On my return from my leave, the chief of my general staff told me that a part, but he could not give me the figure at the time, of these escaped officers had been shot. This had to a certain extent caused talk and excitement in our Luftwaffe; one also feared reprisals. I asked from whom he had his information and what had really happened. He said he knew only that part of the escaped men had been recaptured by the camp guards in the vicinity of the camp, and by the police authorities in the immediate neighborhood, and had been brought back to camp. Nothing had happened to these men. On the other hand, of the fate of those who had been recaptured at a greater distance from the camp he knew only that some of them had been shot.
I then went to Himmler and asked him. He confirmed this without mentioning a definite figure, and told me that he had received the order from the Führer. I called his attention to the fact that such a thing was utterly impossible, and that the English officers in particular were bound to make at least one or two attempts to escape and that we knew this. He said, I believe, that he had at least opposed the Führer in this matter at first, but that the Führer had absolutely insisted on it, since he maintained that escapes to such an extent represented an extreme danger to security.
I told him then that this would lead to the most severe agitation among my forces, for no one would understand this action, and that if he were to give such orders, he could at least inform me before carrying them out so that I might have the opportunity of countermanding them if possible.
After giving these instructions I talked to the Führer personally about the matter, and the Führer confirmed the fact that he had given the order and told me why—the reasons just mentioned. I explained to him why this order, according to our opinion, was completely impossible and what repercussions it would cause with regard to my airmen employed against the enemy in the West.
The Führer—our relations were already extremely bad and strained—answered rather violently that the airmen who were flying against Russia have to reckon with the possibility of being immediately beaten to death in case of an emergency landing, and that airmen going to the West should not want to claim a special privilege in this respect. I then told him that these two things really had no connection with each other.
Then I talked with the Chief of my General Staff and asked him—I believe he was the Quartermaster General—to write to the OKW and say that I was now requesting, that the Air Force was requesting, that these camps be taken from our control. I did not want to have anything more to do with prisoner-of-war camps in case such things should happen again. This letter was closely connected with those events, a few weeks after those events. That is what I know about this matter.
DR. STAHMER: Witness Von Brauchitsch testified the other day that in May of 1944 the Führer decreed the strictest measures against the so-called terror-fliers. Did you, in compliance with this Führer decree, issue instructions to shoot enemy terror-fliers or to have them handed over to the SD?
GÖRING: The definition of “terror-fliers” was very confused. A part of the population, and also of the press, called everything which attacked cities “terror-fliers,” more or less. Tremendous excitement had arisen among the German population because of the very heavy and continued attacks on German cities, in the course of which the population saw to a certain extent that the really important industrial targets were less frequently hit than houses and nonmilitary targets. Some German cities had thus suffered most severely in their residential districts, while the industries in these same cities remained on the whole untouched.
Then with the further flights of enemy forces to Germany there came so-called low-flying aircraft which attacked both military and nonmilitary targets. Reports came repeatedly to the Führer, and I too heard of these reports, that the civilian population was being attacked with machine guns and cannons; that single vehicles, which could be recognized as civilian vehicles, and also ambulances which were marked with a red cross, had been attacked. One report came in—I remember it distinctly because the Führer became especially excited about it—which said that a group of children had been shot at. Men and women standing in front of stores had also been shot at. And these activities were now called those of terror-fliers. The Führer was extremely excited.
The populace in its fury resorted at first to lynching, and we tried at first to take measures to prevent this. I heard then that instructions had been given through the police and Bormann not to take measures against this. These reports multiplied, and the Führer then decreed, or made a statement to the effect that these terror-fliers should be shot on the spot.