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Volume II · Page 4
could be saved if these death reports were dropped. Notifications of death could be made as before, as for the Russian prisoners of war." (NO-2148, Pros. Ex. 570.)The proof has shown that beside the sixty inmates who were admittedly killed by him, Haven participated in the killing of many other inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp who suffered from malnutrition and exhaustion. He selected the victims for the transports who were later killed in the Bernburg Euthanasia Station. His defense that all his activities were done only for the benefit of the political inmates in the concentration camp is clearly ridiculous and without foundation. It is interesting to note that Hoven's defense that he killed for idealistic motives is the same he used in the proceedings against him in 1944, only then his alleged idealistic motive was "to prevent a scandal in the interest of the SS and the Wehrmacht." (NO-2380, Pros. Ex. 527; see also, NO-2366, Pros. Ex. 526. )
EXTRACT FROM THE CLOSING STATEMENT OF THE PROSECUTION*
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In Sievers we have an unresisting member of a so-called resistance movement. He asks the Tribunal to free him from guilt for his bloody crimes on the ground that he was really working as an anti-Nazi resistance agent. Nor was he a latecomer to the resistance movement; according to him, he has been resisting since 1933. Yet in those 14 years, yes to this very day, he has not performed one overt act against the men who ran the system he now professes to have always detested. He joined the Nazi Party as early as 1929 and the SS in 1935. He stayed with Himmler's gang until the last days of the collapse. He came to Nuernberg in 1946, not to give evidence of the horrible crimes of which he had first-hand knowledge, but to testify in defense of the SS. During his testimony before the International Military Tribunal, he consistently denied any knowledge of, or connection with, crimes committed by the Ahnenerbe of the SS. It was left to the cross-examination of Mr. Elwyn Jones to prove him the murderer and perjurer that he is. Nor did he show any signs of resistance in this trial except to the manifold crimes
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* Closing statement is recorded in mimeographed transcript, 14 July 1947, pp. 10718-10796.
