dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
DR. FRITZ: The next quotations used by the Prosecution are some excerpts from your speech of 13 January 1945. Mr. President, this is speech Number 8, contained in full in Document Book Number 1, to be found on Pages 46 to 51. The Prosecution in this case is quoting only two paragraphs, one on Page 50 of my document book, Paragraph 2. [Turning to the defendant.] In these passages you mention Jewish influence on British policies. How could you make those statements? What were your reasons?
FRITZSCHE: The-Prosecution assumes from this quotation that it was the introduction to further persecution of the Jews and to their complete extermination. This conclusion, however, is justified neither in the words nor in the sense nor when seen in the light of the context. I shall forego giving you in this case a picture of the connections, not even in a brief summary. It can be gathered when you read the speech in question. However, I cannot see where an appeal for the extermination of the Jews is to be found.
DR. FRITZ: Forming a part of the general crimes against humanity you are accused of incitive libel against the Jews, the logical result of which is said to have been further persecutions. Therefore, I want to ask you about the murder of Jews. Did you know of Hitler's decree, as testified by the witness Hoess, a decree according to which the Jews were to be murdered?
FRITZSCHE: I should like to state under my oath that I did not know of this order by Hitler. If I had known it, I would not have served that person who had given this order for another hour. I should like to state further that evidently this decree, as well as this entire action, was concealed with specific care from me and my co-workers, because once I almost discovered its existence.
DR. FRITZ: Did you receive at any time an indication about the killing of a large number of innocent people?
FRITZSCHE: Yes. In February or March 1942 I received a letter from a medium-ranking SS leader of the Ukraine. I do not recall this man's name. The contents of the letter were to the effect that the author was the commander of an SS unit, that he had received an order to kill the Jews and the Ukrainian intelligentsia of his area. Upon receipt of this order, he had suffered a nervous breakdown and he was now in a hospital. It seemed to him that a complaint along official channels was quite impossible for him. He said he did not know me but had confidence in me; perhaps I could help in some way. He asked me not to mention his name as he was bound to silence at the cost of his life. Without much hesitation and immediately upon receipt of this letter I called Heydrich, the Obergruppenfuehrer, then leader of the RSHA or the Gestapo. I hardly knew him personally, but he declared himself quite willing to receive me immediately. I visited him and asked him pointblank, "Is your SS there for the purpose of committing mass murders?" Heydrich was quite indignant at this question, and said that larger or smaller SS units had been assigned by him for police purposes to various ministers, Reich commissioners, and so forth. These special details of SS men had been misused on various occasions, and he thought this might apply to the unit which had been placed at the disposal of Gauleiter Koch. He told Me that he would have an investigation started immediately. Next noon he called me, from headquarters as he said, and let me know that this action had actually been attempted on the order of Koch. Koch, for his part, had referred to the Fuehrer. The Fuehrer, however, had not answered as yet. Heydrich said I would receive further details. Two days later Heydrich asked me to come and visit him and said Hitler had expressly declared that he had not given this order; Koch now said that there was a misunderstanding. I was further told that an investigation of Koch had been started. At any rate, Heydrich promised me that this action would not be carried through.
FRITZSCHE: I remember particularly well one sentence which was used in this discussion, words used by Heydrich: "Believe me, Herr Fritzsche, anyone who has the reputation of being cruel does not have to be cruel; he can act humanely." Shortly thereafter, I was made a soldier and asked to be sent to the 6th Army and was sent to the Ukraine.
DR. FRITZ: Did you . . .
THE PRESIDENT: Wait a minute. I did not understand that last sentence. Heydrich said, "Believe me, Herr Fritzsche..." and then... .
FRITZSCHE: May I repeat: ". . . anyone who has the reputation of being cruel does not have to be cruel; he can act humanely."
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, but then you went on about going to the fifth Army?
FRITZSCHE: Yes, shortly thereafter I became a soldier...
DR. FRITZ: He added, Mr. President, that shortly after this meeting with Heydrich, he himself, that is the Defendant Fritzsche, became a soldier and he specifically asked to be detailed to the 6th Army which at that time was stationed in the Ukraine.
THE PRESIDENT: What was the date of this incident?
FRITZSCHE: February-March 1942.
DR. FRITZ: When you were a soldier in the Ukraine, did you try to check the statements of Heydrich as to their correctness?
FRITZSCHE: I had no official authority to do this, but as an old journalist I made investigations on my own, of course. First of all, I investigated in Kiev, with the local German radio station. The answer was: Yes, several shootings actually did take place, specifically after the blowing up of certain blocks of houses in Kiev, on which occasion many German soldiers lost their lives. However, they were shootings according to sentences imposed by courts-martial. Then, for 3 days I traveled in all directions between Kiev and Poltava. Mostly I traveled alone. I found the population in utmost peace; there were no signs of terror whatsoever, and by the way, I was received very well myself. At Poltava I checked with officers and soldiers. On these occasions as well, I was told, "Yes, there were some court-martial sentences. The reason for these sentences was sabotage." Then, in Kharkov itself, I visited the SS command stationed there, and I spoke with the Sturmfuehrer Rexlach. He denied any shooting actions. He showed me the prison and there were perhaps 50 inmates, no more. I asked him about camps and he stated that there were none. Then I visited a Ukrainian family; I questioned a German agricultural leader at Bielgorod, and I met with the same result in every case: no shooting actions took place. I certainly assumed from that that it had been an attempted individual action which had not been carried through.
DR. FRITZ: Before this letter which the SS leader had sent you, did you not already have suspicions, perhaps from Allied radio broadcasts to which you had access?
FRITZSCHE: These radio broadcasts were accessible to me. I had reports on atrocities specially gathered at that time and selected from the great number of enemy broadcasts which we received every day, and then I had these reports investigated and checked.
DR. FRITZ: And who concerned himself with this checking?
FRITZSCHE: The competent specialist, Oberregierungsrat Korber, in charge of the Schnelldienst office of the Press Department, or one of his co-workers, or I myself.
DR. FRITZ: Where was this checked?
FRITZSCHE: We inquired of the RSHA, for in most of these reports of atrocities the SS or Gestapo were mentioned as the ones who had perpetrated the murders.
DR. FRITZ: At which of the many branches of this office did you inquire?
FRITZSCHE: We inquired at the various competent offices, and I do not doubt that we inquired of Eichmann, who has been mentioned in these proceedings here. Apart from that, we inquired of Sturmbannfuehrer Spengler or his deputy Von Kielpinsky, both of them members of that office which, at that time or later, was taken over by Ohlendorf who has also appeared here as a witness. Frequently we inquired of the branch offices of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the so-called state police control offices as well, especially if there were reports from a special area.
DR. FRITZ: What were the answers you received?
FRITZSCHE: We always received the answer that the report in question was either completely wrong and was an invention, or that the report had this or that legal basis. Frequently figures and details were reported which in effect were quite disarming.
DR. FRITZ: Are there any records of this?
FRITZSCHE: Yes. The more important questions and answers were noted and were even reproduced and sent to the various offices within and outside the Propaganda Ministry. All the material was collected in the archives called "Schnelldienst," for which I applied here and which was granted to me but not found.
DR. FRITZ: And you just believed these answers?
FRITZSCHE: Yes, I did believe them, for after all this was information which was given to me by official sources and furthermore I had experienced on numerous occasions that the authenticity of such reports from these sources had been proved very drastically.
DR. FRITZ: What do you mean by that?
FRITZSCHE: Perhaps I might give you an example. The first propaganda action of the war was the report given out by Warsaw about the destruction of the picture of the "Black Madonna" of Czestochowa. This report was transmitted around the world. We took German and foreign journalists to Czestochowa, who could assure themselves that this report was not true. But I must be quite honest here and say that I really wanted to cite another example in reply to this question put by my counsel, another report which really had its surprising after-effects for me in this courtroom some 2 or 3 days ago. The British newspaper News Chronicle , on 24 September 1939, printed the report that the German. .
THE PRESIDENT: What is the evidential value of the News Chronicle in 1939?
DR. FRITZ: The defendant wants to prove to the High Tribunal that he found that many reports from abroad, dealing with German atrocities, actually were false, so that...
THE PRESIDENT: Well, we do not need details about that. No doubt there were frequent reports which were not accurate. We do not want you to go into details.
FRITZSCHE: I wanted to prove with just one news item how at that time something which the world believed could be denied and then, in the shadow of this denial, quite unnoticed by the German public, something did take place, such as a larger wave of arrests or a similar matter.
THE PRESIDENT: He can state the facts, but he need not go into detail about a particular issue of the newspaper.
DR. FRITZ: Was it only once, Herr Fritzsche, that you learned of the falsehood of such foreign broadcasts?
FRITZSCHE: No, that took place quite frequently.
DR. FRITZ: Please be very brief, Herr Fritzsche.
FRITZSCHE: One of my co-workers gathered the necessary material for an article entitled, "In 8 Weeks of War 107 Lies." I should like to say only one thing about this. The compilation of such false reports given out by our enemy gave me a sense of moral superiority over that type of reporting, and this feeling was the basis of my later work, which could not be explained without this feeling.
DR. FRITZ: Did it not strike you that such false reports occurred only in the beginning of the war?
FRITZSCHE: No, that thought never occurred to me. The reports were so numerous in the beginning and I could also notice them in later years. Some affected me personally.
DR. FRITZ: How far did they affect you personally? Can you sketch it in a few brief words?
FRITZSCHE: Just one of many statements: An enemy front propaganda bulletin accused me of the fact that 600,000 Swedish kroner . . .
THE PRESIDENT: What is he going to now? What is the purpose of this?
DR. FRITZ: He wants to give an example of how a false statement applied to him personally. He wanted to state that briefly.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, as I said already, there were, no doubt, erroneous statements made in the foreign press and every press. We cannot investigate those sorts of matters. 3:)R. FRITZ: Then I shall pass on to another question. [Turning to the defendant.] Did you not, as an experienced journalist in the news service, have the feeling that where there is smoke there is fire? Did you not believe that at least something must be true of the enemy reports about murders and so forth in the areas under German domination?
FRITZSCHE: Precisely because I was a professional newsman I did not have this feeling. Again and again I thought-and I repeatedly reminded the public-of one erroneous bit of reporting of the first World War. I beg the Tribunal to grant me permission to mention it quite briefly because it is also a part of the fundamentals of the propaganda which I carried on.
THE PRESIDENT: No, I have already pointed out that we assume that there are a variety of errors. We do not want to go into detail.
DR. FRITZ: Then I shall turn to another question. [Turning to the defendant.] But surely you knew that the Jews had been evacuated from the Reich; you must have noticed that they disappeared from the streets?
FRITZSCHE: Yes, I did notice that even though this occurred very gradually. Beyond that I heard Dr. Goebbels say on the occasion of a ministerial conference that as Gauleiter in Berlin he had demanded the evacuation of Jews.
DR. FRITZ: Where were these Jews taken in your opinion and what were you told about these things?
FRITZSCHE: Dr. Goebbels told me that they were taken to reservations in Poland. The suspicion that they were taken to concentration camps, or that they were even being murdered, never arose.
DR. FRITZ: Did you inquire about these reservations into which the Jews were allegedly being taken?
FRITZSCHE: Of course I did that. For instance, I learned of various things from a former co-worker of mine who had been transferred into the administration of the Government General and who had an administrative position in the region Biala-Podlaska. He said that the area under his control had become a Jewish area, and he repeatedly pictured the arrival and the housing of these transporters. He also mentioned the difficulties and the employment of Jews as workers or on plantations. His entire description bore witness to his humane point of view. He told me that under him the Jews fared better than they had in the Reich.
DR. FRITZ: What was the name of this man?
FRITZSCHE: Oberregierungsrat Hubert Kuhl.
DR. FRITZ: Did you hear unfavorable reports about these deported Jews?
FRITZSCHE: Yes. Sturmbannfuehrer Radke of the staff of the Reichsfuehrer SS reported, perhaps in the winter of 1942, that the mortality rate of the Jews in the eastern ghettos was abnormally high due to the changeover from mental work to manual labor. He mentioned there were even some isolated cases of typhus. Apart from that, Dr. Tauber, who was head of the section dealing with Jewish questions in the propaganda department, told me in 1941, if I remember correctly, that there had been pogroms during the occupation of Lvov and Kovno, but they were carried out by the local population. He assured me at the same time that the German authorities had taken steps against these pogroms. Nevertheless the references to such things caused me to criticize matters severely, even though these things today look almost insignificant compared with what we know of today. My criticism was directed against my superiors, particularly Dr. Goebbels, and also against coworkers and members of the Gestapo and of the Party. I referred repeatedly to the legal, political, and moral necessity of protecting these Jews, who, after all, had been entrusted to our care.
DR. FRITZ: Did you learn anything else about the fate of these Jews?
FRITZSCHE: On several occasions Jews or relatives or friends of Jews appealed to me because of discrimination or arrests. A large number of non-Jews also did this as my name had become wellknown to the public. Without exception, I made their pleas my own and I tried to help through various offices such as the RSHA, through the personnel section of my Ministry, through individual ministers and Gauleiter, et cetera .
DR. FRITZ: Why did you turn to so many different authorities and offices?
FRITZSCHE: Very many requests were involved, and if my name had appeared too often at the same office its effectiveness would have been exhausted very quickly.
DR. FRITZ: Did you on occasion turn down these requests?
FRITZSCHE: No, not in one single instance, and I should like to emphasize that particularly because a letter addressed to me in this prison here was not handed over to me but was published in the press. It was a letter in which a woman asserted that I had turned down a request for pardon. I remember this case specifically and I should like to emphasize briefly that in this case I had expressly called on the Reich Minister of Justice...
THE PRESIDENT: It is sufficient for him to say that he did not turn them down. We do not want one instance of somebody who wrote to him. How long are you going to be, Dr. Fritz?
DR. FRITZ: I believe I shall be able to conclude the entire Fritzsche case tomorrow morning. Mr. President, I have heard that there is no open session this afternoon . . .
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
DR. FRITZ: ...otherwise I would have been able to conclude the entire Fritzsche case today. However, I hope to be able to conclude my examination of the defendant in his own case and that of the witness Von Schirmeister. I hope that tomorrow noon I shall be able to conclude.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal hopes so too, because, as I have pointed out to you, we do not want you to go into such elaborate detail. You have been going, in the opinion of the Tribunal, far too much into detail, and we want the matter dealt with more generally. [The Tribunal adjourned until 28 June 1946 at 1000 hours.]
DR. FRITZ: Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Bench, the Defendant Fritzsche, toward the end of yesterday morning's session, testified as to how he tried to aid persecuted persons, within the scope of his limited opportunities. In order to conclude this subject, and with the approval of the Prosecution, I submit Document Number Fritzsche-6, an affidavit of Count Westarp, which is to be found in my Document Book Number 2 on Pages 23 to 25, dated 15 June 1946. I beg the Tribunal to take judicial notice of the contents of this document. Furthermore, as another piece of evidence, I should like to offer another affidavit, made by a Frau Kruger, Berlin, which is to bee Document Number Fritzsche-8. This affidavit has not yet been included in my document book. However, the original was made by Frau Kruger in German as well as in English and both copies have been affirmed and sworn to. I should like to refer to the contents of this affidavit, especially to the last two paragraphs. From the last paragraph but one we can see that apart from individual cases Frau Kruger has a general knowledge of the defendant's activities. And the last paragraph is quite interesting; it deals with the manner of life led by the Defendant Fritzsche. Apart from that, I also refer here to the entire contents of this article and I ask the High Tribunal to take judicial notice of this document. Finally, in this connection, I should like to refer to an affidavit made by Dr. Scharping which has been frequently quoted, Document Number Fritzsche-2, which is to be found in the Fritzsche Document Book Number 2, Pages 6 to 15. I refer particularly to Page 13 at the bottom of the page, and the top of Page 14. Herr Fritzsche, I should like to put two more general questions to you on this topic. During the last period of the war, did you not try to find out something about the final fate of the Jews?
FRITZSCHE: Yes. I made the most of an opportunity to which I will refer briefly later on. I asked a colleague of Obergruppenfuehrer Glucks, in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, about the Jews. Briefly summarized, his answer was as follows: The Jews were under the special protection of the Reichsfuehrer-SS who wished to make a political deal with them. He looked upon them as a kind of hostages and he did not wish a single hair from their heads to be harmed.
DR. FRITZ: Some of the Prosecution's witnesses have asserted during this Trial that the German public knew about these murders. Now I just want to ask you, as a journalist who worked in the National Socialist State, what was, as far as you know, the attitude of the broad mass of the German people to the Jews? Did the people know about the murder of the Jews? Please be brief.
FRITZSCHE: Leaving out all those matters which have already been mentioned at this Trial, I should like to mention only a few observations which to me seem important. I shall omit the period shortly after the first World War, which has already been described, during which certain anti-Semitic feelings were popular in Germany. I should like to state only that in 1933 at the time of the Jewish boycott, which was organized by the NSDAP, the sympathies of the German people clearly turned again in favor of the Jews. For a number of years the Party tried hard to prevent the public from buying in Jewish stores. Finally they even had to resort to threats. A profound and decisive factor in this development was the promulgating of the Nuremberg Laws. As a result of these the fight against the Jews was taken for the first time out of the sphere of pure agitation, that is, the kind of agitation from which one could remain aloof, and, shifted to the field of State Police. At that time a deep feeling of fear ran through the German people, for now dissension spread even to individual families. At that time many human tragedies resulted, tragedies which were obvious to many, probably to everyone, and there was only one justification for these racial laws. There was only one excuse for them and one explanation; that was the assertion and the hope: Well, now that the separation of the two peoples is being carried out, although painfully, there will at last be an end to the wild and unbridled agitation; and due to this separation there will be peace where formerly only unrest reigned. When the Jews were forced to wear the emblem of a star and when, for instance, in Berlin they were prohibited from occupying seats on streetcars, the German people openly took sides with the Jews and it happened again and again that Jews were ostentatiously offered seats. In this connection I heard several declarations by Dr. Goebbels, who was extremely bitter about this undesired effect of the marking of the Jews.
FRITZSCHE: I, as a journalist who worked during that period, am firmly convinced that the German people were unaware of the mass murders of the Jews and assertions to that effect were considered rumors; and reports which reached the German people from outside were officially denied again and again. As these documents are not in my possession, I cannot quote from memory individual cases of denial; but one case I do remember with particular clearness. That was the moment when the Russians, after they recaptured Kharkov, started legal proceedings during which killing by gas was mentioned for the first time. I ran to Dr. Goebbels with these reports and asked him about the facts. He stated he would have the matter investigated and would discuss it with Himmler and with Hitler. The next day he sent me notice of denial. This denial was not made public; and the reason stated was that in German legal proceedings it is necessary to state in a much plainer manner matters that need clarification. However, Dr. Goebbels explicitly informed me that the gas vans mentioned in the Russian legal proceeding were pure invention and that there was no actual proof to support it. N was not without reason that the people who operated these vans were put under the ban of strictest secrecy. If the German people had learned of these mass murders, they would certainly no longer have supported Hitler. They would probably have sacrificed 5 million for a victory, but never would the German people have wished to bring about victory by the murder of 5 million people. I should like to state further that this murder decree of Hitler's seems to me the end of every race theory, every race philosophy, every kind of race propaganda, for after this catastrophe any further advocacy of race theory would be equivalent to approval in theory of further murder. An ideology in the name of which 5 million people were murdered is a theory which cannot continue to exist.