MR. ROBERTS: I agree. If Your Lordship would be good enough to bear with me for a very few minutes I can perhaps deal with the matters I think should be dealt with.
[Turning to the witness.] You will see that on the 20th of May 1942—this is your letter to “Wolffy,” is it not, that is Obergruppenführer Wolff, and that is signed by you is it not?
MILCH: Yes, I signed it. That is the letter which, as I said this morning was submitted to me by the Medical Inspection department and from which it appears that we wanted to dissociate ourselves from the whole business as politely as possible.
MR. ROBERTS: The point of the letter is, if I may summarize it, that you say: “In reference to your telegram of 12 May our Medical Inspection department . . .”
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Roberts, if I remember right, when these letters were put to the witness he said he had not read them; that he signed them without reading them.
MR. ROBERTS: Well, My Lord, perhaps I had better leave the matter if Your Lordship thinks I am going over ground which has been trodden too often.
[Turning to the witness.] Are you asking this Tribunal to believe that you signed these two letters to Wolff, who was liaison officer, was he not, between—who was Wolff?
MILCH: No, Wolff was not liaison officer, he was Himmler’s adjutant. He sent a telegram to us, apparently for the attention of the Medical Inspection department. The Medical Inspection department replied via my office because for some reason or other it did not appear expedient to reply direct. I stated in my interrogations that these letters, though signed by me, were not dictated in my office, but that for this reply from the Medical Inspection department my stationery was used as was customary. I had nothing to do either with our high altitude experiments or with the Medical Inspection department, nor was I in any way connected with experiments by the SS.
MR. ROBERTS: Did you know that these pressure chamber experiments were being carried out with human bodies, human souls, provided by Dachau?
MILCH: On whom they were made appears from the letter submitted to me by the Medical Inspection department. In the Air Force we made many experiments with our own medical officers who volunteered for it; and as we did it with our own people we considered it to be our own affair. We, therefore, did not want any experiments by the SS; we were not interested in them. We had for a very long time experimented with our own people. We did not need the SS, who interfered in a matter which did not concern them; and we could never understand why the SS meddled with this matter.