27 Nov. 45
the aim of having a little more strength
against the Poles should they attack us. It was nonsense to think of
attacking Poland in this stage by the Navy. A second aim was to have
some defense against the entering of French forces into the Ostsee
(East Sea), because we knew that the French had the intention to
sustain the Poles. Their ships came into the Ostsee, Gdynia, and so
the Navy was a defense against an attack of Poland and against the
entrance of French ships into the East Sea; quite defensive aims.
"Q. When did this fear of an attack from Poland first show
itself in official circles in Germany, would you say?
"A. In all the first years. They took Vilna; in the same
minute we thought they would come to East Prussia. I don't know
exactly the year, because those judgments were the judgments of the
German Government Ministers, the Army and Navy Ministers--Gröner
and Noske.
"Q. Then those views, in your opinion, were generally held
and existed perhaps as early as 1919-1920, after the end of the first
World War?
"A. Oh, but the whole situation was very, very uncertain,
and about those years in the beginning I cannot give you a very exact
picture, because I was then 2 years in the Navy Archives to write a
book about the War and the fighting capacity of cruisers. For 2 years
I was not with those things."
MR. ALDERMAN: Likewise the same kind of planning
and purposes are reflected in the table of contents of a history of
the German Navy, 1919 to 1939, found in captured official files of
the German Navy. Although a copy of the book has not been found by
us, the project was to have been written by Oberst Scherff, Hitler's
personal military historian. We have found the table of contents; it
refers by numbers to groups of documents and notes of documents,
which evidently were intended as the working materials for the basis
of chapters, to be written in accordance with the table of contents.
The titles in this table of contents clearly establish the Navy
planning and preparation to get the Versailles Treaty out of the way
and to rebuild the naval strength necessary for aggressive war.
We have here the original captured document which is, as I say,
the German typewritten table of contents of this projected work, with
a German cover, typewritten, entitled Geschichte der Deutschen
Marine, 1919-1939 (History of the German Navy, 1919-1939). We
identify it as our series C-17 and I offer it in evidence as Ex-