. NMT03-T0351
Volume III · Page 351
| [con…] demned person could not be saved. During the war, civilian and military command offices in numerous cases were seriously charged with the fact that through a defense which they had to consider as useless, they had sacrificed many lives. Such a useless sacrifice it would have been if the Reich Ministry of Justice had instructed the prison authorities, via the executive office, to resist the police. The subject of this sacrifice would have been not only threats to officials or civil servants, but to the entire administration of justice, which would have been eliminated and its opponents would have triumphed. The acting official in the ministry would have been eliminated as a saboteur; and already at that time he would have been replaced by a person who would willingly and without exception have put the administration of justice in the service of the Party. The individual cases of transfer which the prosecution has described have to be evaluated from these points of view. I myself, after taking charge of the Ministry of Justice, immediately established contact with Minister Meissner in order to determine basically that no order for transfer made by the police was to be executed as long as the administration of justice did not have a report. This intention of mine was again foiled by Bormann. A letter from Meissner to me makes this apparent. Hitler had me informed by Bormann that the obtaining of the opinion of the Ministry of Justice was not necessary. Meissner, who shared my opinion, asked me in spite of that, in those cases where the ministry believed that Hitler was not properly informed, that a report should be sent to Meissner. I did that in all cases |
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| . Q. What do you have to say about the Markus
Luftglas case, a case of transfer to the Gestapo, Document NG-287, Prosecution
Exhibit 88?* A. This case, too, I no longer remember even though the name recalls certain memories. In my statements I have to refer to the documents that have been submitted, and by referring to them I would like to determine the following: the Fuehrer order to the police was given to the Reich Ministry of Justice on 24 October 1941, through the usual channels by the Presidential Chancellery. That nothing happened in this case is absolutely impossible. It would have been inexplicable why my letter to Lammers in which I informed him of the release was written only 4 days later, on the 29th, for letters of that kind were answered immediately in our office as a matter of course. The fact that our letter is dated |
* Reproduced below in section V C2a.
