Eichmann and Sassen interview, file 86

… and asked for instructions in cases of uncertainty. Naturally, my section issued those instructions, either approving or refusing, depending on the circumstances. The standard for a positive or negative answer was to be found in the relevant basic laws, decrees, police ordinances, or orders and instructions of the RF (Reichsführer-SS) or the Chief of the Security Police [Sicherheitspolizei, Security Police] and the Security Service [Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service] available to the individual caseworkers. Only on the basis of such existing laws and orders could a caseworker work and make decisions at all.

I believe there is no senior government administrative officer, no police senior inspector, no government assessor and no government councillor who ever worked out a decision in a central authority and submitted it to his section head for signature, or to his section head for initialing with a request to pass it on through official channels—that is, for the office chief to initial it, or, if it was of a still more fundamental nature, for the office chief to forward it to the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, or, if it concerned top-level matters, with a request for the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service to forward it to the RF (Reichsführer-SS) for signature—and such an … of a central authority, within a German central authority, would first have to be born.

Now that was the official route to subordinate offices. It goes without saying that, when a matter fell within a section's jurisdiction, the section head entrusted with running it was responsible for obtaining basic instructions. He had to provide his caseworkers with the necessary working material. He took such basic instructions from the collection of laws, from the collection of decrees, from the collection of police ordinances, and from existing instructions from his superiors.

These orders arose either from legislative bodies or from direct orders of my superiors, who were approached by outside offices remote from the Security Police and, in a sense, in… passed such orders to the responsible section head through official channels, with instructions to comply. They also arose when the officer wrote to his superiors on his own initiative through official channels, explained the situation in memorandum form and, under another Roman-numeral item of the submission, requested that they take note and give instructions. Here, then, the responsible section head had in a sense prompted his superiors, on his own initiative, to take a position on a particular subject and decide how the officer should proceed in future.

In this way, of course, letters bearing file number IV B IV also reached offices to which you claimed you had no orders to give.

Yes, of course. For if the responsible caseworker of a Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service … me… I exclude the task forces (Einsatzgruppen): they had nothing to write; there was no correspondence there. It was a summary procedure in that area, a general order without any further inquiry. There were no guidelines to observe there, no consideration for old, infirm people; there were no guidelines for holders of medals and decorations from the First World War. There were no guidelines concerning so-called kinship by marriage with members of the two confessions. There were no guidelines at all; they proceeded under a blanket order, and not a single written word was necessary. Otherwise, of course, it was, and all these inquiries were quite clearly entered in the right-hand corner below the heading under the relevant file reference, insofar as my

jurisdiction was concerned, IV B 4; then came the file number, with a dash and the last two digits of the year.

These outgoing documents were not always initialed by the section head. They were often initialed by his permanent deputy. When the matter fell outside the section's jurisdiction, they were signed by the Chief of Office IV, my immediate superior; when it fell outside his jurisdiction, by the Chief of the Security Police, and so on up the hierarchy, and sent out. That was the fixed routine in every central government authority, regardless of which Reich ministry it belonged to. No one could have broken through that fixed routine. Incidentally, it was almost the same procedure as we encountered in nearly all the civilized countries of the world, with very small organizational differences.

Apart from such a fundamental instruction to Glo…, signed by Heydrich but bearing your section's reference, can you recall offhand similar fundamental instructions—similar or equivalent instructions issued by an office chief that likewise bore your section's reference?

Not a matter of such scope, of such a method, at any rate… There was one occasion when the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service ordered me not to send this letter to Glo… through official channels, but to hurry there personally and hand it to him, with instructions that he was to burn the letter after the task had been carried out. Glo kept that letter in his small armored wall safe. Apart from that, letters of this kind and scope did not pass through my section. I had close to 200,000 files in my open registry, and probably some 30,000 to 40,000 in my secret registry.

This small percentage difference between the secret and open registries is explained by the fact that an existing order automatically classified all measures connected with the deportation of the Jews as secret Reich matters, so that the enemy would not learn of the measures in advance. My registrar, Ustf. (Untersturmführer) Martin, once gave me the approximate number of files in Berlin, when he wanted to demonstrate how necessary it was to increase the staffing of his registry unit.

In other words, so long as your file reference or that of the section is given, but the order or instruction bears your signature or that of your permanent deputy, one need not assume that the initiative or the issuing of the order itself came directly from your section, from your department?

If any documents went out to subordinate offices that did not bear my signature or that of my permanent deputy…

Whether one could then automatically assume that the order did not come directly from you or from your permanent deputy, but rather from a superior office, referring to your section, at least to…

That is generally to be assumed, but need not necessarily be the case, because the content of the document is based on fundamental instructions, from the

form of a law right up to an order or directive. In Office IV, the word “order” itself was avoided, and “directive” was used instead, because the office consisted largely of civil servants. Such people cannot be ordered; civil servants are directed. It is the same in principle, but it has to do with a civil servant's whole position under criminal law, for example in contrast to a military person (Militantenperson). A military person (Militantperson) can be governed by orders; a civil servant is not to be ordered—he comes and receives his directives. Nor can I issue a directive to a civil servant unless he has the necessary written basis for it in the relevant collection. Directives can also be given to him by me, if he is subordinate to me, when they concern minor matters that do not exceed the section's scope…

Not always, because if, for example—it was quite clear anyway—say the Nuremberg Laws were before me, I simply took an implementing provision for a particular paragraph and decided and signed on that basis. But as a rule it always said: “With reference to: you are informed, it is ordered, you are requested, in accordance with the Nuremberg Law… that such-and-such is to be done.”

As a rule, even that was no longer done: the law was cited and communicated to them. The State Police regional headquarters thereby had written backing from my central authority and was, in a sense, covered.

Just as I was covered with my superiors because I always had to make sure my collection was up to date. Parts of it were held by my caseworkers as a working collection, but they were also entered in the registry and could be taken out for reference at any time. They were caseworkers who had to know these matters by heart. So in such a case a document could perfectly well bear my signature, if the decision I passed on was already recorded in a collection, ranging from a law to a police ordinance. But such a document could bear my signature, or that of a section head and his permanent deputy, only if its content did not exceed that scope.

[Typed example cue with handwritten addition: For example, not extraditions!]

There was an exhibition in Berlin, “Red Paradise” … Acts of sabotage had occurred. The Criminal Police assigned to investigate, or the responsible Sabotage Section of Office IV, headed by a criminal police councillor, established… Jews were, at any rate, mentioned in some connection. I was ordered to summon to Berlin the head of the Israelite Religious Community in Vienna, Dr. R. L., and the two heads of the Religious Community in Prague, Dr. Weizmann and Edelstein; to summon Dr. Eppstein in Berlin—there were probably a few more—and to receive them at my office on a particular day.

When they were there, I told Müller. He came to my office, and I stood a little apart from the row of Jewish functionaries and a few steps beside Müller, having taken up position, and Müller read out a declaration with roughly the following content:

“Since it has been established that Jews were also involved in the sabotage of the exhibition ‘Soviet Paradise,’ I have summoned you here on the orders of the RF (Reichsführer-SS) to inform you that four or six functionaries of the Jewish Religious Community in Berlin have been sentenced to death for this. The Berlin State Police regional headquarters has meanwhile identified these Jews and taken them into custody.” As far as I can remember, they were Jews who had already come to the State Police's attention and whom, for some reason, the State Police regional headquarters, under the existing ordinances, in any case

and these Jews were then taken to Oranienburg concentration camp and killed there on the orders of the RF (Reichsführer-SS).

It would have exceeded my section's scope. I was not entitled, on my own authority as section head, even to tell the Jews of the RF's order to carry out a death sentence. It would have been exactly the same as signing the letter to Glo that I had to write on the Chief of the Security Police's orders. I was not entitled to do that; I could not do it. In this case I was a letter writer and a letter carrier, just as an officer generally occupied a buffer position between those above and those below.

Now it is also clear that in this literature that appeared in 1945, I, the former section head of Office IV b 4, am portrayed as the murderer, the mass murderer, and I, first, have never killed a single Jew. No one in my section, from a criminal-assistant trainee up to a government councillor, or from an SS man up to an Stf., has ever killed even a single Jew, killed anyone at all. No one in that circle, myself included, has ever issued an order to other offices to kill Jews. The section reference may have appeared at the top, but I received the order to prepare and draft the letter; the Chief of the Security Police or the RF (Reichsführer-SS) signed it, as the case might be.

Now, leaving aside your relations with Heydrich, your knowledge of him and your acquaintance with him—if we consider the hostile image of Heydrich, that utterly cunning, cold… Do you think Heydrich might have had a particular intention in including, for example, your section reference in this order?

No, I do not. Where would the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service have ended up if he had had to write all the letters himself? I had to draft many letters to all the Reich ministers and to all those of equal rank to him, insofar as the matter concerned my area of responsibility.

I was summoned; he threw the outline at me in clipped words. I made my little notes at lightning speed, at first. Later I no longer needed to, because after working with a chief for years, you know the whole milieu, even how he addresses individual ministers. You picked all that up through the milieu and the routine, so that an outline like that was enough to compose the letter.

The longer such cooperation lasted, the less often—whether for stylistic reasons, or because the factual argument did not seem firmly and precisely enough worked out, or, on the contrary, because it was too precise and exact… Those were all changes that occurred at the beginning, hardly ever later, and they also had a great deal to do with the man's mood. Müller—…—an undemanding spirit.

Müller's letters had to be official, correct and factual, without any expression of personal feeling.

The actions against the Jews in Croatia were carried out by the U (Ustasha) after that state's declaration of independence… Did we have an officer for Jewish affairs in A?

Yes, Adolmeid? A was an Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer). A came to me to report. A's position in Croatia was, by comparison, exactly the same as that of my Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Richter in Budapest. From Croatia, I believe, I had nothing at all to deport. Or…

It is claimed that the actions against the Jews were initially under— … by the U… (Ustasha)

were handled; three labor camps were established in Croatia. In 1942, with the Croatian government's permission, they began combing out these camps. 1942.

And for that purpose you sent A to Croatia?

And to transport the Jews to Reich territory or to Poland, and so on… That is what is claimed?

I would not deny that. If I had the adviser there, his position was the same as Richter’s in Bucharest, although I do not remember ever sending a transport of Jews out of Romania. So I would not deny it quite so categorically in the case of Croatia, although I do know very well, from what A described to me, that the U (Ustasha), on their own authority, subjected the Jews in the Croatian area to extermination. He also told me at the time how repulsively they did it. So I would almost say that in Croatia we arrived at a double solution: namely, a., the U (Ustasha) did it on their own authority, and we likewise transported the Jews from the Croatian area to Reich territory. Could that be right? Yes.

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

Do you know that in Croatia there was a so-called Military Zone No. 2 under the Italian military administration? There was also, nominally, an Italian prince-king of Croatia, who in practice was never installed.

And do you know that both Ba…, the Croatian head of state, and the Italian military government in Military Zone 2—strong opposition to deportation was …

I do not know that, but it would be possible. In almost every country, at certain times, apart from a few exceptions—in Hungary, for example—one could observe an oppositional attitude. But this opposition was usually short-lived, because changes of personnel, exchanges of personnel, soon brought it back into normal channels. But one thing I know, and that is certain: Abromeit had not, as we used to say then, met with much success. That is to say, he had not succeeded in taking substantial contingents of Jews of Croatian nationality out of Croatia. That agrees with the remark that there was considerable opposition.

Now the opposition in Croatia was not about protecting the Jews who were there. Rather, they sought, they endeavored to preserve sovereignty over Croatian actions, and so preferred to give the order to their own U (Ustasha), rather than hand Jews of Croatian nationality over to the Germans for transport out of the Croatian area. A repeatedly told me how radically the U (Ustasha) solved the Jewish question.

[Typed cue: Opposition.]

Do you know that, under the Italian military administration in Military Zone 2, the Italians demanded that Jews born and resident in Zone 2 should in any event be protected against deportation?

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

Was it ever mentioned to you at the time, in this connection, that Mrs. Ba… was supposed to be one-quarter Jewish, or something like that?

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

[Typed insertion/overtyping: authentic intelligence material]

Do you know that the Italians had all the Jews in their zone registered in order to let more time pass?

I do not know that, but it might very well be in A's briefings.

Did you also involve the police attaché in Agram, Helm, in the matter of deporting the Jews?

No, I hardly think so, unless A worked with Helm in some official capacity. It was left to A, as the responsible officer, to decide with whom he discussed his official difficulties.

It was claimed that, after Helm became involved, deportations in smaller groups were carried out from March to May 1943.

That is possible. The task of the officer responsible for the Jewish question was to reproduce as precisely as possible, in the area for which he was responsible, all the working material he received in the way of relevant ordinances, instructions and laws. That was his task. To achieve that aim, he had to make contact with every possible office—not only German offices, but Croatian offices too—always, of course, with the permission of his immediate German superior in his area of work.

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

No.

Do you know that Ba…'s attitude changed fundamentally from 1944 onward? Among other things, he gave the International Red Cross permission to inspect the Jewish labor camps.

Mid-1944… I do not know that. But why should Ba have acted differently in his area from the RF (Reichsführer-SS) in his territory? The RF did exactly the same thing: he had negotiations conducted through Bernadotte and, so to speak, had Jews from the concentration camps loaded into the white Swedish buses and handed over to the Swede. Why should the Ba… of the Croatian state have acted differently?

In the end, the matter was not about the RF wishing to present himself in a milder light, and I assume that it could not possibly have been Ba's intention to present himself more favorably through mitigating provisions or actions. Rather, these concessions were nothing but a purely business transaction to open talks with the enemy… Much like the deal that unfortunately fell through: 10,000 winterized trucks for one million Jews, with the promise that the trucks would not be used on the Western Front.

Now, about the Jews protected by the Italians… Do you know that they were concentrated on the island of Arbeth?

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

But after the collapse—and of course we occupied the entire territory—these Jews either fled to the Yugoslav partisans, to southern Italy, to Bar…, and so on, and only some were caught by us and exterminated by us… That was after the collapse, after we occupied all the territories the Italians had occupied… In July 1943. When the collapse—in July 1943, I was in France, and I also drove through the Riviera, because I received an order to go to Paris. But I then drove to Paris over the Alps, down to the Riviera, and approached several outstations of the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service there, including a commander. Even today I can no longer say what assignment I had. But I know that on the way I found several large camps where disarmed Italian troops were concentrated.

Perhaps the assignment was to attend to the Jews previously protected by the Italians, insofar as I was to clarify that these Jews should be taken over as quickly as possible by German units in the Croatian area. Perhaps; I do not know… It cannot be right. Croatia and the Riviera are worlds apart. Then the assignment was a different one… The order is dated June 1, 1942. So this cannot be right.

[Typed note: Short circuit.]

A number of concrete questions directly connected with the events in Hungary. The German standard for deportation—the guidelines according to which deportations were to be carried out?

The guidelines developed over the years. They began with the RF's (Reichsführer-SS) demand that we allow the Jews nothing different from what German nationals from the German western provinces were allowed at that time through France… Fifty kilograms of baggage, and so on, and so on. Before that, during emigration, they could take away whole … four-room, five-room apartments, and so on.

When deportation as such began, the provisions concerning people were initially carried over from those guidelines; the material provisions naturally fell away. It developed roughly as follows: the deportation guidelines were about one and a half typewritten pages long. After so long, I cannot possibly reproduce them comprehensively today, but I think I can give the most important points by saying the following:

In territory where the formation of partisan groups was not to be feared, first, an age limit was set. But that age limit was not set by years; it was defined by fitness for transport. That is, only units fit for transport could be loaded. In Reich territory and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, people could not be evacuated if one spouse belonged to a Christian religious community … was a non-Jew under the Nuremberg legislation, thus living under the principle of privileged mixed marriage.

Holders of decorations for bravery from the First World War could not be evacuated, nor could anyone who had been wounded in the First World War. A number of other categories of people were exempt too, but they do not come to mind offhand. For the transport itself, it was provided, ordered, that loading was to take place humanely

and that every avoidable hardship was to be avoided. The transport trains had to be equipped with the necessary food and drinking-water supplies. The transports had to have the necessary receptacles for collecting excrement, and each wagon had to have a Jewish transport orderly identified by an armband. During the transport itself, orders required drinking-water supplies to be replenished and excrement containers emptied at junctions where a longer stop was already planned. Carriers of infectious diseases of any kind were not to be evacuated.

How many people were normally allowed into such a wagon?

What was prescribed was what was written on the doors of the covered R-wagons, about 48 men. But if 50 or 60 got in, that did not matter, because the figure of 48 men was calculated with full baggage. That 48-man rule was written on the basis of a very old law, from a time when each soldier had very extensive baggage, a knapsack… things that took up a great deal of room. Whereas during the last world war, for example, a soldier's marching kit was considerably smaller. The wagons should actually have accommodated more soldiers from the Second World War than 48, and generally did.

The length of the transport also had to be considered. B., the climate. C., the time of year. D., whether there were only men or women with small children. All that had to be taken into account, and it was taken into account by us in Reich territory. It was not taken into account by the Hungarian gendarmerie, and that caused a great deal of friction between German and Hungarian offices and led to complaints from the receiving offices.

Were the wagons sealed once they had been loaded?

That was not really done, because… No, it was not done at all. Perhaps one cautious escort officer or another had the wagons sealed, but I know nothing about it. It was not part of the regulations, because a guard of about 30 men with one officer was sufficient, and above all because the order had been given to replenish drinking-water supplies and empty excrement containers at the longer stops. The Jewish transport orderlies, who had to be identified by an armband, were allowed to step outside the wagon to report any incidents or complaints to the transport leader.

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

I cannot say what was handed out in detail. It was put in wagon by wagon; at any rate, cooking was not possible. Bread, for example, and probably sausage or cheese or margarine, because the transports were not underway for weeks. At the very most, they were underway for three days. You must not forget that all these transports were arranged on the basis of a timetable conference in the Reich Transport Ministry, and that the trains had to keep to a normal timetable. They could not just travel however anyone pleased.

After Brandt flew out on May 15—and he had tried beforehand to obtain from you a temporary suspension of all deportation measures? In vain?

Naturally, because I had the RF's (Reichsführer-SS) order to press ahead with the deportations. But the deportees were assigned to labor and were no longer sent to physical extermination, because the RF had given the appropriate orders to the responsible main-office chief.

After he left, about twelve days later, on May 27, 1944, the deportations were carried out more intensively. It seems the German deportation detachment was under Wi?

As a general statement, that is incorrect; it depends on which counties these deportations took place in. But it is quite possible that, if the Hungarian gendarmerie intensified roundups in some county, in a way, under instructions from the Hungarian Interior Ministry, then, because Wi was, so to speak, my best horse in the stable, I sent Wi there as well to support the local man I had there, and naturally placed the local man under Wi. Wi was always the senior in rank, in any case.

In the last week of May and then at the beginning of June, you sent out one or two trains a day? A train consisted of 45 wagons? And carried about 3,000 people on average. So 80 men to a wagon, I told you. Twenty-one square meters—four people per square meter?

In June, we certainly never put 80 people into a wagon. Loading did not fall under the authority of German offices in Hungary. The Hungarian gendarmerie under Olt. (Oberleutnant) Ferenczy was solely responsible. We had absolutely no right to object. Can you imagine a Hungarian gendarmerie lieutenant colonel, with a regular government above him, taking orders from a German captain?

After these one or two trains were sent out each day, and that pace was not fast enough for E., and he demanded six trains a day, you agreed on four trains?

That is possible.

Do you remember ever seeing this Mrs. Brandt?

I do not remember seeing Mrs. Brandt, but I certainly will not deny it. Every Tom, Dick and Harry approached me, and with the best will in the world I cannot remember any more. I would not remember Mrs. Kastner either if she had not come to me so often with her husband, and if I had not had that particular incident of having to have her searched for… The word “brusque” may fit the author's sentence very nicely. I never treated Kastner brusquely. The negotiations with the Jewish political functionary—we can all testify to that—took place in a conciliatory manner.

Kastner himself writes about this… We will return to it later; he denies it…

If I negotiate brusquely, I do not, first, ask the visitor to take a seat before an authority, and the visitor is not allowed to smoke. Surely that makes it clear enough that the negotiations were never conducted in a brusque tone, but that we had negotiating partners before us… If I am summoned today before a Bohemian, Mexican central authority, and so on, I will not allow myself to smoke.

I will even regard it as a special act of courtesy if the Mexican, etc., official with whom I have to deal invites me to sit down and does not leave me standing in front of his desk.

That has completely slipped my mind.

Now, did the German envoy in Budapest intervene to secure this release at your instigation or at your request?

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

That may be right, because when K. … to me …—as I told you before, I moved heaven and earth to get the wife back. That is right.

Yes, but this also concerns Kastner himself. These Jews had been caught out by the Hungarian Gestapo over forged documents and so on and so forth.

That was the agreed line. In truth, the Hungarian colleagues’ reason was to find out what the Jews were paying the German offices—in other words, to get to the bottom of the economic transaction. That was the reason. LE [László Endre] himself told me that.

No…

What I have to say to that is: it is a downright pack of lies. 1. It was not 800 Jews, but 700 Jews. 2. I placed these 700 Jews under the guard of members of the Florian Geier Division, which was subordinate to Becher, so that they would be protected against any attempt to seize them. And these 700 Jews, whom K. had registered on lists, did not go through Germany. No transport ever went that way at all. I would not have been allowed to do that, because the German Gauleiter themselves would have raised an uproar…

They emigrated to Palestine through Romania. 2. I never spoke to a Hungarian minister named Ja…. I never spoke to any Hungarian minister at all. The highest authorities I spoke to were the two state secretaries—only once, briefly, at a luncheon, did I speak to the Hungarian prime minister Steu…. K. never told me I had failed to keep my word. There was no reason for that at all, because the Jewish side had never, in any form whatsoever, made any de… declaration that the deal—the agreed deal—was complete and that I could now send the promised 100,000 Jews on their way.

That is not the point. The point is that you had promised him you would gather these 700 or 800 Jews from the ghettos for him…

Where he got these 700 was completely immaterial to me. He described them as 700 young people… And where Kastner got these 700 young people was immaterial to me. He could take them from anywhere he wanted in Hungarian territory. He could also have taken them from German territory. He could have taken them from wherever he wanted.

The point is that you had promised to give him these people, wherever they came from, but you left only the Clausenburg ghetto untouched. Then you rescinded this order for the 700. Kastner then appeared before you and is said to have had a very stormy argument with you in the presence of Krumey, Will, Hunsche and Novak—according to Kastner’s account.

Concerning these questions dealt with in the book, the story of J. B., I have the following to say. 1. Fundamentally, it is a mixture of truth and fiction. 2. In detail: I had the … of the RF (Reichsführer-SS) in the course of all the negotiations with the Jews. Their objectives were: a) clearing Hungarian territory of Jews; b) any material interests of the RF (Reichsführer-SS) connected with that, with regard to motorizing the 8th and 22nd SS Cavalry Divisions.

I would not have needed to haggle over this at all. Haggling would have been too much trouble for me. I always favored short negotiations. Depending on their scale, negotiations with the Jewish functionaries took five minutes or half an hour, perhaps a little longer on occasion, but never two hours. When I consider the matter today, but cannot give an exact account of the course of a discussion, I am surprised that the other side can…

They wrote it down straightaway…

What I have to say is that whenever Kastner approached me about a contingent of Jews to be taken abroad—and he did that frequently—I approved it off the cuff, so to speak, and he was to settle the details with Krumey. I said a mixture of truth and fiction. That is true insofar as one sentence is still familiar to me today, namely: “Then I would have to guard the camp…” I had few personnel, and these 700 Jews were indeed guarded by a few men from the Florian Geier Division, who were subordinate to Becher. He assigned them to guard duty. That is correct.

It seems to me that the author intends to conjure up an element of suspense here, and to bring the cunning of the Jewish negotiators to the surface like a patch of grease on water… In truth, all these negotiations were much more matter-of-fact and much shorter. Nor would Dr. Kastner ever have made the remarks you have just mentioned to me. Not out of fear, but because his personal decency would have forbidden it. K. was what people call a well-brought-up man.

But if that is still not enough explanation from me, I must set the author straight on this point. Everything said here is, so to speak, conceivable, but one thing is inconceivable: that one of my Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer), in a conference with opponents, should have said to me: “But look, Adolf…” 1. The expression “But look” comes from a J. B. brought up in …. It also belongs to my way of speaking, but never to the way of speaking of someone brought up in northern Germany. 2. None of my subordinates would ever have dared, even if we were on familiar terms, to call me by my first name during a negotiation.

But he does not say “But look…” He says:

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

[Klausenburg:]

I never maintained a concentration camp in Klausenburg.

This is not about a concentration camp. It is about a ghetto…

I do not know about that. Those are all matters handled under the lead responsibility of the Hungarian gendarmerie, which registered and concentrated the Jews of their country and loaded them into the wagons…

This is not about the Hungarians either. It is about the 700 people you promised would be taken out of Klausenburg. Out of the ghetto.

Where he took them from did not interest me. He could have taken them out of a concentration camp too. It was all the same—wherever he wanted. Among those 700 he could have had God knows what sort of people, perhaps people who had killed German Wehrmacht personnel in Poland. I never checked them. Where they came from was an entirely secondary matter. He could have taken them from anywhere. Is that clear?

In Jewish circles K. was later greatly reproached for devoting too much energy to rescuing these 17,000, the so-called Bergebbelsen transport. Can you confirm, so to speak, that K. really kept getting on your nerves over this matter?

Yes, that is right…

Did you already know then that all of K.’s relatives and friends had found refuge in this transport?

I did not know that. He could put anyone he wanted into this transport. He decided that himself.

But why was your office indifferent to whether any influential Jews, Jews dangerous to the Reich, or other Jews were getting out?

To what extent these agile, dangerous Jews could really have become dangerous to us in the relatively short time before their full striking power developed, and to what extent the 10,000 trucks we hoped for would actually enter the country—that was for the RF (Reichsführer-SS) to weigh. The first would have taken a long time. We would certainly have had the second: they would have been rolling. Everything else had to be subordinated to that.

I mean, with this mass of Jews available, it would have been a small matter for the German officials themselves to select them for their harmlessness, so as to reach the number of Jews approved for release while still taking precautions…

The really influential or dangerous Jew had enough connections and contacts, and in the general chaos in Hungary he crossed the border away from the checkpoints anyway. On the Hungarian side there was a legion of Magyars who took pleasure in getting one over on the Germans by letting their opponents escape across the unguarded border. There was also a legion of Magyars who had no idea and opened up these opportunities for money and a few kind words. Throughout all the war years the country was too open in every direction, giving an agile Jew the opportunity to make off across the unguarded border.

Was I then supposed to check precisely those 700 people whom K. named to me? In reality there were certainly over 1,000 who rushed off to Palestine. Was I supposed to check them as well and thereby bring trouble on myself with the Hungarian gendarmerie? These were things that happened, so to speak, at night. It was, so to speak, a gentlemen’s agreement between K. and me.

Do you know what became of this K. transport?

I think K. took his people to Palestine, through Romania.

They are said to have come to Switzerland in April 1945, that is,? months later—to Switzerland …

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

You say one transport? All—1,800 arrived in Switzerland, so they only got to Switzerland, and only arrived there in April…

You lost sight of them?

Yes. What did a transport of 700 or 7,000 Jews matter to me by comparison? I had orders to comb Hungary from east to west, and I did not have to make any great effort. On the contrary, Dr. LE kept pressing me to take more from him every day than Pohl took from me. Once I had the fellows, they were my burden between the departure signal at the loading station and the arrival signal at the destination station. That was what I was responsible for. What happened before and what happened afterward was beyond any influence of mine. I had no official jurisdiction there. My duty was to take the Jews from the Hungarians and deliver them. When L. E. demanded more from me, speed was what mattered to him; what mattered to me was the number of wagons and transport trains I received from the Reich Transport Ministry.

Tell me, Brandt states that about a quarter of the Jews survived the war?

A quarter is surely too little, when we see today how many supposedly gassed Jews are still walking around the world. It is flung in one’s face like sarcasm: “That one was gassed too? That one was supposed to have been gassed too…” Today you see nothing but gassed Jews walking around, enjoying better health than people like us…

So when Brandt says that a quarter of the Jews survived, that means 125,000 were sent to extermination and the rest are still alive today. Let me reckon with 500,000 Jews of Hungarian citizenship who were evacuated. A quarter of them is 125 thousand. Then perhaps, if we put the figure very, very high, perhaps 125,000 were sent to physical extermination and the remaining 375,000 are still alive today. And that is the truth.

But how could they have been sent to physical extermination if the RF’s (Reichsführer-SS’s) order had already come in April?

Exactly. The RF (Reichsführer-SS) did not revoke that order at any time up to the end of the war, no, no. Now I tell you, I will not commit myself to any number. I only want to give a comparison, you see. It is quite possible that Brandt means the reverse. Only very few Jews of Hungarian citizenship were sent to physical extermination. No one knows how many; one would have to ask the concentration-camp personnel.

But the RF’s (Reichsführer-SS’s) order to halt physical extermination dates from April 1944?

From the time when the 10,000 trucks were running…

So this order to halt it was never revoked up to the end of the war?

No.

You arrived in Budapest in March? So there would only have been one month for physical extermination?

If you calculate the lead time every authority needs, the negotiations with the Hungarian authorities, you would have had to be a bureaucratic magician to conclude such difficult negotiations within fourteen days—something experience has not yet borne out. So I think, when you say that at most this quarter could have been sent to physical extermination, then they must have been sent to physical extermination…

…under Hungarian direction? Because it cannot have happened on the German side: the Reichsführer’s order to halt it was already there.

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

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

Yes, that is right.

On April 25 you had your last discussion with him. That means you had received the RF’s (Reichsführer-SS’s) instruction about the 10,000 trucks before that. It was probably ready for a decision around April 20. In other words, weeks had also passed before the whole matter had reached that point.

So if you had already begun deporting in April—that is, if the operation could already be running in April—then it is accordingly impossible that these people were sent to physical extermination.

Arithmetically impossible, yes…

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

I am telling you, the Hungarian Jews—do not fixate on a quarter or three-quarters, which I just assumed. I only wanted to prove to you that it is unthinkable that Jews of Hungarian citizenship are actually alive.

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

No, no.

The Hungarians had not handed any Jews over to the Germans either?

No, no.

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

That is beyond my knowledge.

There are descriptions from the Hungarian side of some pogroms in 1941, 1942 and 1943, saying that a thousand Jews died at one point, two thousand at another? But you have only heard about that too?

Why should the Jew Brandt, as the author of his book, not lie less than Jewish mentality calls for—the mentality that forever and always, for more than 2,000 years, plays the eternally persecuted? Forever and always innocent, the injured party, and always someone else to blame. In pushing the blame onto a third person, the Jew has gone so far for 2,000 years that it is not only what that third person had to do for reasons of self-preservation: he also foists on him what he never intended and never actually did.

Why should Brandt be any different? He is the son of a half-rabbi. The more he plays on pity, the more he joins the chorus of all the Jews who demanded, and obtained confirmation of, some 13 or 19 billion marks from Germany, which has become rich again. The tendency, the wish, the aim of the Jews, represented by Goldmann, is to keep cranking and pushing the figure higher. The economic fiasco Israel experiences continually, the adventures it has embarked on, cost an incredible amount of money.

According to their own Jewish reports, they scrape together 50 million dollars a year from the world. This state receives 250 or 270 million dollars a year from Germany—five times what all the efforts of international Jewry raise in a calendar year. And that is still not enough, because the country cannot survive. So this man too has undoubtedly been influenced to play on people’s tears, to prise open the West German Deutschmark purse still further and obtain more billions of Deutschmarks, because they can calculate the end of their days down there purely mathematically.

It still annoys me today, time and again, whenever I have to read such utterly banal lies, and when third parties tell me these things and believe the lies into the bargain…

I can only say again that what the author says here about a quarter turns things upside down. As I have already said, do not hold me to my word about the quarter… rather a quarter than the reverse. It is, so to speak, thanks to the whole history of the negotiations, thanks to their being drawn out, and to the genuinely slight brutality of an RF (Reichsführer-SS), that the Jews of Hungarian citizenship are all still alive. Ask any Magyar; he will confirm it. Ask the Magyars who came after the last uprising in Hungary.

You must not ask the first refugees, because those were the Jews. The ones who came last were the genuine ones, and Jews mingled among them too. Who makes up the Hungarian STPO today? Jews. What was the uprising in Hungary? An uprising against their own Magyar Jews, who occupy positions of power in enormous numbers, virtually all of them. Consider the last Hungarian uprising and compare it proportionally with our deportations of Jews… Call as witnesses to this statistic the Magyars who fought—but fought as Magyar patriots.

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

No, he had his … (Schlu…), where he housed these fellows… I said earlier that I also provided guards so that they could escape being seized by the Magyar side, since we were, after all, dealing with a sovereign Hungarian government.

When Brandt stayed away longer than expected, you told K.:

?

1. I first heard the word “mills” from K.—that I should stop the death mills in Auschwitz; no, the extermination machines… As for mills, the word itself is not one that comes naturally to my tongue (on the tongue). What kind of fool do they take me for, that I would negotiate for weeks with a man and send him off, believing that he would return from distant Constantinople within three days? That is an insult to my intelligence. Besides, it was not up to me to start or stop any extermination machinery. That was exclusively a power held by the RF (Reichsführer-SS).

(peacefully)… Do you remember such a proposal from Kastner: first, 100,000 Jews…?

No, that is out of the question.

But that you then sent six trains with about 30,000 Jews to Strashof, who were not supposed to be capable of procreation.

In other words, I am supposed to have taken nothing but old bags (better said, old men) to Strashof? No, not like that. They were infertile, worthless Jews. I combed Hungary from east to west and did not give a damn where they went, because they were put on ice, yes indeed.

What Brandt either does not want to remember or cannot remember is what a man who handled intelligence matters at the office of the Commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service) may have told him, what the Hungarian Gestapo may have told him so that it could get its foreign currency. Why has he not brought up those negotiations? Because those people may have possessed nothing, or perhaps are not a draw. I am supposed to have said all that—I, the representative of the German Gestapo… He chops everything up and mixes it all together in one sauerkraut pot.

There was only talk of 100,000. I said: “As soon as the telegram arrives, the matter is in order.” Then there was no more talk about 100,000. Whatever scraps were left over after that, involving a few million in foreign currency of various kinds, I do not know. Surely the people who squeezed the foreign currency out of him will themselves have talked big, and will have threatened to tell the wicked Eichmann about it, and so on and so forth.

I already told you that Becher, in my presence, when he had difficulties with Kastner—some economic dossier received from Becher, to bring it to a successful conclusion—behaved like a jumping jack and shouted in a manner utterly unbecoming a Stf. (Standartenführer): “If you cannot fulfil this, then I will ask SS Ostf. (Obersturmbannführer) E. to have another 10,000 Jews gassed.” After Kastner had gone, I first took Becher aside, reprimanded him, and told him that he was not a member of the Gestapo and had no business interfering there; and, second, I would make a report about it. Perhaps that is why Müller wanted him…

So you see, even if Becher here, who was a cool businessman, did not … so that later I began to have misgivings and asked myself: Was he trying to use this whole affair to secure an alibi for himself with Kastner? Or was this performance meant to make him feel safe with me, after arranging the whole scene with Kastner beforehand? The latter seemed likely to me. I told Müller that too.

But that is outrageous, that an SS Stf. (Standartenführer) with…

Yes, outrageous—and that bow-wow was running around free in Germany after 1945 too, and could bark that he had helped so-and-so many Jews.

Kastner personally got him out of the clutches of the SS captors at the time. Do you still remember those 18,000 who came to Strashof?

No. Strashof is familiar to me. Quite a few probably ended up there.

There is a fairly widespread account that says you found this deal—Jews for trucks—repugnant, that you were somehow disgusted by it, and that you acted only because you had received an order to do so. You took the corresponding measures, but at bottom the whole business repelled you, and at bottom you wanted to carry out this entire policy toward the Jews with iron consistency. In that respect you had the direct support—first, of your superiors. But you both had to submit to the RF’s (Reichsführer-SS’s) order, and you did so, but your heart was never in it…

So, in other words, we would rather have killed them? What I have to say is this: at heart I was on no opponent’s side at all. If I had followed my heart, I would have preferred to see every single enemy of the Reich dead rather than alive, because only a dead enemy of the Reich is good.

In particular, I have this to say: when I received an order, damn it, I always carried it out. I am still proud of that today, because I fulfilled my oath. I have nothing more to say about it.

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

No… No, why should I have found it repugnant? Everyone at that time had a best friend, and for me that friend was … (Ze…), from the 22nd SS Cavalry Division. I knew how that man labored and did his best to defend his few square kilometers. I told you how I got him the grenades, how I celebrated his birthday with him; I told you how we got to know each other as junior leaders… Wherever I could help him, where he and his division, which had been treated so poorly, probably because of a lack of material resources—how I helped him…

Do you think that, if I had an order like that from the RF (Reichsführer-SS), “Motorize the 22nd and the 8th; 10,000 trucks in exchange…”—then let the million Jews go to the back of beyond! The main thing is that I can give my friend 5,000 trucks for his division. I never consulted my heart, and I did not have to consult it. I had to consult Germany, not my heart—which, in itself, is the same thing…

Can you tell me what Müller’s attitude to this deal was?

Just as cold as mine. If we can exchange a number x of enemies of the Reich for military advantages, any deal is worth carrying out. And I am convinced that, if necessary, we would have given them two million for those 10,000 trucks. I would then have bargained for whatever could be obtained. That is another proof that the Jews had not been burned up, that they were there. You have no idea what both sides could have drawn from this source, Jew or non-Jew…

In the course of your friendship, did Kaltenbrunner ever open his heart about this deal?

Yes. It is right—what benefits the people is right. That was how we felt… Kaltenbrunner too received orders…

…and carried out his orders in just the same way, only from a higher level. Müller received orders and carried them out from an intermediate-high level, and I carried them out from my subordinate level—purely in official terms, viewed within the group structure. If we had asked ourselves every time, “Is this right, is this wrong?”, we might just as well have pulled nightcaps over our heads and gone to sleep (good night).

Unfortunately, that is what people did elsewhere, and that is also why we lost the war.

When Brandt was in Constantinople and was supposed to return, but was arrested in …, the Davada planned to send … Bader to Budapest. You are said to have obtained a visa for him, which the German embassy in Constantinople handed to Bader. But when he was due to travel, he made excuses and, at any rate, did not go. Brandt now states that even Mosch… and Ben… forbade Bader, as a Palestinian citizen, to make the journey. They wanted the negotiations moved from Budapest to a neutral place… It took time and was delayed, and they were eventually sent to Budapest by the diplomatic post of a neutral country. Brandt states that this tragic delay, for which the Jewish agencies alone were responsible, cost several hundred thousand people their lives…

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

Do you remember this account, so that you could support us in our interests—truthfully, of course? Do you remember taking any steps to obtain a visa for an emissary who was to return to Budapest in Brandt’s place? Do you remember anything about this Bader?

It is possible that I spoke to Kastner about it. We were talking about it continually. I would have—with anyone who came, anyone who came in connection with the matter would have been given free entry and safe conduct…

Do you remember anything about this story, this agreement? Had Becher already become so actively involved then? Was he, so to speak, taking the conduct of the matter out of your hands?

He wanted to, but he could not. In his incompetence he sometimes overstepped the limits of his authority.

Do you remember that, in the subsequent negotiations, it was envisaged that Becher, accompanied by Kastner, would represent the SS in Lisbon?

I no longer remember that.

That the deportations were halted immediately after this agreement?

July 7, 1944? No, they continued until the Hungarian provinces were free of Jews.

Do you remember, around this time, when it was decided that Becher would travel to Portugal and meet the Jewish delegates there, and that Becher would be accompanied by Kastner—do you remember whether you agreed to it or rejected it?

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

Would it not be possible that Becher received permission directly from the RF (Reichsführer-SS)…?

Yes, but then I would at least have heard something about it. He was never a civil servant, and as a member of the Waffen-SS would have …

But he did travel to Switzerland on the RF’s (Reichsführer-SS’s) orders to negotiate with the Jews…

But only much later, when the RF (Reichsführer-SS) was negotiating with Bernadotte. Becher was involved on the margins of the Bernadotte negotiations.

Around this time, a short while afterward, it became known that Brandt had been arrested by the Allies. Becher is then said to have become afraid to enter Allied territory?

I think this: all these detailed matters were handled by Ostf. (Obersturmbannführer) Grom on my instructions. He knows far more about them, because he only needed to keep his mind free for those matters. I was interested only in the fundamentals. The small incidental details did not interest me at all, in Hungary either. Perhaps I signed off on a few things and thereby took note of them. That is how I know some things. But one has a permanent deputy for everything subordinate.

My task in Hungary was not that we should take the Jews away from the Hungarians, but that the Magyars should ask us to take the Jews off their hands. My task was to see that registering them, rounding them up and so forth, loading them—that the Hungarian gendarmerie did that, not us. In that respect my mission was a Jesuitical one. Reaching that point naturally required a considerable number of conferences. The details beneath that level were my permanent deputy’s job. That is why you ask me about one matter or another that still seems unimportant to me today, and I cannot give you an exhaustive answer.

Do you remember whether Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Clages had an adjutant named Kraus?

Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Clages was a desk officer with the Commander of the Security Police and Security Service in Hungary. Desk officers with such commanders had no adjutants, anywhere.

Do you remember the Hungarian lieutenant colonel Garsoli?

No.

Is it true that Clages was shot by Hungarian officers? Around August–September 1944?

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

Do you know nothing about Israeli paratroopers either? Clages negotiated with them—where a parachutist passed himself off as a negotiator in the Brandt affair?

You mean the dropping of enemy agents? Yes, that happened in Hungary too. Clages was responsible for that. It was his department…

But you know nothing about it?

No.

Nonsense…

[Handwritten addition: …]

What do you have to say now?

I have two questions to ask. When did Horthy leave the country?

In October.

When was the first V-1 fired?

On June 7.

And when does Brandt say that Hungarian resistance eased because of my …?

At the beginning of July.

When the first V-1 was fired at London, I came to Dr. L. E. in the morning. He showed me a Hungarian morning newspaper saying that the retaliation had begun, and reveled in the words: “Victory is ours…”

[Handwritten addition: …]

Not only was there no sign that the senior Hungarian government officials in question, the men who mattered, were wavering; quite the opposite was true. E. and B. now believed in final victory with greater vehemence. I took care not to tell E. even an iota of what I knew from my pessimistic outlook. In any event, work went on with increased zeal, and I would have had to be superhuman to carry out, technically, what the state secretary in the Hungarian Interior Ministry wanted and demanded of me.

I know that I once wanted to move against the Jewish ghetto in Budapest. That is clear. On the other hand, after the Hungarian gendarmerie had combed through eastern Hungary, I naturally moved westward as the inevitable next step and wanted the western Hungarian counties cleansed too, in accordance with my orders. I do not believe that the Hungarian minister Steu… feared me more than his Crown Council. As I have already said, he once invited me to lunch with Winkelmann and Veesenmayer. The invitation was not sent to me directly; General Winkelmann took me along, so to speak. I received no official state invitation. I spoke with the Hungarian prime minister both before and after lunch, and I remember very clearly that he laid me, for my efforts—the guilt, figuratively speaking—at Hungary’s feet…

That lunch must have been around this time. In Hungary I had done nothing for my personal protection except during my night’s rest. For that, Winkelmann had about eight uniformed police officers posted, who sealed off the house where I was privately quartered. So, if elements of the Hungarian gendarmerie or of the Hungarian army had already taken an opposing position at that time, I ask myself: given the famous Hungarian bravery of centuries, why did they not simply bump me off?

At that time the Reich Police Office in Berlin did not have very many men who could be spared. The author mentions that the Hungarian commander of the Hungarian gendarmerie, Ferenczy, had also begun to waver…

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

I have only a passing point to make about that, because it shows the author’s inaccuracy. Ferenczy was not the commander of the Hungarian gendarmerie. Ferenczy was a desk officer in the office of the commander in chief of the Hungarian gendarmerie.

I already said at the beginning of this tape that I wanted to move against the Budapest ghetto, and we discussed this with Ferenczy and E. I could never have done anything that B. and E. had not ordered. Also to mention those 12,000 houses marked with the yellow star… That too would certainly have been possible in the course of the technical… although I cannot remember it, because these are details again.

But this conference takes place after the Regent has already issued a ban on deportation?

That is impossible. B. and E. were state secretaries, officials as such, and could never have undertaken anything against their government, nor would they have done so. What good would all my wanting have done, even against their government’s intentions, if I had not received the contingents from the gendarmerie for it? That is, not I, but they…

But what do you say about the transport, the deportation on July 14, which is said to have taken place with B.’s agreement, with 15,000 Jews from internment camp …, after which Horthy ordered these people to be brought back? Surely that is something you must still remember?

Were they brought back?

Yes, yes.

To my knowledge, Horthy never intervened. I never undertook anything contrary to the Hungarian government either, because then I would have had a second impediment weighing me down: Veesenmayer. Before I entered into new matters with E., I always obtained no-objection clearance from the Higher SS and Police Leader and probably also from his superior, the Reich Plenipotentiary, Dr. Veesenmayer.

Only after I received that clearance—not in writing; an oral assurance was enough—and knew that this or that action would cause the Reich no harm in foreign policy, did I agree to Dr. L. E.’s wishes. Then, after consultation with B., the Hungarian gendarmerie set the matter in motion, but only after I had coordinated things, that is, obtained the clearance for myself. I would never have received it from Winkelmann or Veesenmayer if Horthy had opposed it forcefully. Unthinkable: the Foreign Office would have hit the RF (Reichsführer-SS) over the head…

It does not say “forcefully” here. It says that the Regent issued the order but then wavered greatly in carrying it out, because his prime minister too was not really willing to tackle it…

Then it was not a ban on deportation…

Wait a moment. It is quite possible that the Regent wanted it, that the prime minister wanted it too, and that they had reached a decision, but said to themselves: “After all, the Wehrmacht is here. We must proceed cautiously. Above all, we must watch out for this Eichmann, because he can cause us trouble.” Just as Veesenmayer reasoned from the Foreign Office’s point of view, the Hungarians could reason from the actual balance of forces and say: “If we enforce an absolute ban with harsh measures, the Reich, which still has far greater resources than we do, can simply crush us.”

It does me extraordinary honor that a Hungarian prime minister is said to have been afraid of me. It does me extraordinary honor that Horthy may have been cautious in his wording, perhaps because of the wicked Eichmann. Nevertheless, I must say that my office went no further than the official position of a desk officer. I was never in a position to dictate to a Müller or an RF (Reichsführer-SS). I could not even change the mind of my very kind-hearted friend Kaltenbrunner, with whom I had a personal friendship. I could not do that. That is Jewish blather. I can say no more about it.

It is not about what you could or could not do. The point is that it is perfectly logical that Horthy and the prime minister—not you, but your office… that they said to themselves: “That is the Reich leadership of the SS. That is the chief of the Replacement Army… Children, watch out.”

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

The Higher SS and Police Leader, and he in turn had to answer to the Reich Special Plenipotentiary, to Veesenmayer. As confirmation, I will now tell you the following.

The Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service, to whom I was superior in the organizational hierarchy as a desk officer of the Gestapo Office, and to whom I could issue instructions in my own field if my department chief had signed off on them, called me once. I had a personal, cordial relationship with Dr. Geschke. He called and said: “Come over, put on your steel helmet. I have an official order to give you.” He said that partly as someone bound by his office, and partly—it drew him, half he sank…—said it to a superior of his office.

For in Hungary I worked in two capacities at once: as a desk officer in the Reich Security Main Office [Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office], who gave himself his own detailed orders, and as a desk officer of the Security Police and the Security Service in Hungary, as leader of the Sonderkommando (special detachment) Eichmann, as you called it. In a lesser form, that is the same as Heydrich at a higher level, as Deputy Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia. In Security Police matters, he gave himself his own orders for Bohemia and Moravia.

Geschke ordered me to come to him. I, who came from a troop unit and applied that subordination to myself in every respect as long as I was in Hungary, actually strapped on my steel helmet, because I had an official order to receive. Geschke slapped me on the shoulder and said: “Man, that is not how I meant it…” I said: “Duty is duty and schnapps is schnapps.”

An order from the RF (Reichsführer-SS): “You are to go immediately to the area of …, and there keep 10,000 ethnic Germans and so on out of the Russians’ reach. Understood?”

I have told you this so that you can understand my official position as Sonderkommando (special detachment) Eichmann. No Hungarian office had even the faintest idea of my personal connection with the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service. My special detachment was large, so it required a large building of its own. The ordinary Security Police and Security Service desk officers, with five, six or eight flunkies, could of course be housed in a few small halls or rooms within the building of the BDS [Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Commander of the Security Police and SD] (Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service), where he was based.

From that I conclude that the author describes it this way out of ignorance or malice, or because at that time the name Eichmann was just what he needed to catch the eye, in … A ban on mentioning any other name… A B. or an E. would not have taken orders from me. A Ferenczy, an excellent Hungarian officer from head to toe, would not have let me order him about—never. Ferenczy treated me as a comrade of equal rank, but nothing more.

But the point is whether, instead of E.—Horthy…

[overlapping talk]

No, no. My deportations kept rolling to my satisfaction. With that, I had fulfilled the RF (Reichsführer-SS) order. Nothing else interested me.

Do you know that in those days, in the first week of July, some of the gendarmerie barracks were occupied by troops transferred from the interior to Budapest—Hungarian troops—and that the Hungarian gendarmerie moved out?

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

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

And it may be that, alongside the many stumbling blocks facing the Hungarian government, this too played a part in hastening Horthy's end. E. and B. had such a weighty say in the Hungarian Interior Ministry that I cannot in good conscience tell you now, any more than I could then, what the Hungarian interior minister's name may have been. I cannot tell you what he looked like, let alone whether I ever saw him at all. He had been so inactive; he must have been, too, if he had agreed to such rapid action by B., and especially by such a bold go-getter as Dr. L. E..

You know nothing about that deportation affair, in which you brought them back?

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

It seems that you had carried out the sweep of eastern Hungary on 1 July, and referred to a corresponding lack of work?

Quite—quite possible.

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

Correct.

Then you tried to enter the capital, then you rounded up the suburbs … and these Jews were taken to the brickworks at …?

Yes, they were concentrated.

Wouldn't one have to conclude from this that the RF (Reichsführer-SS) order to stop physical extermination had somehow been revoked again?

No. What one would conclude from this is that my memory has not entirely deserted me, and that I may have been right when I told you that the deal involving 10,000 trucks came later than April. If that isn't so, then the other thing you told me is a lie. One of the two is a lie.

It is beyond doubt that Brandt arrived in Const. (Constantinople) on 15 May 1944.

The agreement says, among other things:

One moment.

The Gestapo has nothing to do with this agreement. I tell you that it is an agreement Becher made with the Jews, not us, not me. I know about it, not in detail but in broad outline. We didn't do it; Becher did, doubtless with the RF (Reichsführer-SS)'s approval, but only in his capacity as Reichsführer-SS. I didn't negotiate this agreement or draw it up.

No, that isn't claimed either. The agreement wasn't signed by the Germans. It was only an agreement the Jews proposed and on which the Jews were to state their position. Becher then immediately proposed going to Berlin and securing from Himmler a temporary halt to the gassing.

That's nonsense.

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

Yes, that may be correct. It was high summer. I was in …hasa …, which E. had already left. I had a liter of milk given to me there and paid the manager for it too. E. laughed at me afterward: the whole estate would have been at my disposal, so why had I paid for a liter of milk while advancing? I came to a second farm under Becher's control, formerly probably a stud farm, because he had an Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) there as a horse expert. He had a servant wearing white cotton gloves serve him lunch. I had my men quartered there too, and when I objected to being served lunch during the war by a servant wearing white gloves, he took off his gloves and slammed the food down in front of me with his bare fists. (Then I'd rather have gloves after all.) It was summer, and then I moved on toward the Romanian border.

I moved on into the Neuarat area and came back in early autumn…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Military-hospital story.]

I then returned to Hungary. It may be that the transports no longer took place in July, because afterward there was nothing more.

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

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

They all went to Auschwitz.

They went to Auschwitz, but some also went to Burgenland and some to Strashofer. Only a very small initial portion was sent to physical extermination, insofar as they were unfit for work; all the rest were held back for delivery in exchange for the trucks. Compared with the Jews from the General Government—although I wasn't responsible for that—the Jews from Hungary fared best of all the Jews from all the countries.

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

Yes, I was always at it, always trying to deport the capital, but the administrative difficulties have to be taken into account. It is difficult to get a train loaded at all, even with oxen or sacks of flour, because you have to assemble the necessary loading personnel, and they have to be willing to work. How much more difficult it is to load people, especially when you have to reckon with difficulties. Of course I was always trying to get at the Budapest ghetto, and L.E. was too, but the difficulties were too great. You mustn't forget that as time went on, when the opportunity was perhaps favorable, I couldn't get transport trains: either none were available, or they were more urgently needed elsewhere, or the line was not in order.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Compare the foot march.]

… shortly before Horthy's fall, do you still remember that?

No.

Well, summer 1944, moved to E.'s estate, then Neuarat, 10,000 ethnic Germans, back to Budapest and into my office again. I never vacated it. Krumey ran it during my absence. Never vacated.

So, Wi—Kastner, won—

All nonsense, poetic license.

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

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

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

No. But I enabled so many Jewish functionaries to travel abroad that I could no longer remember the individual cases.

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

You know absolutely nothing about a Slovak partisan uprising?

No, never.

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

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

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Name of the Hungarian commander, the one with the embrace scene, etc. … Fa…]

Fa…, yes, that was his name: Field Marshal Fa…

Does the name Stern mean anything to you?

Stern was probably in Hungary what Dr. R.L. was in Vienna. I had dealings with him a few times too. He was insignificant.

So throughout this period—July was the ethnic-German matter—so in August, September, and October, you lived there on your country estate?

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

Then you must have felt that you had been put out of business, so to speak…

I had largely evacuated Hungary, and now I received a positive assignment: the 10,000 Germans…

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

I already said that I went to Berlin every month. I went then too: I left the detachment at the estate and went to Berlin. I spent another eight to fourteen days in Berlin and came back down when the time came. The journey only took a day and a half…

… wanted to run away…

So you were somehow back again?

Yes, I came back. As far as I know, I couldn't do anything productive anymore.

But you did:

When was the foot march?

In December…

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

In September–October.

Couldn't it have been in November?

No … because that was the reason for the foot marches…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Destruction of the western railway line. October–November.]

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

You set the first foot march in motion on 9 November. On 17 November, an order is said to have been issued by Jüttner: those who were on the road were sent back. It is said that the end of this foot march was the first success of the Swiss negotiations between Becher and S. Mayer…

The foot march?

Yes, because they were against it too, and that then came together with Jüttner's business, and the RF (Reichsführer-SS) said: ‘Stop the foot march.’

No, no, no. The Jews went from Budapest toward Vienna, but they didn't get that far, because the Lower Austrian Gau leadership took them over. They had to build anti-tank trenches…

[recording switched off]

Then came Jüttner's protest and the protest from the Jewish negotiators in Switzerland who were negotiating with Becher. Then an order is said to have come to stop this foot march, or to bring various groups back. Is that correct?

That must be the same matter about which Winkelmann once told me that he couldn't do anything either. On that I have the following to say:

When the Budapest–Vienna line was no longer usable because the Allied bombers had smashed it up, someone came up with the idea: ‘All right, then the Jews will march.’ So we drew up the plan together and made exactly as many Jews march each day as we would otherwise have loaded onto trains. The Hungarian gendarmerie rounded up the Jews and escorted them on Hungarian territory, and at the border crossing the German gendarmerie took them over. Each such transport was accompanied by just one of my officers, assigned to the respective Hungarian gendarmerie officer. Under a kind of General Staff plan, the marches covered longer stretches in kilometers on one day, but these became progressively shorter as the days of marching went on.

Food depots and drinking-water depots were set up accordingly, and so they went along the Budapest–Vienna road. If you tell me that many Jews were said to have been left lying dead beside the road, I would have heard about that often enough at the time. I heard nothing of it. Of course, one Jew or another dropped out on such a march; that is quite understandable, because on what march does nobody drop out? Once they reached the Austrian border, they could not be taken any farther at all. The Lower Austrian Gauleiter received them, doubtless not on his own authority but on instructions from some defense commander, and there they had to dig anti-tank trenches…

But then you somehow stopped this foot march, and on 25 November vigorously set a new foot march going again.

In other words, the Himmler order that we placed in April was not issued until then. So Brandt has to present some concrete result from one of his negotiations to world public opinion and to Jewish world opinion. It is quite possible that he is therefore trying to show that Kastner, Brandt, or whoever it was, through their willing instrument Becher, had secured the Reichsführer's consent to stop physical extermination.

I was there. Becher wasn't alone with the RF (Reichsführer-SS).

On 25 November?

I no longer know the dates. I went with Becher to see the RF (Reichsführer-SS) two or three times. The Reichsführer said: ‘I am giving Pohl instructions to stop…’

When? That is the question—when?

The author is lying. Think about it: that was the very last imprint (Abdruck) we made at all, because in October the Russians were already shelling the neighboring house to pieces.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Questions about shells and a precise description of the impact, etc.]

By that time everything had already stopped. That is why the hit is still so vivid in my memory. From that moment it stopped. Apart from a few weeks, the Russians hammered the suburbs.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Another precise description.]

So at that time, with the first shells hitting Budapest, all evacuation stopped. The foot march of 8 November was the last remnant. At that time the RF (Reichsführer-SS) did not issue an order to stop …

…the extermination of the Jews, for if he had not yet given it by then, they would all have gone ‘through the moon’. But since many Jews of Hungarian citizenship who were supposed to have been gassed are still alive today, we have circumstantial evidence that the date I gave you roughly coincides with the author's departure. That was when the RF (Reichsführer-SS) gave Pohl the order to stop. In between come April, May, June … up to October: six months in between. During those six months there were evacuations, sometimes intensified, sometimes none at all for several weeks. The author himself writes that I disappeared for a while.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: The matter of the 10,000 ethnic Germans.]

So these Jews are all still alive, and Jewish cunning now consists in a simple shift of dates: putting the RF (Reichsführer-SS) order not at the first date but at the very last date there was. That brings us to this devastating number of evacuated Jews. So where were we supposed to get the one million Jews? We would of course have had one million Jews, but what mattered to Kast. (Kastner) was that it should be biologically valuable Jewish blood.

So what you definitely remember is that this Budapest–Vienna foot march took place in two phases: it was started and carried out, then there was no foot march for a while, and then it was resumed?

That is quite possible. I don't know. I can no longer establish or state those intervals today, but we have already discussed how it was done. I can't say how many days lay in between. But I know one thing: at one point there were around 10,000, or 12,000, or 14,000 on the trek.

Brandt says the following about the attitude or success of the Jewish organizations in Budapest:

Can you tell me in what sense—which would be very important to us—in what sense he can mean here that the Polish Jewish councils lost sight of the great goal for the sake of minor concessions? What can he mean by that?

I can only speculate, because I had no responsibility of any kind in the General Government. I had no transports carried out, and I took part in nothing of that kind. But I think I remember that, over time—it went on for years, certainly one or two years—the local offices made personal promises to the individual Jewish councillors. Since they and their families had been promised freedom, they naturally worked. They kept the village communities, which had been put into ghettos in the General Government, quiet and in line, so that the roundup agencies could round them up without difficulty and transport them away. They kept them calm. There were never any uprisings. That was the work of the Jewish councils of elders in the General Government.

Why does he want to draw a contrast between the work of the councils of elders in Poland and those in Hungary?

In principle it was exactly the same, but here too I can only speculate. In Hungary too—in the General Government, German agencies rounded people up and dragged them away, and Lithuanian agencies, Estonian agencies, carried out roundups and transports there. As far as Glo is concerned, he probably mainly—he had some companies of Latvians with whom he operated in the Lublin district. These fellows were naturally tough, and the RF (Reichsführer-SS) will have known that too, because these people had been through a terrible school. I once spoke with one of those SS men myself.

One bitterly cold winter, I was driving across the countryside with Glo, and we met some Latvians—or Lithuanians. ‘Well,’ I said. Glo then told me: ‘Yes, he has no relatives left either, no family left. All murdered.’ Then the man—he spoke German—said that he was alone and had sworn revenge. They had murdered everyone he had: his wife, his parents, his brothers. He was the only one left after the great slaughter by the Jews up there—Bolsheviks, that is. You can imagine that the German police units that used these companies had what you might call daredevil material there

and, given the whole way they operated, would probably not have allowed any resistance to arise at all. But be that as it may, apart from Warsaw there wasn't the slightest resistance. Now, in Hungary, the German authorities did not carry out the roundups at all. The Hungarian gendarmerie did. I don't think I am mistaken about L.E., who was no fool and had copied these things from the Reich very well. He was a very active man. You very rarely found him behind a desk. He was out and about all day, not only in Hungary but also in Germany and Austria. He copied the methods and adapted them to Hungarian law. I don't think I can be far wrong in saying that L.E. told me the Hungarian gendarmerie naturally made all sorts of promises to the councils of elders to make its own work easier. Whether the Hungarian gendarmerie kept those promises, I don't know. Glo did; I know that.

In what way?

He gathered the elders together in so-called labor camps. He once showed me a so-called labor camp. This was connected with the fact that he had been given an assignment by the RF (Reichsführer-SS), and was very proud of it: to design so-called police settlements and build a model of such a settlement in Lublin. Glo had a guesthouse there, a large, two-story building, long and spread out, and had technical staff working there…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Blah, blah, blah.]

He had whole labor camps, this Glo. The whole place was laid out rather like a monastery, closed off with barriers and guard posts. He had a whole series of such designs ready, hanging on the wall, for the RF (Reichsführer-SS) to decide on his visit which plan to approve. The SS stations in the East were to be built that way. That was one of Glo's assignments. It was a very large assignment, because this SS station was to be where the German population in the East, from all the surrounding areas, did its shopping. It housed a hospital; there was a doctor. Everything was in it.

This post was in constant contact with the outposts, which were small but maintained constant contact. A network was planned throughout the East so that the police would have secure quarters, could be moved rapidly throughout the country, and the population, whoever they were, could immediately find shelter there. Glo was given this work, and it kept him very busy. He had many workshops operating in Lublin and took Jews into them. At any rate, I saw a few thousand of them working there. Not just Jewish council members—all sorts. There weren't that many Jewish councils in the whole General Government, let alone in the Lublin district.

That was how he kept his promises. Now I don't know how far the Hungarian gendarmerie did the same. Perhaps it gave those Jewish councils free passage into the Budapest ghetto. It must have done something, because in Hungary too there was not the slightest difficulty with the roundups, just as there wasn't in the General Government. So when Brandt says that the Polish Jewish councils, for the sake of minor concessions… I have to say that in Hungary, in my opinion, it was done in exactly the same way. How else could the Hungarian gendarmerie have worked so effortlessly?

Of course the Hungarian gendarmerie worked somewhat more carelessly. I was once ordered to report to Pohl in Berlin—or rather, I wasn't ordered there: Pohl asked Müller to have me report, and Müller ordered me to report to Pohl because he had some practical questions to discuss. H. (Höss) had complained about the condition in which the Jews arrived at Auschwitz. If Höss had simply sent them into the gas chambers, what reason would H. have had to complain to his superior about the condition in which the transports arrived, with a few corpses lying in some of the wagons because they had been given too little water or too little food, because they…

That need not have interested him at all if they simply marched into the gas chamber. And why would Pohl have wanted me to come to him so that he could put these complaints to me in rather blunt terms and say that this had to stop immediately? I told him then that I wasn't responsible, because that was the business of the Hungarian authorities, the Hungarian government. I can certainly say: ‘We will not take over the transports.’ I told E. that too: ‘We will no longer accept the transports.’ And I told my advisers in the individual counties that the escort detachment could not set off until the transports were equipped as the WVHA [SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, SS Economic and Administrative Main Office] (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office) required of me.

Do you remember Höss telling you, or in this case Pohl, his superior, that he, H., entirely disagreed with the way this foot march was being conducted?

H. had nothing at all to do with that.

But he saw it?

That is quite possible. At the beginning one could, in fact—that … were taken over by the district leaders (Kreisleiter) for anti-tank-trench construction… That only became clear afterward. It is possible that he disagreed with it. I would have disagreed too, but it wasn't our task. The Hungarians could do what they wanted in their own country. If E. had had some reason, and had wanted, for example, to have his gendarmerie shoot 10,000 Jews who were on the march in the street, nobody could have stopped him. The Hungarian government was a sovereign government. We had to exercise great restraint and be very careful so that Hungarian national feeling did not turn hostile. They were anxiously concerned that the so-called ally should not go too far. How often I had to hear E. say: ‘You know, that will be very difficult for me, because they guard their sovereignty jealously.’

So you don't remember Höss saying to you: ‘I have seen the foot march, and I entirely disagree with it’?

That is quite possible, because Höss always grumbled on principle. I would have done the same in that situation. If I receive transports, if I have a camp, I always have something to complain about. If I had nothing to complain about, I would look for something, so that I get an abundance of this material into the camp, because I could never have enough of …. He never had enough. He never had enough medication, never enough other things. He always had to grumble. He was obliged to. But you see from that, if they had all

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

Couldn't the statistics establish how many Jews of Hungarian citizenship are still alive? Is a figure known?

No. A figure of 220,000 has been announced, but it has been doctored sharply downward.

Where had they been all that time?

They went from camp to camp. They were waiting.

One moment, is this the matter of the prominent Jews Weinberg had gathered around him?

No.

Those are the 700 young people Kastner had chosen, young people. Some other people too, for example his whole extended family, his wife's father and mother, and so on.

I know nothing about that. Drivel.

Could it not be that, in connection with the statement you made to Brandt—

?

No, I most certainly did not order that. I couldn't have prevented them from crossing the border somewhere else, away from the official crossings. The Hungarian borders weren't guarded by us. On one part there was the front; on the other part—… Anyone who wants to cross away from the official crossings can always get across. Jews were escaping in a steady stream. I couldn't have stopped Mrs. Brandt or anyone else unless I had locked them up. But surely no one can claim that even a single member of the family was under any kind of guard while Brandt was away.

None of the family members was made to report to the police. That is a common way of restricting people, so that you have them back under control every few hours. That was never done. Those would have been the most basic precautions, some degree of security. Taking them into custody would have provided 100 percent security—taking them into custody as prominent people, let us say. Not even that was done. Why, then, would I have arranged to exclude these people from the transport?

I can imagine that I was fairly indifferent to it. I didn't care at all whom Kastner included, and I cared just as little whether he had included his relatives too.

There could never have been any fighting in Theresienstadt. Now tell me: what do you have to say about these various statements?

Well, I didn't know the details, but it was clear to me that Becher had received special assignments from the RF (Reichsführer-SS). Do you know why Becher may have received those assignments? I thought Becher had made the most of what he shared with the Reichsführer. Becher once told me, on a drive to see the Reichsführer…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: About the chain…]

Once an SS man has been let in on his chief's personal and most delicate affairs, it follows that he speaks to his chief in an entirely different negotiating tone from someone who deals with him only on official or practical matters. I would say that Becher's negotiations with the RF (Reichsführer-SS) were of two kinds: when a third person was present, and when he was alone with the Reichsführer.

How else could he have obtained command over all the concentration camps?

I don't know, because I had nothing to do with the concentration-camp economy. But it is quite possible. I myself saw and heard that Becher spoke very freely with the RF (Reichsführer-SS) and could certainly influence him.

Do you still remember whether, on your part or Müller's, any

suggestions were made about what should happen if the Allies advanced and a concentration camp was nearby…

No, I know nothing about that at all. It is quite possible that Müller discussed these matters with the responsible offices. On the other hand, I do know that at that time the roads were clogged with concentration-camp inmates. Those from camps under enemy pressure were increasingly being transferred toward …, partly into camps that were still safe, which brought overcrowding as well. On my journeys I saw some of those huge treks creeping wearily along.

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

In other words … it even says here that Becher handed Bergen-Belsen over to the English, against the wishes of the military command authorities. These are all things that you can neither deny nor confirm?

That's right, I can't. It is quite human that, at the end—not everyone is made that way—they should want to buy themselves a life-insurance policy, and in return, to the enemy side… The Jews were the enemy side. I have repeated that several times, and I believed it. It was a guiding principle for me too, because Clain Weizmann had declared war on the German people…

One gets the impression that at the end, in the last months, in Hungary too, Becher swept up your area of responsibility as he went?

He did.

In what sense?

From the beginning he had been trying to take these matters out of my hands. But he couldn't. He could not issue a state-police instruction: he would have met a brick wall at every police office. No official would ever have accepted an order from him. Even if he had been an Obstgrf. (Oberstgruppenführer), the junior official would have stood to attention and said ‘Yes, sir,’ but he wouldn't have done anything, because he wouldn't have dared. The junior official had no backing from above. He may accept an instruction affecting his area of responsibility only if he knows that the man is his superior. But nobody accepts even the slightest order from an outsider.

You have the example of the SS Brigadeführer in Vienna, with the synagogue being set on fire, and how I came upon it just as a typewriter was being smashed onto the floor. I called the Brigadeführer to account, and he had to put up with it, although I was an Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer). Normally he would have had to make an S… of me. In that case, I stood before him as the man entrusted with the official proceedings. Becher, on the other hand, never received an office. But if you tell me that at the end the RF (Reichsführer-SS) placed the whole concentration-camp system under him, then of course the camp commandants' offices will have had to obey his instructions. They could then have put the corresponding memorandum in their files.

But Becher meddled everywhere and conducted negotiations with the Jews, so I asked Müller whether he was authorized to do that. He was authorized. The blame lay with the RF (Reichsführer-SS) himself. He was often rather fickle in his decisions. You might see him in the morning and leave, and the next day or a few days later somebody else would come and tell him about the same matter in a different way. Then he would order the opposite of what he had told you. The Reichsführer also often decided individual cases personally, and by deciding one of those cases he would completely overturn a general order he had issued.

It was enormously difficult, precisely because of his differing decisions. Becher knew how to get one concession after another from the Reichsführer. Negotiating with Becher in itself meant decentralization. I had no control at all over what Becher negotiated with those people, Kastner and the others. Conversely, Becher had no control over what I negotiated with them. No decree obliged me to submit copies of all my measures and discussions to Becher for the record and for his information. Nor was he obliged to do the same. So it was a matter of feeling each other out. Kastner had an easy game, because he could have played the two of us off against each other.

But I had a very decent relationship with Becher, and we didn't make life difficult for each other. I had nothing against Becher. If I hear today that he had the Reichsführer's order, then I must even say that ultimately it wasn't his fault if I formed a different judgment of him. I could only read about his conduct in the enemy press and draw my conclusions from that. As I said, he worked with the enemy. If what Brandt writes here is correct, then Becher was in the right. Some of the cases are correct; I know that for certain. Economic advantages—we negotiated those with the Jews. That is correct.

But how did it show itself that he was trying to take various areas of responsibility away from you, or did take them away?

He had gathered Kastner and Kastner's staff around him in his quarters, and we had arranged a rendezvous at some time or other in his meeting building. Sometimes he came to me, sometimes I went to him, to discuss various matters. Possibly with Kastner too. I told you that a piece of theater was staged for me then…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Face flushed deep red. Gas 10,000 more Jews.]

That went against the grain with me. First, I was annoyed that he was telling the enemy something that wasn't in my area of responsibility at all. Second, I was annoyed that he presumed to take a measure, preempting a particular state-police stipulation of mine. I too would never have said such a thing to the enemy. He was interfering in state-police responsibilities. He even overstepped them by incompetently attributing to the Gestapo office measures that lay completely outside its remit. That may also have been the real reason Müller was so determined to have him come to Berlin. Müller's intention was to arrest Becher and lock him up.

There weren't any incidents with Becher?

No. I did say to him: ‘Don't you know that it isn't our task? How could you say something like that?’ I must have said it to him in some such form.

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

Can you sum up briefly once more? It seems that in December 1944 things in Budapest were in considerable turmoil, and that you had practically lost control of Jewish affairs. What can you say about that in summary?

I told you frankly: I lost control. I lost even more than that. I had to lose control at the point when nothing could be evacuated anymore, and hadn't been for a long time. With that, my authority for everything else had lapsed, because I had no authority of any kind to take measures in Hungary. Nobody was being rounded up or loaded anymore. Nothing could be sent off. There wasn't even a timetable anymore; the trains ran irregularly. The Russians were shelling Budapest. Once they advanced quite a long way, as far as Csepel, were thrown back again for a short time, then came in again and drew the ring around Budapest tighter and tighter. I remember only one more thing: around that time in Budapest, Becher was taking a great deal of valuable material out of Hungary, silverware and so on. Where he took it, I don't know. (He handed it over to the Jew Mosche Schweiger.)

Do you remember that, on 2 or 3 December, that special camp in Columbusgasse where Kastner put his emigrants was surrounded by Arrow Cross men, and that shots were fired at them from inside the camp? There was then a considerable reprisal, and Kastner hurried to you. The Jewish leaders came and asked you why all this was being done, and so on. You answered:

No, I know nothing about it. I had nothing to do with it. I was waiting every day for my recall order.

You left Budapest—on what day?

On 24 December 1944, at three in the afternoon.

Is this picture authentic?

That is a portrait of me as a young man. The head might almost be right, although I don't remember ever rolling my eyes like that. The collar, at any rate—I didn't have such enormous buttons made for myself when I was young. Nor do I remember ever wearing such an awful tie, because as far back as I can remember I never favored gaudily patterned—…. In any case, the lower part is all fake. As for the upper part, I don't know. It may be from some portrait of me as a young man that they found and then photographed.

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

[Typed caption:

]

That would conclude the Hungary chapter, then.

The first measure concerning the Jews resident in Greece is said to have been the order requiring the male Jews to perform forced labor. Do you know about that?

No. Did we have a military commander in Greece?

Yes.

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

Yes, it was a Greek government.

Roughly like the relationship we had with Slovakia, or …

Was it freer?

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

Can you tell me whom I had down there?

We will come to that later. Perhaps you remember the Jews being compelled to work if I tell you that this was lifted in return for a payment, a contribution of around 200 million from ….

Paid to whom?

To the occupation authorities?

I know nothing of that. So that was 1942.

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

I never had a man by the name of Wulf.

Your people never worked under cover names?

No.

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

I was never there … And … I was in Greece for the first and last time in 1937. Never again did I set foot on Greek soil.

What you say here is very interesting, because, as to the truthfulness of the book, various conclusions …

I must reject it flatly, because I never set foot in Greece. I also never had an adviser named Wulf, nor did I have an SS officer named Wulf. I may not immediately remember offhand whom I had in one place or another, but when someone gives me a name, I know at once, and I can picture that person.

So the claim is this: you came to Greece in connection with Wulf's preparations, and Wi remained there to carry out the measures.

It is possible that Wi was in Greece. Did we have a state police office down there, or something like that? Was there a BS down there? It is possible that this Wulf was a desk officer in the commander’s office. Naturally, he was not subordinate to me, but perhaps he obtained the relevant instructions from the Reich Security Main Office through his superior office in VDS. What the individual desk officers in the various other offices were called is naturally beyond my knowledge, because as a rule I never had any personal dealings with those people. Personally, it was none of my concern either: they had prepared this letter for their chief, and the commander wrote to the Reich Security Main Office, not the desk officer.

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

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

Are you familiar with the B…hirsch ghetto in Greece?

No.

It is claimed that this ghetto was alternately filled and emptied by transports out and in, and that 42,835—the figure is given exactly—were taken away in 16 trains for extermination.

Where to?

To Auschwitz, to Poland.

To Poland as well, into the General Government?

I know that transports of Jews were carried out from Greece. And if Wi was down there—I think it was Burger or Brunner who was down there. I would almost say that Burger was there first, in Greece, and that I then, to support him …

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

Now I remember too. And then I also sent Wi down to reinforce him. But who actually carried out the transports there, that is, who carried out the roundup and loading, I do not know. In any case, apart from the …

The man was called L. Brunner, Anton Brunner.

Anton Brunner?

In the book he is named as Anton Brunner.

But his name was Alois Brunner, Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer)?

In the book he is only called Anton Brunner.

I did have an Anton Brunner, but in the end he was at the Administration and Realization Office in Prague. He was a civilian.

This will be Alois Brunner, of course.

They took nothing down with them except their personal belongings. They had no orderly, no men; they had nothing at all. So I no longer know who carried out the roundup there. Perhaps the Wehrmacht did it, or the Order Police. Did we have a commander of the Order Police there?

Yes, I think so. The last one from the Order Police was Schiemana.

Schiemana? I do not know him.

He was a Higher SS and Police Leader. The … and the freight cars were provided by the Wehrmacht. Does the name of Chief Rabbi Koretz mean anything to you—the man who was chairman of the Jewish Council?

The name is dimly familiar.

He played a major role for the Eichmann office, or rather in the deportations, in that he actually urged the Jews to agree to resettlement in Poland, because the Jews would be allotted land in Poland and would receive benefits, and so on and so on. It would have been in 43.

Perhaps it was a ruse by the offices carrying out the roundup and loading, or perhaps there could have been a kernel of truth in it, because there was a time when I actually wanted to create a Jewish territory in the General Government. In the Lublin district; it began with the settlement of 2,000 Jews from Mährisch Ostraum. We wanted to build a Jewish reservoir then, and I had difficulties with Frank in Poland, the Governor General, who had forbidden Jews to be brought into the General Government. But it seems to me that 43 is rather late; my efforts were much earlier. So this probably was a ruse on the part of the authorities carrying out the roundup.

[overlapping talk about Koretts]

He was held in Vienna for several months, and it is claimed that he was prepared for this task during that time.

Possibly the subordinate offices did it. I know nothing about it. I would not want to deny not having heard the name Koretts. Koretts is not an unusual name; perhaps I am confusing its sound with something else.

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

But then how is it that we had so many Jews of Greek nationality afterwards?

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

As I said, Greece was far away. I no longer remember; I never set foot there. I had one adviser down there and no other staff. How, with whom and where he got his way was his task. I know that some transports left Greece.

Did they travel overland?

Yes.

Through Yugoslavia?

That is not stated there.

Do you know anything about negotiations in December 1943 between Mr. von Thadden of the Foreign Office and a Spanish diplomat, concerning the Spanish government’s willingness to take in Spanish Jews from all the occupied territories?

No, that is unknown to me.

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

The following is possible. When you tell me that they were released from a concentration camp, it does not necessarily follow that I must have known about it as the desk officer of IV B 4. At that time there was a general order from the RF (Reichsführer-SS) that a Jew who was in a concentration camp could no longer be released. A detention or internment order, submitted to the desk officer every quarter, was no longer dealt with in that way. But we did have a protective-custody section in Office IV, headed by a criminal police and government councillor.

It is therefore entirely conceivable that Legation Councillor von Thadden approached the Reichsführer-SS through the Foreign Office; that the Reichsführer-SS instructed the chief of the Security Police that the Jews of Spanish nationality were to be released from the concentration camps and gave Pohl instructions; that the chief of the Security Police passed further word through official channels to the head of Office IV; and that the head of Office IV gave his protective-custody officer instructions for the VWHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office), that such-and-such Jews were to be handed over to so-and-so at such-and-such a time.

We have to distinguish between people in the concentration camps, Jews or non-Jews, who were committed through the state police offices for some offense, under some existing provision, and whose regular detention review decided whether they were to remain or whether their re-education had progressed far enough for them to be released; and the Jews committed later, the Jews committed wholesale on the Reichsführer-SS’s orders, for whom no individual index card was made out any longer. It was left to the SS WVHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office) to deal with these groups at its own discretion: to put them to work in aircraft plants, in other industry, or to send them for physical extermination. That no longer concerned the protective-custody officer, nor did it concern the other desk officers. So I must

explain this to you, so that it is understandable that, as the desk officer of IV B 4, I need not necessarily have known about this measure. Perhaps I was informed of it, but it was so peripheral to me that I can no longer remember it, because I was not responsible for handling it. Years earlier I had been responsible, when emigration was still permitted. I had orders from the RF (Reichsführer-SS) to arrange opportunities for emigration for all Jews committed to concentration camps, and we set up a separate department in Vienna for that.

But at the outbreak of war the Reichsführer-SS forbade it, and from then on I had nothing more to do with people who had once been in a concentration camp. So it was a matter concerning only the Foreign Office and the Reichsführer-SS himself. Naturally, the offices carrying it out were involved too, such as the SS Administrative Main Office and the Reich Security Main Office. The Spanish ambassador will have approached the Reichsführer-SS from the office. Those were the sorts of things done with a handshake, or after some reception; everyone looked for a suitable opportunity to achieve something, and so on and so on.

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

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

No, it does not. It says here expressly that Spain had declared itself willing to take in all Jews of Spanish nationality from the occupied territories.

So were these Jews picked up during the roundups?

Apparently, yes.

Or were they Jews who had emigrated decades before?

When the roundups were carried out, our guidelines said: Jews of foreign nationality are to be exempted. In France, for example, I could not have Jews of neutral or allied countries loaded up en bloc in the wholesale procedure if they did not agree. That was not possible. I could never have a Jew of English nationality taken to Auschwitz; they were treated separately.

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

Perhaps by mistake. You see, those were guidelines, but depending on the place, things were also done wrong. For example, I am convinced that in the General Government no distinction was made between a Jew of Polish nationality, a stateless Jew or one with Swiss nationality. I would guess that this was fairly immaterial to the responsible offices in the General Government. That was probably the case here too, because it is not just Germany that is being discussed, but the whole occupied territory.

In what year is this discussion about the Spanish Jews supposed to have taken place?

The discussion between von Thadden and the Spanish diplomat was on 22 December 1943. On 7 February 44, 367 Jews were released from Bergen-Belsen and received a Spanish transit visa.

That date is reason enough why I cannot remember it: from January 44 to March 44 I was in a forest about 100 kilometers from Berlin, with the task of building a village in which the … state police …

[Repeated typed line: from January 44 to March 44 I was in a forest about 100 kilometers from Berlin and had the …]

was to be, and from there, when Müller took over the matter—it was a little barracks town I had built there, a barracks for the head of Office IV, and for the individual sections, and so on—he brought me the order of the RF (Reichsführer-SS) out in the forest: I was to prepare for Hungary with immediate effect. He imposed secrecy on me. I could not even tell my deputy anything about it. I soon went off to Mauthausen, and in Mauthausen itself I was cut off from the world. I was not allowed to leave the camp, because Hungary was being prepared in secret.

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

I never heard anything about it. Perhaps, perhaps not. It is a fairly minor case. Even if I had been in Berlin, my permanent deputy would automatically have handled it, because it was an individual case. I dealt only with cases of fundamental importance.

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

I cannot tell you that either, because I was not in Berlin the whole of 44. When I was in Berlin, I dealt with the Hungarian matters that had to be pushed through there. I was in Hungary from March 44 until Christmas Eve 44; that was when I pulled out. I should have pulled out on 22 December, because the office of the Higher Police Leader and of the Security Police left Budapest then. I still had things to do; I wanted to spend a few more hours with my friend Zehender. I had nothing to do anyway, whether I went to Ödenberg and waited there doing nothing for the order from Berlin, or stayed in Budapest with my friend Zehender, who commanded the 22nd SS Cavalry Division …

I have already described the worry and fear the police went through because I was considered missing for a time. I really was the last man of the Security Police to get out of Budapest, with my driver. The road we then took, the stretch from Budapest to Rat, was already under Russian fire. The great stream of people on the move that had been pouring out of Budapest towards Vienna for days without a break, blocking every last square meter of the road, was gone. The road was dead and deserted.

So if you ask me now whether a transport left Rhodes in August 44, I cannot tell you. I was in Hungary continuously from March 44 until Christmas Eve 44, and I came to Berlin only to sort out my Hungarian business. I did not involve myself in the section’s affairs, nor could I have done so, because I would have had to familiarize myself with them again. Even if I am the desk officer, once I have been posted away I cannot sit down at my desk for the few hours or days I am in Berlin and start running things again.

I had no idea about the background; I would first have had to go through the files, and I had no time for that. My permanent deputy Günther certainly gave me a broad outline of what had happened in the last few weeks. I believe that in any case: I was too interested in the matter, and he was too interested in not falling out with me to play the autocratic prince. I was not entitled to any … authority, because I could all too easily have decided against it, when one has been away from a central authority for so long.

That is also why I know so little about Greece.

But the involvement of the Eichmann office in this deportation of the Jews from Rhodes … that really the entire Jewish population was taken away …

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

It is claimed that two men from the Eichmann office, Anton Brunner and Wi, visited the commander of Rhodes, Lieutenant General Kleemann, who then took over the practical arrangements.

Well, I can only congratulate my Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) on that. They were successful there. Of course they called themselves the Eichmann office; in Greece they would not say Section IV B 4. It was much simpler. I had already been in the section for a long time. That was Müller’s strength: keeping his people until they were ready for retirement or no longer fit for duty. As an old criminal investigator he told himself that the longer a man was in the service, the better a specialist he was in that field. When you have been in a section that long, and before that had to direct the work in the individual central authorities, the press alone turns the name Eichmann into a symbol, furnished with the usual epithets.

In any case, in territories where a German … moved in, the word “Jew” was inextricably linked with the name Eichmann. That is how the name “Eichmann office” came to be attached to my section, even though I was not serving in Berlin. My Hauptsturmführer and my men operated under that name too. Obviously, they had no reason to tell the military commander of Rhodes, for example, “Yes, our former chief … and his permanent deputy Günther has now ….” To keep things short, they used the familiar name Eichmann and told the military commander, “Our chief Eichmann has instructions to deport the Jews.” Although I know nothing precise about any of this, because I was not serving in Berlin myself.

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

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

Dannecker was down there.

In which year—on 22 February 43.

That cannot be right; he was in Paris then. I cannot quite remember, but it was probably 44, because Dannecker was in Paris in 43, and I was in Paris myself.

Could he not have been detached with a special detachment for only a short time?

No … Perhaps I can help you. Did we still have much say in France in 44? I do not think so. That was why Dannecker had become superfluous. Dannecker was a very tough man: once he received an order, he kept at it until the order was carried out. In all my life I never heard a report from Dannecker saying, “The order has not been carried out.” I always put him where things were delicate and someone had to push them through. So, if I had Dannecker down there, I assume this matter in Bulgaria was in 44.

On 20 May 1943 a meeting took place in Berlin to drive the Jews out of Sofia within ….

Where is the meeting supposed to have taken place?

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

If a meeting is supposed to have taken place in Berlin about resettling the Jews in the countryside, I have to object. That may have happened, but it has been dramatized; no such meeting can have taken place in Berlin. It is just as untrue as the author’s assertion that I had been in Greece personally, or had a case officer named Wulf. Whether the Jews were in the countryside or not was not a matter of the slightest interest to the Reich. The responsible head of the office down there decided that at his own discretion, without first consulting the central offices in Berlin.

But Bulgaria was a friendly country at that time.

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

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

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

From Bulgaria—from the Greek and Yugoslav parts occupied by Bulgaria—11,000 Jews … They came to Auschwitz and were exterminated there, in Treblikar (?) and Auschwitz.

So these deportations are unknown to you?

It is no longer familiar to me today.

The authors always say only, “They came to Auschwitz and were exterminated there.” I ask myself: how is it, then, that these Jews were found afterwards?

So beyond that you know nothing further about Bulgaria?

Not at the moment.

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

Yes, that is right. Yes, I had sent Dannecker down, but he had nothing to do with the BDS (commander of the Security Police and Security Service). Instead he was to keep close to the German envoy. If Bulgaria had a commissioner for Jewish affairs, Dannecker will either have advised that commissioner himself with the German envoy’s clearance, or the German envoy will have advised the responsible Bulgarian office in the Interior Ministry on the basis of Dannecker’s work. He will have given roughly the guidelines we had approved in other countries and handed over with a recommendation, so to speak, for their kind observance.

It was an approved procedure, in following which one had to choose the least resistance and would achieve the smallest possible number of …. It was the Jewish adviser’s task that, a), the foreign offices should impose the Jews on the German Reich, and that appearances should be kept up before the world. Keeping up appearances meant that the Jews were not beaten into the wagons like cattle, but that everything was done humanely, according to the principle: avoidable hardships are to be avoided.

Do you believe, looking back, that that succeeded?

As regards Hungary, I know it; otherwise Höss and Pohl would not have shouted, and would not have made me the scapegoat when I could do nothing about it. Naturally, I passed the reprimand I had received back to L.E., and I also arranged with the Hungarian government for them to approach my superior at the office, Veesenmayer, Veesenmayer, and tell him that I had nothing to do with it, but that they had now, in turn, been alerted and would intervene energetically. In the end, Veesenmayer was the one who had the trouble.

Otherwise, of course, I am not convinced that the French police, for example, always treated the Jews they concentrated near Paris very humanely. I know only one thing: the blind obedience of the German Order Police, and that of SS members too, generally ensured—with few exceptions—that the matter was directed along the intended lines. There were no uprisings of any kind in the whole General Government either. The world could see the transports coming from Greece, France, Hungary and so on, and there appearances had to be kept up.

Were you never told that no difficulties were made by the Bulgarian king?

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

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

No, impossible.

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

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

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

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

When was the march into Prague?

In March 39. The declaration of Slovakia’s independence was right then.

Well, Wi went there; the envoy Ludin was there …

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

Either 42 or 43.

But hadn't Ludin long been envoy by then?

41, yes. In Slovakia we had no adviser at a German office or a Security Police office; there was no such office there either.

We had an adviser for the Jewish question at the German legation. Wi was not subordinate to the Security Police; he was directly subordinate to the German envoy. I myself visited Ludin two or three times and had to explain personally, in the greatest detail, the guidelines we received as orders from the RF (Reichsführer-SS). Ludin then certainly prepared the ground with the Slovak government without much difficulty.

[general overlapping talk]

In September 42 I visited the Slovak Interior Minister Mach for the second time and had to pay him a courtesy call. I knew Mach from before he was a minister, and it was not difficult for me to discuss the practical problems with him, especially since there was no need to follow any compulsory sequence of negotiations agreed beforehand by both sides. During this second visit, in the evening, his orderly brought him the report from his Prague representative that an assassination attempt had been made on Heydrich. I left for Prague in the early hours of the morning.

Before this second visit, on my first visit to Mach, I had a discussion with Tiso, the clergyman, the state secretary. When I spoke with Tiso—that may have been some months before September 1942—transport trains were already running. It was not I who initiated the discussion with Tiso; Tiso wanted to speak with me, as Ludin told me. Tiso wanted a binding assurance from me that Jews living in mixed marriages, insofar as they were Catholic, or baptized Jews, would remain untouched. He offered me the rest with the greatest willingness. That surprised me very much at the time, since he was there in his priest’s cassock …

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

And the first transports rolled after that?

Yes. Wi had no trouble, and it suited Wi, who, as a person, tended towards sluggishness because of his corpulence, although he was an excellent negotiator and his strength lay in negotiations. It suited him to find a field in Slovakia that took so little work. There he had Ludin, to whom he only had to drop a few hints, and whenever a small hold-up arose, Ludin would immediately dash off to the Slovak offices. They would immediately iron out the difficulties, and the Slovaks hurried to get transports ready one after another. I remember that we had difficulties with the Reich Transport Ministry, because with the timetable we

sometimes could not manage it at all. The whole removal from Slovakia was not carried out in a continuous succession, as in Hungary, for example. In Slovakia we had hold-ups, often lasting a good many weeks. I also remember that Sch…ki was the only one in the Slovak government who, although he did not create any major difficulties directly, kept raising procedural difficulties.

Have you read anything similar?

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

It is claimed that after the first transports the … came, that volunteers were made available by the Slovak government, and that already in July 1942 the Slovak government opposed these deportations. Mach is said to have been the only driving force in this matter.

Yes, yes, at first everything was fine. They would have been glad if we had taken all the Jews away in a single night. Once Schantski was caught up in his ministerial routine—what a difference there is between a so-called time of struggle and a quiet time behind a desk—he naturally developed misgivings. He heard all the voices influencing him, and perhaps also feared economic disadvantages for Slovakia. Schantski was among those who made difficulties for me on the government’s side. Mach was always the one who got things moving again.

Tiso, for example, never lodged such a sharp veto here or created difficulties, as could so easily have happened in Hungary (Horthy).

Tiso never made difficulties, and that may also explain why his interior minister had no reason to hold up the problem on his own initiative: from his ideological and political standpoint he would rather have had it solved yesterday than today.

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

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

You may also be wrong when you speak of interruptions lasting weeks. After the Slovak government’s opposition in July 42, there was an interruption of more than two years, and transports did not start running again until September–October 44.

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

It is generally said that about 90,000 Slovak Jews originally came from that territory, and that after the war 28,000 to 35,000 were still there. That is, the estimate is 60,000 Slovak Jews.

A mistake was made in Slovakia, and it was the Slovak government that made it: the first thing done was to clear Pressburg of Jews.

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

No.

Do you know that on 10 September 1941 Mach issued a Jewish statute—that all Jews were equal?

No … But it is clear that every government where we had Jewish advisers first had to introduce a legislative regulation of its own accord. That was the prerequisite

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

You spoke of interruptions lasting weeks, but the Jewish literature speaks of an interruption of more than two years, from July 42 to September 44, because the Slovak government opposed the transports after learning what was happening to the Jews. First it speaks only of the first voluntary transport for Auschwitz, then of the Slovak government’s opposition, and then of an interruption of deportations until September 44, when they started running on an intensified scale.

In September 44 Wi was not in Pressburg at all … One moment … Wi went back to Pressburg when the evacuations in Hungary stopped, to get them going again there. On … July, yes, Wi had no work left in Hungary and went back to Slovakia. There he finished off the Jews in Slovakia, and they were combed out more from the east, because partisan groups had already formed there.

At first they had done it the other way round here, combing through from west to east. But we were not responsible for deciding that; the Slovak government was responsible. They wanted their capital free of Jews first. These authorities had to be accommodated there—the Slovaks from Prague who had held government posts there and were now being pushed out by the Czechs needed housing. The Jews removed from Pressburg had to provide that housing. That also explains the first transport they were so eager to foist on us; that was the reason.

And Wi finished off the last remainder when the partisan groups were already at work in eastern Slovakia, groups made up in relatively large part of Jews as well. Then the Wehrmacht became alert too, and so did all the offices that had meanwhile allowed themselves some misgivings; they now gave the offices a free hand. But here too the roundup was carried out not by German personnel but by Slovakia’s central Jewish office.

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

No, that cannot be right. Wi was the German envoy’s adviser, the adviser on Jewish questions at the German legation in Pressburg. If I am not mistaken, Wi was very proud of having managed to obtain a diplomatic passport, as a sort of attaché—that was the position he held. I mention that last point only to demonstrate credibly that Wi really worked as an adviser at the German legation. My official channel in Slovakia, when I was there, was to approach Ludin immediately and first, as the superior of this man who served under him as an attaché.

It is quite clear that the good Interior Minister Mach was virtually the counterpart of L.E. in Hungary—except that in Hungary there were two state secretaries, while here the interior minister dealt with these matters personally. Given the extraordinarily good relationship between Wi and Mach, Mach made extensive use of the advice of Wi. But it is equally clear that the Slovak offices, whose leadership consisted of old members of the Link Guard, jealously guarded the inviolability of Slovak affairs. To answer your question, it is of course unthinkable that Wi and Mach, on the one hand, and Wi and Mach’s apparatus, did not have the closest contacts and relationships that worked out in practical operations. Nevertheless, in his official mission Wi was never attached to a Slovak authority but to a German authority. I want to establish that as a matter of principle.

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

Yes

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

Yes, correct.

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

Yes correct.

On 10 March 1942 several thousand Jews were deported.

That was the very first transport. Before that, the labor camps were set up. The first people to fill them were the Jews who came from Pressburg; they had to make housing available.

The other reason was that the Slovak government wanted the Jews to work for it. They therefore preferred to keep the labor camps in Slovak territory rather than deport them. Probably, too, the status certainly had not yet been settled that authorized Slovakia, or the Slovak government, to place its own nationals under a foreign state. Such legislative work always took an immense amount of time before it was finally passed by all the relevant central authorities, whether they were in charge or involved peripherally.

Do you also know that, at Himmler’s request, the Foreign Office demanded 20,000 Slovak Jews for deportation, and that Tiso agreed?

I cannot really remember, but that is entirely within the scope of what was wanted and sought.

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

No, I know nothing about that.

And that Tiso agreed to it nevertheless.

As I already told you, the impression I had of Tiso made me stop and think: how could a clergyman be so interested in getting rid of people? I said to myself, he is simply more a politician than a clergyman.

As a result of these negotiations about the 20,000 Jews, about 17,000 Jewish workers—that is, Jews fit for work—were taken from the Serett camp to Auschwitz and Lublin. Do you know about that?

Yes—not the 17,000 specifically. I know that transports were continually sent out of Slovakia. The destination may have been Auschwitz, but I do not know whether the destination was the General Government. I cannot say at the moment. I do not want to deny it, because it was a matter I did not determine. Pohl alone determined it, or rather his inspector of the concentration camp system, Brigadeführer Glücks (?). Here in Slovakia too, I received the loading times from Wi, the times the trains would be ready. My Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Novak then drew up the timetable with Reich Railway Councillor Stange. The trains were routed as the SS WVHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office) wanted, not as we wanted. We had no capacity to receive them; Pohl alone had that.

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

That is unfamiliar to me.

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

The Secret State Police Office was not responsible for which groups of people were driven out of Slovakia. That was a matter for the Slovak authorities. The German Reich government declared itself willing to take over all Slovak Jews, just as it had declared itself willing in principle to take over all Jews in the other countries. Which groups were evacuated, and under which guidelines the roundups were conducted in these countries, was left to the individual countries, insofar as we did not carry out the roundup ourselves. It was also left entirely to the Hungarian government which groups they evacuated.

So there is the possibility that 10,000 children?

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

You will remember that the great ghetto uprising was in February–March 1943? We have also established that the high point of the extermination operation was probably in 1943. There are in fact indications that the Warsaw ghetto uprising acted as a spur to the extermination operation. What I need from you is a denial or confirmation of that thesis. I would like to learn whether your section made any suggestions as a result of this uprising, or whether, from discussions with Müller or other leading people, you know—you can reconstruct—how, in the state of mind at the time, a harsher form

of physical extermination was a response to this event in the Warsaw ghetto, where the Jews’ readiness to fight against the Third Reich had, after all, taken on a dangerous form. Now tell us what else you know about the reaction this uprising provoked, so that we can then infer how far it prompted harsher measures.

I can confine myself to one thing, something the RF (Reichsführer-SS) is supposed to have said. I must first explain that one day a photograph album was sent to me and my section through official channels. Before I had it, the RF (Reichsführer-SS) had already seen it, and he had even initialed the accompanying letter attached to the album with his H.H. [Heinrich Himmler] This photograph album had been commissioned by the Guard Leader (Gardeführer) (?). It contained many dozens of photographs, in the manner of war correspondents, depicting the phases of the fighting.

I still remember that the units charged with suppressing the uprising were surprised by the toughness of the resistance and the good weapons they faced. I still remember that we, the SS, and other units of the Wehrmacht too, had to record disproportionately high losses. I also remember—I no longer know exactly whether it was Müller or Kaltenbrunner—that the RF (Reichsführer-SS) was said to have remarked that, had we acted in time, firmly and comprehensively, this valuable blood would have been spared. I can no longer say today; perhaps you can help me with the number of the losses …

Several thousand men.

So that I said to myself: I could not imagine that Jews confined in ghettos could fight like that. And when this uprising, … Stroop—when it had to be put down as the last resort—they were only then, after the losses in blood had become so high, forced into this ruthless intervention, which probably any unit in another country would also have resorted to.

The harshness of this measure can quite well be compared with the way the French act today in Algeria and Indochina.

Perhaps not so harshly down there, because there one is not dealing with large masses of people in a relatively confined space.

The Ti… are actual ghettos, Arab ghettos, exclusively Arab quarters, with their small winding alleys …

Now I remember that, in the course of these heavy losses suffered by the German Wehrmacht, an order went out to the office of the General Government to comb through every last corner ruthlessly. I believe that was done, so that some time after the Warsaw fighting there was in fact no Jewish question left to record in the General Government. There was no Jewish question there any more for lack of people.

And one of the most important measures was that Glo, perhaps out of caution and concern that something similar could happen to him in his numerous factory-like concentrations, where a thousand and many thousands of Jews worked, carried out the liquidation on the basis of this intensified order. Thus, some time after the uprising, Glo too had no Jews left to record for labor deployment in his area—Jews who would otherwise have survived the war just as those employed at the Heinkel works or at Auschwitz did, and as many others in the concentration camps did, who, however, more …

because they were not living in a ghetto and beyond control in what they did; rather, their activities were regulated by the hour and they were supervised. The Jewish labor squads with Glo, for example, were not, because he never had that number of guards. There the Jews were gathered more in a kind of ghetto arrangement, not in the concentration camp arrangement we had in the interior of the Reich. That was the first measure. Certainly and without doubt the RF (Reichsführer-SS) was guided by these thoughts. It was not for nothing that he sent the entire weight of what he had in this sector, the handling of Jews, to Hungary with me at its head.

He wanted to comb through Hungary with tremendous speed before the Jews could properly collect themselves and organize resistance. That also explains the order to comb through Hungary from east to west, keeping the dangerous eastern sector out of action. As for the Budapest ghetto, one must again say that something similar could have happened. But it must be noted that the Budapest ghetto itself was under the leadership of the Arrow Cross men, whose mentality was quite different from that of the German supervisory bodies in the Warsaw ghetto. The Arrow Cross man still had something of that revolutionary recklessness, the swagger of a daredevil, which we had gradually shed after 1933.

That is why we did not need to have these worries about the Budapest ghetto. Had these people noticed the slightest thing, they would certainly have intervened decisively, naturally also out of concern in view of the events in Warsaw. Only that explains the speed with which the Hungarian gendarmerie proceeded; it was, after all, a force for order in Hungary. The state secretaries L.E. and B. feared nothing more than that Hungary might become a playground for wild uprisings. That was indeed a consequence of the Warsaw ghetto. Had this beacon not hovered like a … over not only the German security authorities but the Hungarian security authorities as well, one thing or another would certainly have run its course more slowly.

I need not add what a sacrifice it was for Germany to provide the rolling stock: there was no wagon that could be allowed to stand empty. But evidently the first concern of the leadership of both countries was to get rid of sources of unrest. Admittedly, we had no major stirrings in Hungary, but the preventive measures were only too justified. Had such a preventive measure been taken in Poland, this bloody uprising would certainly not have occurred—to the advantage of the German Wehrmacht units concerned, and indeed to the advantage of the Jews themselves as well.

Do you remember whether the leading German officials responsible for the Warsaw ghetto faced any consequences after the uprising—that is, whether they were punished or even ex…?

I know nothing about that. It would have been the General Government’s own affair insofar as civil servants were concerned. If it had involved SS members, I would probably remember something. I do not know whether punishments were imposed locally. It is quite possible that one or another was, of course, held to account for lax performance of duty in the security precautions, because that was the usual thing.

Do you remember any proposals that went out from your section at that time and referred in some way to the Warsaw uprising, to push any measures forward more energetically?

I had only one more occasion after that, through the large-scale operation in Hungary… I was sent to Warsaw on official business to look at Warsaw. Let me put it in Müller's words for once: “My dear Eichmann, go up there and see how far things can go.” So I was sent to Warsaw on official business and had myself shown around. They showed me the pockets of resistance that they could clear out only with concentrated explosive charges. They showed me all the major battle positions; that was how fierce the fighting had been. I have seldom seen an area as devastated as Warsaw. I never forgot that when I was in Hungary.

Budapest had always been a great worry to me too. I did not keep that to myself: I told my subordinates as well and pointed out what could happen to us in Hungary. But Warsaw gave me cover in that respect: to have, in the east—and that would have been even more terrible than an uprising in Budapest—behind our … front, a partisan area of thousands of square kilometres… They would not have had to kill off individual members of the Wehrmacht; they would have blown up our lines of communication. A large part of the rolling stock for our troops passed through Hungary, and that would have been affected.

I don't know; they would have had to shoot me if, despite having been sent to Warsaw, I had been criminally careless and had not had eastern Hungary combed through with that speed, and had not pressed the Hungarian authorities with that speed. It was easy for me because I had people there who came three-quarters of the way to meet me. It could also have been the other way round; then I would have had to work like a berserker. And had there been an uprising, it could have led to the collapse of a large part of the front, for we see how precisely these Jewish uprising movements actually worked.

But what I particularly want to ask is whether you remember planning any operations at that time in France, for example, or Denmark or Holland, or in the southeast as well?

The advisers on Jewish questions were instructed—instructed in the strongest possible terms—to set everything in motion to have the remaining stocks of Jews still resident there transferred. That was arranged, for only in that way can it be explained: so much time had to pass for the fear to become so great, on the Slovak side too. The warning signal of Warsaw, the partisan area of eastern Slovakia, until they then declared themselves ready to transport away the remaining Jews by an accelerated procedure, insofar as they could still be rounded up. A chain extended from Warsaw to the last possible point, that is, until it was no longer possible to operate at all; it went along with the intensified rounding up of the contingents to avoid a second Warsaw.

So is it an exaggeration, or does it correspond to reality, to say that at least in the execution, not in the conception, of the protective measures for the Reich, or rather the hostile measures against the Jews, Warsaw acted like a catalyst, which, where there was still doubt or lukewarmness—

No. Even circles that constantly pestered us with representations because, consciously or unconsciously, they wanted exemptions from deportation on the argument, “We need the workers; we cannot meet our armaments quota”—those who were forever intervening—suddenly fell silent. For these offices too could no longer, and would no longer, afford to run the risk, by pressing their interventions over matters important to the war and matters not important to the war, that one day it would be proved against them: “Had you not intervened then and declared your quota unattainable, this or that uprising would not have occurred.” That then stopped completely.

Could you briefly list those offices?

At home it was the entire armaments industry, chiefly the directors of the large factories. These interventions came constantly from the Speer Office. They also came from the Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, from Göring himself. All of that then stopped. We had only to say, “Will you take responsibility for ensuring that there is no Warsaw uprising?” and the desire to intervene vanished and died away. But that was not its effect only in the Reich; it had the same effect in the other countries. My advisers had a leading entrée in all the countries where they worked.

I cannot say it offhand. We could use Warsaw, and did use it, like a travelling salesman selling an article who displays a special advertising attraction and then sells more easily. In that way we could make the great difficulties or the great amount of idle running in our own administrative apparatus clear by invoking Warsaw. I had to do it too; I was required to point to it, because I myself did not want to, was not allowed to, and could not take responsibility, for security reasons. After all, the Reich Security Main Office was responsible for that.

Do you think Stroop had this photograph album made to show off his heroic deeds? The photograph album was certainly made by Stroop to demonstrate to the Reich leadership, in black and white, the consequences of treating the Jewish question too leniently.

And this photograph album did not go through the official channels and get put before the responsible section officer and case officer to give them a nice picture book. No, the Reichsführer clearly intended to say to his men, “Look, there you have it.” That was why this album circulated.

Do you have any idea who, in the earliest years of your section and later too, when the occupation of Poland made it necessary to seek practical solutions, first came up with the idea of forming ghettos?

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

Do you know who your great opponent in the formation of ghettos was?

No.

Heydrich.

That surprises me very much. It is like this: I do not want to say I originated the ghetto idea; that would be too much honour. In the General Government we already had ghettos. We took them over; they were there already. They were then tightened up. We found that ghettoization by the Jews themselves—

—was exceptionally fortunate from the standpoint of surveillance: we only needed to take over that state of affairs and save personnel. Of course one must not make the mistake of creating large ghettos like Warsaw. I certainly did not have such things in mind, for such ghettos had never existed in practice either. There were Jewish ghettos with 30, 40, 50,000 Jews, but no more. Then, for the first time, a large ghetto was brought together in Litzmannstadt.

It was a section comprising a third of Litzmannstadt; around 200,000 Jews lived there. You say the great opponent was Heydrich. I never heard anything of that. The Jewish old people’s home Theresienstadt was first called the Jewish ghetto Theresienstadt; that was also how the deputy Reich Protector put it. Only later did the RF (Reichsführer-SS) no longer want the name Jewish ghetto Theresienstadt; he called it the old people’s home Theresienstadt.

When did you first propose reviving the formation of ghettos in its complete form?

Theresienstadt was the beginning.

So Theresienstadt corresponds to your suggestion?

Yes, it came about like this. The word “ghetto” had not yet come up when Heydrich summoned me in the presence of his State Secretary Frank: “I have promised that in a few weeks the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia will be free of Jews.” The press people had put that in the newspaper. Now Heydrich began to become uneasy because he saw what he had done. So he sent for me, told me all this, and said, “Something must happen. Eichmann, a proposal.” I arrived unprepared, for I had not been told beforehand what it was about.

Now there I sat, expected to make a proposal to my highest chief. And I made the proposal, the only one I could make: “Ogfr. (Obergruppenführer), give me a town with the necessary land, and I will take all the Jews of the Protectorate in there, in a kind of ghetto.” Then Heydrich said to Frank, “Which town would be suitable? What do you propose?” And old Frank said Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt consisted of Wehrmacht personnel, several thousand Czech craftsmen, all kinds of craftsmen, as is usual in a small garrison town. Heydrich then said, “The Wehrmacht there will be marched out.”

The other inhabitants living there were fully compensated; there was never a complaint about it either. Then Theresienstadt was—my people whom I sent there took over the things from the … of the Wehrmacht, who still had their offices there. With that, Theresienstadt was free, and ghettoization began. That is 1940: for the first time ghettoization arose on Reich soil. In ’39 we marched into Poland; Heydrich was not yet chief and Reich Protector then. We already had ghettos in Poland too, but there the idea did not have to be born; it was there already.

Found among the Jews themselves and retained, they were then concentrated still further: that is, more Jews were moved in with the Jews. The whole thing was now sealed off and guarded, partly with barbed wire, with walls; in places the houses were sealed up, that is, closed up with masonry, and so on. In the small towns in Poland it was often the case that the percentage share consisted of the Jewish population. The Poles, the farmers and so on, lived in the hinterland, but the Jews lived in the small towns. And these Jews were assigned to these ghettos from all areas.

From your knowledge of Jewish physiology, would it be right to say that the protest against the idea of the ghetto and the restriction resulting from it—basically the social restriction, self-restriction—came chiefly from assimilated Jewry, whereas believing Zionist Jewry would have had no objection to the idea of the ghetto itself, or even welcomed it because it protected Jewry, so to speak?

The father of ghettoization was the orthodox Jew, and it had to be the orthodox Jew, because in the east, where the principal pogroms took place in earlier times, it was orthodoxy. In the German lands, where there were also ghettos in the Middle Ages, it was orthodoxy, for Zionism did not yet exist then. There were a few assimilation-minded money changers who came and went among the princes.

At that time the individual territorial princes adopted the same convenient arrangement, this ghettoization initiated by the Jews themselves, because it also seemed quite practical: here they were among themselves, they wanted to remain among themselves, and the non-Jewish part had its peace, for at nine in the evening the Jews closed their ghettos. It arose from the Jews’ need for security. The assimilation-minded Jew, if he preferred living in a Jewish ghetto at all—if he had the choice, he did not live in a ghetto; that contradicted his whole outlook. If we forced him to live there too, he was very unhappy.

The orthodox Jew and the Zionist were happy about it, because the Zionist—because he did not regard it as a matter of protection, but because the Zionist government recognized it as wonderful training in becoming accustomed to communal life. That is why these two groups were in favour of it, and not even a little word of complaint or grievance was ever heard from the Jewish side about it. Dr. Eppstein from Berlin once told me that Jewry was grateful to me for giving it the opportunity to get to know communal life in Theresienstadt, and that this was a wonderful school for these people’s future life in Israel.

It matters insofar as the Jews sometimes present it to the non-Jewish public as though the first measure, or one of the various measures taken by the Germans that led to ghettoization, excluded the Jewish community from the community of the host country, so to speak, and thus led to degradation [?].

Of course the assimilated Jews felt that way; nobody else did, unless it was the non-Jew, who could not put himself into this Jewish mentality at all. The non-Jew may have seen a very unpleasant coercive measure in it. The Jew did not, for he had felt comfortable and happy in his ghetto since medieval times. And I believe that the closed unity of Jewry could never have been cultivated to such a degree had orthodoxy, which provided the leadership, not pressed for ghettoization since the earliest Middle Ages. We have a parallel if you look at Ba… today, or look at the settlements.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Voluntary Swabian settlement… German mother tongue.]

The Story of J. B. is the first book on the subject that I have read. First, in general terms: since I am said to have made the remark about the five million Jews, and since not a single other witness could be found in the former German Reich, which contained seventy million people—perhaps they did not want to find them—and I am now the only German to whom this statement has been falsely attributed, international Jewry must naturally single me out as much as possible, so that its credibility before the public and before history will be all the greater. That is why, not only in this book but in other tomes on the subject, there is this opposition: on one side the RF (Reichsführer-SS) bloc, Becher and so on, which is more or less fighting the other bloc, Kaltenbrunner, Müller, Eichmann.

So here, although these struggles never took place—these struggles must be relegated to the realm of fantasy, to what the opponent wishes—these so-called power struggles between the SS groups, as the opponents call them, also prove that they want at all costs, after my superiors have either been hanged or disappeared and I alone am still here, to single me out, even above the Reichsführer as my highest chief. This is only to maintain the five-million thesis, a thesis that has already been inflated by sixty percent today. That also explains the endless hammering, the endless pounding away at the claim that I did not merely deport, as was my official responsibility, but also killed, for that belongs to the opponent’s case.

I would like to divide my remarks on the book The Story of J. B., written by Alex Weisberg, into two chapters: a) fundamentals, b) particulars. It is a mixture of fiction and truth, and in fairness I must admit that truth makes up the greater proportion. On the cardinal points, however, the author has spoken against the truth. First, I was not responsible for liquidation, nor was Office IV of the Gestapo. Second, I only had to carry out deportations; the Gestapo Office was not concerned with anything else.

Third, in Hungary, for example, responsibility for concentrating and rounding up people for the transports lay not with me but with the Hungarian Interior Minister. Fourth, there was no division into SS blocs, that is, H.H. —Kaltebbrunner. Fifth, the five million Jews killed is a lie. This book is not a factual account that can claim to be accurate. I miss a label on one of its opening pages saying “A novel with a historical background”. That would fit, but not “a factual account”.

The author also leaves himself this escape route in his prefatory note, where he expressly states: “The objection arises that it is impossible to reconstruct a conversation accurately after a decade has passed. The objection is justified, but it applies just as much to conversations that took place ten years ago. Direct speech makes no claim to reproduce the words spoken verbatim; it is only a form of presentation, the shortest I could choose.” It is a Jewish piece of cunning, so to speak, for behind this declaration in the foreword the author can reduce to absurdity every argument that might be thrown at him, every argument that makes him uncomfortable, by referring back to his prefatory note.

It follows that the subjective viewpoint dominates, that the wish is often the father of the thought, and that it seems quite understandable to project things heard and read in the postwar years back into the time of the events. For Brandt does not have the intellectual stature to tell an Alex Weisberg, who had nothing at all to do with the matter, things that he saw coming at the time with prophetic foresight. No, he read them after the war, transported them back, and then foisted them on me as matters dealt with in negotiations and conferences. Take the five million, which Brandt mentions several times in his own way: a figure whose true sense was twisted in my mouth, a figure that was not under discussion at all at that time, a figure he heard later and subsequently put into my mouth. It is sheer nonsense; it is a propaganda statement.

And it did not stop there. Other authors raised the figure to eight million.

The fear I inspired in the Jewish functionaries in Budapest probably arose chiefly from my incorruptibility. If that was why the Jewish political functionaries found me frightening, I can only regret that more Germans did not frighten the enemy, for I always was, and still am, incorruptible towards my enemies.

When I am accused of believing the fairy tale of the Elders of Zion, as Brandt says here several times with reference to the Englishmen adducing proof of the truth and so on, and to his own Israelite racial comrades, I have only this to say: either this is ignorance in J. B.’s judgement, or it fits the author’s presentation as compelling proof. The Jewish political functionaries of all people ought to know, and do know, from hundreds of discussions. They had a hundred opportunities to admire the so-called wall charts (Türken) fastened to the wall in my permanent deputy’s office.

A considerable part was even produced on my instructions, to its own design, by the technical department of the Israelite Religious Community in Vienna. The chart of the organizational structure of international Jewry hung beside the chart of the Israelite Religious Community dealing with the emigration of Jews from Austria. It was made in 1935/36 by the graduate engineer Mildenstein, who was briefly my superior section officer at that time—I was then working on the specialist field of Zionism.

Technical and factual help in producing it came from informants in Palestine, Jewish literature, the results of negotiations with Jewish political functionaries, and so on. I took over this body of ideas in full as a subject of study, which lasted three years. It shows not only extensive decentralization and Jewish party tendencies diverging in every direction, but also the ideological disagreements among the individual Jewish groups and larger groups. For interest’s sake I reproduce this chart, or my own view of these matters, in diagrammatic form. I am referring here to the sketch I made in answer to Brandt’s claim that I believed in the idea of the Elders of Zion. This also accounts for my substantive disagreement with Streicher, who held and continued to hold the opposite view.

The author’s judgement is just as misguided when, against his better knowledge, he says that I was the one commissioned by the RF (Reichsführer-SS) with liquidation. His own comrade-in-arms, Dr. Kastner, knew that, for in the early summer of 1944 he said to me, “Shut down the extermination machinery at Auschwitz.” Since I knew that he was fully informed through his fighting organization, and had also been informed by Becher, I officially told him, for good measure, my—

—area of responsibility, and that of the WVHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office). He then said I could raise it with the RF (Reichsführer-SS). But that was not within my remit, and my authority would not have achieved anything either.

A word about trivialization. I was astonished to find that even in circles where I would not have expected it there was evidently confusion about the areas of responsibility.

[Parenthetical fragment not translated: Weinfl….]

On this I state as a matter of principle: first, until 1941 measures could be taken in the concentration camps only when the Chief of the Security Police, or his section officers, had the appropriate notification sent concerning basic decrees of the RF (Reichsführer-SS), under the underlying laws or the corresponding implementing provisions from the Chief of the Security Police and the SD (Security Service), from the SS WVHA. Only then could the camp commandant’s office take action, apart from exceptions for which provision had been made.

Second, at the end of 1941 the Chief of the SS WVHA received directives about the treatment of Jews directly from the Reichsführer. Or I expressly leave this possibility open too, since only one case was known to me: from the Chief of the Security Police and the SD personally, acting for the Reichsführer. It was the Glo… case. These directives ranged from extermination, through labour deployment, to the release of some of the Jews, such as the whole Kastner contingent and so on.

Third, the order for Section IV B 4, which I headed, was “Deport”, with the exception of the General Government, occupied Russian territory, the Baltic countries and Romania. As for Romania, I must truthfully admit that it was not within my remit. I had forgotten that over the years.

Where the concentration and rounding up were carried out by non-German uniformed personnel, IV B 4 was responsible only for taking over the transport trains and conducting them to their handover at the destination stations named by Office IV. Hungary is finished with now.

Now my individual remarks on The Story of J. B.

The section reference was brought in without consultation. What matters is knowing how far you and your subordinates had insight into areas of responsibility under a different section number, and how it was the other way round: insight into your area of responsibility?

For example, when you had to put a transport together, when a deportation was to take place, how far did you have to take Höss’s extermination capacity into account in order to carry out your transport efficiently? What points of contact were there?

First, I had to maintain constant contact with Höss, that is, with the responsible 1A of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, with Liebehenschel. Third, through the continuing discussions with Pohl.

Similarly, my subordinates dealt with Höss’s case officers or with Liebehenschel’s department. Likewise, the chief of Office IV, Müller, kept in contact with the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, Glücks; and the Chief of the Security Police and the SD with the Chief of the WVHA, Pohl. Discussions took place continually. For before I could begin the practical work, the timetable had to be drawn up with the Reich Transport Ministry, and the possibilities for reception and the capacities of Auschwitz concentration camp had to be ensured. The people there needed to be able to plan roughly what they could take in over the coming months and therefore had to know how much human material I intended to supply to them.

There were doctors assigned to Auschwitz by the WVHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office) who decided which of the people brought in could work. The bulk of them had to work, and whoever could not work inevitably marched into the gas chambers. I knew that too.

So the doctors understood that anyone not assigned to labour automatically marched into the oven?

Yes, quite clearly. Everyone in Auschwitz knew that. It was no secret.

[Account of the Night and Fog decree.]

On that I must say that the Jew Brandt is undoubtedly better informed than I am myself, for there was no Night and Fog decree concerning the treatment of Jews. The Night and Fog decree that I know about was handled by a completely different section. In any case it had nothing to do with the Jews. We rode roughshod over those brothers in broad daylight.

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

A Baron Dieter von Wi… who was supposed to have been the commander for Czechoslovakia—that is wrong. Isi von Fleischmann: making everyone into nobility. Wi was simply the adviser on Jewish questions at the German legation in Pressburg, nothing more.

There never was an SS Ostbf. (Obersturmbannführer) Brunner. There was an Ostf. (Obersturmführer). Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Wunsche is mentioned too. That is right; he was a government councillor with me in Hungary.

Page 86. Mrs. Kastner or Mrs. Brandt—which of the two received the bastinado? He always writes only of his own wife, never of Mrs. Kastner. Now I am confused. Could it have been Mrs. Brandt who came to me after all, the one I thought I should address as Mrs. Kastner because she was always coming with Kastner?

After Brandt flew away, Kastner repeatedly came to you with Mrs. Brandt, and neither Brandt nor Katner even mentions Kastner coming to you with his own wife.

Then if it was Mrs. Brandt who received the bastinado, I must correct myself.

What matters is the characterization you gave of this woman. Now it matters whom it applies to, Mrs. Kastner or Mrs. Brandt. But it largely agrees with these accounts, because Mrs. Brandt came to you with Kastner after her husband’s departure on 15 May.

For someone who knows the matter, it is very galling to read here over and over that they marched and were gassed—that everything that left Hungary therefore inevitably marched into the gas ovens. That is, of course, unparalleled nonsense. It is a deliberate untruth, for the Jew Brandt knows even better than I do how many of the so-called gassed are enjoying excellent health today and submitting the largest restitution claims, and so on, in every country on earth.

But that is a general refutation, and the percentage is so high that a special case concerning competence emerges from the general refutation. For there are more Jews of Hungarian nationality who are supposed to have been gassed than there are who were actually exterminated.

I think we could obtain approximate figures from a refugee from the last Hungarian revolution, but not one from the first wave of refugees, because the first wave were Jews. The present Hungarian Gestapo is almost exclusively in Jewish hands, and Magyars have been put only in subordinate positions. That is also the source of the Magyars’ hatred of the Hungarian Gestapo in the last uprising, because it was enveloped from top to bottom in the sweet smell of garlic, because these Jews have been venting their spite on the Magyar people for twelve years now, from ’45 to today.

So I ask myself: where have all these Jews suddenly come from in Hungary? Where did they come from? A real Hungarian freedom fighter should be able to give a full account of that, better than I can.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Comparison with a little Upper Bavarian village—formerly 20 Jews, today 40 Jews. “Well then, where does that come from? They weren’t gassed after all.”]

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Discussion of questioning the freedom fighter… A Magyar? Statistical question.]

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

The Weiss and Becher business with the aeroplane to Lisbon is correct too.

Page 90—not entirely clear. Gold and jewellery had to be handed over. But to whom? Here it says under point 2: “The Jewish bank accounts were frozen; assets were se…; the Jews had to submit an inventory of everything they owned. Gold and pieces of jewellery had to be handed over immediately.” That is supposed to have been in the negotiations between Wi and Philipp von Freudiger. But quite apart from the fact that my Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Wi had no authority to make such direct agreements with Jews of Hungarian nationality, and that this must have been the responsibility of the Hungarian authorities, I must also point out: when it says here that gold and pieces of jewellery had to be handed over immediately—to whom?

The Grünspan affair, 193…, was taken as grounds for an atonement payment of one and a quarter billion Reichsmark, and furthermore the handing over of all objects of precious metal, precious stones, art objects… The handing over of electrical appliances… furs, woollen clothing insofar as it could be spared, and so on, and so on.

[Rattled off much too quickly by that Austrian.]

But that concerned Jews of German nationality. I am speaking of Jews in Hungary. In any case it was not my Hauptsturmführer’s task to interfere in internal Hungarian affairs. There was no such thing.

But what, in your opinion, happened?

I cannot explain it. These are points concerning events in Reich territory; perhaps he copied them to fill pages. Wi had no right to speak here for the Hungarian horizon. Wi had the task, 43 hours before I was in Budapest, of preparing the way for me, that is, the sheikhs—

—to identify them, to summon the sheikhs, the question of quarters and so on. After that, however, Wi no longer had a frame of reference that could be called the Hungarian horizon; he had only the county horizon.

Page 100. Why does Brandt reproach us Germans, when they had it easier than any country had ever had it under the jackboot of the hated Germans? Why did other countries not take the million off their hands? Were we supposed to take them all? England took fifty families a month. If a people is so wretched that no country on earth wants them, they must not assume that we Germans will simply swallow them. We did everything possible and hawked a million Jews like unwanted goods, but nobody took them. We did everything possible up to 1939, and we even put our own mark at risk to get the Jews abroad.

Page 102—that is correct. I had protective passes issued to the Jewish functionaries in Budapest, insofar as they negotiated with my office or with me. They had to show these to all German and Hungarian authorities, and with their help could escape any harassment and obstruction. I had to do it because of the Hungarian Gestapo, the gendarmerie in the individual counties, and the various German authorities.

Page 104. It is incorrect when Brandt says I was the head of a main department, IV B 4, at the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin.

[The passage is read aloud.]

First, I was not the head of a main department; IV B 4 was a section. Second, I was not Himmler’s plenipotentiary for this area, but the plenipotentiary of the SD (Security Service). The Gestapo Office was not responsible for extermination. The Night and Fog operation is completely off the mark. Nothing was carried out in the greatest secrecy; we had nothing to fear. Otherwise, how would the deal of 10,000 trucks for a million Jews have been possible?

How could I say to Kastner that the Gestapo was not responsible for shutting down the extermination machinery? The RF (Reichsführer-SS) was responsible for that, and they were carried out by Pohl as Chief of the WVHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office). I could say that to Kastner with a clear conscience. Kastner was also informed from other quarters. How often I asked Kastner and Brandt, “What are you interested in? Do you want this or that? Which valuable human material?” Besides, the whole world knew about it, so to speak.

Page 114. When Brandt says I told him, “I cannot sell you all the Jews of Europe, however much money you raise—not yet. Perhaps that will happen one day, but I can let a million Jews go.” The man contradicts himself. I told him I could not give him all of them yet—not yet. He should have left out that sentence; then his gassing stories would have been far more credible.

Page 122. Himmler is said to take a much more humane position than Hitler.

[Reference to the formation of blocs: the SS Reichsführer, Becher and associates—Kaltenbrunner, Müller, Eichmann and associates on the other side.]

Page 125. Further deals and possibly handing over more Jews, and so on—again proof that not all were gassed.

Page 131. And …… SS Ostbf. (Obersturmbannführer) Clages; it was an SS Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Clages.

Page 142. Correct, the evacuations had to be accelerated, but none of those in these accelerated evacuations were gassed once the negotiations had been set in motion.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Pages are missing; throws everything into inaccuracy.]

When the author, on his journey, tells the English why another million would be released after five million Jews had already been killed, he says: “First, these people foresee the approaching catastrophe. They seek a pardon for their crimes. They have burdened themselves with countless crimes against all the peoples of Europe, but no guilt weighs on them as heavily as their guilt towards the Jews.” You must know one thing about that: they attribute enormous power to us.

On this I have the following to say. First, those responsible did not foresee any enormous catastrophe from which they would have had to hide, at least not at that time, to seek favour with our opponents. That was far from our minds. Nor did we burden ourselves with crimes. We did nothing other, even after the armistice, than what other nations have done to German blood in a much more horrible way.

The fairy tale of the Elders of Zion does not count either. That is a trick the author peddles.

[Typed gloss: peddler.]

No, the truth is quite soberly and coldly this: what mattered more to the RF (Reichsführer-SS) in the whole deal were simply the 10,000 trucks for his two SS divisions. In principle, what did he care about the million Jews? He was concerned with his divisions; that was the whole focus of the deal.

Page 216. Lord Moyne, who said to J. B., “How do you imagine that? Where am I to put the million?” A short time later he was shot, just like Bernadotte—

[Cancelled parenthetical wording: yet another ….]

—and Kastner, by the zealots of Zion, as a special correspondent of a newspaper in Tel Aviv once called them.

[Page 152: Bastinado—Mrs. Brandt or Kastner?]

Then presumably Mrs. Brandt. In that case Mr. Brandt must be grateful to the German authorities that his wife is still alive at all.

Page 153. Concerning my work: that I had withdrawn an order by telegraph. First, I cannot recall withdrawing a single order in all my work. I preferred to let it be carried out even if I realized afterwards that it had been wrong. Second, I neither issued nor withdrew an order by telegraph. Third, I never bellowed.

Page 256. That Kastner had wasted too much time on the 1,700 Jews. Kastner did not waste too much time; rather, Brandt had difficulties in his talks with the English, in the period between 15 May and 3 July 1944.

Page 232. What he writes there is the height of lying. It may be that 434,000 Jews of Hungarian nationality were deported to Auschwitz, but that they were murdered there is a flat lie. The question remains: how many were killed, and how many are living happily and cheerfully today?

Page 285. Becher is credited with having said, “I will propose to the RF (Reichsführer-SS) that the gassings be stopped. We demonstrated our goodwill by allowing a group of 31 Jews from Bergen-Belsen to travel to Switzerland.”

The following: there is a contradiction here. A few pages earlier the author states, in the negotiations with the English, that Eichmann would be able to stop the gassings, that I was responsible for gassing and deportation, that a word from me would suffice. Now it is the Reichsführer who can do it if it is proposed to him.

Page 289. Becher had to admit that Eichmann was right, that it had only been a Jewish bluff. There he spoke the truth. After the first fourteen days or three weeks in which this deal was getting under way, I told Kastner frankly that Brandt was a crook who had got himself to safety and that the deal would never come off. I told Kastner clearly that the deportations would automatically be carried out at an accelerated pace. For the Jews it had been … bait. We were not so concerned about the first truck; we only wanted the promise. Brandt had imagined that I, Eichmann, would give away even a single Jew on the strength of that bluff. It may well be that this was very unpleasant for Becher. Becher and I enjoyed proper comradeship, but our paths did not cross on official business.

[Page 292: Concerning the march on foot.]

This march on foot did not take place because Eichmann began to rage in Budapest, but because the Allies, on Brandt’s advice, destroyed the roads and railway stations between Budapest and Vienna with their bombs. All his racial comrades should still thank Brandt for this march on foot: he represented them abroad as a spy, so to speak, and instigated these bombing raids.

What could be more natural than that he should now have to answer for this to Jewish Hungarian blood?

Page 293. “Or does that not suit you? Just do not come to me with your American fairy tales.” This “right?” (Gell) is a Jewish operetta “right?”. It is not my way of speaking at all—made up and er….

I would now like to end the whole matter. I have shown this picture that is being attached to me to various people who have known me for a very, very long time. They say that cannot possibly be me. The rolling eyes of the 175… No, I reject this picture. One could make a photograph of the ears, but only a criminal investigator could do that; these details are too precise. Let us close this unpleasant chapter.

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

No, I do not know about it. It is possible, but I was not brought in.

Among other things, it concerned the deportations of Jews? Following this discussion with the Slovak government, the Slovak government asked the German government to send the relatives of the 17,000 Jews previously deported to Auschwitz and Mei… there as well, to reunite them with their family members? You must know about it. It is asserted there that you first refused, but then went to Pressburg yourself, negotiated with old Tuka, and agreed with him to bring the family members, together with those already in the Lublin area, to 35,000, in 1942?

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

I must remind you that it concerned 1…000 Jews?

For me, a political horizon was decisive, not a paltry 1…000. I never spoke with Tuka, nor did I ever see him in person, only in pictures. I negotiated with Mach repeatedly. I also wanted to work with Mach on the numbers, and did so, to reinforce my adviser in Pressburg, Wi…, who worked with the envoy. Where the envoy and Wi could no longer step in, I stepped in.

[Terrible overlapping talk… please.]

At first you refused to take these people in at Lublin. Only after these negotiations, in May 1942, following Heydrich’s visit on 10 April, did you agree to take in the remaining family members with the others in Lublin.

So I would have shown myself very stubborn over something my chief had already approved? Well, after this repetition of the whole situation… if the Slovak government asked me, I probably did it. I simply cannot say today whether they were taken over or not.

Thank you for the remark about talking over one another.

The important point is this: you remember the deportation of the 1…000? We are now talking about the family members.

My statement of principle: if the Slovak government asked the German government—

—to take in the Jewish relatives of Jews already evacuated as well, then I cannot imagine that a single office of the Reich government would have vetoed it. And I would have been the last person not to receive them with open arms. There would have been no difficulty in receiving them either; I would have had ways of accommodating them.

The matter then did go through. Between 15 May and 30 June a further 1…000 were sent away, bringing the total to 52,000. They all went to Lublin, and then came the halt to sending away the Jews. Of these 52,000, 284 remained after the war.

That is hardly possible. Certainly the number may have been small, for Glo was cautious after the Warsaw affair and did what he could to make room. He was right; I would have done the same.

Do you know about that?

Yes, vaguely. In those years all and sundry wanted to visit the places to which the Jews had been sent. It was not just the interest of the individual governments; even the International Red Cross demanded permission. So I know very well how much work I constantly had, reporting upwards to obtain clarity about what I was officially to set in motion. It was not only Slovakia, but France and the other states too, that suddenly became concerned about the Jews they had hawked to the Reich government like unwanted goods, and wanted assurances that they were being treated considerately.

When did these concerns of the governments become especially pronounced?

They always arose when the transports were being pushed into full swing. The evacuation operations were a matter of curves; I prefer the curve drawings, and each evacuation had its own curve, rising steeply and then falling. But as soon as the curve had passed, the different countries approached the German Reich government to inquire about the well-being of those they had handed over to us, proposing commissions.

It is quite clear: with the naming of the different receiving stations and the drawing up of the timetables, everything was so varied that it was simply impossible to chase after a few thousand Jews in some district or other, especially since these transports were loaded by the various countries without personal papers being sent with them. Generally fifty kilos of luggage.

But I finally managed to put a stop to these ever-increasing requests by the various governments to send commissions. I proposed to the RF (Reichsführer-SS) that a commission of the International Red Cross be sent to Theresienstadt, and Müller and I received that commission. After crossing the border between Saxony and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, we gave them a free hand to negotiate and speak with all the Jewish offices in the camp, wherever they pleased, without our being present.

Did that idea occur to you because Theresienstadt offered little scope for criticism? Would you also have been prepared to invite a commission to Auschwitz?

I was responsible only for Theresienstadt, for the countries made a mistake and the RF was a Jesuit. The national governments have, to the RF SS (Reichsführer-SS)—

—appealed to the RF SS (Reichsführer-SS), and the Reichsführer passed the matter on to his police, to the Gestapo, which was responsible only for Theresienstadt. Had the Reichsführer been less Jesuitical and passed this whole body of files to the WVHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office), a visit to Auschwitz and so on would probably have been unavoidable. For nobody abroad could have guessed that an office or main office outside the police had anything to do with this reception or classification.

So they more or less fell for it. The International Red Cross alone sent a commission to Theresienstadt three times. On the first visit my chief received the commission and passed it on to the Jewish [? administration; handwritten replacement unclear]. On the second and third occasions I had to receive them myself on orders. After greeting them I handed them on to the Jews, and they could talk and negotiate with them for hours, as they pleased, without my being there.

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

Yes, I read about it later in the newspapers. I think one of the commission leaders was called Dr. Dinar. The last one asked me whether the Jews were allowed to smoke. I told him, “No, it is officially forbidden, but they smoke anyway.” But the Swiss exoneration, after their very explicit report on what they had found there, was undermined by people saying from the outset, “Yes, yes, Theresienstadt was only a showpiece, only propaganda.”

Whatever it may be called, it is of no interest to the German police. We had no camp other than Theresienstadt; that was the German police’s camp. The Reichsführer was a thoroughly accomplished Jesuit, to his own advantage. You do not always have to tell the enemy the truth. I always kept my promises to the enemy, even when it was hard for me. That is why I cannot stand being told that I withdrew my order by telegraph. I never did that—but by telegraph! I was not a postal official, after all.

Do you know of a case when you made such a promise and it was hard for you?

I have no example. I did not knowingly lie to them. I can only give you one example that is meant to characterize the whole conduct of my section: I did not shrink from apologizing in uniform, in front of my officers, to Dr. R. Löwenherz for having slapped his face. The slap had been wrong; I apologized. It was at a time when we still had many years to go before the end of the war.

But I do not quite understand why you apologize for a mistaken slap in the face, yet speak of the 15, 20, 30,000 Jews here as a trifle.

We had no personal hatred of the enemy; the whole thing was a political matter. If I had undertaken something on my own judgement, that would have been wrong. It was not my place; I was neither a reckoner nor a judge. The orders I received on the basis of ideological understanding on a global scale were carried out as the order said and as the law says. It was not my place as an individual to vent my spite in any way on a single object, on a single individual. There was no such thing.

The enemy was global and was treated globally. I had no right to slap this prisoner in the face. No one had any right to take personal action against our opponents.

[Examples already cited.]

The order said that avoidable harshness was to be avoided. Quite apart from that, slapping a prisoner in the face while wearing a uniform is not very honorable. And so all personal acts in this field are dishonorable. But making them all march off into the wagons, having them transported away, consigning them to a fate that we do not know, that nobody knows, that even the receiving station does not know—that is something quite different. That is ordered; that is in keeping with the legislation.

But there are reports that you were present at loadings, for example at one where you were present…

I was not present at a single one. I did not have the time. At no transport, neither at its departure nor at its arrival. My accompanying staff could testify to that, or the people I had on the spot who were entrusted with what was happening.

So you never kicked a Jew in the backsi… (Hin…; gap in the typescript), or shouted at him, or pushed him? Never?

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

[Slovakia.]

The whole thing stinks of testimony obtained by torture. Second, that I am supposed to have said such a thing to Wi, and that Wi is supposed to have said this to me—that is improbable. A camel through the eye of a needle…

If I had said that at all, I certainly would not have said that the Jews were being killed there slowly. I would certainly have said that they were being killed there as quickly as possible. The Führer's order spoke of a tremendous acceleration…

Furthermore, the Nu or Luzius may have intervened; Wi may have told me about it. That is possible. But such a statement would be impossible in an official capacity, because I would have stepped outside my remit and made untrue official statements. It really does surprise me, though, if this Luzius made representations in Pressburg in that way, that, on this whole matter, the Hungarian bishop's representative… the then Bishop Muench, who called on me at least twice a month, never raised such a question…

That was not his task at the time at all; it was this Luzius's task. He was the Vatican's representative, instructed by the Vatican to draw the Slovak president's attention to…

…that the Jews whom Tisso had handed over to the Germans were being exterminated there.

You may be right, but here is the point: I received no forceful representations whatsoever from the Roman Catholic Church, at any rate none that occupied me. Why should such an intervention by the papal Nu or Luzius in Pressburg have brought such a string of explanations in its wake? Especially since I tell you that it is impossible—these sentences do not even fit the language used…

I hardly think it would have overstepped the bounds of official conduct:

[Overlapping talk.]

Wi would never have dared say such a thing to me. No: a pack of lies, nonsense…

But one thing is certain: following that, no more deportations took place from Slovakia from 1942 to 1944. What was the reason?

Slovak resistance.

What was it based on?

That is beyond my knowledge today.

Was it perhaps based on knowledge of the killing of the Jews? The refusal of the commission?

Possibly. Now, here is the point. After Stalingrad those fellows talked differently. Their considerations were not humanitarian; they were about covering themselves. After Stalingrad I had the greatest difficulties in all the districts that had to be dealt with. I want to state that expressly. People could not do enough: they could invite me, a minor departmental officer, to ministerial discussions, to unofficial discussions, to private dinners and the like…

After Stalingrad these gentlemen—not all of them—considered how they could turn things to their advantage now that the balance of victory in this war was tipping so heavily against the Axis powers. Clearly, the handling of the Jewish question gave them a welcome opportunity to throw their resistance into the balance. They had done exactly the same thing much earlier. The Jew JB [Joel Brand] does not directly reproach Becher and company with it, but implies that, to make a good exit, so to speak, he throws the whole weight of his personality into the balance at the last minute to save as many Jews as can be saved, so that he can play them as a trump card after May 8, 1945.

Those people had done that much earlier. For if I, the little man, was already saying in 1940 that we would lose the war if we carried on like this, then these people, who had provided themselves with ministerial agents in the individual governments, certainly had as broad a view as I did. Their view probably extended much, much further. I am surprised they let things get that far at all, but that is not my business.

There is another explanation as well—

[Kastner with Wi, from this period.]

—namely, that Wi had promised to stop the deportations of Jews from Slovakia if 50,000 dollars were paid in this case?

Here is the point: Wi is the one who first said anything about my alleged remark concerning the death of five million…

[Comment already given on JB's book.]

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Comment on the Jews' opinion of his personality, his high official position, and so on. Formation of blocs… etc.]

It is quite clear that, if they credit me with such a high level of official power, they also have to elevate as much as possible the man who was my adjutant in Slovakia, from whose mouth these things were undoubtedly extorted, so as to make his words credible not only to the public but also to history.

This is about the 55,000 dollars and the stoppage: Wi and Kastner.

Do you really believe that the RF (Reichsführer-SS), the chief of the SIPO (Security Police) and the SD (Security Service), and the chief of the Gestapo on the one hand, and the chief of the SS WVHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office) on the other, would have stopped an evacuation from Slovakia for a paltry 55,000 dollars—a figure that we raised to a much higher magnitude some time later, to a value of, say, ten or twenty, producing it ourselves in the banknote-forgery workshops? For a paltry 55,000 dollars? We would have had to hang our heads in shame before our Slovak brothers-in-arms.

But towards the end of 1942 there was a further offer of about two million dollars, to obtain a stop to all of them except those from Poland.

But 55,000 dollars just for Slovakia, and two million for all territories except Poland?

No, no, no. I know nothing about it. It was extorted.

Does Wi give Dr. Kastner as his source?

I give torture as the source.

But we have already discussed this matter: the offers made to Wi, or rather the sums he is supposed to have put into his own pocket?

Here is the point. You must not hold me to this statement of mine, if—first, if Wi was already a scoundrel before May 8, 1945, which I do not believe, then it could fit. But I do not believe it. Second, there could be the possibility that some obscure, or less obscure, branch of an intelligence office needed foreign currency, and Wi made some concessions to serve, in his own way, a purpose important to the Reich. But you must remember that sums like these, whether 50,000 dollars or two million dollars, are absolutely nothing on the scale of the Reich, especially since we ourselves later produced banknotes on a far greater scale.

Still, there are two points to consider. First: did it fall within Wi's authority to conduct such negotiations at all? Second: could Wi have had a direct line to the RF (Reichsführer-SS), either through Becher, who had not yet appeared on the scene at that time, or through other people, so that you were not informed at all?

There was no such thing. Wi was attached to the German envoy in Slovakia as adviser on Jewish questions. He could decide nothing; he had to put everything through Berlin.

Could he have negotiated with the Jews there at all?

Yes, if I had ordered it… No, no, no.

Two million dollars is for the Jews in Slovakia as well as those in the other countries.

… million are not even a beggar's penny. Not for all the money, not for all the foreign-currency reserves would I have called it off, unless the RF (Reichsführer-SS) had ordered it. There was no such order. There was just one material order: 'Motorize the 8th and the 22nd Divisions for me.'

[Overlapping talk again.]

Kastner said that negotiations took place with Wi, with Jews in Slovakia.

What business did Kastner have in Slovakia?

Pardon… Kastner traveled to Slovakia quite often.

But he did not pay; he was not responsible for that.

Yes, yes. Fleischmann came from Slovakia to the Hungarians, and she went around with Kastner and with Brandt and Freuddnberg to get the money together. The 55,000 dollars were paid to Wi from there as well.

Where did he put it?

He put it in his pocket. But apart from that, when you say, 'It is impossible that Wi initiated such negotiations without my knowledge and without my instructions,' and, second, that it is impossible that Wi had a direct line to the RF (Reichsführer-SS)—but you give that? Two possibilities: military counterintelligence (Abwehr) or an intelligence service. But how is it possible, then, that without your knowledge and without this direct line to the RF he had a direct connection to some espionage bureau or organization?

It would indeed be inconceivable, but it would be one of the last and only possibilities. But if a man wants to be a scoundrel, then I can, in my official capacity…. If he gave it to an intelligence organization, he diverted it and did so without his office’s knowledge, thereby making himself liable to prosecution. It is also possible that it went through the envoy there.

And Kastner's theory is not so easy to dismiss, because if there was a prospect of raising two million and no more deportations being carried out… And none were carried out for two years. Another point: the two million dollars agreed upon with Wi. The Slovak Jews mobilized themselves somehow with the help of the Hungarian Jews and tried to obtain funds from Switzerland. They apparently managed to scrape together only one million francs, or [?]00,000. Fleischmann then handed this money to Wi. But Wi said that the whole sum had to be deposited with him. The whole sum could not be raised, and after a real struggle by the Slovak Jews for this money, when they failed, Wi cancelled the deal and repaid the advance. That is Kastner's statement and Fleischmann's statement, and you could read it in this book as well.

Could there be something true after all in what Krumey said:

? Or rather: 'Besides Eichmann there are also SS men like Krumey and Wi…'

You are shaking my confidence here in the loyalty to the service of those subordinate to me… But I cannot believe it.

The assertion as such: the money paid over was returned and the deportations started again.

The question is whether such a business proposal was possible or not.

At most, it could have led to a partial concession, as in Pressburg—Becher…

[Oh, this talking over one another.]

It would not have been possible to abandon a general policy for money. That was not possible.

But how do you explain a two-year stoppage from a state like Slovakia, which was completely under our power?

Could there not have been political reasons, with the Slovak government becoming obstinate because of various interventions by outside Slovak circles?

How do you explain this two-year stoppage?

I would almost say it could have been fal… reporting by Wi.

[Terrible overlapping talk: one person starts speaking and another interrupts… Please.]

Why did they hang Wi?

[1945. Slovakia and the Russians?]

I cannot say here that one of my people…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Paltry sums… It was only about the Jews from Slovakia… Two million covered everything. They were not paid.]

Stalling reports from Wi—Wi could get away with that because I trusted him blindly. In 1937, when I traveled to the Near East, Wi was my department head, my superior. We have known each other since 193…. He is one of the few who helped build up the SD (Security Service). When you work your way up from the ranks—I came from the troops, Wi from Danzig, from the General SS somewhere—and you are always together, and have a common master, a university professor from Kiel, you do not mistrust one another. If Wi reported something to me, I believed it. I took it at face value. Everything in the book about Wi and me that speaks against me has stuck in my craw. I take it as a lie.

But if the cases pile up, there may be something behind it after all. So if proof is produced that Wi, behind the back of the Gestapo office in Pressburg—he was a man who knew how to live, who had no affairs with women; his corpulence and physical impotence spoke against that. He was a man who had no use for exertion at all. If I am to pass a negative judgment on him, it is difficult for me. Then the second man in league with him is Krumey, because he said what the other man did. Then the trial against Krumey in Frankfurt could also be a fabricated and staged trial, to increase the Jew's payments already granted to him, of thirteen billion marks. I suggest that too on the basis of this knowledge.

So it would be possible that Krumey and Wi had already been in close contact for years…

If it should be as you have just described it to me, and if the combination were …, then I must state the following. Theoretically—if there was a connection between Wi and Krumey at that time, and, contrary to their official orders, they tried to find salvation in some possible cooperation with the Jews—and if so, the second question arises: if the trial now taking place against my permanent deputy in Frankfurt am Main were a rigged affair, intended not only to uphold the thesis of five million Jews, but to raise the existing five-million thesis still further, perhaps to … million, so as to extract further billions in reparations…

One indication, if it were considered a factor of truth at all, could be what Krumey said to the departing J.P.: 'Besides Eichmann there are also Wi and Krumey.' If that is not a lie, Krumey and Wi have made themselves guilty of crimes against German blood. Then Wi knowingly made false reports, and Krumey worked against me behind my back, figuratively speaking. Then I really could not, because of my ruthless fanaticism, achieve a halfway respectable deportation figure, but not the end result: clearing Hungary of all Jews. Then Wi and Krumey would ultimately share the blame for the Hungarian people mariarische being terrorized today by Jewish secret policemen.

Do you consider it possible, still as a theoretical assumption, that Wi and Krumey supplied you with false deportation figures?

Yes. Now, yes.

Do you consider it possible that when Wi told you, 'The transport left today with 12,000 men,' only 6,000 had actually gone?

Yes. Now, yes.

Was there no check for you, with the final destination telling you, 'Yes, 12,000 have arrived'?

They were not counted.

Let us look at this quite soberly. You have goods to deliver—in this case they were enemies of the Reich, Jews…

The arrival was not confirmed to me, only the handover. That was passed on to me by the escort detachment, and in this case it was the copy from the police official of the country of evacuation, from Wi or somebody, giving the numbers. But it was confirmed only by Wi. I never received confirmation of these figures from Auschwitz. I believe they never counted…

During the two years when transports from Slovakia were stopped, could Wi have been stalling you?

That is what I am saying. This is not about small numbers in an outward transport. It is about something else, about the difficulties in general. Until now I have never considered such grounds for suspicion. Now I go further and suspect a third man: Ademeid(?), who had Croatia. All three were the opposite of me: peaceable, good citizens. All three were proud, cheerful wearers of the uniform. All three disliked being put out. They all gladly did their duty, as long as it did not involve overtime, and all three turned a blind eye as long as they were left their personal … peace and quiet.

All three also had one thing in common: they had good heads on their shoulders. That is why I sent them to those outposts. When I now read things in Jewish literature that I simply cannot make sense of, and when my attention is drawn to individual incidents that I cannot explain, then, when asked, I have to answer that grounds for suspicion are already beginning to arise in my mind. And, given the number of matters involved, it seems to me that this counts against the men concerned.

What worries me at the moment is that Krumey has to go through his trial in this way, so to speak. And I ask myself further: how was he convicted as a lesser offender in the first round of proceedings (Schwungverfahren), when he had given his true name and rank? That is what the newspaper writes: he set up a drugstore; he became a Reichstag deputy for the refugee party—all this although it was known that Krumey was SS OSTPF, that he evacuated the Poles and carried out the settlement in the Warthegau; all this when it was known that he had been my permanent deputy in Hungary. That point could not have been suppressed. And when I put all this together with the statement he made to the Jew Brandt … that Brandt goes on to write: all that was missing was for Krumey to click his heels together as he took his official leave of me. …

If we can find a consistent parallel here on these grounds, a great deal would certainly be cleared up at one stroke. Then the exceedingly swift death that the chief witness Wi had to meet would also be explained. I cannot understand how a man who had already asserted, at a trial on the scale of the Nuremberg trial, that his chief spoke of the annihilation of 5 million—a matter made into a central point by the opposing side—could be allowed to … just a few weeks later.

Apart from that, this question—how many million actually perished—is far too important for it not to be possible that Wi does not enjoy exactly the same life as many of the Jews you gassed. …

From this point of view, what indications are there, and in which years, that could give you grounds for suspicion? Or, thinking back to the years in which these people were posted at important points, what do you remember about things suddenly going wrong? What grounds for suspicion are you referring to when you say that you are beginning to suspect something—…

A latent lack of ruthlessness showed itself in everything. I had [? two] groups: Brunner, Burger, Novak, the two Günthers—those were a few fellows to whom I would read out an order that had been given to me, and it was already done.

Wi, Krumey, Adoleid and Richter were people I first had to convince, or tried to convince, who did not accept everything as it was ordered, or who always still had an if or a but. That made not only me but also my permanent deputy Günther in Berlin thoroughly fed up. Günther himself, whom I must call as a witness in this case, will confirm this for me: he himself, in dealing with individual matters of implementation, which he was entrusted with—that he had great difficulties with this group of people. And when I think it over now, I have to tell you that Wi was never sympathetic toward him, the one who endured and suffered.

For Günther personified harshness. And weaklings like Wi and Krumey did not … Günther. Günther was once beaten half to death by the … state police during the seizure of power, and then spent more time in prison than at liberty. He naturally had to keep his distance from these people.

I used to have very stimulating and interesting exchanges of ideas with Wi. He was intellectually gifted and devoted to history. I loved history myself, as an amateur historian. We once had a lengthy dispute: what will become of the German people, what will become of the German Reich after the death of its present Führer? I told him that the German Reich would then fall apart and the vassals would fight one another. He denied that. This was in 1937, shortly before my departure for the Near East. That was the sort of conversation we had.

As his only privilege, Wi was sent by Heydrich as an observer to the Zionist congress in Bern in 1936. In the meantime Dr. Six arrived as the new office chief. Among others, Dr. Six brought SS Oschf. (Oberscharführer) Hagen with him from the press department. Naturally, new chiefs put their own men into the posts they thought appropriate. So Six put Hagen, then an Oschf. (Oberscharführer), in the place of Wi, then an SS Ustf. (Untersturmführer). Wi was, in a sense, demoted. But even before Hagen took Wi's post, Hagen was sent with me to the Near East. Wi had been dreaming of that for weeks and counting on it.

I also know that Wi said some very bitter and very harsh things, not only about Six but also about Hagen, to whom he had until then been bound by comradeship, but whom he hated from that point onward. That was a human weakness. Hagen later went, I believe through Six, to the institute for foreign studies.

But do you remember that Adoleid, Krumey and Wi in particular displayed a certain su… complex toward you?

Yes, especially Wi. He tried it again and again. Adoleid, certainly not. Krumey tried it in Hungary, from an attitude I could understand in someone who had run an independent office for years. Krumey had to accept several reprimands, because he had only been my deputy and, in police matters, was only to act as my extended arm. As someone who was not a police authority, he was not permitted to have independent actions ex… carried out unless they had my approval.

I had to reprimand him several times. I told him: 'You may not do that. Those are Gestapo matters, and you are not authorized to deal with them.' I also know that Krumey, with whom I personally had a cordial relationship, resented that—to put it bluntly, it stank to him.

Do you also remember once shouting at him in the presence of men of lower rank, so that he later complained to you that you could have given him that dressing-down in private?

It is possible. I am not certain.

Do you remember Wi telling you, 'Give me three weeks after the war'—and he said it to the Allied authorities:

?

Yes, I have read that.

Does it go as far as this: in 1944 Wi told Kastner that you had shown him the plans for the gas chambers in March 1942?

I never had anything to do with gas chambers. I never saw a gas chamber. I am a technician by profession; I would have had to see some sort of drawing. The Gestapo office had nothing to do with it.

But there are two witnesses to that, Wi and Kastner?

No, nothing. I had nothing to do with it. I said before—the first time, I was personally upset when Heydrich sent me to Lublin and the captain there showed me houses he intended to seal airtight. But to this day I do not know how people were gassed at Auschwitz.

It went only so far as Müller sending me to the Warthegau to report to him how the vehicles operating there killed their occupants with exhaust gases. The driver had a peephole, and the doctor could establish whether any were still alive. I was to report to Müller how long it took until these exhaust gases had completely …. It was about three to three and a half minutes. The doctor also invited me to look through the peephole, but I could not. I refused.

None of this belonged to my field of responsibility. I stuck rigidly to my regulations and persistently carried out what I was ordered to do. But this other work was for other people, and I did not concern myself with it. Had I seen it, I would tell you, just as I told you that I stood with Höss beside the Jewish trench where the bodies were being burned. But I never saw this whole extermination process from the beginning. I was not the man for that. Apart from that, would it count less against me today if I had not been there, or more against me if I had been there?

Did Wi, Adoleid or Krumey ever follow such a process from the beginning?

No.

Had we in the Gestapo experienced such a process from the beginning, or been obliged to experience it—and they wisely never ordered us to—we probably could not have continued working with that drive. That was a very shrewd measure by the RF (Reichsführer-SS). I only came to know the true course of it after the war. Even Höss described things to me in the most favorable colors. Only the doctor in the Warthegau wanted to show me the naked truth. All the others who kept me away were the people who had been warned.

And I told you before: my knees shook when, on an official trip, I once saw in some little dump how Jews were being shot down in a pit, and a woman was still holding up an infant. And when you have small children yourself, as I did then—I reported to Müller in my indignation at such a proceeding that the Jewish question could not be solved that way, and that, beyond that, we would be turning our own men into sadists. I said that in writing and orally. And after that—or at least soon afterward—no more mass shootings were carried out.

But mass gassings?

That is humane.

[?]

A division into two was certainly made at a higher level, for one man alone could not possibly have done both.

Granted, you never received an order to see the whole thing from A to Z. But could a kind of curiosity not have arisen: what is being done with them now?

Had it been curiosity, I could have looked through that peephole back in 1942. I refused without the slightest scruple, without feeling the least ashamed that someone might say, 'Aha, this fine gentleman from Berlin…'

Yes, if those people in the truck had been under my command, or the others responsible for the work, I would of course have looked through the peephole. Then I would also have been there from the beginning of the processes, if only to set my subordinates an example by my whole attitude.

But since they were not my subordinates, I had no interest at all. I did my duty and fulfilled my responsibilities.

But you visited concentration camps quite often?

Concentration camps is an exaggeration—the concentration camp Auschwitz…

Did you visit Mauthausen?

Visited? I was interned there myself before marching into Hungary and was not allowed out for eight days.

But surely you were shown some things there?

Nothing. There was hostility between the concentration-camp garrison and the SIPO (Security Police) during those eight days together in Mauthausen. The camp garrison had meanwhile become SS drawing-room officers, competing in their officers' mess with the airs of the Prussian army's Guards officers—and on the other side were we, the people's officers of the SIPO, who flung 'Kiss my arse!' at them.

For we had not only SD (Security Service) men in Mauthausen; we also had criminal secretaries, criminal councillors, police inspectors and senior police inspectors, all in ranks from Ustf. (Untersturmführer) upward. These men looked down on those clowns, those drawing-room officers in the camp at Mauthausen, just as the latter looked down on us. I got on more or less well with only one Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) in Mauthausen. Otherwise we were shunned like the plague. I must tell you that, although I was not the highest-ranking man: above me were Geschke and one other.

Were there Dutch Jews in Mauthausen during your time there?

I do not know. We were not in the concentration-camp area.

Do you not know either to whom responsibility for the fate of those Dutch Jews in Mauthausen had been assigned?

I had other things to do in Mauthausen than inspect the concentration-camp area. I was glad when I—with my quota of preparatory organizational work …. For I had to organize a column seven kilometers long. I sent Krumey with Wi and forty vehicles as an advance detachment with a twenty-four-hour head start. Then I followed the main body with two tankers. I was the march commander not only for the SIPO but also for the Ord. Pol. (Order Police). I had enough to do and no opportunity to enter into closer dealings with Mauthausen concentration camp.

I did not see a single barrack housing prisoners. The Jews I deported did not interest me even at Auschwitz, let alone at Mauthausen.

What about the Dutch Jews?

They had the hardest work there, carrying stone blocks.

But please, they did not… That is wrong…

No, I saw that myself.

The assignments were the responsibility of the concentration-camp commandant's office. Nobody else had any influence. That was Höss's responsibility at Auschwitz and Zierach's at Mauthausen.

But surely you are not going to claim that Mr. Höss ordered on his own authority that the Jews delivered there had to be exterminated?

There is no order at all that Belgian, Dutch or Hungarian Jews have to be exterminated. No such thing exists. There is an RF (Reichsführer-SS) order which reads—and naturally this was amended repeatedly over time: 'Jews fit for labor are to be put to work; Jews unfit for work are to be taken to the Final Solution.' There was nothing else. Neither Pohl nor Zierach nor Höss could decide that. Only the medical commission in each concentration camp could decide it.

Listen · The Reichsfuhrer’s order · 0:15

Against that I must put forward a claim: there were very different categories of work in the different concentration camps.

Yes, that is right. There were. For example, an archduke in Mauthausen had to keep pushing a very large stone block uphill. When he reached the top, he had to let it crash down, then run down and push the stone up again, and so on. That is how he wore himself out, I believe. And do you know who the order came from? From Goering, through the RF to Pohl, and from Pohl to Mauthausen.

[Much overlapping talk: whether or not, this way and that, hard work, heavy work, national or international… etc. Please.]

I must defend myself against that, although it does not fall within the Gestapo's jurisdiction. Nevertheless…

[Overlapping talk.]

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Intellectual Jews were to be exterminated…]

The Jews once killed a number of German soldiers and a number of Dutch formations in the Amsterdam ghetto. After that there was very careful sorting: the far-left Jewish sources were gathered together and taken over in a combined transport. And if an HG could prescribe somewhere that Jew XY—stones up and down…—then it could equally well be that some office head, whether in Holland or in the Reich, ordered these Jews to this or that work. But that also means a denial of your principle: it is impossible to classify people by nation. Then it is a particular transport from Amsterdam in which such a case had been established. One must say that it is this particular transport, because they shot German or Dutch soldiers dead. Then there was a reason ….

Then the RF (Reichsführer-SS) ordered it, and it was proposed to the RF again, when it concerned Dutch Jews, who…

It did not go by nations. Name one nation that was completely exterminated. Not a single one—not even the General Government, although there was an order there… Not even there, where anyone could do as he pleased, since the Gestapo office was not responsible for it either. Nor in the Baltic countries, nor in the occupied Russian territories. Not even there, let alone in the places where the Gestapo had a hand in it.

[Overlapping talk again.]

I had other things to do at Mauthausen. It did not interest me.

[Story about Sonntagsberg.]

There is a Habsburg castle nearby. The Hohenbergs lived there; we paid a visit there. Later I had a connection with the legitimists in Austria, and a distant Hohenberg was with us too. Emperor flower (Kaiser blume)…

[General laughter.]

Around that time I had business in Vienna…

[Overlapping talk.]

An Ustf. (Untersturmführer) Pfeiffer was dealing with the legitimists in Vienna. With this Pfeifer I traveled to a childhood friend of mine, Baroness Ska…, at Achleiten Castle near Strengberg. I knew Ska… As a boy I had had a motorcycle accident near Strengbergen and was left lying with a concussion. An inn belonging to the castle took me in. When Marianne Ska… heard about it, she had the team harnessed, came and nursed me for a few days. Then I was taken into the castle. This Ska… was a relative of the Hohenbergs.

With this Pfeiffer I toured Austria in Rotschild's black limousine. I had to visit all the SD (Security Service) sectors in Austria and give them injections for the solution of the Jewish question. We also drove from Vienna to Linz, and Strenberg lies on the way, as you know. We spent the night there. I was received very ungraciously because I wore the black uniform of an SS Ustf. (Untersturmführer). I then gave Marianne my explanation.

As for her old lady, nearly eighty, there was no need—she did not listen to me at all, she already despised me so much. Marianne then asked me to free her uncle or nephew—or were they two brothers? I said, 'I cannot do that, and I will not do it.' Pfeiffer was astonished at my harshness, since I was lodging there as the guest of a childhood friend, even though he was the case officer dealing with the matter. But I then took an interest in the fate of the people she had asked about, and heard that, on HG's orders, these relatives of the Ska… castle…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Stone example…]

In short, the principle was that the two must die, but must not be killed.

[Question concerning the sentence:]

'Then they were taken to the Final Solution?' That says quite plainly that they were exterminated.

Yes, if I said it that way, then that is what I meant.

But our thesis from the beginning has been that it was the Final Solution from the moment they were rounded up, deported, gone… We have always said that the Final Solution always—not as the Jewish side claimed…

[Explanation of the Final Solution:]

At first it was called the solution of the Jewish question.

The solution of the Jewish question crystallized over time into the term Final Solution, namely from the moment Germany encroached on Austria. Already in Austria and the Sudeten region it was called the Final Solution of the Jewish question. Under that term, which appeared on all file memoranda and so on, physical extermination was of course not meant—only the final solution. That was the expression suggested to me, in a manner of speaking, following Herzerl in his book The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat). This book first gave me the intellectual impulse that I must help my people, and that the opponent could help find the solution.

People were looking for a solution; they were looking for a position of power. From that position of power I took a point and threw it in, threw it into the scales, to meet Herzerl halfway through Adolf Boehm. Through his solution of the Jewish question we reached a final solution for both sides. Then later, when physical extermination was ordered from the end of 1941, that intrinsically harmless expression, Final Solution of the Jewish question—in the sense of final satisfaction for both sides through emigration, elimination (Eminierung), departure from the people—was used to camouflage physical extermination.

In other words, is the thesis that the Final Solution is only camouflage for the extermination of Jews?

In itself, yes. An example, a document, a letter in Germany, quite simply—as soon as the word Final Solution is added, it means extermination. But all emigration, everything that went through Kastner too, all the files had the same term: Final Solution. Everything had the same term. Everything that emigrated and so on has nothing to do with extermination. So Final Solution is an umbrella term. A piece of bureaucratic jargon; that must be clear.

[Slovakia:]

November 1942: a proposal from the SS HA (SS Main Office), from Ogf. (Obergruppenführer) Gottlob Berger, forwarded through Grf. (Gruppenführer) Müller to the RF (Reichsführer-SS), to raise the necessary funds to set up an SS division in Hungary. To sell emigration permits to Slovak Jews living in Hungary?

I cannot remember, but I will not deny it.

In November 1942 an order is issued on the basis of a report from IV B 4 a…

One moment: family support for those living in Ba…, for the relatives of men in the 8th and 22nd Divisions. Yes…

[General overlapping talk. The contents of the report are read aloud; typed as notes in the transcript: among other things, old Jews, emigrating Jews, 100,000 Swiss francs, (untranslated typed word: versulgen)… etc.]

The families of the SS men from the Beuern (unclear typed word) and from Pa… were to receive payments. This support for the families was to be raised, as it were, within the country itself, by the Jews. But who gave the initial impetus, and when, I do not know. The matter itself is correct…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Account of a fine gentleman, formerly… of the SS…]

[Typed as notes in the transcript: 1942–44, no deportations.]

[Typed as notes in the transcript: In 1944 Slovakia was practically, in military terms—]

[Typed as notes in the transcript, continued: Occupied by the German Reich after partisan activity had decreased.]

[In eastern Slovakia.]

Are you aware of that?

Yes, to that extent. Not the visit by HH (Himmler), but that Slovakia was then combed out completely in a final roundup. The deportations followed immediately, in September and October 1944, to Sachhausen, Stuthof, Theresienstadt and Bergenbelsen. For that reason a large proportion of those Jews survived the war. The Jews from Slovakia survived the war because the RF (Reichsführer-SS) stopped all exterminations in 1944, probably in the summer. Auschwitz then had no room left, and all the Jews subsequently evacuated had to be distributed according to the space available in the camps, which was announced by the VB HA. That is why the Jews from Slovakia were distributed among the individual camps, each of which had to take as many as it had room for, because there was no longer any physical extermination.

Theoretically?

No, in practice too—apart from individual cases, of course. They had my own negotiating partners killed. It was not Wi or Krumey who caused that; my own Günther took them away from me. And in Vienna it is Ebener who is responsible for Stoffen's death. Ebner could not forgive me for one thing: Stoffen had passed on information to me concerning the Vienna State Police.

While I was in Hungary, the very peaceable Dr. Ebner had Stoffen arrested on the pretext that he had prepared an escape attempt, which he never had, and sent him to Auschwitz. Höss came to me: 'What am I to do with him? He worked with you before.' 'Leave him be. I have given him a broom; he is to sweep the yard. Just let him go on sweeping.' When I came again, Günther had given the order to kill Stoffern. This was only an example to show that individual cases still occurred after the general order to stop the exterminations.

Now it is claimed that there were two sides.

But Brandt says the RF, Becher and company on one side, and Eichmann, Müller, Kaltenbrunner and company on the other.

We have Berger, Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann—Wi and Becher.

Why do you put Berger in the compromising transigente group? He is precisely the man who wants family support for his volunteers… exemption, so that he can get the money in. That is a contradiction.

That is no further contradiction than this: when Slovakia was occupied, Berger became Wehrmacht commander there. Then Hoefler was appointed. Berger declared unconditional deportation essential to the war effort because … was made up of partisans… Jews had fled from the purely Slovak Jewish labor camps, which were run very loosely, gone into the mountains and played at being partisans.

That is regrettable, but it was never done. Jews who had converted to a Christian religion were exempt from deportation—not only in Slovakia, where a priest was president, and that priest approached me personally and said, 'But leave my Catholics alone.' In all the other countries too, in France as well, in Germany. Those were the so-called non-Aryan Christians. They even had an association in which this rabble was registered, and they were not touched at all. We would have burned all ten fingers.

One moment. What stood in a Jew's way, then, of going to some parson?

Nothing at all stood in their way. Do you know what the Jews did? They married. They took an Aryan 'way out' (Ausweger), then went abroad and got divorced. You could do nothing with that legislation, nothing at all. All you could do was watch.

They did it everywhere. It runs into the tens of thousands. We could do nothing about it; the Nuremberg legislation stood in the way, as did all the Jewish legislation on the part of the Jewish groups in the various other countries. They all adopted this provision for union with Aryan Christians. That is why Bishop Muench, the permanent representative, kept coming to me. Local abuses had occurred, that is quite clear, on the part of the State Police and regional headquarters, and they were cleared up—or were not. That is why Muench came shuffling in with long lists, and I had all these matters put right by teleprinter.

Did that not strike you in any way?

Of course it struck me—all these marriages.

But could you not intervene somehow? Did the Jew not have to have been baptized for at least so many years?

An example: if I, a non-Jewish German national, had married a Jewish woman at the registry office when this loophole in the Nuremberg legislation was recognized—perhaps she offered 20,000 Reichsmarks, or offered nothing, a love match—if I had married this Jewish woman, then in later years the German-blooded partner was taken into protective custody. Nothing more.

But if the Jewish woman or man found a Jew of foreign nationality and he married her, there was nothing to be done. The Nuremberg legislation provided no solution, and we had to abide by that until May 8, 1945.

You have no idea how many Jews went underground in this way?

An exact figure is impossible. There must be tens of thousands.

Very well, then. The end in Slovakia in 1945 is said to have been as follows: Georges Dunand, who had been staying there, helped many Jews flee and hide until the Russians came, with help from Kastner, again from Budapest.

Kastner darted back and forth, to Switzerland, back to Hungary.

But he did a thorough job. He handed over all the Jews to me without a single shot being fired, without my noticing the slightest demonstrations, without—apart from the Hungarian gendarmerie, whose strength I do not know—without my having to provide even a single man except my advisers on Jewish affairs. He handed them over to me. I cannot give the exact number.

Now, this man who made my months in Budapest so agreeable and gave me relatively little trouble—should I be ungrateful to such a man? Kastner naturally had every freedom of movement. If Kastner managed to drive Pohl into fits of rage—and here what Brandt attributes to me is correct—if Kastner brought it about that Höss repeatedly came from Auschwitz to Hungary and begged, wringing his hands, for fewer people to be transported and the transports to be better equipped; if Kastner managed to serve up my residence on the Schwabenberg with more or less pleasant desk work—if I had such good Jewish confidential agents, then this Jewish confidential agent could claim some thanks. I could repay him only with personal freedom of movement.

I had instructed the border posts to let Kastner pass. These were the borders adjoining Hungary. Only for Austria did I have to be asked. The borders with Slovakia, Romania and Poland were, I believe, open to him.

The commander of the SIPO (Security Police) in Slovakia—Witiska?

I cannot say anything definite about that. I do not know. I had my adviser with Ludin. The SIPO commander in Slovakia was no concern of mine. It may be that I no longer remember him because he was of secondary importance to my work. Slovak agencies carried out the concentration and registration in Slovakia.

[Overlapping talk.]

The highest authorities I had to take into account in Slovakia were Mach and Ludin. I visited nobody else except once, when Tiso asked for me, and I came. Those three people—I had no official dealings with anyone else in Slovakia.

One moment. The following police bodies were subordinate in some way to the Reich Security Main Office: first, the police attaché; second—

[Unintelligible on the recording.]

Third, Anton Brunner.

Brunner was the reinforcement for Wi. He too was not subordinate to the commander. There were different arrangements in Slovakia. The Final Solution of the Jews there was conducted through the Foreign Office, hence the adviser on Jewish affairs at the German legation. So Wi was the adviser on the Jewish question. Then there was the commander of the SIPO and the SD (Security Service), and he had the desk officer of Office IV, the Gestapo, and he had the officer for Jewish affairs—

That is none of my business…

No. Wi, the man seconded by the Reich Security Main Office, specifically as attaché, was the only person here who was to solve the Jewish question in Slovakia in agreement with his envoy. What the commander may have done with his section head does not concern me. He could do nothing other than what the attaché sent by the Reich Security Main Office to the envoy had ordered him to do.

No…

I am speaking now of autumn 1944, of the moment when a commander of the Security Police from our side was there, and a Wehrmacht commander. Slovakia was no longer autonomous then. I am speaking of the time when the last deportations were still being carried out. There was a commander of the Security Police, and he had a case officer from Office IV, the Gestapo, who dealt with Jewish matters. And the man is in BA, and we want to question him…

[Typed note: Surer (?), Austrian …]

[overlapping talk]

If a case officer from Office IV is working in a country where I have a man from my Main Office stationed, then you can believe that the commander's or commandant's man has no say unless my man gives him the authority. Wi gave him orders; that is quite clear. For Wi represented the central authority in Pressburg, whereas the commander's section head represented the subordinate authority.

You are contradicting yourself here. You said the other day that you had not the slightest influence over the commanders of the Security Police, that they took orders from the RF (Reichsführer-SS)… So it is just as possible in Slovakia that they received their orders from a higher office.

But I said that the commanders receiving orders from the RF (Reichsführer-SS) were individual cases. The RF (Reichsführer-SS) liked to intervene personally, very often in the most junior matters, even going so far as to overturn his own general decisions and reduce them to absurdity. That caused us great difficulties.

[Typed note:?]

No, you wanted to whitewash yourself by saying: “What the commanders did did not concern me at all. I had my individual representatives, but the commanders did as they pleased within their own spheres of power, on the strength of what they received from other, higher quarters.”

That is rubbish. Dannecker was with the commander in Paris, so how can I have contradicted myself? My Dannecker was my detached officer with the commander. In Paris he was exactly what Wi was with the envoy in Pressburg. If the commander had said to Dannecker, “Shut your mouth,” Dannecker would have had to shut his mouth. He would have gone to Berlin, and the moment he entered the Reich Security Main Office he would have been the case officer for France.

In that capacity he would then have instructed the commander in Paris, through official channels, to do it. Then he would have gone to Paris and said to the commander, “What am I to do now?” Meanwhile Knochen would have received a letter from the Reich Security Main Office, specifically IV B 4, bearing Dannecker's file reference. He would have said, “Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer), I have meanwhile received a letter from Berlin. We do have to do it the way you said.” That I myself, to Dannecker …

You do not know the subtleties that were customary in the Gestapo office.

Yes, but you made an exception for France last time.

[wild overlapping talk]

Now, Comrade Sassen: last time you claimed that the Higher SS and Police Leaders, the commanders and so on could naturally do as they pleased, just as it suited them: “I had nothing to do with that.” You also said that in France, thanks to the fortunate combination of your section head also being the local commander's section head at the same time, he could be very effective.

[overlapping talk]

No… I will give you another example: Holland.

How was it in Holland? Where was my government councillor Zoepf? Where did he work? With the commander of the Security Police and the SD (Security Service) in The Hague. And if that good commander in The Hague had not shown a great deal of generosity from the outset, and if Zoepf had not been his very close friend—if things had been different in that way, and if there had been disagreements—Zoepf would have gone to Berlin and done exactly what I just described with Dannecker. There are more examples.

The central point is this: yes or no, within a commander's area, could a man from your section independently make suggestions to the commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service) that had any force in implementation? Or whether you, your man, and thereby your section too, were in principle not involved in everything the commander arranged…

[overlapping talk]

So-called advisers, and there where commanders were stationed who were in no way subordinate… Yes… and so on. But I had nothing to do with that. They received their orders directly from the RF (Reichsführer-SS)…

That is quite true. The commander of the Security Police and the SD (Security Service) had to come to report and receive orders. Where did he come? Not to me, never. Although a commander had the same rank as a section head in the Gestapo office, because commanders came from those section-head posts; they were transferred back and forth. No, to receive orders he went first to the chief of the Security Police and second to the office chiefs—not just the chief of Office IV. He also went to Ohlendorf, because in his command area he had to represent all seven offices of the Reich Security Main Office for his country.

That was why he was the chief of the Security Police there, namely Heydrich's delegate, his attached representative for France, Holland and so on. Never to the section head. Now a practice developed out of receiving orders and reporting in person: from the chief of the Security Police as well as the office chief or office chiefs—and in special matters the commander was also summoned to the RF (Reichsführer-SS)—he received his orders in general terms, while their implementing provisions were left to the individual sections.

That is, he was instructed to approach the section heads about them. Hence the twofold possibilities from that vantage point, just as I had them downward: from there upward, from me downward. Thinking it through carefully, it was a diabolical opportunity for the Ex… to justify itself to foreign governments in administrative-law terms, as need or opportunity arose, or to interfere. That must have been an opportunity Heydrich intended.

Those are Jesuitical cardinal questions, and they strike at just one person: Heydrich. You can see how everything meshes like little cogwheels and how it could be adjusted according to whim. I could work downward just as carefully as they worked upward. Whether it was a commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service), an envoy, or Wi, it made no difference at all. They could work upward; Wi could even work over the envoy’s head if he wanted to…

[murmuring in between]

I could not give the commander orders either. He came to Berlin, to the chief of the Security Police, to the office chiefs, and in special cases to the RF (Reichsführer-SS). These people were told through the higher chain of authority—through our chain of authority—what they had to be told. There was no section head who had another official in the country alongside the commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service), except me, of all people. Nobody else did.

So I could play things however I wanted. For example, I could go to Müller and say, “This Knochen is coming now. Tell him he must do the thing in such and such a way.” That happened. Then Müller, without my having to open my mouth at all: “Here, Konochen, go to such and such a place and deal with this.” That made it easier to get what I wanted, an easing that benefited Dannecker and came back to me through Dannecker's reports. It was exactly the same in Slovakia; it will have been the same everywhere…

[overlapping talk]

…because I had no authority, I had to use back channels. But the back channel was my own office chief. I could not send Knochen any Bukas, or make demands. The office chief had to press it on Knochen when Knochen made his personal report to the office chief. That is, he had to work on Knochen so that Knochen would carry it through. I could not shout at Knochen about it… Please, let us take another example. Why was I repeatedly sent to the various countries? Because there were difficulties. I could not give instructions. I could enforce the wish and the will of the RF (Reichsführer-SS), the wish and the will of Kaltenbrunner or Heydrich, the wish and the will of the chief of Office IV, who was the one most feared by the commanders.

Müller was feared even more than the RF (Reichsführer-SS). So when I threatened a commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service) with the chief of Office IV, he gave in and promised to do as much as possible. I probably then said, “Then I ask you to do the very most that is possible.” This came about directly in the form of direct missions, never derived from authority to issue instructions. There was no such thing. I could not instruct commanders. The Ex… side was handled quite differently from the intelligence side…

The RF (Reichsführer-SS) went about it very cleverly. He kept his entire police out of the extermination of the Jews, with one exception: Lu… [?]. Otherwise he left the Security Police and the whole police out of it, and transferred it to bodies remote from the police. That was very clever. It is not in itself a task for the police, when I think how, not long ago, the chief of the German Security Police was president of Interpol. The police could not allow themselves that, and did not allow themselves that. That is why the RF (Reichsführer-SS) also left them out. The police are there for registration work, and also for concentration work—

It was also there for loading, for transport, for escort. It is the maid of all work. But the RF (Reichsführer-SS) kept his police out of the work of physical extermination, and for this measure had a body at some remove, one that did not have to observe tradition or pay attention to decrees, ordinances, laws and so on.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: The police are your friend and helper. Example: words of the RF (Reichsführer-SS); English system; Hubertus peace.]

What is meant by the English system?

I don't know… Bumping people off without anyone hearing it.

Operation Reinhardt?

An economic operation, an operation to take over and secure the property of Jewish organizations in all countries. There was an administration and disposal office in Prague, and in the Czech lands too; in the General Government, the Governor General, certainly; and in the other countries, the various governments. I cannot say any more… We were never involved in the purely economic side.

We have already discussed how, according to a certain quarter, the whole Jewish matter—under the heading that Goebbels and Heydrich had been its real driving forces, whereas Himmler carried out Hitler's categorical order only after prolonged reluctance. What do you think of that?

As for my position on the formation of blocs, one has to make a very fine distinction here. We cannot simply say that the RF (Reichsführer-SS) carried out AH's (Adolf Hitler's) order very reluctantly… Now, the RF (Reichsführer-SS) did not carry out the order exactly. We can see that with the Jews in Hungary: he had negotiations conducted. By rights, once a Führer order has been given, there is no negotiating afterwards. In principle it makes no difference whether I negotiate with the person giving the order or with the person I am supposed to work with.

The RF (Reichsführer-SS) had those negotiations conducted, let us say, under the pressure of circumstances. And I certainly believe that his original thought was to motorize his two SS divisions. When the other offices and all those people learned about it—whether the Abwehr (military intelligence), whether …—they scented opportunities. Perhaps they wanted to fill their thin purses with foreign currency; perhaps one or another was personally open to bribery; perhaps, recognizing how the war would end, they wanted to secure themselves a so-called easy way out.

It all came like a long pent-up thunderstorm that had already begun flashing here and there: in Holland, for example, or in the West generally, when the Reich Marshal had various works of art requisitioned, not only from Jews. Some of those doing the requisitioning were great art experts, and they could offer the buyer an Equa…. As a rule it consisted of all the permits concerning emigration and so on. So there were already the so-called economic hyenas, lying in wait wherever something could be squeezed out of the Jews. They were always people who wanted to cover themselves on both sides. But that was everywhere by then—

Now we must look at this matter from the RF's (Reichsführer-SS's) point of view. Now, if we pick the matter apart, it is possible—the opponent, who knew nothing of the RF's (Reichsführer-SS's) original wish to motorize the two divisions, had to think that two blocs had formed. He knew nothing; he only knew that the RF (Reichsführer-SS) would bargain and other offices would not.

[Cancelled typed note: A tomcat is yowling pitifully in the background.]

It is incomprehensible to me, however, why this formation of blocs is supposed to have meant that the RF (Reichsführer-SS) was on one side and people directly under his command on the other, working against him. You know, at best that would have ended in a concentration camp if the RF (Reichsführer-SS) had found out. Or can you imagine anything else? No, neither can I… And I thought I understood—when I have to acknowledge Jewry's efforts here—to do everything to make the high number of allegedly exterminated Jews credible, not just for the present but also for the future.

Do you know whether, several years before the war, a plan drawn up by Heydrich down to the smallest details was prepared and ready for the so-called solution of the Jewish question in every respect?

No, I would have had to know about that. But if that means the ongoing efforts to solve the Jewish question, which have to be divided into individual complexes—if that is what is meant—then I must indeed say yes. That includes emigration; the second part, another desperate attempt to create a Jewish territory, Mad. (probably Madagascar), and later in the Lublin district, all of which failed; and then the other concentrations, which ended with the great transports to the concentration camps. But there was never a fixed general-staff plan according to which we marched. The moment dictated these things.

So could it also have been the case that up to 41/42 this plan existed under the name “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”?

No, in no way whatsoever.

Does Heydrich have a plan at all?

No, there was never any such thing. There was never a general-staff plan according to which, so to speak, we marched. Nobody asked for one, nobody worked one out, nothing.

But Heydrich was surely entrusted with the Jewish question in some way at the Wannsee Conference or at other conferences?

Yes, Heydrich obtained formal confirmation from the Reich Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan. He was authorized to set the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in motion, to take it over. Yes, that did happen. I was already in Berlin, because I had to help work the whole thing out. It kept being sent back; it kept circulating in other hands and so on… That was about 1940, when the appointment for Heydrich arrived, signed by Göring.

And then he has no far-reaching plan either?

No—that is not right.

Does it help you at all with Operation Reinhardt if I tell you that this operation began after Heydrich's death and was called Reinhardt in his honor, so to speak?

No, I don't know that.

Before the invasion of the West, was a plan drawn up at your office at the prompting of some higher office, or shall we say—

—or were directives collected so that particular Jewish and Masonic documents, property and so on could be secured in good time?

As for Freemasonry, I believe nothing was initiated, because Freemasonry had become uninteresting, in the Reich too, everywhere… No, but otherwise you are right. An attempt was made to secure the necessary archival material. And I still remember the Jewish Alliance. It had published a newspaper, and that newspaper had found quite a considerable response in Germany. We thought it was a very important affair. And then the whole Jewish Alliance came… to Paris, and the people who entered Paris from the commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service) set about searching that establishment.

I still remember a report arriving; Dannecker also gave me that report orally. Our people were utterly astonished at the organization's small, unimposing, insignificant-looking apparatus. It was a back-alley outfit of the first order; it was nothing, nothing at all. And with that I can answer your question myself, by confirming that Jewish political organizations in the West were indeed investigated, undoubtedly with the agreement of the relevant French authorities. Unlike Holland: I believe we did that on our own authority there.

Do you know from that time, or did you receive any indications suggesting that in France the registration of Jewish property, or documentation and so on—in general, the Jewish question—could be resolved so quickly because the French police had already done some preparatory work, so that the Germans could set to work immediately in cooperation with the French?

That is very likely, because we had no material at all to find in France. That is, the material was as meager as I have just told you. Our intelligence service, or rather our confidential agents, had worked so poorly that we had imagined this organization to be something quite different. I also believe its importance had been greatly inflated from one quarter. If we had gone to work in France with our relatively meager documentation, it would probably have been a fiasco. Only through the French police, who cooperated a full hundred percent, could that success be achieved.

Near Paris we had—there is a large prison there, and the French police brought the Jews into it, and from there they were evacuated. A French commissioner was there, responsible for the whole matter. He was also introduced to me, and we exchanged a few courtesies. The French police needed no instructions; they would probably have objected to receiving them. The French police were much more anxious to preserve their sovereignty than the gendarmerie in Hungary, for example. Here the government watched over everything much more strictly.

But my question is mainly this: on the basis of what evidence can you make it plausible that, on the French side, work on Jewish affairs had already been going on long before the German invasion, so that after the Germans invaded it was possible to proceed quickly and at speed?

I tell you, the evidence is that, without much pushing or elaborate negotiations, a so-called completely filled prison camp was placed at our disposal, with a commissioner at its head.

But what I mean is, what indications are there that the French police, for example, had a kind of special section in which Jewish data were brought together? Or rather, what indications are there that the French were prepared? How can one picture the French police having a section before the war for Russian nationals, or even German nationals, with a very particular field of its own? Do you think something similar existed for the Jews?

Without doubt, since the S… —the Second Bureau was for the Wehrmacht, and the S… was of interest to us, the Security Police. We worked with them. But I cannot give you precise descriptions. I can only say that Dannecker stepped into a ready-feathered nest there and did not need to press much advice on anyone. He could work quietly, and as far as I remember was received everywhere with open arms. He also had his responsible French colleagues with whom he ran the whole thing—that is, they ran it. But since Dannecker was in Paris, he had to maintain constant contact and liaison. I cannot tell you any more. It was too subordinate, too far down the chain… What mattered to me was that everything worked.

But it is quite conceivable that active espionage by Jews in favor of the Third Reich before the German troops invaded somehow prompted the French police to register Jews specifically, or at least to do preparatory work of that kind, so that everything could go so smoothly afterwards?

Is there any literature on that?

No, not directly. But it would be interesting to know—if one could establish, for example, that the Third Republic, democratic France, had done exactly parallel preparatory work on the Jewish matter, whether for police reasons or other reasons, thereby making registration easier afterwards?

I can only give the example that we—the prison camp with the commissioner—

Yes, but that was after the invasion. What interests me is what may have happened before the invasion. That is important…

Dutch police: immigrant Jews were registered quite precisely and also watched quite closely.

Those would be the important indications I lack for France: how it was done there…

Did you hear at your office about the Jewish documentation found in France, a very large collection, above all from Sant…, that this formed the basis for the higher school in Frankfurt am Main, the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, which was opened on 26 March 1941 by Rotenberg?

With which the Security Police had nothing to do. Neither it from us, nor we from them—

The Institute for the Jewish Question in Frankfurt am Main, 1940/41. Were you surprised—

—that we, Office IV, had absolutely nothing to do with it. On the Security Police side, responsibility for that theoretically and academically working Rosenberg institute lay not with Office IV but with Office VII, which took the lead. That was quite clear, because both dealt with ideological opponents from the scholarly side. I myself came out of what later became Office VII. Office VII's principal task was to gather knowledge, and that took place in peacetime.

At the time when that apparatus in what later became Office VII—earlier it was called Office I; that is how it began, under Str. (unresolved rank abbreviation) Brandt—and as the problem grew larger and the man could no longer oversee it, Professor Six came in as well. Then that apparatus ran at full speed, because the Ex… apparatus floated along on a peacetime, political footing. Only with the outbreak of war—indeed, even the emigration apparatus had always held a balance between the ex… and scholarly research. But with the outbreak of war, activity in the scholarly sector, Office VII, sank to a low point.

First, that office had already recorded the essentials concerning Jews and so on and had recognized the opponent in his various forms. This material was then taken over in full as a tool by the ex… sector, and dealt with ex…, so that the ex… were now running at full speed. Therefore the executive apparatus (Exkl. App.) of the Security Police and SD (Security Service) that dealt with these matters naturally had neither time nor opportunity, neither inclination nor occasion, during the war, to waste time over Rosenberg's office for research on the Jewish question in Frankfurt.

Office VII naturally had the lead in maintaining contact. If we had encountered anything unclear, we would automatically have turned to Office VII about it. If they could not have dealt with it fully, they would have consulted either their other contacts or the office for research on the Jewish question. So I, who was taken out of that scholarly circle in 1940 and transferred in 1940 to the executive body (Exkl. Koerper), no longer had any connection with it.

[Typed topic cue: Alliance Israel…?]

That was supposed to have been a small outfit?

Yes, a very small, meager outfit.

Impossible… They had a library of 400,000 volumes alone…

That is possible.

Far larger than the rabbinical school, far larger than the Liebschütz, than the Rothschild collections…

That side did not interest me. I looked at that side too only from the standpoint of the ex… body, not as a member of Office VII. When I entered Vienna, for example, there was also a relatively small affair with an enormous library. My assistants transported some 80 to 120 crates of books, but they were large books. Back then, when I was still in Office VII, one of our first measures was the confiscation of libraries and archives. They were brought to Berlin, and they were put in the cellar of the part of Office VII where the museum was…

…in which the archive was located, near Fehrbelliner Platz. I worked in that office for half a year. There were 100,000 of those volumes in the cellar. We had a librarian there, who I believe came from the State Library in Leipzig, working on the cataloguing. He probably never finished it, because the war came and the personnel were taken away from that work. From my standpoint, from the ex… work, the affair was a misfire, because we did not obtain the material we had hoped for. But that is not to say that this ideological structure may have been significant in ideological terms. That is not what I mean by it. Had I been in Office VII, I would probably have told you the opposite of what I am telling you now.

So you had to secure Jewish libraries even before the war? Your section—

Yes, of course, but not the section; I was not in the Secret State Police Office then. Confiscating the libraries—the practical part, sealing the libraries at their doors—that was probably the task of the Gestapo in Office IV. A criminal police officer was sent there; that was part of the overall registration. He stuck the Gestapo symbol, the …, on the door. That official seal was then broken by members of Office VII, because the material had been confiscated for them. I still belonged to Office VII at the time. I had to carry out the first securing of the libraries in Austria.

In spring 1938 I was seconded from the Reich Security Main Office, SD (Security Service), to Vienna. Until then I had been the case officer for Zionism and neo-Zionism, under Six. My department head had been Hagen, Six's colleague. My assignment, for which I had prepared in Berlin, was— I arrived only 14 days after the German invasion troops, when the Security Police personnel and so on had long been in Vienna and were already spreading throughout Austria according to a plan. We had prepared the Austrian operation on index cards, regardless of rank or position, working round the clock in three shifts, about four or six weeks before the invasion of Austria.

My colleague, the graduate engineer von Mildenstein, had designed two enormous card-index tables for the Reich Security Main Office. They were a huge rotating drum, and each of these tables held, I believe, 500,000 index cards. Using a particular punch system, the people sitting at these tables as if at a piano could turn the huge drum by pressing keys. It stopped, and through that hole system they had identified the fellow in question. The categories included Jewish functionaries, Freemasons, and every ideological field you can imagine.

Everything the SD (Security Service) and the Gestapo regarded as yielding information was recorded in those enormous drums. Using that punched-card system, we worked on the Austrian affair in three shifts, regardless of rank, sitting on benches like schoolboys. We wrote the index cards, insofar as the SD (Security Service) fellows could type. The cards then arrived by runners and were given to the workers sitting on the benches. They were arranged alphabetically, sorted letter by letter: matters that could wait, matters that were more urgent, and so on. That was the preparation in Berlin.

With this index-card material the first wave swept into Austria. I stayed another 14 days in Berlin, then suddenly received orders to go to Vienna without delay and report to the commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service). At that time it was Stahlecker. He was then replaced, went to Prague, and Dr. Dr. Rasch took his place. Both were SS Obf. (Oberführer), I believe.

So I came to Vienna. Apparently someone had forgotten to send a Jewish-affairs officer on this operation, and I now had to fill that role in Vienna. I found a completely shattered Jewish cultural life, and for my part rebuilt the Jewish organizations insofar as they could be useful to us from the Security Police standpoint. At the same time, since I came from Office VII, I secured the archival and library material of scholarly interest to us, which had meanwhile been sealed. I had it packed into crates under my supervision so that nothing could go missing. I numbered the crates myself, had an inventory drawn up, and had the library packed very carefully by subject, as it had been arranged, following the catalogue I usually found there. The material went to Berlin by the wagonload. There it was piled in enormous stacks in the cellars of the responsible offices.

In Vienna I removed all the material of the Jewish organizations, except the library of the Jewish Religious Community in Vienna, because those people needed part of the library for their work. That was something I could decide for myself. But after I brought the Religious Community back to life and appointed Dr. Loewenherz as its office director, I had to leave them the tools. I had to give him everything needed to run the office properly. To that extent I left the apparatus of the Jewish Religious Community largely untouched.

Exactly the same standard procedure was followed in the Sudetenland as in Vienna, although that territory was smaller. From Austria too, from the SD (Security Service) districts—Klagenfurt, Innsbruck, Graz, Linz and so on—the local offices collected this material in the same way as in Vienna, naturally on a much smaller scale. It was brought to a central point in Vienna and dispatched from there. A Viennese forwarding firm carried out those transports. The furniture packers, who were Berliners, had made contact with the SD (Security Service) through their long work and one day asked to join it. One was two meters tall, the other short and very devout. That short, devout man later became caretaker of one of Office VII's premises and asked Six for a confiscated harmonium. Every morning the caretaker's devout tunes could be heard in the SD (Security Service) office building.

Was no one converted?

That is how it was with us; everyone could find salvation in his own way. Even I—only after two years in the service of the SD (Security Service) Main Office did I decide to leave the Protestant Church, voluntarily. Nobody forced me, and I was promoted without regard to my continuing church membership at the time. My wedding took place in the Protestant church in Passau… And from the Sudeten district it went on to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Things were done there exactly as I have just told you, Comrade Sassen.

That organ player was there throughout the war. Nobody ever objected.

Did you work through the collection operation in the Rhineland at the time, the Liebit collection point for securing Jewish books? Do you know anything about it?

No. Within the Reich I had no field work to direct or carry out at all. Until 1937, apart from the card-index preparations I described, and interrupted by the trip to the Orient, I had to devote myself exclusively to studying Zionism, neo-Zionism and Orthodoxy. I learned Hebrew for two years and otherwise had SD (Security Service) work to do. I had to contribute to the SS guidance booklets (SS-Leithefte). Every week I had to give my lecture at the SD (Security Service) school in Bernau on ideological suppression, viewed from the scholarly standpoint, so that at that time I could not look up from my desk work at all.

Did your office, or your subordinates, carry out any operations to secure the books of the Greek Jews?

I cannot recall that.

Did your office have anything at all to do with registering Jewish property?

No. The commander of the Security Police had not only the executive side (Exkl.) under him, but also the SD (Security Service) personnel. When such seizures were carried out, insofar as they were of specialist scholarly value, the competent SD (Security Service) office naturally arranged them. The executive side was carried out in agreement with the executive organ of the Gestapo under the commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service), in agreement with his French counterpart. But I cannot imagine that even a single book came out of France.

But they came out of France by the crateful?

That is beyond my knowledge. I would have sworn to it…

I can give no information about that.

You said that neither your subordinates nor your office ever had anything to do with registering Jewish property?

No, except for creating the administration and disposal office in Prague and in Vienna. But only establishing it and equipping it. Once it was functioning, that apparatus was detached from my office and placed under the commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service) as its supervisory authority, and under the Reich Court of Audit for auditing purposes.

But I have a letter here to Dannecker, pointing out to him that a Jew is about to clear out and has a great many valuables and works of art in his house, and so on. A legation councillor at the German embassy asks Dannecker to set SD (Security Service) officials onto the matter, so that they can snatch whatever is still there to be snatched.

The letter came from the German embassy.

That is ignorance of the situation. … everyone … write… Dannecker was not responsible for securing material things. He will have forwarded it accordingly, through his superior.

There is the necessary evidence that already in 1941 some interned Jews were freed through ransom payments? There are details here concerning Dutch Jews, and then this affair here… Those diamond cutters, or something like that?

Yes, I remember… I believe it was arranged through the office handling the Four-Year Plan, … Göring, whose attention had been drawn to it by his art buyers. In this connection it is indeed true that some Jews in Amsterdam were treated as so-called privileged Jews after they had shown their gratitude in some desired form to the competent Reich offices—the Four-Year Plan. Whether this involved personal interests or the general interests of the Reich, I cannot say. For if the plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan had ordered something, the RF (Reichsführer-SS) respected it.

But usually various offices interfered in these matters to obtain ransom money. For example, the Dresdener Bank wrote to the Reich Economics Ministry:

[Typed as notes in the transcript: In this or that camp… such-and-such a Jew… 20,000 Swiss francs deposited with a Swiss bank… to be transferred to the Dresdener Bank when the prisoner presents himself… at the Swiss consulate…]

So there were already passions (Passionen) in 1941…

Yes, it was like that too. It was like an octopus. After the first case became known, non-Jewish offices tried to get everything possible out of their so-called protégés—things of a personal nature and things important to the Reich as well; both may well have been involved. The Jew himself, too, when he saw an opportunity opening up, set all his connections in motion and had everything arranged with the aim of becoming a state-recognized privileged Jew. So it may well be that something like the affair you described to me reached the Dresdener Bank through some channel.

And all that despite Himmler's express order that anyone who had once been imprisoned—

The fundamental order, which came out in writing, came out at the outbreak of war: emigration was now stopped; no Jew was allowed to emigrate any more, and release from a concentration camp during wartime was forbidden. That meant, for the protective-custody section head in our Office IV—that was Section IV A… — IV B 4: that was the subdivision of my section. I had the subdivisions IV B 4 a and IV B 4 b.

What was a?

The one, IV B 4 a, was Regierungsrat (government councillor) Suhr, and after he left, Regierungsrat (government councillor) Wünsche. IV B 4 b was Gunster, holding that post together with his position as my permanent deputy.

IV B 4 a dealt with the determination of …, the revocation of German citizenship, and confiscation of property. That is, State Police regional headquarters x applies to the Reich Security Main Office under an implementing ordinance of the … Reich President for the protection of people and state, for a finding of hostility to people and state against Jew y. Not only against Jews: the circle covered by this law of the …—a law later expanded by supplements and supplementary decrees.

The finding of hostility to people and state, and the revocation of German citizenship, and then, if everything was in order, confiscation of the property followed automatically. The person concerned might long since have left the concentration camp or crossed the Reich border; or, still being inside the Reich, he might only just have passed into police custody. The State Police set out in precise detail why they submitted this application for a finding through official channels, giving full reasons why the person named should fall under this law, and so on.

Usually the interrogation record was attached in copy, or the substance of the interrogation was reproduced almost in full in a letter. What the case officer handling it—these matters were handled only by lawyers, with the supporting personnel available to them, and always a government councillor as head. When Suhr was a government councillor, Wunsch was an assessor. When Wunsch became a government councillor, an assessor B… came in, a Rhinelander. They had their assigned personnel. It was routine work.

The responsible police chief inspector dealt with it. The files were obtained and submitted to the assessor or the government councillor. These findings were collected, and lists came out every fortnight, passing through me. At the bottom was a routing instruction: through the section head of IV B 4 to the chief of Office IV, with a request for his initials, then through official channels to the State Printing Office. These matters appeared in the Reich Gazette (Reichsanzeiger), because the law required their publication there.

At the same time, in the fortnightly process, a letter went to the Reich Finance Minister asking that the responsible Chief Finance President initiate the inspection (Einsicht) of the confiscated property. A letter also went to the Foreign Office with the routine request—that was something written once and then copied again and again, with only the names changing, nothing else—that the passport-issuing authorities at home and abroad be informed that the person concerned had lost German citizenship with effect from …. That way, no passport could be issued if he applied, nor any documents showing his former German citizenship. That was the whole matter.

But that also means your office did concern itself with registering Jewish property?

No, that is not right. We concerned ourselves only with its legal registration, not its material registration. The recognition that the material assets now, after the person committing such an offense had made himself guilty—

…are now to be regarded as forfeited within the meaning of the law. The competent Chief Finance President dealt with registering them, but could do so only after the executive body had confiscated these things for the Reich. It was not confiscation by furniture van, as with the books, for example; it was only a declaration of confiscation. How the Chief Finance President then got hold of the property was his responsibility.

In doubtful cases the local State Police office might, for example, seal a strongroom or something similar, thereby securing it. It could be sealed on the finding that it was confiscated, and once it was confiscated the Security Police had nothing more to do with it, but the Finance Minister did. The exception was the scholarly documents important for the work, or archival material. With the latter I had little or nothing to do. The State Police were to take it over; it had no material value, only intellectual value for handling the cases.

That was the one field of work. The other field, which was under me and which Günther headed as its case officer—later they were called section heads, and that made me a department head. But that came so late, in 1944, that it scarcely made any practical appearance. Nothing was running as it had; the bureaucracy no longer worked away as merrily as before. Instead, one stumbled from one makeshift arrangement to another, according to how badly the State Police regional headquarters had been hit. More and more sections and desks came into my office. I was slowly becoming superfluous.

The second field of work became a section in 1944. So Günther was a section head, Suhr a section head, and I was a department head. It was divided up between the government administrative officer Weern, a police chief inspector …, and, I believe, one more police chief inspector. There were also the other matters handled in the course of routine proceedings by the criminal police officers and so on, down to the police employees and SD (Security Service) employees.

Günther's section also included the timetable department, which Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Novak headed. Directly under the department head was the registry, open and closed in nature, run by Ustf. (Untersturmführer) Martin with a small staff of criminal police officers, police employees and SD (Security Service) employees. The office under Ostf. (Obersturmführer) Jaenisch, …; and the technical field of work under Ustf. (Untersturmführer) Ruschka, responsible for all the building matters—construction, air-raid shelters and so on. A teleprinter station was built later, through which the individual outstations could write to Berlin. A very large telephone exchange underground… In my spare time I have a passion for drawing, and I have this house…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Motor pump during an attack—water pond in the courtyard—during bomb attacks, all men at the double—only house in the neighborhood preserved—but in 1944 declared structurally unsafe.]

I had this whole house, which was surrounded above and below, on the right and left, by important rooms containing teleprinters, an armory, and a …, which I had with sand—

…had reinforced—had the walls reinforced with sand. For that purpose I had a work detail of Jews throughout the war. I simply made them privileged Jews because they were living in mixed marriages anyway. In the evenings they covered up their Jewish star and went home, and in the mornings they came back. They did have to wear their Jewish star, but they had a pass from us saying they were allowed to move about freely, so that they would not be snatched away from us.

Throughout the war I had an old, rickety building foreman, the only man for whom we repeatedly obtained a certificate of indispensability. Otherwise he would have ended up somewhere in the OT [Organisation Todt] (Organisation Todt). But I said to myself: in for a penny, in for a pound. He was a capable foreman and had to make do with almost nothing. He and the work detail he had had to fetch the necessary materials from the rubble district in Berlin. He was a capable, good man. This construction section was under Ruschka’s direction.

I had to explain the technical department to you like this so that the opponent does not get the idea that I had it for designing or building gas chambers or the like. No, not a single line was drawn in my office for building gas chambers, concentration camp installations or anything of that sort. The technical department’s task was to defend the office against air warfare, to provide for the air war, as was generally usual in building air-raid bunkers—an establishment. I only came to this outfit in 1940, and a kind of night-combat organization had formed against bomb fires, to defend the roof over our heads, our files, so to speak, against bombs.

When there was no fire at our own place, we also did firefighting in the neighborhood until the official fire brigade relieved us. Our bunker installations were so large that the whole neighborhood was allowed to use them during an alarm. People only had to pass the guard and hand in a slip authorizing them to go to the bunkers by a particular route. They had to hand that slip in again when they left, so none of them could remain in the building. But this bunker was far apart from the one used by the staff, and it was much better than the bunker for the office employees themselves. The general bunker for the civilian population was under the command of an Ustf. (Untersturmführer)…

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Alarm system linking the civilian bunker to the other office bunker for assistance in emergencies, etc.—Kaltenbrunner’s commendation of this installation—afflicted people seeking shelter under the wings of the wicked Gestapo…]

The work of the individual staff now consisted in… it was the routine correspondence on the executive side exkl.. All the applications from the State Police and the State Police regional headquarters were dealt with here, granted or rejected. All the correspondence with the representatives we had posted outside was handled here. All the correspondence with the other central authorities was handled through the chief of Office IV, through official channels. This was the general correspondence office, which did not work to a fixed formula, as usually happened in important government paperwork. Instead, the hundreds and thousands of questions and points of casework came in here.

There is a letter here

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Signature. On behalf of: illegible.]

In this letter, which appears in “The Jews and the Reich” on page 33, and in which the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service addresses the RF (Reichsführer-SS) on a matter of obtaining foreign currency for recruiting Waffen-SS volunteers in Hungary and granting family support …

The file mark at the top is IV B 4 aa, so my section …

How can you explain that this letter cannot have been signed by you yourself or by one of your subordinates?

The basic explanation is this: a section head was not allowed to sign a letter to the RF (Reichsführer-SS). That would have been a breach of the service regulations. A letter to the Reichsführer-SS sent by the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service had to be signed exclusively by Heydrich or Kaltenbrunner. Acting on his behalf, however, the office heads were authorized to sign such a letter, and nobody else.

So Müller, Six, and so on—all those holding the rank of office head could sign it, but only on behalf of the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service.

And what do you have to say about the content itself?

About the letter itself I must say the following. The heading gives the file reference IV B 4 a, that is, a subject area of my office IV B 4. Judging by its content, the outpouring of a lawyer, so it belongs in the legal section. At that time it could have been Suhr.

But at that time you were not yet a department head?

But it was a subject area at that time, and this “a” was hardly ever written either. The meticulous lawyers added it quite correctly. So they sent it out as a secret Reich matter, number 1852, on 24 November. It refers to an order of 19 August 1942, so someone gave me an order to look into something. Only my office head or the Chief of the Security Police can have given me that order, in either case personally. And according to this reference, that order was given to me in August on the basis of a report I made to my superior office on 13 August 1942, which I—from some office, that is, which came from an outside quarter, which was brought to me. Now neither the head of Office IV nor the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service wanted to decide the matter himself, and he required me to prepare a letter to the RF (Reichsführer-SS) and have it go through official channels.

To examine the facts as thoroughly as possible—when I say “I,” I take that on myself because I was the section head; I had my case officers—I needed, as I infer from comparing the dates referred to in the letter with its dispatch date, the time from 19 August to November 1942 to have inquiries made about it. The letter sets out the result of those inquiries. These are state police inquiries, and I now put them before the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, before his superior, the RF (Reichsführer-SS), after SS-Grf. (Gruppenführer) Berger here …?

And he writes at the end—and that shows, besides the letterhead itself, that the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service did not consider himself competent either—and he submits it and asks for approval. Whether the Reichsführer-SS approved it or rejected it does not emerge from this. That is left open. The heading reads “Ransom money: the price is going up.” This “ ” by the author refers to the following paragraph: Since April of this year, on the basis of representations by the Reich Ministry of Economics, the Reichsbank, in view of the Reich’s strained foreign-currency position, from case to case appli-

From case to case, applications from elderly Jews for permission to emigrate are approved if they make 100,000 francs—earlier, I think, 50,000—available without receiving the equivalent value in return, and if there are no particular security police objections. That is the heart of the matter.

It is a practical textbook example. I handled the matter; it bears my section’s heading. I did not sign it, and I did not hatch it out myself either. Instead I made the inquiries: what else is involved in this matter? I collected it and made it ready for the files. That was what the work of Section IV B 4 consisted of.

But you are to take a position on the matter itself now: that for Dutch Jews, already since ’40 …?

I have already said that all sorts of offices tried, from the most varied motives, to put it briefly, to put goods for blood and blood for goods into practice.

So this was absolutely possible?