“We are prepared in the future, too, if need be, at times to eat a little less fat, a little less pork, a few eggs less, since we know that this little sacrifice is a sacrifice on the altar of the freedom of our people. We know that the foreign exchange which we thereby save will benefit our armaments. The phrase still holds good today: ‘guns instead of butter.’ ”
That document is Document Number M-104. It becomes Exhibit Number GB-260, and will be found on Page 14 of the Tribunal’s document book.
In May of 1941 he was making a speech at the Messerschmidt Works, of which occasion the Tribunal has already got a photograph before it. It was one of those four photographs we were looking at a moment ago. Then he said:
“The German soldier must understand that for the uniqueness and abundance of his weapons and his material, he has to thank Adolf Hitler’s untiring efforts of many years.”
A report of that speech appears in the Völkischer Beobachter on the 2d of May 1941. It is Document Number M-105 and becomes Exhibit Number GB-261. It is on Page 15 of the Tribunal’s document book.
One of the most important parts that this defendant took in the preparation for aggressive war was his organization of the famous German Fifth Column. He was the responsible person, as Deputy of the Führer, of the Auslands-Organisation of the Party, that is to say, the foreign organization of the Party. A history of that organization, a very brief history, will be found in an American state publication, Document Number 3258-PS. It becomes Exhibit Number GB-262. It is on Page 147 of the document book.
I would only mention now two matters. In October 1933 that organization was placed directly under Hess’s control, and a year later it was Hess himself who gave it its present name of the Foreign Organization, (Auslands-Organisation).
For the convenience again of the Tribunal, a chart is set out in the organization book for 1938, which is Document Number 2354-PS, Exhibit Number USA-430, and is on Page 69 of the Tribunal’s document book, and I think it is unnecessary to refer to it now in detail. It had the various offices—civil services offices, cultural offices, press and propaganda offices, labor front offices, and the foreign trade offices, the various offices dealing with the German merchant marine—which afforded, of course, an excellent medium for spreading Nazi propaganda to every port through the world.
The Tribunal has heard a good deal about a somewhat similar organization of Rosenberg, the APA. Very briefly and in a word, I think the distinction between the two can be said to be that the APA was concerned with the enrollment and propaganda for non-Germans, for foreigners, whereas the Auslands-Organisation was concerned with Germans living abroad, who, of course, were to form the basis of Fifth Column activities in future years.
I think the Tribunal will see that there are set out under the heading, “Scope of the Organization’s Work,” two documents. I think that perhaps it is sufficient to refer to the first of them now, Document Number 3401-PS, which becomes Exhibit Number GB-263 and which the Tribunal will find on Page 173 of that document book.