. NMT05-T1226
Volume V · Page 1226
| crime the whole world knows.
This judgment does not suggest that Leo Volk actively participated in the
beatings and other ill treatment practiced on the concentration camp inmates,
but it does declare, as it did in the original judgment, that he was a vital
figure in one branch of the WVHA responsible for the concentration camps of
Germany and occupied countries. Defense counsel very properly says: "The concentration camp policy was a violation of the principles of Christianity." From this statement he argues that Volk could not have participated in furthering the concentration camp policy because Dr. Volk came from a strictly Catholic family. The fact remains, however, that Volk joined the National Socialist party as early as 1933 and never left it, even after its anti-religious program became evident to everyone. That Volk is a kindly person at heart, as counsel points out, is not disputed. Nonetheless he remained part of a system which enslaved, tortured, and killed masses of population in the concentration camps he helped to administer. The fact that the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps did not come within the framework of the WVHA until April 1942, does not change the fact that concentration camp inmates were used in the SS industries. On 30 April 1942, Pohl said: |
"The mobilization of all prisoners who are fit for work, for purposes of the war now, and for purposes of construction in the forthcoming peace, come to the foreground more and more. From this knowledge some necessary measures result with the aim to transform the concentration camps into organizations more suitable for the economic task, whilst they were formerly merely politically interested." (II/67, Doc. R-129.) |
| Dr. Klinnert says: |
"1. Some of the industrial enterprises of the branch companies of the DWB, i.e., the DEST G.m.b.H., and the DAW, employed concentration camp prisoners in their plants at a time when the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps did not yet belong to the WVHA and Pohl was not in charge of the supervision." |
| This only emphasizes the policy of the industrial enterprises to exploit concentration camp labor regardless of the method of administration. Defense counsel says further that only a very small part of the more than 50 branch companies of the DWB employed concentration camp prisoners during the war. They did, however, use them and Volk was aware of that use. Dr. Klinnert says that Volk had no knowledge of the circumstances which made labor allocation of concentration camp inmates criminal. In this respect Dr. Klinnert falls into the same error committed by his predecessor who, in his trial brief for Volk, said: |
