THE PRESIDENT: Both in Book V II?
DR. BERGOLD: Yes, both in Book VII. Both in Book VII.
If your Honors please, I have another three documents which I shall have to submit, which are not contained in my document book, of which translations are not available yet. I would like to give them exhibit numbers, because I assume that in due course they will turn up. I do not need them, except for the Karoli document to which I shall refer later on. With the court's permission I shall offer those three now. I shall submit as Klein Exhibit 22 an affidavit by Pastor Tusch, a second affidavit of the reverent gentleman of 18 July 1947, in which he affirms that in the concentration camp of Wewelsburg there was a man called Otto Klein who was a Czech national. He was a Waffen-SS officer.
Then I shall submit an Exhibit Klein No. 23, Document No. 23, an affidavit by witness Hermann Karoli of 28 July 1947. If Your Honors please, this man Karoli was here on the witness stand once before. At that time I could not put the questions to him, because as far as the report was concerned when Klein left Office W-VIII it was made by the Defendant Baier and I was not informed about this report. I only learned later on that Karoli took part in the auditing and the result of this auditing is contained in Karoli's affidavit. I would like to ask the court to accept the affidavit despite the incorrectness of this procedure.
THE PRESIDENT: What is incorrect about it?
DR. BERGOLD: Actually, I should have asked the questions of the witness when he was on the stand. That would have been regular, wouldn't it?
THE PRESIDENT: But you state you didn't know about it.
DR. BERGOLD: And then my final document will be Exhibit Klein 24, an extract from the "Neue Zeitung" about the possible phase of United States policy.
It is a verbatim report on new directives issued by Lucius D. Clay. I shall submit paragraph "D" under the heading "Federal States and Central Government," because the rule is established under what conditions Germans can be taken into protective custody. I shall come back to this later on in my final plea.
This concludes the presentation of my documents. I shall now ask the court's permission to call Defendant Horst Klein to the witness stand.
Horst Klein, a witness, took the stand and testified as follows:
JUDGE MUSMANNO: Please raise your right hand and repeat after me:
I swear by God, the Almighty and Omniscient, that I will speak the pure truth and will withhold and add nothing.
(The witness repeated the oath.)
DIRECT EXAMINATION BY DR. BERGOLD:
Q Witness, when were you born, and who were your parents?
A I was born on 27 February 1910, in Wiedenbrueck, in Westphalia. My parents were Edvin Klein and Berta Klein, nee Post.
Q What was your father's profession?
A My father was a district counsel in the Wiedenbrueck district. From my birth until his death, his work was devoted only to his district, and the phase of his work was that his district, while he was in office, developed from a purely agricultural district to a very healthy, sound, agricultural and industrial district.
Q What attitude did your father take to the events shortly before and after 1933? What attitude did he take toward the Party?
A In 1932 my father saw the rescue from Communism within Germany, near the Ruhr area where the Communist danger which threatened from the Ruhr was very disquieting. The Party was not a dictatorial one at that time; it collaborated with other parties, for instance the German National Party, the conservatives in what was called the Harzburg front. Later on my father got into trouble with the Party on more than one occasion. He clashed with the district leader, the Kreisleiter, and his work was changed by the constant conflict with the Kreisleiter into a veritable hell.
My father did not resign from his office as he wanted to do his duty, and he did not wish anybody who was not trained to taken over his work. I can still recall that in 1939, when he celebrated his thirtieth jubilee in office, he wanted to leave. He had taken over somewhere else. Then the higher president of Westphalia called or us. He was Freiherr von Luening, and in a long conversation he persuaded my father to stay in office.
Q Witness, what schools did you attend, and what education did you receive?
A I went to the secondary school in Wiedenbrueck. After that, I went to High School in Guetersloh. The High School in Guetersloh was a very religious establishment, and I have never left the church myself. In 1928 I graduated in Guetersloh. I wanted to take up my father's career and become an administrative official. I studied law and politics at the universities of Lausanne, Freiburg, and Bonn. In February of 1933 I passed my examination before the District Court in Cologne.
Q When did you first acquaint yourself with political problems?
A Even as a child I came into close contact with political questions because of my father's position.
Q Did your father, in 1933, or before 1933, express his political anxieties to you concerning the political and economic situation of Germany?
A Yes. The way my father looked at the situation was that, as the result of the bad economic position of Germany, and the unemployment, there would grow logical unrest, and that the masses would turn to more extreme solutions.
By the end of 1932 the tension was such that civil war seemed to be imminent. The middle classes were between the millstone of the Communist Party and the NSDAP. The Communists seemed to be the more extreme party.
Q Well, that is what your father told you. Did you have any experience of your own which bore out what your father told you?
A Yes; first of all I had live impressions about the Communist danger from the Ruhr. As far as my father was concerned, between 1918 and 1923 we had special units of the Reichswehr, which were used against the Communist trouble in the Ruhr. In knew from what these soldiers told us, with what enormous cruelties the Communists made these uprisings in the Ruhr. In 1932 it was my impression that these conditions would return. I give you two small examples of what I mean.
Q Yes, but be very brief, please.
A In Bonn a friend of mine, Schomorz, in 1932, when he walked back from the station in the evening and took a taxi home, and took out a five-mark piece to pay the fare, was assaulted by a complete stranger and severely wounded in his face with a knife. The man escaped into darkness without taking hold of the five mark piece. The reason for the assault was, obviously, only class hatred. Another example -- in November of 1932 I visited my sister in Duesseldorf. I had to go back to Wiedenbrueck during the night, which was about 150 kilometers. I wanted to go by way of Wupperthal, Elberfeld, which was the usual route, but my sister told me that I must not under any circumstances go back that way because in the suburbs of Elberfeld cars and motor bikes were always being shot at.
I had to take a different route. Since the unemployed were hanging around all street corners, as soon as I came to the cross roads, stones were hurled at me. The houses were full of slogan posters, and the various insignia of the various parties were all over the streets. The fact that I had a motor bike apparently sufficed for the unemployed, in order to stir up their class hatred.
Q That is enough. Now, how did you regard matters after the Nazis came into power?
A First of all, I was full of hope - and I expected a political appeasement. The personnel chosen was somewhat defective, the ones, I mean, who became political leaders - for instance, with regard to the person of our district leader, I did not share my father's impression. I relied on Hindenburg who, at that time, was the person I worshipped most in Germany, and I believed in Hitler's oath on the Weimar constitution.
Q When did you join the Party?
A On I May 1933. I had no misgivings at first. I believed that we would be safe from Communism. I was requested by the Justice Administration, to which I belonged, but I never held an office or any activity in the Party.
Q What was your opinion about the Party program? Did you read it, or didn't you?
A Of course, I looked at it. It seemed to me in its original form as Utopian. The Party program contained things which made sense, together with other things which didn't. The sentence, "The collective good is above the individual good" - which stresses general socialist principles, is flanked with the sentence about getting rid of the bondage of interest.
All interest was to be demolished, and one wanted to go back to medieval ecclesiastical ideas. That this was Utopian was quite obvious. The decisive element for the policies of the Party did not seem to me to be the Party program, but the propaganda at the time.
Court No. II, Case No. IV.
Equally, as very often not the basic law - but the executive direction, which the masses face in life. These executive directives are expected from people who have recently joined the Party and were experienced in life.
Q. This is all very nice, but did you not know that the program also spoke about the extermination of your Jewish fellow citizens?
A. That, you could not see from the Party program. The Party program contained, according to the propaganda directives issued at the time, only the fact that the Jewish population should be pushed back - but not illegitimately, or in a criminal way. The Jewish population at that time appeared to be in all leading positions in Germany, with the result that the impression arose that the Germans proper were being impaired. I believed that the Party -
THE PRESIDENT: I wonder if the translation was exact when he said - the Jewish population was to be pushed back. Does that mean curbed, or restrained?
WITNESS: May I say something about that. I used the term "pushed back." They should be restrained in their economic interests.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, "pushed back", then, means restrained; and curtailed, curbed, held down?
WITNESS: To keep them down would be too strong an expression.
A. (continuing) I assumed that the Party, with the exercising of this restraint, wanted to appease public conditions. I was not in a position to see that the Party had these enormously evil plans as Hitler carried them out later on. In the Balfour Declaration Zionish had stressed their approbation for an autonomous Jewish state.
Q. Was it your expectation that new formulations would be reached about relations between the Jews and the nations which gave them hospitality?
A. Yes, certainly, on an international basis - basis of international law.
Q. Now, you told us that your father took a negative attitude towards the Party. Could you not, an the basis of what your father told you, if you deliberated, see how dangerous national socialish was?
A. No. First of all, you can answer that only from the situation at that time, and understand it properly. It is easy today to reach such conclusions. You are always clever after the event. At that time I did not think the misgivings of my father were material, and his difficulties I regarded as difficulties for a transitional period which would be eased as time went on. No decent human being could foresee the perverted destruction which Hitler, the insane, later carried on. Nor is it possible today to see a situation which will come to an end twelve years from now.
Q. When did you join the SS, and why?
A. I am not quite sure. However, on the 1st of April, or 1st of May, I joined the SS.
THE PRESIDENT: What year?
A. In 1933 - by request of the authorities, who insisted that one must belong to a formation. I was a passionate motor cyclist, and there was only one motorized unit in Wiedenbrueck, but not SA or anything else - or NSKK. The SS always made the best impression of all these formations.
Q. Well, did you not realize that by joining the SS you joined the most active part of the NSDAP?
A. No, in no sense at all. That wasn't true at the time at all. The SS at that time did not have any political significance. The real leadership was exercised by the Political organization.
At that time, aside from the political organization, the SA was much more important, and the SS was only a sub-form of the SA. The SA had about five or eight million members, whereas the SS was allowed to have only two hundred thousand. The SS had no political infulence; certainly not in my home county.
Q. In order to clear up one point - a question which was asked of your sister. When you joined the motorized SS you joined the Allgemeine-SS?
A. Yes, certainly, and I say so in my affidavit also.
Q. What did you do in the SS - what type of service?
A. In my unit we simply were sportsmen; we made trips through the country, we tested our capacities, and things of that sort. On some occasions we went on service when public ceremonies were held, and so forth.
Q. What type of men did you meet in the SS; what sort of fellows were they?
A. You get an impression of an organization when you look at the men with whom you are on service. What I saw in the SS at the time were all decent boys. They were above reproach. They had to prove that they had no criminal record. They were not gangsters. Also, you did not find the SS at that time what you found in the P.O. at that time; no bosses, nor anything else.
Q. This is very nice of you to mention the word P.O. This is an abbreviation which even most Germans don't know. Please don't use abbreviations but tell us what it is.
A. I apologize to the Court. P.O. is, as I see it, the usual expression for a political organization - P.O.
Q. Witness, now tell me - did you not think that at that time the SS was particularly anti-Jewish? It was to be a unit of anti-Jewish Nordic, blond-haired men. Did that not entail a definite attitude as biased?
A. No, the Jewish question was not discussed in any form in the SS. I should like to refer here to General Wolff's testimony. Although the facial theories were discussed in the SS, these theories were concerned with hereditary questions - that is to say, findings of popular signs of the time were transmitted to us. The point of this was to give these young SS men an idea of the importance of whom to select as your wives; and the intention also prevailed to have decent, strong and healthy men. For that reason, very strict regulations concerning marriage were issued. The idea of the Nordic race served, in my opinion, as I held it at the time, more as a means to an end than as the actual aim itself. As it was, apseudo-science-- it was easier for the general public to follow it, but it had nothing to do with the Jewish question.
DR. BERGOLD: If the Tribunal please, my next question is somewhat long. If you wish me to, I am quite happy to promote the idea of a recess.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, if you will urge us, Dr. Bergold, we will agree. You insist?
THE MARSHALL: The Tribunal will recess for fifteen minutes.
(A recess was taken)
THE MARSHAL: The Tribunal is again in session.
BY DR. BERGOLD:
Q.- Witness, did the Roehm Putsch draw your attention to the criminal ways of the regime?
A.- Not at all, let me tell you. About the way in which I witnessed the Roehm Putsch to start with, I have to go back to the previous history. In the spring of 1934 the SA, as I heard from my father, began to participate to a large extent in the political life of my home district. Furthermore, the SA began to engage in hostile activities against the SS in many places. A friend of mine, who was a Government assessor in the Landrat Bielefeld, von Reinhardt was the name, told me - I think it was in May of 1934 - that he, together with young SA men, had been called to Dortmundt to go to see the competent SA-Gruppenfuehrer there. There they had been told that after a brief training course they would have to take an oath toward the competent SA group leader personally. He had been very much struck by that measure. When was it? I believe on the 30th of June. Anyhow, it was a Saturday, in the evening, together with my father I returned from a trip in the evening. At home orders were awaiting me to go to Bielefeld, which was thirty kilometers away, to attend a parade there. I went to Bielefeld and there met about fifty comrades from my sturm. He didn't know what was going on, and we spent the night being in a state of alert. Gradually the news seeped out that an SA Putsch was supposed to have occurred.
Early on Sunday morning 20,000 SA men marched along the streets of Bielefeld. No excesses occurred in Bielefeld, and on Monday I could go back home. But from those events I gained the impression that the SA gad engaged in a Putsch which had been prepared a long time beforehand. I had no reason whatsoever later on to doubt the statements made by the Reich Government.
Q.- Well, but there were those executions, the so-called measures of justice taken by the Fuehrer.
Didn't that seem illegal to you?
A. Of the execution of Roehm and other high SA leaders I did hear at the time, and in view of the situation that seemed to me an emergency measure, and I also took it to have been a unique revolutionary act. That Hitler or Himmler at that occasion would also eliminate human beings who apparently had had nothing to do with that SA revolt, I only heard after the collapse.
Q. How long did you do active duty in the SA?
A. Well, at the beginning of July, at a speed of about ninety kilometers per hour, I went on my motor bike, and I ran my motor bike into a pile of rubble. I was thrown off and across the road for eight meters, and I hit the road with my skull. I hit the read with my skull.
Q. Don't go into quite so many details.
A. All right. The consequences of that accident for many years deprived me of all possibilities to do any duty service.
Q. Witness, I am going on for another year. Now, you have told us that from the party program you could not realize that the NSDAP was working toward the extermination of the Jewish co-citizens, but in the following year, in 1935, the well-known Nuernberg Laws were promulgated. Did you or did you not have to recognize clearly the aims of the party at that time?
A. No, I was of the opinion that the Nuernberg Laws represented a measure taken by the Reichstag, which had been elected by a whole German people, or measures taken by the Reich Government. The Nuernberg Laws had for their purpose the point to avoid that more people of mixed race, bastards, were to be born, and that concerned all other races as well, colored reces, too. According to the Nuernberg Laws marriages between Germans and Japanese too were prohibited. In the case of the Japanese we were concerned with our allies. It was also their intention to prohibit marriages with Hungarians. At a later time a special executive ordinance was issued according to which marriages with Hungarians were permitted.
That racial legislation was not defamatory because the allies certainly were not to be defamed, and one could not from that legislation recognize that the aim was to exterminate another race, because certainly the allies were not to be exterminated. The purpose, after all, was merely to make a distinct line of separation between the races and to avoid having further persons of mixed race born. Furthermore, the SS did not have anything to do with the issuance of those laws. Those were laws issued by the Reich Government, and at that time no member of the cabinet was a member of the SS. The Reich Government had been placed in office by about twenty-five million electors who had elected them. The SS had perhaps a total of 200,000 members at the time.
Q.- Well, but the Nuernberg Laws talked mainly about the Jewish citizens, and the prohibition of not mixing with other races was only a secondary matter. Did you think about that at all? Did you think at all about the fact that first of all the Jews are named in that legislation?
A.- It seemed obvious that when that racial legislation was passed one had dealt first of all with the problems that were closest. The Jewish part of the population was large in Germany, and there were only a few colored people. Consequently the problem which was closest at hand was dealt with first.
Q.- Well, Witness, but surely you must have heard about the activities of Herr Julius Streicher, the Gau-Prince of this City of Nuernberg.
A.- Herr Streicher seemed to the rest of the Reich to be a Nuernberg speciality. His paper was pornographic. Perhaps I may have read it once, but I never touched it again after that.
Q.- Tell us what was your own attitude toward the racial problem?
A.- I considered the racial question as being a mixture of inmature modern scientific ideas and medieval ecclesiastical ideas. The Codex Juris Cannonici too has a prohibition of the marriage between Christians and Jews so the party program evidently was influenced by such medieval ecclesiastical ideas, or anyway Mr. Dieler, the author of the party program, was influenced by them.
I have already proved, when I spoke of the breaking up of servitude, I myself considered these racial ideas as being more or less nonsense, and I repudiated them.
Q.- Only by words or by deeds as well?
A.- No, whenever I had the opportunity by deeds as well.
Q.- Can you name such deeds by which you took the part of, as we now call it, the racially-persecuted people?
A.- I think it was in the spring of 1934 - correction, 1939, when I made the acquaintance of Fraulein Scheinmann, I soon heard from her that her mother had been a Russian Jewess, that is to say she had been a Russian. She herself was an illegitimate child, and under the Nuernberg Laws she was a full Jew. She had been engaged to an officer, but nothing had come of the marriage because of the prohibition under the Nuernberg Laws. She had a son born from that affair with that officer.
Q.- What sort of difficulties did she have to encounter?
A.- She told me that the Juvenile Office intended to take the child away from her. Over the course of many years and four many hours, I argued with the inspector of the Juvenile Office to persuade him to leave the child with its mother. I only managed to persuade him by making myself responsible for the education of the child.
Q.- Did that success have anything to do with the fact that as an SS man you had a powerful influence over that inspector?
A.- The inspector all the time simply called me Herr Assessor. My SS rank he didn't care about at all. I could only get at him at all from the human angle.
Q.- What other difficulties did Fraulein Scheinmann encounter apart from the difficulty -- According to the testimony by your sister she must have had more and greater difficulties.
A.- She was having difficulties all the time. At one time these difficulties were made to her by the political leaders, the Block-Walter. Sometimes her superiors made these difficulties. She was a technical assistant, and sometimes she worked as a nurse in army hospitals. Sometimes it was her colleagues who made these difficulties. Then it was the NSV who made difficulties for her. In brief, there were many of her fellow citizens who made difficulties for her.
Q.- That is enough. But there must have been one very big difficulty something to do with the Gestapo?
A.- Yes.
Q.- What was that about?
A.- The Gestapo arrested her, because together with an air-force physician - because she was engaged to an air-force physician and was living with him. There was a definite suspicion of racial violation. I heard that she had been arrested, and I immediately contacted the Gestapo.
Q.- When was that?
A.- That was in 1940.
Q.- And what did you do as an SS-Officer; where you able to give rein to your particular contact with the Gestapo; could you impress them, because after all there were very close connections between the Gestapo and the SS?
A. No, I had no particular contacts. I could only tackle the inspector of the Gestapo from the human angle. To start with I offered him a good cigar and talked to him about general topics. Then slowly to breach the Scheinmann problem. I described to him the difficult fate of that woman. Finally the inspector softened when I told him that Fraulein Scheinmann, in spite of the difficult position she was in, nursed German soldiers in a hospital. After three to four hours I had got him to the point that I could take Fraulein Scheinmann away with me, or rather that she was brought along.
I then asked him concerning the air-force doctor, Dr. Poeltzig, whether and indictment was to be filed for racial violation with the War Military Court. I only left when the inspector had given me a letter to the competent Air Force agency in which he stated that the Gestapo was not interested in having Dr. Poeltzig prosecuted.
Q. And that settled the case, did it?
A. Yes.
Q. But there is somebody else whom apparently you helped. You helped a German who had an affair with a Chinese.
A. Yes, that was in 1941. The former landlady of Fraulein Scheinmann, Frau Grenz, rang me up and said that her daughter for sometime had been under arrest by the Gestapo. Her daughter had an affair with a Chinese who wanted to marry her, but that there were difficulties on account of the Nuernberg Law and she was expecting a baby.
Q. And in what way did you help?
A. After the experiences I had in Scheinmann case, in this case I didn't think I would be successful in an attempt at persuasion. Above all I didn't know that girl Grenz.
Therefore I deceived the official and took him in. To start with gave him all my personal data, and then I told him that from the highest authority I had been given the commission to take an interest in the Grenz case. Then I told my opinion in no uncer 6104a certain terms concerning the nonsensical aspect of this arrest.
I told him he could think the matter over as to what he would do in this case. My deception succeeded. The next morning the girl had returned to her mother.
Q. Well then, in both cases you took the steps, and without in any way utilizing the power of the SS. You only did it as a private individual?
A. Yes, My official rank made no impression on anybody in those days.
Q. Weren't those rather dangerous steps?
A. I had placed myself in contradiction to the Nuernberg Laws, and in the Grenz case the facts of the case were actually that I had set at liberty their prisoner and that I had arrogated an office to myself which wasn't mine.
Q. And why did you do that; why did you expose yourself to such extent for a strangers?
A. Then I started out on my professional career I had planned to do everything within the possible to see to it that right and humanity would assert themselves. For the rest I thought the racial legislation was nonsense, as I said here before.
Q. Very well. I shall discuss your attitude to the Jewish program with you, but I think there is still another question which hasn't been answered. Weren't you bound to recognize that the Hitler regime would eventually make war?
A. No.
Q. Why not?
A. In those days I firmly believed in Hitler's love of peace. Hitler reiterated again and again that he himself had been warblind, and that he definitely wanted to save the German people from the terrors of war. When I did my military service I did not gain the impression that war was actually being prepared. Rearmament, according to the official account in those days, was only designed to restore Germany's ability to enter into alliances as it was called.
That Hitler had peaceful intentions appeared to be evident from his attitude toward Poland. Hitler, for the first time since 1918 - that is to say, his was the first German Government since 1918 which had made and attempt to iron out the existing differences with Poland by entering into a non-agression pact. For the rest I myself had an opportunity to talk to a high Polish officer. He was the Generalarzt, the Physician General of the Polish Army. Stanislaus van Rouppert was his name. He was a distant relative of my brother-in-law, and it was in the summer of 1938 that I talked to him. General von Roupper said to me that he was altogether favorably inclined toward the Third Reich, and that he had the same feeling for the SS, and that he was firmly convinced that relations between Germany and Poland had been settled finally, that is to say, through reciprocal friendly agreements could be settled. What happened was that Hitler deceived everybody, and first above all he deceived the German people. After Hitler had led the German people into war, all resistance against Hitler seemed tentamount to treason.