[Page 172]

A. There was a proceeding pending at the Ministry of Justice at one time; and the Ministry of Justice corresponded with me, but I believe nothing ever came of the matter.

Q. You had no part in the drafting of that legislation, did you?

A. No, I am not acquainted with it. I believe no special law was issued; as far as I remember, it was left to the Gauleiter to establish laws. I do not know.

Q. The laws were left to the Gauleiter, to the Kochs and the Franks and the Rosenbergs; is that what happened?

A. No, we are talking about the provinces of West Prussia and of Posen now; that is what our correspondence was about.

Q. I now want you to answer some questions about Sauckel.

THE PRESIDENT: Shall we adjourn for ten minutes?

MAJOR ELWYN JONES: If your Lordship please.

(A recess was taken.)

THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Lammers, can you hear what I say?

THE WITNESS: Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, will you kindly try and answer the questions after they have been put to you and not break into the questions? Try and wait for a moment

[Page 173]

BY MAJOR ELWYN JONES:

Q. I want to deal for the moment with your relations with Seyss-Inquart. You were receiving reports from him as to his administration in the Low Countries, were you not?

A. It was like this: every three months or so a general report was sent in and then passed on to the Fuehrer. We also received individual reports.

Q. And in the Low Countries, as elsewhere, you know that the object of German administration was to extract and exploit that territory for the German advantage as much as possible, do you not?

A. Our aim, naturally, was to make use of the occupied countries for our war production. I know nothing about any orders for exploitation.

Q. To reduce their standard of living, to reduce them to starvation; that was one of the results of the Netherlands policy; you knew that, didn't you?

A. I do not believe that we went as far as that. I myself had friends and relatives in Holland and know that people in Holland lived much better than we did in Germany.

Q. I want you to look at the Document 997-PS, which is already Exhibit RF 122, which consists of a letter which you sent to Rosenberg, the defendant, enclosing a report, given to you by Stabsleiter Schickedanz, to the Fuehrer, together with a report delivered by Reich Commissioner Dr. Seyss- Inquart, about the period from 29th May to 19th July, 1940. If you look at Page 9 of your text, Page 5 of the English text, of 997-PS, You will see there is a first statement of the outlines of German economic policy in the Low Countries. You will see the paragraph is marked on your copy, so that your difficulty of finding where these passages are might be eliminated. It reads:

"It is necessary to reduce consumption by the population..."

Q. Just one moment, and I will read out the passage to you.

"It was clear that with the occupation of the Netherlands a large number of economic and - in addition - police measures had to be taken. The first of these were intended to reduce consumption by the population in order, firstly, to gain supplies for the Reich and, secondly, to secure a uniform distribution of the remaining supplies."

A. Yes, it is also a very reasonable policy. Supplies had to be reduced in order to distribute them equally and to gain some for the Reich. In any case, the report is not mine but was made by Herr Schickedanz and I do not know if it is correct.

Q. But the object of this reduction of consumption by the population was to benefit the Reich so that the territory of the Low Countries should be robbed in order that the Reich should profit. That was the whole policy, wasn't it?

A. That is certainly not here; it says here, firstly, that supplies must be acquired for the Reich; and secondly, that the various supplies must be equally distributed; that means among the Dutch people. There is not a word about a policy of exploitation.

MAJOR ELWYN JONES: If it please the Tribunal, it has the document and can read the language in which it appears.

Q. I want you now to turn your mind to the defendant Sauckel. You, witness, knew quite well of the vast programme of enslavement of the people conquered by the Nazi forces that Sauckel was engaged upon, did you not?

A. I have seen Sauckel's programme and also the regulations he drew up to

[Page 174]

Q. Are you suggesting that you thought that the millions of foreign workers that Sauckel dragged into the Reich came there voluntarily?

A. They did not all come voluntarily. For instance, they came from France through a compulsory labour law introduced by the French Government. They did not come voluntarily, but through a measure decreed by the French Government.

Q. I want you to look at one of the first reports that you received from Sauckel on his labour programme. It is Document 1296-PS, Exhibit GB 325. It starts with a letter from Sauckel to you dated 29th July, 1942:

"Dear Reich Minister:

I enclose for your information a copy of a report to the Fuehrer and to the Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich. Heil Hitler.

Yours faithfully,
Fritz Sauckel."

Q. Yes. And you must presumably have examined it, did you not?

A. Yes, not now; it was submitted to me for information.

Q. And you examined it at the time?

A. I assume that I read it, that I glanced through it quickly. It had no further interest for me.

Q. You will see in the first page of the report itself that it indicates, for instance, that in the period from April to July, 1942, which was the first period of activity of Sauckel as plenipotentiary general for man-power, he had obtained a total of 1,639,794 foreign workers, and you see that 221,009 of those were Soviet prisoners of war. You saw that, didn't you?

A. I probably read it. I had no reason to object to it. Sauckel was not under my orders. He was really under the Four-Year Plan, as the signature here shows; but for all practical purposes he was immediately under the Fuehrer. He sent the reports straight to the Fuehrer; and the only reason why I myself did not pass the report on to the Fuehrer was because I knew that the same report had reached the Fuehrer via Reichsleiter Bormann. Otherwise I had nothing at all to do with this matter.

Q. But you knew perfectly well that it was wickedly wrong, didn't you, to compel soldiers that had been captured in battle to go to work against their own country?

A. It was Sauckel's job to arrange that with the offices with which he worked; I never bothered about this question. That was a matter for Sauckel to arrange with the appropriate departments, with the Wehrmacht, and possibly, in respect to international law, with the Foreign Office. Moreover, I see no mention of prisoners of war here.

Q. I don't want to suggest that you are -

A. I have not yet read anything about prisoners of war.

Q. Just look at the first page of the report. There is no mystery about this, you know. You can read German perfectly easily.

A. Yes, but I cannot read reports of several pages in one minute.

Q. Just look at the first page of the report.

A. Yes, now I see it.

Q. You see from that report, quite clearly, do you not, that in the very first four months of Sauckel's career as a slave- driver he obtained 221,009 Soviet prisoners of war to work in this labour machine?

A. The details did not interest me. I had no authority to supervise Sauckel. A report was sent in stating how he had done this. As to whether he had a right to do it - that was a question which he had to settle in agreement with the appro-

[Page 175]

Q. You have testified on Sauckel's behalf that he resisted the suggestion that the S.S. should work in this sphere of labour personnel. Did you not say that?

A. No, I did not say that. I merely said that he did not want to have the S.S. alone, but that he wanted support from any executive authorities which might be appointed at the time. It is obvious, of course, that in the partisan regions these would be mainly police and S.S.

Q. And quite simply, you knew that Sauckel was asking for more help from the S.S. to get more labour. That is what he was after, wasn't it?

A. Yes, otherwise he could not work in these regions, if order was not maintained.

Q. Just look at the Document 1292-PS, which is Exhibit USA 225 and RF 68. That is the report of a conference on the allocation of labour in 1944, 4th January, the minutes of which you wrote yourself, so that if anything you say is to be relied upon, that is your report. You will see that there were at that conference Hitler, Sauckel, Speer, Keitel, Milch, Himmler.

A. The new work programme for 1944 was made out and I was instructed to inform the departments concerned. I took part in this conference only because it concerned a measure in which the respective fields of a number of offices had to be made known. Otherwise I would not have participated in this at all.

Q. And in that conference Hitler said that Sauckel must get at least another four million workers for the man-power pool, did he not?

A. That is possible. The Fuehrer asked more of Sauckel than Sauckel thought he could provide.

Q. And Sauckel said that whether he could do that depended primarily on what German enforcement agents would be made available; his project could not be carried out with domestic enforcement agents. And then your record goes on:

"The Reichsfuehrer S.S. explained that the executive agents put at his disposal were very few in number but that he, that is to say, Himmler, would try to help on the Sauckel project by increasing their number and working them harder. The Reichsfuehrer S.S. immediately made 2,500 men from the concentration camps available for air-raid precautions in Vienna."

A. There is no doubt of that, but Sauckel did not want to have help from the S.S. only, he wanted to get any help he needed for the country in question from the appropriate establishment, as I said before - the Feldkommandantur, for instance.

Q. There is a last document which I want to put to you on Sauckel. It is Document 3819-PS, Exhibit GB 306, a small part of which was read into the record by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. That is a report from Sauckel to Hitler, dated 17th March, 1944. I take it that you probably saw a copy of that report, did you not?

A. I do not know it.

Q. Just look at it, because it is most illuminating on the attitude of Sauckel toward the assistance of the S.S. and the German Police.

A. Yes; this is dated July, 1944. I have one here which is dated 11th July, 1944.

THE PRESIDENT: Major Elwyn Jones, he is saying that he has in his hand a document of 11th July, 1944. The document you referred to was 17th March, was it not?

MAJOR ELWYN JONES: Yes.

Q. You have got your minutes of the conference. Is there not attached to it a report of Sauckel dated 17th March?

A. There is another report here dated 5th April.

MAJOR ELWYN JONES: I shall not proceed with that part of the document, my Lord.

Q. If you will turn to the document dated 12th July, that will do for my present purposes. You remember that is your own report of the conference of 12th July,

[Page 176]

A. I was always neutral at such conferences. If there were any differences of opinion, I offered my service as go- between.

Q. What were you neutral about, witness?

A. I was not in charge of an office. The other departments had their own departmental interests.

Q. You were not being an honest broker between Sauckel and Himmler, were you?

A. I frequently had to try to effect a compromise between various people, including on occasion Himmler or Sauckel, when a dispute arose; and I think I need not blush to say that in that case I was an honest broker. I wanted to bring about an agreement between these two so that it would not be necessary to involve the Fuehrer in their differences of opinion.

Q. Just look at the manner in which you opened that Conference. You said there - it is the second sentence under your name:

"He limited the theme of the discussion to an examination of all the possible means of making good the present deficit of foreign workers."

"The question of whether and in what form greater compulsion can coerce people to accept work in Germany must remain in the foreground."

A. Yes; they were obviously thinking of female labour and of a reduction of the age limits set for juvenile workers.

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