A. No. This position had a vacancy and was not filled at the time.
Q. The defendant Fanslau, however, at an earlier period of time on the 9th of November 1944 was in charge of the direction of The Amtsgruppe?
A. It is possible, but I did not know that anymore when I gave the affidavit.
Q. The defendant Fanslau himself states that this had been in June or July of 1944.
A. That may be. It's probably correct.
Q. You have stated in your direct examination that during this time personnel and finance questions were discussed with the senior expert in the office. Does this mean that you also discussed these matters with the defendant Fanslau? These were finance questions.
A. No, I was unable to do that because he knew very little of finance questions because he had not occupied himself with them for more than a year. Of course, I discussed the finance questions with my comrade Hans Loerner Just how many of these discussions took place, I cannot recall any more today. They probably were questions which still came from the time when I held the office and they were only questions with regard to the financing of the units.
***at the time when you were chief of the Amtsgruppe, did you have *****ferences with the office chiefs, with the individual office assistants and representatives to give a lecture and orientation?
A Yes, I used to call my office chiefs from time to time; however, this was not in order to have every one of them give me a lecture because then the others present would have been bored, those who were not concerned with these matters. We used to discuss the increase in the membership of the Waffen SS and discuss the problems arising from that; and then we used to sit down and have a glass of beer. This happened about every two to three months. Official matters which concerned only one Amtsgruppe were discussed in private conferences, in order to save time.
Q During the time that you were chief of the Amtsgruppen, were there any regular conferences held between the chiefs of the individual Amtsgruppen - let us say with Pohl?
A No.
Q Was it the same case with the office chiefs did the defendant Fanslau have the authority within Amtsgruppe B, C, D, and * to direct the personnel there and to initiate transfer *** *** assignments, promotions, etc.?
A No, he was unable to do that; that was the task for the main office chief.
Q Could he do this with the administrative officers of the replacement units and the units in the field?
A Yes, as far as I can remember up to the staff officers; from staff officers up, he was unable to do that.
Q Witness, it has repeatedly been difficult for us to convince ourselves of the fact that the holders of high grades in the SS, and the occupants of high positions in the SS did not have any knowledge of the crimes which are being charged here; or that they had only a very limited knowledge of them. I therefore would like to direct a few questions to you with regard to the secrecy. I have an order of the Fuehrer and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht of the 11th of January, 1940 before me.
I shall read it to you, and please tell me, if you can recall this decree. "Fundamental Order. 1. No one, no agency, no officer, is to obtain knowledge of a secret matter if it is not imperative for him to have knowledge because of official reasons. 2. No agency, and no officer is to obtain more knowledge of any matter which is to be kept secret than is necessary for the execution of their tasks. 3. No agency and no officer is to obtain any knowledge of any secret matter at an earlier period of time than is necessary for the execution of their tasks. 4. The careless passing on of orders whose secrecy is of decisive importance, by means of any general distribution, channels, is prohibited." Do you remember this order?
A Yes, naturally. The order was posted in every office, and it was posted at a prominent place where it would be seen easily, and thousands of copies of this order were distributed; and we had to certify every three-quarters of a year, with our own signature, that all members of this office had been informed of this order.
Q. Therefore, this order also applied to within the Waffen SS just like within the Wehrmacht?
A It applied to every member of the German Wehrmacht and consequently to all members of the Waffen SS.
Q And was this order complied with?
A Yes, I know from my activities as administrative chief of the army that severe penalties were handed out for non-compliance with this order. I believe that a death sentence was imposed on one occasion.
Q We have already heard here that there were various categories of secrecy; for the documents which were to be kept secret, were there any special regulations with regard to keeping them in strongboxes etc., and with regard to the use of classifying them?
A Yes. There were extensive regulations. The regulations themselves were classified according to the various categories. There was a difference if it was to be classified secret or top secret, or as state secret.
The difference between top secret and state secret was only that the military agencies and the military commanders used the term top secret, and that the civilian agencies used the term state secret, which also means top secret. Then we had the classification of confidential, only for leaders, that is to say, only for officers; and we had very extensive regulations for secrecy. In any case, it was mandatory that they were announced repeatedly.
Q Did also special regulations exist with regard to the safekeeping in a certain manner, in certain safes or in certain strongboxes?
A Yes, that was very strictly observed. I can recall one case where in the army at night, the secret field police examined the locks and examined the desks; they even broke open the desks in order to determine whether in an ordinary desk a top secret document was kept which should have been placed into the safe. Whenever such a case was discovered, then the culprit could count on receiving an extraordinarily severe penalty; he was immediately placed before a courts martial.
Q And for the mailing of such secret or top secret matter, was there also a special regulation?
A Yes, this was also part of the secrecy regulation.
Q Were these documents registered especially?
A Yes, the regulation required that the documents be given a number and a special registration; and these documents caused people to be rather nervous in general; there was much annoyance and difficulty because of them for the chiefs.
Q Well, so much for the fundamental question. Did you ever discuss the Reinhardt Action with the defendant Fanslau or the order which you signed; or did you give the defendant Fanslau any knowledge of it?
A No. This was a typical example, that he was not allowed to gain any knowledge of it, because I did not sign this document as chief of the Amtsgruppe, but as a deputy. He, therefore, was not allowed to gain any knowledge of it; he was not at all concerned with the matter and it was none of his business.
Q In your direct examination you stated today that you had tried to get a transfer from Amtsgruppe A because of its close relations with concentration camps in which Amtsgruppe A was involved. Did I understand you correctly to that effect? Do you want to make that statement?
A No, that is completely wrong. I would never have wanted to leave Amtsgruppe A because I really liked the work there. I was an enthusiastic Tropp Administrative Officer and liked the work with all my heart. However, I had had enough of the atmosphere with which the concentration camps were surrounded, and some of my closer comrades had the misfortune by virtue of their position to stay there to work on these matters, like for example my comrades in Amtsgruppe D. This, of course, could not be changed. However, as it is said in Germany, I had become fed up to the gills with the whole atmosphere and I was trying as much as I could to get transferred. It was not because I knew that one person or another had been killed or murdered, but the whole system was just not the right thing for a soldier. All of us and the comrades in Amtsgruppe A were shocked when Amtsgruppe D became a part of the WVHA. I do not want to throw any stones at my comrades in Amtsgruppe D - that they had the misfortune to be assigned to this Amtsgruppe was just a matter of fate in my opinion - just as it was a matter of fate in my case that I was brought into a connection with the Action Reinhardt.
Q Therefore, if I understood you correctly, you maintain that the work of Amtsgruppe A was not at all affected by the incorporation of Amtsgruppe D.
A No, the task of Amtsgruppe A was the same as that of an administrator or an assistant of the American or the English or any other army; soldiers had to be taken care of, and that was a matter which is done in every army, and all of us liked to do this work, including myself.
Q Witness, now I have a final question to you. For many years you were a chief of the defendant Fanslau. Can you tell me anything about his personality and his character. In his character was he a politician or was he a politically unbiased soldier.
A. It is always very difficult to give a judgment about any human being, especially when I an confronted by him. In the case of Ganslau it is not very difficult for me. I have already stated that the Office A-V required special character and personality, and that Fanslau had these characteristics. It is shown by the fact that I myself gave him that position. Fanslau was an old party member, and he was an old member in the SS. However, during the last years of the war he felt exactly the same as I did, and like many thousands of other SS officers who were disappointed, and we did not see the fulfillment of what we had expected.
DR. STAKELBERG: Your Honor, for the time being I have not any further questions.
BY DR. RAUSCHENBACH (For Hans Loerner):
Q. Witness, what do you know about the activity of the Defendant Hans Loerner in the administration of the General SS before the war?
A. Hans Loerner, as far as I can recall, joined the administrative service of the General SS in 1934. For several years, I believe until the outbreak of the war, he was Chief of the Administrative Office of the Allgemeine-SS, the General-SS, of the Chief Sector Nurnberg.
Q. Is it correct that Hans Loerner in the year 1940 did not like the activity on the staff of Pohl, and on the 1st of May, 1940, he was assigned by you to the troop administration Office of the SS?
A. Yes, that is correct. Hans Loerner was an old soldier. He was an officer on the First World War, and he also was longing to work in troop administration. At that time I assigned him to my office for that reason.
Q. What was his task at the time?
A. He had to solve the budgetary questions together with me. He furthermore carried out finance tasks for the party.
Q. What were his duties when he became Chief of the Office A-I in the WVHA?
A. He was export for budgetary matters for the entire Waffen-SS.
Q. Do you know anything about the fact that the Defendant Hans Loerner was charged with the execution of the new order of payment of the NS DAP?
A. Yes, I know of it. In the middle of the was the NSDAP ordered a new payment plan, and Hans Loerner was charged with the task to carry it out for the sector of the SS.
Q. Did he have very much work in this case?
A. Yes, because there was a lot of paper work to be done.
Q. Did you ever discuss the utilization of the Jewish property with him or did you ever discuss the Reinhardt Action with him, and was Office A-I included in this matter at all?
A. No.
Q. Did you ever discuss with Hans Loerner the medical experiments on concentration camp inmates?
A. I couldn't do that because I myself did not know anything about them.
Q. Was the Office A-I included in the loan from the Reinhardt Fund to the economy?
A. No, the treasury was doing this work directly. It received the order to carry out payments from me, and by means of this order the funds were issued.
Q. Did you ever give any orders about participation of the office chiefs of Amtsgruppe A in official conferences of Amtsgruppe D, or of conferences of the concentration-camp commanders?
A. No. I myself did not participate in them, and I has no business whatsoever in them.
Q. You see the organizational chart. Is that the same chart which you drafted in the course of an interrogation as the original?
A. Yes, unfortunately.
Q. In this chart which you sketched for Amtsgruppe A, the Defen dant Hans Loerner has been described as Chief of the Office A-II from 1943 to 1945, is that correct?
A. No. I overlooked this and made a mistake. I really made a bad mistake here. Only from 1944 on, as he told me himself, was he charged with the leadership, or rather the supervision. However, I have never seen any order to that effect. This was also a type of deputizing, because the task of the Amtsgruppen, with the continuation of the war, became less and less, and more and more improvisations had to be made, and the war in its entirety required work to be carried out so quickly that these regulations could not be observed any more.
DR. RAUCHENBACH: I thank you. That is sufficient. Your Honors, I have not further questions.
BY DR. SCHMIDT (For Defendant Joseph Vogt):
Q. Witness, as Chief of Amtsgruppe A you were the superior of the Defendant Vogt. When did you come into contact for the first time with Vogt?
A. I think I made Vogt's acquaintance in the Administrative Office of the SS at Munich. I believe it was in 1937.
Q. In the years 1939 to 1942, that is to say until the establishment of the WVHA, you were Chief of the Office KI, which later on was the Administrative Office of the Waffen-SS?
A. Yes.
Q. In what department did Vogt work at the time in this office?
A. It was the main department for the auditing office.
Q. Can you tell us of what his sphere of work consisted at the time?
A. He had to audit the troop treasury. That is to say he had to supervise, and he had to see whether the funds which were turned over to the Administrative Offices were spent properly, and that complete accounts were given for these funds. Otherwise it could have happened that an administrative officer could have taken 50,000 marks and only listed 30,000, and he could have embezzled 20,000 marks right there.
Therefore, he had to exercise a control whether the 50,000 marks were actually listed in the books. This was done with the aid of the monthly accounts which had to be submitted.
Q. Witness, was this a preliminary auditing, or was this just an examination of the treasury? I am referring to the activity which you have just mentioned.
A. It was an examination of the treasury.
Q. Besides examining the treasury did he also have to make preliminary examinations of the bills?
A. His auditing work was recognized as being the regular auditing by the auditing court. Already, for the reason that an additional agency would not have to be included for preliminary auditing, already at that time he worked for the treasury court as a preliminary examining auditor.
Q. Did this activity, the examination and auditing of Vogt in the Office KI, which later on became the administrative Office of the WaffenSS, did this activity also extend to the accounts which were given for funds spent by the concentration camps?
A. No, he was unable to carry out this work, because as I have stated the Office KI, which is an abbreviation for Corps Administrative Office had nothing to do with the concentration camps.
Q. Is it therefore correct that the auditing activity of Vogt at the time extended exclusively to the troop treasury of the Waffen-SS?
A. Yes, that is correct.
Q. With the establishment of the WVHA you again became the superior of the Defendant Vogt. At the time of the establishment of the WVHA did the sphere of work of Vogt change in any way as compared to his activity in the former Corps Administrative Office or the administrative office of the Waffen-SS?
A. Yes, it changed insofar as A-IV was the only preliminary auditing agency for the German auditing court on the field of the entire Waffen-SS. Only the auditing of building-technical matters was exempted. The auditing court of the German Reich was the highest auditing agency, and it was directly subordinated to the Fuehrer. It therefore was independent, even from decisions by the Reich Ministers. It was already the usual procedure before 1933. The president of the auditing court at the time was only responsible to the Reichstag. The auditing court therefore was a completely independent auditing agency. Because this institute could not examine every agency and in order to do that it would have required thousands of officials, it had established in the individual government offices or agencies a so-called preliminary auditing agency, and thus Vogt had exactly two superiors, namely myself as Chief of the Amtsgruppe in his official contacts, while in his preliminary auditing activity he was directly responsible toward the president of the Reich auditing court.
Q. Witness, I take it from your answer that Vogt's field of auditing was enlarged by the establishment of the WVHA on the 1st of February, 1942. Now, was there a change in Vogt's preliminary auditing field of work at the time of the incorporation of Amtsgruppe D into the WVHA? At the time of the incorporation did Vogt's field of work change at all?
A. It is very difficult to answer this question, not because it is difficult but because it is hard to explain this question to the layman. Vogt was approximately in the same position as the auditing court itself. That is to say, he was unable to carry out the preliminary auditing work by himself. He in turn had established his own preliminary auditing agencies which were not designated as such, which, however, were working for him. Such an agency was located within the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps. Therefore, he did not even see the direct bills from the concentration camps unless he ordered that such bills should be submitted to him. Of course he was able to do that.
Q. Witness, what preliminary auditing agencies with the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps are you referring to when you say that Vogt had a preliminary auditing agency to which the bills from the concentration camps were submitted? Is this an agency which was subordinated to Vogt or which worked independently beside him?
A. I have intentionally used the title "preliminary auditing agency" in order to make it clear to the Tribunal. It was a task of Amt D-4. In this office the so-called intermediate auditing work was carried out, or was mostly being done; a representative of the auditing court used to come to this agency and carried out the auditing work there directly. Therefore, the bills did not first have to be submitted to Vogt, but the auditing court went directly to Oranienburg. However, I also know cases where the auditing court carried out the auditing work directly in the concentration camps.
Q. Witness, in your affidavit, which has been referred to several times today, of the 17th of January, 1947, Document NO-1576, Exhibit 4, you have already stated that Vogt had to approve all the expenses of the chief of the Amtsgruppen A, B, and C, and that he was entitled to raise objections when funds were spent in violation of existing provisions.
Witness, I now ask you, what were you trying to say by making that statement?
A. That was done in theory. Of course it was not complied with in practice.
Let me take a practical case. Amtsgruppe B, Gruppenfuehrer Loerner had purchased clothing for the Waffen SS in the value of four million marks. This bill appeared in some compiled account of an agency which carried out the procurement in Amtsgruppe B. This compilation at the end of the three-month period, or at the end of the year, was subject to the preliminary auditing and if it had been discovered that these four million marks would not have been spent at all for this purpose, that is to say, things would have been purchased which certainly were not for clothing for the Waffen SS, then Vogt would have objected. However, in time of war this auditing activity became less from month to month. Even at the time when I was still with the WVHA an order was issued to the effect that the preliminary auditing was only to extend to certain percentages of the total bills.
The auditing agency of Vogt, according to my estimation as an expert, would have required at least three hundred collaborators in order to audit the giant sums of money which were spent in hundreds of thousands of individual amounts, if he wanted to audit them according to peacetime regulations. This task was completely impossible and the auditing court began to see that very quickly, and the extent of the auditing work which had to be done can be seen from the fact that Vogt in the year 1943, that is, at the time when I am still able to judge it, only had eight or ten officers to work for him.
Q. I take it from your answer that you did not want to say in your affidavit that Vogt could already object when the funds were spent, that is, when the orders for payment were issued. He could only object when these expenses had already been paid and the whole act of payment had already been completed, is that correct?
A. Yes. The words "preliminary auditing" lead to a wrong conclusion. As I had already said, this was not a preliminary auditing in the sense that the expenses had to be examined before the money was transferred, but that the words "preliminary auditing" only referred to the auditing court.
Therefore, it was preliminary work which actually had to be carried out by the Reich auditing court. It would have been better had it been called "subsequent auditing work".
Q. Is it therefore correct that Vogt, towards the chiefs of the Amtsgruppen A, B, and C, in financing matters, did not have any right of supervision?
A. No, they certainly would have stopped him from interfering. Only Pohl had this authority, as chief.
Q. Witness, in your affidavit from which I have already quoted just now you have further stated that within Amtsgruppe A you were the supreme auditing chief in the Waffen SS, and that you had been subordinated to Pohl. What did you try to say by that?
A. It was quite clear that the auditing court in carrying out its auditing work would find and discover things which would have given cause for objection. These objections were collected by the commissioner of the auditing court. He turned them over to this director and this director, who, in turn, was the representative of the president of the auditing court, would come at six-months intervals to see me in order to discuss the differences which existed, and in order to clear up these matters. In this respect I was the superior of Vogt and I was responsible for the expenditures. I was not responsible for them in the manner in which they had been spent, but rather with regard to the auditing court.
Q. I want to refer once more to your affidavit. You went on to say that the bills incurred by the concentration camps for food of the inmates were compiled by the administrative leaders of the various concentration camps; that they were submitted to Amtsgruppe B, and that they were compiled there; that they were then submitted to Vogt in order to have him carry out the auditing. He was to audit them, to see if they agreed with the amounts which had been appropriated for that purpose. That is how your statement reads in the affidavit.
A. Yes.
Q. Just a moment, witness. Now I must tell you that the man Burger whom you have named here, who was office chief of D-4 from June 1943 up to the end of the war, stated to me in an affidavit that he never received any bills from concentration camps about the food for inmates; that he did not compile them in his office; and that he did not submit them to Vogt, and he did not pass them on to Vogt for auditing--
MR. ROBBINS: Your Honor, I object to the counsel stating these extra-judicial statements into the record. It seems to me that if he has an affidavit from Burger, and this is the--
DR. HAENSEL: I would like to correct a mistake in the translation. Just now the translation should have been Amt D for dog, and not Amt B for baker. Perhaps in the text we should use the words "baker" for "B" and "dog" for "D".
THE PRESIDENT: Substitute dog for baker in the record.
MR. ROBBINS: I believe counsel should make available to the prosecution the affidavit that he is referring to, and that he should do that before examining the witness on them.
THE PRESIDENT: You are in the same position then that the defense counsel have been most of the time.
MR. ROBBINS: I think, Your Honor, every time we examined a witness on the basis of an affidavit we gave copies to the defense counsel.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes -- ultimately.
What is the paper you are reading from, Dr. Schmidt?
DR. SCHMIDT (Counsel for the defendant J. Vogt): Your Honor, I have not been reading from an affidavit, but I only repeated the statements which are contained in an affidavit by Burger, and which in my presentation of evidence in the case of Vogt I intend to submit as a document. I only wanted to tell the witness of the affidavit orally so that he will be able to give us his point of view on that subject.
MR. ROBBINS: I withdraw the objection.
THE PRESIDENT: There is no objection -- except that it is four-thirty.
THE MARSHAL: This Tribunal is in recess until nine-thirty, Monday morning.
(The Tribunal adjourned until 9 June 1947 at 0930 hours.)
Official Transcript of the American Military Tribunal in the matter of the United States of America against Oswald Pohl, et al, defendants, sitting at Nurnberg, Germany on 9 June 1947, 0930-1630, Justice Robert M. Toms, presiding.
THE MARSHAL: Persons in the courtroom will please find their seats.
The Honorable, the Judges of Military Tribunal No. 2.
Military Tribunal No. 2 is now in session. God save the United States of America and this honorable Tribunal.
There will be order in the Court.
DR. SCHMIDT (Counsel for the defendant Vogt): May it please the Court; may I proceed with my examination of defendant Frank?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
AUGUST FRANK - Resumed CROSS EXAMINATION - Continued BY DR. SCHMIDT:
Q. Witness, last Friday, before the recess we stopped at the question of what happened when bills concerning the food supplied of concentration camps were made up. In your affidavit you said, under the date of 17 January, 1947, which is Document NO-1576. and is Exhibit 4 in Document Book 1, that these bills were sent to Office Group D, Burger, put together there and then checked up by Vogt. Now, last Friday I put it to you that Burger, whom you mentioned, said to me under oath that he had never received any such bill and passed them on to Vogt for checking up. I, therefore, would like to ask you, witness, what happened really when these bills for food supplies for concentration camps were examined? Can you give the Court more details as far as you remember these events?
A. In order to answer that question I have to go back a little. The interrogating officer asked me who it was that checked the food bills for the concentration camp. I had no misgivings to tell him. This was a regular proceeding and it went roughly like this, to give an example. The administrative officer of the Dachau concentration camp bought in March of 1943 from two slaughterhouses the meat which he needed.
These two slaughterhouses delivered the requested quantity daily or weekly. At the end of the month these two slaughterhouses sent their bills, and the bills said, for instance, "2,000 kilos of meat, and 1,000 kilos of sausage." The administrative officer of the camp then audited the bills to find out whether they were in accordance with the quantity ordered, and together with his other bills which collected throughout the maintain his office, he put this down in his monthly balance sheet for this particular month; and that balance sheet, together with the actual bills he sent to Oranienburg. In Oranienburg these bills from all concentration camps came together and prepared for auditing on the part of the Treasury Department. Now, whether Vogt, the auditing official of the WVHA, or the Treasury Department; whether either of those two audited the bills I couldn't say because that was an internal arrangement between the two agencies. But let us assume that the auditing official of the WVHA audited the bills. This is what the auditing official would have seen. He saw a bill from two slaughterhouses -- in order to continue with my example -- and he found that bills for 2,000 kilos of meat and 1, 000 kilos of sausage were in his hands. In order to check whether the inmates themselves received the quantity to which they were entitled, the auditing official would have had to, apart from the bill itself, have more documents at his disposal. For instance, he would have had to know for how many inmates these quantities were meant; for how many days they were supposed to last; whether for noon meals or evening meals, whether for working or non-working inmates. And also he would have had to know whether the sausage and the meat would really have reached the mouth of the inmate concerned.
That last examination could only have been done on the spot. It was not his business, but that of the commanding officer, the commandant's. Therefore, the auditing official, on the basis of the bill alone, would never have been in a position to know whether or not the inmate actually received his ration, for which reason, I do not understand the objection which comes from an affidavit, and so forth, because that was a perfectly normal auditing activity, which consisted merely in checking up on bills -- whether the prices were in accordance with the price regulations, whether the quantities had been correctly put down, and whether the whole sum was the correct result, and, in the end, whether the actual amount put down was justifiable. That was what an auditing official had to do. That was not only so with concentration camps, bat also for any other troop administration.
Q. From your description I might conclude, therefore, that it was not the duty of Office A-IV to supervise whether, for instance, inmates in concentration camps had sufficient food in accordance with the official rations, is that correct?
A. That is correct. For that purpose a so-called economic inspector would have had to be used. That in war time, because of the shortage of manpower, was quite impossible. One might say quite generally, as I said before myself, auditing as war went on became less and less frequent and, as far as I know, in 1944 it was discontinued altogether.
Q. When I asked you earlier, you told me that there was an order from the time when you were with the WVHA, which you recall and the order said that the auditing activities of A-IV were concerned only with bills as a whole Was that order connected with the fact that towards the end of 1942 or the beginning of 1943 with the larger garrison administrations who had several SS agencies under them there were so called collective agencies instituted at the camp and that collective treasury department would decide on the basic accounting for all SS agencies of that area, because up to that time the individual treasuries of the various SS agencies did not remain independent departments, but were merely paying offices?
Well, in that respect, we followed the example of the Army. The German Army administration from the beginning would establish in every garrison, for instance, in Munich, a single treasury and through that treasury all bills of the entire garrison would go, no matter whether it was an artillery regiment or a pioneer battalion. There was only one exchequer for all bills. It was, as it were, a decentralized organization, which had certain ministerial authority as far as the garrison exchequer was concerned. We followed that example and also followed this method with the result that in a large part of the work which had been previously done by the WEHA, we delegated that activity to below, which was the process you mean, Doctor, wasn't it?
A. Yes. May I add perhaps that the auditing offices of the WVHA, if it had to audit accounts on a peacetime basis in accordance with the official regulations, then in 1943, as far as an SS Army or roughly 350,000 men was concerned, with all its bits and pieces, the Auditing Department would have needed at least 150 officials, excluding assistant personnel, but actually in 1943 the Auditing Office, had, as I recall, about 12 or 14 officials and that figure alone shows how auditing activities decreased from 1942 and 1943 onwards.
Q. Is it correct, therefore, that because of the formation of collective exchequers in the garrison, concentration camp bills would no longer be separate items on the balance sheet, but merely reached the auditing official as part of the accounting of the collective treasury agency?
A. Quite so. The extent which the bills of a concentration camp reached in war time, just as in the case of the bills from the Army itself decreased from month to month, because either the articles needed were bought centrally or the purchase was impossible, because of the shortage of money. Therefore, for all practical purposes, they were only bills for feed and small items of daily needs which had to be paid by the socalled garrison exchequer.
Q. Witness, one more question about Action Reinhardt, which is the auditing report by Vogt which he gave you when he returned from Lublin in June of 1943 for Pohl: in the affidavit which I referred to before, you told us that from that report you saw that the Reich had obtained millions of marks and a large number of foreign currency. On direct examination by your counsel, if I remember correctly, you stated that Vogt's report had not obtained figures. May I conclude from your statement on direct examination that the statement you made in your affidavit -- that you wish too modify that statement? Would you please say something about that briefly?
A. I think I said something about that already last week when I said that I could no longer distinguish what knowledge I had from written reports and what knowledge I had from oral reports. I can't recall the details of the time that Vogt, whom he returned from Lublin, gave me his report which was very brief and he added a few words by way of explanation. I think the whole conversation lasted for about five or ten minutes, as I recall it, and I can't remember whether in the oral report Vogt told me, or whether in the written report, about the considerable amount of foreign currency which he had discovered in the books kept at Lublin under the title, "Action Reinhardt". One mustn't forget here that all this happened three or four years ago and that the conversation was not of such vast significance that I would remember it word by word.
Q. Thank you very much. Can you tell me, witness, what the official conversations were about which you asked Vogt -- I refer to administration, for instance -- did you talk about the auditing activities of Office A-IV, or did you concern yourself with other duties of Office Group for example, the preparing of budgets, money, supplies, and so forth?
A. The main problem of these conversations held in 1943 was mainly concerned with personnel questions. We were short of people in every sense of the word and whenever I called on my office chiefs to report to me, the main motive, so to speak, always was where on earth can we save more men; can we release officers to go to the front; what work can be dispensed with, including, of course, the auditing side of everything. From 1942 to my resignation in 1943, I took at least 50% of Vogt's personnel away from him. I had to do this because the whole auditing business, I regarded in war time was pure paper work, whereas to supply the troop was to me more important than to audit bills.