As the power to tax is the power to destroy, so the power to furnish includes the power to withhold. They allotted inmate labor and were themselves the largest users of it. The concentration camp commandant, the guards, the camp doctors, the labor allocation officer, the administrative officer were under their control.
Responsibility for the administration of the system cannot be shoved up higher than this. In the dock sit Pohl and his office chiefs. They are highly skilled administrative officers -- the brains of the concentration camp organization. They made it operate and operate successfully, from the Nazi viewpoint. They were high-ranking SS men, career men in the administration of the concentration camp system. Under the aegis of these defendants, every conceivable crime was committed -- the systematic commission of atrocities in concentration camps, the utilization of slave labor under brutal and murderous conditions, the extermination of Poles, Jews and Russians and those who were no longer fit for work, the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the confiscation of property on a gigantic scale. Pohl and Frank understood what Himmler meant when he told them and his other SS Generals at Posen: "most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying together, when 500 lie there, or when 1,000 lie there. To have lasted through this and ---to have remained decent fellows has made us hard."
Technically, the WVHA was organized on the first of February 1942, but actually it was a continuation of Pohl's Verwaltungsamt-SS which was organized in 1934 and later, in 1939; became the Main Offices Budget and Buildings, and Administration and Economy. One month after the WVHA was formed, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was incorporated into it as Amtsgruppe D. The WVHA was merely the last of a succession of administrative offices headed by Pohl and staffed by these defendants.
The case of the prosecution rests upon documents and photographs found in the files of the SS. These documents establish the position, the activity, and the responsibility of these defendants. In addition, there are eye-witness accounts of the many crimes charged in the indictment. And there are motion pictures of the concentration camps taken by the advancing Allied armies. This is the character of the evidence supporting the charges here.
The defense is based primarily on what the defendants themselves have said, and the object of most of their talking has been to explain away or contradict what is in the documentary evidence. Such testimony is self-serving, a factor which tends to weaken its credibility and weight. But there are more important factors, most of them peculiar to this case, which must also be kept in mind when this testimony is considered. We now turn to these.
To comprehend the attitude and activities of these defendants before German's collapse, and their behavior on the witness stand, it is necessary to keep constantly in mind the burning spirit of comradeship and loyalty to their organization which is characteristic not only of them but of practically all of the hundreds of thousands of members of the SS. Without reference to this feeling of blood brotherhood, a good deal of the testimony by the numerous members of the SS who have been called as witnesses throughout the course of the trial becomes unintelligible gibberish. The sources of this feeling and the reasons which later fortified and nourished it are exceedingly complex. When one tries to understand the mentality of the SS man, he is, of course, seeking to analyze a peculiar, Irrational creed compounded, like some vile witch's brew, from ingredients which are so far removed from the thoughts and beliefs of the ordinary civilized person that it is almost incapable of being recognized by any intellectual process. The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing. In trying to grasp the well-springs of these men's actions and outlook, the logic is almost a hindrance.
But we know at least what some of these ingradients are.
Among them are the pseudo-ethnological theories of Nietzsche and Gobineau - the concepts of the Aryan superman as opposed to the Semitic subhuman. Nietzsche wrote that the Christian religion was based on Judaism, which was essentially a philosophy devised by the weak to dupe and deceive the strong. Any Aryan who accepted these moral values which sprang from the codes of the ancient Jews was no more than a naive victim of a scheme deliberately adopted by this subhuman race in order to win by guile what it could not take by force. Therefore, the Christian doctrines of charity, mercy, and brotherly love were to be dumped on the scrap heap, and for them was to be substituted a now, virile set of moral values which corresponded to the true position of the superman. This new philosophy was to be based primarily on the promise that might makes right. Nietzsche died in a Bavarian madhouse in 1900 but these ethico-racial concepts of his were dusted off and incorporated as part of the official doctrime of the Nazi party and particularly of that party's so-called elite, the SS.
If a man seriously holds to such ideas as these, and the evidence in this case shows that every effort was made to indoctrinate the personnel of the SS with them, then it is not surprising if such a man act in complete disregard of the standards if ordinary decency and humanity as those standards are understood by the Christian world. The ethical and moral concepts of the Christian world are largely based on the Old and New Testaments, and these are the very standards which, according to the philosophy of the New Order, were to be despised and cast off. This is what Nietzsche meant by the transvaluation of all moral values.
It is a natural step from the adoption of such a philosophy to the incarceration into concentration camps of millions of human brings classified as "racial inferiors" and it is equally natural that these subhuman types should be wiped out after they had contributed as much as possible to the wealth and comfort of the superman.
Now the very fact that such a creed is so horrifying to the ordinary person is itself enough to draw those who do believe in it together and it was inevitable that these persons, mutually attracted by a common faith in their psychopathic cult, would quickly form a feeling of spiritual kinship to each other. This is one of the sources or the SS blood brotherhood.
But there are other ingredients which go to make up this feeling. A very potent one is the militaristic spirit. The Court will remember that almost every defendant eventually said that he regarded himself first and foremost as a soldier.
Even the auditors and bookkeepers professed to have this conception of themselves. Vogt said of himself:
"Since the age of 15 I was a man in the soldiers class." (T. 2864).
We had heard before of the church militant, but this was our first introduction to the adding machine militant. There is always a certain amount of feeling of comradeship among members of a military organization. This played its part in elding together the members of the SS. It was heightened and fed by their notion that they were members of an elite, exclusive organization, an idea which was systematically imparted to them by every method known to modern propaganda. The men of the SS were expected to be more than mere converts: they were to be the living embodiment if these ideals, and were to carry the gospel to the uninitiate.
This propaganda was so effective that the members of the SS even today believe, as Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Wolff testified here in this court, that they were the purest and finest that Germany has produced. He evidently saw nothing incongruous in making that statement and admitting at the same time that the crimes committed in SS uniforms were the worst in recorded history.
To those elements which constitute this intense loyalty, demonstrated by the blood-oath that every SS man swore, must be added another factor which manifested itself more and more as time went on. The guards of the concentration camps were always members of the SS. They advertised their ruthlessness; the Death Head was their symbol and fetish. Almost from its inception, therefore, the SS way associated in the minds of the German people with dark, sinister and fearsome happenings. Himmler recognized this when he said that there were people in Germany who became sick when they saw these black coats and that he did not expect that they should be loved by too many.
As the organization grew, the concentration camps multiplied, the feeling of terror of the SS on the part of the population became proportionately more acute.
After the end of the war, every member of the SS from Scharfuehrer up to General became an "automatic arrest case", and several thousand of them are still sitting behind barbed wire enclosures today. Therefore, to all of the other forces which tend to fuse and unite the members of this organization has been added the effect of this physical segregation and this social ostracism. They are now drawn together by very much the same feeling that must exist among members if a leper colony. The repugnance toward them is not even tempered by pity - their disease is moral rather than physiological.
DR. GAWLIK: If the Tribunal please, we cannot understand the translation. Large parts of the English text are being left out. It is hardly possible for us to follow the speech.
THE PRESIDENT: I think if we slow it down just a little bit, Dr. Robbins, the interpreter will keep up with it.
MR. ROBBINS:
What is significant here about all this is that this feeling of blood brotherhood and loyalty to the organization has been projected time after time into this very courtroom.
It must be abundantly clear to the Court by now that it is almost impossible to get a member of the SS to say anything even mildly unflattering, much less incriminating, about another member. It would be surprising if the situation were otherwise. It is expecting too much to think that a man confined in one of these SS internment camps will come into this courtroom and testify against his former leaders when he knows that after he has left the witness stand he is going to be sent back among his comrades. They know that though the wings of the SS have been clipped by the Allies, the personnel of the SS are still living together as a band of brothers, and they have seen enough of the way the SS operates to know that a good memory and a tendency to be loquacious is conducive to a short life-span.
What is the significance of all this? The credibility of the defendants and of the witnesses produced on their behalf is the most important question in this case. As we have said, the major part of the prosecution's proof is based upon captured documents, many of them written by these very defendants. Upon the naked evidence shown by those documents, every defendant stands condemned. That is why none of them dared to refuse to testify: they all know that if they did not make every effort to explain these creations of theirs in some way, if they did not do something to mollify their plain meaning, deflect their implications and minimize their effect, their fate was sealed. If one considers only the evidence of the documents and the positions of these defendants in the WVHA, there is not even a serious question of criminal responsibility left.
Therefore, we have been treated to a thesaurus of asseverations by the defendants that documents addressed to or signed by them were not read; or if read were not understood; or if understood were understood imperfectly; that official directives were never carried out or were secretly rescinded; that official duties assigned were never performed; and that official reports contained in their files were full of factual mistakes.
The question of credibility is therefore a principal issue in this case, and we are not indulging in a mere*oratorial exercise when we discuss these peculiar circumstances which bear upon it.
We urge the Court, when it weight the evidence in this case, to reflect that the situation here is far more complicated than in an ordinary criminal proceeding. We are not presumptuous enough to suggest to what extent these collateral circumstances should be used in evaluating the credibility and weight of the testimony here, but we do say that if these factors are ignored completely, then one of the most important factors in the case will be overlooked.
When the Word "credibility" is mentioned in connection with these men, not only must the Court keep in mind the nature of this feeling of blood-brotherhood, but it also should not lose sight of the fact that all of these defendants were Hitler's minions. They were all officers in an organization which was, to use their own expression, on the "ministerial level". Many of them had personal contacts with Himmler.
Pohl described himself as "one of Himmler's closest collaborators." Hans Loerner was a kind of super-caterer in Himmler's personal tent during the Nurnberg party rallies. August Frank described his inspection tour of one of the concentration camps in company with Himmler: The Court will recall his description of the fatherly interest that Himmler displayed in the inmates. Every one of them is an old member of the Nazi Party and has been thoroughly grounded in its methods of operation.
One of the customary methods by which Hitler achieved his results was through re-emphasizing and reiterating a falsehood so many times that his hearers, even if in the beginning they knew of its untruthfulness, were despite themselves brought around to believe in it. This is no mere speculation. Hitler was fond of cynically discussing the efficacy of this method. He describes it in his book Mein Kampf, he frequently talked about it in private conversations, and he even mentioned it in some of his speeched. He was firmly convinced that people could be made to believe anything if it was repeated often and loudly enough.
It must be admitted that up to a certain point his confidence in this belief seemed to be justified. But justified or not, the belief and the method were well-known to every old party member such as these defendants, and it is fairly evident that from time to time they have used it on this Tribunal.
Here again is a situation different from anything that ordinarily comes before a court - where all of the defendants are confessed leaders of an organization, one of whose principal tenets was that a lie will be believed if you repeat it often enough.
We have been speaking about the bonds of loyalty between all the members of the Waffen-SS. If what we have said about them is true, how much more powerful must be the ties between these defendants here. All of these men have long-standing connections with the SS. Some of them were active in concentration camp affairs as early as 1934. They are high-ranking officers, not only in the SS, but in the same main office of the SS. Most of them have known the others for years. They are personal friends. Some of them, before they came into the WVHA, were fellow officers in the same combat unit. Baier and Pohl were in the Navy together, and have known each other since 1912. Fanslau and Tschentscher were in the SS Viking Division together. All of these elements must be added to the ones which have already mentioned as forming this mystical tie between the members of the SS generally.
It has been perfectly apparent from the time this trial opened that there has been a definite plan among these defendants to coordinate and unify their testimony, and it is equally apparent that from the very beginning, certain strategic principles were adopted by the whole group and religiously adhered to throughout the course of the entire proceeding. We will briefly touch on the matters which show the existence and direction of this overall plan of strategy.
These defendants were apprehended at different times in different parts of Germany. When they were first arrested, the war had just ended and nobody knew precisely what was to happen next. All that these men knew was that they had been generals and colonels in one of the most important main offices of the SS. They knew that the particular organization with which they had been Affiliated was in charge of operating the entire concentration camp system, and also of handling the administrative side of the Rheinhardt Action.
They knew that when the invading Allied armies came in, they had uncovered proof of unspeakable horrors which had been committed in the concentration camps. The black heart of the SS had been laid bare. They knew that they were being held in connection with these atrocities, but they were not sure whether they were to be tried or summarily shot; or if they were to be tried, what sort of a trial it would be, or how they would be treated. The only police methods with which they were familiar were those of the Gestapo, the Secret Field Police, the SD, and similar organizations. The memory of these methods did not add to their peace of mind. Furthermore, the sense of guilt which they had carried, dammed up within themselves for so many years, finally found an outlet. They decided, in short, that the jig was up and that for once the simplest way was to tell the truth.
After they had been in captivity for some months, the machinery for the carrying out of these trials was eventually set up and they were interrogated. By that time, it had become apparent to them that no one intended to threaten or molest them; but enough of their original sense of guilt remained to cause them to talk comparatively freely. Further, even then these various defendants did not know how much the Americans knew about their activities. They did not know what documents we had and what documents we had not found. They knew that a systematic effort had been made to destroy the files of their various offices, but they also knew that this destruction of evidence had not been 100% efficient all over Germany and they could not be sure that such and such a letter or report which was sent to Himmler's office or to Oranienburg or to Auschwitz had not fallen into the hands of the Allies. They were also under the disadvantage of not being able to communicate with each other. None of them knew how much his colleagues had talked.
In these circumstances, the defendants all executed affidavits which have been introduced in evidence here. In most cases six or eight months elapsed between the time that a particular defendant executed the affidavit and the time he took the stand. In every case, the defendant had an opportunity to read it and to make corrections and changes. These affidavits contain statements which incriminate, in some cases, not only the affiant but also several of his colleagues, by showing their connection with such matters as the allocation of food to the concentration camps, the allocation of inmate labor, the appointment of concentration camp personnel, the administration of the money derived from the Reinhardt Action, and so forth.
As the trial progressed, however, one after another of these defendants took the stand and repudiated statement after statement which he had made in his affidavit. One of the most striking examples of this was furnished by the defendant Vogt. By the time he took the witness stand, he was able to point to eight or ten statements in his affidavit which he described as incorrect. The court naturally became inquisitive why he had not called attention to this before. Here are the reasons which Vogt gave for signing the affidavit, saying nothing about its alleged inaccuracy for several months and then, when he took the witness stand, attempting to gainsay a substantial part of it.
(1) He did not have his spectacles on when he examined some of the documents and was therefore not able to read them (2815)
(2) The interrogator did not allow him to examine the entire document but only showed him the first and last pages and covered up the contents of the document above the signature with his hand. (2815, 2836).
(3) The interrogator forced him to sign the affidavit before he had a chance to consult his lawyer. (2821) (4) He was in such a debilitated physical condition as a result of malnutrition, that his entire nervous system was affected and he did not know what he was signing.
(2821, 2826) (5) The interrogator misinformed him in the course of their talks and also put words into his mouth which he did not use.
(2828, 2832).
It was in order to bolster this last contention that Dr. Schmidt, Vogt's counsel, demanded to see a copy of the interrogation. (2823-25) The prosecution turned the transcript over to him last June and has been waiting ever since to have these alleged improprieties pointed out. We are still waiting.
Another example is the fiasco of the affidavits concerning the responsibility of Amtsgruppe B for the supply of food to the concentrartion camps. Here two defendants were implicated, Georg Loerner and his office chief in charge of food supply, Tschentscher. Prior to the trial, five defendants had made sworn statements that Amtsgruppe B was the highest authority for the distribution of concentration camp food. Even Georg Loerner himself stated in his affidavit that "official channels were from D-IV to Gluecks and from Gluecks to me. I admit that these were the normal channels." Affidavits by Frank, Fanslau and Vogt who were all in excellent positions to know, corroborated Loerner's admission. Pohl testified under oath in an interrogation a year before the trial opened that Georg Loerner was "incharge of clothing, feeding, and housing the SS and concentration camp inmates."
Or the stand, however, every defendant recanted.
Another instance is the affidavit of Pohl which implicated the defendant Eirenschmalz. It was executed on April 1 of this year and said that the statement of accounts for the construction of the gas chamber and the crematorium of Auschwitz concentration camp was sent to Eirenschmalz's office for a preliminary examination. In the course of his cross-examination on the 27th of May, the prosecution read this part of the affidavit to Pohl and asked if he had any comment to make about it. His reply was "I cannot imagine anything else and have nothing to add in this respect. I assume that this is correct." Three days later, however, he executed another affidavit which in fact said that he was in no position to know how the work in Amtsgruppe C was divided and that the statements in his former affidavit, were therefore, based "only on assumption", as were operated.
This repudiation of affidavits has not been confined to the defendants. Almost every member of the SS whose affidavit was used by the prosecution in this case has had a change of heart since the affidavit was signed and has accommodated the defense with a counter affidavit, saying that he must have been mistaken originally. The case of Hermann Pister, the ex-commandant of the Buchenwald concentrarte on camp, himself on trial for his life, was an example of this.
Pister stated that the office chiefs of the WVHA had met with the concentration camp commanders and that allocation of labor and other concentration camp affairs were discussed. In his repudiation he says that there were meetings but they were only social meetings and no business affairs were ever discussed. Pister's first statement that official matters were discussed was corroborated by Pohl's testimony that "Before the official meeting, in order to give them the opportunity to discuss certain things with me, I invited them to supper in Berlin" Regardless of whether the meetings were official or unofficial, Pister's first version of the conversations makes more sense. It is hard to imagine Mummenthey, for instance,who directed plants in which thousands of inmates worked, scrupulously avoiding the subject of availability of workers.
A few other points should be noticed in connection with these incidents. We have already given some of the reasons why the affidavits were made in the first place. Another reason is that at that time some of them were taken, the affiant was not even certain how many of his erstwhile colleagues had been captured by the Allies.
MR. ROBBINS: If it please the Tribunal, Mr. Fulkerson will continue reading the opening statement.
MR. FULKERSON: Therefore, it did not seem particularly important at the time to attempt to protect someone who for all he knew was either dead or had succeeded in making an escape. When all these defendants were brought together and charged in the same indictment as having collaborated closely with each other to plan and carry out these criminal enterprises, the perspective at once changed.
They concluded that if they did not hang together, they would certainly hang separately. The indiscretions contained in these affidavits, therefore, had to be erased somehow.
Some of the excuses given for going back on these earlier statements have already been discussed. Another standard explanation given by the defendants for changing their stories is that their recollections like wine, improved with age. "If I had known what I know now, I would not have written all that nonsense in my affidavit," August Frank said on the witness stand. It is a strange phenomenon that his memory for past events increases and sharpens rather than diminishes as time goes on. But this phenomenon is not confined to Frank. Pohl had to say repeatedly that his memory became more accurate day by day. In fact, it improved so much that Baier's position shrank from that of manager of the whole DWB -- the description which Pohl first gave him -- to that of a mere unimportant auditor.
It should be noted also that the retractions, amendments, explanations, and commentaries were made for the first time from the witness stand. In other words, each defendant wanted to hear all the testimony that he could before he made his corrections, so that the revised version would conform to the official line. Since Pohl testified first, he did not have this advantage, so he had to correct his testimonial reaffirmance of his first affidavit by a second affidavit.
By the time the testimony had been underway a few days, this strategy of having every defendant cover up and defend the activities of all the other defendants became quite obvious. The only defendant who was not allowed to get on the Ark was Pohl. Apparently, the planners of the strategy decided that Pohl was too deeply implicated in too many outrages to be helped, no matter what was said. Since he was beyond salvation anyway, it was decided to make him the scapegoat of all the others.
But from a purely strategic standpoint, it was not advisable to blame everything on Oswald Pohl. However, ubiquitous and ambidextrous he may have been, he could not have been everywhere at the same time. This presented a problem, but fortunately, from the standpoint of the defendants, a solution was quickly hit upon. Some of the Amt chiefs are conveniently dead. The maxium de mortuis nil nisi bonum was turned wrongside out. It certainly could not hurt Glucks, Kammler, Hoess, and Lolling, who had already passed to their reward, to be accused of the things which could not plausibly be blamed on Pohl. The same was true on Melmer. The argument boils down to the proposition that the only bad SS men are the dead ones. Unfortunately, we do not believe that divine retribution works as quickly and thoroughly as this contention would suggest. It is true that Himmler, Koch and Kammler are dead or have vanished but some odds and ends remain.
Another striking proof of this coordinated defense strategy is the fact that not a single SS man called by the defendants had admitted knowing anything about the extermination of the Jews, mistreatment of inmates in concentration camps, inadequate food, clothing and shelter in concentration camps or any activities on the part of the concentration camp guards and the administrative personnel which was even mildly nasty. They never heard that foreigners were in the concentration camps and never heard of the deportation of Jews. These protestations of ignorance reached a climax in the court room when the defendant SS Colonel Scheide, a member of the Party since 1928 and of the SS since 1930 and one time company leader of the body guard of Adolf Hitler said that he did not even know that Jews were put in concentration camps.
No matter how high up in the SS nor how close he was to the scene of these mass murders, no one ever heard about anything.
The members of the Tribunal themselves have asked how far up in the SS hierarchy one has to go in order to find someone who knew what was happening.
Even Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Wolff, head of Himmler's personal staff, didn't know that the SS was killing Jews. He maintained this although he was shown a letter over his own signature where he said that he was happy to hear that 5,000 of the chosen people were being sent daily to Treblinka. The SS man Caesar, labor allocation officer in the worst camp of all -- there on the spot in Auschwitz for years -- never heard about mistreatment or killings.
The only exception to this was the defendant Hohberg who learned that gassing and shooting of inmates were constantly carried out by the SS; that guards mistreated and killed inmates and that people were shot en masse in the East by Sonderkommandos. Everyone, he said, saw how the SS evicted Jews from their apartments, herded them into trucks and deported them.
Hohberg was not a member of the SS. He is the only member in the dock, therefore who was not bound to adopt the strategy prescribed by the manual. He was at liberty to concoct his own, and being a sensible man, it was not difficult to think of something more plausible than the official line. His defense, therefore, requires a separate analysis which will be taken up in a moment. However, his main source of information about conditions in concentration camps and gassings at Auschwitz was an SS officer, in fact, an office chief of the WVHA, Moeckel. Hohberg was not particularly friendly with Moeckel; he just wanted to find out what was going on.
But today it is Impossible to find an SS man, either inside or outside of the WVHA, who knew of anything. In the course of his pretrial interrogation, Pohl was asked whether the SS knew about the things that went on in concentration camps and his reply was that from Gluecks and Loerner right on down to the last little clerk in the WVHA everyone must have been aware of it, and that it was complete nonsense to speak about this information being confined to a handful of man.
When he went on the witness stand, of course this statement, which had been made under oath, was retracted. One of the defendants' own witnesses, who had been an inmate in a concentration camp, testified that these things were known all over Germany. He pointed out that concentration camps were often near big cities and told about the contacts between the inmates and the civilian population. He described how a truck full of bodies being sent from Sachsenhausen to an outside crematory overturned on a highway in public sight; about how the inmates would march through the villages pushing carts full of their dead and dying comrades, and how suicides and shootings were frequent during the march and could be seen by everyone. This was a witness called by the defense but not an SS man.
Another inmate, from Camp Buchenwald and Dora, gave the reason for the construction of the crematorium at Dora. For some time, the bodies of the inmates were hauled from Dora to Buchenwald for burning. But it became quite embarrassing to the SS, he said, when the drunken drivers would lurch and careen over the highways, soilling corpses out of the truck-beds. People on their way to church would stumber over the bodies. It obviously would not do to have these constant menaces to traffic and religious meditation, and so a crematorium was built at Dora. This witness regularly conducted large parties through the camp at Buchenwald. They weren't shown everything, he testified, but they were able to see a great deal with their own eyes. He himself showed the parties exhibits of shrunken skulls and tattooed skin; they could see the inmates in their rags and with their bleeding wounds and how Jews were worked like horses. There were months when visitors arrived every day. Busses carried them from Weimar to Buchenwald. Often groups of young people came. The inmates assumed that these were the school children of the new generation.
Another witness confirmed that these things were common knowledge. Even the defense counsel, at least at the beginning of the trial, were baffled by this persuasive ignorance.
One counsel put the following to the second defendant in the dock:
"But you must admit one thing without endangering your veracity or otherwise you must shake your veracity. You must admit that -- it was known generally that brutalities and other things did occur."
We have yet to hear such an admission from an SS man.
Dr. Hansel in his opening statement has tried to explain Georg Loerner's professed ignorance by attempting to prove that Loerner, a Major-General in the SS, was a simple-minded, a slow-witted individual, one who did his office work without ever thinking of its consequences and who at the end of the day went to his home without looking to the right of the left. We have heard over and over from his colleagues that in his position in the DWB he was just a "dummy". But when this theory was put to Hohberg, he replied:
"Mr. Defense Counsel, Georg Loerner is not quite as silly as you make him out to be."
It is perfectly incredible that these defendants, high-ranking officers in the WVHA, should not even have heard of these horrors which were a matter of public knowledge. But apparently the strategy committee decided that this subject was too hot to handle in any other way. Rather than take a chance on having the defendants admit that they know about such things, and then be exposed to a barrage of questions about the extent and origin of their knowledge on cross-examination, they concluded that it was better for them to deny everything. In that case, the reasoning seems to be, the worst that the court can do is infer that the defendants are lying; whereas if the defendants admitted any knowledge at all about this subject, a number of uncontrollable possibilities might enter into the picture.
Another indication of this unified plan of defense is a series of standard excuses, defenses and narrations which were employed by almost every defendant. One of these common refuges is Fuehrer Order No. 1. They all explain their ignorance by referring this order, which, as the court will remember, admonished secrecy and directed that persons were to know only what their jobs required them to know. It has been mentioned a hundred times in the course of this trial. For the defendant to fall back on this general directive in order to bolster their stories that they did not know what was going on within their own agency is ludicrous.
To say this is to ignore the whole purpose of the establishment of the WVHA, as well as all that we know about the way that it was conducted. This brings us to another of the standard defenses.
Each defendant, when he took the stand, tried to create the impression that his own office, whether its job was the allocation of clothing or the auditing work, was completely independent and isolated from the activities of all the other departments of the WVHA, and that the whole organization was run in such a manner that his right hand never knew what his left hand was doing. To hear them describe their activities the fact that most of the offices of the WVHA were under the same roof was a mere topographical accident; and those elaborate organizational charts were periodically drawn up not to simplify problems of liaison and make the function of the various offices clear to everyone, but merely because someone had nothing else to do and like to play with drafting instruments. It was true, they admitted, that every Amt was part of an Amtsgruppe and that every Amtsgruppe had a chief who was supposed to supervise and coordinate the activities of all the sub-offices. It was also true, they admit, that the Amtsgruppe chiefs were, on paper, responsible to Pohl. But this, they assure us, was purely theoretical, and had no relation to the way the organization was actually run. The truth of the matter, they say, is that each sub-office was a separate and distinct entity, and had little or no contact even with the other offices in the same Amtsgruppe.