that I remember nothing about it because the whole business was such a trifle that I did not concern myself with the whole thing at all, and my permanent deputy took this matter off my hands. Denmark was a trifle too, but it turned into an international stink.

Now, a trifle is perhaps not the right word, because transports rolled to Auschwitz. Ten thousand alone have been established.

Oh well, it was a trifle after all, and so it will be, because I can remember nothing at all about it. Guenter took all the small matters off my hands.

Here it says of one transport, a transport that Eichmann possibly organized himself, from which it follows that he was in northern Italy at the time?

No, I was never down there. Never, never.

It is claimed here that 600 Jews, some of them from Tripoli, were deported on 22 February 1944, and that of these only 126 men and women survived the selections at Birkenau. And of this transport it is claimed that it was possibly organized by Eichmann himself.

No. February 1944, that was when I was sitting in the woods 60 or 80 kilometers east of Berlin. I had been in Italy privately at Easter 1939, and then I was not in Italy again until 1950, and I drove through Italy in 1937 when I came back from Egypt [off the sheet]

Does the camp [not typed] mean anything to you, where the Italian Jews were concentrated, and as a second camp [not typed] near Bozen?

No, nothing. Only in 1945 was I at the Brenner, but on the Austrian side [off the sheet]

The transports from Gris went to Mauthausen, 1944.

I must tell you that I hardly recall it, and also that in the year 194 [off the sheet] I was hardly acting as head of the section.

Were you told that Jewish transports had to turn back because they could not pass the Brenner on account of the Allied bombing raids?

No, I know nothing of that.

Did you have anything to do with the solution of the Jewish question in Trieste?

No, I had nothing to do with that either. In 1944 I was hardly acting at all. My permanent deputy had to do all of this, not I, and that is why I am not informed about any of these things. Besides, Guenter was not obliged to report everything to me, since in any case he was not permitted to ask a decision of me.

And did Globocnik approach you in any way as Higher SS and Police Leader in Trieste?

No, never. He conducted no correspondence with me. Perhaps with IV B 4, that may be, but I know nothing of it.

And in Rome with Kappler.

No, that neither. I only know that Kappler was an important man for Mueller. How, why, for what reason, that I do not know. I only kept hearing the name Kappler.

Good, then let us conclude.

Can you tell us something about the measures that were taken against the Jews in Holland?

In Holland we had SS-Brigadefuehrer Harster as Commander of the Sipo and SD. Then in The Hague there was a Regierungsrat, Zoepf, who had a very close personal connection with Harster. Somehow it was then decided at a higher level that this Regierungsrat Zoepf was to handle Jewish matters in Holland, and that for this purpose he was to consult with the responsible section of the RSHA.

Was there not another colleague as well, Aus der Fuenden?

Yes, I remember, Aus der Fuenden. I believe he was Zoepf's deputy. He was a very simple fellow, and not blessed with intellectual gifts even in the slightest. I came to know Zoepf somehow, whether it was that he came to the RSHA and introduced himself there as the appointed adviser on Jewish affairs in the occupied Netherlands territories. At any rate he was there, and he drew his directives from my section.

Since Harster's time was very much taken up by the radio game he was running with England, and by the resulting number of enemy parachute agents he had secured after they dropped, Harster had little time to commit himself personally to the solution of the Jewish question. So Zoepf had a fairly free hand, and I know that Zoepf often went directly to the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands territories, Seising, and also to the economics minister there, Fischboeck. But Zoepf also had Dutch bodies at his disposal that were furnished with executive powers.

Zoepf was an extraordinarily soft man, distinguished by one thing only: his official zeal, his official punctuality and his official loyalty. In the period when he was acting alone, Zoepf produced more difficulties than practical results. Numerical quotas were agreed on, in the order of 20,000 to 50,000, and the practical end result was as a rule not even 10 percent. I myself had to travel to The Hague some five or six times, to keep pushing matters along through Zoepf and through the Commander, and to stiffen their backbones, and in that way to set them again on the offices that were responsible for the legislative underpinning and for the executive orders.

And no sooner had a figure of 20,000 to 40,000 been settled than I could establish with certainty that in reality only 10 to 15 percent were being transported away. So it dragged on a long time, to transport away the few thousand Jews from Holland.

110,000 Jews out of 140,000 Jews altogether were transported away from Holland [off the sheet]

That many, though, 110,000 Jews. Well, I did say that I had to go to The Hague five or six times to keep pushing the matter along. So it did have its success after all.

Now I already told you, my efforts in Holland to sabotage the interventions extended from the [not typed] to the point of contempt for death [handwriting] Jewish [blotted] all the way to the mighty, in the old dusty but quite proper and respectable Hotel De [handwriting], and to journeys to Amsterdam, where Zoepf, by virtue of the powers of his chief, namely the Commander of the Sipo and SD, had a case officer there who had been wrested from the Commander of the Sipo. A Hauptsturmfuehrer, his name escapes me. He had been a very clever and very experienced detective, who was far ahead of Zoepf, and who to me, to my eyes at that time, was also the right man for Amsterdam, who grasped the right moment and set the right police measures in motion, and who also had the right successes.

It was Lages.

Yes, right, Lages, that is what he was called. Hauptsturmfuehrer Lages.

In conclusion I can state that the BDS [Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Commander of the Security Police and SD] always showed the greatest readiness to serve, that Regierungsrat Zoepf was in no way behind him, and that the man who controlled the center of Jewish life in Holland, namely Amsterdam, was in my eyes always the right man as well. But once Zoepf had, and this lay in his character, worked out the legal underpinning for Holland and forced it through the official channels with many difficulties, from that moment on Zoepf was no longer the suitable man, because practice avoided him.

He could carry legislative matters through, he could conduct negotiations reasonably well, but a man of practice he was not. And so I soon sent him up a whole string, so to speak, of dispensable advisers on Jewish affairs who had become available. Of these I remember the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, Hauptsturmfuehrer Brunner, and I believe Hauptsturmfuehrer Burger as well.

Aus der Fuenden?

Yes, I believe I sent him too. He does not come from Harster's office. One day Mueller told me I should place Aus der Fuenden somewhere. Aus der Fuenden had done his crash course with me, running through all the subject areas, and then I sent him up to Zoepf as support and as an aide, because Zoepf was already complaining about staffing difficulties in any case.

Novak was in The Hague for a time as well.

Now, out of this mass on offer that I sent up there, I would not want to hold to one or another of them, and here too I would like to include Novak and [off the sheet] Bosshammer.

Bosshammer carried out some deportations in Italy in 1945.