The Higher Police Leader East is a department, which, as a department in an occupied territory, is directly under the jurisdiction of the Reichsführer SS and not under any central department in Berlin. Therefore I could not have had knowledge of that order. The police leaders in occupied territories were immediately subordinate to Himmler.
DR. KAUFFMANN: I now come to the next accusation of the Prosecution regarding the concentration camp at Dachau. A document exists which has the number Document 3462-PS, Exhibit Number USA-528. It is a statement by the Gaustabsamtsleiter Gerdes.
The Prosecution are accusing the defendant of contemplating the wiping out of the concentration camp at Dachau and its adjoining camps at Mühldorf and Landsberg by bombs or poison. I shall read a few sentences from that document. They are on Page 2 of the German text, near the end of the page:
“In December 1944 or January 1945 I was in the office of Gauleiter Giesler in Munich, Ludwig Street 28, and had the opportunity of learning about a secret order from Kaltenbrunner. Gauleiter Giesler received that order in my presence through a courier and, after I had been given permission to read it, it was destroyed in accordance with the remark on the document; ‘To be destroyed after cognizance has been taken.’ The order which was signed by Kaltenbrunner was worded roughly as follows:
“ ‘In agreement with the Reichsführer SS I have instructed all higher police departments that every German who participates in the future in the persecution and destruction of enemy fliers will remain unpunished.’
“Giesler told me that Kaltenbrunner was in constant contact with him since he was considerably worried over the attitude of foreign workers and particularly the inmates of the concentration camps at Dachau, Mühldorf, and Landsberg, which were in the path of the approaching Allied armies.
“On a Tuesday in the middle of April 1945 I had a telephone call from the Gauleiter ordering me to keep myself available for a night conference. In the course of our conversation that evening Gauleiter Giesler disclosed the fact to me that Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner had given him instructions, in accordance with an order from the Führer, that there should be made an immediate plan regarding the liquidation of the concentration camp at Dachau and the two Jewish work camps at Mühldorf and Landsberg. The instructions stated that these two Jewish work camps at Landsberg and Mühldorf were to be destroyed by the German Air Force, since the sites of those two camps had lately and repeatedly been affected by hostile bombing attacks. The action was given the camouflage name ‘Cloud A-1.’ ”
KALTENBRUNNER: May I say something to that?
DR. KAUFFMANN: First, please, do you know Gerdes?
KALTENBRUNNER: I do not know Gerdes and I have never seen him.