MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And in making his will and turning over the Government of Germany to Admiral Dönitz, I call your attention to this statement:
“Göring and Himmler, quite apart from their disloyalty to my person, have done immeasurable harm to the country and the whole nation by secret negotiations with the enemy which they conducted without my knowledge and against my wishes, and by illegally attempting to seize power in the State for themselves.”
And by that will he expelled you and Himmler from the Party and from all offices of the State.
GÖRING: I can only answer for myself. What Himmler did I do not know.
I neither betrayed the Führer, nor did I at that time negotiate with a single foreign soldier. This will, or this final act of the Führer’s, is based on an extremely regrettable mistake, and one which grieves me deeply—that the Führer could believe in his last hours that I could ever be disloyal to him. It was all due to an error in the transmission of a radio report and perhaps to a misrepresentation which Bormann gave the Führer. I myself never thought for a minute of taking over power illegally or of acting against the Führer in any way.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: In any event you were arrested and expected to be shot?
GÖRING: That is correct.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, in tracing the rise of power of the Party you have omitted some such things as, for example, the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933. There was a great purge following that fire, was there not, in which many people were arrested and many people were killed?
GÖRING: I do not know of a single case where a man was killed because of the Reichstag fire, except that of the incendiary, Van der Lubbe, who was sentenced by the court. The other two defendants in this trial were acquitted. Herr Thälmann was not, as you recently erroneously believed, accused; it was the communist representative, Torgler. He was acquitted, as was also the Bulgarian, Dimitroff. Relatively few arrests were made in connection with the Reichstag fire. The arrests which you attribute to the Reichstag fire are the arrests of communist functionaries. These arrests, as I have repeatedly stated and wish to emphasize once more, had nothing to do with this fire. The fire merely precipitated their arrest and upset our carefully planned action, thus allowing several of the functionaries to escape.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: In other words, you had lists of Communists already prepared at the time of the Reichstag fire, of persons who should be arrested, did you not?