MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: They carried out all of the functions of the camps, didn’t they?
GÖRING: If an SS unit was guarding a camp and an SS leader happened to be the camp commander, then this unit carried out all the functions.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, this system was not a secret system. This entire system was openly avowed, its merits were publicly advocated by yourself and others, and every person entering into the Nazi Party was enabled to know the kind of system of government you were going to set up, wasn’t he?
GÖRING: Every person who entered the Party knew that we embraced the Leadership Principle and knew the fundamental measures we wanted to carry out, so far as they were stated in the program. But not everyone who joined the Party knew down to the last detail what was going to happen later.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: But this system was set up openly and was well known, was it not, in every one of its details? As to organization, everybody knew what the Gestapo was, did they not?
GÖRING: Yes, everyone knew what the Gestapo was.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And what its program was in general, not in detail?
GÖRING: I explained that program clearly. At the very beginning I described that publicly, and I also spoke publicly of the tasks of the Gestapo, and I even wrote about it for foreign countries.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And there was nothing secret about the establishment of a Gestapo as a political police, about the fact, that people were taken into protective custody, about the fact that these were concentration camps? Nothing secret about those things, was there?
GÖRING: There was at first nothing secret about it at all.