1 Dec. 45

of course, had to procure these uniforms by some means or other and deliver them to a certain Hauptsturmführer SS — the name is recorded in the War Diary. These people had their misgivings. That was a thing which could not be forbidden.

DR. NELTE: Yesterday you also made statements about the treatment of prisoners of war. In what way was Abwehr II concerned with prisoner-of-war questions?

LAHOUSEN: That is quite simple. Abwehr II was naturally very interested in an objective way that prisoners of war should be treated as well and as decently as possible, and the same applies to any intelligence service in the world. That was all.

DR. NELTE: Do I understand you to mean that Abwehr II, as a department, was not concerned with prisoner-of-war questions?

LAHOUSEN: It had absolutely nothing to do with prisoner-of-war questions.

DR. NELTE: Yesterday you spoke about the problem of the treatment of prisoners of war in connection with a conference that took place, if I remember rightly, at the end of July 1941?

LAHOUSEN: Yes, at this conference I did not represent only my section, but the whole Amt Ausland Abwehr, that is to say — for general questions of international law and military political questions, that is, those questions which to the greatest extent generally concerned foreign countries, and the intelligence sections. Department III which dealt with espionage was practically interested-because after all, the officers affiliated with it were in the prisoner-of-war camps. Naturally, from the point of view of my section it was important to be informed about those matters — and that my section was only interested within the frame of the entire problem, that people should not be killed off, but treated decently, quite apart from any of the other considerations which were mentioned.

DR. NELTE: You said yesterday that the prisoner-of-war camps in the operations zone of the Eastern sector were under the OKW. Is that correct?

LAHOUSEN: Yes, what I said about prisoner-of-war camps yesterday I knew from the conference with Reinecke, and not from any knowledge of the orders themselves, which I had neither seen nor read. At this conference I was able to obtain a clear idea of the prisoner-of-war question owing to the presence of Reinecke, the chief of the prisoner-of-war department, who represented his own department and the OKW, and I repeated everything I remembered about this.

DR. NELTE: What I was really asking was about the limitation of the jurisdictions.

LAHOUSEN: Yes.