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people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Testimony-Abroad/Hermann_Krumey-01
Last-Modified: 1999/06/14

HERMANN KRUMEY
27 May 1961

To the Competent Court of Justice, Frankfurt am Main
Re: Request for Legal Assistance

The main hearing in the criminal proceedings against the
Accused Adolf Eichmann is at present taking place in this
Court.

In the context of this main hearing, I request you to extend
legal assistance to this Court by the examination on oath of
the following witness:

Hermann Krumey, Remand Installation, Frankfurt am Main,
Hammelsgasse.

The witness is to be examined as to the following
allegations of the Accused:

     (1) that the Accused was not responsible in 1942 for
     the deportation of one hundred children from the
     village of Lidice to Poland, that he neither carried
     out nor ordered the carrying out of this deportation,
     and also that he is in no way responsible for the
     murder of these children in Poland;
     
     (2) that the Accused did not arbitrarily, and by
     exceeding his official authority, carry out the
     persecution and extermination of the civilian Hungarian
     Jewish population in the period from March 1944 to
     December 1944, when he was the head of a Special
     Commando in Hungary.

To complete the testimony of the witness, I would request
that the witness also be asked the following questions which
were drawn up by Counsel for the Accused:

     (1) In 1942, were you in Lodz as the representative of
     the Race and Resettlement Head Office?
     
     (2) During this period, did the Commander of the
     Security Police and the Security Service in Prague send
     a transport of eighty-eight children from Lidice to
     your Department?
     
     (3) Did the Accused carry out this deportation or did
     he have it carried out?
     
     (4) Did you contact the Head Office for Reich Security
     as to what should be done with the children?
     
     (5) Did you request instructions from Section IVB3 as
     well as from Section IVB4?
     
     (6) Which Section finally issued instructions?
     
     (7) Were these children killed or evacuated to the
     Generalgouvernement?
     
     (8) On whose responsibility was the evacuation carried
     out?
     
     (9) In 1944, were you, as a member of a Special
     Commando, under the command of the Accused?
     
     (10) To whom was the Accused subordinate at that time?
     
     (11) Did the Reich Plenipotentiary for Hungary,
     Veesenmayer, the Higher SS and Police Leader
     Winkelmann, and the Senior Commander of the Security
     Police and the Security Service, Geschke, influence the
     activity of the Special Commando?
     
     (12) Who suggested deporting the Jews?
     
     (13) What role did the Special Operations Commando play
     with regard to these deportations?
     
     (14) Was the Accused able to take independent decisions
     on deportation matters, or was he subject to orders
     from the Chief of the Head Office for Reich Security,
     Kaltenbrunner?
     
     (15) Did the Accused carry out deportations contrary to
     other orders from his superior?
     
     (16) What was the numerical strength of the Special
     Commando?
     
     (17) Who carried out the concentration of the Jews, and
     who guarded and accompanied the transports?
     
I would also request that the witness be asked the following
additional questions, which were drawn up by the Attorney
General:

     (1) What were your duties in connection with the
     evacuation and resettlement of Jews, Poles and Gypsies
     in the Wartheland District?
     
     (2) Why were the Lidice children sent from the
     Protectorate to your office in Lodz?
     
     (3) Why did you think that these children were to
     receive special treatment?
     
     (4) Why did you contact Obersturmbannfuehrer Eichmann
     on these matters?
     
     (5) What instructions did you receive from Eichmann?
     
     (6) What do you know about the fate of these children?
     
     (7) Who proposed the plan of having postcards sent to
     the Jews still in Hungary by their relatives in
     Auschwitz, bearing the postmark "Waldsee"?
     
     (8) In 1944, was Eichmann the decisive factor in Jewish
     affairs in Hungary?
     
     (9) Was Eichmann not opposed to any concession in
     Jewish affairs?
     
     (10) What was your official link with Eichmann in
     Hungary?
     
     (11) Who had authority and responsibility for the foot
     march of the Jews from Budapest to the Austrian border
     in October-November 1944?
     
I would request you to summon to the examination of the
witness the representative of the Attorney General of the
State of Israel, c/o H.E. Ambassador Dr. F.E. Shinnar,
Israel Mission, Cologne, as well as Counsel for the Accused,
Advocate Dr. R. Servatius, Hohenzollernring 14, Cologne, and
to afford them, on their part, the opportunity to ask the
witness any questions which might arise from his answers.

There is no objection on the part of this Court to the
aforementioned representatives of the parties obtaining
copies of the record of the examination.

Please forward the original of the record of the examination
to this Court,

(-) Moshe Landau
President of the Trial Court

The Court of First Instance, Frankfurt (Main), 6 June 1961

Present:

Judge of First Instance Rieber as Judge

Court Official Schweidler as Authenticating Official at the
Court Office

In the criminal proceedings against Adolf  Eichmann there
appeared:

1. Mr. Erwin S. Shimron as the representative of the
Attorney General of the State of Israel;

2. Advocate Dieter Wechtenbruch, Munich, as Counsel for the
Accused;

3. Advocate Hans Schalast as counsel for the witness whose
name appears below in the criminal proceedings against him.
He was authorized to be present at the examination of the
witness, so that he would be informed about these
proceedings, if consultations with his client should become
necessary.

4. The witness whose name appears below.

The witness was instructed about the penalties and
consequences for giving sworn evidence which is deliberately
or negligently false or incomplete, and also giving
deliberately false or incomplete unsworn evidence, as well
as about the significance of the oath and the fact that he
could refuse to provide information on questions, by
answering which he or his relatives could be exposed to the
risk of criminal proceedings, and he was admonished to tell
the truth.

Personal details:

My name is Hermann Krumey.  I am 56 years old, and am a
pharmacist.  I live in Korbach, Bahnhofstrasse 38, currently
in custody at the Frankfurt (Main) Remand Institute,
Hammelsgasse, and am not related or connected by marriage to
the Acussed.

On the matter in question: I make the following statement
subject to the condition that in this case there be
guaranteed mutual legal assistance, so that Eichmann can be
examined in the criminal proceedings against me by means of
legal assistance.

When the Sudetenland was annexed to the Reich, I had already
given up my profession as a pharmacist and was already a
full-time District Gymnastics Superintendent.   After the
annexation, I, like the other gymnastics superintendents
operating in my area, was appointed to the general SS as an
Obersturmbannfuehrer.  I accepted a position offered to me
as a full-time SS Fuehrer (Fuehrer of a Sturmbann) in
Bremen, with the rank of an Obersturmbannfuehrer of the
general SS.  After I joined the SS, my former gymnastics
association was dissolved; it was already being wound up
when I was accepted.
In November 1939, while serving in that position, I was
called up by a red notice to report to the SS Head Office
for Personnel.  From there I was seconded to the Higher SS
and Police Leader in Posen, effective immediately after my
having been called up.  The Higher SS and Police Leader at
that time was Koppe.  Apart from myself, the other office
staff were a major in the gendarmerie, Hagelstein, and a
captain of police, Watermann.  My task was to organize the
transport by rail required to carry out the compulsory
transfer from the Warthe District of those Poles evicted
from their farms by the District Commissioners, because at
that time I was mostly only in my office in Posen, where I
received the District Commissioners' requirements for
rolling stock.  I did not visit the various District
Commissioners, as we lacked vehicles.  The trains for which
I received requests I would, in turn, request from the Posen
Reich Railways Office, and later possibly from IVB4 in the
Head Office for Reich Security, and my duties also included
negotiating with offices in the Generalgouvernement about
the destinations of the trains in the Generalgouvernement.

When these compulsory transfers caused difficulties and
unacceptable situations because, due to inadequate
arrangements, the Poles evicted from their farms had
insufficient accommodation and no work in the Warthe
District, and crime was therefore increasing, a separate
organization was set up in order to run this operation
properly.  The Central Office for Migration was set up for
this purpose in Posen, under the Inspector of the Security
Police and the Security Service.  A branch office of this
Central Office was set up in Litzmannstadt.  This was
preceded by a field office of the Central Office, under
Hauptsturmfuehrer Barth.  When this field office became an
office in its own right, I was appointed to head it.  That
was in the spring of 1940.

There were several field offices subordinate to my office,
as well as a transit camp in Litzmannstadt.  The purpose of
the office was to handle the processing of the Poles on
their way to the Generalgouvernement, after they had been
evacuated by offices controlled by the Reich Commissioner
for the Strengthening of German Folkdom.  In the transit
camp, those Polish families which had been identified by the
Race and Resettlement Head Office as qualifying for
Germanization, were sorted out, as well as those Poles whom
the Labour Office took away to work in the Reich.  The field
offices had already previously sought out those who had been
evicted from their farms, but were ethnic Germans or Poles
who professed to being German.  There were guidelines to be
followed on this.  These persons selected by the field
offices, and also during processing in the camp, were
excluded from deportation to the Generalgouvernement.  In
the camp, a statement of property was also drawn up for
every Polish family to be resettled; these were then
collected by the Main Trustee Office East and - so it was
said - were to be the basis for compensating those
transferred compulsorily.

In reply to a question from Counsel for the Defence: I do
not remember that forms used by the Race and Resettlement
Head Office in the Germanization procedure for Poles
utilized the term "special treatment" for Germanization.

In reply to a question: I had nothing to do with the
allocation of the property of expropriated Jews to ethnic
German immigrants, nor do I know anything about this.

As the Head of the Litzmannstadt office, I always sent my
train requirements to Department IVB4 in the Head Office for
Reich Security, and no longer dealt directly with the Reich
Railways.  In the matter of transport, the main concern was
to ensure that the evacuees were deported in good time, so
as to guarantee accommodation for the settlers as they
arrived.  All this was the concern of my office in
Litzmannstadt.

One morning I heard that close to one hundred children - I
have now seen from documents shown to me that the number was
eighty-eight - had arrived at the Gneisenaustrasse camp from
the Protectorate.  I still remember going to look at the
children.  Today I no longer remember who informed me of the
children's arrival.  When I saw the children, the nurses who
were to have accompanied them had already disappeared.  The
presence of the children was something unusual, and it
created difficulties because our camp was set up only as a
transit point for families, not for accommodating unattended
orphans.

I do not remember the teletype shown to me from the Race and
Resettlement Head Office, dated 12 June 1942.  I see from
the handwritten note at the bottom of the teletype that my
deputy, Pueschel, dealt with this teletype.

Untersturmfuehrer Kanzler, whose name is entered by hand at
the end of the list of 11 June 1942, is not known to me.  He
did not belong to my office.  I know that makeshift supplies
and accommodation were provided for the children, and that
we wanted to know what was to be done with them.  It is
possible that I telephoned Section IVB4 of the Head Office
for Reich Security about the children; today I no longer
remember whether I spoke to Eichmann or someone else who
worked there.

I am familiar, from the proceedings against myself, with the
teletypes I have been shown, dated 17 June 1942 to Fischer
in Prague, 20 June 1942 to Eichmann, and 22 June 1942 to
Ehlich.  I am unable to remember how I came to draft and
dispatch them, because too much time has elapsed since then.
According to the dictating sign, I did dictate them.  I do
not know whether I dictated the addresses word by word to
the shorthand typist.  What I normally did was to indicate,
when dictating to the shorthand typist, the relevant office
by the name of the person in charge.  I was not acquainted
personally with Fischer; Eichmann and Ehlich I knew.

I would also like to observe that I think it likely that,
when the children arrived, I did not yet know about the
incident of the razing of Lidice.  However, I certainly did
hear subsequently about the matter and was definitely
concerned as to how the children came to us and what the
reason for this was.

It has been pointed out to me that the 20 June 1942 teletype
to Eichmann does not mention the term "special treatment,"
but that in my teletype to Ehlich, dated 22 June 1942, I
dictated the following sentence: "I have notified IVB4 of
the transfer of these children, on the assumption that they
are destined for special treatment."  I would like to state
on that: I do not remember exactly what was in my mind when
I drafted the teletype.  It is my opinion that I did not
then take the words "special treatment" to mean
extermination.  I am sure that at that time I was not aware
of and familiar with the term "special treatment" in the
sense of extermination.  The children were a special matter
within our camp operation and required a special treatment
relative to our conditions.  In using the phrase, "on the
assumption that they are destined for special treatment," I
consider that I indicated that the children required to be
given a special treatment, as they could not simply be
included in our normal evacuation procedures, but would
have, for example, to be accommodated in homes.  I would
explain the fact that I contacted Eichmann on this
assumption by saying that his Section, IVB4, was the office
which, as far as I was concerned, was responsible here
because of the aspects of transport.  IVB4 always decided
where our transports were to be sent.  That is why I also
enquired of them in this instance, since, after all, the
children had to be evacuated from our camp, and I wanted to
know where they were to go.

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