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.
Every office chief was isolated from everything that went on outside his four walls.
Having established these "facts", they then fall fack on the Fuehrer Order to show why they could not possibly have known what was taking place next door.
"Globocnik lived in a veil of secrecy", testified Frank, "he never discussed these things with anybody." Baier testified:
"We didn't know about the things and now, whenever I look at the documents, and I look at what happened within a short distance from my place of work, I can only think that probably these things were kept secret by virtue of the Fuehrer's order."
The defendants frequently insisted that the only unifying force, the only connecting link in the entire WVHA existed in the person of Oswald Pohl. He was the only one, they say, who know what the whole picture was and how the activities of the organization were connected with the concentration camp system and the Reinhardt action. The rest of us were just little men who sat at our desks and did our own unimportant jobs without having any notion of the implication or effects of what we were doing. Pohl kept us absolutely in the dark. This is a corollary of part of the defendants' strategy which has already been described. We have mentioned that they have apparently concluded to throw Pohl to themselves. By depicting him as the only coordinating clement in the whole WVHA, they are seeking to ring the most out of this sacrifice.
The only difficulty is that this description of the WVHA flies into the teeth of all the evidence concerning its history and reason for being, and indeed into the teeth of all human experience. The whole purpose of creating an Economic and Administrative Main Office in the SS was to have one central agency to handle all matters in these spheres which affected any of the thousands of SS agencies, units, institutions and industries.
Instead of having a series of separate agencies handling different matters without reference to each other, all the agencies were merged into one and put under the command of one man. When a matter which affected affairs that were administered by four of five offices was discussed, enough copies of the memo announcing the decision were made for all the offices concerned and was simply distributed within the building. When a problem arose in one office whose solution could be expedited by another, it was a simple matter for the heads of the offices involved to arrange for a conference or even to settle the matter over the telephone.
That a close liaison between all the offices did exist is shown by document after document. The case of the Stutthof concentration camp, whose affairs were rather entangled, bears this out very clearly. Practically every office of the WVHA was concerned. In February 1940 Pohl and Heydrich, Chief of the RSHA, recommended to Himmler that the civilian internment camp at Stutthof near Dantzig be converted into a concentration camp.
In February 1942, the WVHA took over the camp and Pohl immediately ordered that it be expanded so that it could accommodate 25,000 inmates. Prior to Pohl's acquisition of the camp, however, an important conference and inspection took place at Stutthof in January 1942. It was to be determined how the SS industries would fit into the picture. Pauly, the commandant, a representative of the Higher SS and Police Leader, the Chief of the Amtsgruppe for Construction; the Inspector of the W offices, Maurer; defendant Volk representing Staff W; and three other representatives from Staff W participated. The results of the conference are contained in a report to Pohl signed by the participants including Volk. The report states that the concentration camp is to house 25,000 inmates including prisoners of war. The report also refers to "special camp for free labor for the running of the factories." This was a reference to Polish workers. These camps, the report states, contain "evicted Polish families" totaling about 11,500 individuals. These entire families were to be kept in confinement for at least another two or three years. The report sets out in detail all of the machinery for taking over the concentration camp by the WVHA and for operating the concentration camp enterprises.
A few days after the conference, Volk wrote Hohberg a memorandum, the contents of which show the importance of Volk's participation in the conference and inspection at Stutthof.
In describing the brick works at the Concentration Camp, which were to be taken over by DEST, Volk says that the works have a production capacity of eight million bricks, and the stones cost 135 RM per thousand, and that since there are only 29 employees the works "must be lucrative". Of course nothing is included in his calculation for the cost of labor to be furnished by inmates of the camp. That is why the industry would be particularly "lucrative". In the memorandum, Volk goes on to propose methods by which the brick works may be brought under the Reichsfuehrer-SS.
The brick works were in fact successfully brought under the SS, and specifically under the operation of DEST and the defendant Mummenthey. In a letter from Volk to an official of the concentration camp, dated 25 April 1942, Volk states that the brick works were acquired by the Reich through SS-Obercharfuehrer Hoffmann of Staff W and that Hoffmann was "following my instructions". On the stand, Volk testified that his letter was "wrong to some extent, but not quite wrong". He said that Hoffmann was not at that time in the legal department of Staff W, but was in the legal department of DEST. However, Volk could not deny -- as his letter states -that he had instructed Hoffmann to acquire the brick works. Volk was obviously disturbed by the fact that the documents had shown 1) that he had given instructions in establishing a concentration camp enterprise and 2) that he had given instructions to an official of DEST. Both propositions he had previously denied.
In addition to DEST, two other SS industries under W IV and W V respectively, operated enterprises at Stutthof with concentration camp inmates.
W IV and WV rented the enterprises from the Reich. Rental was collected by Amtsgruppe B which was in charge of accommodations. The Reich had purchased the enterprises through office III (Legal Office) of Amtsgruppe A.
Upon Pohl's acquisition of the concentration camp he wrote to Himmler:
"I issued an order for the extension of the camp immediately after taking over."
Building plant for extension of the camp were drawn by Amtsgruppe C.
Kiefer's office C-II was also involved in negotiations since it was planned that the construction industries in connection with Stutt hof were to be placed under office C-II.
It was also of course necessary for the budget office under Hans Loerner and the auditing office under the defendant Vogt to take a part in the establishment of the concentration camps.
In September 1942 Hans Loerner gave his "opinion" to the accounting court on the Stutthof concentration camp as follows:
"The establishment of collecting camps for undesirable Polish elements in the territory of the City of Dantzig was already necessary in the August days of 1939 and even more so at the beginning and end of the Polish campaign."
The report by Hans Loerner goes on to detail the mechanics of budget and finance in connection with the concentration camps, and shows that the "Chief of the Budget Office" was required to have rather extensive knowledge of concentration camp affairs. Loerner relates that within a short time, seven collecting camps were established; that the construction of the Stutthof Concentration camp was begun on its present site; and that certain funds for building the camp were made available by the Dantzig Police treasury. Financing of the concentration camp is dealt with in detail in the report, which refers to the source of revenue for feeding, clothing and housing the prisoners and to the fact that the concentration camp enterprises became self supporting only after the WVHA took charge of the concentration camps. The report was prepared by Loerner after conferring with Vogt of office A-IV.
Hans Loerner issued an order, after conferring with Pohl that after the purchase of certain real estate by the Reich on behalf of the DWB, the amount of 300,000 RM would have to be paid back by the DWB to the Reich.
A memorandum from the Legal Department of Staff W, by Hoffmann to Baier and Volk, states "If necessary, detailed information relating to this subject may be obtained from SS-Obersturmfuehrer Vogt, Chief of the auditing Office."
Thus every Amtsgruppe played an essential part in setting up the concentration camp and getting it into operation. It is wrong to talk about Pohl running the concentration camps. This was a job which he could not perform by himself. It was rather a job which was carried out by the five Amtsgruppen of the WVHA.
The whole spirit of the organization was to cut out wasted motion caused by formalities and cut out red tape. The following letter by Georg Loerner illustrates this very clearly.
"Every employee of the Office I is herewith given the opportunity to inform himself about the organizational structure of his Office, the sphere of work, the basic rules of business procedure, etc. I expect every employee of the Office to thoroughly familiarize himself with these regulations in order that he may on his part contribute to the avoidance of any wasted effort and to the speeding up of the transaction of business.
*** *** I expect every employee of the Office to show pleasure in performing his duty with the utmost sense of responsibility, and not to find in my office any bureaucracy and red tape.
All employees of the Office are free to discuss their personnel worries and needs with me at any time. As far as possible I shall assist them by word and deed."
Document after document shows how the various officials of the WVHA had conferences together to settle matters which affected them all. Kammler had weekly meetings with Eirenschmalz and Kieffer. There were regular consultations of the W office chiefs. We quote from the minutes of one of them:
"The Amt Chiefs were asked to attend this meeting, not because a special point is up for discussion, but because it had been noticed that, lately, when evacuating certain Amts, regular cooperation between the staff and the offices is not always assured. Especially now, when the offices are very much dispersed, it is necessary more than ever before, to cooperate very closely with the Staff."
In other words, even after the Allied bombardment of Berlin had made it necessary for the various offices to be in different buildings, the same close liaison was maintained. Under such circumstances it is preposterous for those defendants to talk about the Fuehrer Order as a reason for their ignorance of what was happening. Yet this is one of the standard excuses. "I didn't know what was going on outside of my office. The reason I didn't know was Fuehrer Order # 1."
Another example of the complete integration of the entire Main Office is the matter of deputyship. One becomes a little dizzy trying to follow this: Frank and Georg Loerner were successively Pohl's deputies; Fanslau was Frank's deputy; Hans Loerner was Fanslau's deputy; Tschentscher was Georg Loerner's deputy; Kiefer and Eirenschmalz were Kammler's deputies; Maurer was Gluecks' deputy and Sommer was Maurer's deputy. Hobberg and Baier were Pohl's deputies in W, and Volk was Baier's deputy. Almost everyone in the dock, in addition to his own duties, had a deputyship to perform. This makes the claim that no one heard anything except what went on in his own office even more absurd.
But Frank explained that the WVHA was different from other agencies in Germany, because elsewhere the deputy was expected to know everything about his chief's work, whereas in the WVHA being a deputy was merely a "formality". Nobody else was able to devise a more likely explanation, so it was also incorporated into the manual of defense strategy and repeated by the other defendants.
Another standard defense is that what the defendant did was in accordance with German Law at the time.
August Frank used this, for instance, in defending his order that the property of deceased inmates "with the exception of Poles, Jews and Russians" was to be returned to their families: that is the property of Poles, Jews and Russians was to be confiscated.
The answer to this is simple enough. Pohl and most confederates here have used the phrase "seizure of power" to describe Hitler's becoming Reich-chancellor in 1933. From that time on, as the judgment in the I.M.T. trial shows, Hitler was the supreme power in the German Reich. Anything that Hitler wanted to become a law did become a law. Its incorporation into statutory or decretal form was merely a matter of phraseology. The German laws after 1933, were nothing except the expressions of Hitler's will. When, therefore, a defendant says that what he did cannot be a crime because it was authorized by German law, he is in effect saying that what he did cannot be considered a crime because Hitler wanted it done.
Another one of these stock narratives turns up in the testimony when the question of the attitude of a particular defendant toward the Jewish question is raised. To read these pages of the testimony alone, one would think that he had before him an extract from Voltaire's essay on Tolerance rather than the testimony of an ex-general in the Waffen-SS who was charged with the administration of part of the concentration camp system. When the question of the defendant's attitude toward the Jews was introduced in the course of his examination, the first effort he made was to clamber up his family tree until he found some Jewish or half-Jewish in-law.
If this search was fruitless, he fell back his childhood associations at school and at play with Jewish children and how friendly their relations had been. Next, he recalled the fact that during the First World War he had known some Jews in the Wehrmacht who had been excellent officers. Then he told about some Jewish family that he had taken under his wing after the seizure of power and personally protected as much as he could.
Finally, if possible, he produced a handful of affidavits from Jewish acquaintances to the effect that they always regarded him as a sterling character and that he had expressed his disapproval of the atrocities to them. The "proof" of each defendant's spotless record so far as anti-semitism is concerned was usually produced in exactly the order which has been stated.
We now pass on to another standard defense. The defendants had apparently heard by their lawyers that according to the I.M.T. judgment, if a man was drafted into a criminal organization, its crimes could not be laid at his door. Forthwith, several of the defendants became draftees. This is another defense which is so feeble that it is wearisome to have to answer it.
Now although a man can be drafted and forced at the point of a gun, if need be, to chop wood or carry water, no one can force him to display the energy and administrative skill which was necessary in order for him to become a legal advisor, business executive, colonel or general in one of the most important main offices of the entire SS.
The contention on the part of any of these defendants that their service in the SS was a kind of involuntary servitude is symptomatic of more desperation than good judgment. Some of them have been connected with concentration camp affairs ever since such institutions existed in Germany. Indeed, an affiliation with concentration camps was evidently regarded as a laurel and a badge of merit. Among the documents are letters recommending promotions for various defendants. Time after time, one of the reasons given in support of the recommendation is that the candidate has been active in the administration of the concentration camps for a long time. This is proof enough of the esteem in which such activity was held. Another proof is that the SS administrative officers who survived the test of time and rose to the top were all men who had extensive experience in administrative affairs of the concentration camps.