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Volume VI · Page 850
| [Gov…] ernment was working in close collaboration with the German Government. In Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia the German troops had been greeted as liberators, and they fought on together with them. From the Ukraine one also heard of a great sympathy on the part of the population in favor of the war against Soviet Russia. May I remind you of the name of General Vlassov. A school friend of mine, who came home on leave from the eastern front and who was serving with a cavalry regiment, told me that he was now in charge of a brigade of Cossacks who had reported voluntarily to fight against the Soviet Russians. The second reason was that I was told especially by Dr. Kuettner and Walter Tengelmann that the Russians before their retreat had to a large extent destroyed the industrial plants or dismantled them, so that in the industrial areas there was in actual fact a considerable amount of unemployment. The third reason was that Sauckel and Ley again and again announced that these people were coming to Germany voluntarily in order to get to know German conditions and in order to work in Germany, and one also read in the publications, for instance, in the social-political information bulletins of the Reich Association Coal [RVK], that provision had been made for the families of these workers in cases where the families remained behind. Roughly, I could say that the foreign workers got leave in Germany. They could go out when they wanted. You saw them all over the place, on the street, and everywhere they were active at work; every builder, every gardener had foreign workers. A few were employed as barbers, you were quite often attended by a foreign assistant, the sleeping car attendants, the waiters in the restaurants and hotels, even domestic servants in private households were foreign workers; and in the case of all these people one did not have the impression that they considered themselves slaves. I talked to the foreign workers occasionally who were employed in my plant, and not one of them ever told me that he had been under any duress. | |
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| CROSS-EXAMINATION | |
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| MR. ERVIN: Now, in
connection with your testimony on Linke-Hofmann, you mention several times that
Dr. Putze * had some connection with the Speer organization. What was that
connection? DEFENDANT WEISS: Dr. Putze had quite a reputation in the Speer Ministry. On the one hand he was an Armament Chief |
* Putze, member of the Vorstand of Flick's Linke-Hofmann firm, signed Document NI-3586. Prosecution Exhibit 173, reproduced in B above, one of four related documents involving the Linke-Hofrnann expansion discussed during the direct examination of defendant Weiss.
