The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

The Trial of Adolf Eichmann
Session 44
(Part 2 of 7)


State Attorney Bar-Or: In my copy this is the first sentence on page 2. I shall read one more sentence: "During the week under review, the Head of the Palestine Office was in Berlin, in order to report to Hauptsturmfuehrer Eichmann about his journey to Geneva."

Presiding Judge: Is this from the first volume?

State Attorney Bar-Or: Yes.

Presiding Judge: We shall designate this T/828(a).

State Attorney Bar-Or: Now I turn to our document No. 1332, the report for the week ended on 22 March 1940.

Presiding Judge: These volumes are from 1942, as we can see on the cover.

State Attorney Bar-Or: I stopped in the year 1940. These volumes are already in the archives of the Court. They have already been deposited with the Court. These here are exhibits T/162 and T/163.

Presiding Judge: We shall cancel the marking T/828 (a). This will be T/162(a). I want to refer always to the volume in question. This is from 1940.

State Attorney Bar-Or: From March, 1940. It refers to page 152. The report is marked: Report No. 12. Are you asking about our document No. 1331 or 1332, Your Honour?

Presiding Judge: If you say that this is from 1940 - it must be document No. 1332.

State Attorney Bar-Or: Yes, I understand.

Presiding Judge: This must be T/163. The report will finally be T/163(a).

State Attorney Bar-Or: You are now marking Prosecution document No. 1331, Your Honour?

Presiding Judge: Yes, this is correct.

State Attorney Bar-Or: Thank you. I think the Court has before it document No. 1332, which refers to the week ended on 22 March 1940. It is the report which begins on page 152, No. 12.

Presiding Judge: This will be T/163(b).

State Attorney Bar-Or: In paragraph II, Situation Report, I should like to direct your attention to several points. Here we have an order according to which all Jews, Jewish enterprises and Jewish associations are obliged to deposit with the authorities all securities, objects made of gold, platinum or silver, as well as precious stones. And then it says: "On 18 March 1940, the heads of the Jewish Religious Community and of the Palestine Office appeared before SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Eichmann and were given instructions with regard to the implementation of the order of the Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia for the care of the Jews and the Jewish organizations." I go on to report 1333 for the week ended on 29 March 1940. It begins on page 185 of the volume which is before the Court.

On page 185a it says, among other things, that "The deputy head of the Jewish Religious Community appeared in Berlin before SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Eichmann on matters of transport."

And then: "The Jewish monuments in Prague - Moses and Rabbi Loew - the reference is to the Great Rabbi - have been removed."

Presiding Judge: This will be T/163(c).

State Attorney Bar-Or: I pass on to document No. 503.

Presiding Judge: Are you not submitting any reports from the other volumes?

State Attorney Bar-Or: I shall revert to them later. I am following the chronological order.

Presiding Judge: There are three documents here. Are they being submitted together?

State Attorney Bar-Or: This is, in fact, a batch of documents which belong together. We have here an exchange of letters, a consultation about the question of designating the Jews in the area of the Protectorate with the Jewish Star. Letters are exchanged between Lammers' Reich Chancellery and the Minister of the Interior. Of course, the opinion of the State Secretary representing the Reich in the Protectorate, SS Gruppenfuehrer Frank, has also to be ascertained. On behalf of the Minister of the Interior, we have here the opinion of Dr. Stuckart, whom we have already met, of 14 August 1941. In the end the matter is decided in the office of Lammers.

Presiding Judge: This will be T/831.

State Attorney Bar-Or: I go on to document No. 911, a letter from the Accused to the Foreign Ministry. This deals again with individual Jews in Prague and who have apparently pleaded, according to the Foreign Ministry, that they are neither citizens of the Reich nor citizens of the Protectorate. The Accused lets it be known that he intends to send them to what he calls "Arbeitseinsatz," i.e., he wants to send them to a work assignment.

Presiding Judge: This will be marked T/832.

Something has been struck out in the document.

State Attorney Bar-Or: The deletion is in the original. It was, of course, not made in the office of the Accused, but in the Foreign Ministry, and it is explained thus: The Foreign Ministry had to reply to the applicant in this document; instead of writing a new letter, the answer is given on Eichmann's reply itself. What has to be notified is left in, the rest is struck out. We shall find this in a number of documents.

With your permission, I should like to revert for a moment to T/294 and to draw the Court's attention to it. It was originally submitted by the Attorney General together with several basic documents. It is the report of a meeting held in Prague on 10 October 1941 about the solution of the Jewish problem. The document was submitted at the time because of the connection, which appears here - so we maintain - between the Operations Groups led by Nebe and the Accused. But the principal importance of the document lies not with Nebe and not with his Operations Group. The principal importance lies in the fact that here, for the first time, a plan for the establishment of Theresienstadt Camp was prepared (in connection with some press conference, which was or was not held). This is actually the chief importance of this document. And in this connection, I should like to direct the attention of the Court to several passages:

First, on page 4 of the document, we find references to the difficulty of evacuating this village or fortress, which was inhabited by Czechs, in order to adapt it to the changed requirements. Concessions have to be made because of the mentality of the Czechs in the Protectorate, etc.

On page 5 we see that the participants in the meeting decided to put the large apartments in the good houses in Theresienstadt exclusively at the disposal of the external branch of the Central Ghetto Authority, the Council of Elders, the Foodstuffs Office, and, last but not least, the guard units. In other words, not at the disposal of the ghetto inmates who were to be taken there. "The Jews will have to find accommodation under the ground," as it says here.

And furthermore, it says that Jews are not to be buried in Theresienstadt and that their bodies will have to be cremated in a place that is inaccessible to the public. The Court will certainly remember the drawing which was submitted by Mr. Ansbacher and which shows how this regulation was put into effect.

Finally it says: "The Gypsies who are detained for evacuation may be taken to Riga, to Stahlecker, whose camp has been constructed on the model of Sachsenhausen." And the document ends:

"Since the Fuehrer wants the Jews, as far as possible, to be removed from the German area by the end of the year, all pending questions have to be solved immediately, including the question of transport, lest it pose a difficulty in this respect."
I do not know whether this was brought to the attention of the Court at the time when this document was first submitted. It was put before the Accused, who referred to it in extenso on pages 3424 ff of his Statement. I should like to read only one passage from the Statement. It describes his participation in the meeting, how the various matters were dealt with, how each participant expressed his opinion. On page 3443 the Accused says that there was a press conference, and that Heydrich said that within one month the entire Protectorate would be judenrein.

But in the end he could not keep this promise - the means to be used had to be planned. In order that nothing would be promised that could not be implemented, he, Eichmann, prepares the Unterlagen (data), the details for the meeting, and he concludes:

"Ich bin jedenfalls mit meinen Unterlagen - also ich will mal so sagen: ich bin vorbereitet hingegangen wie jeder. Es wird ja jeder - es ist - wird ja jeder informiert sein - und habe eben das dann zur Kenntnis gebracht, was der Chef Heydrich von mir erfragt hat, um diese Sache hier eben zu besprechen. Und jeder wird eben sein - sein Kommentar von sich aus dazu gegeben haben" (I came at any rate with my facts - well, I want to put it this way: I came prepared like everybody else. After all, everyone will be - is - informed, aren't they - and I then gave the information which the boss, Heydrich, asked of me, in order to discuss this matter. And everyone will have contributed his own comment).

State Attorney Bar-Or: I pass on to document No. 1236. The Court will see a form called "Einweisungsbescheid" (Transfer Order), actually an order to make a deposit in the Emigration Fund for Bohemia and Moravia; and attached to it is a sample form for payment of Auswanderungsumlage (emigration tax), as it is called here, dated 6 October 1941. In this way assets, property and monies were transferred to what here is called the "Emigration Fund for Bohemia and Moravia," the fund which, in the end, had to pay for the upkeep of Theresienstadt Camp.

Presiding Judge: This will be marked T/833.

State Attorney Bar-Or: I go on to document No. 732 of 18 September 1942. Here we see a sample of the correspondence between the Reichsfuehrung-SS in Berlin and the Dresdnerbank, the German Bank which carried out the financial transactions, about which we shall hear from a witness in the course of today. These were transactions made especially in the Protectorate, and also in other places such as Vienna, in which the Jews were obliged to transfer their monies. The Dresdnerbank is in charge of keeping the accounts of this fund in Prague, the Reichsfuehrung-SS in Berlin. The report of 18 February mentions accounts in the Dresdnerbank to the credit of the Reichsfuehrung-SS and points to respectable amounts which have accumulated in these accounts already in February 1942.

Presiding Judge: This will be marked T/834.

Judge Raveh: A small point concerning the previous document No. 1236. There is a new name there: "Zentralstelle fuer die Regelung der Judenfrage" (Central Office for the Regulation of the Jewish Question).

State Attorney Bar-Or: The only Zentralstelle which changed its name during the War was the Zentralstelle in Prague. In the beginning, in 1939, it was called, as in Vienna and later in Berlin, Zentralstelle fuer juedische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration), and this Zentralstelle later changed its name to the name you have just mentioned. Your Honour, the two names are completely identical.

State Attorney Bar-Or: I go on to document No. 1012. This is a minute from the files of the Foreign Ministry, dated 2 June 1942, and it says:

"According to information from the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service (Regierungsrat Suhr), out of the 2,000 Jews of Slovak nationality resident in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, approximately 1,000 have been deported to the East, or transferred to the ghetto in Theresienstadt. No difficulties were encountered during the implementation of this measure."
Presiding Judge: This will be Exhibit T/835.

State Attorney Bar-Or: I pass on to document No. 1195. It is an interesting document, not so much from the point of view of its contents, as because of its form. It contains an exact statistical survey of the Jews in the Protectorate as of 31 March 1942. Here, for the first time, the Court can see those statistical tables that the Accused liked so much, as we know, and which increasingly filled his rooms in Berlin. The surveys were made not by the Gestapo, but by the Community in Prague, by the Jews of the Community themselves. The interesting thing about the document is the covering letter signed by Guenther, who was in charge of the Zentralstelle, and who forwarded the document to the Accused in Berlin.

On the document the Court will find the marking of the Zentralstelle and an incoming mail stamp; it seems that this is the only document that passed through the registry of the Accused, the entry stamp says "IVB4 a." The explanation of how the document was found is easier than appears at first sight. We have already heard, and shall hear again, that a large part of the archives of the Accused was transferred to Theresienstadt towards the end of the War and was burned there. We have heard evidence about this. The document before us was obtained from the authorities in Prague. I have the impression that it is one of the few documents saved from that fire.

Presiding Judge: We shall give it a separate number.

State Attorney Bar-Or: We have attached it because it comes with the statistical report; it transmits the statistical report to the Accused.

Presiding Judge: This will be Exhibit T/836 (together with the letter).

Judge Halevi: What was burned - all the documents from the office of the Accused?

State Attorney Bar-Or: The documents of the Accused were burned. The archives of the Accused were sent to Theresienstadt and burned there in March 1945.

Judge Halevi: What was sent to Theresienstadt - the complete archives?

State Attorney Bar-Or: The archives of the office at Kurfuerstenstrasse 116. Because of the bombings, a safe place had to be found. The area was populated by Jews in its entirety, a fact known to the Allies, and it was found suitable for housing these archives.

Two more remarks: The Court will certainly note that here it says not only IVB4, but that the marking "a" is added; we find it on documents, and it is also printed on the stamp. And the registry distributes the mail to sub-sections. This document was shown to the Accused and was numbered T/37(295).

I go on to document No. 1334, entitled: Monthly Report for February 1942. It refers to Volume 42 and begins on page 167.

Presiding Judge: This will be Exhibit T/828(a).


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