7 Jan. 46

The Tribunal will see, from the extracts which I will read, that the Army was chiefly concerned with preserving a sufficient severity of treatment for suspected partisans without at the same time obstructing the procurement of labor from the occupied territories.

I will read the last two paragraphs:

"The Quartermaster General, together with the Economic Staff East, has proposed that the deportees should be sent either to prison camps or to reformatory labor camps in their own area and that deportation to Germany should take place only when the deportees are on probation and in less serious cases.

"In view of the Armed Forces Operations Staff, this proposal does not take sufficient account of the severity required and leads to a comparison with the treatment meted out to the 'peaceful population' which has been called upon to work. He recommends, therefore, transportation to concentration camps in Germany which have already been introduced by the Reichsführer SS for his sphere and which he is prepared to introduce for the Armed Forces in the case of an extension to the province of the latter. The High Command of the Armed Forces therefore orders that partisan helpers and suspects who are not to be executed should be handed over to the competent Higher SS and Police Leader, and orders that the difference between 'punitive labor' and 'being set to labor in Germany' be made clear to the population."

Finally, I would like to offer a group of four affidavits which show that the anti-partisan activities on the Eastern Front were under the command of and supported by the Wehrmacht, and that the nature of these activities was fully known to the Wehrmacht.

The first of these is Affidavit Number 17, Exhibit USA-562, Document Number 3715-PS by Ernst Rode, who was an SS Brigadeführer and major general of the Police, and was a member of Himmler's personal command staff from 1943 to 1945:

"I, Ernst Rode, was formerly Chief of the Command Staff of the Reichsführer SS, having taken over this position in the spring of 1943 as successor to former SS Obergruppenführer Kurt Knoblauch. My last rank was Major General of Police and of the Waffen-SS. My function was to furnish the forces necessary for anti-partisan warfare to the Higher SS and Police Leaders and to guarantee the support of Army Forces. This took place through personal discussions with the leading officers of the Operations Staff of the OKW and OKH, namely with General Warlimont, General Von Buttlar, Colonel General Guderian, Colonel General Zeitzler, General Heusinger, later General Wenk, Colonel Graf Kielmannsegg and later,