Eichmann and Sassen interview, file 87

It was the time when the public offices of the Security Police [Sicherheitspolizei, Security Police] and the Security Service [Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service] sometimes had to fight the fiercest battles with the armaments industry offices, because those offices stood up for the Jews in the factories and secured certificates declaring them indispensable. In painstaking individual proceedings the Gestapo and its regional headquarters then provided evidence in some cases, and separate correspondence had to be sent to the Reich Security Main Office [Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office] even over individual Jews.

We in turn had to approach the armaments authorities, or Minister Speer, and they had to approach their Gau district to get rid of Jew x or y. One director had been very stubborn, but Mutschmann also wanted his Gau clear of Jews. The initiative did not come so much from the Gestapo or the local Gestapo regional headquarters; they were driven by the Party offices, here by the Gau leadership. Every Gauleiter wanted to report his Gau to Bormann or the Führer as free of Jews. It was just the same race as when factories could not hurry fast enough to report to the German Labour Front that the whole plant belonged to the Labour Front.

Then they received some award they were allowed to display on their flag or …. In short, Mutschmann took this director, had a placard hung around his neck, and had him marched through Dresden with some policemen, with writing on it saying that he was Dresden's greatest protector of Jews. After that Mutschmann very quickly succeeded in making Dresden completely free of Jews. That was the time when Jews who had made themselves indispensable in the individual armaments industries were prised loose case by case, but then sent to armaments industries attached to the individual concentration camps. The VWHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office [SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, SS Economic and Administrative Main Office]) had various armaments branches, and they were put into those.

Now I must point out that all the decrees, regulations, laws and so on concerning Jews originated with individual police offices, this Party office or that other administrative office. One gets the impression that there was no central direction of the Jewish question.

That is why we once had a difference of opinion. Nobody can really believe that Jewish affairs were not centrally directed. Everyone imagines, as the literature since '45 also describes it, that a ‘pope of Jewish affairs’ sits up here, holding all the strings and supplying everything with the relevant documents, regulations and orders. Perhaps he obtains them from his immediate superior, but otherwise he directs everything centrally, like a spider in its web. The former official believes that, the man who served in uniform believes that, the people believe it, the opponent believes it, and the world believes it.

The world believes it, just as the majority of people on earth, insofar as they concern themselves with the Jewish problem, believe that international Jewry is equally tightly directed: a spider sits up there in its web, steering, leading and directing everything. The one idea is just as much nonsense as the other. In our Third Reich too, the Jewish question was by no means centrally directed. This collection of laws compiled by the Jewish lawyer Dr. Blau is direct proof that it was not.

Rather, each central authority issued some Jewish regulation of its own. Yes, it went so far that whenever AH (Adolf Hitler) had once again made a speech in which he particularly denounced Jewry, and when, from 1939 to his last speech, did he ever give a speech without particularly addressing this international opponent, a week later, sure enough, one would find that some central authorities or a Party authority had issued another supplementary regulation or done something or other.

I have established here that, although the Reich Citizenship Laws were issued in 1935, three or four years later somebody thinks: hold on, we have forgotten to lay down in law that Jews are forbidden to join the Hitler Youth. And years later an implementing regulation to the Reich Citizenship Laws was issued. It was like that everywhere. Two or three ministers conferred with one another, a minister with a Gauleiter, some Reichsleiter with another commissioner. In the course of their conversation they concluded that Jews would have to be excluded from this sector as well, or: I would have to bring this matter within my jurisdiction.

So it was discussed and settled over a little glass of cognac. An exchange of letters followed, confirming the agreement, and the central authority concerned issued a decree laying down for its subordinate offices how they were to proceed. A typical example in this collection of laws was the meeting between the Reichsführer-SS and the Reich Minister of Justice, Dr. Thierack, where some matter was discussed, I think the transfer of Jews from penal custody to the custody of the concentration camps of the SS VWHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office).

It concerns notifying the Gestapo of Jews released from the criminal justice system.

Yes, and now this. Just as it happened in the legislative sphere, laws, regulations, decrees and so on, they had exactly the same decentralization in the Ex… work. Nobody can say or claim that the Gestapo Office, the Reich Security Main Office under Müller, had the matter centrally in its hands. Or that I, as his desk officer IV B 4, had it centrally in my hands. Even the hostile literature notes in one place that, for example, I officially had nothing to do with, and was not responsible for, the work of combating opponents in the occupied Russian territories, the General Government, Lithuania, Estonia and so on and so on.

I also had nothing to do with the Ex operations in Hungary and in the various other countries. The local military forces did that. It is hard to believe, but the evidence makes it possible to establish that the Reich Security Main Office was not always the office taking the lead here. We were, as I was once able to explain to you very clearly, we were the maid of all work. Only when matters were taken out of our hands by an order, a directive or a command from very senior superiors did we simply have to look on.

Of course that is not to say that the Security Police and the Security Service forces in the General Government and the occupied Russian territories had no hand in the solution of the Jewish question. Of course they had a hand in it, and the Waffen-SS and some of the Wehrmacht were involved as well. No, the Reich Security Main Office, Section IV B 4, had nothing to do with it. Instead, other, higher local commands were ordered to do it by the Reichsführer-SS, without an obligation to report to the Reich Security Main Office, IV B 4.

Without any supply of guidelines from the Reich Security Main Office. These guidelines were given as orders by the Reichsführer-SS, because as desk officer IV B 4 I was never allowed to issue an order. That would have contradicted all the principles of a police authority, a central authority. I could only give the local Gestapo offices instructions, never orders. You cannot command an official; you issue an instruction to an official. Whereas the operational detachments (Einsatzkommandos) in the occupied Russian territories were military; they had to take orders. In the General Government it was something in between.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Example from the book discussed, with the relevant documents; letterhead with Waffen-SS.]

They too were involved in it, although Wikingruf, for example, claims the opposite. Anyone who reads Wikingruf will not believe it, but here we see it in black and white. And if you ask an honest man of the Waffen-SS today, he will be able to confirm it. I remember a member of the LAH [Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler] (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler) being here once who openly admitted that his unit, from the LAH, had also been deployed in such Jewish affairs in the occupied Russian territories.

Within Reich territory, how were responsibilities divided between the Security Police and the Order Police? In my opinion various orders and decrees were not matters for the Security Police, in this case the Gestapo, at all: for example, the ban on Jews visiting cinemas, theatres and so on.

The precinct captains monitored that, or it was done through the reporting obligation imposed on them.

The wearing of the Jewish star?

Monitoring that was of course the responsibility of the Order Police, that is, the competent precinct captain. In Austria it was called the police commissariat, and the Ra- inspectors and senior Ra- inspectors worked there. In the Old Reich they were called precinct captains, and there were also the sergeants and senior police sergeants. Then, after all, there were the surveillance agents, and arrest was not exclusively the task of the Security Police, the local Gestapo or the Gestapo regional headquarters. In towns the precinct captains dealt with that; in the countryside it was the rural constables, the gendarmerie.

It says here that

?

That is correct. That was me; that was Desk IV B 4. I was the supervisory authority.

How was the Reich Association of Jews in Germany founded? Have we already discussed that?

No, I cannot say exactly. When I was still in Office VII in Berlin, Desk IV B had long existed. At that time the desk was staffed by a Sturmbannführer Langer (R.R.). He was there for a long time, and a Sturmbannführer Lischka (R.R.) succeeded him. SS Obersturmführer Eichmann succeeded him. So when I took over Desk IV B 4 in the autumn of 1940 as section head, with my permanent deputy Stf. Günther, the Reich Association of Jews was a long-established body that worked well. In the preceding years, under those two government councillors I have just named,

the Reich Association had taken shape and form. Legal permission was laid down for such a Reich Association to be formed at all, and the Chief of the Security Police was designated as the supervisory authority. Further new regulations kept being issued for this Reich Association. It was a Jewish institution, just as I created it with the Israelite Religious Community in Vienna in 1938, or with the Israelite Religious Community in Prague.

There it was the decree of the Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of the German Reich; here it was the Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia's decree approving its establishment. The supervisory authority in Vienna was the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service, and in Prague it was likewise the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service. In the Old Reich it was the Reich Security Main Office. The head of this Reich Association in Germany came just as his colleague Dr. R. Löwenherz did, or the Prague men Dr. Weidmann and Edelstein.

They often came daily, or … a week, gave their report and asked for a decision, and the decision was conveyed to them. I made it my practice that whenever someone came to obtain my decision, or told me of his measures and instructions, or submitted proposals that I either approved or rejected, the Jew recorded every such discussion in a file memorandum, a duplicate of which he had to send me soon after the discussion. As a rule, to avoid so much unnecessary running about, he would hand me the note of the previous discussion at the next meeting.

I then briefly went through it with him and immediately made marginal notes on what had been dealt with in the meantime and what was still particularly noteworthy. The Jewish side had to incorporate the original in its own files. I remember that in Vienna Dr. Löwenherz had assembled a whole Leitz binder of such file notes. I saw it once when I visited the Israelite Religious Community. It began when I still held the rank of Obstf. and ended when I held the rank of Obersturmbannführer.

That is to give you an idea of how many memoranda were in this binder, though there may also have been two or three Leitz binders. Of course I also made it my duty to arrange meetings in the Israelite Religious Community's building in Vienna or Prague. Sitting there beside the office director, surrounded by that institution's desk officers and department heads, and in the presence of a particular case officer from my own office, I conducted and led the discussion. It was a purely factual working conference. So what I mean is that supervision rested with the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service.

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

Dr. Eppstein.

Were you on closer terms with him? Did he come to you more often?

Yes, I had known Eppstein for a long time. I dealt with him when I was still in Office VII. As the case officer for the Zionist World Federation I had a great many questions to ask for my own information. An M. district secretary named Kuchmann summoned Eppstein. He was an official of Desk IV B 4 in the Gestapo Office, with which I had nothing to do at the time, because I was still

under Six, in the office for scholarly evaluation. There I talked about the subject with Eppstein, or with the Chief Rabbi Dr. Baeck, whom I had summoned as required. With Baeck it was mostly about questions of orthodoxy, about Orthodoxy; with Eppstein I discussed current practical questions of Zionist politics. How far the opponent was keeping me in the dark for substantive reasons was something I generally knew how to judge. I had the reports of our confidential informers and agents, which I wanted to check through the Jew; conversely, I had the Jew checked through our informers' and agents' reports.

That was the Security Service's game, a double means of checking. That was where I got to know Eppstein. He was an exceptionally skilful, well-bred, educated lawyer. Eppstein, just like Dr. Loewenhers, had nothing servile about him whatever. His speech was free and open, one might say courageous, even though one also knew that these Jewish negotiating partners never came to the slightest harm. In my dealings with them, I instructed my guards and my outer office always to arrange these Jewish functionaries' visits so that they did not have to wait. They arrived and were treated politely and courteously by the guards.

Then they came up to me, without much escort, since they were regular visitors. They sat down, and we negotiated as gentlemen do. They knew me; they knew my attitude from conversations that from time to time reached into it. That is unavoidable when you deal with an opponent for a long time: one occasionally … developed a personal connection. I with them, and vice versa. There was no more trembling in the knees, no more uncertainty. If I could read their faces, they could read mine just as well, especially since I never approached them with underhanded intentions.

They may have been cautious at first, but later they knew perfectly well that they could say anything in the negotiations. How else could I have managed such a matter as the supervisory authority if I could not also hear the truth? How else could I have expected productive work from these Jewish functionaries if I had not dealt with them openly? They also knew, and I have never made any secret of it, that I have no prejudice at all against the individual Jew. I know no hatred of Jews. I do not share the views of the Streicher idea. Rather, I see the necessity of the struggle and its inevitability, but in the political sphere.

Surely the Reich Security Main Office would naturally appoint people as presidents of this Reich Association, or of the Central Office in Vienna, who were decidedly compliant tools of the Reich Security Main Office?

Anyone else would probably have done it that way, and it was done that way locally. The local Gestapo or Gestapo regional headquarters' section heads naturally exchanged the ‘material’ supplied to them by the Reich Association of Jews as its local representatives over the years, for people they could get along with easily. But that is wrong. In subordinate offices it might not have had the same effect, because they are supplied anyway by their Jewish central office,

with instructions and guidelines. They are therefore only executing bodies. But suppose I had appointed a Jewish office director in the person of a Dr. R. Löwenherz who said ‘Yes, sir’ to everything I said, or even ‘At your command’. If I had had a man in Dr. Eppstein who said yes to everything, or in Prague, then that Jewish organization would have been a pigsty where no swine could have found its way around any more. It would not have worked, and the offices attached to the Jewish agencies would probably have needed ten or twenty times as much staff. As it was, the operation was orderly. The Israelite Religious Community consisted of around 400 Jewish officials. They had their own Matr. register, birth and death registers; hence the office directors too. I protect them from abuses.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Example: Night of Broken Glass.]

I want to tell you about the treatment of Jews within Germany, about the support for those who had been pushed out of the German people's spheres of life. A certain proportion would undoubtedly have turned to crime if they had not received at least enough support to fill their stomachs, to buy a pair of boots, to buy a pair of trousers. All of that was handled by the welfare department of the Religious Community in Vienna. I had to raise the money for it, that is, raise it by allowing the Jewish functionaries to travel abroad so they could make their begging rounds in England.

There they scraped together and collected foreign currency, which they also continued to receive in subsequent remittances. They offered it to the foreign-exchange office (Devisenstelle, handwritten correction of struck Reisestelle) in Vienna and could convert it into Reichsmarks at up to twenty times the exchange-rate value. The Reich Economics Ministry once took me to task because I was endangering the international exchange rate of the Reichsmark when I sold the Reichsmark, the rate was then 2.50 or 2.…0 to one dollar, when I sold the dollar for 20 Reichsmarks, among Jews, of course.

The Jew had to pay 250 dollars in the country of immigration, so he had to pay 20 times 250 dollars, 500 Reichsmarks, instead of 6 00 Reichsmarks. The difference first cost the Religious Community itself; then it pocketed the difference, or, if the dollars were given to it, it pocketed the whole 5,000 Reichsmarks. From that the organization paid its employees, from that it paid for welfare, from that it paid for the emigration of Jews without means. So if a compliant man had been in the leading position, whether in Vienna, Berlin or Prague, the Religious Community could not possibly have coped with that enormous volume, with the thousands of matters that had to be dealt with in twenty-four hours.

Even if I had had to assign police personnel to it, those personnel would not have been able to do it, because you have to be a specialist too. And the tougher the particular director, the better he kept his operation in order. And if you have a man of stature in some position, and that man knows from the outset that he and his whole family and his whole clan are in … (?) for the supervisory authority, and therefore of course for all the subordinate authorities too, then, as a rule, he is a man of that stature in his office and in his dealings with the supervisory authority. Indeed, he positively wants to make that evident.

So, according to your assertion, neither Dr. Löwenherz nor Dr. Eppstein nor the representative in Prague was a compliant tool?

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

Can you remember concrete examples of them contradicting you, where you can show that the negotiations were in practice between equals?

The … example:

How did the Central Office for Jewish Emigration come into being in the first place? You know that you needed a tax clearance certificate, a certificate of good conduct, a such-and-such, and so on and so on. A series of documents had to be produced to obtain a passport. Some of those documents were valid for a relatively short time. The tax clearance certificate, the hardest to obtain, was valid for six to eight weeks; after that it was invalid. The Jew already had to wait at the authorities until the rest of the public had been dealt with. If he finally got an opportunity to speak to the official at the counter, he was lucky.

As a rule he had to come three or four times before he finally got his turn. Once he finally had that tax clearance certificate in his hands, he then had to queue just as often elsewhere, only to be told: ‘Jew, wait’, depending on the counter official's whim. The result was that the tax certificate's six or eight weeks of validity had long since expired, and he had to start again from the beginning. In the meantime other documents became invalid too. One day Dr. Rothenberg and Dr. Löwenherz came to me and said: ‘Obersturmführer, this cannot go on. What else are Jews supposed to do to be able to emigrate?’

They described to me what I have just described to you, and said: ‘Unless you can arrange preferential treatment for the Jews here, you will not get rid of them, even though the Jew is willing to emigrate.’ I thought that over and discussed the difficulty with the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service, Dr. Stahlecker. I told him: ‘If we could gather all those counter officials who have to be approached under our control in one building provided by the Security Police, then they would go down as if on a conveyor belt and drop off with their passports ready. It is good for both sides.’

I was fortunate to have a superior like Stahlecker, who immediately took up the matter and went with me that same day to see Reich Commissioner Bürckel. Bürckel was full of enthusiasm, and the Reich Commissioner's decree was issued that very day. That is an example. A man without stature would have come crawling and whining; he might even have tried to gloss things over, and so on and so on. No, the office director was not a compliant tool in the hands of the Security Police. He was a man of stature who came forward, demanded things and expressed his wishes. Löwenherz had something of an Austrian's character and temperament, whereas Eppstein was the very type (Bruttotyp) of a cheeky, incisively spoken Prussian lawyer, and an ice-cold lawyer at that.

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

Another Viennese example.

A lawyer from the Austrian Jewish Religious Community in Vienna once came to me in the days after the Reich Night of Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht). He worked in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He said to me: ‘Hauptsturmführer, wild Jewish lout attacks harmless German lion.’ I was sitting at my desk. The officials would simply come in to discuss some particular special case. So this man came in and told me that as a good, nice joke. If I, who embodied the Security Police, had been such a rabid Jew-devourer, hardly anyone would have dared to say anything like that to me in my office, where my permanent deputy Hauptsturmführer Günther sat opposite me. I was not even alone; the two of us worked in one room.

Dr. Eppstein always came running when, through local shortcomings in the transports, the guidelines for carrying out the evacuation were not followed exactly. The meticulous lawyer had his prescription in the form of the evacuation guidelines; he had those. If he found a failure on the part of a local office, he came running and reported it to me, identifying the place and sometimes the official too, and asked me to put a stop to it before it set a precedent.

Do you have a concrete example?

No, it happened all the time, and I will tell you this…

No, I am interested only in whether these people were installed as heads of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, as [? office directors] of the Religious Communities, and whether they were compliant tools of the Reich Security Main Office?

But now we know how it was.

And what happened to these people afterwards?

Dr. R. Löwenherz, over the years, one did occasionally exchange a private word; these people had their private worries too. Quite early on, Dr. Löwenherz said to me: ‘Obersturmführer, you promised Dr. Rothenberg that he could emigrate to Palestine after he had spent a certain time as head of the Palestine Office setting things up here, and once the operation was running so that a deputy could take over. You have kept that promise and allowed Dr. Rothenberg to emigrate to Palestine.

Now I ask for myself as well: when my task here is finished, would you promise to let me emigrate to England?’ In 1939. I told him: ‘Mr. Löwenherz, I promise you that you can emigrate to England, but for the time being there is no question of it. Work here and get on with the job. As director of the Jewish Religious Community you are in charge of an operation with 400 employees, and I would not know whom to put in your place.’

[Interjected question:]

How did you come to choose Dr. Löwenherz?

A few days after the reunification I had orders to come to Vienna to get emigration moving there. Since I had been working in Berlin as the case officer for the

Zionist World Federation, I was the sought-after specialist on emigration whom the Chief of the Security Police had at his disposal. So I came to Vienna and conferred with a criminal police official, Dr. Ebener, who was still lugging around an Austrian commissar's uniform with a heavy sabre. That same Dr. Ebener who was later to become the permanent deputy of the head of the Gestapo regional headquarters in Vienna. The Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service, to whom I was assigned, [typed “was Dr. Dr. Rasch, SS Stf.” struck out; handwritten replacement: whose name at present …]. First I had to explain my proposed programme to the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service.

I told him how I envisaged the procedure; he approved it. I set it out in writing as a file memorandum, had it initialled, and now had the authorization of the superior of the Vienna Gestapo regional headquarters to proceed in that way and no other. The Gestapo was instructed to accommodate all my wishes and make things easier for me, and so on. First I restored the organized Jewish life that had been smashed in those days, but only insofar as I needed it for the emigration of Jews from the Ostmark. I needed a proper, effective Jewish central instrument, which I had to provide with a head; the most important thing was the choice of that head.

I asked Dr. Ebener to have some former Jewish leaders of organized life in Austria who were in custody brought out to me. They came to an office room in the Hotel Metropil. Dr. so-and-so came, and Dr. so-and-so came. One was too old for me, another too slow and infirm, the third too polite and servile. Then a man came who had already served as an official of the Israelite Religious Community. I spoke with Dr. R. Löwenherz, coming to his personal details, questioning him factually about what he had done [?], and all the usual things. I discovered that he had told me untruths in some cases, probably out of worry and distress, since he did not know me. So I slapped him in the face.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Very uncontrolled; not gentlemanlike.]

But I have already told you that. In all my time working on Jewish affairs I attacked a Jew only once, and that was Dr. Löwenherz, who received a slap in the face in the first hour of our acquaintance.

And so, in that very hour, I appointed Dr. Richard Löwenherz director of the Israelite Religious Community. I sent him back to his cell with a slip of paper and a pencil and instructed him to describe, first, the organizational structure he envisaged, and second, how things would function. I dictated my intentions and ideas to him in telegram style as guidelines. Then Dr. Löwenherz went back to his cell. I had instructed that he was to remain in custody but no longer counted as a prisoner.

I simply wanted to establish quickly, as quickly as possible, whether he had the intellectual stature to run such a large organization. The next day I had him brought to me again, read through it, discussed it with him, and was surprised at the contents. They corresponded completely to my ideas and to what I had discussed with the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service, who essentially approved everything because he was not clouded by any expert knowledge of the essentials. I, on the other hand, coming from Six, was already automatically equipped with these things.

I had him released immediately and sent him home. He also told me that his watch had gone missing; he had not got his watch back, and something else was missing too. I then spoke to Ebner: he must get his watch and his things back. I heard nothing more about it, so probably it was all put right.

And so he became office director. He then got all his racial brethren released, which cannot be held against him, and brought them into the Religious Community.

Löwenherz has survived the war. Where he is today I do not know; he will probably be in England with his married children.

Was he in Vienna throughout the war?

Yes, I never heard of anyone attacking him.

Dr. Storfer, a commercial councillor who, during the First World War, was an Austro-Hungarian officer (administrative major), had somehow made his way to me very early on, together with a surgeon named Neumann, a well-known Jewish doctor, a leading authority. He interceded for imprisoned Jews. Since the Israelite Religious Community's organization was swallowing official after official, I gave him a few cases. Soon the story spread that he was the man with connections in high places and that, through those connections, Jews in prison could be released. Storfer was a wealthy man who never took a pfennig from others of his race.

Having grown familiar through these matters, Commercial Councillor Storfer came to me at every opportunity. He also managed to make friends with Dr. Löwenherz and shuttled back and forth between Dr. Rothenberg and Dr. Löwenherz. I must say that I had a certain soft spot for this Commercial Councillor Dr. Storfer, which my permanent deputy Günther could not understand. Storfer showed me a book published by his army commander, a field marshal lieutenant or the like. It was illustrated, and one page showed a photograph of Storfer as an administrative major in the Imperial-Royal Army (K.K.).

Storfer had a very pleasant, proper way of conducting negotiations, and I never turned him away. He had been useful to me. Not that he betrayed anyone; he undertook special assignments. He told me about difficulties arising out there in some of our own offices. He was, so to speak, a kind of informer, but not for Jews: an informer I could put to work to give me information about our own apparatus. He learned it from the Jews who were being dealt with out there in practice much more easily than a non-Jewish confidential informer could.

That went on for years with Storfer. While I was in Hungary, Günther, who had never been particularly well disposed towards Storfer, somehow influenced Dr. Ebner (or the other way round?). Admittedly, Storfer did something foolish. Storfer was afraid because I was no longer there, and he entertained thoughts of escape. Ebner found out, conferred with Günther, and Storfer was then sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. I told you that during my time in Hungary I was probably in Auschwitz twice and spoke to Höss. Höss said to me: ‘I have a prisoner here

from the Gestapo regional headquarters in Vienna. He complains in my ear every day that he is a special associate of Obersturmbannführer Eichmann, that he has guarantees, and that he wants and asks for the Obersturmbannführer to be informed immediately. He says he came here to Auschwitz without Obersturmbannführer Eichmann's knowledge. At any rate, I first had a separate cell assigned to him, and he had to sweep the yard.’ Unfortunately, he was then shot on Günther's orders.

Exactly the same thing happened with Dr. Eppstein. Theresienstadt had very lax leadership, so I needed a very firm hand. I needed people tough enough to organize an operation with such a mass apparatus, and people with guts, because only that way could I learn the truth. There was some occasion or other for my sending Eppstein, who no longer had anything to do in a Reich Association that had become insignificant, to Theresienstadt to take over the whole administration there.

Dr. Baeck sat on the Council of Elders, as did the Austrian General Sommer, and so on and so on. [Handwritten addition:? secretary +? Murmelstein] Eppstein was in charge of the whole thing. They had 150 men, their own police. While I was in Hungary, I came through Prague, and … Günther had Eppstein transported to Auschwitz and had him shot there. He could not stand Eppstein either; he had never been well disposed towards him.

I do not want Günther's name mentioned in the book, because Günther is still alive and I do not want to harm him. Günther was as industrious as a bee with paperwork. He could spend hours on detailed work, reading through 300 or 400 individual files; he could dictate his 50 or 60 letters every day. He was a relentless worker who could force his way through the thickest walls with his Thuringian thick-headedness. He had a thick hide, which the blue state police had once beaten black and blue.

Probably as a result of his difficult path in the NSDAP during the years of struggle, I think he was more often physically battered during those years than walking around in good health. In that frame of mind he probably ruled out any personal approach. He would not let Jews come within three paces of him. His conversations and remarks to Jews lacked any personal note. His instructions came out in barrack-room fashion; although spoken somewhat unfortunately, they were still curt and harsh. He could hardly bear contradiction. He was my permanent deputy from 193 … to 1945. He never advanced beyond that position; I cannot say why either.

He was an extraordinarily reliable man. Perhaps it was some sort of complexes that led him, precisely during my one longer absence from the office, when he was conducting affairs as my deputy and had full powers, without asking me, for I was not there, I had been assigned to Hungary, to get rid of the people I had worked with all those years. That is what vexes me. I worked with Eppstein from the beginning of 1935 to 1943, roughly eight years; I worked with Dr. Storfer from 1938 to 1944, six years. All of that happened in the summer of 1944 while I was in Hungary. He also had Weidmann and Edelstein from Prague bumped off. He had all my Jewish functionaries during

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

What reason did Günther give for these measures?

Günther gave me this as his reason: “Look, we are now at the beginning of 45, or the end of 44. You know how things stand. You were right in your pessimism. You worked with these Jewish functionaries all that time. They know too much, and that is why I let them die.”

My answer was: “Yes, my dear Rolf, there are a hundred others who know exactly the same thing. It is all recorded in file notes at the Jewish religious communities, at the Reich Association, everywhere. What is the point? These people’s entire staff knows just as much as Eppstein himself, as Stauffel himself. I do not see the point. Besides, I promised these people that they could emigrate and remain free. And you know that when I promised the Jews something, I kept that promise. I know you take the opposite view: you can promise an opponent whatever you like and break it at any time; you can swear an oath and give your word of honor and break it at any time.” Yes, I said: “I can break an oath to an opponent. But I cannot fail to keep a promise I personally made to an opponent who works for me, and instead, out of gratitude, give him a shot in the back of the neck. That will not do.”

But what was I supposed to do? It was too late. Of course Mueller will have approved it for him; that is what I assume. Günther will not have done it on his own authority. He will have reported it to the head of Office IV in a consultation and presented his concerns and his reasons in such a way that Mueller approved it.

But what concerns could he have expressed to Mueller?

The concern that the Jew XY had worked here with us for so long and had detailed knowledge of the Security Police personnel, and so on and so forth.

Ultimately that is an argument for the opponent: that every minor official, such as Günther, who is a deputy, has authority over life and death.

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

But if, as you say, he presented it to his superior in the right way, then he achieved the same thing as if he had decided it himself?

But it was the end of 44. The Russian was already pressing toward Vienna. 44 was a different time from 41/42. Toward the end of 44, some things had already become less tightly controlled. There was admittedly not much left to do in our field, so he was still dealing with such leftover matters.

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

You always invoke the existing laws—and here they are—

Yes, as I say, the end of 44. You must not compare the actions at the end of 44 with those that took place in normal, orderly times. I count those as lasting until 20 July 44. Times were normal then, and from that point on things moved in giant strides toward chaos.

No, my counterargument: when Vienna was still a fortress, when the betrayal came to light, the—

that the officers from the military district command committed by passing information to the Russians about weak points. When these people were caught, they were not immediately put against the wall. A normal court-martial hearing took place, and only then were they hanged. So even in such a case things could have taken their normal course. Such examples are seized on with delight by the opponent and used as proof that arbitrary rule prevailed in the Gestapo.

If one uses these cases that occurred at the end of 44 as an argument, then all I can offer as evidence is that in 41 tapes I have described everything that was normal, and now I can give no other account. Of course that is an arbitrary act.

But you will have to admit that right and law are not tied to a particular time?

What upset me then was quite different from what upsets me today. As a secondary matter, I had seen that I had given the Jews my word and could not keep it. I also felt affronted because they were making a mess of my own apparatus, making a mess of my section, where there had been no arbitrary rule. This was the only arbitrary act. That is why I gave Günther a piece of my mind, and Mueller as well. I told him exactly the same thing.

Did Günther know about your promise?

Yes, of course he knew.

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

No, I could not do that, because I had been posted to Hungary. During my absence, which ran from 19 March 44—barely eight days; I was in Mauthausen concentration camp then—until 2 or 3 January 44, when I resumed my official duties in Berlin, my permanent deputy moved up: Günther moved up from his position as my permanent deputy to acting desk officer in the desk officer’s absence.

But there is one thing I do not understand. First you describe Günther as someone who let off steam in petty work routines. How is it that you then name such a man as your deputy, especially since you first said he had been a reliable man? He was not reliable if he knew you had made promises and did the opposite?

I am no clairvoyant. First, choosing a permanent deputy for myself was not within my authority. There was no such thing. He was assigned to me as my permanent deputy. I did not know Günther at all when he came to me. He came from some SS officer school. He wore a red-bordered arrow here on his left arm—Braunschweig. It was a senior SS officer school where he served. Then one day in Vienna I was assigned two Günthers, one an Ustf (Untersturmführer) and one an Ostf (Obersturmführer) or Hstf (Hauptsturmführer).

I did not know them at all. I took the Hstf (Hauptsturmführer) as my permanent deputy, although I was an Ostf (Obersturmführer) at the time. When I was ordered to Berlin in 1940 as a desk officer, the same decree, of which I had known nothing, stipulated that Günther was to be my permanent deputy. The Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service ordered that personally. This whole transfer took place after Heydrich—the ramshackle outfit, the—

Or rather, did you not ask Günther directly, “Did Mueller approve that for you?”

I can no longer remember that today. I believe it of my superior, whom I still greatly esteem today, and I think him capable of doing it, because it was not agreeable to him. He knew my way of negotiating with the Jews, of dealing with the Jews. It may be that Mueller was glad to play this trick on me, because, had I been there, he would certainly have been talked out of this intention again and again by arguments during our consultations. Anyone who knows Mueller could well suppose that such a proposal from Günther suited him very well.

That would of course give the opponent still more arguments for claiming that arbitrary rule prevailed on the Gestapo’s part. For if the minor official Günther has this intention, and it is even done with pleasure, as you claim here, and the Chief of the Gestapo approves people being dispatched to their deaths without having incurred any guilt, other than working loyally with you for years, then those are wonderful arguments for the opponent to speak of arbitrary rule and prove it. And of course one must assume that other cases—

You know of no other cases?

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

But it is possible that similar cases occurred in other sections and are exaggerated and magnified, and so on, and that this is how the Gestapo has acquired the reputation it enjoys today.

Let me tell you something. What I am saying now is of course theoretical. If it were possible to assemble a panel of Jews and non-Jews, and if they examined every working minute of the time when I was the desk officer in IV B 4, when I headed the Eichmann Commando in Hungary, when I headed the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, and when I was a case officer and later a desk officer in Office VII—if they went through my entire working life from 1934 to 1945 in detail, remained factual, kept strictly to the truth and judged objectively—then I will tell you something: such a panel, convened to convict me, would have to acquit me. For during my tenure there was no arbitrary rule in my section, in my office. Where I encountered those few individual cases—for of course I could never vouch for my people—I intervened immediately and without mercy.

[Descriptions of incidents already recorded.]

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

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

Not requests. He had to send a decree to the SS HAVW, and Mueller must have signed it. There is no other possibility, because as a desk officer I could never have written to Roess, “Here, kill the Jew XY.”

One moment. You said that had been agreed in a discussion with Günther and Hoess?

Of course, naturally—how, probably—but first it had to be put in order in the files.

And Günther must have done that through official channels. What he then did, how and in what form, is another matter. That follows from the decision authorizing it, recorded in the files.

You must not forget: this was a time when people were being killed nonstop in the concentration camps.

When did this happen?

It was in the second half of 44, or in the final phase of 44. I cannot give you the exact date. When I came to Auschwitz and Hoess told me about it, I said, “Well then, have Storfer brought to me. I would like to speak with him.” Storfer came to me beaming with joy, and I said, “Well, my dear fellow, what are you doing here?” He said to me, “Ostf (Obersturmführer), I did something stupid. I wanted to escape because you were no longer there. I became frightened, and they caught me. But you know I never did anything.”

[Etc.]

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

It was a special position: that, as an employee of the Security Police and the Security Service, I could give orders to Reich finance officials and Economics Ministry officials, and so on and so forth. I said to Hoess, “Give him light work and decent food.” He promised me that, and Storfer was very grateful to me. And I said, “I will speak with Ebner about what can be done so that you can get out of this place again.” Hoess knew about it; he was present. The three of us spoke together.

And at the time when I was discussing these matters—one has to understand, once someone is in a concentration camp—you get in relatively easily, but getting out is terribly difficult. There was an order from the Reichsführer-SS that anyone in a concentration camp was not to be released. That was a standing order, which is why getting anyone out was so difficult. So I thought at the time: well, not much can happen to Storfer; a little sweeping in the yard is no great matter, and he gets decent food.

Yes, he said to me, “Ostf (Obersturmführer), it is terrible. I sleep in a room with a few hundred people. I get a tight feeling around my heart. I have never done anything like this. Could I not have somewhere, even if it were only a corner—” So I said to Hoess, “Let him sleep in some corner where he can sleep peacefully and alone. Arrange something, and let him go out with his broom whenever he feels like it and sweep up here.”

And Hoess did that. He was not the brutal concentration-camp commandant people imagine with a bulldog face. He was the father of a whole lot of children. He had human understanding for human worries. He had the orders that bound him. And had chance made it my fate to fill the post of a concentration-camp commandant, I would not have acted differently either. Had I been ordered to gas Jews and shoot them, I would have carried out those orders. And I have said before:

And Günther must have done that through official channels. What he then did, how and in what form, is another matter. That follows from the decision authorizing it, recorded in the files.

You must not forget: this was a time when people were being killed nonstop in the concentration camps.

When did this happen?

It was in the second half of 44, or in the final phase of 44. I cannot give you the exact date. When I came to Auschwitz and Hoess told me about it, I said, “Well then, have Storfer brought to me. I would like to speak with him.” Storfer came to me beaming with joy, and I said, “Well, my dear fellow, what are you doing here?” He said to me, “Ostf (Obersturmführer), I did something stupid. I wanted to escape because you were no longer there. I became frightened, and they caught me. But you know I never did anything.”

[Etc.]

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

It was a special position: that, as an employee of the Security Police and the Security Service, I could give orders to Reich finance officials and Economics Ministry officials, and so on and so forth. I said to Hoess, “Give him light work and decent food.” He promised me that, and Storfer was very grateful to me. And I said, “I will speak with Ebner about what can be done so that you can get out of this place again.” Hoess knew about it; he was present. The three of us spoke together.

And at the time when I was discussing these matters—one has to understand, once someone is in a concentration camp—you get in relatively easily, but getting out is terribly difficult. There was an order from the Reichsführer-SS that anyone in a concentration camp was not to be released. That was a standing order, which is why getting anyone out was so difficult. So I thought at the time: well, not much can happen to Storfer; a little sweeping in the yard is no great matter, and he gets decent food.

Yes, he said to me, “Ostf (Obersturmführer), it is terrible. I sleep in a room with a few hundred people. I get a tight feeling around my heart. I have never done anything like this. Could I not have somewhere, even if it were only a corner—” So I said to Hoess, “Let him sleep in some corner where he can sleep peacefully and alone. Arrange something, and let him go out with his broom whenever he feels like it and sweep up here.”

And Hoess did that. He was not the brutal concentration-camp commandant people imagine with a bulldog face. He was the father of a whole lot of children. He had human understanding for human worries. He had the orders that bound him. And had chance made it my fate to fill the post of a concentration-camp commandant, I would not have acted differently either. Had I been ordered to gas Jews and shoot them, I would have carried out those orders. And I have said before:

I am neither grateful nor ungrateful to fate for not having been given such a post, because I cannot piss against the wind anyway. Our oath obliged us to obey orders, and that is what I did. I was always a proper SS officer, accustomed to obeying.

Another example: I set up Tehersienstadt, and you know what Theresienstadt was. It was initially meant to be a collection center for the Jews of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, but was then converted into an old people’s home. At the time when it was initially to become this collection center, so that the deputy Protector—the word he had given the press, that in two months the Protectorate would be free of Jews—he even said to me, “Eichmann, now I have promised this, and now something has to happen.” You know Heydrich’s impulsive manner.

Well, one of the first measures in the first weeks—I was in Berlin at the time and had just dropped into Prague for a quick visit—and I discover that the commander of the Security Police and the Security Service in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia had ordered that three or four Jews be publicly hanged on the gallows in Theresienstadt. In Theresienstadt, and while Theresienstadt was being established. I can no longer describe the exact circumstances to you. In any case, the supervisory authority was the commander of the Security Police and the Security Service in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

The handling of matters was the responsibility of the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague, my Hstf (Hauptsturmführer) Günther, the brother of my permanent deputy. This Günther had established that some Jews had cooked up, or intended to cook up, this or that piece of dirty business, so the commander of the Security Police and the Security Service ordered the public hanging in Theresienstadt. You can imagine the panic among the Jews already brought to Theresienstadt, who had been promised that they could build up a territory of their own there, and so on.

Once, when I visited Theresienstadt, the Jewish functionaries gave me hell. I explained to them then—I naturally had to cover for the commander in front of the Jews—“Well, if people break the laws in this way, I cannot help either. Then the local commander intervenes. But I can assure you that in future no more justice will be carried out here. I also expect the Council of Elders to see to it that such things do not happen again.” I then authorized a Jewish police force of their own down there, which grew to as many as 150 men.

You can say that this too was arbitrary rule. It can be counted as such, if one chooses. But the commander for Bohemia and Moravia, Dr. Weinmann, in the same year that the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service became deputy Reich Protector, 41—

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

Yes, they were subject to the courts of the Protectorate Government. The Protectorate Government reached an agreement with the Reich Protector’s administration: it would move the Czech population out of Theresienstadt, compensate them and resettle them elsewhere. In return, the Czech Protectorate Government hands over all the Jews in the Protectorate to the Reich Protector’s administration, because he assured the Protectorate Government that they would go to Theresienstadt.

Now Theresienstadt did not have enough room for all the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia. The Reich Protector could therefore order that the groups who found no place in Theresienstadt—these groups were then taken away to concentration camps in the East. From the moment they came to Theresienstadt, they were subject to the commander of the Security Police and the Security Service. He had a permanent detachment in the town of about five or six men from his office. Outside, Theresienstadt was guarded by about 15 to 20 gendarmes of the Czech Protectorate Government, that is, one man every few kilometers.

These unlawful acts by Jews—were they committed in Theresienstadt itself?

Yes, they were committed in Theresienstadt itself, and the punishment was carried out in Theresienstadt itself as a deterrent example. It was wrong in this respect, and they agreed with me when I said: “If we want to build something up here in Theresienstadt, we must not start with executions. It will frighten people off.”

But how did you want to punish the people who had committed unlawful acts?

They would have had to be sent to a concentration camp, but not hanged in Theresienstadt. I was against that. The order from the RF (Reichsführer-SS) said that such people were to be transferred to a concentration camp, and Theresienstadt was not a concentration camp. That was a mistake by the commander of the Security Police and the Security Service. He probably thought, in his ignorance, that it was a camp where people were concentrated, therefore a concentration camp, and carried out executions there. That was not allowed.

Theresienstadt was also, in a sense, under the supervision of the Reich Security Main Office, because I had founded it and set it up and was now leaving, since I had been transferred to Berlin. From Berlin I provided the “shots in the arm”, after the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, my superior, became Reich Protector and asked me for practical advice about what to do after making that promise to the journalists. I suggested it to him, which is why I was entrusted with the work of setting it up.

For the detailed work, since I still had my ramshackle outfit in Berlin, I proposed Günther. Günther was subordinate to the commander of the Security Police and the Security Service, and so that commander was the supervisory authority for Theresienstadt. It was the RF’s (Reichsführer-SS’s) intention that Theresienstadt should not be a concentration camp. Indeed, he even made it a showpiece and coined the name “Jewish old people’s home”. No more executions took place, not one. What I had told the Jews stood: “German offices will no longer punish you. Punish yourselves.”

On what grounds was Seidl then sentenced to death?

The Jews themselves spoke for Seidl. All the people who served in Theresienstadt, whom I had appointed, whether it was this Seidl or—at any rate, these people were sentenced to death. Their only defense witnesses were Jews, and they all spoke for Seidl. I read it myself: the Jews did not understand why Seidl and the other people who lived in Theresienstadt were sentenced to death. That had been a form of justice; it too had been arbitrary. Arbitrary acts occur everywhere at one time or another, do they not? I have nothing further to say about it.

If you had to conduct a trial today concerning the whole range of questions we have been discussing for some time, and you were the prosecutor, whom would you call as prosecution witnesses, in order of importance? And whom would you call as defense witnesses if you were conducting the defense?

In answer to your question, I have the following to say. As prosecutor, if I had the authority, I would summon AH (Adolf Hitler) and the RF (Reichsführer-SS) in connection with these matters, both of them for the overall events. For the police side, the police implementation: the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service. For everything that happened after the police registration: the head of the SSVWHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office), Pohl.

I would then have all the department heads and desk officers—

[Struck out in the typescript.]

Then, for the Reich Security Main Office, I would also summon the head of Office IV, all the Einsatzgruppen chiefs in the East, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, and the head of Office VII, SS Brigadeführer Dr. Six. Then, from Office IV B 4, the desk officer Eichmann and the protective-custody desk officer; and, for the legislative side, the head of Office II and the relevant department heads or desk officers. I would also summon all the SS and Police Leaders of the General Government, the commanders of the Security Police and the Security Service in the occupied territories or territories we influenced, and all the advisers on Jewish affairs in the various European countries. With that, I think we would have covered the Security Police side.

I would then summon, from the VWHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office), the inspector of concentration camps, SS Brigadef. (Brigadeführer) Gluecks; then the head of the office within the VWHA responsible for the administrative work; all the concentration-camp commandants; and all the desk officers who formed the link between the camp commandants and the inspector of concentration camps. The Chief of the Order Police, and with him the responsible operations officer, who had to provide the transport escort detachments that accompanied the deportation trains as far as the transfer stations where they were handed over to the VWHA.

Then, from Germany, the Gauleiter and their case officers, insofar as they were involved in removing the Jews from their Gau. Then the Reich Foreign Minister, with the relevant state secretary, department heads and desk officers, to clarify the German Reich’s negotiations with the various “Sadoliken” states and the Foreign Office’s role in obtaining those countries’ consent to the removal of the Jews. Then the Reich Economics Minister, with the relevant department head, desk officers and state secretary: on the one hand, those responsible for removing the Jews from the economy; on the other, to clarify the disposal—to the Reichsbank and so on—of … Jewish property.

Then the head of the Chancellery of the Führer: for the first period, Rudolf Hess, and then Bormann, with his permanent liaison officers to the Chancellery of the Führer, Office IV of the Reich Security Main Office, the Foreign Office and the other central authorities. Acting on his instructions, he was, so to speak, the hammer that—

had to break through for the Gestapo wherever objections of principle were the order of the day—objections of principle to a solution in this or that field, right down to classifying Jews as indispensable (UK) for work in armaments plants. I would even summon the Armaments Minister, who would have to answer for why, on what scale and under what conditions he employed Jews in the armaments industries.

I would also summon the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, to clarify the role he played through his responsible case officers in the mental preparation, that is, in influencing people. I would also summon Reich Interior Minister Stukart, with his responsible department head and state secretary and his desk officers for general legislation; and, should you wish, all the Reichstag deputies who voted for the laws, the Reich citizenship laws and so on, even if only formally. That would have been the first group.

Outside the Reich: all the state functionaries who worked with the Germans in the various countries and, where there were such organizations, the party functionaries too. That is what I would do as prosecutor, and I would arrange a mammoth trial here.

Not doing that, and taking them individually at a time when the subject had not yet been understood as a whole, was a mistake. Whether it was a mistake for the other side or for us is for history to decide. It was a mistake, and I have a definite opinion about that mistake, but that is of no interest. That would be the prosecutor. Now the defense.

So the trial is now under way. The chief defense witness: history. I would summon a person who is an authority in this field, and I would also summon an authority on the disastrous effects of the Treaty of Versailles on the thinking and conduct of every German and nationally minded person. That was the attitude out of which men like AH (Adolf Hitler), HH [Heinrich Himmler], Goebbels, and so on and so forth, emerged. I am among them too—several million altogether. Added to them were the rest of the 75 million who had to support the seven million unemployed, who themselves had just too much to die on and already too little to live on. The culmination was 1933.

Versailles brought the question to a head: would 75 million Germans become Communists or National Socialists in 1933? Versailles no longer allowed any other solution. That is also the chief defense witness for all the people I named earlier, whom I would summon as prosecutor. It is still very difficult, in 1952, to find actual people as defense witnesses. Twelve years of influence and propaganda have so affected those who might have been considered as defense witnesses—unless they have meanwhile died a natural or an unnatural death—that some of them no longer want to know anything about it and simply no longer want to remember anything.

That is still the best factor in it. But very many of those who would still have been willing in 1945/46, under pressure from the occupying powers—for every pressure produces a counter-reaction—are no longer there today. Comfortable living and democratic re-education have borne fruit, so that today, as defense counsel, I would not know, as—

[unintelligible on the recording]

—seen, I could still bring someone forward today as a defense witness who would really stand by the matter.

In 1945 I would have had all my subordinates. Today I am no longer so sure. Some of them will now be serving in the new police force again and will not be candidates for defense witnesses at all when they consider their pension entitlements. Others may have had to lead a hard life in the meantime and curse the time and the stupidity that made them become Nazis. If something gets in their way today, it is humanly understandable that they vent their anger here.

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

As prosecutor, which Jews would you call—or rather, charge?

Yes, I would have to charge the ones I would also have to call as defense witnesses: Dr. Loewenherz, Dr. Eppstein, Dr. Rothenberg, the two leaders of the Orthodox community in Prague, Dr. Baeck, the entire Council of Elders in Teresienstadt. I would charge all of them, although they only did their duty, toward Jewry as well. They worked with the Gestapo, cooperated.

They may well have secured as much as possible for Jewry, but on the other hand they also made things relatively easy for me. Had I not had this Jewish operational apparatus—and it is not a matter of the individual, because behind them were the individual organizations with their Jewish employees and officials in Vienna, Berlin and Hungary—I would have needed a hundred times as many staff, and I still would not have managed it. I might have managed to get the staff, but that alone would not have been enough. Those people would have needed years to become familiar with the subject. Nothing would have been resolved, neither emigration nor deportation.

That is not right. Evacuated meant what the word said. When groups of people were evacuated—Poles, Gypsies, Jews, ethnic Germans—they were evacuated. People were also evacuated to Theresienstadt. Evacuated or deported is exactly the same thing. Deportation is—deportation to a concentration camp. Later there was no more evacuation to those camps. Later people were no longer evacuated to Theresienstadt either; they were deported. Only in the case of ethnic Germans did people speak of evacuation, and later it was described by the expression “resettlement”.

People spoke of resettlement in the case of the Poles too. A distinction was indeed made, but that does not mean that deporting and evacuating are the same as killing. Not even the term “final solution for the Jews” (Judenendlösung) is the same as killing. It had been called that long before 1941, when this operation first began. The Madagascar project came under the heading “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”.

The project in the Lublin district, the attempt at the first settlements of Jews, the attempt to obtain large territories in the General Government that were to be designated a Jewish reservoir, also came under the heading “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”.

The six transports I had sent to western, unoccupied France under pressure from the Gauleiter also came under the heading “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. So you can see that relatively harmless things went under “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” for years. The expression was retained later, when it really was the physical Final Solution. But even then a distinction was made between those who were exterminated in the concentration camps and those whom the VWHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office) held back for work in armaments plants.

Special treatment was killing.

But it was not applied only to Jews. Every section had special treatment. It was, so to speak, a decree from the RF (Reichsführer-SS). It was not said that someone would be hanged or shot, but that he would be subjected to special treatment. I also assume that this was something the RF (Reichsführer-SS) considered with his legal advisers. He had removed certain groups of people from the jurisdiction of the Reich Minister of Justice and perhaps said to himself that one could hardly pronounce a judgment saying “shoot”, “hang” or “kill”, because the Jews had been removed from the judicial system. So the term “special treatment” was coined by some lawyer, or perhaps by him himself.

I know that the word meant “killing” in every case. I cannot think of any other cases at the moment. But it also happened that prominent people in a concentration camp came under special treatment. In that case it was meant to signify that they did not live in a barrack but probably in a kind of villa, in considerably better conditions than the other inmates.

If physical extermination had actually begun, and from then on it says “Final Solution” or “finally solved”, is that to be understood as “killed”?

No, not at all. After 41, the words “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” by no means only meant that people were being killed. The statistics show that far more remained alive than were killed.

Can one say that the subject area “Jewry” was not separated from the Freemasonry section until the end of 1936?

Around that time, yes. The end of 35, the beginning of 36.

Can one say that priority in the Jewish question lay exclusively with the Party and its propaganda apparatus?

Yes, up to then, yes.

How long did you work under von Mildenstein?

34, from the troops to the Security Service, until spring 1936, … Brand with Six—around that time there was a general shake-up. We had … a head of office who had a lawyer as his chief of staff, a Hstf (Hauptsturmführer), who gave a lecture every week on criminal law and civil law. Around that time Mildenstein visited the Freemasonry department where I served—the seal collection—and tried to interest me in the Jewish department he had just set up. I was glad of the change and agreed. The transfer to the other department followed soon afterward, and as a case officer I had to work on the Zionist world organization.

I worked under von Mildenstein from about the summer of 1935 until 1936. It must have been around then that von Mildenstein moved to the Speer office. He went to the USA on Speer’s behalf to study the motorway system. For a few more weeks the department was run by the senior-ranking case officer, who then transferred to the German armed forces. Wi took his place. It then became a proper department, and the case officers advanced to desk officers. In the summer of 1937 Wi was replaced as department head by SS Oberscharführer Hagen, a confidant of Dr. Six who worked with him. I then traveled with Hagen to Egypt and Palestine in the autumn of 1937. In the winter we made preparations for the Ostmark, and in the spring of 1938 I went to the Security Service main sector in Vienna.

Are you familiar with these writings?

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

“The Jewish State.” It inspired me greatly at the time and was the main tome I used, alongside newspaper clippings, brochures and so on, in order to …—

Besides the Zionist world organization, I also had to work on Orthodoxy.

I then produced the first guidance booklet on the Zionist world federation. It had about 30 to 40 pages. It was printed and sent to the training leaders of the Security Service main sectors and sectors, so that the people out there would know their opponent in the greatest detail. I produced a second booklet on “the A. of Israel” as the organization representing Orthodoxy.

I also produced a third guidance booklet on the “New Zionist World Federation”.

In those guidance booklets, I proposed the greatest possible support for Jews in their efforts to emigrate and, where there were no such efforts, promoting them by every means. At the end of all those Security Service guidance booklets, every officer handling Jewish affairs in the sectors and main sectors had to be given a work program telling him how to act. In that way the individual sectors were aligned in their thinking and steered toward the same goal, and the head of each sector could … his Gauleiter accordingly. And not only that: he could also brief the other representatives of the individual central authorities accordingly. That included the greatest possible encouragement of emigration.

Now you must understand that those guidance booklets never went out under the compiler’s name. Admittedly, their covering letters carried my case-officer code beside the book number. But that code accompanied the booklet only as long as my head of office wanted it to. It did not appear on the booklet itself, only on the covering letter. That covering letter changed very quickly, as soon as the booklet was passed on to the Chief of the Security Police. If these are the booklets you are calling memoranda here, then I can certainly remember them, because those case officers each sat on their own dungheap, just as I sat on mine. I know nothing about any separate memoranda. But I must add that I need not necessarily have known anything about them.

But … that was how it was, after the closing of the lodges, which was usually carried out after drinking alcohol by a completely disorganized mob without any specialist knowledge—

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Lengthy description of the training in knowledge of Jewish matters, specialist knowledge, Hebrew language instruction, etc.]

so, in the Jewish question too—primacy lay with the Party—

[The thread of the preceding passage is then completely lost.]

Do you know a brochure that is said to have been issued by the Jewish-affairs section, entitled “The Jewish World Organization”, 1938?

Yes, that is what I have just told you. The Jewish world organization included, for example, the Zionist Association for Germany, the A… Israel, the New Zionist Association, and so on and so forth.

Did you compile that brochure?

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

When did this brochure come out?

1938.

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

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

I do not know that either.

But the authors were Professor Six and Herbert Hagen.

Then that is right. They published those things later, after the Security Service sectors had them, making them available to the general public. I do not know to what extent my material was revised, because I remained factual. We had to remain factual.

The proposal for a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna—was that your proposal?

Yes.

Heydrich was the one most closely involved there personally?

You cannot say that. At first he knew nothing about it. I made the proposal to Stahlecker in Vienna. He took it up immediately. When things were running to everyone’s satisfaction and going well, Heydrich came to Vienna after … time and spent a whole morning looking things over. After that I was ordered to Berlin.

How would you describe the activities and personalities of Storfer and Professor Neumann?

I sent them both abroad, and Loewenherz too, to look for opportunities for emigration and to obtain foreign currency.

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

In almost a year, 100,000 Jews emigrated after the Central Office in Vienna was established. It was the first well-organized emigration, carried out in cooperation with German and Jewish employees. There may have been 206,000 altogether, something like that. I no longer know exactly. The work ran nonstop, as I have said. I came to Vienna in March 1938. At the beginning I had many difficulties to overcome, so it was almost the summer of 1938 before the outfit was running properly. It must have been early 39 when we reached the first 100,000. Emigration from Vienna continued into the years 40/41.

I was already in Prague with Stahlecker as a desk officer when the—

German troops marched into Warsaw. I had already been there for over a month. At that time I held two functions there: first, as personal adviser to the commander of the Security Police and the Security Service; second, as head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which I had set up in Prague on the Vienna model. After it was established I was ordered to Berlin. Stahlecker stayed on there, was later sent to the East as an Einsatzgruppe chief, and fell outside Leningrad. At that time I traveled constantly back and forth between Berlin and Prague. Günther, a brother of my permanent deputy, was in Vienna then. That was 39, and by then I had hardly any contact with Vienna. In any case I have a figure of 206,000, 210,000, something like that, in mind.

How many got out of Prague?

I cannot say, but well over 100,000 there too, although the war broke out a few months later. I still remember a figure of 97,000.

Is it true that until the summer of 1939 Heydrich’s involvement in the Jewish question was limited to Austria and Bohemia and Moravia, and that he had no say in the territory of the Reich?

Well, he did have a say in his police sector. Not in the economic sector; that was the Commissioner for the Four Year Plan.

—when was it founded?

Before the war.

That is only partly correct. Heydrich was in Vienna, and a few weeks afterward I received a teleprinter message telling me to come to Berlin with my deputy. We had been to Mueller. Mueller told us how we were now to come to Berlin. I had my reservations because of Prague. Well, we went back and thought we had won, because we did not want to go to Berlin to sit behind a desk. But a few weeks later a teleprinter message instructed us to report for duty in Berlin. I went to Mueller; Mueller told me about it, and he went with me to Heydrich as well.

Heydrich told me that, besides my work as a desk officer under Mueller in IV B 4, I was to establish a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin on the Vienna and Prague model, and here the Reich Association and so on. Now, that did not work in Berlin. I did establish it, but it did not function properly, because by that time there were already hardly any immigration opportunities left. The countries closed themselves off. Bohemia and Moravia and the Ostmark, too, could not get rid of their Jews through emigration.

Although the Jews wanted to emigrate and the central offices offered the necessary help. But foreign countries, instead of reducing the sums people had to show, kept raising them higher and higher. They no longer issued affidavits or any other immigration papers, and they made difficulties in other ways too.

How many Jews would you estimate remained in Poland as of 1 September 1939?

Three million.

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

Is all that correct?

Yes, that is right. I still did that under Stahlecker; at that time I had nothing at all to do with Berlin. I said to myself, now we have Poland. Throughout my work I was, in a certain way, inspired by the book The Jewish State by Adolf Boehm. Somehow that book also gave me the wish to help here, not for the Jews, but because the solution to this problem lay here: to make the German people free of the Jew…

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

Now, in Stahlecker I had a superior who listened to me, a man who was extraordinarily lively and active, who was also somewhat ambitious. Anything that was a new idea, one might also say a creative inspiration, was what he looked for. The whole of official life follows a set routine. Officials are transferred, or they have already been in place for a long time and stay there until they die or reach retirement age. New ideas are hardly ever born, except through poring over implementing ordinances, decrees and draft laws that are described in the minister’s anteroom as especially creative. But when it came to political solutions of a new kind, people were generally reserved.

Stahlecker was not, not when I proposed a central office for Jewish emigration to him, nor when I made this proposal: now we have an enormous number of square kilometres in the East. We can carve out a territory here the size of a German Gau (regional district). Its head, in relation to the Reich, will be the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service, and all the Jews will be settled here, with their own schools and administrations. Only the supervisory authority will be the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service. Stahlecker was enthusiastic about it. He will doubtless have reported it to Heydrich, because I received authorization. Not only that, Stahlecker himself drove there with me.

I came to the San. I saw a blown-up railway bridge, wide, endlessly wide country from horizon to horizon, shaped somewhat like a plateau, with the San, that mighty carrier of water, in front of me. As an initial base I had the village of Nisko, a sizeable village right on the boundary between the Russian sphere of interest and the German sphere of interest.

I thought the terrain was ideal. I drove back, made my sketches and descriptions of the terrain, and Stahlecker got into the car. We drove off together and looked at everything. Then we drove to the … line. A GPU [State Political Directorate] (Soviet political police) commissar received us, and after we had talked very pleasantly for a while, a Siberian rifle unit … received orders to escort us through the Russian corridor so that we would be spared any possible unpleasantness, because we were travelling in full uniform. And so we came back onto Polish soil under German control.

I drove back and had Jewish craftsmen assembled, two thousand of them, naturally along with the rest of the personnel. I took my rabbi, Dr. Mobelstein, with me. I assigned him a certain amount of administrative work there. And after I had the best craftsmen in Mährisch Ostrau, I had the best specialists and workers assembled for me from Prague and also from Vienna, possibly also from the Old Reich, though I would almost deny that. I had material assembled from Theresienstadt, because we had a great many barracks there, and I then had a few trains put together with the two thousand people, including one veterinarian, who also asked me to let his son be his adjutant so that he would not have to work. Fine, I approved it.

The Jews did not work under our direction. They worked under the direction of the various Jewish caseworkers or specialists, and I would only have told Mobelstein how I envisaged the settlement in terms of construction. I rode over the terrain with him and explained how I would like it. Nisko was to be the first base in this whole district, which I believed and hoped I could obtain for myself. I wanted to bring in further transports, transport trains with material, and bring the people there along with the material, so that settlement could spread from there, from that centre, radiating out in every direction. The San was the border. That was the Jewish territorial border.

And when the thing finally got going, K.H. Frank threw a spanner in the works.

I know nothing about that, but I would not have found anything wrong with it either.

Yes. He gave an order to the commander of the Security Police and Security Service through his Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Krüger, that I was to be arrested on entering the General Government. Streckenbach told me this over a small cognac. To avoid causing difficulties, I stayed the night in Krakow, drove back the next morning and then made my reports. But the situation must already have been such that the other side had won, because I myself never again received an order to go to Nisko on the San. On the contrary, after a year, once there was no hope left, I had the camp on the San dissolved and had the Jews taken back to their places of origin or to Theresienstadt.

Did you set up this transit camp at Nisko on the San yourself?

Yes, but it was not a camp. Picture this country with its boundless expanse: there were perhaps fifty kilometres with nothing standing there. A little farther on there was a town, Radom. Later it was the district of Lublin. I wanted that whole district too. I wanted to make the town of Radom the capital of this Jewish territory, which would have consisted of the whole district of Lublin. Drawing on experience, I first established myself at Nisko on the San. I could not tackle Radom yet. That would have required extensive administrative regulations to remove the Polish population living there from the area, and even that would not have been enough. Instead, I tackled the matter from below and first got myself established there. Here I needed no decrees and no regulations. Unfortunately, it did not work out as I had imagined it would.

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

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

The example of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna showed Stahlecker that there always had to be something behind a proposal of mine. I had a certain credit with him. Stahlecker was no pen-pusher who wanted to know everything exactly, down to the smallest detail. He did not bother with that. He liked to be everywhere, hovering above things. Heydrich was exactly the same. Heydrich and Stahlecker could have been siblings. Stahlecker had confidence in my work because of the really successful establishment of the Central Office in Vienna. He knew that I did not simply talk idly about things. On top of that came the crucial point, the political solution. And that was an important part of the political solution: bringing the Jews there and giving them a territory in this district of Lublin.

That would mean that, after deducting the three million Jews for Poland, only half a million remained for Germany, Austria and Czechia?

Yes, that can be right. Deduct those who emigrated, and it can be exactly right.

I worked it out for Heydrich, not with his support.

I had even been to Hamburg, to the Tropical Institute, with Dr. Ra…. I worked all of this through down to the smallest detail.

That too. I had an expert then named Schlie, a Reich German. He was the same man who managed that strange ship that could never reach land. I had him. But above all, through the emigration advisory office of the Reich Interior Ministry, headed by a ministerial councillor, which admittedly still based its views on the law enacted in the year ’13, I obtained the names of the necessary technical experts and worked with them too. But more important than that was that I drew up a body of legislation specifically for the settlement.

Yes, that is right. That happened in connection with Madagascar.

Yes, that is right.

With reservations.

That is not right, because Eichmann did not originate that. It originated higher up.

What did that gesture just now mean?

That they were not assigned solely for the Madagascar project. We wanted to have them in any case; we wanted to establish ourselves there. Once you are in, you can see what comes next. The same applied to the General Government at the time. It is not my fault that I came off worse there.

But Müller, Heydrich and Himmler came off worse too.

Of course, quite clearly. But I think Frank regretted it very much afterwards, because Frank was later pushed into something that he had not wanted at all. He did not want any Jews in the General Government; he wanted it free of Jews. I only wanted to pack one district of his full of Jews. But later he had the whole Final Solution business, and he was in charge of it. Just as he had driven me out of the General Government, he had to take others who then carried out the Final Solution for him. Whether that was any more pleasant, I do not know. The whole thing would have gone differently if Frank had not torpedoed Nisko on the San. Whether he torpedoed it himself or it came from another quarter, I do not know. For Frank it was a great struggle at the time, against Heydrich, against Himmler and against me too.

That is not far off the mark.

And he had to believe in God. If he did not believe in God, he could of course leave the church and be an atheist, but then he was excluded. Atheistic lines of thought were not welcome.

This is the first I have heard of that.

I do not remember making such a statement. I would have regarded such a statement as insubordinate.

But do you think it possible…?

No, no, I do not think that possible.

Do you think it possible that the RF (Reichsführer-SS) much preferred a dead Jew to a living Jew on Madagascar?

No, not at all. Whoever writes that has no idea of the truth.

Yes, I have already said that. Everything changed then.

If I said that to Richter, then it was certainly only something I had heard. It is completely false that Himmler, Heydrich, Müller and Eichmann decided to exterminate Jewry at the beginning of the Russian campaign. “Decided” is not the right word anyway. The RF (Reichsführer-SS) received it as an order; it was not his idea. I still remember exactly the moment when I was told, “The Führer has ordered physical annihilation.” I heard the words “physical annihilation” for the first time in my life.

That is how this situation stayed with me. I have forgotten a great deal, but I will probably never be able to forget that moment. Neither Müller nor Heydrich nor Eichmann nor anyone else was involved in it; this matter was decided directly by the Führer and the RF (Reichsführer-SS). The RF (Reichsführer-SS) then issued the necessary instructions, certainly also to the head of the VWHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office).

The Chief of the Security Police, perhaps together with Müller, because Müller was in direct contact with the individual special task force (Einsatzgruppen) chiefs, perhaps the two of them came up with the words “anti-tank ditches”. When I was summoned to Heydrich, I was already presented with a fully worked-out plan, which I was to inspect and report on to him. He told me that Glo… had received orders from the RF (Reichsführer-SS) to use the Russian anti-tank ditches to shoot the Jews there and then level the ditches. I was to go there and report to him how far the work had progressed.

With this statement I give the lie to the author’s construction. I bring it up because the author says I told Richter that it was a blow from which Jewry would not recover. I do not want to deny that sentence outright, because I cannot remember it. But if I did say it, then I had heard it and repeated it to my staff in that form.

Complete nonsense.

This author’s logic or argument is to be dismissed as sheer nonsense, because I would not even have had the possibility of looking there for the only way of solving the problem. My task was to send the Jews to the concentration camps, after nobody would take them any longer and the RF (Reichsführer-SS) had stopped all emigration at the beginning of the Russian campaign. The order came that anyone in a concentration camp had to remain there until the end of the war, that nobody could be released, and that all the Jews were to be sent to the concentration camps. It was completely indifferent to me where the Jews went.

As far as I was concerned, they could have marched to Madagascar, or to Glo to be gassed, or to Auschwitz, or to Riga. It was completely indifferent to me, because I could not determine where they went anyway. My timetable man had to sit down each time with the responsible official in the VWHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office), and the VWHA told me the reception stations. Or, if the VWHA was not responsible for Riga and Minsk, it is quite possible that the RF (Reichsführer-SS) himself fixed the reception stations. The RF (Reichsführer-SS) had a mania for interfering, often down to the smallest details, and made life administratively difficult that way.

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

Nonsense. That is all I can say. I had nothing more to do with Stahlecker from the moment he left Prague. I had nothing to do with him either officially or privately. We never exchanged a single letter.

That is rubbish. I had no business concerning myself with that at all. For me, Poland was finished after the Nisko project and after the BDS [Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Commander of the Security Police and SD] (commander of the Security Police and Security Service) in Krakow told me that he had to arrest me. After that I did not concern myself with anything further. I went there another two or three times to Glo… as a postman, but nothing else. I had no jurisdiction and no authority.

No, I did not carry out a single execution.

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

Yes, but why are the subordinates never named?

When the retreat began on our side, I was summoned to Müller. Müller told me that the mass graves in the East had to be cleared up so that they would not fall into Russian hands, and that a Standf. (Standartenführer), Paul Blobel, would arrive in Berlin within the next few days. He had been commissioned by the Chief of the Security Police and was coming with his own detachment. Blobel had previously been chief of a special task detachment (Einsatzkommando), and before that head of a Security Service district somewhere in western Germany. Müller went on to say, “I do not know how to accommodate him. I am placing him under you for his material needs.” I received the order. Some time later a tall, heavy-boned man reported to me.

He introduced himself in a perpetually hoarse voice and coarse language. The fellow did not have five kreuzers’ worth of manners: “Ostf., you are to provide for my material needs. The substance of my assignment is none of your business. Where can I find quarters? I have my men here too.” Three or four men, just as arrogant as he was. As I said, I did nothing more than provide for his material needs. His work did not interest me, and I had no idea how things were done there. He had his own maps and worked entirely independently with his men. I had already had clashes with him before, which I have already mentioned. The detachment was simply called the “Blobel Detachment ”.

[indistinct muttering]

Is that right?

No, I never had an order from the RF (Reichsführer-SS) for physical annihilation.

If that is so, I do not want to deny it, because the RF (Reichsführer-SS) very often interfered in details, and he may well have written to the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service. It should be noted that in deporting Jews from Reich territory or anywhere else, not from the General Government, because I was not responsible for that, Jews fit for labour deployment are to be exempted.

Rubbish. The military situation, nothing else.

That is possible, yes.

Possible.

Yes, that is right. The suggestion came from some forestry fellow.

No, he had to take his time, because he could carry out his deportations only when a) the legal prerequisites had been created and enacted in territories outside the Reich or not under Reich control, b) the Reich Transport Ministry made the necessary transport trains available, and c) the SS VWHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office) … the capacity to receive them. Then I could carry out my order.

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

Possible.

Possible.

That is rubbish.

That is all possible.

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

That …

Yes, that is right.

That is not right either. I was ordered by the RF (Reichsführer-SS) or by the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service to go to Budapest personally.

[Regarding Eichmann’s pressure for deportation.]

When I was pulled away from the building site I was running, x kilometres east of Berlin, to house the Gestapa [Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, Secret State Police Office], Office IV, when I was pulled away from that site on a superior’s order, it certainly was not my own wish, because I was ordered to go. But when I was ordered, see the example of Wi…, and then to Berlin, then of course I take the best men of my staff or my office with me to make things easier for myself. That is what I did in Hungary too. I took everyone with practical experience.

Yes, to try to pick this matter apart today, after twelve years… I brought pressure to bear on Budapest several times, not just once. At first, of course, I had the difficulties and the resistance, but later it was the transport problem.

It was a lightning operation, that is clear, because I could not proceed otherwise. I had orders to ensure that eastern Hungarian Jewry could not emerge as a source of partisan formations, and I could only do that through a lightning operation. That is why I began as I did, although it would have been more convenient in terms of results: I could have produced figures; it would have been much easier if I could have started in the west or southwest, where our SS divisions were stationed, for example. I could also have brought pressure to bear directly on Budapest to exploit the element of surprise. I had orders not to allow partisan formations to arise, so I had to comb through from the east, the most difficult course for me, not only because I had to send my men into completely unknown areas, not only because I had to ask E. and B.

to let the gendarmerie first deploy in these areas. How vast and scattered this territory is, how difficult to traverse, and how compact and inviting western Hungary then lies before you, how invitingly the Bohemian-Moravian region lies before you. I still knew western Hungary from peacetime; I had practically been at home there. It was downright tempting, but the order bound me not to allow partisan formations to arise. How I did that was left to me. So, whether I wanted to or not, I had to forgo immediate advance credit, to put it plainly, and sacrifice a few weeks. But I told myself that it would pay off. Everyone had started in the west; everyone had started where there was the least resistance. Jewry, however, had not been prepared for that, which is why I was successful.

That is nonsense, of course. I could not have done such things at my own discretion. I only did such things when I had them in black and white in my files.

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

Yes, because the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service was familiar with the tasks of the solution. That is right.

Here the author is wrong. Many of my staff had been government councillors: Bosshammer, Wunsche, Suhr. Wi was a cut above me; Wi was certainly no intellectual nonentity. You know, when the man giving orders himself obeys and is accustomed to turning the orders he receives promptly into action, I should like to meet the subordinate who does not do the same. That is just it; that is the leadership principle (Führerprinzip) we had. It is, in itself, the duty of every officer to behave with the utmost correctness and live with the utmost correctness, in his private life and all the more so on duty: sober, clear, matter-of-fact, brief and to the point.

Then these men could never even get the idea of torpedoing the whole thing. Of course I held my lousy outfit in an iron grip. At the same time I was popular with my subordinates, because I had a personal connection with them, not for reasons of expediency. I spoke with them in their regional dialect, insofar as they came from Bavaria and down that way, and made music with them over the years. There was nothing of the ramrod Prussian about me. If one of these men, from the rank and file up, voiced objections, I listened to them.

If they were well founded, that was all right with me. If they were unfounded, I will certainly have said, “Keep your mouth shut. You do not understand this.” To the extent that I used the familiar form of “you” with them, and I did with most of them because I had worked with them for years, I could do so without committing a breach of service discipline. On the contrary, the franker the answer was on a matter that displeased me, the more harmlessly it was taken by the other side.

Quite clearly, there were other ways. I could have sabotaged it. But then I would have become not [? merely] a scoundrel but a swine, a swine who had sworn an oath to the flag and an oath of service, but would then have had to join the ranks of the criminals of the twentieth of July.

But would you, on the other hand, agree that your personal part in the decimation of European Jewry is indisputable?

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

I had the order to deport.

So that is your position on this?

Yes, that is my position. At most I could add that I did not want it. I did not want deportation; I wanted emigration. And if the other countries, which could not do enough to denounce the German measures, had at least opened their arms a little, drawn them, so to speak, into their protection and taken them in, I would not have assembled even half a deportation train, for lack of people. I would not have needed to arrange a single timetable conference at the Reich Transport Ministry.

I would not have needed to visit a single concentration camp to separate those fit for labor deployment from those unfit for it. The other countries did not do that. After Versailles, that is their second great guilt. Their further guilt is that at the end we gave them another chance, and the RF (Reichsführer-SS) said to them, “Take them off our hands. But you will no longer get them for nothing; now give us goods in return.” For the third time the other countries rejected the offer, and then the trains had to roll.

And you gladly accept that responsibility?

Insofar as we are talking about the police measure, namely rounding them up in those areas where I, that is, the Security Police, was active, where I then provided the transport trains and they departed, or in those areas where, through my advisers, I induced the governments concerned to hand over to the German Reich the Jews who were their citizens, so that I could take them away after their own police had rounded them up: I accept responsibility for that, of course, for having done it. I was not asleep during the war years.

[Typed working instruction: We must revise these sentences individually once more. 1. What were the Security Police doing, and how much of that jurisdiction fell to my section?]

But I never noticed that resistance. This book is a mixture of fiction and truth. I must say there is a great deal of truth in it, but the author has not investigated the matter thoroughly either. I do not know what year this potboiler was written in, because otherwise, in his childish inexperience, he could not have built my humble self up into such a mighty office as he has done. I always knew how to get my way. That is why I was in that position, why I was in the higher police service, on the higher career track. But as regards my jurisdiction, I am credited here with things for which I had no responsibility whatsoever.

I am only saying that this author too has to resort to such a portrayal if the so-called statement attributed to me about the death of six million Jews is to gain credibility. For it is quite clear: if he reduced my sphere of duties to what I actually held, there would be a great many people who would say, for one thing, the man cannot have known about that, and for another, he cannot possibly have killed six million Jews. It is physically impossible, if you work out the time. But when the author here invents an official apparatus for me and credits me with such vast powers, powers I never had at my disposal…

yes, then of course one can say: this man with such enormous influence, even over the RF (Reichsführer-SS), yes, it really is credible that he killed the six million Jews. That may well have been the author’s basis.

Now, your very first reaction?

Three-quarters rubbish, one-quarter truth.

This report is by Wi…

What is truth? Do you know what truth is? I know; you do not.

How was he interrogated?

You cannot credit the report with technical accuracy…

No, you cannot. I told you that. The inevitability is …. But I consider Wi far too shrewd not to have reduced my relationship with the Chief of the Security Police and SD (Security Service), and my relationship with the RF (Reichsführer-SS), to its proper, normal proportions at the time, if he had been able to testify freely. Now, I told you earlier, without knowing it, that there probably is nobody left today, because everyone today speaks purely from a subjective standpoint, with an eye to what he can gain, if he is incriminated, or what he can earn, if he has material things in view.

You cannot find anyone today. I am convinced that if you asked my closest colleagues from that time today, they would run me down, because that can only improve their own lives. But I tell you I am not like that. I would be a scoundrel if I ran down the RF today, or the Chief of the Security Police, or the head of Office IV. Nor will I run down my colleagues. I know that incriminates me today. I did not do it then, and I do not do it now either. That is my stubbornness.

I can only give you my personal impression: in my view this report was made under absolutely no direct, immediate coercion, torture or anything of that kind. Instead, I read a single motive in it, a single driving force. Not the general desire to whitewash oneself, because that plays no very great part with an intellectual man such as Wi, whom I am gradually getting to know as well. He has one basic motive, and a very primitive one: he hates you like the plague.

Why should he hate me? … was once my superior, that is true.

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

Otherwise all of this would probably have attached to him, this aura. It is a … aura, but let us put it that way, in today’s negative sense: he would, in a way, have gone down in history. It is possible. Although I never contributed anything to that, because I had everything except a ruthless, hard-driving ambition. I once said that to Müller too, and he thought a person ought to be ambitious. It was about entering the civil-service career. At the time I still wanted to wait until the war was over. That may have been around 1942. It is possible, but then it comes from a primitive mentality, if he acts from this motive…

No, it need not be that at all. Precisely because he is an intellectual man

it is these emotional impulses that use all the resources of the intellect to give a primitive feeling room to breathe. That is the case with Wi. He suppressed this envy for years. With the end of the war, with defeat, with the gallows in sight, this hatred, this envy, became outright hatred, all the more because he was caught and Eichmann was not. That is the only way to explain how an intellectual man like Wi. could be led to say it. It is not something one says under pressure or torture:

That is whimpering.

What you say is very plausible, but I do not know how to put it in human terms, since I never had the slightest difficulty with Wi and never made difficulties for him either. We had been good friends. It was exactly the same with Krumey. Although with Krumey I did notice certain things: it was difficult for him, an office head accustomed to working independently, to have me giving him orders and forcing him into the blinkered policy of a government agency, because it was not he who was responsible, but I. He was used to being responsible, and so Krumey took various unauthorized actions.

I told him once, too: that might have been possible in resettlement, but it will not do in the police apparatus, because I have to answer for it. We were both the same age and held the same service rank. He himself, however, applied and asked to go to Hungary with me. I gave people as much freedom as possible, as far as I could. It was Wi himself who asked me to take him out of Slovakia and take him along to Hungary. His particular hobbyhorse, and what he would look forward to, was the de-Jewing of the Hungarian aristocracy, and beyond that examining under the magnifying glass the whole assimilation-minded Jewish population of Hungary. He did that, too.

What did he mean by “examining under the magnifying glass”?

Singling them out and working on them. He did it, after all. He was the one who introduced me to L.E. [László Endre]. He tracked him down, because Wi. belonged to the advance detachment along with Krumey. He opened up those channels that then proved fatal to Jewry. How does the man come to impute things to me today, things which he must know at least as well as I do, since he was my superior for a year and a half or two years? To impute things to me that I could never actually have permitted myself, because I would immediately have been called to order.

There is no police apparatus anywhere in the world in which a desk officer can override the chief of a country’s police. And what chief of a country’s police lets himself be influenced by a desk officer? A country’s police chief may have 500 or 1,000 desk officers under him. The RF (Reichsführer-SS) may have had 5,000 desk officers under him. Would he then have let himself be influenced by one desk officer? I do not believe it. Or would the RF have let himself be influenced by a regimental commander? Is there a parallel?

Becher?

Becher had a quite personal relationship with the RF (Reichsführer-SS). If the RF tells Becher his bedroom secrets and commissions him to choose a fine gift, and he tastefully chooses a very beautiful, heavy gold chain and then tells me about it as well, the RF has certainly chosen the right man. Because if I have such a sensitive, delicate bedroom mission, I keep it inside my heart, sealed away and turned to stone. So this man worked his way in and saw how to get access to such things. But I had only a stand-at-attention relationship with the RF, and otherwise none at all. It was the same with Heydrich. It was not like that with Kaltenbrunner, and with Müller it was not like that because of the daily work. So you cannot bring in Becher as a counterexample.

I do not understand any of this, not the watch decree either. I do not understand any of it.

Bedroom secrets are secrets because they are tied to the bed, and a bed is not a sounding board.

The founding of the Reich Security Main Office must have been before September 1939. It meant bringing together the SD (Security Service), Stapo [State Police] (State Police) and Kripo [Criminal Police] (Criminal Police). After its founding, Eichmann was brought to Berlin by Heydrich and assigned to section IV B 4 in the Reich Security Main Office. That meant Eichmann was effectively detached from his previous organization, the SD. He was taken out of the SD and seconded to the Gestapa (Secret State Police Office), although the SD belonged to the Reich Security Main Office just as the Gestapa did. Until then the two had operated separately. One was purely a Party matter, the other a state matter.

In my view, you probably did not help enforce the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in the so-called Old Reich, because the law had already been enacted in 1933. But when you took over Austria, that law was extended to Austria too, as far as I remember. To what extent were you brought in to implement the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in Austria?

Not at all. In Austria I dealt with no measures concerning the Jewish question other than emigration itself. Everything else was negotiated and discussed between the hotel on Morzinplatz, later the Gestapo, and the Office of the Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with Germany.

But that confirms you were involved in some way, because besides being head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, you also held the position of Jewish-affairs desk officer with the Commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service).

No, I did not hold that position with the Commander of the Security Police and SD. I held it as a desk officer in the SD upper district. But I worked in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration and dealt with nothing other than Jewish emigration. [Handwritten note at the foot of the sheet: My successor in the SS upper district was SS (? Obersturmführer) G…mann, who until then had dealt only with (? church matters) …]

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

It must have been someone else, but I do not know.

That surprises me, because at the time I was working in another SD (Security Service) district in Austria, and under this law we had the task of assessing officials, that is, establishing whether they were Jews or not.

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

You had nothing to do with this law in your later work either?

No, not later in the Protectorate either. In the Protectorate it was handled by a desk officer with the Commander of the Security Police and SD (Security Service), a government councillor from old Austria who then became a senior government councillor.

And the law on revoking naturalizations and withdrawing German citizenship, which was also enacted in 1933: you had nothing to do with that either?

I dealt with that later, when I took over section IV B 4 in 1940. I then had the part of the work that also counted toward the ex…. I had a field of work covering the withdrawal of German citizenship, that is, establishing hostility to the people and the state. That led to withdrawal of German citizenship and, in turn, of property as well: seizure of the property and its transfer to the regional finance president for confiscation, and publication in the Reich Gazette (Reichsanzeiger). But that was only from 1940 onward. Until then I had nothing to do with it.

These laws repeatedly mention the so-called exceptions: people with decorations for bravery, those wounded in the First World War, and veterans of the First World War. Were those provisions actually observed for as long as they were in force?

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

Until when were they in force?

Well, that is to say, some of them were never abolished. Public offices sometimes overstepped the bounds through unauthorized actions, but then the matter was put right again. It is only in that sense that one can understand saying they were abolished later, because those groups were later taken to Theresienstadt. Take the Austrian General Sommer, a Jew. He was taken to Theresienstadt and had so-called accommodation for prominent people there.

He did not live in the barracks-like communal quarters but in a small house, and to my knowledge he survived the war. The public offices adhered very strictly to these provisions, which is not meant to say that exceptions occurred here and there; but they occur everywhere. I must also add that we all experienced the war, and we were all brought up with a heroic outlook and learned to respect all those who fought and bled for the German Reich. Yes, we also respected the enemy who suffered wounds for his fatherland.

And we could not have acted differently toward Jews either, if that was our outlook. I have already said that we also had Jewish SS men who had taken part in the meeting-hall battles for the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). We did not rebuff those people either. We later smoothed their way so that they could have a decent, quiet life. We respected the Jewish front-line veterans of the First World War just as much. We also had a Jewish holder of the Pour le Mérite, named Bergtold, or something like that.

So these Jewish SS men were… abroad…

No, they were treated as they wished and given what they wanted. They were not harassed. They were not shipped abroad, but they were generally glad to go so they could finally have some peace, insofar as they had not shot themselves, and so on and so on. But they could do what they wanted; they were left unmolested.

I had a Ustf. (Untersturmführer) at my office who then discovered he was a quarter-Jew. He wanted to kill himself. I stopped him. He then went into the air force (Luftwaffe) and fought magnificently there. And from what I have been told, he has again played a major role in Austria’s new national movement since the war.

How many Jewish SS men do you estimate there were?

The number was small, though there were a few more after the proof of Aryan ancestry. You cannot put a percentage on it. There were probably more in Austria than in the Old Reich.

But if I absolutely have to give a figure, I have to say around 50, for the Reich and Austria. That applies to SS men. There were considerably more in the other parties, many hundreds. Some were old fighters who only discovered through genealogical research that they were of Jewish descent.

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

Yes, most of them, if they were officers. A few cases came to my attention, mainly in 1937 and 1938. In Austria it was after the annexation (Anschluss), when people began researching their ancestry; in the German cases too, of course. Sometimes it took a very long time and ran into 1940. But the way was smoothed for these people. They had their wishes, and those wishes were granted. I had an SS Oberscharf. (Oberscharführer), and I had the man brought to me myself, although I generally did not concern myself with individual cases. We discussed his case. He was not downcast. He simply said, “Bad luck, Ostbf.. It was a fine time, but that is how things are now. I cannot do anything more.” I asked what he wanted to do.

He was a musician. I gave him … hours to think about what he wanted to do. He came back and wanted to go to Switzerland to start a band. Good, I said. He had money. If he had not, I would have got him the money for the journey, but he did not need any. He received a passport, and I instructed the border-crossing posts to let him through. Everything was in order. He now reaches Switzerland, apparently does not trust the business, and crosses the … border. When he is challenged, he does not stop. The other man shoots and hits him, and the man falls dead. I received a report at once. Everything was recorded in detail, but there was nothing more to be done. The border posts were not at fault.

Do you remember whether any of these former Jewish SS men worked against the Reich, in Europe or outside it, perhaps out of bitterness?

No, I do not know of a single case. The man in the case I just described was of the most decent disposition. He was a full Jew. He was an Oberscharführer. What else were you supposed to do? I addressed him as “my friend”. His being a Jew receded into the background; this was a comrade from the old meeting-hall battles…

You had nothing to do with the Editors’ Law?

No. I must tell you something fundamental about all these laws. Until 1940 I had absolutely nothing to do with them. When I was still in the SD (Security Service) Main Office, I was the case officer for the Zionist world organization and for Orthodoxy. When drafts circulated from a ministry taking the lead to other ministries, some of those regulations, implementing measures, laws and decrees could certainly reach the SD Main Office too, and through its distribution list reach the responsible department head. In that case the department head countersigned them, not the case officer. The case officer was assigned to a Jewish political matter on the research side, and that was the work of the SD Main Office at the time. To what extent Ohlendorf’s Office III took the lead…

[Written marginal remarks: For this work it is of the utmost importance to be able to build up the origin of the Jewish people, Eretts Israel, to extract billions from Germany as so-called reparations, and to hammer a sense of guilt into the German people. That suits the Jewish cause morally, but it is also important because the money to come is supposed to be a kind of atonement payment, and the greater the sense of guilt, the easier it is to demand that money. The basis of all these efforts and all these successes is ultimately the legend of the six million murdered Jews. It is of the utmost importance for us to examine this thesis closely, both in its origin and in its significance. If one looks closely, there are actually two Jewish theses in conflict with one another. The first is the well-known one of Bu…, who speaks of more than six million. The other is Reitlinger’s far more serious work, “The Final Solution”. That work asserts that the six million cannot possibly be right and that the figure must be around four million. Neither Reitlinger nor Bu… nor the Israeli government has even remotely attempted, for example, to provide a list by name of those six million murdered people. Yet they know how to list exactly what damage individual Jews suffered in the Third Reich; it is itemized in minute detail. But no attempt has yet been made to provide this list of the six million Jews by name, not even leaving out the uncertain factors, such as the Jews in Russia, whom Israel and Jewry can easily claim cannot be counted, and therefore certainly cannot be listed by name. Nor has such a list been compiled for European Jewry. They work only with large numbers: they claim that before the war there were so many, and after the war only so many Jews remained, so the rest disappeared and the Germans murdered them. They take no account whatever of migration, of the movement of Jews from one place to another. They simply say that there were so many Jews in Belgium before the war and only so many afterward; the difference between the two numbers must therefore be the number of Jews from Belgium murdered by the Germans. If we now draw the conclusion, calling for a register of the victims by name, and if, on the other hand, we see how precisely the Germans worked, how the murder was carried out with the most meticulous bookkeeping methods, and if we also see the enormous quantities of documentary material that, there is no other way to put it, were passed to Jewry by people from the Third Reich and afterward, then compiling a list of the victims by name does not seem so crazy at all. After all, those victims ultimately form the basis for claims, demands and so on that cannot be overlooked. So, if one demands a list of names, it would already be a useful attempt in that direction if the Jewish population of Holland or France, precisely recorded by name by the Jewish organizations before the war, could now be accounted for exactly: these are the victims who fell here and there. That would at least make the matter somewhat more credible. But if we take the core of this]

[Written marginal remarks, continued: matter, the six million murdered, then one must establish that this thesis is derived solely from one remark by Eichmann, who is said to have said: “If it comes to that… then I will jump laughing into the pit, for with me there are also five million enemies of the Reich…” But here they have said “Jews” instead of “enemies of the Reich”. The principal witness for the statement is Wi….]

[Written marginal remarks: Wi was handed over to Czechoslovakia suspiciously quickly by the Allies. And I say suspiciously quickly because, in Eichmann’s absence, he was an absolutely crucial witness. It is incomprehensible that Jewry did not insist that he should not remain available, especially since he had declared himself willing to talk freely, probably out of old personal resentments against Eichmann, and was eager to say exactly what people wanted to hear. So, as I have said, it remains incomprehensible that this man was handed over to Czechoslovakia so quickly, when one could say with deadly certainty that he would immediately be hanged behind the Iron Curtain. In other words, what did they do? They put forward this thesis, but immediately silenced its principal witness. In any run-of-the-mill detective story such a circumstance would immediately arouse suspicion; it would be a clear ground for suspicion. Further statements, such as those made by Höss, who said he had killed two and a half million Jews in his camp, are doubted even by Jewish authors and described as gross exaggerations. Höss is no longer here either, yet his two and a half million are eagerly included in the thesis of six million. One must therefore conclude that something is wrong. First, despite the presentation of extensive documentary material, no attempt has ever been made to compile a list by name. Nor is there any document or other evidence beyond a single sentence from Eichmann. And the principal witness for that sentence, also the principal witness for Office IV B 4, Wi…, was very quickly sent away, practically pushed into the grave. Personally, however, I would like to say that I do not believe Wi is actually dead. He is probably being held in reserve as long as there is no certainty about Eichmann. Third, on the basis of this thesis and its generality, demands are made whose end cannot be foreseen and whose outcome could have a downright tragic significance for Eretts Israel. That is probably why it can hardly be expected that a list of the victims of Nazism by name will be produced for the time being. This also makes clear what tactic should be followed: the continual demand for such a list. Only on that basis will it be possible to cast doubt on this thesis of six million for an ever wider public.]

I can no longer tell how far Ohlendorf was involved in countersigning. But I am inclined to think his apparatus had more of the leading responsibility within the SD (Security Service) Main Office than, for example, Office I or the later Office VII for the scholarly assessment and study of opponents.

When I was transferred from the SD Main Office to Vienna and Prague, I had nothing to do with these matters either, insofar as we are discussing legislation here, because I had to concentrate exclusively, in the truest sense of the word, on emigration alone.

When I was transferred back to Berlin in 1940, this time to the Gestapo, of course, whenever some central authority produced new implementing regulations, these went round for circulation. Those authorities first approached our Office II, Legal Affairs and Administration, as it was called. From there I too received the matters for countersigning. That was my only involvement in these affairs. As I have already said, apart from the draft law concerning Madagascar, I personally did nothing else in this field.

The initiative always came from the competent central authorities.

Yes, that is how it is.

The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, generally known as the “Nuremberg Laws”: who took the initiative?

At that time I was sitting in the museum of Office VII, and in a museum one learns nothing of what is happening in practice. My work under the museum director Richter from Berlin was to arrange and organize my seal collection and record it in a card index. We were quite separate and had nothing to do with the SD’s activities. Occasional visitors came from the HJ (Hitler Youth), BM, and so on to look at the museum. But I believe those two laws arose from a discussion at the highest level between Goebbels, Göring, the RF (Reichsführer-SS) and the Führer, and that Frick was brought in because he had to develop the matter through his state secretary Stukart. I also believe that one stimulus was the constant propaganda hammering by Streicher and Goebbels, and that the Führer’s Chancellery was involved in providing the impetus.

The Führer’s Chancellery had to be involved in every piece of legislation. But the question remains: did the initiative come from the Führer’s Chancellery, or was it merely asked to deal with the matter?

All these things were enacted at a time when I had absolutely nothing to do with them. It was only in 1940 that I dealt with the ex-consequences of these laws.

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

By that time, 1940, the major clean-up of individual cases was already over. From 1940 onward there were only follow-up skirmishes by the individual State Police offices and regional headquarters. The procedure was then that, for example, a State Police office or regional headquarters would report

that Jew XY employs a German housemaid, although he has a young rascal over eighteen in the family. The Jew was therefore taken into custody under the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, and instructions are requested as to whether he should be transferred to a concentration camp under the RF (Reichsführer-SS) decree of …. That came to me. It then went either to the government administrative officer Woern or Police Chief Inspector Mees, depending on the Jew’s initial letter, because one handled A–K and the other K–Z. They then checked which regulation applied.

Penalty: Dachau concentration camp. Prepared. File note concerning Jew XY: 1. …, what I have just said. 2. To the State Police regional headquarters in Munich, concerning Jew XY, with reference to the letter of …. In reply to the letter cited, you are informed that Jew XY is to be committed to Dachau concentration camp under RF decree No. …, pursuant to the law ….

[Typed routing note: III – IV B – Protective-custody section: forwarded for information and further instructions.]

[Typed routing note: IV – ZDA – or resubmission for review of the detention date; the interval was three months each time.]

The last item can be omitted if the protective-custody section itself registered the matter for automatic resubmission. With that, the case was settled. That is the bureaucratic handling, the ex-handling of this case.

You do not know of any particular cases?

No, no particular cases.

Do you remember any cases of the opposite kind, interventions on behalf of prominent Jews? Influence from higher up to exempt them from prosecution under the Reich Citizenship Laws or the Law for the Protection…?

Yes, that happened all the time. Those were the so-called interventions, but I cannot remember individual cases. They ranged from Göring himself, through the Waffen-SS General Wolff, down to the present Provost of Berlin, who was then Pastor Grüber, with dozens and hundreds of people intervening in between. It was actually forbidden to intervene. But what are you to do when the Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan intervenes, when an SS general intervenes? You cannot then be more of a stickler with the other people than circumstances require.

And how did you conduct yourself in such cases?

I did not dare take on Göring. Göring did not call me himself, nor did his office. Göring discussed these things with the RF (Reichsführer-SS). The RF then sometimes came along with things directly contrary to what he had just ordered. I had a row with Wolff, but Müller put that right again. I did repeatedly admonish the pastor and ask him to stop intervening. I gave him three State Police warnings. When Grüber still had not had enough after the third State Police warning, I told him I would now have to order his transfer to a concentration camp if he intervened again after that third warning. He did it again, so I simply had him committed to a concentration camp, and then I

did not let him out again either, however much his wife pressed me. Once she even caught me personally on the telephone. She booked a long-distance call from Magedburg and got me on the line. I gave her a refusal, however, and left it to her to approach the RF (Reichsführer-SS). She will have done so, but Grüber nevertheless remained in the concentration camp until the end of the war. Grüber was an ordinary pastor whose hobbyhorse was caring for non-Aryan Christians.

If he had confined himself to that, since those people occupied a kind of special position, it would have been all right. But as these things happen, and Grüber certainly did not recognize this either, that was why I gave all those many, many admonitions, which could almost be interpreted as forbearance if one did not know the facts. I had to do it because I knew that, in practice, care for non-Aryan Christians too often extends, through a man like that, to relatives of those non-Aryan Christians who are not entitled under the law to be placed in a privileged position. Is that clear?

[Regulation on professional assistance in foreign-exchange matters.]

[Reading of this decree; enactment on 29 June 1936.]

[Statement.]

[Typed as notes in the transcript: I came to Vienna; Central Office founded, and so on.]

Now I had indeed seen that I had all the responsible officials sitting here along the production line, together with the Jewish officials of the religious community in Vienna, that the paperwork was running properly, and that no document expired before the others had also been issued. Then it turned out that the immigration countries were making their admission requirements increasingly difficult. The amounts of the so-called show money were raised each time. In short, those countries made every effort to keep the Jews off their hands. We made every effort to get the Jews out as quickly as possible. Yes, the Jews helped the authorities do that, and in this way we supported one another. That took a great deal of money. North America, for example, demanded show money of 250 dollars a head; other countries required even more. The money had to be raised.

I did this without knowing that a law existed on assistance in foreign-exchange matters. You must understand that at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration I did not have a single lawyer who could have helped me, or a single lawyer who knew the body of legislation as such. Nor did I know what had been enacted in the meantime. I did not concern myself with it and simply forced my way through, stubbornly, and did one thing: I went to the foreign-exchange office in Vienna. A Reichsbank councillor named Wolf was there, an open-minded, unbureaucratic gentleman.

I described my difficulties to him and said: “Look, here I have obtained the papers for Jew XY, and there I have these difficulties with the countries. These people keep raising the per-head sums and will not admit the Jews. I send my people out, Löwenherz, Storfer, Rette berg and so on, to raise foreign currency. Now I have the currency. I want to give the Jews the currency as show money so they can march out. But I also want to use it, because I have to maintain the religious community in Vienna, the four hundred officials and

employees. The Jews who have been thrown out and pushed out of German spheres of life are practically out on the street. The medical services of the religious community’s welfare office need help, need money. The state allocates them no funds. What am I to do? I am supposed to get the Jews to emigrate, and people handicap me. Give me permission to sell dollars or Reichsmarks to Jews within the country at whatever rate I can get, up to the amount the Jew still has available. For example, if a Jew still has a hundred thousand schillings, I will sell him five hundred or a thousand dollars for a hundred thousand schillings.” I received permission. Whether he asked the Reich Economics Ministry, I do not know. That was none of my concern. I dictated my file note and, as I said, I was covered.

So I said to my friend Löwenherz: “Here, flog the foreign currency. Hand it over, deliver it to Wolf. It will not be taken from you there, only deposited, and you will control it. You can say: I have ten families here, and each family now needs five hundred or a thousand dollars in show money. That makes ten thousand dollars in show money. But you have ten thousand dollars lying with Wolf, which you can use. You must provide me with proof that you exchanged those ten thousand dollars not for thirty thousand marks but for three hundred thousand marks, in one case for six hundred thousand Reichsmarks. That was the highest case.”

Then Löwenherz came to me once. He had another Jew who still had money and was prepared to pay twenty marks for one dollar if only he could get the dollars. He desperately wanted to leave. I approved it, so the matter went through. But when it happened, it came out and there was a row. The Reich Economics Ministry took the view that Eichmann in Vienna was undermining the mark’s value abroad. A great bureaucratic steamroller was set going. It went through Heydrich to the RF (Reichsführer-SS), who was alarmed.

But I did not receive a single reproach from my superior. I still remember Heydrich laughing heartily at this prank and encouraging me to push through ruthlessly wherever necessary. That pleased me very much. My superiors then ironed the matter out, with the result that Eichmann’s tactic does not undermine the Reichsmark’s value. What the Reich Economics Ministry did about it, I naturally do not know. That is what I have to say on the subject of assisting Jews to obtain foreign currency.

Were you involved in that?

Yes, I can tell you more precisely about that. In 1937 I slipped on the parquet floor while holding a yellow pencil and fell on my right hand in such a way that I broke it in two places. It was put in plaster, and I then got into the habit of signing with my left hand and writing with it whatever I had to write.

I was a case officer then. I still remember Dannecker sitting beside me as the case officer for purely assimilation-minded Jewry. We were laughing at my clumsy left-handed writing when the order came that I was to report to Six. I went with Wi to Six. It was just when Wi was changing over with Hagen; Wi was no longer really doing anything. Six ordered me to go to Breslau immediately, for eight days to begin with, to discuss the whole business with a Jewish-affairs case officer, Ustf. (Untersturmführer) Roesner, at the SD (Security Service) upper district in Breslau. I took the extensive material I was given and had to explain to him how things were to be done and what he had to observe. Until then nothing at all could be done, until 15 July 1937.

I reported to the office, which was headed by a Stf. XY. Stbf. (Sturmbannführer) XY kept me waiting three days. I was an Oberscharführer at the time. The first thing he did was thunder at me: “Even if you come from the HA (Main Office) with the aim of spying on me here, I will have you put against the wall.” A friendly gentleman.

I told him: “Sturmbannführer, I know nothing about that. Nobody has given me the task of spying on you. I have come with instructions to instruct your officer for Jewish affairs and give him the tools so that, from the moment the Reich laws take effect here in the East Upper Silesian area, he will be thoroughly familiar with this field. I have no other order.” He then rather went around it [?]. On my way out I had to salute with my left hand, as my right hand was still bandaged. I met one of his Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) and he took me to task over that. In a word, they made one difficulty after another for me at the SD upper district in Breslau.

I got through those eight days as best I could. I wrote Wi a letter every day, since there was no possibility of oversight there; this Sturmbannführer was known as all-powerful. After exactly eight days I cleared out, without having managed to accomplish much there at all. I reported everything. Proceedings were brought against the man, and he was ordered to Berlin. I was questioned as a witness in his presence and in the presence of an Ostf.

(Obersturmführer) Albrechts from the personnel department, with Streckenbach also present, and had to relate everything. The man was then removed from his post. Much later I met him again at some lecture. By then I was an Ostbf. (Obersturmbannführer); he was still a Stbf. (Sturmbannführer). He tried to ingratiate himself, saying, “But we know each other.” I simply said, “Yes, yes, we know each other.” That settled it. I had nothing in mind for the man.

I remember the matter very well because the head of the SD upper district handicapped me so that I could get nowhere with the actual work. Roesner too was very reserved toward me, and they more or less tried to keep me occupied at the office without my being able to get my business across. That was why there was a complete reshuffle of personnel. I cannot tell you any more about it. What I mean is that the Reich government did considerable preparatory work long before the laws took effect in Upper Silesia. I was there before July 1937, because at the end of September I went to Palestine.

[Now on the regulation concerning the registration of Jewish property, of 26 April 1938.]

I remember the regulation, but I had nothing to do with it.

For at that time I was working in Vienna as head of Jewish emigration. But in Vienna we had a property matter under the control of Fischbeck, the Property Transfer Office, where the matter was recorded centrally. I had nothing to do with it later either.

[Compulsory identity cards; introduced in 1938.]

I had nothing further to do with that.

[Regulation on carrying out changes of surnames and first names; 17 August 1938.]

This matter was also put before the SD (Security Service) Main Office, and I believe before Office VII. Who wrote down the names, I do not know. I was simply very surprised at the time by the quite exhaustive selection of names, some of which were no longer current at all, dug up from the most ancient times, from the time of the Jewish kings. In compiling these names there must have been involved, first, the Führer’s Chancellery. Streicher will have taken pains and hurried to send names to Berlin. No doubt the Jewish associations themselves will also have been asked to supply names. I can imagine that the Jewish Reich Association was asked to supply names.

Who was responsible for drafting this law?

The Gestapa (Secret State Police Office) certainly took the lead. The office of Six was involved too, but only as a participant. Office IV [?]. I believe I can vaguely remember that Stbf. (Sturmbannführer) Lischka, my predecessor as the officer for Jewish affairs in the Gestapa, even showed me that list. That is why I think so; it is not unfamiliar to me. But as I said, I had nothing to do with it, because I had the Central Office in Vienna at the time.

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

No. I was involved in the whole affair, the Night of Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht), only to the extent that I let a number of Jews camp and sleep in my office under the protection of the guards, and the next day they went home again. That was the only thing I had to do with it. I mention it because this whole Night of Broken Glass was contrary to our wishes, our aim. The Jews must have recognized that, for why else would they have fled to the offices of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD (Security Service)? They crawled into the lion’s jaws, so to speak, and they must have known that the Security Police and the SD were against it. It must have become known to them that quickly, even more quickly than to me as head of the office, because I knew absolutely nothing. I had received no instruction, no order, nothing, absolutely nothing.

Did you have anything to do with Hinkel’s order excluding Jews from the cinema, the theater, public concerts and so on and so forth?

I had nothing to do with that. Hinkel did it within his own jurisdiction. Only this: when I was running the Central Office in Vienna, Hinkel came one day in person…

Hinkel, with Party number 9, as he introduced himself everywhere, the man who wrote the book One Among a Hundred Thousand (Einer unter Hunderttausend). He looked over the shoddy outfit and was absolutely delighted. He was accompanied by a Stf. Roth and a Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Kualkofski (?). In the period that followed, Roth and Kualkofski came to me in Vienna very often, less because I could have helped them in their efforts to reach their goal than because they recognized my office as a welcome treasure trove, where they could perfect their knowledge of everything concerning Jewish [? life] in Austria, even better than at the State Police headquarters.

There was a bustling stream of Jewish callers at my office. When I tell you that for a number of weeks we got 1,000 Jews a day completely ready to leave, that means at least 2,000 Jews could come marching up every day: some to submit the application to obtain a passport, the others to collect the passport for signing. As a rule, though, there were more than 2,000 Jews a day, because at that time I demanded that Löwenherz provide me with at least 12,000 to 14,000 Jews every day. We were lucky then: we had foreign currency, other countries were taking people in, so there was a coming and going all day long.

Into this came Party comrade number 9, Hinkel, with whom I developed an extraordinarily cordial relationship over time. In his own field Hinkel was stubborn and intolerant and recognized nobody except Goebbels. He respected the RF (Reichsführer-SS); he was an honorary Gruppenführer, after all. He was one of the first to have an SS tailcoat made for himself, and at that time he had organized the film ball in Vienna, which took place in the rooms of the castle (Burg). I was invited too, and at gatherings of that kind such things were done and worked out.

That same night I drove with some Slovak officers to a place called Engerau, along with other people from the Security Service upper district, to discuss the details there. A little revolution was starting there around that time. I think it was around the time when Slovakia was making itself independent and withdrawing from the territory of Czechoslovakia. It must have been at the time of the 1938 film ball. Beyond that I had nothing to do with Reich culture administrator Hinkel. He will have described his affairs to me, or his assistants Roth and Kualkofski will have.

Listen · The Vienna office · 0:36

That was the Madagascar project. In presenting that Madagascar project, the chief of the Security Police and Security Service obtained from Reich Marshal Göring all the powers relating to Jewish affairs.

Oddly enough, the following ordinance under the Hitler Youth law was issued in 1939:

This ordinance is dated 23 March 1939.

The Jew, that is clear, but we courted the person of mixed descent (Mischling). Today's quarter-Jew was tomorrow's German-blooded person. And there were a considerable number of them. You could not treat blood in such a way that you simply threw out the baby with the bathwater. We needed them, including the half-Jew, provided the half-Jew was not a Jew within the meaning of the legislation, that is, if he was not circumcised

if he did not belong to a Jewish religious community, then he counted as a Jew within the meaning of the legislation. But a half-Jew as such was also 50 percent German blood, which tomorrow was already 75 percent, and by the next generation it was full-blooded.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: But he could also marry a Jew? What then?]

Hence the provision that they could also be persons of mixed descent. Persons of mixed descent in the Hitler Youth: that might well offend many a Party comrade and seem incomprehensible. But one has to have a standard to be able to sort such great masses into certain channels; hence this business. And you cannot offend people like that either. How many persons of mixed descent were there in the armed forces? There were even officers. That would have stirred up a hornets' nest like no other. It was not a matter of thrashing everything out neatly with a sledgehammer. No, it came gradually, as things developed with the legislation on Jews. Nothing at all had been prepared long in advance, as people would like to believe.

Did you help issue an ordinance under the Reich Citizenship Law or not, given that the Reich Association later came under the Reich Security Main Office? This ordinance came out on 4 July 1939.

No, that was still done by Lischka, my predecessor.

Confiscation of radio sets, II B 4. Which department was that? The decree of 29 September 1939. The Reich Security Main Office existed by then, and Office II at that time dealt with legislation, so Office IV was only marginally involved in this matter.

Yes, Office II was responsible for legislation.

[Topic cue: Exceptional law applying to the Jews in Germany.]

Did the Reich Association of Jews in Germany have the right to issue ordinances for the Jews?

Yes, the Reich Association had that right, but of course only if those ordinances had been agreed in advance with the responsible section in Office IV and approved. In practice it worked like this: before 1940 the head of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, Dr. Eppstein, went to my predecessor Professor Lischka and presented his request. Or else it was prompted by the Gestapo, worked out by him, and submitted in summary. After 1940 he submitted it to me; it was approved or rejected. If it was approved, it was a lawful ordinance of the Jews in Germany, valid and binding for all Jews under the Nuremberg law code.

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

No, I did not come until the autumn of 1940. Just as the Jewish religious community in Vienna had also fixed an amount, exactly the same applied to the Reich Association in Germany. Only in the old Reich (Altreich) it was handled a little more formally and strictly. In Austria, that is, in the Ostmark, it was done rather more easily: Dr. Löwenherz came to me, presented the matter, and I told him, “Yes, yes, do it that way.” Then Löwenherz ordered it. In the old Reich, Eppstein first had to make the pilgrimage to the State Police with the exact draft.

It was laboriously worked through there in bureaucratic fashion, and after weeks and days the man got the papers back and had to change them on certain points. It was more meticulous, more complicated, more bureaucratic. In the Ostmark and in Bohemia and Moravia, by contrast, the matter was handled roughly by rule of thumb, and the responsible heads could act fairly freely at their own discretion, knowing that in any event they had the backing of their supervisory authority.

How did the order come about that all members of the German police had to see the film Jew Süss (Jud Suess)?

I can only imagine that Goebbels, who initiated the matter with Veit Harlan, was trying to reach as large an audience as possible, and through the man with whom he got on well and was in ideological agreement, he tried to recruit that man's enormous corps as viewers too. I myself, at the time when I

watched the film, did not know that there had been pressure from above. I read here for the first time in the collection of laws that any pressure had been exerted at all. Perhaps it was in the individual branches of the SS or the SA.

Above all in the police.

I know nothing about that. I had so many police officials of junior and the very lowest ranks; nobody was forced. I am convinced that most of them did not go at all, perhaps because most of them baulked at the expense. I know of no pressure, not even of a recommendation having been made. I could imagine that, through Dr. Goebbels' agreement with the RF (Reichsführer-SS), it was recommended to sections of the General SS, the black SS and the SA, perhaps by the training officers. With the best will in the world, I could not get any more out of it than that.

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

Yes, I dealt with it. I was not involved in drafting it; somehow I took it over. By mysterious routes it eventually reached the final stop where it had to be handled in practice, and landed with my section. For this purpose I had government councillor Suhr, whom I had to take over from the chief of Office 4. After he was transferred to the commander of the Security Police and Security Service in France, I put in charge the man who had already been working with me for some time as an assessor and then became a government councillor, Hunsche.

As his assistant I assigned him the later government councillor Bosshammer (and then government assessor). This business first involved establishing hostility to the people and the state. Once that was established, confiscation of the assets was ordered, all of it by my section. The whole file was then sent to the Reich Gazette (Reichsanzeiger) for publication, because it also entailed the revocation of German citizenship.

Then the file was sent in duplicate to the Foreign Office, or rather the Foreign Office read it in the Reich Gazette anyway, as did the various heads of mission in the various foreign countries. The file was then handed over at the same time to the chief finance president, with a request to confiscate the assets. Publication took place every 14 days in the Reich Gazette. That was the practical procedure. Of course we could not establish who in Munich, Stuttgart and so on had been guilty of activities hostile to the state. The responsible State Police offices and State Police headquarters had doubtless, on

the basis of their cooperation with the Security Service and its upper districts, and so on, established that the Reich President's emergency decree for the protection of the state, the various other implementing provisions, and the supplementary laws were to be applied to this or that person within their jurisdiction. A comprehensive file was then opened. If the man was still in Reich territory, which was seldom the case, he was summoned. If not, every possible inquiry was set in motion to establish the evidence.

This summary was then sent to Berlin with a request to revoke German citizenship on grounds of hostility to the people and the state, and a request for the chief finance president to confiscate the property. In the section we did not have to examine the person or the personal details. The final authority on that was the State Police office or State Police headquarters, unless an appeal was lodged against it. In my section we only had to establish whether there was a legal basis for the case. The individual was of no interest to the central authority. The matter was simply passed on, as I explained in detail at the beginning.

Under what file reference was it listed in the Reich Gazette?

In every case, IV B 4, my section.

The decree of the Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan to SS Grf. (Gruppenführer) Heydrich concerning the overall solution of the Jewish question, dated July 1941, that is, at a time when you were already a section head in the Reich Security Main Office.

What do you know about these two things?

Too many years have passed for me to have been able to recall these things immediately a few weeks ago, but in the meantime I have read some things. Around that same time I was building up and delving into the Madagascar project. You know that it was not something I worked on in a quiet retreat. It was something that stirred all the central authorities and mobilized them, because I drummed them together once or twice a week. There were 20, 30, 40 section heads at the meetings of the individual central authorities. And Heydrich, who had a very receptive mind for matters concerning the primacy of the Security Police, saw

here, just as at the Jewish central offices in Vienna and Prague, a second opportunity to extend his powers. With this Madagascar project, over which all the authorities had been fighting and scrambling until then, he simply approached Göring and obtained a general authorization (Generalboudoir) for the Final Solution of the Jewish questions. What was meant by this decree was the Madagascar project. And Göring had here, as a special report or overall draft… this Madagascar draft, after the authorized section heads sent to me by the central authorities had initialled it, was forwarded as a ministerial draft through the chief of the Security Police and Security Service to the individual ministries, naturally first to the Reich Marshal. I always addressed it: “To the Reich Marshal G.” Underneath: “Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan.” But that is not important at the moment.

So by the overall draft you mean the Madagascar project?

Yes, the Madagascar project.

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

No. No draft for that was ever requested or supplied at all. I would have had to know about that too, because I was just as surprised as everybody else.

Did a reply then come to this overall draft sent to Göring?

Heydrich was then appointed commissioner with the …. In any event, from that time on no central authority could interfere in any way with Heydrich's arrangements concerning the Jewish question, or reproach him or lay down rules for him.

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

Yes, that was how it was arranged. He was charged with the overall solution of the Jewish question, on the basis of the Madagascar project. At that time nobody yet knew that one day the Madagascar project would fall through and different directives would be issued from high and still higher quarters. But Heydrich, and Himmler too, derived from this instrument of appointment the right to go on doing or leaving undone whatever they pleased. For this instrument of appointment had undoubtedly not been issued specifically for the Madagascar project alone. Rather, the Madagascar project had been the occasion for Heydrich to obtain such a general commission.

Do you not think it was a trick by Heydrich and also by the RF (Reichsführer-SS) to put such a humane project before Göring, knowing that Göring was somewhat soft on the Jewish question, and then derive a general authorization from his reply?

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

Yes, but when you speak of the appropriate seriousness… if the Reich Marshal had suitable staff and something was put before him, it had to be properly thought through.

It was such a convenient and cheap solution. Not only the party that wanted it, the German Reich government, but also the party affected had gladly promised to cooperate, since it was already a familiar undertaking for them too. In a sense, the conservatively minded felt it was their duty to help.

You never saw Göring's letter of reply?

No [? no longer knowingly].

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

No, but (I assume) I was told that he now had the general authorization.

Following the submission of this Madagascar project?

Yes. The whole Madagascar project, with its many paragraphs and so on, was the overall draft, together with a … and an outgoing letter. I undoubtedly drafted the letter to Göring myself; there was no other one. It must also bear the file reference IV B 4. And I do dimly remember doing it. It was a hell of a lot of work.

Is it not possible that this decree then followed it, the one saying that Heydrich may take all the measures of a substantive and material nature…

Of course. After the entire Madagascar project had been submitted, Göring appointed Heydrich, that is, the chief of the Security Police, to carry out the whole undertaking, that is, the Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe. But a physical solution was never meant by Final Solution. Never. Because if Heydrich had really planned that, he would not have said to me one day: “The Führer has ordered the physical

extermination of the Jews.” So what was the point of this whole appointment, then? All that work had been in vain anyway, the whole Madagascar business.

Is it not possible that Heydrich made suggestions along those lines to the Führer?

Heydrich to the Führer?

Once he had the assignment for the Final Solution of the Jewish question… the Madagascar project had to be dropped for foreign-policy reasons, and another solution of the Jewish question had to be found. Heydrich, as the man appointed to the task, put a corresponding proposal to the Führer.

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

Could it not have been Bormann?

I do not know.

You worked with Heydrich on this matter, after all. Perhaps you yourself once answered Heydrich along those lines, and Heydrich passed it on to the Führer?

No, that is wrong. I do not even believe Heydrich did it. I would reject that outright. Not even the RF (Reichsführer-SS). I would rather think that some “arranged people” (Arrangierten), who had no conception at all of the gravity of the task, Reichsleiter of the kind we had, I do not want to name any names, that they said it to the Führer. If anybody said it to the Führer at all. Nobody ever had to stiffen the Führer's backbone before his speeches to get him to speak particularly sharply against the Jews yet again. He did that on his own.

And if you follow his speeches, it would be a task for a psychiatrist, and if you establish their increasing vehemence, while we can always establish that he had no adviser when drafting and composing his speeches, then you could readily infer from that indication that this order must have occurred to the Führer himself at some moment. I have said before that I knew Heydrich. The way he told me was such that he too had not expected a consequence like that. He will undoubtedly have noticed that at that moment I had no idea of its implications. These are weighty words and sentences, whose significance one cannot even grasp at the moment they are uttered. One can grasp it only afterwards. Only later can one gauge that burden weighing tons. [Handwritten addition: Because that precedent was lacking.]

Was it not Heydrich's task, after the Madagascar project fell away, to put new proposals for solving the Jewish question to the Führer? And your

task in working with Heydrich on the Jewish question was to take a position, make proposals, and so on. Did Heydrich never say to you, “What can we do now that the Madagascar project is no longer valid?”

Heydrich never did that, not once, and neither did Müller. I conceived my own individual projects: the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, and the Madagascar project too. I also conceived the project for a Jewish state in the Lublin district. But I conceived nothing beyond that. The other thing was brought to us, the Security Police, from outside, and that is physical extermination. The Security Police had nothing to do with it.

But surely the man charged with the Jewish question, after he had to abandon the project for which he had been appointed, had to put forward new proposals?

Then you have a poor understanding of the civil service.

Heydrich was not a civil servant. He was a creative man, and as such he surely thought, “What do I propose now that the other thing has gone wrong?”

If that had been his only task, he would certainly have thought about it. But since he had other tasks, he did not, because in those days he was Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia. And I remember very clearly that it was precisely because of this Hermann Göring proposal that I had to go to Prague several times. Now, the date: he was appointed in '41. If Heydrich told me that Glo was to use the anti-tank ditches on the Russian side for physical extermination, then that means we must have been in possession of those ditches. From that I conclude that at least eight weeks must have passed since the twin battles of Minsk and Białystok.

It must have been even longer, because I was sent there after reporting to Heydrich. I went to Minsk and still saw remains of T-34s. I even dismantled an electrical (Schaltung, circuit) from one of them for myself. The salvage units had long since done their work. Of the 400 or 600 tanks which, according to the armed forces report, were supposed to have been left along the route, I perhaps no longer saw any. So clearing units were already at work. Not a single corpse was to be seen any more. So let us say eight or ten weeks (after the twin battle). Then Heydrich sent me to Glo. so that I could report to him on how far Glo had progressed with his work.

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

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

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

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

But that does not rule out his thinking about it in Prague as well: “What do I propose now?”

How often do you think the deputy Reich Protector concerned himself with the work of the Security Police? How often? Just to give you an idea of the time involved in those days.

I cannot say.

Half a day a week. For the entire Security Police.

I do not believe that. The signatures alone took up his time.

You do not believe it? Then I must say you were lucky to have been in the Security Service. His office chiefs were responsible for the signatures. The deputy Reich Protector, in his simultaneous capacity as chief of the Security Police and Security Service, signed personally only in very important cases. Otherwise, at that time Müller signed everything in Office IV.

In Office IV. But I remember very well that we received many things bearing his signature. Besides, he did make time when I visited him in Prague…

I visited him in Prague too.

But that does not mean he was not racking his brains: “What am I to do with the Jews now that I cannot send them to Madagascar?”

Within four weeks.

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

You will have to ask a clairvoyant about that. Now I have just about had enough. This is a factual discussion…

[Animated overlapping talk]

But the point is that Heydrich may well have asked once, “What can I do now?”

But I have said that it was not like that, and that I assume Heydrich had nothing at all to do with the whole Final Solution…

Now that the thought had occurred to the Führer, from his own head or from another quarter, now there is another solution than the extermination

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

The Führer, yes indeed, that I do believe. Read through the speeches and ask a psychiatrist; you will see that I am right. I can say it only by instinct, with the experience of the years now added to that, and I must tell you again: neither Heydrich nor the RF (Reichsführer-SS) originated the physical extermination of the Jews. I tell you that. Take the Führer's speeches as indications and have a psychiatrist examine them from that point of view. And you will see that, with so many speeches available, the psychiatrists' tests generally turn out right.

Wait a moment. These tests have already been carried out a hundred thousand times by the enemy side. They have examined everything down to the smallest detail, analyzed it, put it together, and so on. Nobody has yet given a professionally responsible psychiatric explanation, that is, direct circumstantial evidence that this idea originated directly with the Führer and was passed on by him. Besides, you do not have to be a psychiatrist, or work in the so-called teams, to know that fundamentally the physical extermination of the Jews is absolutely at odds with the Führer's nature. Absolutely.

Then why did he describe it so precisely and bluntly in his speeches years beforehand…?

Speeches are matters of propaganda. But apart from that, fundamentally the question is only who, besides the Führer… Let us assume that the Führer originated the idea. But that he originated it alone, that there were no influences that helped him in any way at that time and in that matter, I do not believe. A man like the Führer, in particular, must have thought: “If I give the order for physical extermination, I must also have the necessary apparatus at my disposal.” So I am asking who could have contributed to this inner decision so as to turn it into an order.

Not Heydrich and not the Reichsführer-SS. Perhaps the political people.

Do you not think that, if he has to consider the apparatus for the purely technical side, he must appoint the man who is to be put in charge of it?

In the second place, of course.

No, in the first place. I cannot give an order without knowing whether it is possible to carry it out.

But the initiative has to come first. Who took the initiative?

We are not clear about that.

But you know the Führer well enough not to believe that he would issue an order before the apparatus for killing people was there…

Of course not.

So he will have discussed it with the RF (Reichsführer-SS) and Heydrich before issuing the order.

Yes, the Reichsführer-SS gave the order to Heydrich. That is quite clear.

But for me the primary question is: who was the initiator?

Yes, we are not clear about that.

But surely that ought to be possible to establish? Who was it supposed to have been? My feeling is that it was neither the Reichsführer-SS nor the chief of the Security Police.

That is why I come to the idea that Heydrich, as the man charged with the Jewish questions, has to propose solutions. Once one solution does not work, he has to propose another. From that I conclude that it came from Heydrich or Himmler.

Now let us put it melodramatically: issuing an order simply to bump off defenseless people corresponds to a categorical imperative of the circumstances, but it also cannot be conceived by a person capable of setting aside all sentimental mush and saying, “This is a task… datidata… it has to be carried out.”

Now tell me, do you know a colder bastard than Heydrich within the Reich Security Main Office, within the political body?

No.

Since that time, since your conversation about this order, when you think about Heydrich from that time on, do you consider it possible or impossible in this very cold, purposeful, calculating, but at the same time energetic man? Do you consider it impossible that such a man could have such an idea, when there is no other solution left? Is it so impossible that Heydrich came up with this idea? Is it so impossible that, out of loyalty to the Führer, Heydrich took this whole problem off his hands? And there is not the slightest proof that such a Führer order ever existed at all, in writing…

No, it is as you say: Heydrich was a cold bastard, and the RF (Reichsführer-SS) was equally unflinching when it concerned his own people. But I tell you, both of them had to reckon not only with SS members but also with their civil servants, and that would not work. And I tell you that the initiative must have come from the political sector. Must have. And I tell you that the initiator is probably, in my opinion even quite certainly, to be sought in the Goebbels–Bormann circle.

Once the Führer, from this standpoint… once everything was at an impasse, and Goebbels and Bormann had been present at the dozens of discussions about the Madagascar project, once he was listening more to those advisers… He hardly listened to the Reichsführer-SS, and Heydrich was with the Führer very rarely indeed. I remember only a single occasion. Now, once the Führer had decided on this order, he naturally sent for Heydrich. That is clear. For one must not forget that the Reichsführer-SS was always the second-level authority in this administrative field, until the time when he became commander of the Replacement Army and Reich Minister of the Interior.

He was a Reichsleiter, but not a minister. He was also a state secretary, but that means nothing at all in such matters. You could have sent for Stukart, since he had even been the Reichsführer-SS's superior: he was first state secretary.

No, no, it is as I say: naturally the Reichsführer-SS was charged with this order. What did the Reichsführer-SS say? He will have said, “It is the only solution, my Führer. We have tried everything.” Perhaps he put it in telegram style. In part he heard it from me; he had summoned me several times. In part he heard it through the continuing reports.

What did he hear from you? That this was the only solution?

From me he heard about the difficulties. The Reichsführer-SS will have been summoned to the Führer. The Führer will have told him his advisers' opinion. The Reichsführer-SS will have told the Führer that it was the only possible solution, because we had exhausted all the other possibilities. The Reichsführer-SS knew that the possibilities had been exhausted: a) through my presentations, through the continuing reports; c) through his office chiefs, and through the chief of the Security Police. Perhaps he also knew it from the other heads of the German central authorities. So when Heydrich summoned me, he could say: “The Reichsführer-SS has told me that the Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jew.” Glo was assigned, and so on, and so on.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Assignment to inspect the Russian anti-tank ditches.]

With that I can close the matter. I have already said the rest.

There is nothing at all in the available evidence to support the claim that Goebbels was the father of this idea of extermination. Goebbels' private diary was found. In that diary the first indication that Goebbels knows about the extermination operations comes in mid-August 1942. Around the time when the Führer order is supposed to have been given, before that time, during it, and immediately afterwards, there is only a single suggestion to that effect in the Goebbels papers. Bormann is a possibility, of course, although I think the picture one generally gets of Bormann is that of a creative, resourceful man who, with an epoch-making decision such as the extermination of Jewry, that the man somehow comes up with the idea. I think we are on the wrong track with Goebbels and Bormann.

Then who ordered the Night of Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht)?

That was something that came from the Party.

Yes, but that was the first, the first major thing that shocked us.

But a Night of Broken Glass and something so far-reaching…

That is a small step. We are outside the law, so it is a small step. Or rather, it lies outside normal administrative rules. The Night of Broken Glass lay outside administrative rules; the physical extermination of a people lies outside administrative rules. So if something outside administrative rules, take the Night of Broken Glass, has an originator, and if in case B the originator of physical extermination is unknown, since it too lies outside any administrative rules, I have to tell myself that, from the standpoint of official procedure, the indications point more to that side than the other.

I would have had to find a note somewhere in a file, or take it into my own files, if it had been a Security Police matter. I had a file for everything in these fields. Without a file you simply could not do anything, and nobody would have done anything either. Everyone from top to bottom, down to the lowliest nobody, would have demanded the file.

That has nothing to do with it. The point is that it was suggested to Hitler by the Reichsführer-SS or Heydrich. But when I think of Bormann, if you tell me Bormann said it in 1944, then I believe it, because at that time Bormann's influence on Hitler was great and malign. In 1941, by contrast, his influence on Hitler was still vanishingly small, while the Reichsführer-SS's had always been great. Bormann's decrees about the Church were all harsh, but that was all much later.

At that time Bormann was still more of a minor Party official. I rule out your suppositions about Bormann and Goebbels, but it is difficult to rule out Heydrich and B. entirely, as against the other people in the Party. As Reich Protector, Heydrich visited Hitler fairly often. He was directly subordinate to him at that time, and it is entirely possible that he made Hitler a proposal on the matter.

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

Yes, of course claro, but do you know anyone tougher than Heydrich?

When it came to carrying things out, no.

Name the inner circle around Hitler at that time. The armed forces are ruled out. Göring is out. Probably not Goebbels either. Which of the Reichsleiter? Bormann? No, unlikely.

All right bueno, then it was Hitler himself. Heydrich and Himmler were not the initiators. No, that is my conviction, and I can say nothing else. Given the facts and what I knew of my highest superiors, no. Heydrich was not an actor. He always spoke openly; he never concealed anything from me. I was on very good terms with Heydrich. Then he would probably have said to me, “At last, Eichmann, the time has come. Now we have done it. Now we have got all the a…holes (A…loecher) from the ministries out of the way. Now we can finally do as we please.” That is how Heydrich would probably have spoken to me. But Heydrich did not do that.

Or do you think he did not do it because the matter was rather too much for him after all?

No, I noticed that Heydrich too had been handed something new here. I was astonished as well, and Müller noticed it too when I told him, “This will not do. We cannot carry out the Jewish question this way.” No, no, no, no, the Security Police could not have originated something like that. No, Heydrich did not propose it.

Let us take the Führer's standpoint for a moment. If the Führer had toyed with this idea, he would immediately have seen the implementing body in his mind's eye and presumably said to himself, “Whom do I entrust this to?” Do you believe, on the other hand, that the Führer, who always held the ethic of comradeship in such high regard and knew that carrying out his orders required real men who could simply ride roughshod over everything

and solely to fulfill a task important to the Reich, could at the same time take on a hideous task too. And do you believe that, out of this comradely ethic, he virtually seated himself on a throne and said: I give you the order, Heydrich or the Reichsführer-SS; you carry it out—and that is the end of it?

No, I do not believe that either. It was probably like this: the Führer summoned the Reichsführer-SS and presumably then discussed the matter with him. Yes, at heart the Reichsführer-SS was a soft, kindly man. Nobody knows that; only someone who knew how to deal with this man knows it. The Reichsführer-SS cannot have originated this. Sometimes this man left me baffled—for example, the watch decree. I still do not know how to reconcile that.

Well, you say ‘How disgusting!’ about this watch decree. Let us turn the clock back twenty years. Somebody comes along and says to you: ‘Jews—men, women and children—away with them!’ You would probably have said exactly the same thing: ‘How disgusting!’?

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

That is true too. But it is far too important for us to establish how this order came about. We must be clear about one thing: the physical annihilation of Jewry, as it was ordered and carried out, surely does not accord with the German spirit or the German mentality. One surely cannot say that it is characteristic.

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

In what way?

With the bombing raids.

But we did the same thing ourselves.

But not in this form.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Description of the shooting of the Jews—report to Müller—men are trained to become sadists—solving the problem on this basis is not right.]

Heydrich said the same words: that the men had to be replaced.

then came the year ’43, the bombing raids on Berlin. What I saw there defies all description. I said to myself: and the Führer was right after all with the annihilation order; this enemy must be annihilated. That thought had never come to me in this way before. But when I saw all that misery, then yes.

[Typed as notes in the transcript: Description of the aerial mine in the diplomats' cellar—these people too, for once, saw how these dogs treated us—guests of a foreign diplomat, all dead.]

Yes, it went against our mentality, but only up to a certain point, and then no longer.

Yes, but that was November ’43—two years later.

Yes, that makes no difference. Good leaders must foresee that.

But to what extent can one say that other countries knew about these annihilation operations—and they did know—and said to themselves: now we need have no moral inhibitions either?

It is not my task to judge that.

If our air force had been sufficiently equipped, we probably would not have had these raids on Berlin. I understand your hatred over these raids; I experienced them too. But as a matter of principle, it is un-German. The enemy airman somehow does his work in a hygienic way: he drops his bombs from 5,000 km up. But pushing the people in—

The Security Police did not do that. The Security Police is comparable to an air-wing commander who flies towards some German city with his wing. Was he convicted of crimes against humanity? Why do they convict the Security Police? We did not kill anybody! Just as the ground personnel loaded the bombs, we only transported the Jews away. In many cases it was the auxiliary personnel of other countries. We had nothing to do with their subsequent fate.

But you knew what happens to these people?

But not all of them were killed. As a member of the Security Police, I had my duty to do: to load them. Anything beyond that did not interest me. The Security Police had no other task to undertake. The rest was the task of the VWHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office).

But it was precisely the troops of the SPO (Security Police) and the SD (Security Service) that had to carry out the task in the East about which you said: ‘This will not do’—these shooting operations.

We were not responsible for what the Einsatzgruppen did in the East. That was a direct order from the Reichsführer-SS. The office had nothing to do with it, not even by way of reporting—not even that.

But we do not want to confine ourselves to the office. We are talking about the matter in principle. And when we say that it does not accord with the German spirit, and you then draw the comparison with the air-wing commander as far as the Security Police's task in the various territories is concerned—but excepting the way the Einsatzkommandos came into play. Those Einsatzkommandos cannot be compared with the air-wing commander at all. In my view, they have the most un-German task of all.

No, they are comparable to the parachutes that were dropped. They were not under the air-wing commander either. Those Einsatzgruppen chiefs received their order directly from the Reichsführer-SS. We, the office, received different orders from the Reichsführer-SS.

Yes, as a comparison I said that the enemy air fleet that flies in to murder women and children goes about it differently. It does not know whether its bomb hits or whether there is a dud among them, or something of that sort. The member of the Security Police who had the loading done here, with his own personnel or with the personnel of other countries, did not know whether these Jews would be killed or put to work, or something of that sort.

But other air fleets dropped paratroopers, and these men—they knew this—had a very specific assignment: to kill X or blow up factory XY with 10,000 men, and so on. That is surely comparable to the Einsatzgruppen. They were deployed in the East; very specific orders were given by the same chief, who, like the air-wing commander, gave his orders to these troops. So here the order was passed down by the Reichsführer-SS to the Einsatzgruppen chiefs on the one hand and to the chief of Office IV on the other.

Yes, but I do not know whether the comparison applies.

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

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

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

But we do not want to talk about that at all.

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

Yes, but we do want to discuss whether it accords with the German character. According to your theory and your view, it would be exactly the same if, after an attack on England, the English suddenly shot the German prisoners out of hatred.

Does that not fit with Morgenthau?

That was after the war.

How do you mean, after the war?

One moment: no German internees were killed.

Why? Because they themselves were afraid of the pig they had already slaughtered. Otherwise they would have done it.

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

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

But that was a plan that was never carried out.

That is no concern of mine. What was decided was decided.

Not decided. That was proposed by a Mr. Morgenthau. It was not an order. It was a personal plan worked out by Mr. Morgenthau, but Morgenthau had nothing to do with it, because he was Secretary of State for Finance. It had been a privately worked-out plan of Morgenthau's. It was discussed on all sides, and they said there was only one way to smash Germany: take away its economic potential and make it a … state. And that was in 1943. But there was not even a draft law, let alone one of the states—in this case the USA—having announced the plan as its own.

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

But where did they shoot and gas people?

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

Now, you are absolving your conscience on various matters.

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

You justify your measures by what you experienced in Berlin. Against that I have put the point that, according to your theory, the English could just as well have done the same thing because of the bombing raids. At that time there was no talk at all of a Morgenthau Plan.

But they did do it.

When the physical annihilation began, there was still no talk at all of a Morgenthau Plan.

I said that earlier.

On the contrary, there was still talk of the Atlantic (Pact?), which was very humane. That was the political aim at the time. There was no talk at all of a Morgenthau Plan.

Yes, that plan was very humane.

So, to conclude this controversy, I stand by it. First: the Reichsführer-SS is not the initiator in this direction, and of course neither is his main-office chief Heydrich, nor any of his main-office chiefs. The initiative must have come from a third quarter. Nor do I have to justify myself in any way, and I have no need whatever to unburden my conscience. I do not need that. I feel no burden and no

sense of guilt in me. For me, as a German who had sworn his oath to the flag, doing my duty to the people and the fatherland was a matter of course, the most elementary duty. And I did my duty by carrying out and obeying the orders I received. Insofar as I had to work out their details, I had to give those orders force. Wherever I can be connected with what happened in the physical annihilation of the Jews, I have admitted it freely and without evasion. But what does ‘admitted’ mean? I have nothing to confess; I have stated it. Where I cannot be connected with it, I do not take upon myself things that do not concern me. The reason I do not is that I cannot impose that on my subordinates. Even though, like someone running amok, I could say: take all this shit on yourself and the whole thing will be put to rest. I do not do it, and I have said my piece.

When you received the orders, did you think about their meaning and how they were to be carried out?

No, I carried them out. That was no concern of mine at all. Where would we have got to if everyone back then had thought about it, if my subordinates had thought about it? You can do that today in the German federal army, but not with us. For me, an order was an order.

And yet you did think about it. When you said to Müller, ‘This will not do’, you were thinking about whether an order could be carried out.

But I did not receive that order. I was sent there to inspect and report. Then I came back and had to report. I reported, and included my own thinking too, and what I thought was: ‘This will not do.’ I was not assigned to carry it out. That was quite different people. It was the Waffen-SS that did that, not even the Security Police, not even the POL police.

When you said at the time, ‘This will not do’, did you think about some other way of solving the matter? Or make proposals?

Politically, always only politically. I never sought a solution by force. It formed no part of my thinking.

So, at bottom, you were in favor of physical annihilation then, if that is what you are saying? So you were, after all—

I could jump in your face with my bare arse, but I want to keep calm and ask you: now explain your impudent assertion to me.

If you now claim that you wanted to solve the Jewish question only by political means and not by force, you are saying that you were against physical annihilation, because physical annihilation is a solution by force. Against physical annihilation—then you misspoke, yes, of course.

Yes, that is what I said: against physical annihilation.

[See the bottom of page 438: is this answer correct?]

Yes.

But then you contradict what you first said: that after the bombing raids the Führer was right after all about physical annihilation.

Yes, you heard very well. ‘AFTER ALL’ is the important expression. The one was in 1941 and the other was in November 1943.

Was that just a passing reaction—‘and the Führer is right after all’—after you had seen all that? And after you had slept on it, did you think differently again?

No, I did not change my attitude, and I still say that today.

And what do you say about the way it was carried out?

Not my task. I had nothing to do with it.

But you did think about it?

Well, in this respect, especially today, I am like a private citizen who can think back over a matter. In 1941, when I saw that, I felt as though I had been torn out of seventh heaven, and I said that. And then I said—and you heard quite correctly, and you have captured my whole attitude—after that experience in Berlin with that old married couple, I said to myself: and the Führer was right after all to have all these dogs killed. When you see such horror—that is our own blood, those are our children, that is me! That is when sacred egoism breaks out—nationalism. That is why I was a nationalist.

Yes, but what did the Jew from Greece have to do with it—or from the other countries?

I did not give a damn. He had declared war on us; he was an enemy. Total war had been declared, and it made no difference to me who it was. Every enemy who declared war on me, who declared war on my people, deserved annihilation. That is why I also said at the end: I do not care, I leap joyfully into the pit, knowing that five million enemies of the Reich have croaked along with me. That is how I said it, and not otherwise.

Then it would also have accorded with your attitude and temperament if, for example, the Jews had gained the power after the war, through some combination of circumstances, to gas one or two million Germans, and had done so? That would also have accorded with your conception of justice?

I already wanted to have 500,000 Germans shot. I recommended that to Müller, recommended it most urgently.

So it would accord with your conception of justice if the Jews, had they had the opportunity, had simply gassed two million Germans chosen at random?

Why? I am no cosmopolitan (Cosmolit); I am a German. For me, everything that serves the German people is good and useful.

And for the Jew, that is good and useful too.

Possibly, but I do not accept it if he does it after the war. He is my enemy, quite clearly. Has anyone ever heard that I wanted to ingratiate myself with a Jew? I would have had an opportunity now. I could have sold Goldmann the whole thing. I would only have had to inflate the numbers. I have been promised large sums for that. I would only have had to say eight million Jews instead of six million, nothing more, and say the necessary things to go with it—not at nearly such length as here. No, I am first and foremost a German, and whatever serves my German people is right and sacred to me.

You think the whole affair benefited the German people at the time?

Yes, at the time it did.

How did it benefit them?

Killing enemies. Enemies ought to be killed. What did the commander of the 6th Army in Korea say to the journalists when the peace terms became known? ‘Gentlemen, I cannot tell you anything about that. My task is to kill enemies.’

Those were the Reds he had to kill. This lieutenant general had his duty; he did his duty. It was not for him to ask questions.

He was a Jew.

That makes no difference. I have never heard of this respectable lieutenant general being brought before a war tribunal.

No, he did it in the sense that he had to destroy enemies while fighting at the front. That is an entirely different matter, which you are wrongly comparing with the measures against the Jews that we took.

In a war there is neither front nor hinterland. In total war everything is a front.

But in what way did this measure against the Jews benefit us? Would it not have been better to put these Jews properly to work? Why were the boys from Organisation Todt put to digging ditches and building roads, rather than the Jews, instead of gassing them?

That would have benefited us. You must ask the Führer about that.

But I do not know how it is supposed to have benefited us.

It benefited us insofar as we said: good, enemies are biting the dust too, when our own people have to bite the dust as well.

That is what is un-German: saying that enemies bite the dust, not talking about bombing raids here and bombing raids there, the reprisals.

But ask a Germanic man of old, or perhaps old Frits. He will tell you exactly the same: only in that way could Germany become great. That is why I told Müller: first have 500,000 Germans shot, and then you can go to work on the Jews.

But old Frits did not annihilate people. On the contrary, he sat at table with his opponents.

I sat at table with the Jews too. But the principle remains the same.

Yes, but that is not how he did it.

But you are getting onto thin ice with questions like these. I had nothing to do with these things. Why do you ask me in this way? Ask the people from the VWHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office). I am only approaching this academically in my

answers about it. Ask the people who had direct dealings with it, not me from Office IV of the Security Police. We had nothing to do with it, apart from the Einsatzgruppen chiefs who had to carry out their task on the special order of the Reichsführer-SS.

But you did act as a henchman?

No, not at all, in no way whatsoever.

But you knew that some of the people were being sent to physical annihilation. So you were doing a henchman's work.

No, that is not a henchman's work. Those are efforts to influence the European governments to distance themselves from the Jew.

Do you believe that this would have had a positive effect abroad rather than the opposite?

That does not interest me at all. I had my order. What do the effects have to do with me? That does not interest me. Ask the Reichsführer-SS about that, Heydrich, the Führer, if you like.

But you did think about it?

Whether I thought about it is none of your business at all.

Yes, it is. If we are writing a book about you now, whether you thought about it is very much our business. It would even be very interesting.

No, my thoughts are none of your business, at least not today, because I have become annoyed—because people are trying, trying to shunt the whole matter onto the wrong track. Yes, gentlemen, if people will not remain objective, I will remain objective, but then I will say nothing.

But that is not it at all. Only in this way can we get your counterarguments to the opposing literature. Is it not objective for me to ask, when you tell me it benefited the German people, what the benefit consisted of?

That is no concern of mine.

Then you cannot say in the first place that it benefited the German people.

In 1943, of course—yes, out of hatred.

But where was the benefit?

But where is the benefit in 1945, when I say: I leap joyfully into the pit? Where is the benefit there?

That is why I am asking: where is the benefit?

Not for you, nor for me—perhaps for our generations.

But where is the benefit?

I do not know.

Then why do you speak of a benefit?

I see a benefit in it. I see no benefit in letting enemies of the Reich live today, letting matters come to an attempt on the Führer's life, and letting treason occur on every front. When I came to Hungary, I could just as well have said: thank God, now you are getting away from the bombing raids—they are no good anyway. Now off to Budapest, into the wine taverns, and then just guzzle wine in peace. No, I received the order and went to work.

But what you are saying now about the attempt on the Führer's life is wrong. That was proposed from an entirely different quarter. It has nothing to do with the 500,000 you wanted to have shot. Or one can—can also say it of those 500,000, but not of the Jews.

Nobody said that either.

Yes, but we were talking about the Jews. You yourself let the influential Jews travel abroad, the ones who carried weight abroad, the finance Jews—from there they produced the propaganda. And little Rosenthal and Grünbaum, and the little Jew from Greece, they were killed. That was no great political foresight, but you had nothing to do with that.

That was not my task either. Complain to Göring; complain to all the others.

You know better than I do about the Reichsführer-SS's excessively friendly behavior towards Mr. Rotschild in Vienna.

Complain about that to all those who intervened, starting with Pastor Krüger, who is now a provost in Berlin, right up to the Reichsmarschall. You can take it up with Ogrf. (Obergruppenführer) Wolff too; I was at very serious loggerheads with him. Complain to all these people that the little Jew had to suffer while the big one is now in North America. Complain to these interveners of ours, but not to the Security Police.

That is not what I mean at all. We are talking about matters of principle.

That is what I said too: matters of principle.

Yes, and that is why I come back to this: where was the benefit in killing these people? Another benefit would surely have been to put them to work where our own people from the OT (Organisation Todt) were working, instead of gassing them.

Yes, if you put it that way, I must tell you what we all said to ourselves: this method of solving the problem is too monstrous.

So you did think about it after all.

One moment: once it was too late, then no longer. By then thinking served no purpose. Later I gave it no more thought.

People thought about it when it really was too late.

Yes, perhaps at the highest level, just as the Reichsführer-SS said that if he has to do it again, he will organize the concentration camp system quite differently, entirely on the English model. You are right there. But as a recipient of orders, it was not my task during a total war to weigh the order I received and its effects on a postal scale. Where would we have got to if everyone could interpret his orders according to his own opinion and wishes? I would have put my subordinates before a court-martial, and I myself would have deserved to be beheaded.

I experienced this myself with an Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) who had an order to carry out a shooting. He asked me to relieve him; it would destroy him psychologically. I valued the man highly—he was capable—so I took the task off him and arranged for it to be handled another way.

However much you value your man, I would just as surely have had my people brought before a court-martial.

Do you not think that not every man is suited to such a task, although that same man can be a wonderful officer at the front?

I could not shake an executioner's hand either. He was introduced to me once, but I could not do it; it was quite impossible for me.

Well, there are soft men and there are hard men.

That has nothing to do with softness.

That is not what I mean either. It is not meant to be disparaging. But I did not come running into the SS from behind some desk. I come from the Wandervogel, from the old Austrian oltoestr. front-fighters' group, where an old general put a rifle in my hand for the first time. Later I saw the people's distress; I saw Versailles, the outcome of the war, the betrayal. I became a fervent nationalist. I came along a

road that was marked half in black and yellow and half already in blood-red with the swastika. My experience with my fiancée at the time: we saw the unemployed marching down the street from the Märzenkeller, and my fiancée just said, ‘These idiots.’ And I—I said nothing at all; I did not know her well enough yet. Then I only said: well, they are orderly, though. A few months later I was in the Volksgarten hall and took part in the first hall brawl on the side of those idiots, and then that engagement fell through. And so I went on. I had been in the SS; I joined the troops, then went on to the SD (Security Service) and immersed myself all the more in ideological matters.

On orders, I even studied philosophy of religion for two and a half years. You can imagine that people who study philosophy of religion need not always be the hardest spirits in life. There were exceptions: take the Nazis of Noyola(?), to give an example from the Roman Catholic Church, or Calvin. I did not become a gentle man during my studies. I did some thinking then, and serious thinking—such thinking that I spent my honeymoon, which someone else spends in bed and on holiday, buried in books, and began learning Hebrew. I threw myself into it more and more, more and more. And I did not become a fanatic, and I did not become a hater.

I became a man who realized that the matter had to be brought to an end objectively and politically, by mutual agreement. I studied the efforts of Theod. (Theodor) Herzerl to achieve and create a Jewish state, and I held hundreds and thousands of discussions with the Jewish functionaries. Not like some lowly Kriminalsekr. (Kriminalsekretär) who will not even let a Jew sit down: I negotiated with these people. There was an atmosphere, I would say today, of mutual trust. Only along that road did I come to the Central Office in Vienna and Prague, to the idea in the Lublin district and to the Mad (Madagascar) project. They came about, these projects of mine.

And when everything failed, I no longer knew how to proceed either. Then I let everything hang and let it go. And when Heydrich told me that the Führer had ordered physical annihilation, I still had to think about it: ‘PHYSICAL ANNIHILATION’—that meant killing. And I could see in Heydrich too that he did not agree with it either. I tell you this because, as I said before, I had spent two and a half or three years struggling with religious studies and toiling over them. So I also have confidence, without becoming arrogant, that even in the eyes and in the appearance of my superior, and in the momentary bearing of my

superior, I could read, at least roughly: ‘What is your cast of mind?’

And what was your first inward reaction to that?

I told you: I sat there and listened. I let the words ‘physical annihilation’ grind through my head.

And did you think about how it would be carried out?

I immediately received the order: ‘Drive out there—Glo is assigned to it, and so on…’

The first time I did not see anything more, only that respectable captain. The second time, I told Müller: this will not do; this is not how we solve the Jewish question.

Is that respectable man from the Order Police not Captain Wirth?

Yes, that was his name. Later he was a major. A South German.

Did you not then try—since this task of physical annihilation seemed so monstrous to you—did you not try to free yourself from the task?

No, never. An order means carrying it out. That is to say, I had nothing to carry out: at that time I only had to inspect and report.

But later you were assigned to carry it out.

No, the Security Police was never assigned to carry it out.

But to help carry it out—or rather, to round people up for the subsequent Final Solution.

Yes, that is correct, but rounding people up never gave me a headache.

But you also knew the brutal circumstances in which people were rounded up?

The rounding-up? No, that was not done brutally. There were orders in place for that, and if someone really committed an offense locally, they were disciplined, of course. But wherever masses of people are moved there are incidents; that is so throughout the world, and I did not need to think about it. I gave no thought to loading people and delivering them to their fate—what do I know?—either they live or they die. That was an order.

I have had a little humanistic schooling. ‘Wanderer, when you come to Sparta, proclaim that you have seen us lying here, as the law commanded.’ That is how it was. People still speak about it after a thousand years because they were true to the law. Jewish orthodoxy also adopted the expression ‘true to the law’. That is why it is still alive, two thousand years after its final dispersal from its Jewish state.

If we Germans were more true to the law and less quarrelsome by nature, we would be in a different position.

That example from ancient Greece is flawed, because it concerned people who fought at the front.

Why, you ridiculous little squirt, did you fight at the front? Think about what I told you: we had a total war, and the distinction between front and hinterland was completely blurred. I must expressly oppose and fight the notion, still held today by incorrigible minds, even Germans, that the last war was fought only at the front. At the front it was fought by the Waffen-SS, who at the same time shot Jews in the pits at the front, including a woman with an infant in her arms.

The woman screamed to me to help her. The Waffen-SS shot her down in the pit at the front. And in the hinterland an old married couple in Berlin begged me, staring wide-eyed, to shoot them. So if you confuse these concepts or refuse to acknowledge them, I am sorry. There is no distinction in annihilating enemy powers once total war has been declared. Take the Trojans against the Greeks—or rather, the Trojans against the Persians, and later the Carthaginians against the Romans. It was exactly the same.

[intervening conversation]

Now another question: during your work, did you ever volunteer for the actual front?

It may have been a dozen times, even two dozen. The last time it was very urgent for me; I wanted to die. That was in the presence of my Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Dennecker. I was in Budapest; Christmas 1944 was approaching. My old friend Zehender, commander of the 22nd Cavalry Division, whom I often visited—we drank together—told me that so many of his officers were out of action and that a whole company had gone over to the Russians, but he had caught them again.

I thought to myself: I have nothing more to do here in Hungary anyway. I have no order to go back. I will have them give me a squadron, and I will stay there, at least until New Year. Then Zehender calls Kaltenbrunner in the presence of Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) Dannecker, and he said to Kaltenbrunner: ‘Eichmann is with me. He is asking for this and that.’ I went right up to Zehender's ear to hear what my chief was saying. I had caught roughly the sense of it—

And then Zehender told me word for word: “Kaltenbrunner told me it can't be done; the Reichsführer-SS would tear his head off.” That brought my last request to go to the front to nothing. I would have dearly liked to take over a squadron, especially since at that time the Personnel Main Office had me listed as a cavalryman, an SS Untersturmführer in the Waffen-SS. As an Untersturmführer I wore yellow collar patches—as an SS Ostf., green piping, that is, Security Police, and as an SS Untersturmführer, yellow piping, as a Waffen-SS fellow.

Later we also adopted the two SS runes on the Security Police uniform, to make it the same as the Waffen-SS uniforms, on the Reichsführer-SS's orders. If I had managed to get to the front then, I would have sought death. It was an end-of-the-world mood that you can no longer put into words today. The Jew Kastner also congratulated me on the Iron Cross then. I received it at that time, the Iron Cross, Second Class.

The police ordinance on marking the Jews was issued on 1 September 1941. That was at a time when you were already a section head in the Reich Security Main Office. To what extent were you involved in drafting this decree?

Not in drafting it at all. One day my section received yellow cloth by the meter, by the roll, as though I were an old cloth merchant, with stars stamped on it and the German word for “Jew” (Jude) written inside them. Who designed this form, I don't know. It may have been the Führer's deputy chancellery, through Senior Government Councillor Fleischhauer. It may have been that people remembered the Stürmer methods and thought this would be practicable in the Propaganda Ministry. In any case, these things were allotted to me and I had to pass them on to the Jewish central organizations. I distributed it to Loewenhers, to Eppstein and to an envoy from Prague. It was cut up and the quantity roughly calculated for the Jews who were required to wear this star under the Nuremberg laws. That was my task; I had nothing further to do with it.

So you weren't involved at all, not even by giving your views on this decree?

No.

But who initiated it, then?

It was some spontaneous idea dreamed up by some little man.

But it is called a police ordinance.

Yes, it was an implementing ordinance, and it had to be issued in the form of a police ordinance.

So it originated in the Reich Ministry of the Interior?

No, it certainly didn't originate there. It originated in another office, and then, of course, the Ministry of the Interior was entrusted with it, and in turn its branch, the Security Police. The guidelines were handed to the Reich Association by the Gestapa (Secret State Police Office)—that is, imposed on it. But the initiative for wearing the star came from a higher level.

Yes, everything became more difficult then. We were moving further and further into total war, and there was no time left for special arrangements.

[Typed topic cue: Führer decree charging Rosenberg with combating the Jews in the intellectual sphere.]

Only Reichsleiter Rosenberg is named here, in cooperation with the armed forces (Wehrmacht), for the occupied eastern territories.

There were various offices within the workings of the Reich leadership, and each thought it had exclusive rights to the answer for a final solution of the Jewish question. Streicher believed that in his own way, as did the Reich Security Main Office, and so did that great and small philosopher Rosenberg. Who whispered to Rosenberg that he should now concern himself with an institute for research into the Jewish question, I don't know, but that was how it was. Beyond the monthly brochures or effusions this institute put out, which I began to read or skimmed and which then automatically went into the files, I have nothing to say about it.

In any case, there was no time to establish this institute to deal with the problem in the intellectual sphere. And I have said it so many times: total war was approaching with giant strides, and at that time anything that wasn't decisive for the war wasn't even read; it went into the files. I stress again: everything that could not be entered under “decisive for the war” at that time was filed away, including the Institute for Research into the Jewish Question.

Didn't you have any disputes over jurisdiction with this Rosenberg office?

No, we had no disputes over jurisdiction, because we mediated it.

[Typed topic cue: The regulation on the use of public transport by Jews, issued by the Reich Association of Jews in Germany.]

It was some man who had something to do with transport. He drew attention to the overcrowding and so on, and then approached the matter through ministerial channels. The maid-of-all-work, the police, then had to tell the Reich Association to let its subordinate bodies know that such-and-such a regulation had come into force, and to publish it in its communications staff.

Order on transferring Jews after they have served their sentences?

This matter has nothing to do with the executive treatment of opponents as such. It is a purely formal legal agreement between the Reich Minister of Justice on the one hand and the chief legal advisers of the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service on the other. That is why you also see the file reference of Office II. It had nothing to do with Office IV; that was Law and Administration. When such a decree was issued, the judicial authorities acted in the case as the regulation prescribed. Neither IV B 4 nor any other section of the Reich Security Main Office needed to be involved.

Did you give any thought to the fact that these Jews were to be transferred to the Auschwitz and Lublin concentration camps, and that it says

they had served in a prison of the judicial system?

I gave that no thought at all. I wasn't the Tsar of the Jews, as the Pariser Tageblatt called me; I had to attend to my duties. That doesn't mean I was responsible for every wicked deed and every good deed done to the Jews. At first I had been responsible for Jewish emigration, and later I was gradually brought in on individual cases and so on. But where these were settled generally through ministerial channels—that is, by decree, regulation or official procedure—then my responsibility ceased. I gave no thought at all to what, if, where, how things would be. I did my thinking about what I was concerned with, and had enough to do with that.

So as far as these laws were concerned, you were essentially just kept informed?

The whole matter was passed to me for my information, nothing more.

Why did you send people of stature like Dannecker, who is described by the opposing side as a nonentity—and of whom you don't think all that much yourself—why did you send such a man to an area as important as France?

Because I had to take what was available.

That's not true. The Security Service and Security Police had very capable people.

I didn't choose them for myself; I had to take what I was given. Or can you pick out whatever you want from a monkey house of 6,000 to 8,000 Security Police men?

Yes, in your field.

Not me. I had to make do with what I had.

Given your position, you could have taken this or that man from a Security Service district at any time.

I did do that, to some extent. I suffered from the section heads of the Reich Security Main Office taking my good people away from me.

But you must realize that there was a time when everything was done about national opposition and sabotage, but nothing at all was done about Jews.

So to some extent I had to rely on these people because there was no one else. If I had had leading lights, for example someone of the caliber of Dr. Jakewitsch, whom I sought out myself, or Hauptsturmführer Bolschwin, who snatched Office VI away from me because it counted for more—perhaps with such help I would have got Lublin. Perhaps the Mad. (Madagascar) project would have been pushed through sooner, before the island was lost to me. Perhaps emigration would have been even more radical and more rapid than it already was. Given my modest resources, it was a great deal if I could bring about the emigration of 100,000 in Vienna in one year. If I hadn't had, in part, slow minds at my disposal whom I first had to train, but had had people with a perspective of their own, then perhaps I would have brought about the emigration of 150,000 in one year.

You must make a distinction there. For a central office like Vienna or Prague, experienced officials are enough, but the position of a representative for Jewish affairs in France called for a man with political breadth.

I couldn't, when the issue of the day was France, … a man who had great intellectual gifts but no previous involvement whatsoever in the subject. Here I had to take people who for years had already—…

worked in Jewish life. What use was it to me if I got a Government Councillor Bosshammer or a Government Councillor Wunsche? They were nothing but order-takers. Whereas Ostf. Brunner, who started with me in Vienna—he came to me as an SS man and became an SS Hauptsturmführer. Once this man had become accustomed over the years to the dealings and the paperwork through his work at the Central Office, I put him to work. He made his way. Dannecker had been working in the Security Service Main Office as a desk officer for assimilated Jews long before Brunner. I then got him, and said to myself: the majority of Jews in France are assimilated Jews. All right, I had nobody else, so Dannecker, then. Wi,

[overlapping talk]

France called for a man of stature, not a Dannecker.

I couldn't get one. I wasn't all-powerful; I had to take what I was given. It was on a Yule evening that I fell out with Blobel. Blobel had been placed in my administrative care, and Blobel tried, with his Prussian loudmouthedness, to deal with me—a man who was on good terms with his people, calm, steady, consistent, who would sometimes tell his men the truth with a “you idiot”, and who also addressed them with the familiar form of “you”. In short, this Blobel wanted to give me instructions, issue me orders, handle me with Prussian precision. You have to understand the finer distinction between the so-called necessary Prussian drill and Prussian precision and correctness. But you also have to bear in mind that you get further with your people on a calm footing than…

If you know how to maintain a personal connection with your men, you reach the goal more quickly and more effectively than if I try to achieve it through so-called blind obedience. That may be the difference between an office led by a South German and one led by a North German. On that Yule-festival evening I asked Gruppenführer Müller, who was sitting to my right, why he had ordered me, of all people, from Vienna to Berlin.

He told me: “Yes, Comrade Eichmann, I knew what I had done. With you I gained an entire office, and I don't need to build up its staff, only supplement it. It was clear to me from the outset that you would bring your ablest colleagues with you.” I must tell you that too, in answer to your question today. I had all the representatives in the European countries come that evening, and each brought something. Wi, brought Slovak schnapps; Richter brought Romanian ham, preserved in tins, and so on. It was a pleasant evening; everything was divided up equally.

I said that evening that it was easy to stand by the flag in good times, but that it took strength, and put idealism into practice, to grip the flagstaff even more tightly in bad times and to carry the flag to victory in accordance with the orders given. In his second speech, Gruppenführer Müller picked up directly on that: “Your superior, your section head, Ostf. Eichmann, spoke of the flag.” And that was where he began… By that I only wanted to say that even Müller wasn't in a position to—and that he was glad I brought my colleagues along.

That was also how it came about that I took a Dannecker with me. But I didn't take him with me: he offered himself to me, and I wasn't given anyone else. Had I had other people of stature, there probably would have been a Jewish state in Lublin. The Mad. (Madagascar) project would also have been carried out, and emigration would have been pushed still harder. Perhaps, with these capable minds, it would not have had to come to such a Final Solution at all, at least not with Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Germany, because all that would already have been dealt with beforehand.

K. H. Frank in Prague connected me by telephone with Kaltenbrunner, and I spoke to Kaltenbrunner from his desk. Although my marching orders were for Berlin, he ordered me to come to him in Alt Aussee because it was no longer possible to get through. It was one day at the beginning of May, I think, after lunch, that I went to the slope of the Loser. The Loser is a local mountain at Alt Aussee, and on that slope there were villas for people staying there on summer holiday. The Chief of the Security Police and Security Service was quartered in one of these pleasant villas.

His adjutant, an old and trusted comrade of mine, SS Sturmbannführer Gscheitler, received me and announced me. Then I entered a room where I saw Ernst Kaltenbrunner sitting behind a table, wearing an Obergruppenführer's field tunic and almost wedge-shaped ski trousers, with his feet in two splendid ski boots, despite the last-days-of-Pompeii mood of doom that prevailed among us then—mentally, at any rate, with me. He was sitting after lunch with a small cognac and a game of patience in front of him. I said to him, “Well, did it turn out well?” And he said, “No, it's bad”—the game of patience, that is.

So the game had turned out badly, but that was nothing new to me; everything had to turn out badly. He had a cognac brought to me. Gscheidler brought it himself, rather than the orderly as was usual. The white snow on the Loser slope shone through the window. It had snowed heavily; that area did not become free of snow until the end of May. The room was comfortably warm, and it was pleasant to be there when I thought of having to camp in the cold for days and nights on end. The cognac tasted excellent despite my gloomy mood, and Kaltenbrunner said to me, “Well, what are you doing now?”

You have to understand that things were no longer as they had been before, when I was summoned to give official reports. By now the die had been cast. All these things had become secondary; people no longer attached decisive importance to them. The mind was partly absent and occupied with things that lay far ahead of what the present moment offered. For this was the beginning of a nervous shock, dealt to you over a few days as though with a wooden mallet: the Reich, for which we had cared and feared so much, had broken apart.

When he asked what I would do now, I told him, “I'm going into the mountains.” He replied, “That's good, that's good, for the Reichsführer-SS too, because then he can speak differently to Eisenhower. He knows that when Eichmann is in the mountains, he won't surrender, because he can't surrender.” That settled the whole official part, and I became, so to speak, a partisan chieftain. I took my leave of Kaltenbrunner formally, without any personal touch; none from him either. He remained seated behind his table with the patience cards on it. His expression conveyed his goodwill.

Gscheidler then escorted me out, and I went to one of the big hotels in Alt Aussee where I had my men. One of the big hotels whose owner was still speaking several years later about that dog, Eichmann, who had requisitioned his hotel and quartered his hordes there, who had allegedly wrecked everything and caused him material damage. That was nothing but the product of a petty shopkeeper's mind, because not everything in that hotel was wrecked. The senior staff medical officer of the neighboring military hospital in Alt Aussee implored me to evacuate Alt Aussee with my combat force so that he could declare it an open town.

After a few days I gave in to his urging, after having inquiries made into the number and kind of wounded in the Alt Aussee district. Even before the bulk of my combat force had left the hotel, I saw with my own eyes Red Cross nurses personally scrubbing and cleaning it with brushes and scrubbing cloths, room by room, floor by floor. So after me, part of the military hospital—which had to move because of overcrowding—looked after and cleaned everything here in this hotel belonging to the swine who had the nerve to claim that we had wrecked everything, and fitted it out as a hospital ward.

He was simply one of the profiteers who thought he could feather his nest a little further with some compensation or other. Around that time, one evening, on the strength of Kaltenbrunner's newly issued order to organize resistance in the high mountains—no, in the Totengebirge —I assembled all the riff-raff that had been foisted on me here. Alongside my reliable men whom I knew, the men of my own office, there was some motley

bunch of Waffen-SS men, and there was a wild bunch from Office VI, Schellenberg. Some were people from Kremsmünster Abbey, which had gone up in flames—I think they set fire to it themselves—but before that, several truckloads consisting of tropical uniforms and other uniforms, anything but winter and ski equipment. Instead they had down sleeping bags and emergency rations of chocolate and hard sausages, things we hadn't seen for a long time, in vast quantities. They had a cash box, a small iron box measuring about 30 by 20 centimeters, 10 to 15 centimeters high, filled with dollars, pounds and gold coins.

I now had to take over all this stuff, together with the men, on Ernst Kaltenbrunner's orders. Up on the Blauern —that's a march uphill from Alt Aussee of perhaps one and a half to three hours; I can't say exactly, because there was suddenly heavy snowfall at that time, and I also requisitioned 150 Hitler Youth from the mayor of Alt Aussee because there was nobody else left, with instructions to shovel away the snow, which in places was one to two meters deep, so that I could get through with my vehicles, at least as far as the Blauern. It had been recommended to me as a solid strongpoint, on a saddle with Ischl in the valley on one side and Alt Aussee in the valley on the other.

There on the Blauern I had requisitioned a room from the innkeeper, the only one there was, had an armory set up there, and had the uniforms brought in. The mayor, an old Party member, warned me about the innkeeper and told me he was a treacherous clericalist (Schwarzer), and that it would be best if I had him bumped off. When he told me that, I was firmly determined to have this man bumped off first of all. It really was a time when everyone was bumping everyone else off.

Then I came up to the Blauern and took a look at that little runt of an innkeeper, and said to myself: no, there's no need to bump him off; he does nothing anyway. Among the stores from Kremsmünster there was also a barrel of red wine. I put it out beside the road, and each of the soldiers making their way home from Ischl through the mountains could knock back a few glasses of red wine and move on. They were not allowed to stay more than five minutes. That was how the barrel of red wine was emptied. The box with the dollar notes, pound notes and gold coins,

I handed over to Government Councillor Wunsche for safekeeping with the most exact record-keeping. Even in those days, his being a government councillor was still my best guarantee that these things would be properly accounted for.

I myself moved into the inn on the Blauern and camped there. I forgot to say that when I was last with Kaltenbrunner and gave the answer already described to his question about what I would do now, he said: “Look, Horia Sima is in Alt Aussee with his little wife, very nice; take him up with you.”

So I drove to Horia Sima at his quarters, reported to him and said that I had orders from the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service to take charge of him and bring him into the mountains with his staff.

Horia Sima was plainly very pleased; his cabinet chief, his other ministers and the generals he had with him were even more pleased, seven or eight people altogether. I brought them up to the Blauern and initially quartered them nearby. When his war minister or defense minister asked whether they could arm themselves, I granted the request. Before collecting them down below, I had had them fitted out in paymaster uniforms so that they would not attract attention in the village. I had them driven up like that, except for Horia Sima, whom I had driven up in civilian clothes.

[Typed aside: He was the last Romanian… (?)]

Up on the Blauern they all changed again into different uniforms, as far as that was possible with the strange uniforms I had received from Office VI. The war minister, or one of his generals, made a request of me in the armory—well, “armory”: it was only a corner, a quarter of a room. I was very surprised when he picked out an FN pistol and, with an extraordinarily shrewd and practiced expert's eye, noticed something I hadn't seen at all. I must say that I hadn't looked over the armory very thoroughly, and I must also say that I am no weapons expert.

This man found silencers among these things and, as though he were a weapons technician who had spent his entire life doing nothing but fitting silencers to Belgian FN pistols, fitted one to his pistol. The whole thing looked like half a flamethrower. I told him that the whole thing was actually forbidden, and he said to me, “But it deadens the sound”—his exact words. I said to myself: those are still daredevils; they still have idealism in their bellies. You can march with men like that.

I also had a complete radio truck among my equipment. You have to understand that a radio truck was a huge monster, with all sorts of things. On the first day, as the sun rose, a Hauptsturmführer came from Office VI: “Orders from Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner: I'm to collect emergency rations.” I said, “What are you to collect? Emergency rations? I need those myself.” “Orders from Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner.” Then he grew arrogant and insolent, and my Ostf. Burger said to me, “Shall I bump him off?”

Then I said to this Hauptsturmführer, “You can have half a suitcase full, but no more, otherwise I'll have you bumped off.” He took half a suitcase full of dried sausages and chocolate. As I only pieced together later, he had made off somewhere with these things, perhaps to Switzerland.

For a red-haired SS Oberscharführer came to me two, three, four, five times in succession, each time with a slip saying that he was to be given so many rolls of gold napoleons (Napoleondor). Each roll contained 50 coins. The signature was always Ernst Kaltenbrunner. I knew it, and it looked genuine to me. But I had no reason to check whether it was genuine or not, because for us in the mountains gold and money meant nothing, while bread and emergency rations meant everything. Although I had been sharp with this Hauptsturmführer and had not spared my threats, I nevertheless had Government Councillor Wunsche pay out every man who asked for his little rolls of gold without objection, against a receipt. I had Wunsche put Kaltenbrunner's requisition in the files—or perhaps he put it in the cash box too, as though it were worth gold.

Ostf. Burger came and told me he had made a valuable find in the trucks from Kremsmünster: some air-force sleeping bags filled with down. They were all already spoken for, but he had saved one for me and brought it to me. When I saw it, I found it very serviceable and appropriated it. It served me well later in captivity too, until I lost sight of it as well.

The next morning I heard loud shouting and bellowing. When I looked out of the window, I saw Burger slapping a civilian right and left across the face. I sent an orderly to order Burger to my room. He reported that the man was a teacher who had come up from one of the villages in the valley to loot the stocks of fat in one of the trucks, and that he had therefore made his point by hitting him. I told him that an officer does not hit people.

If he loots, he will be court-martialed and shot, not beaten. And with that I sent him packing.

I ordered the radio truck to be taken into a clearing in the forest, because Horia Sima had asked me to keep in touch with the outside world at all times. The radio truck would be just the thing for keeping us informed about everything as quickly and as well as possible. We could now contact stations on all sorts of wavelengths, and we had no shortage of people with a gift for languages: the Romanians alone had a large vocabulary.

Hardly had I given the order when there was a tremendous explosion. I sent a runner to find out what that tremendous bang was, and he reported that the radio truck had been blown up with a bundled hand-grenade charge. I then had that a…hole … of an SS Unterführer (noncommissioned officer) brought to me. I could do no more than roar at him. What purpose would it have served? The radio truck was finished. I couldn't lock the fellow up because I had no prison. The offense was too minor to shoot him for it. I couldn't drive him away either, because he could have betrayed us. So I shouted at him and threw him out again.

I just said to myself: what a pack of swine you've assembled here. Waffen-SS fellows who had perhaps just been discharged from a military hospital and made available to some unit again, picked up somewhere by the Security Police and taken over; that utterly insubordinate bunch from Office VI; a few broads; my own men; and 150 Hitler Youth on top of that. Then I also had the Romanians on my hands, and now I was supposed to fight a war in this Totengebirge.

I had weapons, the very latest ones. I had never seen an assault rifle before; now I had heaps of them. I had never seen as much ammunition as I had up here now—Panzerfaust antitank weapons in vast quantities. I then ordered the Blaualm evacuated and a withdrawal to the Rettenbachalm, which is a little higher in the Totengebirge.

I had sent Burger, my best skier, up on patrol with one man to accompany him. I sent him to the Rettenbachalm and still higher to check the snow conditions, possible accommodation and so on. So the immediate objective was the Rettenbachalm in any case.

All the weapons we didn't need—and this time my officers had to work just as hard as any rifleman A…—I had sunk in the river running beside the Rettenbachalm, rendered unusable, smashed against the rocks.

I ordered them not to throw a single rifle into the river in working condition. I had set aside a whole morning for the job. Once I was sure that not one of these weapons beyond what we could carry to the Rettenbachalm had been left on the Blaualm, but that they had been sunk, unusable, in the little mountain stream, I was the last to leave the Blaualm and went to the Rettenbachalm. There an advance party of the Romanian government-in-exile had designated some herdsmen's huts where the remaining detachment could shelter. I dismissed most of the men after the radio truck was blown up, when I saw that discipline had deteriorated beyond what was permissible. Around that time Ernst Kaltenbrunner sent an orderly to me on the Blaualm, who delivered the following order: “The Reichsführer-SS orders that no shots are to be fired at Englishmen or Americans.”

[K… (Heading: Chief of the Security Police and Security Service.)]

I had to countersign it, and then the lad hurried back down to the valley. When the Blaualm had been evacuated, large stocks were still left there, all things that were of no importance for an attack and therefore could not harm us—the uniforms left behind, for example. Strangely enough, Office VI had sent up bales of cloth, linen, shirts… I felt like an old dealer. I thought to myself then: so these were all the activities of Office VI that were decisive for the war. It was hoarding for their own households. Perhaps some of it was for the informants; I'll grant that, but in my own mind I thought otherwise.

So I dismissed them, all that rabble. In the case of the decent ones, I had Wunsche pay out 5,000 Reichsmarks to each, against a signature. Besides dollar and pound notes, the cash box contained Reichsmarks too. A little SS girl, an auxiliary, begged and pleaded with me to take at least her along. She didn't know where to go, had nobody, and was trying to come with us to the Rettenbachalm. But at that time I was merciless and hard, even in the face of women's attempts to charm me. Instead of answering, I told Government Councillor Wunsche, “Pay out 5,000 marks, bb… next.”

I was so hard and curt then that anyone who heard I no longer needed anyone was glad to clear off, and would have been even gladder not to see me, let alone have to speak to me.

So, on arriving at the Rettenbachalm, I had my Romanian government-in-exile there. I visited them first, because they had been placed under my protection.

They thanked me for the good provisioning. I saw that they were well housed and comfortably placed in the mountains; at any rate they had a roof over their heads and were not going hungry. I was astonished that even now they were still lugging around large bundles whose protective wrapping had long since torn. They were large bundles, 50 by 25 or 30 centimeters across and 40 centimeters deep, consisting of Romanian banknotes. They must have been large-denomination notes. They carried them around all the time. The amounts must have run into millions upon millions. They guarded those bundles more carefully than their bread or a bockwurst sausage.

Oberscharführer Slawik, my house dragon from Budapest, lived like a wolfhound (Wolgshund) on the ground floor of the villa where Winkelmann had quartered me. He had the Order Police detachment under his command. It was the Order Police that had had to be assigned to me at the Reichsführer-SS's request for my protection—building security, personal protection. So this detachment was under him, and in Hungary he had an easy time of it, because he only had to see to the security of the house. He was really only there to keep watch during the day so that I could sleep properly and peacefully at night.

This Slawik now turned out to be a cook on the Rettenbachalm; he was a butcher by trade. Slawik, that ever-cheerful, optimistic, well-stuffed lump, who never went hungry because he was right at the source, had arranged something for me on the Rettenbachalm. He had found a wooden compartment in a herdsman's hut and had hay brought into it, and some straw as well. This man, who had grown up entirely in the big city, had no idea what harm he was doing. He had laid hay containing peppermint on top of the straw, and I, dog-tired, threw myself down on this bed of hay, with the result that I woke up the next day with a headache.

That was the morning when I passed on to Horia Sima and his men, and to my own men as well—long-serving SS members, or rather Security Service members, of whom only Krumey, Wi., Richter, Brunner, Dannecker and Zoepf were missing; everyone else was there—the Reichsführer-SS's order, passed through the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service: no firing at Englishmen or Americans. “IMA” was the reply. The so-called home guards were already creeping around us. They were Austrian hunters and other riff-raff, with red-white-red armbands, all anti-Prussian types, probably all people who had shouted themselves hoarse with cries of “Hail Hitler” in 1938, and who later claimed never to have been involved. They were creeping around us, with rifles, of course.

I then established a cordon and had warning signs put up, including on the so-called hunting paths. In the high mountains these are open to every forester, every worker, every forestry assistant. I had those closed too, and had a sign put up warning that anyone approaching would be fired on without warning or challenge. I had positions manned with sharpshooters—I had Austrians; every one of them was a sharpshooter except my fat Slawik. What they shot, or whether they shot at all, I don't know, because there was gunfire everywhere at that time. No report was ever brought to me. On the other hand, we weren't troubled by the opposing side either. So one must assume either that the opposing groups respected the warning signs or that my firing positions were working well. There probably isn't a third possibility here.

Horia Sima, with whom I spent most of that day, and I agreed that because we had no communications, and because of the lurking danger from the opposing groups, we would be overrun. We agreed to move our camp a few meters higher up the mountain. Before that I sent my driver, SS Unterscharführer or Rottenführer Bolanski, to Alt Aussee. I told Wunsche that he was to give Bolanski the necessary money and impressed on Bolanski that he was to buy up the entire stock of bread from whichever baker he came across. If it couldn't be done the easy way, then the hard way, but it had to be paid for in any case, and I didn't want to see him again without the car loaded with fresh bread. We had only rusks and biscuits. A few hours later Bolanski returned with the car packed full of fresh bread, probably several hundred loaves.

Then Bolanski asked me to give him a car—at the end I was driving a very small Fiat Topolino—and two or three trucks, because he wanted to set up a trucking business somewhere. I thought to myself that I no longer needed a car in the high mountains. Why shouldn't I grant this wish to my driver, who had served me faithfully for so many years? I told him, “Take a truck, or whatever you need, from the Blaualm and make off in my Topolino.” As I heard later, on the way from the Blaualm to Bad Ischl he cleverly let the Topolino run down into a ditch—a good eight, ten to twelve meters or so—and left it there. He seems to have made off somehow with the trucks. Perhaps he had some luck with his trucking business. I would wish him that.

The next day we moved our position a few hundred meters higher,

With the exception of Horia Sima, everyone, including myself, took part in hauling up margarine, bread, emergency rations, pots, cooking gear and so on and so on, on a rope that had been rigged, because the slope went up at over 45 degrees. And then, when we reached the top, we spent the night in the open. We more or less covered one another with our bodies. So we lay on the crusted snow and woke up countless times during the night.

The next day Burger said to me, “Ostbf. (Obersturmbannführer), we've discussed the matter. You're wanted as a war criminal and we're not wanted as war criminals. So if you were to leave and appoint another commander, especially since we're not allowed to shoot at the English and Americans anyway, and the Russians aren't coming here because this is an American sphere of influence, you'd be doing your comrades a great service.”

After I'd settled the matter with myself, I said, “Men, I'm leaving you here on the Rettenalm on your own now. The war is over, you're not allowed to shoot anyway, so see how you get through.”

Jaenisch, my long-serving outer-office bruiser, came forward immediately and asked to be allowed to accompany me. We had another schnapps together. Horia Sima, whom I also told about it, gave me his gold fountain pen. He himself now put on civilian clothes too, and so did his cabinet people. We promised to meet again in a waiting room at a dentist named Wolf's, somewhere in Germany, by keeping a relative there posing as a patient until we had found one another.

So we went our separate ways, and Jaenisch and I soon fell into American captivity. Later I heard that Horia Sima had set up a large centre in Salzburg for the restoration of a “nationals.” Romania, with American help. The continual spells of captivity and living underground meant that we never did meet in that waiting room at the dentist's. I myself later had an opportunity to speak with a Professor Bopesku, who had once been a close associate of Horia Sima's. I asked him, just as I asked a former Romanian envoy named Ginuea, to pass on my greetings to Horia Sima and tell him about the misfortune that befell me, which also made it impossible for me to meet him. And that is the end of it.

That red-haired Obsch. (Oberscharführer) who turned up with the note—were you able to establish afterwards that it was forged?

No, I thought so, and I still think so today. I can't imagine that Kaltenbrunner handed me the whole lot and then hampered me with some detailed instruction, because he couldn't have known what order I had issued. So I assumed it was forged. Had it been a superior other than Kaltenbrunner, I wouldn't have had that thought at all. But with Kaltenbrunner I had to assume that he was leaving me a completely free hand—never, after this whole business, the RF (Reichsführer-SS) and Eisenhower, when he knows Eichmann is up in the high mountains; perhaps there were others there as partisan leaders as well.

There would have been a partisan war too, if it hadn't been for the order that the English and Americans must not be fired on, from the RF—everything, everything in confusion. If we had remained consistent, we could have built a line of resistance, though of course, looking back today, without success. But we would have gone on shooting it out for months. Today, of course, it's madness, lunacy. Perhaps the RF recognised that too. As I heard later, those fellows all cleared off to Switzerland, with gold and money and the devil and all.

The whole emergency ration served only to get that whole crowd through the lean period in Germany, and then they went to Switzerland, where the gold coins bought better bread again.

All the people from Office VI cleared off to Switzerland.

And Wunsche?

He stayed up on the Rettenbachalm, after the men had decided it would be better for me to leave, since I was wanted as a war criminal. And my combat assignment had been fulfilled anyway. I wasn't allowed to shoot at the English and Americans, and the Russians weren't coming here in any case.

This room where Klaltenbrunner was sitting at the time—was it a large room?

No, it wasn't a large room. It was a fairly comfortably furnished room, a living room. It didn't belong to him either. It was a villa that had been vacated for the purpose.

Did it have a wooden floor, or carpets?

Yes, carpets.

Did it have a large window facing the mountains?

No, an ordinary window, with curtains, closed when I was inside.

Was there an open hearth fire, a fireplace?

I don't remember that, but it was probably a tiled stove.

This table—was it an ordinary household table?

Yes, a fine large table, a dining-room table.

And he was sitting quite alone at this table?

Yes, he was quite alone. He sat at one end of the table, if I remember rightly. I came in from this side; Kaltenbrunner sat here, with the window to his right. Here was the end wall of the room; here a door led into the adjoining rooms, where Gescheidler then went; and here the game of patience lay in front of him.

Do you play patience yourself?

I played it at one time, but today I can't remember how. I'd have to start again.

You don't happen to remember the game K. (Kaltenbrunner) had in front of him?

Yes—playing patience is something you do while thinking about something. Either it comes out or it doesn't. It goes like this: you think about something, you consider whether it will come out or not, and so you lay out the patience. There's an element of superstition in it. We did it in captivity too: will we be released by Christmas or not—is it over or isn't it? Only that was a different kind of patience, because we had light playing cards leichten, not patience cards. And I did ask him, “Oberführer, did it come out?” And he says no, nothing more.

You no longer remember the pattern there…

No, it gets laid out, it gets laid out in rows, and then the cards are moved around again. There are all sorts of kinds of patience.

Were they proper patience cards that he had?

Yes, a new deck. But that's how it was done in Austria. A lot of the old ladies do it; after the meal they lay out

the old ladies, after the meal, then they drink their mocha with it and later lie down and sleep for an hour or so.

Were there any pictures on the wall?

I don't recall that any more.

What kind of cognac were you given?

A foreign cognac.

When the adjutant let you in, did the adjutant stay?

He announced me to K. (Kaltenbrunner), and then I was let in, and then he withdrew.

He didn't wear glasses?

K.? No, he didn't wear glasses.

Did you have the impression that he'd already enjoyed several good cognacs?

No, not at all.

He generally drank little.

Well, K. generally much preferred beer. I once went to see him in Vienna, when he was still Higher SS and Police Leader, and I thought to myself, he's remained modest after all. He ate his Upper Austrian soup in the evening, and I was given a bottle of beer, and he had a beer too.

What was that about the message from the RF (Reichsführer-SS)?

The RF ordered that the English and Americans must not be fired on.

Because when you were there in Alt Aussee, that must surely already have been in the first days of May?

Yes, certainly…

It was the end of April?

No, some soldiers were already heading home, armed and unarmed, up from Bad Ischl. The Americans were already in Bad Ischl, and the girls were already dancing with the Americans in the market square. I remember it all too well, because we were furious about that state of affairs. It was the first days of May. On the 3rd or 4th of May there had been a terrible snowfall, a return of winter. Of course, there was still deep snow up on the Blaualm, but the approach from Alt Aussee was about two hours, and the meadows down there by Alt Aussee were already free of snow. The Almbach was already running free of ice, and this terrible stretch up here was so covered in drifts by that snowfall that, for stretches of a hundred metres, with the

car there was no getting through. The HJ (Hitler Youth) were working there and shovelled the road clear so that the vehicles could get up as well. I'd like to say that again, since it provides another firm date, and it could very easily be reconstructed exactly.

The actual capitulation took place after you'd already left the unit, didn't it?

With the best will in the world, I can't piece together those last days any more. I was living in a kind of shock at the time. When everything really did collapse, I lost the will to live as well. In those days practically nothing mattered to me. They could have stood me against the wall, and if I'd had a pistol I would have shot myself. Just as I said to my adjutant Jaenisch, once we were prisoners and things looked so hopeless at first, “You know what, we'd do best to end our lives.”

To which Jaenisch said, “You could have known that yesterday. We'd have had it easier then; now there's no sense in it.” And I asked the camp doctor whether he couldn't give me some kind of poison. He said, “Is it as bad as all that?” “No, there's no point to any of it any more; it's all shit.” But he had nothing in his dispensary except a little morphine, and that was no use. Many people went through days like that. You had fought, worked, cared and feared for the Reich, and now it had collapsed. It took me a few days before the will to live came back.

Now it's odd that this order from the RF (Reichsführer-SS) dates from a time when he'd long since been dismissed. He was dismissed on 29 April.

Yes, that must have been later, but we knew nothing about it.

He was in northern Germany. Was he still in contact with K. (Kaltenbrunner) then?

Certainly, by radio somehow.

Did you notice any radio installation in K.'s villa?

Not in the villa. But there was also a Stbf. (Sturmbannführer) from Office VI on the slope of the Loser. They were receiving reports there continually. Whether they had a transmitter, I don't know. And in those last days I went there daily to find out the situation, so that I knew how things stood.

Wunsche asked to go to Aussee once more to visit his family. I gave him permission, and then he came back and reported that, while he was down there, the American tanks had come

in, and he'd then gone back through the garden, across the fields, and made off on his way to the Blaualm.

Because by then Hanke had long since been RF (Reichsführer-SS).

All right, even if that's so, we knew nothing about it.

You don't believe that this was a private initiative of Kaltenbrunner's?

Then K. (Kaltenbrunner) wouldn't have said, “On the RF's orders,” and K. wouldn't have said, “It's good, because H. (Himmler) wants to negotiate with Eisenhower.” And it's important that he also knows that Eichmann is up here in the mountains. Of course, looking back today, it was a childish business to go into the mountains with such a ridiculous little band, wanting to play at war up there as a mountain spirit with a few gnomes. One could have caused trouble up here for a few weeks simply by blocking the pass. With a few men, if you know the mountains, nothing is easier than blocking the road from Bad Ischl to Aussee.

But it would only have lasted a few weeks. If they'd sent up a proper mountain infantry battalion, it would very soon have been in their hands. One would probably have kept withdrawing further and further. Admittedly, the attackers would have taken heavy losses at first, because all the advantages are with those who know the mountains, and I'm not attacking, I'm only observing, while they can't observe me. But eventually it comes to an end, if only for supply reasons, because at that time everything up there, everything, was deep in snow.

In the last conversation with K., didn't he bring up the RF, or what the RF's exact position was? No judgment of him either?

No, nothing at all, nothing.

[Romania's withdrawal from the war]

You were in Budapest then?

[August 1944]

That withdrawal from the war is said to have made a strong impression on you?

I remember so little of it that I can't recall it at all. I evidently had so much to do that none of these things really reached my awareness. It wasn't my job. I probably took note of it and told my men, “It's all just sh…,” and that was the end of the matter for me. I can't remember anything else. But I can still remember very clearly how delighted I was at the time, when the

headlines appeared: retaliation has begun. That morning I had been at the Hungarian Interior Ministry with B. …, and … was sitting behind his desk sorting the morning post. He stood up—he was a very lively, impulsive man—stood up, embraced me, waved the Hungarian morning newspaper about and said, “So retaliation is here.” I can remember that exactly. So how little impression it must have made on me when Romania withdrew from the war.

Wasn't there talk of your going to Romania with a detachment?

No—yes, but if one calls Neuzrat Romania, then of course. Arat is an old Hungarian county capital. It went to Romania through some old peace treaty, probably after the last war. When I came through that Sunday morning, Arat was celebrating its return to Hungarian mother soil. Whether Neuzrat had previously belonged to Hungary or Romania, I don't know, because Neuarat and Arat are separated by a little stream. At that time, though, Neuarat was Romanian sovereign territory, even after that morning ceremony I witnessed. So if one still calls that Romania, then I was in Romania, but only 500 metres from the Hungarian border. Of course, I also got into the area around Nickolsburg, which is Romanian territory too, but only one or two kilometres from the border at most. Beyond that there were Romanian troops again, Romanian borders and guards, which we had to respect at that time.

How many days before you drove down there to carry out the operation with the ethnic Germans—how many days before that had you received the order?

On the Sunday when I drove through Arat to Neuarat to sort out the business with the military hospital, as I already said, there was the great ceremony on the market squares, attended by prominent Hungarian authorities, for the public reincorporation of this territory into Hungary. I don't remember the date, but it can be established very easily, because that town had fallen back into Hungarian hands a day or a few hours earlier. So that fixes the date. And it was also on that Sunday that the senior staff medical officer told me, “The most seriously wounded of my men don't need medicine any more now. The mere fact that German soldiers are here again

is the best medicine. I've told the nurses to pack everything up; please transport us out.” That would be a second way of approximately establishing the date. Now I was lying in wait, because the Hungarian H… Division kept postponing the attack, and because, long before the attack was fixed, I had for my part gathered at an estate that Becher had requisitioned for his purposes—a stud farm with a Hstf. (Hauptsturmführer) and staff. That was under Becher; they were all from the Florian Geier unit.

The march from that estate where I was waiting to Neuarat probably took a day and a half to two days at most, whereas I sat on the estate for fourteen days to three weeks. I was there so long that I once went away for a few days. I think I went to Berlin, via Budapest to Berlin, and reported to Grf. (Gruppenführer) Müller on all of it. Above all, I could tell him nothing—that I had this assignment to evacuate 10,000 ethnic Germans. So I was able to report it to him. I stayed on the estate as long as necessary.

I kept my men busy drilling with the ten to twelve mortars I had from Zehender. And another week had passed before I came to the estate, from when Geschke told me, “At two today, Eichmann, report to me to receive an order.” And in service matters I was so punctilious that I said, “Yes, sir,” even to Geschke, although we didn't use a strict tone with each other on duty; we'd grown too close, there was that kind of comradeship. And I had learned that with the troops you must wear service dress.

So I got myself ready according to regulations and had myself driven the few houses over to the offices of the Commander of the Security Police and Security Service. In the anteroom I ask the adjutant to announce me. I was admitted at once, saluted and reported to receive the order. Geschke burst out laughing and, so to speak, patted me on the shoulder and said, “That's not how I meant it. I do have a message, but you didn't have to come like that.” In any case he was joking. I said, “Regulations are regulations, and when I have an order to receive, that's how I do it.”

He then gave it to me in a matter-of-fact way, because I have no idea at all

what countermeasures it calls forth on my part, what consequences such an order has, which I then pass on in detail and issue. I must be able to justify myself. It could have happened that the vehicle with the mortars, on the snowdrifted road—on those raised, snowdrifted roads in the east where shells were landing to the left and right—took a direct hit. Then the whole bloody lot would have blown apart with all the ammunition I had in it.

And if I alone had survived, or if I'd been wounded, I would later have had to justify myself. They would have asked how I'd received the order. So I reported in the normal way, was entered in his daybook, received my order properly, received it in legally valid form and carried it out. As Commander of the Security Police and Security Service, he can give me orders, not directives. To receive a directive I don't need a regulation uniform; in some circumstances I can even appear in civilian clothes.

Is there any indication that you regarded this march to bring out the ethnic Germans as half a suicide mission, as the situation warranted?

I was the only unit—a few dozen men—in a Hungarian army group. And when I began down there with the ethnic Germans, I drew the anger of the Magyars on myself.

So it was half a suicide mission after all?

Yes, of course.

You're also said to have remarked to several people, “Well, if we ever get back from there…”

It's possible I said that.

So you said that to Höttel, among others?

Höttel wasn't in Hungary at all.

Yes, he was with you at the end of August. You were at his flat in Budapest, and by then you'd already received the order for Neuarat. You discussed it with him, and he and you said, “It's half a suicide mission; let's see whether we get back.”

That's possible. I may also have said it to Krumey and all my men.

You once said that you had a personal, human, warm relationship with Höttel, and that towards him you were

absolutely frank, without sentimental reservation?

Yes, that's true too.

Now he says that under the impression of it, in anticipation of the mission to Romania, and also because of your clear understanding of the war situation, including Romania's withdrawal, you were in a certain psychological state. And did you tell him that the war was now lost for Germany, meaning that absolutely everything was lost for us too, and that you too would be regarded by the United Nations as a major war criminal?

I can't have said that. The United Nations—certainly not.

Rather, in a press digest that we received every day—only enemy press, of course, which I too received every day as a desk officer—I once read about the war criminals. I was number nine. I was still rather amused by the whole thing then. But I only came to know the term “major war criminal” at the Nuremberg trial.

Then the Allies will say so because you allegedly transported Jews by the million, registered them, and some of them were handed over for physical extermination.

But he doesn't say “gassed”?

No—and that some were then taken away for extermination. Höttel then asks how many there were, and you're said to have replied that the number was a major Reich secret, but that you would tell Höttel because, as a historian, he might be interested in it.

I didn't know that Höttel was a historian at all. I'm hearing that for the first time today.

That's right too—those killed. I didn't make the report either. The RF (Reichsführer-SS) had asked for a statistical compilation, but not from me—from a government councillor (Regierungsrat) who had once worked at the Reich Statistical Office. No, I never made another report.

Yes, a report was apparently made, but it wasn't accepted, so a statistical compilation was then drawn up to do it differently. Because before that, before this statistical compilation, you had already

had to make a report.

An overall report? With figures? No, never.

And this report that the statistician made wasn't a report about the physically exterminated Jews, although he'd obtained all the source material from the VW HA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office). Instead, everything was in it: the number of Jews who had emigrated normally, and then, using estimates—these people are specialists in this field—he somehow estimated how many had emigrated illegally. He calculated the natural decrease exactly from births and deaths. He made himself an upside-down pyramid. All that was included, and it was called the statistics on the solution of the Jewish question.

But surely some written work of that kind had been done earlier too?

No, never, because I didn't know the extermination figure at all. I first saw it when the statistician was working with us at my office. These statistics didn't even distinguish how many were still held in the concentration camps at the time and how many had actually been killed by the camps. Instead, he checked everyone who had been taken into the camps, some of them through my office, against the camps' intake figures. That was enough for him. There was no breakdown of how many Auschwitz had killed and how many were still alive.

Was that the first time you heard the number of exterminated Jews?

I've never heard the actual number of exterminated and killed Jews at all. I don't know it.

And the number of Jews registered?

The registered Jews—I was able to calculate part of that figure myself, insofar as I transported them. For those the General Government transported, I took note of the final reports from Glo to the RF (Reichsführer-SS). I still remember one figure. I don't know whether it was two and a half million or three million in the General Government. The number of Jews living in Poland was probably around that size. That includes the Russian territories too, because the Jews cleared off when they had the chance and were freely admitted if they gave the Russian a watch. So I don't know this figure at all; only the VWHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office) knows it. Today, of course, I know the figure roughly if I sit down to it

because what the Allies established, what they took over—subtract that from the figure, and the remainder simply isn't there any more. You have to subtract the emigration figure and the natural decrease, and then a residual total is left. It wasn't my job to establish that. I was never mentioned or named either.

Further proof: K. (Kaltenbrunner) had called a service conference at the Preussenhaus. The meeting there took place between Mussolini's liberation and March 1944, but it could also be that I was ordered from Hungary to Berlin for this purpose. I don't remember. In any case, K. called this meeting at the height of the war, at the Preussenhaus, because there was no room in the State Police office, which was partly bombed out. Leipziger Strasse, near Potsdamer Platz.

All the State Police office chiefs were there, all the State Police regional headquarters chiefs, all the inspectors and all the commanders of the Security Police and Security Service. Whether the chiefs of the operational groups (Einsatzgruppen) and operational detachments (Einsatzkommandos) were there, I don't know. In any case, it was a gathering of about 300 men; it might have been 400. Goebbels was there too, and Lange, because the Security Service senior district leaders were also present. I was among the speakers who had to give a lecture, and I gave my lecture on the result of combating ideological opponents. It was at the height of the war at the time. Before me, Ko… spoke about his liberation of Mussolini. I mention all this because these are dates, when you can't otherwise give them offhand.

And that day I had to give a lecture whose draft I had to submit to Müller. I also asked Müller whether I was to give an overview of the figures. I'd noted down some figures and didn't know how to put it to those people. They were people from whom I had nothing to hide. I couldn't establish the number of Jews actually killed. I didn't have it.

Müller told me not to speak about these matters at all, but to pass over them and say that the Führer had given the RF (Reichsführer-SS) an order under which the RF had charged the VWHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office) with the final solution. And I then said in conclusion, it is to be hoped that the thousand-year-old scourge of humanity will now

be quiet once and for all as a result. I'm telling you this because I was still in office and rank then, and had to prepare a special lecture for people I couldn't have fooled. Even then we didn't know the exact figure, and no doubt the VW HA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office) may not have known it either in the rush. What was known was overblown material, fabrications, things inflated to suit the situation. That was customary among subordinate offices: to make the success stand out as much as possible in the report.

It wasn't always a lie. Sometimes they had already taken an advance on work still to come and included it, saying to themselves, “Who knows when I have to submit the next report? Go ahead and include this month too.” You weren't guilty of making a false report, because by the time the matter had gone back and forth, that item had been dealt with too. No one ever understated things in this field. The same applied to the others, whether it was the armed forces (Wehrmacht), the Party or the Labour Front, and so on.

Now, in those circumstances—the mission to Neuarat, Romania's withdrawal from the war—you are said to have replied to Höttel's question about whether you knew the exact number of Jews killed:

Two million? That's sheer nonsense. Were there even two million Jews in the occupied Russian territories? They'd run off…

About five million Jews lived in the occupied Russian territories before we got there.

But the estimate for the whole of European Russia was only five million Jews.

I'm hearing that for the first time…

But we occupied most of European Russia—in the most important part—

It can never, ever have been two million Jews.

That's once again a mixture of fiction and truth. Here the good man gets everything wrong again, consciously or unconsciously. I never drew up a report of that kind. One day I am summoned to Grf. (Gruppenführer) Müller, and he told me that a government councillor (Regierungsrat) would be coming to me to establish statistically the result of the solution of the Jewish question. He has access to all the files and every facility. And he did come, a rather surly man, and gathered his material, partly at my office and partly while travelling. It took about fourteen days.

He collected material from everywhere, because I didn't have the records from every country. My accounts, often of individual cases, didn't interest him; he wanted the overall picture. He often wrote himself to the commander in Paris, or wherever it was. He himself wrote to the individual concentration-camp commandants. The collected material supplied by Liebehenschel at the VWHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office), or by Brigadeführer Glücks, wasn't enough for him. No, he also wrote to the individual concentration camps for reports. Then he gave me all the material, but there was no mention at all of how many were dead.

Instead it said that so many had been taken away to the concentration camps. There was, however, mention of how many the chiefs of the operational groups (Einsatzgruppen) had killed up there within their own jurisdiction. Of course, there was also mention of roughly how many Glo had dealt with in the General Government. Where he got that from, I don't know. So then I had the figures, and I was ordered to compile a report on the only Führer typewriter in the Gestapo (Secret State Police)—that is, in the Security Police—a typewriter with oversized letters.

It was to be a report for the Führer. I made this report two or three times. It was thrown out again and again, but not because of the figures. I think the statistician wouldn't have let his figures be rejected at all. I had to rework the report stylistically, nothing else. Before that I had never been ordered to make a general report, so to speak. That was the general report, and I only regret that no copy of it exists. Because at the time I thought to myself, and I certainly also spoke with Günther about it

I thought to myself at the time, well, that doesn't solve the Jewish question. I still remember this matter very precisely, because that was the first time I'd made such a report on a machine of that kind, one I'd neither known nor seen before. Something like that stays in the memory: drafting a report for the Führer, and then the report goes off. And since the report was drawn up at my office, it naturally bore my file reference too. Not the report, but the covering letter with it.

So here Höttel is mixing things up, consciously or unconsciously. In part he tells the truth; the other part isn't entirely untrue either—incorrect, rather.

Now he goes on to say,

But I didn't have the best overview of the number of murdered Jews. The VWHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office) had the best overview. Liebehenschel had it, or Glücks, or I don't know who else handled these matters. I had nothing else to do with the concentration camps except to speak with the VWHA and ask, how many do you want, and where can you take them? Liebehenschel arranged that for me, except on one or two occasions when a meeting was held under Pohl's chairmanship with about a dozen office heads attending.

As his reason, he says that you had the best overview—and he says it as though he wanted to protect you somehow—because,

That's where the great error lies. Of course I knew it when Glo one day reported that the General Government was free of Jews judenfrei; it was simply reported in that bare form. Of course I knew roughly the number of Jews in the General Government, and when it was reported free of Jews, there was simply nothing left in it.

I had nothing to do with it. It was a special order. When I say I was twice sent off on a journey as a postman, then that is… When they say the General Government is free of Jews, that is a small total compared with the others. People were simply quick to say it—free of Jews; that’s that.

I knew nothing about the occupied eastern territories either. I could not even have completed a report, because I did not have the figures. I reckon the commanders of the individual task forces (Einsatzgruppen) had no figures either, because the individual group commanders, when called upon to produce such a report, probably made rough guesses and put figures in. I don’t think they actually did a count. They made rough guesses and then always put the figures very high…

At the Nuremberg trial Ohlendorf spoke of 90,000…

And I have read an author from the opposing side who finds this figure very high…

The figure given by Ohlendorf—the Jews exterminated by the special task units (Einsatzkommandos)? No.

In the same book in which the same author also says that Hoess’s figure is too high—

Then Hoettl goes on to say that,

At that time I was not in a depressed state of mind. I had been a pessimist all those years.

So did this conversation take place at all?

As I have already said, I cannot remember being in Hoettl’s apartment in Hungary, as I am said to have been. Nor can I remember Romania’s withdrawal from the war making any particular impression on me.

Wait a moment, if Turkey’s declaration of war, which was farther off after all, had already made such an impression on you…

An impression… Well, I was in Berlin, standing with Günther in front of the world map, when I said to him, “Do you still not believe that we have lost the war?”

But can you remember nothing about having spoken with Hoettl

I really cannot recall it. I do not want to deny it; I would gladly admit it if I could recall it. It is true that I spoke with Hoettl very often, and probably about the extermination of the Jews as well. What else would we have talked about?

Reconstructed some figures? That is also true to some extent… People always confuse one thing—whether those people even said it that way, Hoettl and so on… In all these stories about figures, when they throw a number around, three or four million, they always forget to say one thing: that this whole figure, which the statistician produced, is made up by repeatedly adding together the individual categories—whether emigration, natural decrease, or departure for the concentration camps. Everything was included. But you cannot say that all these Jews were killed. I spoke out against that from the very beginning, because it is not true. It is just as untrue that I am supposed to have said I will jump joyfully into the grave because I have killed five million Jews. My own people would have thought me a megalomaniac fool.

When did you have to set up a room for this statistician in your office? Was it in Berlin?

Yes, in Berlin, in the Kurfuerstenstrasse. This report was submitted at the end of the year, and at the end of 1944 I was in Budapest. On the other hand, it cannot have been the end of 1943. Possibly I am mistaken and he began at the end of ’44, and it was finished at the beginning of ’45. I read somewhere that this man testified and gave the exact date as well. It cannot have been ’43; it must have been the end of ’44 or the beginning of ’45.

There is really no need to accept this man’s statement about the date just like that…

I cannot recall it. Conversely, it cannot have been the end of ’44 at all, because Hoettl met me in Hungary during that year, as he said here… So it must have been earlier. Nor can it have been between March and the alleged meeting with Hoettl, which I wish neither to deny nor to admit, because I can no longer recall it. If I perhaps had a second event to go by, as has so

often happened, then perhaps I could connect it with that. So it cannot have been 1944 at all. But it was at the end of the year; I remember that again, because I had to redictate that tome so often, and the date kept being put on it. So it must have been the end of ’43.

When did you move out of your office in the Kurfuerstenstrasse?