Archive/File: people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-070-01
Last-Modified: 1999/06/08

Session No. 70
24 Sivan 5721 (8 June 1961)

Presiding Judge: I declare the seventieth Session of the
trial open.

Attorney General: I call Mrs. Raya Kagan.

[The witness is sworn.])

Presiding Judge: What is your full name?

Witness: Raya Kagan.

Attorney General: Mrs. Kagan, you reside in Jerusalem, in
Kiryat HaYovel, and you work in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs?

Witness Kagan:   That is correct.

Q. In 1937, you went from Vilna to Paris, in order to
prepare for your studies for a doctorate degree in history,
and when the Germans entered France, you remained there?

A. That is correct.

Q. You were detained on 27 April 1942?

A. Yes.

Q. You were taken to a camp?

A. I was transferred, first to the Prefecture and then to
Tourelles.

Q. What was Tourelles?

A. Tourelles was a small camp - it was the name of a quarter
in Paris.

Q. Do you remember that one day a certain SS officer arrived
there?

A. Yes.

Q. Who was he?

A. That was on 18 June.   In the morning we were told to
come down from the barracks to the courtyard, and all the
women inmates of the blocks, all the prisoners, came down
quickly, and we saw an SS officer.

Q. Who was this SS officer?

A. I did not know him personally, but two women prisoners
who had been arrested by him personally, whispered to me:
"That is Dannecker."

Q. What happened to you?

A. After the selection, which Dannecker himself conducted,
he chose young, fit women.  We were separated from the rest
of the women, we were placed in a wing of the barracks which
up to that point had been empty, and there we awaited
deportation.

Q. Were they all Jews?

A. We were all Jewish.

Q. Jewish women?

A. Jewish women.  And the deportation began on 22 June, at
five in the morning.  We were transferred in buses to the
railway station of Drancy.  We were sixty-seven women
altogether.  This was the first transport of Jewish women
from France.  And there, nine hundred and thirty men joined
us, and hence the total transport amounted to one thousand
people.

Q. When were you deported from Drancy?

A. Some hours later, they put us into a cattle train, and we
moved off.

Q. And you arrived at Auschwitz?

A. On 24 June.

Q. This was in 1942?

A. In 1942.

Q. And you remained in Auschwitz until 18 January 1945?

A. Yes.

Q. And from there you made your way to Ravensbrueck, and you
were sent to Mecklenburg?

A. I was taken to a Jugendlager (youth camp) near
Ravensbrueck, and my last camp was Malchow, near
Mecklenburg.

Q. What kind of work did you do in Auschwitz, Mrs. Kagan?

A. On the day following my arrival at Auschwitz, I was
chosen - quite fortuitously, of course, since there were
Jewesses from Germany; they were looking for office clerks
who knew German, and in our transport there were many Jewish
women from Germany whose mother tongue was German.  I was
also considered as a candidate.  I had no prospects of
success, but, by chance, the Schutzlagerfuehrerin (the
[female] leader of the protective camp) chose me, too.  Out
of our transport, four women were chosen for work in the
office.

Q. What was it called?

A. The office in which we were required to work was called
the "Political Department," with its two divisions - the
"Politische Abteilung" (Political Department) and the
"Standesamt" (Civil Registry).  Two of us were transferred
to the Politische Abteilung and two to the Standesamt.

Q. What were the functions of the Politische Abteilung?

A. This department was very important in Auschwitz.  It had
political functions - maintaining security in the camp.  SS
men, who worked with us, were engaged in this.  In addition,
there were administrative duties.  The Politische Abteilung,
in its administrative function, was called the
"Registratur," and about half the girls in the commando,
perhaps more, worked there.

Presiding Judge: Were the Registratur and the Standesamt the
same thing?

Witness Kagan:   No, they were two separate departments,
with two directors.  But there was a head of this Politische
Abteilung, and he was the director general of both of them,
of both the Registratur and the Standesamt - he was
Untersturmbannfuehrer Maximilian Grabner.  We were talking
about administrative duties...

Attorney General: Yes, please explain.

Witness Kagan:   In the Registratur, the women prisoners
dealt mainly with current matters affecting the prisoners,
the affairs of living prisoners.  On the other hand, the
Standesamt, kept a register of the inmates, and it had three
functions: the registration of births, marriages, and
deaths.  In Auschwitz, of course, the first two duties were
non-existent, or virtually non-existent, and all the
emphasis was on the registration of deaths.

Q. Do you recognize this form, Prosecution document No.
1112.

A. That was called "Aufnahmebogen" (reception
questionnaire).

Presiding Judge: This document will be marked T/1331.

Attorney General: This was also submitted to the Accused and
was given the reference number T/37(306).  The Accused's
reply to the document is to be found on pages  3467-3471.

Please explain to us now, Mrs. Kagan, what this was.

Witness Kagan:   When a prisoner reached the camp, he had to
register with the camp administration.  There, first of all,
he was asked all kinds of personal questions.  This document
was placed in a file, and that became the prisoner's
personal file.

Q. Who had to complete the upper portion of the form on page
one?  I notice that it says here "Kempf Max Israel" in
handwriting, on the printed form.  Who had to enter this?

A. The prisoners themselves completed this.

Q. Here, on the second half, the lower part of the page,
there is something completed in handwriting which records
when the prisoner was detained and what unit sent him.

A. That part was not filled in by the prisoners.

Q. Who filled it in?

A. Apparently the Germans.

Q. I draw the Court's attention to the fact that it says:
"The unit handing over for arrest - IVB4a."

Please look at page 2 of this form.  What is the second
page?  Is that the same?

A. Yes, but nevertheless, there are some differences here.
It is less comprehensive than the first form.

Q. What you said about the first page also applies to the
second?

A. Yes.

Attorney General: Again, I should like to draw the Court's
attention to the fact that on this form as well, which
refers to another prisoner, it says that the unit sending
the prisoner is "RSHA IVB4a."

Presiding Judge: What is the significance of the additional
digits, which are identical in both cases - can you tell us
something about that?  After "RSHA IVB4a," there appears
"3233/41 G," on both forms.  Do you know?

A. No.

Attorney General: We shall have further evidence on this.
We have evidence from the trial of Rudolf Hoess, by a Pole
by the name of Rajewski.  This is a code number indicating
the country from which the prisoner was dispatched.  Each
country had a specific mark showing where the report had to
be sent to, announcing the prisoner's arrival.  That is a
document which we intend to submit tomorrow.

So, these forms were completed in the Registratur
Department?

A. In the "Aufnahme" (Reception).

Q. What did they do in the Registratur?

A. They used to receive it in the Registratur, and there
they had a sort of archive.  There were cabinets with such
files, and where necessary, there were also all kinds of
other matters.  For example, if he was an Aryan, there were
questions which were addressed to the office.  The file
could be found there and passed on to be dealt with
appropriately.

Q. Particulars about corporal punishment that had been
administered - where were they recorded?

A. I saw them annexed to the personal file, when the man
died and the file reached me.

Q. Did you, for example, see an entry such as this - our
number 1245?

A. I saw one such as this, and I also saw another form, this
form, these two forms.

Q. That part at the end?

A. Yes.

Attorney General: We have all of this together.  It applies
to various people, to corporal punishment.  Would you like
to tell us, Mrs. Kagan, what these forms relate to - the one
dated 16 May 1944, concerning Bruno Jellinek of Vienna -
what the form reports?  Was he a Jew?

A. Yes.

Q. What does the form say?

A. The form says that this man tried to buy bread.

Q. What was his punishment?

A. His punishment was ten lashes.

Q. And this went into the report to the department?

A. It went into the file, after the punishment was carried
out.

Q. And what does the form say about the Jew, Yitzchak
Meserezki, dated 2 September 1943?

A. That he absented himself from his Kommando in order to
look for some food.

Q. What was his punishment?

A. His punishment was terrible - ten times hard labour and
ten times "Stehzelle" (standing cell).

Q. What was the Stehzelle?

A. This was a tiny cell, in which a man was only able to
stand.  And, after he had stood there all night, he had to
work the next day, as usual.

Presiding Judge: Are you submitting the collection of
documents?

Attorney General: I shall do so immediately.

Presiding Judge: Incidentally, Mr. Hausner, how did these
documents get here?  Are they Auschwitz files that were
seized?

Attorney General: There are a number of documents which we
found at Kibbutz Lohamei Ha-Getta'ot.
Presiding Judge: Where did they originate?

Attorney General: There is an Auschwitz museum in Poland
where there are original documents which remained extant
after the Germans tried to cover up their tracks.  Some of
these are in our possession.
Presiding Judge: They surely attempted to destroy the
Registratur?

Witness Kagan:   We ourselves dealt with that.

Presiding Judge: We shall, no doubt, hear more about this.

Attorney General: What does the last form in front of you
say - the one dated 3 July 1944?

Witness Kagan:  That he disappeared without permission from
his place of work and went to the kitchen, in order to fetch
coffee.

Q. What was the proposed punishment?

A. Here there is something very interesting - some note that
the Kapo of this Kommando used to distribute the coffee;
that means, that the Kapo certainly demanded that he should
bring the coffee, and it was not that he, himself, absented
himself from the work.

Q. What was the proposed punishment?

A. Twenty lashes.

Judge Raveh:   What is the meaning of the question marks
next to the remarks that you have just read?

Witness Kagan:   A query, apparently, why the Kapo was not
punished.

Q. Who added these question marks?

A. Probably the officials in charge who received this added
these question marks.

Q. They had doubts?

A. They did not have doubts, but probably they thought that
the Kapo also ought to have been punished.

Attorney General: As far as you know, did they distribute
coffee in Auschwitz?

Witness Kagan:   If it could be called coffee, then they
distributed coffee.  It was something with an undefinable
colour and an even more undefinable taste, without a grain
of sugar.

Attorney General: I ask the Court to admit these documents
as evidence.

Presiding Judge: This will be marked T/1332.

Attorney General: What did they deal with in the Standesamt?

Witness Kagan:   The Standesamt, as I have explained, was
the department which dealt with the registration of deaths.

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