GÖRING: Yes; it does not read quite like that here.
GEN. RUDENKO: It was not explicit. Make it more precise.
GÖRING: Koch is trying to assert that he alone supplied all these people for Sauckel. Whereupon, I replied that for the whole Sauckel program 2,000,000 workers had been supplied and that he, Koch, could lay claim to have supplied only 500,000, at most. In other words, Koch was claiming that he himself had supplied the total number.
GEN. RUDENKO: Did you think that 500,000 from the Ukraine was a small number?
GÖRING: No, that is not the point. I have just explained. Of these 2,000,000 which represent the total supplied by Sauckel in the past, 500,000 came from the whole of the Ukraine, so that Koch did not produce the whole number as he was trying to assert. That is the meaning of the quotation.
GEN. RUDENKO: But you do not deny the underlying meaning that you were speaking here of millions of people who were carried off forcibly to Germany for slave labor.
GÖRING: I do not deny that I was speaking of 2,000,000 workers who had been called up, but whether they were all brought to Germany I cannot say at the moment. At any rate, they were used for the German economy.
GEN. RUDENKO: You do not deny that this was forced labor, slavery?
GÖRING: Slavery, that I deny. Forced labor did of course partly come into it, and the reason for that I have already stated.
GEN. RUDENKO: But they were forcibly taken out of their countries and sent to Germany?