Even after their death the prisoners did not escape the management of WVHA. I refer the Court to our Document 2199-PS, a letter to commanders of concentration camps dated 12 September 1942 and signed by the Chief of the Central Office Group D of WVHA, SS Obersturmbannführer Liebehenschel. I offer this as Exhibit Number USA-461. I shall read the body of that directive, which appears on Page 1 of the translation. I quote:
“According to a communication of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, and conforming to a report of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD in Prague, urns of deceased Czechs and Jews were sent for burial to the home cemeteries within the Protectorate.
“In view of different events (demonstrations, erecting of posters inimical to the Reich on urns of deceased inmates in the halls of cemeteries of the home communities, pilgrimages to the graves of deceased inmates, et cetera) within the Protectorates, the delivery of urns with the ash remnants of deceased nationals of the Protectorate and of Jews is henceforth prohibited. The urns shall be preserved within the concentration camps. In case of doubt about the preservation of the urns oral instructions shall be available at this agency.”
The SS indeed regarded the inmates of concentration camps as its own personal property to be used for its own economic advantage. The Tribunal will recall that as early as 1942 the Defendant Speer recognized that the SS was motivated by the desire for further profits when he suggested to Hitler that the SS receive a share of the war equipment produced by concentration camp labor in ratio to the working hours of the prisoners. I refer to our Document R-124, at Page 36, which was read into evidence by Mr. Dodd as Exhibit Number USA-179. The Führer agreed that a 3 to 5 percent share should satisfy the SS commanders. Himmler himself frankly admitted his intention to derive profits for SS purposes from the camp in his Metz speech to the officers of the SS Leibstandarte “Adolf Hitler,” our Document 1918-PS, Exhibit Number USA-304—the passage in question being found at the top of Page 3 of the English translation and on Page 10 of the original German, 7 lines from the bottom. The passage begins:
“The apartment-building program, which is the prerequisite for a healthy and social basis of the entire SS, as well as of the entire leadership corps, can be carried out only when I get the money for it from somewhere. Nobody is going to give me the money. It must be earned, and it will be earned by forcing the scum of mankind, the prisoners, the professional criminals, to do positive work. The man guarding those prisoners serves harder than the one on close-order drill. The one who does this and stands near these utterly negative people will learn within 3 to 4 months—and we shall see. In peacetime, I shall form guard battalions and put them on duty for 3 months only. They will learn to fight the inferior beings; and this will not be a boring guard duty, but if the officers handle it right, it will be the best indoctrination on inferior beings and inferior races. This activity is necessary, as I said, 1) to eliminate these negative people from the German people; 2) make them work once more for the great national community by having them break stones and bake bricks, so that the Führer can again erect his grand buildings; and 3) to in turn invest the money, earned soberly this way, in houses, in ground, in settlements, so that our men can have houses in which to raise large families and have many children. This in turn is necessary because we stand or die with this leading blood of Germany; and if the good blood is not reproduced, we will not be able to rule the world.”
One final aspect of SS control over concentration camps remains to be mentioned. That is its direction of the program of biological experiments on human beings, which was carried on in the camps. Just a few days ago another military tribunal passed judgment on some of those who participated in the experiments at Dachau.
THE PRESIDENT: There is no date on that document you just read, is there?
MAJOR FARR: There appears to be no date on the English translation. The original document bears the notation of a speech in April 1943.
At a later stage in this case, evidence of some of the details of this program of experiments will be presented. It is not my purpose to deal with those experiments from the substantive aspect. I shall show only that they were the result of SS direction and that the SS played a vital part in their successful execution.