Transcript for NMT 11: Ministries Case

COURT IV, CASE XI, COMMISSION I

AI have already seen this plan before. I examined it closely and therefore can answer your question immediately. This plan of Frick's has nothing to do with the actual re-organization of the Ministry and with the actual relations between the individual spheres of work.

QSo far as this chart refers to the Speer Ministry, will you please correct it?

ACorrection is impossible for the simple reason that it is wrong from start to finish.

QWitness, do you think that Frick as former Reich Minister of the Interior really had an opportunity to know the internal organization of the Speer Ministry?

AOf course, Frick theoretically had an opportunity to become familiar with the organization, but on the other hand, it must be said that he did not make any practical use of this theoretical opportunity, because what he has put down here in this chart simply does not correspond with the do facto situation.

QWitness, I have asked you to draw up charts in illustrating the organization of the Speer Ministry. Let me now give you my Kehrl Document No. 73, which I offer as Exhibit 215. The prosecution already has a copy of that plan. Please, first of all, identify this chart.

AThis is the chart which I drew up on the Armaments Ministry.

QAs of what date is this chart drawn up?

AAs of 1943, January.

QAfter the dissolution of the Armaments Office and the Armaments Delivery Office, I now give you another plan, Kehrl Document 447, which I shall put in evidence as Exhibit 388. This is the status of 1943 and 1944, namely, the autumn of 1943 and the entire year of COURT IV, CASE XI, COMMISSION I 1944.

Will you please identify this chart also?

AThis likewise is a chart which I drew up.

QWhat is contained in both of these charts is correct?

QNow on the basis of these two charts, please ellucidate briefly the organization of the Speer Ministry.

AWhat was basically important to me was to indicate the entire sphere of responsibility of Reich Minister which he had in the fields of production, raw materials, manufacture of semi-finished goods, and means of production; then the production of civilian consumers goods, production of arms and war materials of all sorts; in addition, the electricity and construction, and it was important to me to make clear that this over-all competency of Reich Minister Speer was subdivided within the Ministry into various offices.

QWho headed each of these offices?

AAn office chief headed each office.

QWhat is the most important thing that you wish to get across by these two charts?

AThe important thing is the following: First of all, the offices all have analogous functions. Secondly, the offices are all of equal rank, one to the other. Thirdly, the office chiefs likewise have exactly equivalent ranks and from it results this, that every office chief has only one superior and one person who is competent to issue directives to him and that is the Minister himself.

QIn these plans we also find the Raw Materials office and the Planning Office. These offices were under Kehrl's charge. Were they the same sort of offices as the others?

AYes, they were. Both the Raw Materials Office and the Planning Office are among all the other offices in the Armaments Ministry.

QWas such an office in the Speer Ministry an office with complete independence as far as administration, personnel, budget, and so on, are concerned?

ASuch an office in the Armaments Ministry must be compared with the offices in the Ministerial sub-departments in the other Ministries. They had no administrative independence.

QAnd how much independence did they have in technical matters?

AThey were limited to the spheres for which they were competent.

QWas that true also of the Planning Office?

QCould Kehrl fire or promote officials as he saw fit?

ALike every office chief, he had to have in such measures the approval of the central office. In the question of promotion the Minister alone decided.

QWas it permitted to the offices themselves to correspond with other highest Reich Agencies?

AThe correspondence with the highest Reich Agencies went through the central office and the office of the Minister. Of course the individual office was permitted to have immediate contact with similar offices in other Ministries - for example, Kehrl could take up contact a similar office in the Ministry of Economy but contact with the Ministry took place only through the office of the COURT IV, CASE XI, COMMISSION I Minister.

QThen they were not permitted to have direct correspondence or contact with other Ministries?

ANo, such contact had to go through the office of the Minister.

QCould every office, for example, have independent correspondence with the party Chancellory?

ANo, that was not permitted under any circumstances.

QOn those charts we see seven or nine individual offices. What was the relationship of the rank of these office chiefs to Speer's rank?

AI have already said that every office chief was immediately subordinate to the Minister, that is to say, the Minister was the only person competent to give directives to the individual office chiefs.

QThen the individual office chiefs had the sane rank?

AYes, there was no primus inter prares with them.

QWas it so that one of these office chiefs was the Plenipotentiary deputy for the Minister when he was absent?

ANo, there was none such.

QBut, witness, isn't it customary that a Minister has a deputy who is responsible for the whole field of the Ministry who has the rank of a State Secretary?

AThat is quite customary in all Reich Ministries, and the Armaments Ministry also had a State Secretary, namely, Schultze Filietz. But from 1933 on this State Secretary did not act as the over-all representative of the Minister but administered the electricity department.

QYou said 1933, witness; you meant 1943, of course?

AYes. In about June of 1944 General Field Marshal Milch COURT IV, CASE XI, COMMISSION I became Speer's standing deputy, but then for reasons of health he never took over these functions.

QDo you know which office the Minister regarded as the most important office in his Ministry?

AThe war conditioned that, of course, he was primarily interested in the technical office and the armaments delivery office, that is, all those offices which dealt immediately with the production of war materials.

QThen the most important offices to Speer were the technical office and the armaments delivery office. Now one further question regarding correspondence: Could the office chiefs send letters to the Reich Defense Commissioners or the Gauleiters and sign them themselves?

ASuch letters went through the office of the Minister and were usually signed by the Minister himself, or, at least, were always approved by him.

QThen such letters could not be signed by the office chiefs?

QWhat was Speer's method of working in collaboration with his office chiefs?

AIn all basic and fundamental questions Speer reserved decision for himself. In addition, it was important to him to have continual and clear insight into the methods of working in each individual office, and to know what important conferences or discussions were carried out by his individual office chiefs, and to know the important correspondence of his office chiefs.

QDid he create a special apparatus to make this possible?

ATo have close working connections with the office chiefs Speer introduced the weekly conferences with the office chiefs.

QPlease describe briefly how those office chief conferences COURT IV, CASE XI, COMMISSION I were conducted?

AThe office chief discussions took place weekly, always on a specific day. The Minister himself was chairman of these discussions and the office chiefs had to be present in person. Only a particularly pressing business trip could constitute a legitimate excuse for absence. On matters of working, the policy and directives which either the Minister or an office chief intended were discussed during these conferences. In order to intensify these conferences it was the task of the chief of the central office to take the preliminary drafts of these working policies of the individual office chiefs and to make them available a few days earlier. Thus important letters which were to emanate from any one office were always discussed in these office chief conferences.

QWitness, you have already testified that it was most important to Speer to be informed about all matters concerning his offices and office chiefs. How did Speer get this information regarding conferences and correspondence on the part of these office chiefs or offices?

AEvery office chief was obliged to submit to the office of the Minister a target plan for the next few days. Moreover, it was established that important meetings of the office chiefs could, if possible, be carried out in the meeting room in the Ministry itself, which was the office where the Minister was present. Both of these measures served the purpose of making it possible for the Minister to deal himself with important questions. Furthermore, there was the provision that the copies of important correspondence should be submitted to the office of the minister.

QI am returning now to the Planning Office. The prosecution contends that there were two planning offices, namely, a planning office of the Speer Ministry and a planning office of the COURT IV, CASE XI, COMMISSION I Central Planning Board.

Is that contention correct?

AI know of only one planning office, and this was one of the offices in the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production.

QWhat was the letterhead of this planning office?

ACuriously enough the letterhead was not: Reich Ministry for Production, Planning Office, but the Plenipotentiary General for Armaments Tasks, Planning Office.

QWhat is the reason for that?

AI believe that that is based solely on the Planning office decree of fall 1943.

QYou mean the decree of 16 September 1943?

AI guess so, but I don't know the exact date.

QCan you tell us something about Speer's competency as Plenipotentiary General for Armaments Tasks?

AI can't tell you anything specific about that. I never heard a precise definition of that sphere of competency. I had, and have, the impression that this office, the Plenipotentiary General for Armaments Tasks, was the result of a tactical maneuver between Goering and Speer, and for very simple reasons. On the one hand the deputy for the Four Year Plan, Goering, didn't want to give Speer completely free play in the sphere of armaments, and, of course, on the other hand Speer was not adverse to be able to speak also in the name of the Four Year Plan in the performance of his armament tasks.

QWas Kehrl a member of the Central planning Board?

QDo you know who the members were?

AI do. I know the Central Planning Board as a committee of four men in toto; these four men were Speer, Milch, Koerner, and Funk, the Minister of Economy.

QSauckel wasn't a member?

QDo you know what functions Kehrl exercised in the Central Planning Board? The prosecution contends that he had some functions.

AThe Planning Office was for the Central Planning Board which was not an office but a committee of individuals, the main secretarial office for the Central Planning Board. That also defines Kehrl's functions. That is to say, for the meetings of the Central Planning Board or for decisions reached by this committee Kehrl had to provide the data on which these discussions could be based. As a person familiar with these data he had to report on their contents in the meetings; and then as is the function in other offices, he had to see to it that the decisions were implemented and carried out.

QLet me interpolate a question about the fact that Kehrl had to provide data. These data were conceived of as the bases for the discussions in the Central Planning Board?

QDid Kehrl have a right to make decisions in the Central Planning Board?

ANo, since decisions were reached solely by the members of the Central Planning Board.

QCould Kehrl oppose decisions of the Central Planning Board?

AOf course Kehrl could oppose decisions; but such did not render the decision invalidated, did not rescind a decision.

QYou said that he could oppose the decisions of the Central Planning Board. Was that a right that adhered formally to Kehrl, or was that a right that everyone had at these meetings?

AThat was not a right that referred solely to Kehrl, that was a right that everyone had who was invited to such meetings. Thus, practically speaking, that was nothing more than a critical statement COURT IV, CASE XI, COMMISSION I of a person in a field in which he is an expert.

QThen it was nothing more or less than what everyone regards as a matter of course in every discussion, namely, that everyone expresses his opinion?

AThat's correct.

QKehrl did not have any obligation to oppose decisions of the Central Planning Board, did he?

QDid the Planning Board have any tasks in the field of labor allocation?

AThe Planning Office did have a formal competency by virtue of the planning Office decree.

QActually this Planning Board had no competency?

AIt had a formal, but not an actual, competency.

DR. GRUBE:Perhaps I should ask the interpreter to translate "Planungsamt" as planning Office.

QThis planning Office decree of 16 September 1943, which is to be found in Exhibit 2016, says under I-4, quote: "The Planning Office is to allocate all manpower in the Greater German sphere of influence to the individual sectors (war production, transportation, food, etc.); it is to propose these measures to the Central Planning Board for decision and to take statistical measures to have the decisions carried out." Will you please say what you have to say about this?

AThe following is to be said about that: For armaments industry, in toto, labor allocation of course played a great role because the Armaments Minister was one of the main people who needed workers. This was what we called "Bedarfstraeger" in the field of manpower. And this explains Speer's desire to have some influence in the allocation of labor. He believed that he could COURT IV, CASE XI, COMMISSION I achieve this through his position of Plenipotentiary General for Armaments Tasks; and in this capacity he accordingly gave the Planning Office such a task.

However, the following must be noted: in this case Speer had been counting his chickens before they were hatched. Sauckel was the man to watch out for in this situation, the Plenipotentiary General for Labor Allocation, namely, the man who was competent for all matters of labor allocation. And moreover his competency was total, and he had never declared himself willing to have others restrict his competency. When at the end of 1943 Speer created the so-called "blocked plants" in the West, the relations between Speer and Sauckel became more and more tense and thus every prerequisite of Speer's realizing his hopes were done away with.

QWhat was the function of these blocked plants?

AThese closed plants prohibited the export of workers from those areas and thus came into conflict with Sauckel's intentions.

QAnd that led to tension between Speer and Sauckel?

AYes, it became a notorious fact. Later this tension was becoming more and more acute and consequently these matters could no longer be negotiated.

QAccording to your knowledge, then, witness, the Planning Office never exercised these functions in the sphere of labor allocation as Speer had intended?

ANo, it never came to a realization of de jure competency on the part of the Planning Office.

QWas there not another aspect to this policy? An aspect from within the Ministry itself?

AThat Speer had no other intention in forming this Planning Office than the intention which I have already described, can be seen from the following: He made no effort to reorganize the COURT IV, CASE XI, COMMISSION I competency for labor allocation matters within the Ministry; that is to say, in the Armaments Ministry the Armaments Office remained solely competent for matters of labor allocation.

And it is essential to note and to state that then when the Armaments Office was dissolved Speer did not give these matters of labor allocation to the competency of the Planning Office but transferred them to the Central Office, which was under me.

QWitness, do I understand you correctly - that Speer had the intention of giving the Planning Office a function in the sphere of labor allocation? Did Speer do this only on the assumption that he would thus be able to break into Sauckel's domain? And when this did not happen did the matter of who was competent for labor allocation matters in the Ministry become entirely indifferent to him?

Court 4, Case 11 - Commission 1

A.Yes, he was attempting to encroach on Sauckel's sphere. When that attempt was unseccessful he changed, for the time being, nothing in the competency for Labor Allocation Matters within the Ministry.

Q.And this existing competency for Labor Allocation Matters within the Speer Ministry was the Armaments Office under General Weger?

A.Yes, that is so.

Q.And once Speer's hopes came to naught in 1945, then when the Armaments office was dissolved, the competency for Labor Allocation was not transferred to the Planning Office but to the Central Office; is that correct?

A.Yes.

Q.Witness, since you have now discussed the question of the Armaments Offices' competency in the field of labor allocation, could you tell us in what other ways it was competent?

A.The Armaments Office had the following functions in the field of labor allocation: 1, To draw up statistics on the manpower status in the armaments and war production industry; 2, To compile statistics on the armaments plants' demands for workers; 3, checking on and examining these requirements with respect to their necessity. This refers to the so-called examining committees ; 4, Representing the Ministries' wishes, vis a vis the G.B.A. and his offices; 5, the distribution of the so called red slips to the main committees and what-not who were in charge of the overall production policy; and, finally, 6, uncovering possibilities of acquiring new German manpower or a more efficient use of manpower already employed.

Q.The main function then of the Armaments Office lay primarily in labor allocation; is that so?

A.The overall competency of the Armaments Office was formulated as follows: At that time it had to assure the preparedness of plants in material respects and in respect to personnel. That included labor allocation but also included such questions as priority: fuel, protection, plant security, transfer of plants, and so forth.

Court 4, Case 11 - Commission I

Q.Now, if I understood you correctly, witness, it was the Armaments Office that represented the wishes of the Ministry with respect to labor allocation, vis a vis the General Plenipotentiary for Labor Allocation?

A.Yes.

Q.Do you know that the manpower needs of the other Bedarfstraeger were reported to the Labor Allocation Office without going through the Speer Ministry?

A.Yes; it was customary for every individual plant of every branch of industry to report its requirements to the competent labor office.

Q.Witness, since the Armaments office was competent, how could the Planning Office undertake a statistical compilation of manpower data, if it, itself, had nothing to do with the Labor Allocation?

A.For this statistical work the Planning Office had to confine itself only to the data made available by the Armaments Office and for a very simple reason: The reports of the manpower status came to the Armaments Office via the Armaments Office via the Armaments Inspectorate. Both of these were offices that were not subordinate to the Planning Office but to the Armaments Office, and consequently the Planning Office could get these data only from the Armaments Office.

Q.Was this competency observed also in practice?

A.There was no other competency because that was the only channel. The Placing Office had no department of its own in the Armaments Office.

Q.Now, witness, please take these two charts. Document 447 contains nine offices and Document 73 contains but seven. Please once more explain where the Armaments Office turn up here in Document 447.

A.Right here, the second one.

Q.Chief of the office was who?

A.General Weg er.

Q.Now, the second chart, No. 73, was drawn up as of January 1945. Here the matter of labor allocation was handled by whom?

A.By the Central Office

Q.You said before this that these tasks of labor allocation which, per se, were the task of the Armaments Office were, after the dissolution of the Armaments Office, not transferred to the Planning Office but to the Central Office.

A.Yes.

Q.Let me now ask you to tell us something about the basic trans actions of the Planning Office.

A.They were the following: setting up quotas for raw Materials and distributing same; establishing priority for transportation, power and construction projects the value of which was greater than five million Reichsmarks investment value; and statistics for the plans of the agencies in charge of production, involving questions of import and export; and then the tasks for the Main Secretary Office of the Central Planning Board. These were its major functions.

Q.Witness, you didn't mention what was perhaps the most important function, namely, the dealing with war time and peacetime production. Did that have some special reason?

A.I didn't mention that because in the question of priorities in manufacture did not belong to the Planning Office but to the Armaments Office. To be sure, in January 1945, after the Armaments Office was dissolved, this task was transferred to the Planning Office.

Q.Did the Planning Office plan the extent of the Armaments program or the scope of then?

Q.Then how were these armaments programs drawn up, so far as you know?

A.As far as I know, they were, in almost all cases, decisions on the part of the Fuehreror decisions from headquarters for a very simple reason: We are speaking now of 1944 in the main, that is, of a period, in which the events at the front were not taking the course that the Court 4, Case 11 - Commission I leaders had planned.

There ware continual changes in the programs depending on events at the front. Consequently, these plans again and again emanated from headquarters so that neither Speer nor anyone else in the armaments industry planned these programs.

Q.Did Kehrl have any decisive influence on the scope or extent of these programs?

A.He had no decisive influence in that. Carrying out the programs was discussed in the Central Planning Board and everything depended on whether there were the necessary raw materials for a program; that is, the raw materials status led to the programs being decreased. Kehrl, as chief of the Planning Office, did not determine this but the statistics on raw materials determined the scope of the program.

Q.On the basis of the data which the Planning Office had to provide and which served as the basis for discussion in the Central Planning Board, it was then decided gust what scope the individual program should have?

A.Yes, that is so.

Q.The programs were established from above?

A.Yes; they were established from above with the taskbeing given that they should be fulfilled so far as possible.

Q.With all these actual limitations in mind can you really speak of a Planning Office at all?

A.It would undoubtedly have been better to have designated it as an office for quotas and priority.

Q.Witness, at the beginning of your examination you stated that you had contact, as a liaison man, between the Speer Ministry and the German Labor Front and you stated that you looked for higher production by a better utilization of the manpower available in Germany. That is to say, you did concern yourself with questions of labor allocation.

A.Yes. Anyone who has a responsibility within the framework of a productive economy cannot avoid the question of employment, and consequently I, too, devoted thought to fulfilling these programs. My main concern, as I already said, was the more efficient employment of the manpower already available. I concerned myself mainly with the following tasks during this period: We had a shortage of trained personnel in war economy. I knew that this trained personnel existed in Germany and by examining individual factories and plants I ascertained that for reasons of better wages they had fled from their specialized work into the field so called piece work. Consequently, it was necessary to fetch then out of this piece work. That was done on the basis of a new wage policy which gave the trained worker a much higher basic wage than had previously been the case.

Secondly, through the air attacks we observed a freeing of workers Court 4, Case 11 - Commission I from the industrial centers primarily of the Rhine and the Ruhr.

These were mainly female workers. For various reasons -- lack of dwelling space and the like - it was impossible to bring this manpower back to the place where it had been working and consequently I laid down the principle that it would be necessary not to bring the people to the work but to bring the work to thepeople. We therefore set up a large scale program of homework and this homework program was the basis for a large scale exchange of workers between armaments and industry.

Q.Witness, these three notions that you had, namely, 1, returning trained personnel totheir special fields, 2, new wage policy, and 3, increase in homework and, finally, a transfer to heavy labor of the workers, corresponded with the notions that emanated with Kehrl?

A.Yes, that's the reason why I had discussions with Kehrl. These matters were the subject of discussions in the Office Chiefs' conference in the Armaments Ministry.

Q.Do I understand you to say that the plant for mobilization of theavailable manpower in Germany were the subject matter of discussions that you had with Kehrl?

A.Yes.

Q.In the Office Chiefs' conference who brought these questions forward?

A.The Chief of the Armaments Office or one of his referents, for the Armaments Ministry and since the German labor Front was interested in these matters also, I likewise brought then forward.

Q.Why did the Chief of the Armaments Office bring then up?

A.Because he was the competent man for questions of labor allocation and employment.

Q.Did anyone participate in these discussions in the Office Chiefs' conferences?

A.That was the point of then, namely, that anyone who had anything to say could participate in the discussion.

Q.Did Kehrl take part in these discussions also?

A.So far as it was a matter of basic questions, of course he did.

Q.Did you report in these Office Chiefs' discussions regarding the activities of the German Labor Front as such?

A.So far as it was of importance or interest to armaments, yes.

Q.Did you also report on the measures of the German Labor Front with regard to the caring for foreign workers?

A.I reported on these matters so far as they were planned or brought about through the Central Office of the Central Planning Board.

Q.What were the basic policies regarding the treatment of foreign workers?

A.I reported on matters which were the subject of written information from the so-called Camp Leader Special Service and which dealt with labor allocation matters. We ascertained that this information of a fundamental nature always manifested one leading concept, namely, that you can only ask people to work if they are willing to work and this readiness to work is only to be found when the people are treated decently and justly.

Q.And you found this policy again and again manifested in the directives of the German Labor Front?

A.I have already said that we had this Camp Leader Special Service. This was a periodical that went to camp personnel again and again and this thought croppedup in this paper frequently.

DR. GRUBE:Mr. Commissioner, I am now coming to another subject. Let me ask you, should I begin with it before the recess?

THE COMMISSIONER:We will recess about eleven o'clock. We will take it now if you are ready; all right.

(A recess was taken.)

THE MARSHAL:The Commission is again in session.

DR. GRUBE:May I continue, Mr. Commissioner?

THE COMMISSIONER:Please. BY DR. GRUBE:

QWitness, in the first of the trials here at Nurnberg documents have again and again been put in evidence and statements have been made alleging poor treatment and insufficient food for foreign workers. It might be assumed generally that everything was not quite in order. What do you have to say about that?

AI did not assert in my previous answers that everything was in order, and, precisely from these trials I have found out that everything was not in order, but, I am reporting here on what the Central Office of the German Labor Front and the armament agencies to which I belonged did on their own initiative, and I must declare that to these agencies it was important so to organize matters and so to direct matters that they should be in order.

QWitness, according to your observations, is it not so that these cases in which something was not in order with respect to the treatment of foreign workers were only a minute part of that otherwise very large complex?

AIt turned out that again and again these were occurrances in individual plants, that is to say that which is fundamental was not criticized Out what was criticized was what happened in specific individual instances in the Reich.

QWitness, were measures taken to assure correct treatment of foreign workers?

AOn the part of the Central Office of the German Labor Front, in conjunction with the armament ministry, the following was arranged for. First of all this aforementioned "camp leaders' special service" was used in order to make the statement in one formulation or another again and again that only Court IV, Case XI, Commission correct and proper treatment would bring about that degree of efficiency which leads to production.

I know of no statement in this "camp leaders' special service" bulletin which demanded strict or severe treatment of foreign workers. The Central office of the German Labor Front further more set up a so-called camp management warning index and in this card index, this warning index, the names of all these people who were included regarding whom there had been complaints with respect to the treatment of foreign workers, complaints of something of an asocial or detrimental nature; it was important to the Central Office of the German Labor Front to achieve through this measure the situation where men and women who had behaved improperly in this respect should no longer have any contact with foreign workers. In addition to that there was created a so-called central camp inspection with the task of conducting continuous examination of the working methods in the plants themselves and also in examination of the competent offices. Through this measure it was attempted to achieve what I mentioned before, namely, proper, just and decent treatment of foreign workers and to guarantee such treatment.

Transcript for NMT 11: Ministries Case

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