DR. KAUFFMANN: You explained to me that orders for executions were received in the camp at Auschwitz, and you told me that until the outbreak of war such orders were few, but that later on they became more numerous. Is that correct?
HOESS: Yes. There were hardly any executions until the beginning of the war—only in particularly serious cases. I remember one case in Buchenwald where an SS man had been attacked and beaten to death by internees, and the internees were later hanged.
DR. KAUFFMANN: But during the war—and that you will admit—the number of executions increased, and not inconsiderably.
HOESS: That had already started with the beginning of the war.
DR. KAUFFMANN: Was the basis for these execution orders in many cases a legal sentence of German courts?
HOESS: No. Orders for the executions carried out in the camps came from the RSHA.
DR. KAUFFMANN: Who signed the orders for executions which you received? Is it correct that occasionally you received orders for executions which bore the signature “Kaltenbrunner,” and that these were not the originals but were teleprints which therefore had the signature in typewritten letters?
HOESS: It is correct. The originals of execution orders never came to the camps. The original of these orders either arrived at the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps, from where they were transmitted by teletype to the camps concerned, or, in urgent cases, the RSHA sent the orders directly to the camps concerned, and the Inspectorate was then only informed, so that the signatures in the camps were always only in teletype.
DR. KAUFFMANN: So as to again determine the signatures, will you tell the Tribunal whether the overwhelming majority of all execution orders either bore the signature of Himmler or that of Müller in the years before the war and until the end of the war.
HOESS: Only very few teletypes which I have ever seen came from the Reichsführer and still fewer from the Defendant Kaltenbrunner. Most of them, I could say practically all, were signed “Signed Müller.”