A. Nobody from the WVHA. The WVHA was a ministerial level which did not have to deal with those things, and could not deal with them.
Q. Who inspected him to see that he gave the food that was allocated to the prisoners, to the prisoners?
A. The commandant.
Q. The commandant? Well, did the commandant then--was he responsible to report to anybody as to the food of the inmates?
A. If he had the impression that the administrative leader, either through his inability or by embezzling the food, did not comply with his duties, then he reported that to Amtsgruppe D, namely to the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps. Then he would wither have the man relieved from his duties because of inability, or he would have him punished.
Q. But if the inmates did not get the food, and the commandant did not care whether they got the food, or not--nobody would know anything about it. Is that correct?
A. No, then it could become apparent only when the inspector of the concentration camps made his visit in that particular camp, and if it struck him that the inmates looked starved. Otherwise, nobody could actually find out about it.
Q. Well, did Amtsgruppe D ever make any report from any of these camps that people were starving to death there?
A. I couldn't tell you that because I had nothing to do with it.
Q. All right.
BY DR. RAUSCHENBACH (Counsel for the defendant Frank):
Q. Witness, I shall now proceed to Document NO-495 which is Exhibit 37 in the second book, on page 66; on page 56 of the English document book. In this document it is stated that the following agencies will be dissolved as of the 31st of January, 1942: First the Main Office, Budget and Construction. Second, second the Main Office Administration and Economy; and third, the Administrative Office SS. I ask you now, witness, this last office which I just mentioned:
The Administrative office SS, was that the Quartermaster of the SS, the chief of which you were from thirtieth of November 1939, up to the moment of the dissolution on the thirty-first of January 1942?
A. Yes, I was chief of that particular office for over two years, and thus I was chief of the troop administration of the Waffen SS. I shall repeat that during that time I did not have the slightest connection, and I couldn't have had the slightest connection, with the concentration camps, because those were purely military tasks, and while I held that office I was also promoted to major general in the German army for my achievements in supply. That was at a time when Pohl himself was not yet a general, but was only being paid from a Party office. Thus I did not have an official subordination to Pohl either at that time, because otherwise it would have been absolutely unusual that I would have become an active German major general of the Waffen SS, before Pohl.
Q. Who was it that took over the tasks of the Administrative office SS after that office was dissolved.
A. As I have already said, those tasks were separated into those on the ministerial level and those of purely troop quartermaster jobs. The troop quartermaster went into the Fuehrungs Hauptamt, the operational office, whereas I became chief of Amtsgruppe A. And I took along the ministerial tasks from the Administrative Office, and at the same time the tasks dealing with finance, of the auditing and personnel questions, and combined them in Amtsgruppe A.
Q. I understood you to say that that Amtsgruppe A, of the new WVHA basically was nothing else but the continuation of the administrative office of the Waffen SS of before. Is that correct?
A. Yes.
Q. What were the points of contact - to come back to that again that Amtsgruppe A, while you directed, had with the concentration camps?
A. Those points of contact were very slight during the war. They consisted of procuring the amounts of money asked for by the concentration camps which, as I have already mentioned, were put at the disposal by the Reich Finance Minister without any restrictions. The second point of contact was the auditing job. May I add at this occasion that the auditing of accounts has so far in this trial perhaps been mis-interpreted by the name of "preliminary check". By the term "preliminary check" a layman would be under the impression--and I believe that people are under the impression--that was not the preliminary check, in the sense that the check was carried out before the expense actually occurred. The preliminary check actually was called preliminary check because it was done for the auditing court. In other words, we should have to say that the checking was taken care of by the court of auditing. And the preliminary check was carried out by the auditing office of Amtsgruppe A.
Q. Did the administrative office of the concentration camps have to state when making requests for money what they wanted to do with the money?
A. Not anymore during the war.
The administrative leaders sent their money applications to Oranienburg to the administration of the Inspectorate. Then the administration of the Inspectorate collected those requests and reported the amounts acquired to the Main Office, to Amtsgruppe A.
Q. Could one see from those applications what the money was being used for?
A. No, not during the war.
Q. How was it then, before the Inspector of the concentration camps was incorporated into the WVHA?
A. Nothing was changed in that respect that had nothing to do with the incorporation of the inspectorate. This providing of money for the finance ministry already took place when the inspectorate had not been incorporated yet.
Q. Witness, as far as the incorporation of the concentration camp inspectorate into the WVHA is concerned. I believe it would be a good idea if you would explain to this Tribunal the chart which I already introduced as an appendix to my opening speech.
DR. RAUSCHENBACH: I do not knew, Your Honor, if you have this chart at the present time before you. Otherwise, I happen to have a few copies here, that is, the chart of the WVHA which I introduced as an appendix to my opening speech, for the defendant Frank.
THE PRESIDENT: We don't have your chart, Dr. Rauschenbach; we just have the chart that is Exhibit 36.
DR. RAUSCHENBACH: I don't mean that, Your Honor. I mean the chart which I introduced as an appendix to my opening speech.
BY DR. RAUSCHENBACH:
Q. Do you have the chart before you, witness?
A. Yes.
Q. Now then, what do those red lines mean, and those blue lines, respectively?
A. The red connecting line shows, in my opinion, with absolute clarity that Amtsgruppe D, even after the incorporation into the WVHA, had a double channel of command upward. That is absolutely unusual because all other Amtsgruppen had only one channel of command upward and that was the Main Office chief.
Now, if Amtsgruppe D. as this chart shows, actually continued to have two channels of command, the same continues for the concentration camps themselves.
Q. A preliminary question, witness, when and where was this chart set up, and by whom?
A. The chart was set up here.
DR. RAUSCHENBACH: Your Honor, this chart will be used for informational purposes only, and it will be used only to refresh the witness's memory so that although I did introduce it as an addition to my opening statement, I did not introduce it as an exhibit in itself.
I shall give this chart the exhibit number "1-Frank" for purposes of identification.
Q Witness, would you explain, please -
MR. ROBBINS: May it please the Tribunal, I have no objection to this chart. I don't see why it can't be introduced in evidence and not merely marked for identification.
THE PRESIDENT: It has been given an exhibit number, Frank Exhibit No. 1, and will be admitted in evidence.
Q Witness, will you please explain to this Tribunal on the basis of this chart that Amtsgruppe A even on the face of it could hardly have had any connection with the concentration camps?
A I believe that the origin of this chart is based upon the wish to recall the old plan which already existed prior to that and which might be found as a document, because it shows that the Amtsgruppe were parallel and not subordinate to each other and because the chart also shows that Amtsgruppe D even after its incorporation in the WVHA remained so to say a foreign body.
Q Did Amtsgruppe D have an immediate channel from the RSHA?
A Yes, as can be clearly seen from this red line, both to the RSHA and also Himmler.
Q Did Amtsgruppe A have a direct channel to both the RSHA and the Reichsfuehrer SS?
A No, as can be seen from the chart, the channel could not be this way. The Chief of Amtsgruppe A as I was for a short while could only have connections with Pohl. We have been told by a particular order of the Main Office Chief that we were prohibited from communicating directly with Reichsfuehrer.
Q Would the tasks of Amtsgruppe A have changed in any way if all of a sudden Amtsgruppe D would have been removed from the WVHA and possibly incorporated into the RSHA?
A No, not at all, because the chart had already been set up before the incorporation of Amtsgruppe D in its structure and it remained the same. Amtsgruppes A, B, C, and W were in the same sequence and they had the same tasks in the organizational chart of the 1st of February, 1942.
Q Do you mean the chart which was also added to my opening speech?
A Yes.
Q I mean for the 1st of February, 1942?
A Yes, I don't have it before me, but that is the one, I know.
DR. RAUSCHENBACH: Your Honor, that's the chart that is added. It is in addition to this particular chart you are holding in your hands now. I shall introduce it as Exhibit 2, I mean Exhibit Frank 2.
Q Witness, after you have told us about the relationship of Amtsgruppe A organizationally to the concentration camps in general in the basis of those two charts, what do you say about the chart which is already opposite you on the wall? Could this plan possibly create a wrong opinion in any way?
A I believe that it has already been stated before in this trial and I believe that even the prosecution admitted that by this particular chart on the wall the opinion could be created that the entire mail, for instance, for Amtsgruppe W went to Amtsgruppe A through Amtsgruppe B and soon that it went through all those offices before it hit them and therefore a very erroneous impression can be created and I myself asked you, as my defense counsel, to again use the old chart as it used to be and as it can be found in the documents and to have it reconstructed because according to my opinion that old chart shows clearly how the real and only organization was.
Q What plan and what chart do you mean?
A I mean the chart and document as can be found in the, I believe Budget of the Economic and Administrative Main Office, it is one of the documents.
A Yes. I shall come back to this chart in a different con nection and I shall explain it to this Tribunal or have you explain it to them.
Now I shall proceed to another document which appears to be rather important for us, that is to say, it is Document NO-724, Exhibit No. 472. It's in Document Book XVIII on page 108 of the German Document Book and on page 83 of the English Document Book. Witness, in those over 500 documents that were introduced by the prosecution, there were three documents which were signed by you. Two of those documents deal with the so-called Reinhardt Action. One of these documents is this particular one you have before you now. What can you tell me about the history of this document? You can go into detail in this connection. It is, as you can notice from the prosecution's intonation about this document, one of the most important documents in this trial for you.
A Yes, the serious charge of the prosecution that the accountants of Amtsgruppe A were participants in the murder of hundreds of people will probably entail me to make a detailed description about the origin of this document. I believe I do not have to go into detail about the history of the extermination of the Jews itself. It must have been around the year of 1941 when at a time in the brains of Hitler and Himmler the plan for the extermination of the Jews must have originated and the executing tools became the following persons: the Chief of the Gestapo Heydrich, as well as Eichmann as expert in Jewish affairs, and Reichs Leader Bouhler together with the Criminal Commissioner, Wirth, the former Gauleiter, and SS and Police Leader Globocnik and Hoess. These were the persons who carried out this plan of extermination without any doubt they took care of all measures to grant secrecy that could possibly be expected -
Q Witness, may I interrupt you at this point and ask you why don't you tell the Tribunal beforehand how the confiscation of the Jewish property came about, and who actually confiscated their property?
A I believe that one has to go into detail particularly about that. I didn't want to state it at this point. However, as you are asking this question, I shall on the basis of an example tell you about the confiscation of the Jewish property and go into detail.
Again, one has to differentiate between two periods of time. That is the period of time before the 1st of October, 1942 and the period of time after that date. I shall give an example from life. A German Jew was arrested in 1941 by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp. Now what happens with his property? What the Jew is carrying along with him when he was sent to a concentration camp, in other words, his own personal property, his watch, his wallet, all his personal belongings, his suitcases and so on were taken into a special store room for the belongings. I do not wish to discuss the question at the present moment what happened to those things in case the Jew should have died. I shall deal with that particular question now, namely, what on the other hand happened with all those valuables and fortunes which that same citizen and Jew left behind at home, for instance, his house, his furniture, his car, his business, perhaps his stock or his estate, his bank account, the following regulation had been used there: By legal Reich regulations under the 4 year plan of Hermann Goering, and also by ordinance of the Finance Minister, a series of decrees had been released in a form of a law which ordered that all those things which I have just mentioned -- all those items were to be confiscated by the competent country finance presidents. In other words, the whole thing occurred in the following manner: The Gestapo sent to the Finance President a report that the owner of the house at Koenigstrasse 10, a Jew, was arrested, and sent to a concentration camp as a public enemy.
The property as such, thus was confiscated. Now, what happened is that the Provincial Finance President--that is one of the officers of the Finance Ministry--assigned a special trustee for that property and then sold that property, that is to say, everything that was there, the house if I may use the same examples--the car, the business, and the stock, and he put the money which he received for that into the Reich account. As to all the values that were still left in the house, the Provincial Finance President also confiscated those, and he sold them to the pawnshops which existed in his district.
Q. In other words, neither the WVHA nor the SS confiscated that part of the Jewish property which had not been taken into the concentration camps?
A. Up until October of 1942, as I mentioned before, the administration of the SS had nothing to do whatsoever with the entire Jewish property or fortune. I want to discuss the case now, for example, that this particular Jew that I mentioned before, had died in the concentration camp. For this case, on the 3rd of April, 1941, the RSHA issued an order which I would like to quote, because it is highly important.
Q. What document is it, witness?
A. It is document NO-1235, and it bears the exhibit number---I cannot tell at the moment; it should be on the original, though, someplace. It is in document book V; the exhibit number is 148-B.
DR. RAUSCHENBACH: This document, Your Honors, is on page 150 of the English document book, according to my notes.
A. (Continuing) It is peculiar that this document consists of two parts: that is to say, the first part is an order of the Inspector of Concentration camps, re delivery of gold and valuables (valuables of Jewish inmates). The addition which I spoke about before, that is, the decree issued by the RSHA to which the inspector refers, was not in the German document book, it was only added later on. In this important order to which the Inspector of Concentration Camps refers--and unless I forget, it was at a time when Amtsgruppe D was not incorporated with the WVHA-the following is stated, and I shall quote:
"A release of valuables which have been taken into custody to Jews of foreign citizenship who are in concentration camps, or to members of families of Jews who had died in concentration camps, will not be considered. The objects, as far as they belong to citizens of the former Polish State--based on the decree concerning the property of former citizens of the former Polish State, dated 17 September 1940, (Reichsgesetzblatt, page 1270) are to be reported to the Main Trustee Office, Berlin, some Street, 12."
"In any other case, I interpolate, if it was a German Jew, the competent government president on the basis of the Seizure Law of 26 May 1933 and July 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt, pages 293 and 479, had to confiscate this property. In the latter case, however, it had to be established first whether the persons were enemies to the country and the nation according to the law of the 4th of July 1933, and an accurate list had to be added to the application. All the items belonging to the owner and all the valuables which will be confiscated, have to be stated together his name and his last place of residence."
From that decree it can be seen that the property that was being kept for these people in the concentration camp property room also had to be transferred to the Chief Finance president.
Q. The Chief Finance President--is that an office of the SS or of the WVHA?
A. No, that is an agency of the Reich Finance Ministry. It would be a very interesting matter, particularly for us, in the interest of the entire recapitulation of this sad chapter, as to what the Reich Finance Ministry received in this manner in its cash boxes or steel cabinets. I read once, in a special paper, that the Jewish property in Germany, shortly before the beginning of the war, amounted to from five to six billion gold marks, I guess, and I believe I can as sert that at least 85 percent of this immense amount of money was actually credited to the Reich Finance Ministry.
I don't include in this the fortune of those Jews which directly or indirectly also was received by the Reich Finance Ministry, from those countries and territories occupied by Germany.
I would like to mention another example which will stress this fact. If a Jew emigrated before the war, or even during the war, then that Jewish fortune--excuse me, I shall give you another example in order to illustrate the whole thing better. Let's say a Jew fled into Switzerland, in 1939, and he did not emigrate officially. He tried to take his fortune along into Switzerland. In many, many cases that Jew taken as an example, was captured or caught by the investigating agencies of the German Reich Finance Office. His property and fortune was confiscated and the whole property and fortune of that particular Jew which he left behind automatically become the property of the Landes Finance President Office. In other words, this property also became the property of the Reich Finance Ministry.
I shall now come to the period of time after the 1st of October 1942. I would not like to state prematurely but only within the framework of my entire statements, what happened after the 1st of October, 1942. However, I can say that the fortune that a Jew had when he was sent to a concentration camp--and I shall repeat that, after October 1942 also became the property of the Reich Finance Ministry.
Q. Witness, when was it--let me put it this way. So far you have been speaking about the Reich Finance Minister. When was it that the WVHA of the SS was used for the first time in evaluating confiscated Jewish property?
A . That occurred with the document NO-724, which I signed. I wanted to mention that just now. That was the beginning of the confiscations of property ordered by the Reichsfuehrer in the concentration camp itself, whereas, Globocnik was an exception, he went further than.
that. I shall tell you that in connection with my statements later. All I wish to say now in advance is that through this document which I signed, and for which I now have to take the responsibility, there were three final stations for this fortune. Those were;
First, for the cash in the cash boxes, the treasuries of the concentration camps or the treasuries of the WVHA, respectively.
Secondly, for the gold and the jewelry, the final station was the Reichsbank--shall we say the vaults of the Reichsbank.
Third, for the watches and fountain pens, as we all know, the workshops of Amtsgruppe D in Oranienburg.
I believe by that I have explained what part the administration of the SS played from the 1st of October 1942 in the evaluation and use of the entire Jewish property for the benefit of the Reich.
DR. RAUSCHENBACH: Your Honor, I believe that this is an opportune moment to recess until tomorrow morning, because I now have to go into detail.
THE PRESIDENT: We will recess until 9:30.
(At 1630 hours, 5 June 1947, a recess was taken until 0930 hours, 6 June 1947.)
Official Transcript of the American Military Tribunal in the Matter of the United States of America, against Oswald Pohl, et al, defendants, sitting at Nurnberg, Germany, on 6 June 1947, 0930 - 1630, Justice Robert M. Toms, presiding.
THE MARSHAL: Persons in the courtroom will please find their seats.
The Honorable, the Judges of Military Tribunal II.
Military Tribunal II is now in session. God save the United States of America and this Honorable Tribunal.
There will be order in the Court.
AUGUST FRANK - Resumed DIRECT EXAMINATION (Continued) BY DR. RAUSCHENBACH:
Q. Witness, yesterday I started with asking you about Document NO-724, Exhibit 472, and we had started with the preliminary question about the problem, how the confiscation of the Jewish property came about in Germany, and you mentioned that the confiscation of the Jewish property actually was not a matter with which the SS or the WVHA dealt, but rather that it was based on laws, and that it was carried out by the Reich Finance Ministry. Where did you get your knowledge from which you told us about yesterday?
A. I get that knowledge partly from official sources and partly from my own personal knowledge. The official sources were known to every German. A whole series of laws were established, as I already mentioned yesterday. These laws began before the war, and they were continued during the war. Mostly the Reich Finance Ministry, the Reich Justice Ministry, the Four-Year Plan, participated in all these laws. I am sorry if I have to mention the Reich Finance Ministry in this particular connection. However, I owe this to both my comrades and the truth. Maybe the SS has a long criminal record, but one thing you cannot reprach the SS with, and that is that the SS enriched itself with the gold of the Jews. It was not the SS that recast the gold in the State Mint. It was not the SS that used the foreign exchange. It was not the SS either which sold the Jews' pawn shops. That, for the benefit of the truth, has to be established.
Q. And then you told us how much Jewish property, or what part of the fortune shall we say, of an emigrating Jew was confiscated for the Reich. Where did you have that estimate of the amount from and therefore of the damage that was done to the Jews? Where did you have that knowledge from?
A. This knowledge of mine comes from private observations. It is, for instance, known to every German that after that crystal Sunday in October, 1938, the Reich government wanted one billion Reichsmark fine from the Jews.
THE PRESIDENT: A billion.
THE INTERPRETER: One billion indeed.
JUDGE MUSMANNO: After that what Sunday?
THE INTERPRETER: Crystal Sunday, your Honor.
A. (Continuing) A sum of one hundred billion gold marks -- that amount of one thousand million Reichsmarks, according to my opinion, went straight to the pocket of the Reich Finance Minister.
Q. (By Dr. Rauschenbach): Witness, I believe the Tribunal understood you correctly, but what do you mean by the "pocket of the Finance Minister"?
A. I mean the pockets of the Reich, of course. It was personally known to me, that is through the case which occurred to my sister, that if a Jew emigrated, and I shall assume the amount of 100,000 marks that he had, that was his fortune, then he could change those 100,000 marks into a gold deposit of 5,000 marks. That is to say 95,000 marks became property of the Reich, and he could deposit 5,000 gold marks in Switzerland, or somewhere else, wherever he emigrated.
Q. But you do not know from your official position, do you?
A. No, I knew that from my own private affairs. I shall admit gladly that hundreds of Jews who emigrated succeeded in taking their fortune along with them, and I am glad about it. Many of them, according to the law, could take along their heritage, and to transfer it to the foreign country they were emigrating to.
However, according to my knowledge, according to my private knowledge to be exact, the fact remains that most of the fortunes became property of the Reich.
Q. That is sufficient, Witness, and we will leave this subject. Now, when was it that the WVHA for the first time made use of Jewish property?
A. That was in July 1942. That was when the Chief of the WVHA, Pohl, had a conference with the Reichsbank Vice-President, Puhl, P-u-h-l.
This conference was preceded by another conference between the Reichsfuehrer Himmler and the Reichsbank president Funk who at the same time was Reich Economy Minister. Probably, at the same time, as can be seen from the documents, there was a conference Himmler-Krosigk, the Reich Finance Minister. It will be possible for me, to prove on the basis of the documents, that the WVHA a very short while before that, had not been included in the affair at all, and knew nothing at all about it.
Q. You just said that they knew nothing about it. Do you mean by this the term "Reinhardt Action"? Or do you mean the confiscation of Jewish property, generally speaking?
A. I would like to say as of now in answering this question the following: When the Action Reinhardt is mentioned, then at that particular moment when I was in the WVHA, it could never have been the extermination action. I would like to point cut clearly that the Reinhardt Action, the term as such, was always known to the WVHA as an economic use action, an action where the Jewish property could be utilized. It was approximately six weeks after the conference between Pohl and Puhl when the WVHA received a draft of an order from Lublin which bore Himmler's initials and which was the authentic basis for NO-724.
Before I speak about this document in detail I would like to state that in this draft of the order not one single word was contained of the killing or of an extermination, or any other kind of Action Reinhardt. That word did not appear at all in the draft of the order and at that time it was not even known in the WVHA.
Q. Witness, in that decree which you signed, that is, Document NO-724, it is stated that personal property, for instance watches, would also be sent to the utilization department. Now, I can't believe you without any further difficulty, that from that decree which you signed yourself you could not understand or know anything about a killing or an extermination. At least that you couldn't tell it if there wasn't.
It seems almost a matter of course that such personal belongings could not have been taken away from people who were still alive.
What do you wish to say about that.
A. If I am to talk about the question of the watches, then I have to say that it was surely unusual that a military administration dealt with the collection of watches. However, it is not absolutely necessary that a watch must originate from a man who is dead. At this moment I do not wish to speak about the question of the property, and what have you. It is not necessary that a man is killed first before his watch can be taken from him. I believe that you could find these examples in all the armies of the world. I believe that, as long as there are wars and as long as there are prisoners and as long as there are watches in the world -- these watches will be stolen. The same thing applied to us also when there were prisoners of war. I do not think it very tragic in my own case. However, the charge that glasses and gold from the teeth could not originate from men who were alive, and I knew that. I was aware of that. But it was also clear to: me that in the camp, or in a series of camps where fifty or sixty thousand, or more, people are moving about there will be death cases just like in any other city. It is also clear to me that in the East, where they had infections of typhus, the death rate was higher than in normal times. Apart from that there was a war going on and one does not really have to use percentages of death rates. Let us just use normal times. I want to say for instance three per thousand, as far as I know. Nurnberg has 1.8 per thousand as the death rate per month. Now, if I use such a figure and use that as a basis, then there are of course a couple of thousands of deceased persons per year.
On this occasion I wish to state clearly that Himmler and Globoenik were real masters of cunning and deception. Today it is absolutely clear to me why in this particular draft of the order the property of the living and of the persons who died normal deaths, and of those who were killed, were mixed up with that property coming from stocks and workshops. That was the most cunning deception that can be done, and I became a victim of that also.
One has to understand further that there was another camouflage, that, for instance, the money, the cash, went in the treasuries of the Waffen SS, and therefore to the Reich treasury; the gold and jewels went to the Reichbank, and they were stored there for months -- if not years -- until they were examined, counted, and utilized. The watches were sent to Oranienburg, the eye glasses were sent to the medical inspectorate; the various things like towels, suit-cases, rucksacks, were sent to the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle. Furthermore, napkins and towels were sent to the soldiers. Furs were sent to Ravensbruck; suits and clothes to the Reich Economy Ministry. There were ten, or perhaps a dozen, offices where these things were sent. I ask, further, not to forget that it was the fourth year of the war at the time. I wish to say that today in this clear Tribunal, with a distance behind me of four or five years, one cannot possibly judge the scale of the criticisms, and I would appreciate it if this Tribunal would permit me to take up their time and bring you back to that particular time when I signed the document; go back four or five years because only thus will it be possible to explain to you, and for you to understand the situation which I was in at the time.
Q. Witness, in order to shorten, to abbreviate, and in order not to use up too much of the time of this Tribunal with details which are not important, I would appreciate it if you could tell us as little as possible about your personal attitude and your personal activity at the time. On the other hand, however, it is important and we have plenty of time for that, to point out and to stress and to explain in detail the conditions which prevailed at the time when this order was issued around in your surroundings. In order to answer my question now, what do you know about a Reinhardt Action before you signed that particular decree. Would you tell us about that in detail?
A. At that time when I signed this document, NO-724, Germany was in the fourth year of the war. I myself was chief of Amtsgruppe A, and thus as General in the Waffen-SS, and to take care of 300,000 soldiers, roughly.
A tremendous amount of money had to be distributed in dozens and hundreds of channels; thousands of wishes from the army had to be satisfied; new administrative officers had to be trained and the groups became larger from day to day. It was a difficult task which was almost impossible to cope with, and it kept us, both myself and my few colleagues, busy day and night. It was not thus that the German army, for instance, like the American army had plenty of everything and had a peaceful hinterland.