Various

“ JODL: Yes, I understood you. My propaganda division worked in Berlin. I cannot tell you in detail how it worked with Minister Rosenberg or with the Ministry of Propaganda on such a document. But General Von Wedel, the chief of this division, could tell you. I only knew it was drawn up in agreement with the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, for I was always eager that we should not take separate lines but rather work in line with the competent civilian authorities. But it is only propaganda; it is not a directive to destroy Russia. Propaganda is a spiritual weapon. ”

“ Prosecutor, have yourself had sufficient administrative experience to realize that in every department, anywhere in every country of the world, it is a matter of course that administrative orders should be checked. One does not need to know that mistakes are made in human life and in every human organization; a control must be exercised all the same.
GEN. ALEXANDROV: If you deny that you went there in order to improve conditions and to suppress the crimes perpetrated in the course of labor recruitment, then you must have gone there to accelerate the deportation of manpower into Germany. ”

“ MR. ROBERTS: If the world is going to be told the truth, what is the earthly good of manufacturing an incident?
JODL: I testified as to that yesterday—I can only repeat what I said yesterday at length: I knew the history of war too well not to know that in every war things like that happen—the question as to who fired the first shot. And Czechoslovakia at that time had already fired thousands of shots which had fallen on this territory.
MR. ROBERTS: Now, I say, Witness, subject to correction, that you are not answering the question at all. ”

“ SAUCKEL: Yes, but I request that I be shown the document in cross-examination so that I can define my attitude in detail.
M. HERZOG: This document is taken from your own document book, which you yourself submitted.
SAUCKEL: Yes, I remember it well.
M. HERZOG: Were the Nuremberg Laws concerning Jews in accordance with your convictions?
SAUCKEL: I had no influence on legislation such as culminated in the Nuremberg Laws. My conviction is that every nation and every race has the right to exist and to demand respect and protection through itself. ”

“ SAUCKEL: Youths were supposed to be brought in only as volunteers.
THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle) : You did not recruit any youth involuntarily; you mean that?
SAUCKEL: I did not.
THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle) : I do not mean you personally; I mean the administration.
SAUCKEL: No, the labor administration was not supposed to bring in any youths, especially girls, by compulsion; only voluntarily. Domestic servants were only volunteers.
THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle) : Some were brought in to be educated in Germany and to become German citizens, were they not? ”

“ I am of the opinion, from the point of view of international law, that members of a resistance movement against their own Norwegian government are certainly not to be considered as normal troops but as constituting an uprising, a rebellion. But if Norwegian troops come to Norway from England, then they are regular soldiers. And that, today, is still my opinion on the basis of international law. ”

“ M. HERZOG: Did the Defendant Speer approve of all the steps which you took in recruiting foreign labor?
SAUCKEL: At all events he agreed, or he demanded, that workers should be put at his disposal. Sometimes, however, we did not entirely agree as to how it should be done; for instance, we did not agree about the protected factories in France.
M. HERZOG: We will come to that later. I ask you to tell me whether you always succeeded in satisfying the demands for workers which were made to you by the different sections of German industry? ”

“ But what he has done in this brief time to collect workers from all over Europe and bring them to our factories with such rapidity is a unique feat. I will say this to you all: If everybody in his own sphere would apply a tenth of the energy which Gauleiter Sauckel has applied, then indeed the tasks which have been assigned to you would be easily fulfilled. That is my inner conviction and not mere words.”
Did you hear such an appreciation of your activities from the lips of Reich Marshal Göring? ”

“ I would ask you, Sauckel, you who yesterday described your own life as a workman, what you meant when you said: “To an inmate of a concentration camp and to a Jew work is not a mark of nobility.”
SAUCKEL: I want to say most emphatically that this paragraph is a very condensed and free rendering, and not a shorthand report. I raised an objection because I assumed that inmates of concentration camps would be traitors. My only object was that these people should not be taken to the same places of work as the other workers, the Jews either. ”

“ DR. LATERNSER: Generaloberst, can you give further examples regarding the efforts of the commanding generals to end the hopeless war?
JODL: No commanding general could touch upon the political question, because the ending of a war is not a military but a political decision. But indirectly I must say that there was not one officer in a responsible position who did not tell the Führer soberly, honestly, and openly what the military situation was and describe it as hopeless—as indeed it turned out to be at the end. ”

“ Every additional gun which we procure brings us a minute closer to victory. It is bitter to tear people from their homes, from their children. But we did not want the war. The German child who loses its father at the front, the German wife who mourns her husband killed in battle, suffer far more. Let us disclaim every false sentiment now.
“Here we must be guided by the realization that in the long run a high output can be demanded of foreign workers only if they are satisfied with their lot. I will not tolerate men being treated badly. ”

“ If the Dutch-Belgian area were to fall into the hands of the English and French, then the enemy air forces, in order to strike at the industrial heart of Germany, would need to cover barely a sixth of the distance required by the German bomber to reach really important targets. If we were in possession of Holland, Belgium, or even the Straits of Dover as jumping-off bases for German air attacks, then, without a doubt, Great Britain could be struck a mortal blow, even if the strongest reprisals were attempted. ”

“ The present state of mind in France, the uncertainty concerning the means which the French Government possesses, the half-freedom in which it finds itself, all these do not give me the necessary authority to furnish Gauleiter Sauckel with an immediate reply. We can do nothing. We are not free to change salaries; we are not free even to combat the black market; we cannot take any political measure without everywhere coming up against some German authority which has substituted itself in our place. ”

“ The results of the Kapp Putsch in 1921, of the Hitler Putsch of 1923, are well known. If more proof is necessary, there is the result of 20 July 1944. At that time no one any longer hoped for victory in the true sense of the word. Nevertheless, in this revolt, in this attempt, not one soldier, not a single arm of the Wehrmacht, not one worker, rose up. All the perpetrators and all the members of the Putsch were alone. To overthrow this system a revolution would have been necessary, a mightier, a more powerful revolution than the National Socialist one had been. ”

“ Our standpoint was that we had to do our duty to our people.
DR. SERVATIUS: It is not intended that you should give an explanation in the wider sense, but that you should limit yourself to the general aspects of the question of labor allocation, and tell us whether today you consider your activity justified or not.
SAUCKEL: From the point of view of the war situation and of German economy, and as I saw and tried to carry out my allocation of labor, I considered it justified, and, above all, inevitable; for Germany and the countries we occupied were an economic whole that could not be split up. ”

“ SAUCKEL: I request permission to reply to the word “minimize.” The distribution and direction of manpower in the Reich was my principal task. It included, with the German workers, 30 million persons. I do not wish to minimize this task, for I did my best to introduce order into this mass of workers, as dictated by my sense of duty. I do not wish to minimize anything. It was my task and my duty towards my people.
GEN. ALEXANDROV: We need not argue on this subject. It would be much simpler to consult the document. An order by Göring will be handed to you in a moment. ”

“ I fought for the principle that these additional rations, which the workers from the West were already largely receiving, should be granted to the workers from the East as well; and that where western workers—that is, Dutch and Belgian workers—did not keep up their output in the same way as the Eastern Workers, these additional rations should be cut down accordingly, but not the standard ration which applied to the German people as well.
M. HERZOG: You therefore consider that if the output of one worker is smaller than that of another, his food rations must be smaller. ”

“ GEN. ALEXANDROV: And now, one last question. In your speech at the first meeting of the staffs for the Allocation of Labor, held in Weimar on 6 January 1943, you stated—and I quote from the third document book of your defense counsel, Document Number Sauckel-82:
“Now, where the foundations of our work are concerned...”—I skip the first paragraph and pass directly to the second—“We are true to our Führer and to our people. This loyalty justifies us in the execution of the harshest measures.”—And then, at the end—“In this respect I will assume ever-increasing responsibility.” ”

“ SAUCKEL: I must say that from our point of view, and according to our judgment concerning economic and labor questions, there was a great deal of manpower and very extensive reserves in the occupied territories.
DR. SERVATIUS: Do you mean that in comparison the economic forces of Germany were far more exhausted than those of the occupied countries?
SAUCKEL: Perhaps I can show it by a comparison with the first World War. In the first World War, 10 to 12 million Germans were mobilized for labor. In this war about 25 million German men and women were used, and more than half were women. ”

“ SAUCKEL: I did not hear that statement myself. He gave a specialized report on questions of labor legislation, as it says at the beginning. I am seeing the record for the first time in my life. There were several parallel meetings at the same time. I did not hear it myself, but it stands to reason that some sort of ruling regarding penalties had to be made, as is done in all labor legislation.
Perhaps I may read to you from the same document, the beginning:
“Measures regulating the employment of labor and wages are only possible on the basis of a healthy working morale. ”

“ What I demand and have demanded for my own people is exactly the same.
M. HERZOG: Did you see to it that the Nuremberg Laws were strictly applied in the Gau of Thuringia?
SAUCKEL: The Nuremberg Laws could apply to Thuringia only insofar as my authority to appoint or dismiss employees was involved; and, of course, according to German law, it was my duty to carry out the law. The carrying out of this law by me entailed neither ill-usage nor any other inhuman treatment.
M. HERZOG: Did you approve of Hitler’s theory of living space?
SAUCKEL: The Führer wrote about living space in his book. ”

“ If today people who co-operated actively to bring Hitler to power, who had a part in the laws which we soldiers with our oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler were bound to support, if these people demanded revolution and mutiny of the Wehrmacht when they no longer liked the man, or when reverses occurred, then I can only call that wicked. ”