These measures are described in Himmler’s article “Organization and Obligations of the SS and the Police,” our Document Number 1992(a)-PS. They are also described in an authoritative book on the police, entitled The German Police, the book published in 1940, written by Dr. Werner Best, a ministerial director in the Ministry of the Interior, and a department head in the Security Police. It bears on its fly-leaf the imprimatur of the Nazi Party, and the book is listed in the official list of National Socialist bibliography. Chapter 7 from that book is our Document Number 1852-PS. I offer this book in evidence as Exhibit Number USA-449.
Through this unity of organization and personnel, the SS and the police became identified in structure and in activity. The resulting situation was described in Best’s book, which I have just offered in evidence, our Document Number 1852-PS, as follows. I quote from Page 7 of that document, Paragraph 5; from the original book, Page 95, Paragraph 3:
“Thus the SS and the police form one unit, both in their structure and in their activity, although their individual organizations have not lost their true individuality and their position in the larger units of the Party and State administration which are concerned with other points of view.”
Through the police, the SS was in a position to carry out a large part of the functions assigned to it. The working partnership between the Gestapo, the Criminal Police, and the SD under the direction of the Reichsführer SS resulted in the end in repressive and unrestained police activity. That will be dealt with in the case against the Gestapo. In considering that evidence, the Tribunal will bear in mind that the police activities there shown were one aspect of SS functions, one part of the whole criminal SS scheme. I shall not, therefore, consider here evidence relating strictly to the police functions of the SS.
Control over the police was not enough. Potential sources of opposition could be tracked down by the SD. Suspects could be seized by the Criminal Police and the Gestapo, but these means alone would not assure the complete suppression of all opponents and potential opponents of the regime. For this purpose concentration camps were invented. The evidence already presented to the Tribunal has shown what the concentration camp system involved, and the end result of that system was graphically illustrated in the moving pictures displayed about 10 days ago. The responsibility of the SS in that system is a topic to which I now turn.
The first requirement for the camps was guard and administrative personnel. Part-time volunteer members of the Allgemeine SS were originally utilized as guards; but part-time volunteers could not adequately serve the needs of the extensive and long-range program that was planned. So beginning in 1933 full-time professional guards units, the Death’s-Head Units, which I have already described, were organized. During the war, members of the General SS resumed the function of guarding camps, which they had initially undertaken when the camps were created. The Tribunal will recall the provisions of the Hitler order which I read a few moments ago, directing the substitution of General SS members to the Death’s-Head Units in the event of mobilization. It is unnecessary to repeat the evidence of wholesale brutality, torture, and murder committed by SS guards. They were not the sporadic crimes committed by irresponsible individuals but a part of a definite and calculated policy, a policy necessarily resulting from SS philosophy, a policy which was carried out from the initial creation of the camps.
Himmler bluntly stated the SS view as to the inmates of the camps in his article, “Organization and Obligations of the SS and the Police,” Exhibit Number USA-439, our Document 1992(a)-PS. I quote from Page 7 of the translation, last paragraph; from Page 148 of the original, third paragraph:
“It would be extremely instructive for everyone—to some members of the Wehrmacht I could give the opportunity—to inspect such a concentration camp. Once you have seen it, you are convinced of the fact that no one has been sent there unjustly; that it is the offal of criminals and freaks. No better demonstration of the laws of inheritance and race, as set forth by Dr. Guett, exists than such a concentration camp. There you can find people with hydrocephalus, people who are cross-eyed, deformed, half Jewish, and a number of racially inferior products. All that is assembled there. Of course, we distinguish between those inmates who are only there for a few months for the purpose of education and those who are to stay for a long time. On the whole, education consists only of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis, for the prisoners have, for the most part, slave-like souls and only very few people of real character can be found there.”
Then, omitting the next two sentences, he continues with this striking remark:
“Education thus means order. The order begins with these people living in clean barracks. Such a thing can really be accomplished only by Germans; hardly another nation would be as humane as we are. The laundry is frequently changed. The people are taught to wash themselves twice daily and to use a toothbrush, a thing with which most of them have been unfamiliar.”