LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: Now, I want to quote you quite shortly two paragraphs of this document, which is a report, published as an official United States publication, called “National Socialism, Basic Principles, Their Application by the Nazi Party’s Foreign Organization, and The Use of Germans Abroad for Nazi Aims.” I just want you to tell the Tribunal what you think first of all about this report, which is printed in that book:
“In 1938 the German Legation owned two houses in The Hague. Both were of course the subject of diplomatic immunity and therefore inviolable as concerned search and seizure by the Dutch police. I shall call the house in which Dr. Butting had his office House Number 2. What went on in House Number 2? It had been remodeled and was divided like a two-family house—vertically, not horizontally, but between the two halves there was a communicating door. One side of the house was Dr. Butting’s. The other half housed the Nazi military intelligence agent for Holland....”
You say that you do not know anything about that?
BOHLE: Butting was Landesgruppenleiter of the Auslands-Organisation. I am hearing about this house—or these two houses—for the first time, that is quite new to me.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: Very well. I will just go on.
“S. B. (the military intelligence agent) may have had as many as a dozen subordinates working in Holland, all subagents of the Canaris bureau. These were professional spies who knew their trade. But they could not possibly know Holland as intimately as was required by the strategy of the German High Command, as it was revealed following the invasion of May 1940. For this, not a dozen but perhaps several hundred sources of information were necessary. And it is at this point that Butting and the military intelligence agent come together. Through his German Citizens’ Association, Butting had a pair of Nazi eyes, a pair of Nazi ears, in every town and hamlet of the Netherlands. They were the eyes and ears of his minor Party officials. Whenever the military intelligence agent needed information concerning a corner of Holland which his people had not yet explored, or was anxious to check information relayed to him by one of his own people, he would go to Butting.”
Do you know whether Butting assisted the military intelligence agent in Holland in any way like that?
BOHLE: I was told later that he aided in Holland. To what extent he helped him I do not know, for he had had no such mission from me.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: I understand, he had no instructions but he was doing it. Just turn now to the last paragraph on that page, too:
“ ‘I know every stone in Holland,’ S. B. once boasted. By ‘stone’ he meant canal, lock, bridge, viaduct, culvert, highway, by-road, airport, emergency landing field, and the name and location of Dutch Nazi sympathizers who would help the invading army when the time came. Had Dr. Butting’s Party organization not existed under the innocent cover of his Citizens’ Association, S.B.’s knowledge of Holland would have been as nothing compared with what it was. Thus the Citizens’ Association served a double purpose; it was invaluable for espionage at the same time as it fulfilled its primary function as a Fifth Column agency.”