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Volume V · Page 995
| [in…] corporating partner with Georg
Loerner in the leather and textile enterprise at Dachau, with an investment of
10,000 Reichsmarks which he protests came from some unknown source, Frank must
have known that by 1 April 1941, 700 inmates of Ravensbrueck were employed.
When, in September 1942, Frank wrote to the garrison administrators at Lublin
and Auschwitz and directed that the Jewish Star be removed from the garments of
deceased inmates, he must have been aware that the concentration camps were not
populated exclusively by Germans. His testimony as a witness in his own behalf
negatives any such ridiculous inference. It must be concluded, therefore, that
Frank knew that the slave labor was being supplied by the concentration camps
on a tremendous scale. It must also be conclusively presumed that Frank knew
that slavery constituted a crime against humanity. As to Action Reinhardt, his connection is equally obvious. His counsel protests that "he did not work for the political aims of National Socialism." The answer to this is that he had to work for those aims. Germany was a one-party political state; National Socialism was Germany. The Party and the Reich were so inseparable, their aims and purposes were so interwoven, that it was impossible for anyone to have worked for the one without working for the other. It is futile to claim that the program of extermination of the Jews, or the ravaging of the Eastern countries, or the program of enforced slave labor, or the devastation of conquered territory, stemmed from National Socialist policy but not from the Reich. The SS, in which Frank attained the high rank of Obergruppenfuehrer, was a National Socialist agency, and anyone who worked, as Frank did, for 8 years in the higher councils of that agency cannot successfully claim that he was separated from its political activities and purposes. It is his contention that he first became aware of the Jewish extermination program after hearing Himmler's Poznan speech 4 October 1943, a month after he had left the WVHA. It is his contention that, through the long series of acts relating to the disposition of the proceeds of Action Reinhardt before that date, he acted in the belief that the hundred million Reichsmarks of Jewish property, the 2,000 carloads of textiles, and the staggering amount of other loot arose from Jewish inmates who had died of natural causes and in the ordinary course of events. The very magnitude of the inventory would have put a person much less naive than Frank on inquiry, and of course, Frank's designation of the loot as "Jewish concealed and stolen goods," indicates a resort to secrecy and subterfuge which is entirely in conflict with his profession of innocent ignorance. But even if we were to give Frank's contention full faith and credit (which we do not), we |
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