15.4.46

condition, why so many thousands of them were found sick and emaciated in the camps, was that every detainee had to be employed in the armament industry to the extreme limit of his physical power. The Reichsführer constantly and on every occasion kept this goal before our eyes, and also proclaimed it through the Chief of the Economic and Administrative Main Office, Obergruppenführer Kohl, to the concentration camp commandants and administrative leaders during the so-called commandants' meetings. Every commandant was told to make every effort to render this possible. The aim wasn't to have as many dead as possible or to destroy as many detainees as possible. The Reichsführer was constantly concerned with the problem of engaging all forces possible in the armament industry.

Q. Therefore there can be no doubt that the longer the war lasted, the larger became the number of the ill-treated and also tortured inmates. Didn't you ever when you inspected the concentration camps learn something of this state of affairs through complaints, etc., or do you consider that the conditions which have been described are more or less due to sporadic excesses of individual officials?

A. These so-called ill-treatments and torturing in concentration camps, stories of which were spread everywhere amongst the people, and particularly by detainees who were liberated by the occupying armies, were not, as assumed, inflicted methodically, but by individual leaders, sub-leaders and men who laid violent hand on them.

Q. Do you mean you never took cognisance of these matters?

A. If in any way such a matter was brought to my notice, then the perpetrator was, of course, immediately relieved of his post or transferred somewhere else. So that, even if he wasn't punished because there wasn't evidence to prove his guilt, he was taken away and given another position.

Q. To what do you attribute the particularly bad and shameful conditions which were found on invasion by allied troops, and which to an extent were photographed and filmed?

A. The catastrophic situation at the end of the war was due to the fact that, as a result of the destruction of railways and of the continuous bombing of the industrial works, it was no longer possible to properly care for these masses, for example, Auschwitz with its 140,000 detainees. Improvised measures, truck columns, and everything else tried by the commandants to improve the situation were of little or no avail. The number of the sick became immense. There were next to no medical supplies; plagues raged everywhere. Detainees who were capable of work were used continuously. By order of the Reichsführer, even half-sick people had to be used wherever possible in industry. As a result every bit of space in the concentration camps which could possibly be used for lodging was filled with sick and dying detainees.

Q. I'm now asking you to look at the map which is mounted behind you. The red dots represent concentration camps. I will first ask you how many concentration camps as such existed at the end of the war?

A. At the end of the war there were still thirteen concentration camps. All the other points which are marked here on the map mean so-called labour camps attached to the armament factories situated there. The concentration camps, which there were thirteen, as I have already said, were the centres of districts, such as the camp at Dachau in Bavaria, or the camp of Mauthausen in Austria; and all the labour camps in each district came under the control of the concentration camp. That camp had then to supply these outside camps, that is to say, they had to supply them with workers, exchange the sick inmates and furnish clothing; the guards also were supplied by the concentration camp.

From 1944 on, the supplying of food was almost exclusively a matter of the individual armament industries in order to give the detainees the benefit of the wartime supplementary rations.

Q. What became known to you about so-called medical experiments on living detainees?