The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts//Sessions/Session-112-02


Archive/File: people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-112-02
Last-Modified: 1999/06/14

Finally, as appears from the instructions of the Economic-
Administrative Head Office, the transfer of the Political
Department of the Head Office for Reich Security to the
Concentration Camps Department, did not detract from the
full authority of the Head Office for Reich Security to
continue with the control of matters concerned with
deporting detainees, or releasing them from concentration
camps.  On the other hand, the standing instructions for
running those concentration camps, which came from the
Economic-Administrative Head Office, include a clear-cut
directive about the Jews.  The detailed directives show that
there were two types of Jews: "Transport Jews" (Transport-
Juden), where it says specifically that they were being sent
to IVB4a, a sub-unit in Eichmann's office, and Jews under
"orders of protective dentention" (Schutzhaftbefehl-Juden)
who were marked IVC2.  

Those were the Jews - as we know from
the testimony of Raya Kagan in Session No. 70 (Vol. III)
herself a person who was held at Auschwitz and kept
in that same accursed division - who were arrested because
of transgressions against curfew regulations, for talking on
public telephones during forbidden hours, or for any other
offences for which they were punished by immediate transfer
to a concentration camp.  The Economic-Administrative Head
Office asked, in its permanent directives, that these cases
be reported to it in red ink, that is to say they must be
especially marked.  They were criminal prisoners, as we
heard from Raya Kagan, according to the interesting Nazi
conception; those, in fact, enjoyed better treatment than
the "Transport Jews," and generally those who came as
criminal prisoners were not at all subject to selections.
The gas chambers were designed, first and foremost, for the
Transport-Juden. And Rudolf Hoess, what does he say? T/90,
p. 12, in the printed version: "The Transport-Juden - that
was the marking for all Jews sent to the Auschwitz camp by
the office of Eichmann, IVB4 of the Head Office for Reich
Security.  The bills of lading bore the following remark:
`The transport is in accordance with the permanent
directives and must be transferred for special treatment'" -
that is to say, death.

Eichmann himself made a slip of the tongue once, in the
interrogation...

Presiding Judge: Do we have any document containing exactly
this wording by Hoess?

Attorney General: Yes, T/90, printed page No. 12.

Presiding Judge: I am not referring to that.  Hoess gave
here a version about a transport destined for extermination.
We have two letters from France...

Attorney General: Yes, we have two forms, but that is not
precisely the same thing.  These are personal forms of
certain Jews which were filled out - as Raya Kagan tells us
- inside Auschwitz itself, and there is a part which the
prisoners themselves filled out, the upper part, which
contains the personal data taken from the prisoner himself,
as Raya Kagan has told us, whereas the lower part contains,
among other things, the notation of the dispatching unit,
and that was usually filled out by the Germans, the SS men
in that same office.  Hoess speaks of the instruction which
came with the entire transport, not with reference to this
particular Jew or that one.  These kinds of instructions are
not in our possession.

Presiding Judge: We have two letters signed by Roethke from
France and the Duesseldorf Documents.  My question was:
Which of these documents contains this text which Hoess
describes?  It says there that this particular transport
left from the Duesseldorf railway station...

Attorney General: Your Honour, I do not remember, let me
check this again.  My colleagues tell me that they do not
remember this either.  We shall check these matters again.
In any event, Sir, I do not think that on this point there
is any reason not to believe Hoess.  I understand that the
Court is asking me for support for Hoess' statements, but I
am saying that there is no reason - towards the end of my
speech I shall speak about the evaluation of the various
testimonies - certainly on those points where one of the war
criminals wants to disclaim guilt, it is most desirable to
seek corroboration for his statements, especially if he
wants to shift responsibility for what is directly
attributed to him onto another person, then one must really
see whether his statements stand up in the context of the
entire set of proofs.  I shall talk about this, but here it
is not important if Hoess had said: The instruction came
from the Economic-Administrative Head Office, or whether he
had said it had come from Mueller or from Kaltenbrunner, or
from anybody else.  Why from Eichmann of all people?

And there is a negative fact, too: There is not a single
proof which points to the contrary; there is not a single
testimony except for the words of the Accused himself who
stands alone in this matter, without any support or
corroboration that anyone else had given the instruction.  I
do not know what weight is to be given before this Court to
the reasons which induced the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
to acquit Pohl of the direct responsibility for killing, and
of course, we cannot base ourselves on this conclusion,
because that was a different court, and the evidence was as
submitted to it, and we do not know what the prosecution
proved and what it could have proved then, but still the
fact remains: Pohl was sentenced to death for having
administered concentration camps and was executed; but of
the charge of having given direct orders for homicide he was
acquitted.

Eichmann himself made a slip of the tongue once and related
that when he wanted to do a favour to his Jewish
acquaintance, Storfer, he travelled especially to Auschwitz,
and when he saw Storfer in his desperate situation, he made
an entry in the Auschwitz books which secured for Storfer
employment in cleaning the gravel paths in the camp.  The
Court will remember that I examined him on this matter; this
was in Session 99 (Vol. IV. pp. xxxx-xxxx), and when he
realized the danger threatening him from the conclusion that
he had the authority to give orders about what was going on
inside Auschwitz, he said that he had received permission
from Mueller to intercede on behalf of Storfer.  And when he
was asked where Mueller got the authority to intervene -
since, according to Eichmann's version, the Head Office for
Reich Security had no authority over the concentration camps
- he added that Mueller had to obtain the agreement of
Gluecks for this, the person who was the Superintendent of
Concentration Camps.

Well, Eichmann wants us to believe that he is travelling
specially to Auschwitz in order to ease the fate of a Jew,
and that for this purpose he has to be present there
personally, and he troubles the head of the Gestapo, and the
head of the Gestapo turns to the Superintendent of
Concentration Camps, so that Storfer does not have to
perform back-breaking labour at Auschwitz but be allowed to
clean gravel paths.  Why, matters are brought ad absurdum,
to the point of ridicule, when one wants to excuse through
lies that which cannot be excused, that is, what he had
stated explicitly - his clear and express authority to give
orders about the fate and employment of the "Transport
Jews."  If he had the authority to give instructions that a
particular prisoner should perform lighter work, he
certainly had the authority to give instructions in general,
because otherwise, what business was it of Eichmann's to
make entries in the personal documents of the detainees in
the camp?  If we believe his version, then Hoess should have
received an order from Gluecks to let Eichmann come and have
Eichmann make the entry, and Hoess had to act accordingly
concerning Storfer.

Your Honours, there were scores of thousands of people
there.  This was a vast factory.  According to the Polish
Report, there were thirty-nine satellite camps around
Auschwitz.  Their absorptive capacity exceeded one hundred
thousand persons.  And he wants us to believe him, that in
the matter of a single Jew - and soon I shall speak about
the eventual fate of this Jew - that this was the procedure
for dealing with the matter?

What was Storfer's eventual fate, we learn from Eichmann
himself.  He says that Guenther caused him to be executed at
Auschwitz, together with Eppstein and Edelstein.  And again
the question must be asked: Does Guenther, the deputy head
of the Department, who has no more authority than the head -
to say the least - is he authorized to order an execution?
If so, then Eichmann himself also had the same authority.
And when I asked him, he said: Yes, true, most probably he
received authority for this from Mueller.  And where did
Mueller get this authority?  There is no answer to that.

Kasztner writes in his report, the report of the Rescue
Committee, T/1113, page 47: "Eichmann told me: `If Brand
does not return within three days, I am going to set the
Auschwitz mill in operation'."  And Hansi Brand stated here,
Session 58  (Vol. III, p. xxxx): "Eichmann told me:
`Telegraph your husband that, if he is not back within three
days, I am going to start the mill at Auschwitz'."  Thus we
have it from his own mouth that he himself is able to order
the death-mill to be put into operation.

We have submitted to the Court the Romanian publication
about the meetings which took place in Berlin on 26 and 28
September 1942, with regard to the deportation of the Jews
of the Generalgouvernement to the camps.  This document is
signed by Klemm of the German railway administration.  The
reference is to the evacuation of six hundred thousand Jews,
and to arrangements for the transports to Treblinka, to
Belzec, to Sobibor.  When Eichmann was examined about this
document, from page 3544 on, T/37, he disclaimed all
responsibility: "Not I," he stated. But in the end, when he
was asked again and again, well, you see, after all it says
here that this meeting was called on the demand of the Head
Office for Reich Security, then he says: "True, I see,
perhaps really Novak attended this."  And when I asked him
here: "Why did you say Novak?  You claim in general that you
did not deal with the Generalgouvernement, that you had
nothing to do with this matter,"  he says: "I wanted to
reconstruct all possible possibilities, I wanted to speak of
all kinds of possibilities and combinations," as though he
was solving some kind of a puzzle here, into the squares of
which one has to insert this or that possibility, so that it
fits the other words in the puzzle.  If Eichmann knew that
he had no standing in the Generalgouvernement, he would not
have said that possibly his Novak, his railway man, did
indeed attend that meeting.

Presiding Judge: Well, actually, the reference there was
also to transports from Romania.  This might be an
explanation for the presence of Novak, according to the
version of the Accused.

Attorney General: True, but he does not say that.  If he had
said that because this is a matter concerning Romania, and
"because I wanted to get the Jews out of Romania and my man
Richter, who was posted in Bucharest and was negotiating
with Antonescu, and the Romanian representatives were
invited to that meeting, therefore I sent Novak to take
part" - well, in that case, I would not have thought that
the excuse was correct, but I could not have said anything
against it.  But he does not justify the matter in this way.
What he says is this:

     "I discussed theoretical possibilities, since the
     meeting was in Berlin, apparently, and not in the
     Generalgouvernement, although it pertained in the main
     to the camps within the Generalgouvernement, and since
     it was convened at the demand of the Head Office for
     Reich Security, it is possible that my man, who
     attended all meetings in matters pertaining to the
     railway administration, went to this meeting as well."

This "possibly" becomes a weapon against him, Your Honours.
If it is possible that his man attended that particular
meeting, then it is also possible  - and we have it from his
own mouth - that he had a hand in all matters of the
Generalgouvernement.  And what does he say to Joel Brand
when he presents himself to Eichmann for the first time?
"You know who I am, I am in charge of the operation in
Europe, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and now it is the turn
of Hungary."  This came out here, explicitly from the mouth
of Eichmann, since, generally speaking, Brand spoke the
whole truth.  Later on I shall come to an analysis of these
remarks, but, generally speaking, Eichmann confirmed this
and had no reservations at all about what Joel Brand says
that he heard from him, from Eichmann: "I am the man who
carried out the operation in Poland."

In his police interrogation he said that Mueller had sent
him to the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz to report.  Rudolf
Hoess says that Eichmann was the one who brought him the
instruction to extract the gold teeth from the mouths of the
victims and to cut off the hair of the women marked for the
gas chamber or for labour.  He admits that his first visit
to the headquarters of Globocnik was made in order to
inspect the preparations made in those Russian trenches, in
order to start the Final Solution.  T/248 is the report from
which we learn expressly that Eichmann reported, together
with Horn abut the liquidation of OSTI,* {*Ostindustrie}
which was the institution for robbing the Jews of the
Generalgouvernement.  Now, what was the business of a
railroad official from Berlin, who has no connection with
the Generalgouvernement, with OSTI, which operated within
the Generalgouvernement?

Thus, when we add, one by one, his general standing, of
which I spoke yesterday, and of which both our witnesses and
his witnesses spoke, with no reservation regarding Poland,
his central position with regard to the entire extermination
of Jews, in all sectors - that is Wisliceny, Hoess, Mildner,
Hoffmann - when we take into account what he said about his
visits to Globocnik, those remaining traces which we have
from the operations in Poland, the fact that he was the head
of the Jewish Department in the Gestapo, which had to solve
the Jewish Question in the Generalgouvernement, too; and
even because he brings orders - be it retroactively - for
Globocnik, which make it possible for Globocnik to think: "I
will kill Jews, and I will have somebody to back me up, I
can exceed any quota and through Eichmann I will receive the
retroactive document" - then we have a picture which brings
him in, not only as a conspirator, but as an actual helper
and abetter; and if there is no document which attaches his
name to the Reinhardt Operation - and I was asked about this
yesterday by the Presiding Judge: - we do have the totality
of the evidence against which we again have only his own
word alone.

The Nazis' ardent wish to liquidate Jewry to the very last
person is again conspicuous in the Hungarian chapter.
Hungary, after all, was a loyal, fighting ally in the Axis
camp, and there was no crucial military or political
imperative to humiliate that ally, to enter its land, to
dictate to it which government it should choose, and to take
complete control of the country.  There is reason to believe
that the ultimate ground for all of this was the desire to
lay hands directly on Hungarian Jewry.  In any event, this
aim was officially spelled out in documents of the German
Foreign Ministry.

Not that, Heaven forbid, the fate of the Hungarian Jews was
so favourable prior to that.  They were oppressed by edicts,
anti-Jewish laws and restrictions already before March 1944.
The inspiration for all these came from Berlin and, already
starting in 1938, the Hungarian regime showed that it was
toeing the line by promulgating the "Law for the Restoration
of Social Equilibrium," legislation on the pattern of the
Nuremberg race laws, and a series of economic laws which
were designed to impoverish the Jewish population.  We have
heard about this from Freudiger, in Session 51.

In 1941, the deportation of stateless Jews, those with
Polish nationality from Hungary to the Kamenetz-Podolski
region, was carried out.  We have heard about this from the
witnesses Freudiger, Brand and Leslie Gordon.  The latter
saw with his own eyes the murderous spectacle when hundreds
of deportees from Hungary were massacred by the
Einsatzgruppen, together with thousands upon thousands of
their brethren who were residents of Poland.  This was the
advance payment given by the Hungarian Government, when
approximately twenty thousand Jews were delivered up into
the hands of the German hangmen.  But that, of course, was
not enough.  As far back as 30 January 1941, Hitler recalled
his old prophecy that the coming World War would wipe out
Jewry, and then added:

     "The Jews may still be laughing about this today, just
     as they laughed about my previous prohecies.  But the
     coming months and years will prove that here, too, I
     prophesied correctly.  Already now we see how our race-
     consciousness is conquering nation after nation, and I
     hope that even the nations which today still are our
     enemies will recognize, one day, who their greater
     internal enemy is and will go hand in hand with us on a
     common front, the front of Aryan humanity against
     Jewish exploitation and conspiracy."

This quotation from a speech by Hitler can be found in a
Polish brochure about the extermination of Polish Jewry, and
it is from there that I am quoting.

Judge Halevi:  Has that been translated for us?

Attorney General: Yes, it has been translated; the name is
"The Extermination of Polish Jewry," T/204, page 18 of the
Polish text.

Judge Raveh:   Is that a re-translation, or do we have the
Polish translation?

Attorney General: There we have the German text.

And Goebbels gave open expression to this in an article
published in the June 1942 edition of Das Reich, that the
operation to exterminate (Ausrottung) the Jews would
encompass all of Europe, and possibly far beyond that (in
Europa und vielleicht weit darueber hinaus).

Therefore, the Germans were vexed that in the second half of
1942, in the climactic months of the extermination campaign
throughout the Nazi-occupied territories, when Heydrich
reaped from his grave, as it were, the bloody fruit which he
had sown,  when the influence of Mueller rose in the Head
Office for Reich Security, before Kaltenbrunner was
appointed to a post close to that of acting head, no
beginning was yet made in Hungary with "concrete"
operations, in spite of the fact that Hungary was an ally.
They regarded this not just as an internal matter, but an
all-European matter, as Luther, from the German Foreign
Ministry, wrote, adding that the intense efforts being made
by Germany in this field will remain worthless if in one
area of Europe there remains a possibility of contact
between Jews and non-Jews, on the economic and intellectual
level.

Eichmann's Section was also furious that Jews in forced
labour units, including lawyers, industrialists and
merchants, could meet in the restaurant of the Hegyeshalom
railway station with German officials stationed at this
border post, since, as Guenther put it, "one cannot ask
Germans to be forced to come into such contact with Jews,"
and, therefore, he demanded that the Jews be removed from
there.

German pressure was applied on the Hungarian authorities
through members of the Arrow Cross Party in the Hungarian
parliament, who demanded that the Jews of Hungary be
transferred to labour camps and ghettos, as we learn from a
letter from the German Foreign Ministry to Eichmann.  He
was, of course, constantly kept au courant.  Finally, the
matter was presented by Hitler himself as being of the
utmost importance to the Reich.  German units entered
Hungary.  But the campaign against the Jews was carefully
prepared before that. This was before the days when Hitler
spoke to Horthy about the necessity of a solution to the
Jewish Question in Hungary, already before the dictate in
the Klessheim Palace.  Eichmann had already completed the
setting up of his special commando in the Mauthausen camp,
whose task it was to liquidate the Jews of Hungary.


Home ·  Site Map ·  What's New? ·  Search Nizkor

© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012

This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and to combat hatred. Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.

As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.