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Volume V · Page 823
| [extermina…] tion of Poles, Jews, and
Russians and those who were no loneger fit for work, the razing of the Warsaw
ghetto, and the confiscation of property on a gigantic scale. Pohl and Frank
understood what Himmler meant when he told them and his other SS generals at
Poznan: "Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying together,
when 500 lie there, or when 1,000 lie there. To have lasted through this and
— to have remained decent fellows has made us hard." Technically, the WVHA was organized on 1 February 1942, but actually it was a continuation of Pohl's Verwaltungsamt SS which was organized in 1934 and later, in 1939, became the Main Offices, Budget and Buildings, and Administration and Economy. One month after the WVHA was formed, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was incorporated into it as Amtsgruppe D. The WVHA was merely the last of a succession of administrative offices headed by Pohl and staffed by these defendants. The case of the prosecution rests upon documents and photographs found in the files of the SS. These documents establish the position, the activity, and the responsibility of these defendants. In addition, there are eye-witness accounts of the many crimes charged in the indictment. And there are motion pictures of the concentration camps taken by the advancing Allied armies. This is the character of the evidence supporting the charges here. The defense is based primarily on what the defendants themselves have said, and the object of most of their talking has been to explain away or contradict what is in the documentary evidence. Such testimony is self-serving, a factor which tends to weaken its credibility and weight. But there are more important factors, most of them peculiar to this case, which must also be kept in mind when this testimony is considered. We now turn to these. To comprehend the attitude and activities of these defendants before Germany's collapse and their behavior on the witness stand, it is necessary to keep constantly in mind the burning spirit of comradeship and loyalty to their organization which is characteristic not only of them but of practically all of the hundreds of thousands of members of the SS. Without reference to this feeling of blood brotherhood, a good deal of the testimony by the numerous members of the SS, who have been called as witnesses throughout the course of the trial, becomes unintelligible gibberish. The sources of this feeling and the reasons which later fortified and nourished it are exceedingly complex. When one tries to understand the mentality of the SS man, he is, of course, seeking to analyze a peculiar, irrational creed compounded, like some vile witch's brew, from ingredients which are so far removed from the thoughts and beliefs of the ordinary civilized |
