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Shofar FTP Archive File: people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-090-04


Archive/File: people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-090-04
Last-Modified: 1999/06/11

Q.  Yes.

A.  Yes, that is correct, but that was a directive from the
State Police Central Office Vienna, and not from me. In
fact, this rather surprised me, because at that time I
definitely had no executive responsibilities, I had no
executive authority at that time.

Q.  But it says here that you transmitted this directive to
Vienna, by telephone. Is that correct?

A.  It does not say that I transmitted it. It merely says:
announcement by telephone. Hauptsturmfuehrer Eichmann
announces that the No. 3 Genzbacher Street Home will be
vacated on 18 January. By that date, all males have to leave
the country, or else they will be transferred to Buchenwald.

Q.  Is this what you told them?

A.  The directive that they would be sent to Buchenwald did
not come from me, because at that time I was responsible for
emigration, but not Jewish Affairs, as the office
organization chart clearly shows.

Q.  So what is written here, that you threatened with
Buchenwald, is untrue?

A.  Yes, indeed. I refer again to a report by Dr. Loewenherz
where he states...

Q.  I ask you whether this is true or not true?

A.  This matter concerning Buchenwald has nothing to do with
me.

Q.  So what is written there is untrue then?

A.  I suppose it is true, but not that I had anything...with
Buchenwald, that I ordered Buchenwald. I could, simply, not
do this. Please take a look at the office organization
chart. I just was not at all competent for this.

Q.  It says here that you transmitted a message to Vienna,
and in the last paragraph it says that if these measures are
not taken, the people will be sent to Buchenwald. Did you
transmit such a message or not?

A.  That is quite possible, this is something I do not want
to deny at all, because - if the appropriate department made
this kind of a disposition, then I was involved in it
because I was responsible for emigration, and therefore I
obviously had to inform Dr. Loewenherz of the matter at that
time.

Q.  And the letter of apology which Stahl wrote, for having
criticized the Central Office for Emigration, naturally, he
wrote this of his own accord, and not after you had demanded
this of him?

A.  After twenty-three or twenty-four years have passed, I
don't know this any more. True, I have read it here, and I
consider this quite possible; why not: what person is glad
to have his affairs criticized, when this criticism is not
justified?

Q.  You did, then, force Stahl to write this letter?

A.  This I don't know. On this matter I cannot comment at
all any more. Who can remember such details after twenty-
four years? This I do not know.

Q.  But in order to make completely sure that it gets to
Vienna, you were the person who transmitted Stahl's letter
of apology, isn't that right?

A.  If it can be determined without doubt, then I would
certainly not deny it. And why not?

Q.  You actually controlled the Vienna Jewish community when
you were in Berlin as well. Right?

A.  Yes. After I came to Berlin and was later put in contact
with the affairs of the Reich Central Office, whose
supervising executive was Mueller and whose chief was
Heydrich. The Central Office in Vienna and in Prague
continued to exist, in a parallel, subordinated status with
regard to the Central Office and I continued to have
dealings with the functionaries, chiefly with Dr.
Loewenherz. He used to come to Berlin, and also, conversely,
I would go to Vienna.

Q.  And that even included such details  which depended on
you, as, for instance, the payment of a pension to a retired
employee of the Community, the sale of a Jewish pharmacy,
the distribution of matzot* {* matza (pl. matzot)
unleavened bread eaten by Jews during Passover}on Passover,
etc.?

A.  I don't think this was so, because when I hear the word
matzot this actually must have been the reverse. Dr.
Loewenherz would come to me with all petty details, whenever
he was unsuccessful elsewhere, but was turned down. And so,
I remember that he came to me one day, in order to bring in,
somehow, a fairly large consignment of matzot, at the proper
time - a matter on which every office in Vienna turned him
down.

Q.  And you concerned yourself with this?

A.  You have to read through the complete Loewenherz File
notes and then you can see that this man came to me with
every trifle, because elsewhere, as I have said, he had no
luck, but was turned down. I listened to the man, and
wherever I could help him, I did so. The reports prove this.

Q.  And he came to you with every trifle, because no one
else had the authority; and when the people in Vienna wanted
to send money to those deported into the
Generalgouvernement, Brunner said: "Eichmann is competent in
this matter." Is that correct?

A.  That is quite possible, because there are certain
matters in which I was officially authorized and others
where I was officially not authorized. One has to
distinguish between the various subjects.

Q.  Perhaps you can tell me what connection there is between
support by a Jew for his relatives in the
Generalgouvernement and emigration? How is the Central
Office for Emigration involved in this?

A.  Yes, this I can explain precisely. This was  the attempt
to establish a Jewish state in Radom, a Jewish state in this
district, where the Jews should and could henceforth live by
themselves. This was one of my ideas which I presented to my
superiors at that time, a precursor of the Madagascar Plan,
which came up once again. It was a matter in which my
attention was engaged not just on my own, or through my
reading of Boehm's book, but rather through the Jewish
functionaries themselves, who were hard pressed by Party and
other circles and who would have been happy now to have soil
under their feet somewhere.

Presiding Judge: And would you now answer the question why
the transfer of money from Viennese Jews to their relatives
who had been deported to the Generalgouvernement was within
the authority of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration?

Accused:    This I no longer know in detail today. Surely
this must have been arranged in accordance with regulations.

Attorney General: You received copies of the Loewenherz
Report. What is written there is, I assume, correct?

Accused:    The Loewenherz files or the reports?

Q.  The file notes.

A.  I assume that, on the whole, this is probably correct.

Presiding Judge: This reply referred to the file notes and
not to the final report. I understand that as to that he has
a reservation.

Accused:    Yes, yes.

AttorneyGernal  The police questioned you at length about
the Loewenherz Report, which is marked T/154. With the
exception of a single detail about which you had a
reservation, namely that you gave the order to shoot the
hostages who were seized in connection with the "Red
Paradise" exhibition, with this single exception, did you
consider the report correct?

Presiding Judge: What page is this?

Attorney General: Page 2877. It begins on page 2875, with
the words: "should and could henceforth live by themselves."
In the interrogation about the Loewenherz Report, which Mr.
Less read out to you, you said about the order of the
Reichsfuehrer-SS: "...but here, General Mueller read this
out to them or reported on it - the order of the
Reichsfuehrer-SS...that one overlooks a General and puts
this falsely to my account..."  And on the matter of the
hostages you say: "This I would have...well, so to speak,
this I would never have expected. I didn't think that
possible. I really didn't think that Dr. Loewenherz would
write something so untrue."

With this one exception you voiced no reservation about the
Loewenherz Report.

Accused:    To this day I have not read the Loewenherz
Report. I started reading it, and I have read parts of it,
but I have not read it through. I rejected it after I saw
this passage here, and I saw how another author of another
report, I think his name was Henschel, reported the matter
just as it had happened.

Presiding Judge: I think, Mr. Hausner, if I am not mistaken,
that Captain Less read out to him several passages from the
report, and those passages the Accused apparently confirmed.

Attorney General: That is why I am asking him.

Presiding Judge: The question is whether this refers to the
entire report.

Attorney General: I think almost the whole report. Of course
I have not compared it. There are three tapes.

Presiding Judge: Anyhow the question should be limited to
what was read out to him there.

Attorney General: I shall limit it to this.

With this single exception, you have confirmed all other
excerpts which were read out to you from the Loewenherz
Report, which Captain Less read out to you, as being
correct. Isn't that right?

Accused:    I can no longer remember which excerpts Captain
Less read out to me, but if he did read out to me and I said
at the time that these were correct, then these must be
correct, unless I have, in the meantime, found out, through
the documents that the state of affairs was different. Other
than that, however, I must again insist that I refused to
read the Loewenherz Report through.

Q.  I assume then, that you have read the report up to that
passage to which you take exception. And that you did not
read any further?

A.  I most certainly did not read the report up to there.
Rather I skimmed through it, and then by some circumstance,
the nature of which I no longer remember today, I came to
this affair, and then I compared it with the same passage in
the report of - Henschel I think is the name - but this does
not mean that I had read the report up to this passage. Had
I read it, then I certainly would have had my reasons not to
confirm these various passages, since I saw already when I
glanced through it, that this report must have been produced
only after 1945, because things which are described in it,
did not occur in this way.

Q.  How do you know that it is identical with the truth, if
you have not read it carefully except for this single
passage?

A.  I said, Mr. Attorney General, that I had only glanced
through it, and by glancing through it, I mean just
browsing, as the expression goes, and through this I
discovered it, because on the other hand, we had the notes
of conversations by Dr. Loewenherz and when one compares the
two, one can easily find a certain difference.

Q.  Obersturmfuehrer Dannecker was present at part of the
meeting which you had with the representatives of the Jewish
communities of Prague, Vienna and Berlin, on 3 July 1940.
What was his task then and why did he participate in that
meeting?

A.  This I am unable to say now. I would like to see the
documents.

Q.  I will give you the document, T/802. It says: "And
later, Dannecker was also brought into the conversation."
Did you ask Dannecker to participate?

A.  From a cursory glance I conclude that this concerns the
Madagascar Plan, of which the negotiator - I assume it was
Dr. Loewenherz - naturally was not informed of the details.
Rather, it was said that this concerned some  European
solution regarding a territory which could be utilized for
several million people - and here Dr. Loewenherz was asked
to contribute his ideas.

Q.  And you asked that Dannecker be brought in?

A.  It is possible that Dannecker was at that time the
specialist in charge of the matter in the Section. I cannot
say, I do not want to deny it nor do I want to confirm it,
but surely this can be found in some kind of personal file.

Q.  In any event, you brought Dannecker to the meeting to
talk about the so-called Madagascar Plan, without explicitly
calling it by that name.

A.  In this particular case with Dr. Loewenherz?

Q.  Yes.

A.  It is even possible that he was commissioned, as
specialist, to discuss this affair with Dr. Loewenherz.

Q.  But I am asking whether he was ordered by you to do so?

A.  After all this time, I cannot say.

Q.  Was he working in your Section?

A.  I think that Dannecker was a specialist for a short
time, in Berlin, in the Section. I may be wrong, but for
this reason I said earlier that this must emerge without any
doubt from the documents which were found subsequently.

Q.  One last question in connection with this report. On
page 4 there is something which we would like to have you
clear up. It says there that you referred the Jewish
community in Prague to Pastor Grueber's Bureau in connection
with aid to apostate Jews.

Presiding Judge: That statement was made by Dannecker?

Attorney General: Yes, but I am asking why that was so? Who
said this, you or Dannecker?

Accused:    It is evident from the document that Dannecker
made this statement. It says:

     "Obersturmfuehrer Dannecker declares in reply to a
     query, that support through the Pastor Grueber Bureau
     of the work of the department of the Jewish community
     in Prague in charge of apostate Jews, can proceed only
     through the Central Offices for Jewish Emigration in
     Berlin and Prague."

Q.  Is that so that you can control this matter too, and
that you would be informed in detail as to what Pastor
Grueber is doing?

A.  No, as far as I can try and take myself back, as it
were, into that period, the Jewish community had no
jurisdiction over those who were Jewish merely in the sense
of the Nuremberg laws - apostate Jews - and would not carry
out this work of their own accord. Other offices became
involved in this, and just how this was carried out in
detail, for example Pastor Grueber's Bureau - that I do not
know any longer. I do not even know any more, at this
moment, whether he spoke of this here, in the course of his
testimony. Yet, somehow it was most likely part of the
activities carried out by the Central Office.

Q.  To sum up, one may safely say that your Section
controlled the totality of Jewish life in the Reich,
including social welfare for Jews and apostate Jews. A.
This would not be correct, since the Head Office for Reich
Security was divided into seven Departments - and several
Departments had officials in charge who dealt with Jewish
matters. On behalf of Deapartment IV, I dealt with this as
ordered - that is true.
Q.  And you had the decisive voice, in your Department IV,
in everything that could affect Jews in the Reich. You and
none other.

A.  That is not correct either, Mr. Attorney General.
Rather, on this subject the Chief of the Department retained
for himself all matters of principle and all important
matters, as the files obviously show. I had to do all those
things which I was ordered to do, and the documents give a
faithful picture of this.

Q.  But I am asking  about facts and not about documents.

A.  These were the facts, Mr. Attorney General.

Q.  That you controlled Jewish life in the Reich.

A.  No, that is not correct. No, this is not correct.

Q.  But this is evidently clear from the Loewenherz Report
and all the other reports and all the testimonies we have
heard here about this period. Is all this false? Are only
you telling the truth?

A.  No, the documents are telling the truth, the documents
confirm that which I have just said.

Q.  Yes, if you want to call black white and white black -
there is nothing I can say against that.

Presiding Judge: The Court will adjourn now. The next
Session will be tomorrow at 8:30 a.m.


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