“7. To seize and secure all public art treasures and private art treasures, and particularly art treasures belonging to Jews, on the basis of special instructions relating thereto.
“II. The Führer has expressly ordered that only Ambassador Abetz shall be responsible for all political questions in Occupied and Unoccupied France. Insofar as military interests are involved by his duties, Ambassador Abetz shall act only in agreement with the Military Command in France.
“III. Ambassador Abetz will be attached to the Military Commander in France as his delegate. His domicile shall continue to be in Paris as hitherto. He will receive from me instructions for the accomplishment of his tasks and will be responsible solely to me. I shall greatly appreciate it if the High Command of the Armed Forces (the OKW) will give the necessary orders to the military agencies concerned as quickly as possible.
“Signed: Ribbentrop.”
This document shows the close collaboration that existed between the military administration and the administration of foreign affairs, a collaboration which, as I have already said on several occasions, is one of the determining elements for establishing responsibility in this Trial, a collaboration of which I shall later on give examples of a criminal character.
I now wish to mention to the Tribunal that I eliminate the production of the next document which was numbered RF-1062. Although I am personally certain of the value of this document which comes from a French judicial file, I have not the original German text. This being so, the translation might create difficulties, and it is naturally essential that each document produced should present incontestable guarantees. I shall therefore pass directly to the last document, which I wish to put in and which I submit as Document Number RF-1063. This is a detail, if I may call it such, concerning this problem of the collaboration of the German administrations, but sometimes formal documents concerning details may present some interest. It is a note taken from the German archives in Paris, a note dated 5 November 1943, which gives the distribution of the numbering of the files in the German Embassy. I shall read simply the first three lines of this note: “In accordance with the method adopted by the military administration in France, the files are divided into 10 chief groups.” There follows the enumeration of these methods and groups used for the classification of the files. I wish simply to point out that under their system of close collaboration the German Embassy, a civil service department of the foreign office, and the Military Command had adopted filing systems under which all records and all files could be kept in the same way.
I have now concluded my second section which was devoted to the general examination of this seizure of sovereignty in the occupied territories, and I should like to point out that these files have been established with the collaboration of my assistant, M. Monneray, a collaboration which also included the whole brief which I present to the Tribunal.