A Well, what interested them was the number of able-bodied men giver here, because the figure was considerable higher than the estimate of the Army. Also, in the reply the General Plenipotentiary suggested that not all should be evacuated but only a small group of suspected people who did not belong to the local population. Furthermore, there is an application that the population should be screened and that some SD groups should be employed on the jobs of screening.
Q General, before we continue here I want to just discuss briefly the question of the SD and the relations with the Army from your point of view. I only want to touch briefly on it. For one thing, was the SD subordinated to the Army?
A No, it wasn't. The Army did not have the SD at its disposal. In Croatia the SD was subordinated to the Plenipotentiary of the Reich fuehrer SS. And he in turn was subordinated immediately to Himmler; however, the SD had instructions by its superior agencies to comply with the requests of Army formations if it was a matter of screening population that was under suspicion of being in touch with the bands. The troops did not have a properly trained staff at their disposal for such screening. I want to emphasize that the SD, at the time, seemed to us to be a Reich agency, which had its own separate sphere of activity and that we could take no steps against them. All those things which we have come to learn during recent trials concerning certain branches of the SD were naturally not known to us at the time.
Q: Did the SD have any other importance for the troops and for the army than is revealed here?
A: Apart from screening the population, it was the task of the SD to carry out political intelligence work. The SD had instructions to report to the military agencies on the results of their intelligence activity. In that way, we received many a report which was of interest to us.
Q: Did the army or the troops entertain any other relations with the SD?
A: No. I can't imagine what relations there might have been. In my area they only cooperated in screening and in supplying us with intelligence, and we could not have had the slightest misgivings about those two tasks of the SD.
THE PRESIDENT: What was the size of the SD organization?
A: I don't know. I never saw an SD man. About the SD, I only knew what it says in documents of this kind.
Q: There apparently was a conflict of authority between the army and the SD in some respects, and these various other organizations. Is that not correct?
A: Not in my area. I know nothing about that. The SD there led a life which was entirely isolated from the Wehrmacht and only in cases such as this -- that is the screening of population -- did we request the SD agency in question to cooperate.
Q: They were of a police nature, were they not? Am I correct in that?
A: The SD you mean?
Q: Yes.
A: I am really not in a position to give authentic information concerning the tasks of the SD.
Q: Very well.
BY DR. FRITSCH: Would you now please turn to Book 16, Exhibit 376, NOKW-657, page 92, in the English text it is page 40.
This is an order from the 69th Reserve Corps dated the 24th of December, 1943. It contains the principles for the work of the SD, for the troops. General, would you please read out paragraph II?
A. Paragraph II: If in the course of an operation. "Civilians are arrested who are suspected of band activity and if the troops and the staffs do not have at their disposal the necessary properly trained personnel to interrogate these suspected persons and to screen then, then there is nothing against asking for the cooperation of the SD. But the civilians remain prisoners of the Wehrmacht and according to the result of the interrogation, they are to be treated as the civilians under Section I. The SD is requested to comply with the requests from the Commanders of the Security Sections and/ or the Divisions for interrogations, etc. and to pass on the results of their investigations to the respective commander of the Security Sector. A transfer of the persons who have been arrested as being suspicious of band activity to the SD is not allowed."
Q. And now I am coming to Exhibit 378 on page 97, in the same book. It is page 45 in the English book. This too is a letter from the 69th Reserve Corps. By the way, the document number is NOKW-705. General, would you please read out the first sentence.
A. "The 32 hostages arrested in Golobinci on the 12th of December 1943, were released after they had been thoroughly interrogated by the SD at Ruma on the 15th of December, 1943, since there was no evidence for a friendly attitude towards the bands."
Q. May I use this opportunity to point out that Exhibit 295 in Book XII, German page 58 and English page 67, under V, contains similar statements. I am referring to a document introduced by the prosecution NOKW-1439. General, I am now coming to the end of my discussion of the Panther operation but before I finish, would you please take Book 14 and would you open it on page 102, please? In the English text, the page number is 129. That is an order from the Second Panther Army b which that army gives its consent for the Panther operation and informs the 15th Panzer Corps of that approval.
That term approval "Zustimmung"--is that of any significance?
A. Yes, it is. The first sentence of the order says "agree to proposal to carry out operation panther." The fact that I agreed with that proposal and informed the subordinate agency accordingly, that amounts to an order to carry out the operation. By that order, I assumed complete and exclusive responsibility for everything connected with the operation Panther. The Commanding General von Leyser is herewith relieved of all responsibility. That is the way one should understand this order. For the rest, the order indicates that that the army accepted the suggestion of the Plenipotentiary General in Zagreb for a reduction in the number of people to be evacuated.
Q. General, were people evacuated on that reduced scale?
A. Yes.
Q. I am now going to show you a document purely for the purpose of identifying it, and provisionally I am giving it the Number 3-A. This is my document Rendulic I, No. 28. Under I, it says "882 dead were counted. Many wounded people were taken along. 191 prisoners were taken. There were 21 deserters, 96 evacuated people. This document is a teletype message to the Panzer A.O.K. 2 and has the heading "Final report on the Panther." Will you please say something, particularly in regard to that figure--96 evacuees?
A. Well, it is very difficult to state my view. All one can tell from that figure is that the figure of 6,000 which was the estimate of the German General in Zagreb, finally was reduced to 96, and naturally one cannot be certain whether those 96 were actually taken to Germany, in connection with the suggestion made in the order. I remember that we had a great surprise in this matter. When we evacuated the area, when our troops evacuated it, large numbers of the people there came along with our troops voluntarily and did not want to wait for the partisans to come back. It was difficult for us to accommodate those people.
Q. May I now ask you to take Book 15, Exhibit 369, the Document Number is NOKW-1425, page 53. I cannot give you the English page number because that document has been handed to the Secretary General, but it has not been incorporated in the English Document book. I am referring to that passage which I have marked, - have you found it?
A. Yes, I have.
Q. May I point out that the English Document Book concerning the 6-1/2 pages report of the Cossack Division with which we are concerned here only contains a page-and-a-half. As I have already said the passage which the witness will witness will now read out is not contained in the English text. May I also point out that Glina, the small town which is mentioned here, was the biggest place in the partisan area? May I now ask you to read out the passage?
A. "As during the night of the 9th to the 10th the enemy tried again to take possession of a place between Glina and Gora, Glina was evacuated on the 11th according to plan." The word "Evacuated" seems wrong to me. One shouldn't say "Evacuate." One should say "abandon." "It was abandoned according to plan. Twothirds of the population of Glina (2,000) left the place, together with the Cossacks and are being accommodated in Petrinia."
Q. We will now turn to another matter. That is to say, we are now going to deal with the charge which has been made against you in the indictment under count 15-E. The prosecution maintains that approximately on the 30th of November, 1943, troops of the 100th Jaeger Division under the command and jurisdiction of the Second Panther Army, were ordered to arrest all Communists in the Albanian cities of Durazzo and Shijak and to take then into the concentration camp Semlin.
Please, General, would you take Book 13? Please, General, would you turn to page 102, the English page is 132. The Exhibit Number is 134. The document Number is being NOKW-951. This is an extract from the War Diary of the 21st Army Corps General, would you please comment on the last paragraph?
A Intentions, plans of the 21st Mountain Corps are being discussed here. There had been a discussion between the Ia of the Corps and a Regimental Commander of the 297th Division. This diary I have never seen because such diaries of subordinates units did not come to our knowledge. But on the basis of my general knowledge of conditions, I can only say that in the ports along the Mediterranean Coast there were a particularly large number of unsafe elements, and I can say that those unreliable, unsafe elements constituted a particular danger and were bound to constitute a particular danger just in places where one had to make the coast ready for defense, and it was impossible that they should stay within the operational area. Later on. the OKW ordered the evacuation of the entire coastline, in order to improve opportunities for defense; that the unreliable elements were removed from that area is, I think, a matter of course. And it was never regarded as anything else.
Q Did the corps ask the Army for approval of that measure?
A No, it didn't. The 21st Corps was stationed in Albania and the whole of Albania was within the area. That evacuation or that removal of unreliable elements was purely a matter for the Corps to deal with. If the Corps, however, has requested permission and if it had believed that it required such a permission, I would not have hesitated for one moment to grant such permission.
Q Did you know that some of the people who had been arrested were taken to the concentration camp at Semlin?
A No, I couldn't know that. That was an entry concerning a discussion within the corps of which the army was never informed.
Nor did I know anything of a concentration camp at Semlin. On the basis of my present knowledge of the situation, I must say that that cannot have been a concentration camp in the bad meaning of the word but it was merely a transit camp of the police and the troops, a transit camp as the police and sometimes the troops have to establish them one of those camps the inventor of which was Lord Kitchener in the Boer War.
Q By that you want to say that riesing the matter from a theoretical angle you would have had nothing against those people being taken to that so-called concentration camp:
A No. I would not have had anything against it, nor could I have had anything against it, for those people had to be removed from Albania. Perhaps they could have been distributed among the various places. There were only a few of such places in the mountain zone. That plane in Albania almost the whole of that plane was within the operational area, but all those places were terrorized by Communist bands and naturally were they much against the Communists. If those evacuees, those unreliable elements had been distributed among those places, in view of the customs of the Albanians with which I am familiar, they would have been murdered in no time at all.
If I may say this, the concentration camps which are admissible according to the literature on international law, the purpose of those concentration camps is described as two-fold: first to seclude unreliable elements from the rest of the world, and secondly to protect people from a worsefate. Those two purposes, those two recognized purposes of concentration camps apply fully to those Albanian Communists.
Q May I now ask you once again to turn to Book 13 and will you open it on page 22 in the German text? This is page 32 in the English text. The exhibit Number is 318, your Honor. May I draw your attention to a slight translation error? Under II, the last paragraph, it says in the German text, "Gross-Kazzier'- large scale operation; in the English, it says "Gross-Razzio" - Razzia" is a German word which means an operation, but of course you might think here that a place called "Gross-Razzio", is meant.
What it means in fact is a large -scale operation. What we are referring to here is an operation on a large scale.
PRESIDING JUDGE BURKE: Did they mistake it for geographical area.
DR. FRITSCH: Yes, your Honor. To clear up this matter, may I read out that one passage in the first line of page 32 of the English text? In the course of large-scale operation Durazzo and Shijak, so far 300 Communists and 50 Italian soldiers arrested."
That is the text as it should be.
BY DR. FRITSCH:
Q General, would you continue?
A We can also see that a Communist Printers' Plade and Arms Depot were found. There is no doubt as we can see here that that operation was justified. This daily report, however, was the only information which the army obtained about the whole affair.
Q That clean-up of the coast concerning unsafe elements -was that also carried out in Dalmatia?
A Yes, it was but it was mainly the Croatian police who did it.
Q Would you please turn now to Book 16? I am referring to Exhibit 384, the page number is 112 in the German text, and in the English text it is page 65. The Document Number is NOKW-1339. This is part of the report on the activities of the Secret Field Group Police. It is a statistical report. I want to ask you whether that Group was subordinate to the Army?
A. Whether that group was subordinate to the Army, I don't remember, but at any rate part of the German Secret Field Police was subordinate to the Army.
Q. Did you hear of the screenings which are mentioned in the report or was that report submitted to you directly?
A. This report and all reports from the Secret Field Police, as far as they did not deal with military matters, I never say. The Secret Field Police Group, or whatever the unit was, I don't know, was subordinate to Ic/AO. It received its instructions through the routine channels, just as the Ic/AO got his instructions from certain sectors of the intelligence service or the reconnaissance service of the Intelligence Department of OKW. Those reports of the Secret Field Police which dealt with members of the Wehrmacht, and that was one of the tasks of the Secret Field Police to investigate charges against members of the Armed Forces, etc. All those reports did reach me, and I read them through very carefully.
Q. General, just to clarify the matter would you tell us what that addition to Ic, that is "AO" means?
A. That is a sub-section of Section Ic. A sub-section which deals with reconnaissance matters, and with preventing enemy espionage. "AO" is the abbreviation for counter-intelligence officer (Abrochreffizier).
Q. Before you mentioned of the various channels of command, in particular in connection with these matters may I ask you in place of abstract explanations to tell me here what you told me before as an example?
A. Well, I will give you an example for the complicated situations in which an individual might find himself on account of the parallel situation in subordination. At the place where my Hq. was located in Serbia, in Voljacka-Banja, if occasionally I had the time I used to go for a walk by myself and I noticed a non-commissioned officer of the field gendarme and he was always close to me, and it was always the same noncommissioned officer, and one day I asked the man, "have you nothing to do? What are you doing here?" and he replied, "The Chief of the Secret Field Police has ordered me to escort you, son that nothing happens to you."
I ordered the head of the Secret Field Police to stop this. It was only later that I understood the way he looked at me. He looked at me and then went away. A few days later I noticed the same civilian was always close to me, and finally in my broken Serbian I asked him, "What do you want? What are you doing here?" and in German he replied, "I am the non-commissioned officer so and so, Wachtmeister so and so, and have been ordered to protect you so nothing happens to you." I said, "Who ordered you to escort me?" He said, "It was the Chief of the Secret Field Police. I was somewhat furious, and when I got back called the man to me and said, "What am I to do with you, you don't imagine I will tolerate it if you disobey my orders?" and the man said, "General, what can I do, I have orders from the Chief of the Army Field Police to take care of your safety If anything happens to you I would be shot for disobedience, and on the other hand you firbid me to have you guarded. I don't know what I am supposed to do." To get rid of that shadow I had to contact the chief of the Army Field Police, and get him to tell that little man who was my subordinate, and order him or rather withdraw the order which he had previously given him. Perhaps that example will serve to explain the complicated parallel situation in command.
DR. FRITSCH: Your Honor, concerning relations with the Secret Field Police, I would like to call your attention to the fact that in Book 12, Exhibit 295, German page 60, the English page 69, there is a communication dated July 1943, that is to say prior to the time when the Second Panzer Army came to the Balkans. The report is worded in a manner very similar to the report which we have just discussed, and you will note that that concerns the method which we chose sometime ago.
Q. General, I now want to go over to another problem, that is the so-called Commando Order. In Count III, numeral 128, in that count the Prosecution charges you with having passed on the so-called Commando Order to your troops and having carried it out; would you please say something concerning that charge?
A. The Commando order was issued in the autumn of 1942. At that time I was in Russia and I stayed there for almost another year. The Commando Order did not apply to Russia. That is evident from the order itself. Therefore, I did not receive the Order and therefore could not pass it on. When in August 1943 I came to the Balkans that order was in force for the Balkans, but the troops had had it for almost a year when I arrived. That order, as far as I know, was never applied in my area. We had many a fight with British Commandos along the Coast, however, I do not know of a single case where that order was applied. One British Commando operation took place in the spring of 1944 against an island base defended by one company. That was on the island of Solta. The British were supported by considerable partisan forces. The whole German company was wiped out and taken prisoner. On a second occasion a Battalion base on the large Island of Brac off the Dalmation Coast was attacked by strong partisan forces, who had the support of a whole British Commando Force. There was very heavy fighting. The British had entered the strong point. However, at the end of the fighting the British and the Partisans were thrown back. The German Battalion had in its hands the British Battalion Commander and quite a number of British soldiers. The British Commander was Lt. Col Jack Churchill, a relative of the British statesman. When that officer left the island and was sent further on, he wrote a letter to the German Battalion Commander who had taken him prisoner. In that letter Jack Churchill thanked the German officer for the fair treatment accorded himself and his men. He invited him to visit him in him home in Scotland after the War. -- These are the two Commando operations which I remember. From a small entry in the diary here I discovered something about a small Commando operation by the 15th Corp, which that corps describes as the first Commando Operation. One noncommissioned officer and 7 British soldiers carried out that operation. The diary says that the officer was taken prisoner, seriously wounded. That is to say, there is no evidence anywhere in my memory or any document that the Commando Orders was applied, and I cannot imagine that it would have been applied anywhere, in view of the spirit of the troops.
DR. FRITSCH: Your Honor, may I make a suggestion? Could we have the recess now, as I am just going on to another problem.
JUDGE CARTER: Yes. We will take our afternoon recess.
(Thereupon a 15 minute recess was taken.)
THE MARSHAL: The Tribunal is again in session.
THE PRESIDENT: You may proceed.
BY DR. FRITSCH:
Q General, we just discussed the Commando order, I shall now discuss a different order, the order concerning commissars, which is contained in document book 1 as exhibit 13, NOKW 484 on page 33-a of the German and page 48-a of the English version; when did you get to know this order?
A In order to answer your question, I should like to say this, first, I led the 52nd Infantry division in France and remained with that division until the 15th or 16th of June in France. Around that period of time the first elements of the division were being transferred to the east. On the 22nd, when the attack on Russia was opened, my division was mostly en route. On the 22nd or 3rd of June, I spent the night in Lodz in Poland. I had gone ahead in a car and the deployment of the division along the Russo-Polish frontier was concluded on the 25th and we began our advance into Russia on the 26th i.e. after the German troops had already advanced deeply into Russia, and after about a week, the division went into combat and remained in combat almost continuously until the pause which prevailed in the autumn. During that fighting, and this must have happened around the middle of July, I returned from a regiment which was in combat and in the evening the Ic reported to me that the corps had issued the following order orally: "Fuehrer order, all commissars who have been taken prisoner must be shot. Orders are to be passed on to the troops orally at once." The passing on was done. That was the way and the extent of my knowledge concerning the order regarding commissars.
Q Was that order carried out in the area under your jurisdiction?
A Noo I know of no case where this order was carried out. We were fighting all the time, after all and I was always with the troops. This affair was discussed of course extensively. The troops asked me why this order had been issued and for what purpose and I had to tell them, "I don't know."
Conversationally it was made quite clear that you could not do a thing like that and people looked at me in a asking manner. I hinted to them, I don't care, particularly you don't need to be afraid of me. After all I had led the men for about a year and I was on intimate standing with them, with my commanders. In other words the order was not carried out. I thought much about the order and asked questions of the corps. "What about the order we received?" They said, "We received it orally ourselves and don't know any details." At the end I conceived the idea that this order probably amounted to a reprisal remeasure, the purpose of which was unknown to use. As I look back I must say that it was the first order that was issued which violated those principles at issue here. Before that we never received a single order which could he objected here. Later we experienced that Hitler issued the Commando order and an order extending the Commando order to military missions and here he gave long explanations. That was not so in the case of the commissar order, all we knew was that commissars were to be shot. Nor were we struck by the fact that the order was not explained or commented on, as it says particularly in the chapter on "How to Give Orders" in the manual "How to load troops", that you must not give an explanation in your order and this was the first order, which gave us cause to ponder about and as no explanation was attached we could not arrive at any judgment about it.
As I stated before, I thought that perhaps it was a reprisal measure, from later time I recall a reprisal measure of that type. An order reached us that British prisoners must not be given any water, but that order had been motivated. The motive given was this, in Africa an order was found issued by a Brigade commander who ruled that German prisoners while being interrogated must not be given any water. As a reprisal to that, Hitler declared that British prisoners must not be given any water and this reprisal had an immediate effect. The British War Ministry announced over the radio that the order issued by the Brigade commander in Africa was illegal and had been rescinded. There upon Hitler also rescinded the order of not giving British prisoners any water.
Who was to tell me that "all captured commissars were to be shot" did rot amount to a reprisal measure? I can say I did not know about the reasons behind it. I heard about the reasons behind it either here or on occasions of talks I had in Prisoner of War camps after the war.
Q You state therefore, General, that in your area the order was not carried out?
A In my area the order was not carried out, in Russia.
Q May I ask you did the order also apply to the Southeast?
A It did not apply to the Southeast.
Q Did it apply to Norway?
A In 1941 the Army Headquarters in Norway received this order as one can see from the original. When I arrived in Norway the Commissar order had long since been rescind d and it was of course never used by the 20th Mountain Army which I led up there.
Q I shall leave this chapter now and let us turn to discussing a few documents and to simplify matters I shall use them in a chronological sequence.
Please take a look at volume 14, on page 5 of the German and page 6 of the English text. This is NOKW 076, exhibit 333-A. It is a document which was accepted subsequently. How was it that you, General, received this communication concerning the Croatian armed forces?
A. Well, in this document deliberations are contained concerning measures against the symptoms of decay, in the Croatian Wehrmacht. The army itself could not take any such measures, this was a purely Croatian matter and these deliberations were communicated to the German plenipotentiary General in Zagreb in order to pass them on to the Croatian government. I would like to point out in this connection that the date on the document is 17 September, day when I was not in that area. I was absent from the 16th/17th to the 19th. If I obtained any knowledge at all of this document, it was after the event.
Q. Did the Croatian government do anything in this field?
A. Well, I don't know anything about that. It is my belief, as far as I knew that Government, they possibly did not do anything. The reasons why these deliberations were made at all can be seen from the 2nd page of the document from where it becomes clear that in Zagreb a battalion commander led the troops into an ambush to get them into the hands of the partisans.
Q. General, I would like to come back to the fact that you said that in those days you had been at the Fuehrer headquarters, i.e., at the time when this teletype letter was dispatched; do you have any documentary proof for your statement that you were not personally in the area at that time?
A. Yes, from further documents here it becomes clear, reference is made to a conference with Hitler on the 16th and on the 17th I received the Oak Leaves to the Knights Cross for the battle of Oral in Russia. I received that personally. This is of course quite definite proof and the document I got together with the decoration is also dated the 17th.
Q. Now, please, look at page 52 of the German text, it is still in document book 14, it is page 73 in the English book, this document is NOKW 143 and the exhibit number is 346. This concerns the arrest of a woman teacher because her husband, a captain, deserted to the partisans and wished to influence his company to the same action; was this report to you at the time?
A. Well, it is quite impossible for me to say that, all I can say is that if an excess was committed here or if even the suspicion of such a thing had existed, I was convinced that the commanding general of the 69 Corps General Dehner, whom I know as a highly scrupulous man who would have gotten after anyone who had misbehaved, would have taken appropriate steps. This report would not have been passed on by the 69th Corps if it had not been fully justified.
As a rule women were somehow in league with deserters or people who made attempts, etc. Had I read the report, I would have thought the things which I have just expressed, that would have been all that I could have done.
Q. Now, please, turn to page 8 of the German and the top of page 10 of the English text. This is part of exhibit 339, document NOKW 880. This document deals with the activities of the 1st Mountain Division and you have been charged, concerning these matters, by the prosecution in all counts. Under whom was the 1st Mountain Division?
A. I would like to state here that the 1st Mountain Division in the time with which we are concerned here was without any doubt subordinated to Army Group E, with which I had nothing to do. This is the reason why this exhibit has nothing to do with me.
Q. If the Tribunal please, the fact that the 1st Mountain Division was subordinate to Army Group E is clear from exhibit 451, which is contained in volume 19 on page 83 of the English text.
General, let us proceed to the Cossacks, volume 14 page 16 of the German, page 32 of the English text. There starts a report by the Reserve Grenadier Regiment 45, which on its second page, describes the Cossacks as a nuisance for the population and speaks of its Russian peculiarities.
On page 20 of the German and 36 of the English text there it is reported that the Cossacks behave themselves like the Nuns; will you please tell me whether the army was informed about these things?
A. Of course I knew that. A Cossack division joined us I believe in October of 1943. We welcomed them because they were strong, they consisted of about 22,000 men. Concerning their disciplinary behavior nothing was known at the time and it only became known by and by. We took extremely strong steps when they committed excesses, death sentences were imposed by Court Martials because of rape and looting.
Q. On this point I would like you to look at page 38 in the English version, page 23 in the German. I believe here we have a small survey on excesses of this sort and the measures taken against them; will you please give us your comments about that?
A. This is a small extract concerning the excesses committed by the Cossacks and the measures taken against them. From the fourth column in the middle it becomes clear that between the 25th and 28th of October, eight Cossacks were sentenced and shot to death. On the next page one bracket is omitted, which would have included all the cases mentioned in the first column from 8 to 16, all this should be within the same bracket, namely the Second Croatian General Command. But seeing what the Cossacks were, it seemed more or less hopeless to change these people even with the most drastic measures. The Cossacks and their behavior had a bad influence on the attitude of the population and I caused the army to request that the Cossack division should be transferred from the area. The 69th Corps which suffered most under the Cossacks made a request of that sort on several occasions to the army. It was never approved as long as I was down there as I heard they remained there until the end of the war. Their discipline later on improved a little.
Q. Now, please, look at page 27 of the German and 46 of the English text, it is still part of the same exhibit. Here we have the following case, a Ustascha district leader complains about compulsory drafted labors did that matter concern the 2nd Panzer Army?
A. No, the document makes it clear because before the document begins it says here in handwriting "answered by 1-A on the 4th Dec., matter has been submitted to the army so that relief can be obtained by the German Plenipotentiary general in Zagreb.
A The corps was not authorized to contact the German Plenipotentiary General in Zagreb directly which is the reason why this letter was sent via the Army. The corps say itself that with the German General in Zagreb help might be expected. If, therefore, the unit which committed this piece of misconduct would have been subordinated to the Army the way via the German General in Zagreb would not have been necessary. We then could have handled this ourself, of course. But by all appearances, as can be seen from the last sentence, it was some department or other under the Todt Organization which probably in that area had to carry out some work which was not connected with the Army.
Q To make one point clear, General, what is "O.T."?
A O.T. is the Todt Organization. Todt, I believe, was the first Minister of Labor. I don't know. In any case, it was a State organization which had to carry out large scale work.
Q Excuse me. What I am interested in is: did the Todt Organization belong to the Army?
A No, the Army had nothing to do with them.
Q Now, please look at page 28 which is page 30 in the English. This is the same exhibit still and it is an Army order directed here to the 69th Reserve Corps. What was the purpose of that order?
A The purpose was to have better measures for the security and protection of the railways. The villages were not to be evacuated but the population was to take a hand in the protection of villages. Perhaps, it might be of interest to point out here that in paragraph 3 it says that "in the event that the population fails us a number of reprisal measures are enumerated" which, however, do not include shooting.
Then in the last paragraph it is decreed that bandit nests near the railroad are to be evacuated and destroyed entirely. I should like to say about that that one must not think that these villages were large rich villages, which also existed, but troops were usually stationed there. These were villages mostly consisting of huts, timber buildings with straw roofs, and from those villages it was that time and again attacks were made on the railroads.