13 Dec.
45
THE PRESIDENT: What page?
MR. DODD: Thirteen. I don't want to labor this responsibility of the
Defendant Speer. I was anxious or perhaps I should say we are all
overanxious to have the documents in the record and before the
Tribunal.
THE PRESIDENT: Which is the passage you want to refer to on Page 13?
MR. DODD: I just referred in passing to the statement which begins with
the words, "We have to come to an arrangement with the Reichsführer
SS." And in the next to the last sentence it says: "The men
should be put into the factories as convicts."
Finally, with reference to the Defendant Speer, I should like to say to
the Tribunal that he visited the concentration camp at Mauthausen and he
also visited factories such as those conducted by the Krupp industries,
where concentration camp labor was exploited under degrading conditions.
Despite this first-hand knowledge of these conditions, both in
Mauthausen and in the places where these forced laborers were at work in
factories, he continued to direct the use of this type of labor in
factories under his own jurisdiction.
THE PRESIDENT: How do you intend to prove it as to these concentration
camps?
MR. DODD: I was going to refer the Tribunal to Page 9 of the
interrogation of the 18th of October 1945; and I refer to Page 11,
Paragraph 5, of the German text and Page 9, beginning with Paragraph 9,
of the English text:
"Q: But, in general, the use of
concentration camp labor was known to you and approved by you as a
source of labor?
"A: Yes.
"Q: And you knew also, I take it, that among the inmates of the
concentration camps there were both Germans and foreigners?
"A: I didn't think about it at that time.
"Q: As a matter of fact, you visited the Austrian concentration
camp personally, did you not?
"A: I did not well, I was in Mauthausen once, but at that
time I was not told just to what categories the inmates of the
concentration camps belonged.
"Q: But in general everybody knew, did they not, that foreigners
who were taken away by the Gestapo or arrested by the Gestapo, as well
as Germans, found their way into the concentration camps?