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Volume II · Page 728
thing at all distract us from that task. No order exists which could prevent me from fulfilling this task. Nor shall I ever be given such an order."Yes, the defendant was a fanatic. Too, he was one who could cover up. It was a willful man who could say that. There is an interesting statement concerning the number of employees of the Luftwaffe. The defendant set it at 1.8 million. This is somewhat in excess of the .5 million figure that one witness mentioned.
It has been insisted that he had nothing to do with labor, it has been insisted that he could give no orders, yet in his second peroration to the same speech, he said —
"We have given orders that will make you laugh. Some labor control office or other suddenly declared that the Jaegerstab was not entitled, according to paragraph so-and-so, to establish a 72-hour workweek; it was not valid. I said: The gentleman is herewith informed, if he should say such a thing once more, he will be picked up; I have excellent cellars in this house. Then the opposition disappears immediately. But you have to count on such things, and the difficulty for you is that, in order to get through all the junk, one should clean out, first of all, a whole lot of little pigsties. Something will come out of this whole affair with us, yet. Whoever of my technical people from the Ministry does not earn his keep with the Jaegerstab now, and does not cooperate, I guarantee that he will never appear again in this Ministry, in the machine where I give the orders."Is this the man who said he could not have people sent to concentration camps? The witness Krysiak was "picked up" for having said in 1940 that Germany would lose the war. He was arrested by the Gestapo as the result of a private conversation. It is unbelievable that a field marshal could not, and did not, exercise the same power.
Today is the third anniversary of the speech of 25 March 1944 made by the defendant. His closing remarks on that day detail decisively the philosophy of the then field marshal of the Luftwaffe. Those assembled had been listening to their chief since midmorning. The hour was late. The hands of the clock were past twelve. Germany was in the fifth year of war. The defendant was concluding his speech. He said —
"Gentlemen, I know, not every subordinate can say: for me the law no longer exists, but he has to have someone who
