2 Jan. 46
who was ordered by Kaltenbrunner to be committed to
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp by the Gestapo "because as a
relative of a deserter, he is expected to endanger the interest of the
German Reich if allowed to go free."
The ninth crime for which Kaltenbrunner is responsible as Chief of the
Security Police and SD is the clearance of Sipo and SD prisons and
concentration camps. I refer the Tribunal to Document L-53, which was
received in evidence as Exhibit Number USA-291. This was the letter from
the Commander of the Sipo and SD, Radom, dated 21 July 1944, in which it
is stated that the Commander of the Sipo and SD of the General
Government had ordered all Sipo and SD prisons to be cleared and, if
necessary, the inmates to be liquidated. I now offer Document 3462-PS as
exhibit next in order, Exhibit Number USA-528. This is the sworn
interrogation of Bertus Gerdes, the former Gaustabsamtsleiter under the
Gauleiter of Munich. This interrogation was taken in the course of an
official military investigation of the U.S. Army. In this interrogation
Gerdes was ordered to state all he knew about Kaltenbrunner. I am only
going to read a very small portion of his reply, beginning on the third
paragraph of Page 2:
"Giesler told me that Kaltenbrunner
was in constant touch with him because he was greatly worried about
the attitude of the foreign workers and especially inmates of
Concentration Camps Dachau, Mühldorf, and Landsberg, which were
in the path of the approaching Allied armies. On a Tuesday in the
middle of April 1945 1 received a telephone call from Gauleiter
Giesler asking me to be available for a conversation that night. In
the course of our personal conversation that night, I was told by
Giesler that he had received a directive from Obergruppenführer
Kaltenbrunner, by order of the Führer to work out a plan without
delay for the liquidation of the concentration camp at Dachau and the
two Jewish labor camps in Landsberg and Mühldorf The directive
proposed to liquidate the two Jewish labor camps at Landsberg and Mühldorf
by use of the German Luftwaffe, since the construction area of these
camps had previously been the targets of repeated enemy air attacks.
This action received the code name of 'Wolke A-I.'"
I now pass to the second paragraph on Page 3, continuing to quote from
this interrogation:
"I was certain that I would never let
this directive be carried out. As the action Wolke A-1 should have
become operational already for some time, I was literally swamped by
couriers from Kaltenbrunner and moreover I was supposed to have
discussed the details of the Mühldorf, and Landsberg actions