The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

The Trial of Adolf Eichmann
Session 73
(Part 5 of 9)


Dr. Servatius: Yes, but has the Prosecutor not mentioned the number of comments, two hundred and more, which are in the typewritten records of the first tapes? There are places there where there are no comments, and there are other places where comments exist. In the additional collection, File 17, a more detailed explanation is given. I have already explained how it happened that the later records contain more detailed comments; I have explained that the lack of confidence engendered in the Accused's mind led to suspicions, and that these suspicions led to a detailed contract between the two, according to which the documents could only be published and utilized if the full signature of the Accused appeared on them.

There are also other aspects, from which one can realize the special, journalistic, interest which that journalist had in this whole episode. For example, it is known - and it can be proved - that already before the Accused's arrest, he offered this material to a certain newspaper, but without revealing the name of the person concerned. That same newspaper declined, since it was not interested in anonymous stories, without the name of the central figure who could be mentioned, for otherwise the matter would have become known, and to the Accused as well.

I also have to point out that, only eight days after Eichmann's arrest, the material was already handed to the weekly Life with rights of adaptation and use for its purposes. It is a pity that I should have been handed the material only now, at such a late stage. As far as I know, this material has been in the State of Israel for some time; to the best of my knowledge, it was transferred by Sassen to a representative of Yediot Hadashot.* {*German-language newspaper published in Israel}

To sum up, I would ask that the application to admit the document be rejected, and that the best available evidence be brought, namely the witnesses Sassen and Fritsch, whose addresses I am prepared to supply to the Court.

Attorney General: Perhaps I may be permitted to make a brief comment. I am submitting this material, not so much for the purpose of comparing its contents, as to compare its style. If the contents of Sassen's transcript had been identical with what the Accused told Bureau 06, I would not have troubled the Court for so many hours in this matter, because then it would have been superfluous. But I want to show the similarity of the style which identifies the person by whom the statement was made.

And one final remark: The material in question was, at the time when it was recorded and discovered, secret material; it was within the special knowledge of the Accused and a very limited number of other people. He was certainly interested in concealing it.

Presiding Judge: Mr. Hausner, this is really a new argument. Naturally, what you are saying is in response to the objection by the other party. That is true. But now I have to allow Dr. Servatius to reply.

Attorney General: Therefore I shall content myself with this one sentence.

Presiding Judge: [After Dr. Servatius rises to make his point.] Now we have really to submit to both sides.

Dr. Servatius: Your Honour, the Presiding Judge, only a few words. On the facts that the Accused recorded remarks on to a tape - as he did here as well with the Prosecution - of his own free will, remarks which - if I express myself cautiously - are of an unpleasant nature - on all this there is no dispute. We are only in conflict on the section that was made, on the composition of the journalistic story.

Presiding Judge: We shall consider this and give our decision. Will we be able to use the time left before the recess? We have about another quarter of an hour.

Attorney General: Yes, Your Honour.

Presiding Judge: Do you have another testimony?

Attorney General: Yes. I have a further request for a certain directive which I shall ask from the Court, concerning a particular chapter which has not yet been elucidated in evidence. Since the Court has made its comments on a number of matters, I do not want to call the witness before receiving a directive from the Court in this matter. I disregard the tens - possibly hundreds - of applications from people wishing to testify, each one about the fate of his own community.

Presiding Judge: You are not the only one to receive such applications; they reach the Court, which, of course, is not the right address.

Attorney General: I have received hundreds, Your Honour.

Presiding Judge: I have no doubt of that.

Attorney General: But, as I said in the opening stages, we can only follow the searchlight method and draw the Court's attention to descriptions which, in our view are typical, and, on the strength of them, we shall ask the Court to draw similar conclusions concerning other places and events.

But there is one aspect which has not yet been described at all. This is the flight of the Jews - upon the liquidation of the ghettos and the extermination operations - to the forests, their organization into family camps, their escape from the fury of the persecutor, their afflictions in the forest, their pursuit by the Germans there, their suffering from disease, from starvation, the protection given to them by the partisans, their organization into partisan units; according to my information, there were about twenty thousand such Jews. There were also about twenty thousand partisans.

I know that it is not the Court's wish that we attempt to depict the Holocaust fully, for the Court desires - and, with all due respect, rightly so - to confine the matters brought before it only to the indictment against the Accused. But, in our view, this also relates to the Accused. They fled from these hardships which the Accused brought upon them - they were forced to hide, and everything they underwent came from the Accused, if not directly, at least indirectly. The evidence should be exceedingly brief, from one of the persons who saw the camps, went along with them, accompanied them.

Presiding Judge: One of the camps of the partisans?

Attorney General: One of the people who fled to the forest after the revolt in the Nesvizh Ghetto, saw the family camps, joined a partisan unit, accompanied, for a period of two months, such a trek of Jewish families concealing themselves in the forest of Polesye and their experiences there. According to the number of questions that I want to put to this witness, Mr. Shalom Cholawski, of Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, this should not last more than twenty to thirty minutes. I would urge the Court to allow me to complete the picture.

Following this, I have a number of documents about the "Reinhardt Aktion" (the Reinhardt Operation). After that, there will be the evidence of Mr. Aharon Hoter-Yishai about the Jewish Brigade's encounter with the camps, and with that, I shall conclude.

Presiding Judge: Dr. Servatius, what do you wish to say regarding this application - a description of the chapter concerning the partisans?

Dr. Servatius: Your Honour, the Presiding Judge, I should like to go into this application and consider whether it is not admissible, and whether it would not be redundant. So far, I have refrained, and have not expressed objections to the question of lack of relevancy, for sometimes those are, nevertheless, matters important for the background; but it seems to me that now we are going too far. I, too, have been the recipient of very many applications and, amongst them, requests on the part of Jews to appear and to cast light on one or other aspect of the story. I examined every single application with all due seriousness, in order to see whether there was something there for the Accused's defence, and, thereafter, I have turned down all these approaches made so far. I would, therefore, be grateful to the Court if it should decide to set a limit and not to hear this evidence.

Presiding Judge: We shall deal with this matter as well during the recess. But let us complete the question of these documents, the "Reinhardt Aktion," and will that be the last of the documents?

Attorney General: We still have various odds and ends. First, I have to inform the Court that we approached the Israeli embassy in Warsaw and asked them to examine the document which the witness Bahir said he had identified.

Presiding Judge: The photograph.

Attorney General: The embassy did not find a photograph which could have been such as that which Mr. Bahir could have identified. They searched in the files of the Polish Government Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes - they did not find a photograph in which a man appeared in Himmler's entourage who, in their opinion, bore a resemblance to Eichmann.

I also applied, through our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the Swedish Government - following an observation made by His Honour, Judge Halevi: - and perhaps, after the recess, I could read the cable received from Stockholm. This we could possibly do after the recess, with the Court's permission.

I want to say at the outset, Your Honour, I shall ask the Court also at the end of today's Session not to oblige me to say that that is all, and that my story ends there. We want to make a thorough survey of our library of documents, and if we have forgotten something - and we are talking only of documents, not of witnesses - to be able to submit it when the sessions resume. We are certainly not talking of a large quantity. But if something of value has been overlooked, we should not like the door to be closed to us.

Presiding Judge: We shall see about that at the end of the day, when we get there.

Attorney General: First of all, regarding document No. 4 - we have discussed this with Defence Counsel. The Court will remember that this is the account of Auschwitz by the two young men who escaped. We explained that, in our view, there is no discrepancy in the numbers, but, nevertheless, the Defence does not agree to the submission of the document. I believe that we explained the matter to their satisfaction as well and, therefore, I shall do what I mentioned at the previous session, in reply to His Honour, Judge Halevi. I shall ask one of the two who escaped, who is in London, to let me have an affidavit, and I shall then submit the affidavit to the Court, together with the document, and the Court will decide as it thinks fit, at the proper time. I thought that the Defence would withdraw its objection after my explanation, but it did not turn out that way.

Now, with regard to the "Reinhardt Aktion." What was this Reinhardt Operation? This is explained in the affidavit of Oswald Pohl, our document No. 1106. I ask the Court to accept this document in evidence. Pohl is no longer alive.

Presiding Judge: Dr. Servatius, what do you have to say?

Dr. Servatius: I have no formal objection.

Presiding Judge:

Decision No. 77

We admit the affidavit of Pohl in evidence. Defence Counsel has no objection.

This document will be marked T/1384.

Attorney General: Pohl explains that this was an operation which had two aspects. There was an economic side to the operation: to plunder property and to ensure that the booty from the concentration camps be deposited in the Reichsbank. He says that he communicated with Pohl in regard to the delivery, and that the gold, jewellery and foreign currency were sent to the Reichsbank to the credit of the German Reich.

The other side of the coin in the Reinhardt Operation was the concentration of the Jews into extermination camps. And now, here is a number of reports on this operation.

Our document No. 187 is a secret report on the exploitation of the property of the Jews who were evacuated and deported. For purposes of secrecy, it was decided that Jewish property would henceforth be described as property that had been stolen or plundered or robbed - thus the property of the deported Jews was to be marked. And now, with great thoroughness, there are instructions what to do with the property, what to do with the sums of cash money - that is to go to the Reichsbank; what to do with the foreign currency. The watches are to go to the SS department for special workshops; men's underwear is to go to the Volksdeutsche outside the Reich; women's clothes are to go to the Volksdeutsche; silk underwear to the Ministry of the Economy; bed linen to the Mittelstelle of the Volksdeutsche - that is, some intermediary institution for equipping these persons with household requirements; sheets and so forth - to the front line; spectacles and lenses - to the Ministry of Health; valuable furs - these the SS wanted for themselves.

Instructions were given for fixing the selling price of the plundered property to its purchasers, by giving sample prices as laid down by law. But before the property, and particularly the clothing, were handed to those robbing them, the Jewish badge had to be removed from them. Furthermore, all the articles had to be carefully examined, in order to discover valuables concealed and sewn into them.

Presiding Judge: This document will be marked T/1385.

Attorney General: The next document I wish to submit in this matter is the declaration of the Accused's secretary at the time, Hildegard Kunze. I do not know where she is, I do not know whether she is alive or not. Therefore, if Defence Counsel objects and insists that she be brought here, I shall have to refrain from submitting the document, although I would have wished to bring it to the Court's attention.

From the point of view of authentication, there is no difficulty - it was authenticated at the International Military Tribunal. But from another point of view, the point of view of the principle which the Court has laid down, there is likely to be a problem, and, hence, Defence Counsel has to be heard. If he has an objection, I shall not be able to submit the document. I do not know where Miss Kunze is now, and for that purpose alone, I shall not search for her.

Dr. Servatius: Your Honour, the Presiding Judge, I object to the submission of this document. She was a very young girl who testified after the War, and, apparently, she confirmed what was placed before her. I would have to hear her, in order to see what she would say now. The contents of the document are quite meagre; one may assume that if she were to appear here and testify, its contents would become of even less value.


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