VORRINK: These Jews were the most sensible ones. We in Holland did not live on an island, and we knew all that had happened between 1933 and 1940 in Germany. We knew that in Germany the Jews had been persecuted to death, and I personally still have in my possession quite a few sworn statements of German Jews who had emigrated, who kept us hourly informed of how they had been tortured and martyred by the SS during the period before the war. That of course was known to the Dutch Jews, and in my opinion in that respect they were more sensible since they knew they would suffer the same fate.
HERR BABEL: You put it in such a way as to make it sound as if there were a large number of suicides. Was that so, or were there a few individual cases?
VORRINK: This happened to about 30 or 50 people, but in Holland; where we value life very highly, that is quite a large number.
HERR BABEL: Now, you used the word “Nazi illiterate.” Quite apart from, I would say, your not very friendly attitude towards us Germans, have you any justification for saying this? Have you met a single German who was illiterate?
VORRINK: I am rather surprised at this question. By an “illiterate Nazi” I meant a man who talks about things about which he has no knowledge, and the people who judged an author’s work were people who had been set to read through the book to find out whether a Jew appeared in it and was presented as a good and humane character. According to the Nazi concepts, such a book could not be published. I would add that I have used the word “Nazi illiterate” from the days when there were found in the German cities, in the country of Goethe and Schiller, great piles of burned books, books that we had read and admired in Holland.
HERR BABEL: I understand you to mean that you can bring no positive facts which might justify this derogatory word “Nazi illiterate.”
Thank you.
DR. OTTO PANNENBECKER (Counsel for Defendant Frick): I have just one question, Witness. You just said that young people who did not enter the SS were threatened with prison. Do I understand you to say that they would be given prison sentences for an offense committed previously or that they would be imprisoned only because they did not enter the SS?
VORRINK: They would be given a prison sentence, of course, because they had been threatened. Whether they would have put them in prison, I do not know, but it was a threat. It was one of the usual methods of the Nazis to say “We want you to do this or that, and if you do not we will put you in prison.” There were so many instances of this sort that one could have no illusions about it.
DR. PANNENBECKER: But it is correct in this case that these were youngsters who had run away from home because of differences with their parents?