Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremburg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946, Volume 04

by Various

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

MAJOR FARR: I know of none.

THE PRESIDENT: Then the answer would be “yes” then?

MAJOR FARR: I thought Your Honor was referring to any one branch of the SS which was concerned alone with that. The SS, so far as I know, is the only organization which played a part in the concentration camp picture, except at the very end of the war when I think, as Colonel Storey said yesterday, some members of the SA were also involved as guard personnel of concentration camps.

THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle): Do you know the total personnel at the end of the war?

MAJOR FARR: Of the entire SS?

THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle): Yes.

MAJOR FARR: That is something you would have to estimate. I quoted to the Tribunal yesterday the figures that D’Alquen gave as the strength of the Allgemeine SS in 1939. He said then that there were about 240,000 men in the Allgemeine SS. There were, at that time, about four regiments of Death’s-Head Units, several other regiments of the Verfügungstruppe, a few thousand personnel involved in the SD, so that I should say in 1939 you had about 250,000 to 300,000 members of the SS. With the outbreak of the war, the Waffen-SS was built up from a few regiments of the Verfügungstruppe to about 31 divisions at the end of the war, which probably would mean that the Waffen-SS by 1945 had had some 400,000 to 500,000 persons involved. I take it that 400,000 to 500,000 members of the Waffen-SS would be in addition to personnel of the Allgemeine SS, who were subject to compulsory military service in the Wehrmacht. So that, if I had to estimate, I would say that probably some 750,000 persons would be the top figure of personnel who had been involved in the SS from the beginning, but that is an estimate.

THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle): Then you have no breakdown to show how many of those were civilians, clerks, stenographers, soldiers, and so on?

MAJOR FARR: No. When we are talking about SS members, we are not talking about stenographers who worked in the office, who were not members of the SS. By SS members, we mean personnel who took the oath and appeared on the membership list, either as a member of the Allgemeine SS, the Death’s-Head Units, or the Waffen-SS. I would think that my figure of 750,000 was a figure including members of the SS, Allgemeine SS, the Totenkopf Verbände, and the Waffen-SS.