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Volume V · Page 785
| done in the front lines, I can't
tell you. I can only compare the actions of the SS men who came to us from the
front lines and those SS men who had never been in the front lines: all of them
acted alike. The SS man who was assigned as a guard in a concentration camp or
as officer of the guard in a concentration camp, the moment he entered that
barbed wire fence simply became a member of a group of murderers. In order to
give an example there was an SS Obersturmfuehrer who had just returned from
front line duty and he had a small terrier and while working one of the
inmates, a Jew, while pushing his little cart, unintentionally, hit his little
dog. The dog just gave a little yelp; that was all that happened. This SS man
liked the dog so much, however, that for that reason, because the man had
molested the little dog, he killed the inmate. That is how much he liked the
animal and hated the human being. That was not his character. That was simply
the outstanding position which he held and where he had power over the life and
death of the inmates. For the SS men it was the sacred duty toward the Fuehrer to kill an inmate as brutally as possible. I am differentiating here between the SS men who had power over us in the concentration camps and those in the economic enterprises. There was much difference. The SS men in the economic enterprises could not get behind the barbed wire because their field of work was so different. |
| * * * * * * * * * * |
| V. SELECTIONS FROM THE
EVIDENCE CONCERNING THE SPECIAL DEFENSES |
| A.. Introduction |
| In the Nuernberg trials, special defenses
were generally interposed in answer to several, and sometimes in answer to
almost all, of the various charges of criminal conduct. The materials
reproduced in this section deal with a number of special defenses in the Pohl
case. This evidence, with few exceptions, is taken from the testimony of
defendants or defense witnesses. A special defense, very frequently put forth in the Pohl case, was that particular defendants were connected with the WVHA only at an organization or administrative level; that they did not participate in policy-forming, nor did they otherwise influence the determination of the conduct of the WVHA which formed the basis for the charges; that even if offenses were committed through the instrumentality of the WVHA, the activity of indi- […vidual] |
