KÖRNER: The right? It is only natural that once we have occupied a country and built it up, we are entitled to share in the surplus. We had to take care of the whole of Europe and we knew what anxieties and problems we encountered in the occupied countries.
GEN. RUDENKO: I asked you, where did the Germans get the right?
KÖRNER: I am no jurist. Therefore I cannot answer the question.
GEN. RUDENKO: But you were talking about German rights.
KÖRNER: I am speaking only of the natural right that if we built up a country we should share in the results of that work of development.
GEN. RUDENKO: After you had devastated these areas?
KÖRNER: Germany did not devastate these areas, especially not in any agricultural respect. We, in fact, instituted great developments. I remember, in the West, that some parts of France were completely devastated and our organizations performed reconstruction work there. Thus we rebuilt the uncultivated land which we found in France, through a German organization which had reconstructed whole areas in Reich territory, and repatriated French people there, giving them the possibility of working again as peasants and sharing in the agricultural production of the country. In the East we found territories whose agriculture had been greatly damaged through the war. All the machines had disappeared. All the tractors had been taken away by the Russians, and all agricultural implements had been taken away or destroyed. There we had to start in the most elementary and primitive way to build up agriculture again.
That it was possible for us in the years of our occupation in the East to restore agriculture, German initiative and German machinery alone are to be thanked.
GEN. RUDENKO: Did German initiative also include, together with the restoration of agricultural measures and developments, a vast net of concentration camps which you established in the occupied countries? Was that also included in the extent of the German initiative?
KÖRNER: I had nothing to do with that problem, and can say nothing about it.