Within the higher echelons of the SS, connection with the concentration camp system was evidently analogous to having been editor of a law review or a fellow in All Souls College. Experience with the concentration camps carried with it a prestige which was almost unique.
The change in attitude which has taken place between the time the defendants were walking around in their black boots and stylishlytailored uniforms in the WVHA office and they time they took the stand before this Tribunal is startling. It now appears, if one is to believe them, that they deliberately avoided these very tasks which appear in their personal service record as marks of high commendation. Even when they are compelled to admit that they were involved in the administration of the concentration camp system to some extent, they now say that this was only an incidental job and they did not approve of their having been forced to assume it in the first place.
These defendants were the indispensable men of the SS. It is not difficult to find a person with sufficient training and experience to qualify him to fling a can full of Zyklon B gas crystals into a room and slam a door, but it would have been quite a problem to replace a man who was in charge of an SS industry which 500 brockworks or to find a capable successor for men like Vogt and Volk who were apparently walking abstracts of title to the real estate and fixtures of the concentration camps. To say that these men were drafted to do their jobs is utterly fantastic. They did their work with efficiency because they liked it, because they were devoted to the SS, because they were blotched and infected by this same weird, mad fanaticism. They performed their jobs so well in fact that as time went on they passed from glory to glory and received promotions in recognition of their work.
It is perhaps laboring a point to rebut further the argument that these men were drafted to their kind of work, but a corollary to the argument is the question that so many of the defendants have asked: "What could I do? I was already in the midst of this organization by the time I discovered its connection with these frightful things." The implication is that, short of committing suicide, it was impossible for them to disassociate themselves from these sinister deeds.
We know, however, that nothing so dramatic would have been required. It was not necessary, in order for one of these defendants to terminate his affiliations with the WVHA, for him to walk into the office of the Reichsfuehrer SS, click his heels, salute, and announce in bold, clear tones that he disapproved of the slave labor system, the concentration camp system, and the extermination program. All that he had to do, in order to be quickly relegated to Limbo, was to be guilty of a few lapses of memory, a few exercises of bad judgment, a few administrative blunders. After that, he would not have been burdened with the care of administering an important function in the WVHA. Vogt himself testified that when he tried to retire on a pension, he was told that resignations were only allowed for inefficiency.
We now pass on to another standard defense or explanation. Hoess, it will be remembered, was the commandant of Auschwitz and later Chief of Amt D-I, Kammler was the Chief of Amtsgruppe C, and Gluecks was Chief of Amtsgruppe D, Lolling was Chief of Amt D-III. All of these men are now presumably dead, and as has been point out, the defendants have sought to strew as many of these crimes as possible on their hearses. But to do this is not enough. If, for example, the defendants merely say that Kammler was responsible for this and that atrocity, the fact still remains that there were regular Saturday conferences between Kammler, Kiefer, Eirenschmalz and the other Amt Chiefs of Amtsgruppe C; and if Kammler was such an evil genius, then his subordinates could not have avoided being tarred with the same brush.
In order to disengage themselves from the honrs of this dilemma, it was necessary to divide Kammler into two separate parts. There had to be a Jekyll and a Hyde. This dichotomy was accomplished by saying that Kammler acted in two different capacities. First, he was Chief of Amtsgruppe C. In this role he was Jekyll. His acts were morally pure as the driven snow.
But he was also, the defendants say, commissioned by Himmler to carry out the armament program. In this role he was Hyde. His actions in one capacity were completely divorced from what he did in the other. The defendants knew Kammler only as Jekyll. They were not even aware that Hyde existed.
In this ingenious way, it could be explained how a man could be in constant contact with one of the directing spirits of the crimes which form the basis of the indictment in this case without ever having known that such crimes were committed. We have given Kammler as one example of this Jekyll-Hyde treatment. It was also applied to Hoess, Lolling and Gluecks. All of them are also said to have received special commissions from Himmler, and their acts in carrying out their assignment under these commissions we are told, were absolutely unrelated to their acts in carrying out their duties as officials in the WVHA. Although Hoess was under me at the time, Pohl said, he was acting not as Concentration camp commandant in exterminating the Jews, but as Himmler's special commissioner. This is, as we have said, a uniform plea, but it is to be admired more for its ingenuity than for its plausibility.
Another standard argument is that the SS industries were not SS industries. Pohl was the first defendant who took the stand. In the course of his testimony he mentioned the phrase "SS enterprises" time after time, just as he always had in his correspondence when he was directing them. The strategy had not been perfected apparently at that time, but when the other defendants were questioned on this subject, they had ready an involved explanation that this phrase was inaccurate and misleading.
Volk is an example.
After he made such an explanation, he was asked how he could reconcile it with a letter which he had written in 1942 to the Reich Minister of Justice in which he said that since the purpose of these industries was to employ concentration camp inmates and since they were headed by SS officers they "therefore are actually establishments of the SS." His answer was that he had given a good deal of thought to this matter since his arrest and that he had concluded he must have been mistaken about the nature of these enterprises at the time the letter was written.
Volk was asked to define what, in his opinion, an SS enterprise was. He then read such a definition and pointed out that the W industries did not fall within its terms. It then appeared, however, that he himself was the author of the definition and that the type of business organization which it envisaged had never in fact existed anywhere. In other words he was saying while I was in jail, "I composed a description of an imaginary business concern which corresponded to my conception of what an SS industry would have been if such a thing had existed. These industries which did exist did not fulfill the requirements of my definition so, therefore, they were not SS industries although the SS controlled them, named their director, operated them, furnished concentration camp inmates for their labor supply, obtained the funds for their operation, and controlled the disposition of their profits". This convincing explanation apparently won Pohl over. When he took the stand the second time, he was asked whether the W industries were SS industries and he replied that they were not.
So much then for the common defenses and explanation. They are so feeble and grotesque that it is a little insulting to the Court's intelligence to waste time in rebutting them.
We have not mentioned them here because we feel they need to be answered so much as because the fact that they were so uniformly adhered to be so many of the defendants shows how the close liaison and spirit of cooperation which existed among them while they had adjoining offices in the big building on Unter den Eichen is still being carried on in the Palace of Justice here at Nurnberg. If anything, the coordination is closer now than it was then.
Everything that has been said, of course has a direct bearing on the credibility of the defendants. There are so many examples of contradictory statements made by the same defendant and of testimony squarely at loggerheads with documents which the defendant admitted to be correct that an enumeration of all these inconsistencies would almost amount to the abstract of the entire record.
The defendant Frank, for example, testified that he left the WVHA because he became troubled in conscience by the close connection between Amtsgruppe D and the rest of the organization and because he was upset by his connection with the Reinhardt Action. The truth of the matter is that the job of Administrator of the Police which Frank took over after he left the WVHA was actually higher and more desirable than the position he held under Pohl. It put him in a position where, when the office of Administrative Chief of the Army was open in 1944, he was able to squeeze Pohl out and obtain the job for himself. The Tribunal will remember his saying that relations between him and Pohl became rather strained as a result of this. The real reason Frank left the WVHA was that he was promoted to a more important job in recognition of the excellent record which he had made as Deputy Chief there.
The most audacious distortion made by any defendant on the witness stand was Frank's explanation for his ignorance of the Reinhardt Action until relatively late. After saying that "Himmler and Globocnik were real masters of cunning and deception", he went on to explain:
One has to understand further that there was another camouflage, that, for instance, the money, the cash, went in the treasuries of the Waffen-SS, and therefore to the Reich treasury; the gold and jewels went to the Reichsbank, and there they were stored for months -- if not years -- until they were examined, counted, and utilized. The watches were sent to Oranienburg, the eye glasses were sent to the medical inspectorate; the various things like towels, suitcases, rucksacks, were sent to the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle. Furthermore, napkins and towels were sent to the soldiers. Furs were sent to Ravensbruck; suits and clothes to the Reich Economy Ministry. There were ten, or perhaps a dozen, offices where these things were sent." (2278) Now what is so completely amazing about this testimony is that all of these articles were delivered to their respective destinations by Frank's own infamous "disposition order". Compare the testimony just quoted with the following excerpts from this order:
"(a) Cash money in German Reichsbank notes must be paid into the account WVHA 158/1488 (b) ...rare metals ...jewelry.
..must be delivered the the WVHA.
(c) Watches are exempt from sale. Their utilization rests with me.
(d) Spectacles and eyeglasses ..are to be handed into the medical office....
(f) Rucksacks and suitcases .. are to be delivered to the Volkdeutsche Mittelstelle.
(g) Towels, napkins ..can be furnished for the needs of troops.
(i) Furs..are to be delivered to ... Ravensbruck."
It can thus be seen that every item he enumerates was sent where it was because Frank had ordered it to be sent there. If, therefore, Frank was mystified by this "camouflage", he had achieved the supreme perfection of that art - he had succeeded in deceiving himself. We are reminded of Daedalus, the mythological inventive genius whose labyrinth on Crete was so complicated that when he had finished it, he could not find his own way out. Admittedly, it was a tangled web which August Frank wove, but we do not believe he lost himself in its meshes.
Another example is that of Fanslau and Tschentscher. The description of atrocities committed at Zclozow and Tarnopol, which were principally committed by members of the Viking Division, are so firmly established by the evidence that there can be no doubt about their occurrence. The official reports of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen would be enough to show the extent and ferocity with which these pogroms were carried out. According to the testimony and the documents, these things were happening at Zclozow almost at the very time that Tschentscher and Fanslau say they were there. Yet according to them they not only saw no sign of such a thing but never heard of any such matters the whole time they were in Poland and Russia. Einsatzgruppen documents show that in October 1941, 10,000 Jews were wiped out in the course of one or two days at Dnjoperpetrovsk. Tschentscher was in Dnjoperpetrovsk about a month later when according to the report the extermination was still according to the documents, in progress. But he still testified that he never heard of a Jew being harmed by a German the whole time he was attached to the Viking Division. The ability of these two men to remain ignorant of what was going on all around them is almost without parallel.
Similarly, the defendant Kiefer steadfastly denied that he or his office had ever had any connection with construction activities in concentration camps, until the prosecution produced two sets of blue prints bearing his own signature which he had furnished for buildings to be erected in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
Dozens of other examples of this kind could be given and are given in the briefs concerning the respective defendants. But we have already said enough to show that the testimony of these defendants is so replete with evasions, fantastic explanations and outright lies that it is devoid of any credibility.
Turning now to the criminal acts of the SS and WVHA for which these defendants must bear responsibility, we do not propose to weary the Court with a long repetition of what the whole world already knows. The conditions in the concentration camps which the Allies found in 1945 will stand as a perpetual monument to the obscene depths to which the human spirit is capable of descending. The scenes which met the eyes of the invading Allied troops at Buchenwald, BergenBelsen and Dachau will take their place in history beside the pyramids of human skulls erected by the Golden Horde of Tamerlane and the extermination of the Carthagenian populace by the Romans. But even these ancient butcheries do not furnish an adequate comparison. The slaughter of these people was at least accomplished in a quick and relatively painless manner, whereas before the victims of Mauthausen and Auschwitz were allowed the relief of death, they were frequently subjected to years of starvation, semi-nakesness and every kind of barbarous mistreatment that the sadistic minds of the guards commandant could devise. The concentration camp system stands in a class by itself.
The defendants now profess to share the same revulsion toward this murderous orgy as is felt by decent people everywhere. But they have chanted over and again the official chorus that the first time they had any inkling of such things was after the war was over, and that even then they could not believe what they heard. The only dissonant note was sounded by Hohberg.
We have shown the Tribunal that concentration camp inmates were used all over Germany. The existence of the concentration camps was no secret, and it was impossible in the nature of things to conceal the physical condition and the high death rate that prevailed among the inmates. Too many families in Germany received these notices that one of their members, whom they had last seen when the Gestapo took him into "protective custody", was no longer among the living, along with a can labeled as the ashes of the deceased. In some cases, the Teutonic passion for method led to the practice of registering the deaths of the inmates with the local vital statistics bureau where everyone could see them.
We have already said that among these defendants are men who could proudly point to as long a record of association with concentration camp affairs as anyone in Germany. Himmler made Pohl Chief of the Administrative Office of the SS in February of 1934. Georg Loerner and August Frank were there when Pohl arrived. Frank was directing the administration of workshops in the concentration camp at Dachau in March 1933. This was only five weeks after Hitler's seizure of power. As early as 1936, Pohl's five Main Offices in the SS Administrative Office were an essential part of the concentration camp system. By 1939, ten of the defendants were working with Pohl. In other words, they were the architects and builders of this evil edifice. It is perfect nonsense to say that the men who were in charge of the supreme agency for administering the concentration camps did not even know what was common knowledge.
A distinction should be made, however, between the situation that existed in the concentration camps in Germany and what took place in the East at the official abattoirs at Auschwitz, Lublin, and Treblinka. The commandants and guard personnel of the camps in Germany were given a free hand to behave as they liked, and if it happened that one of these people sought his pleasure in bayonetting inmates or in hanging them by the thumbs for several hours, the officials of the WVHA simply shrugged it off as a matter of personal taste.
It was not that they either encouraged or disapproved such practices: they all explained that after they had chosen and assigned to his job the man who found his solace in such amusements, it was up to another agency to prevent his carrying them to excesses. True, they were not only responsible for the assignment, but also for the transfers and promotions of these interesting types. But technically, the matter of punishing inmates was one for another agency to regulate, or so they say.
We pass on now, however, to a matter which was not haphazard or governed by personal inclinations and which was so closely allied with the WVHA that the very mention of its name instantly connotes this organization. We refer to the Reinhardt Action. This was first set in motion, according to Pohl, in "1941 or 1942". The WVHA was associated with it from the beginning. It was in full swing at least as late as July 1944, and the job of managing the immense wealth which accrued to the credit of the WVHA as a result of it continued throughout the life of the organization. The action was commenced by Himmler's order under the direction of Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader at Lublin. In 1943 Globocnik, for some reason, was transferred from Poland to Trieste and the task of completing his work in the East was transferred to Pohl. But long before Globocnik left, Frank was issuing directives concerning the distribution of the confiscated property, asking Himmler what to do with the surplus dental gold, and Vogt was auditing the treasury at Lublin. Therefore, it can truthfully be said that the administration of the Action Reinhardt was one of the principal functions of the WVHA during its entire existence, and at least in its later phases it was exclusively directed by the Chief of the WVHA.
Globocnik seems to have been a sensitive man. He was afraid of being considered as a person of limited talents.
After he had been transferred to Yugoslavia, he felt constrained to prepare a report on his accomplishments in Poland which would end any doubt as to his thoroughness and versatility. The report consists of a letter to Himmler with several appendices, each dealing with different phases of the Action Reinhardt. From the letter, it is plain that the chief purpose of all this documentation was to show Himmler that Globicnick was a shrewd business man as well as a capable executioner.
According to this report, the Action Reinhardt was as subtly conceived and carried out as any plan which contemplated the extermination of a substantial part of the population of Europe could be. It progressed by easy stages.
THE PRESIDENT: I am afraid I will have to interrupt you. The sound track has to be changed. We will take a recess at this time.
THE MARSHAL: The Tribunal will recess for 15 minutes.
(A recess was taken.)
First, the Jews were uprooted from their homes and transported to ghettos. At this stage of the game all of their real property and movables which could not be carried with them were confiscated. This included, of course, all industrial plants and all the physical assets of businesses in the East which were owned by the Jews. When they had been rounded up, herded into the ghettos and furnished with special identity cards and insignia to be sewn on their clothes so that they were easy to recognize, they were then left alone for a while until the SS could organize the utilization of the confiscated business property and prepare the next resting place for the Jews.
When this period had elapsed, they were "resettled" a second time by being shipped from the ghettos to the concentration camps, where the first thing that happened was that they were stripped of the remaining property which they had, such as currency, watches, jewelry, fountain pens, and the like. Then, in due course, they were asphyxiated in the gas chambers and incinerated, after all the bridges, gold teeth, and fillings were removed from their mouths. It is a boast of the great American packing companies, such as Swift and Armour, that when a pig goes through one of their slaughter houses nothing is wasted except the squeal. These defendants can without any immodesty make the same claim. The commandant of the concentration camp at Auschwitz estimated that during his tenure of office over 2,500,000 persons were so processed under his personal direction. Auschwitz, of course, was only one of several extermination camps in the East. It is estimated that about 8 or 10 million people were eventually reduced to ashes in these crematoria.
We have described the general pattern of the Action Reinhardt. We do not mean to imply that these successive transportations took place with assembly line precision. In the first place, it would have been wasteful to have destroyed this potential labor supply too soon. While they were in the ghettos, and even while they were in the concentration camps, they were used as slave labor by the SS to man the industries which it had confiscated.
Jews with special skills were deliberately cut out from the herd and temporarily preserved. Further, it was impracticable in the nature of things to accomplish all of this overnight. After all, the crematoria had a limited capacity and could only be operated 24 hours a day. It would have been unhygienic to asphyxiate Jew and Poles faster than the corpse disposal facilities could accommodate them. It was tried in several cases and proved to be untidy.
In the opening statement, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto was described in some detail. This was a notable chapter in the narrative of the Reinhardt Action for several reasons. In the first place, the Warsaw ghetto was one of the largest in Poland and the extinction of all the persons who lived there was a noteworthy stride toward the goal of the whole action. In the second place, it was particularly dramatic because the Jews there had the audacity to try to defend themselves, and, when that proved to be futile, had the further impudence to try to hide in the cellars and sewers to keep from being sent to the extermination camps. The whole incident, therefore, furnished some diverting excitement for the SS and army personnel who were detailed to clean out the ghetto and the scene was made more colorful by the methods they employed, such as setting the houses in the area on fire and throwing smoke bombs down the manholes that led into the sewers. It made dramatic copy for the German newspapers and it furnished good material for a long memorandum to Himmler by the persons in charge, The SS had a photographic team on hand to immortalize the whole operation on celluloid, and a number of these pictures have been introduced in evidence here. They are in Prosecution Document Book XX, pages 56 to 109.
But the demolition of the Warsaw ghetto, carried out by Amtsgruppe C after the Jews had actually been exterminated, was no more than an incident in the execution of the Action Reinhardt and if we think of it as more than that, we lose our perspective and sense of proportion in judging the extent of the Reinhardt Action. To consider the Reinhardt Action as synonymous and coextensive with the Warsaw Ghetto Action is analogous to using the names Guadalcanal and World War II interchangeably.
In both cases, the latter was merely a bloody episode which took place in the course of the former.
August Frank said that he always considered the Reinhardt Action as a move to "utilize the property of the Jews". This indeed was one of its principal objectives, although, of course, it had the further purpose of achieving a "final solution of the Jewish problem"; this is, of wiping out the Jews in Europe completely. The aim was double-barreled and the two objectives were inseparable. The defendants here, however, all fall back on the plea that although they may have known about the confiscation phase, they never dreamed of the existence of the extermination phase out of which the former grew. This is as far-fetched and implausible as most of their other defenses, especially in view of the fact that in document after document spectacles and dental gold are specifically alluded to as constituting part of the confiscated treasure.
While the seizure of this wealth was in progress, the WVHA had the responsibility of deciding how it was to be used to the best advantage. The proclamation of this decision was made through the issuance of August Frank's notorious distribution order of September 1942 to the chiefs of the SS administrative camps at Lublin and Auschwitz, where the personal property had been collected. This directive, part of which we have already read, gave complete details for sorting, classifying and shipping all this property to its proper destination.
The jewelry, precious metals, gold teeth, and currency would be taken to the Reichsbank by Melmer, who was in charge of the treasury under Hans Loerner in A-II. The fountain pens, flashlights, alarm clocks, and damaged watches were to be sent to the shops at Oranienburg to be repaired by Office D-II, which was under the defendant Sommer. An inventory of the furs and hides was to be sent to Georg Loerner's Office B-II, and the articles themselves were to be sent to the clothing plant of the Waffen-SS at Ravensbrueck. Office D-III was concerned with the obtaining of the dental gold.
Dentists in the concentration camps who were all subordinates of the defendant Pook actually supervised the extractions from the corpses and submitted periodic reports of the dentures obtained in this way to Office D-III. Pook's underlings were also charged with scraping, cleaning, and sterilizing the teeth before they were eventually sent to the Reichsbank; typhus and tuberculosis bacteria were omitted from the distribution list. Kammler, chief of Amtsgruppe C, was in charge of the demolition of the Warsaw ghetto and the defendant Kiefer was his deputy at the time this work was carried out.
Such was the disposition of the personal property which was seized in the course of the Reinhardt Action. But the problem of the utilization of the machinery, industrial plants, and real estate was delegated to Amtsgruppe W. It was decided to organize a corporation called OSTI, a subsidiary of DWB which was supervised by Staff W.
The purpose of OSTI was to combine the industrial potential seized in the course of the Reinhardt Action with the vast labor pool of concentration camp inmates so as to make the most economical use of both. Industrial machinery was moved from its former locations and centralized in huge factories either within the concentration camps and labor camps or conveniently near them. The maximum production was expected as a result of this concentration of plant and labor supply.
OSTI was eventually dissolved in 1944. From the very beginning, the ranks of its workers had been decimated by the pestilences which swept unchecked through the camps, as well as by starvation, exposure, impossible working conditions, and the brutality of the guards. This slowed down its operations. But the real reason for the dissolution came later.
Now we have just said that the SS always regarded the stay of the Jews and Poles in the concentration camps and labor camps as a temporary one. It was always understood by the SS that so far as these people were concerned heaven was their destination and their departure was to be postponed only long enough for the facilities of the murder centers at Auschwitz, Lublin, and Treblinka to be expanded.
By a grim irony, these wretches who had been marked for extermination were made to produce the engines which were later used to kill them. Exhibit 660 in Document Book XXVII is a letter from the construction chief at Auschwitz, Bischoff, an official of Amtsgruppe C. The letter is addressed to the DAW, one of the W industries, and reads in part as follows:
"You are informed with reference to the above mentioned letter that three gas-tight chambers are to be completed in accordance with the order of 18 January 1943. They are to be exactly similar in measurements and type to the chambers previously supplied.
"On this occasion we would remind you of a further order of 6 March 1943 concerning supply of a gas door 100/192 for corpse cellar I of Crematorium III, BW 30a, which is to be manufactured exactly according to type and measurement of the cellar door of the opposite crematorium II with a peep-hole of double 8 mm. glass with rubber packing and steel frame. This order is to be treated as especially urgent."
Apparently the order was filled in time. By autumn of 1943 it was felt that the gas chambers and crematoria had reached a state of perfection sufficient to complete the solution of the "problem" caused by the existence of these inmates who were being used during the interim as slave labor in the various factories of OSTI. On November 3, 1943, as the documents show, all the Jewish workers who had been employed by OSTI were liquidated and put in the stoves. This withdrawal of most of its labor force wrecked OSTI's productive capacity, and after several abortive attempts to continue it as a going concern, Pohl finally gave it up as a bad job and concluded to dissolve it.
Such, in a nutshell, was the role of OSTI in the Reinhardt Action. We will mention only one other phase of it before we pass on to a discussion of the activities of the individual defendants. We have described how, according to Frank's directive, the cash, jewelry, and precious metals acquired in the course of the Reinhardt Action were to be taken to the Reichsbank. There the German currency was deposited in "Account 1288", commonly called the Reinhardt Account. The jewelry, trinkets, and teeth were assorted into two classes. The articles that were considered valuable only for the precious metals they contained were melted down and the ones that were thought to be more valuable if sold in their original form were sent from the Reichsbank to the municipal pawn shop and there disposed of.
Eventually, therefore, all of this wealth was reduced to a credit entry in the Reinhardt Account.
The question then arose how to dispose of this money to the best advantage and this again was a decision which was the responsibility of the WVHA. The financial affairs of some of the W industries were considerably entangled. Some of them owed money to creditors such as the German Red Cross and the SS Savings Association, which was under the control of the defendant Hans Loerner in Amt A-I. It was decided to pay off all such claims to third party creditors. At about this same time, Pohl wanted to expand the armament industries which were owned and operated by the DWB, and the officials of OSTI were also clamoring for a loan. It was decided to take care of all these matters by transferring 30 million marks to the DWB, which would then pay off the third party creditors and make the loans to expand the armament industries and to capitalize OSTI.
These matters were discussed and settled in June 1943, and eventually the whole transaction was reduced to a contract between Frank, acting as representative for the German Reich (which technically was the owner of the Reinhardt Fund) and Pohl, acting as representative of the DWB.
Thus, it can be seen that the WVHA was not only the agency which supervised and directed the collection of property confiscated in the course of the Reinhardt Action, but it was also the agency which controlled the spending of the money into which this wealth was converted; and it can also be seen that the W industries, which were part of the WVHA, were approved as borrowers. The WVHA, then, had a triple function in the carrying out of the Reinhardt Action: it acted as a collection agency, as administrator, and as beneficiary. One would have to strain his imagination to think of a closer possible connection.
We will now take up the tasks of the individual Aemter within the WVHA and the activities of these defendants in accomplishing those tasks.
The concentration camps were under the immediate supervision of Amtsgruppe D, and it was through this part of the WVHA that every minute, every detail, of the life of the inmate was rigidly regulated. Amt D-IV had an administrative official in every concentration camp. Amt D-II had a labor allocation officer in every concentration camp. Camp security and inmate affairs were regulated on the spot by D-I and D-III had responsibility for their medical and dental treatment, such as it was.
The organization of this Amtsgruppe and its place in the WVHA explodes the defense that the RSHA, which had "legal" jurisdiction over arrests, releases, and punitive executions, is primarily responsible for what went on in the concentration camp. Only the WVHA had officers in the camp who were to look after food, clothing, billets, medical and dental care, labor commitments, and camp security. No other Main Office had the necessary support in the way of construction, supplies, finances, and means of using labor that the WVHA had from its Amtsgruppen C, B, A, and W.
The defendant Sommer was chief of the Main Department in charge of labor allocation in Amt D-II and deputy chief of the Amt. After the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps became a part of the WVHA, D-II was the most important office in the concentration camp system. Sommer's orders transferring inmates to the construction projects of Amtsgruppe C, to the SS industries and to armament projects were tantamount to death orders for thousands. He was the labor allocation expert, and his talents were the bearings on which the vast organization revolved. Large transports of inmates from one camp to another were handled by Amt D-II, and the record is full of descriptions of the deaths and mistreatments which occurred during these hauls. Sommer must have known of the way his function as labor allocation expert fitted in with the initial separation of the inmates, when the transports arrived at the camp, into those who could and those who could not work.
The Tribunal will recall the witnesses who described how those who could be allocated for work were driven to the right, those who could not work to the left. The way sinister led to the gas chamber. The same is true of the transports from the work camps and smaller concentration camps to the nearest gas chamber of invalids who were unfit to work.
Sommer could not have been oblivious to the constant revisions of the total number of inmates available for labor. When his lists showed a decrease, he is bound to have known that these people had disappeared somehow, and that it was unlikely that they were on vacation.
Sommer was involved when inmates were marked for death in the punitive details at the stone quarries. He signed the orders sending them there, and a few days later his representatives in the camp were notified of the death of those inmates. Sommer's part in the Action Reinhardt in receiving and repairing the watches and clocks has been mentioned. He could not have been ignorant of their source. The boxes he received were clearly marked "Action Reinhardt", and if others down the line were deceived as to the origin of this loot, then it was because all identifying marks had been removed in the repair shops at Oranienburg.
The participation by Pook, the Chief Dentist in D-III, in Action Reinhardt has also been referred to. It was the task of his subordinates in the concentration camp to supervise the extraction of dental gold from the cadavers after they had been removed from the gas chambers. Pook was the superior of scores of camp dentists following this procedure in every concentration camp. His men received the gold whether the inmate had been gassed, beaten to death, or shot, and whether or not in the course of the Reinhardt Action. Pook knew that these inmates had not died natural deaths. No one was in a better position to find out. He worked in Lolling's small but powerful office as Lolling's immediate subordinate; his office, like Sommer's, was within a stone's throw of the notorious concentration camp Sachsenhausen; he made innumerable duty trips to the various concentration camps. He ordered that anaesthetics be dispensed with, and told one of the camp dentists that too much consideration was being shown in the treatment of inmates.
In our consideration of the tasks of Amtsgruppe D we must not forget a rather special group of crimes committed in the concentration camps, the medical experiments on involuntary human guinea pigs. Thousands were murdered and tortured by freezings, poisonings, infections, and sterilizations. These acts were perhaps the most spectacular of all the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. The judgments of the International Military Tribunal and of Military Tribunal No. 1 in the recently concluded case against Karl Brandt et al have established their criminality beyond all doubt.
While there is credible evidence in the record that a number of the defendants were connected with criminal medical experiments, the prosecution is content - in order to simplify the issues - to limit this aspect of the case, so far as personal participation is concerned, to the defendant Pohl. This man, as chief of the WVHA, was a necessary party to these crimes. Concentration camp inmates were the unwilling victims of the experiments. They could be made available only through Pohl and Amtsgruppe D. On 4 December 1942, Maurer, chief of Amt D-II, directed that prisoners assigned for experimental purposes should be listed as such on the daily roster, and that directors of employment should be informed accordingly. In a letter of May 1943, Pohl considered the appointment of a doctor to supervise all experiments in concentration camps, so as to relieve Amt D-II's Lolling of that responsibility. He stated that eight to ten series of experiments were going on at that time. After May 1944, the consent of Pohl's subordinate Gluecks had to be secured before any experiment could be performed on inmates.