[Turning to the defendant.] May I ask you to state the exhibit numbers?
ROSENBERG: I have just mentioned the exhibit numbers.
DR. THOMA: What are the USA exhibit numbers?
ROSENBERG: Document Number 1028-PS has Exhibit Number USA-273; Document 1030-PS has Exhibit USA-144. On the others I do not find any USA numbers.
DR. THOMA: Document 1017-PS is Exhibit USA-142; Document 1028-PS is Exhibit USA-273; Document 1029-PS is Exhibit USA-145; Document 1030-PS is Exhibit USA-144. They are contained in the special document book for the Defendant Rosenberg. I state in this connection that these are provisional drafts, with notations by the secretary, from the end of April and the beginning of May. These provisional drafts were not released but, as can be seen, were crossed out and supplemented with written remarks in the margin; and, in addition, they contain viewpoints which later on were not approved by the Führer. For this very reason, as far as the Ukraine is concerned they could not be applied at all. The written instructions which went out to the Reich Commissioners for the East and the Ukraine, after the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories had been formed, were unfortunately not found, so that I cannot refer to them.
DR. THOMA: On 20 June 1941—that is to say, one day before the outbreak of the war against Russia—did you make a speech to everybody concerned with Eastern affairs regarding those Eastern problems? The document concerned here is Exhibit USA-147, from which the Prosecution quoted a single paragraph several times.
ROSENBERG: This is a fairly long impromptu speech made before those who were concerned with, and assigned to deal with Eastern problems. With regard to this, I state that it was my duty, as a matter of course, to consider political measures which would have to be proposed to avoid a situation in which the German Reich would have to fight every 25 years for its existence in the East; and I should like to emphasize that that which I authentically said in a confidential speech does not correspond in any way with the Soviet accusations that I was in favor of a systematic extermination of the Slavic peoples.
I do not wish to occupy the Tribunal’s time by reading very much here; nevertheless I would like to read a few paragraphs to justify myself. It says on Page 3 (Exhibit USA-147):
“Originally, Russian history was a purely Continental affair. For 200 years Moscow-Russia lived under the Tartar yoke, and its face was mainly turned to the East. The Russian traders and hunters opened up the East as far as the Urals. Some Cossack treks went to Siberia, and the colonization of Siberia is no doubt one of the great accomplishments of history.”
I think that this expresses my attitude of respect toward that historic achievement.