DR. THOMA: I shall not read all of it, Your Honor. But I have unfortunately only the opportunity of presenting State Secretary Riecke as an official of the Ministry for the Eastern Occupied Territories. The Tribunal, however, even from this witness, who will appear before them, will be able to see that the best officials which the German Reich had, were used in the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories and that every individual complaint was conscientiously checked. It is not so, that in addition to what we have heard today numerous other crimes have been committed which have not come to the knowledge of the Tribunal, but I believe that everything has been exhaustively presented of the “admittedly terrible things” that happened in the East during these 4 or 5 years. And the question now is how Gauleiter Koch responded to it.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal are simply asking you not to read the whole of the document which covers many pages. That means you can go ahead and read the essential parts of it.
DR. THOMA: Therefore, I would like to assert that each and every complaint which was received by the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories was followed up. Gauleiter Koch writes:
“Various recent decrees of the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, in which my work was criticized in an exceptionally severe and offensive manner and from which have resulted misinterpretations of the policies as well as my legal position, have induced me to present this report to you, Mr. Reich Minister, in the form of a memorandum.”
And then follow remarks which show that the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories investigated the complaints. He complains:
“On 12 January 1943, for example, I was informed by the Ministry that Anna Prichno of Smygalovka, an Eastern Worker, had objected that her parents who remained in the Ukraine could not pay their taxes. I was asked to cancel these taxes or to reduce them by half and also to report how I decided.”
On Page 13:
“Lately numerous individual complaints from Eastern Workers employed in the Reich have been passed on to me and on each single case I have been asked to give a report, usually on such short notice that it was impossible to comply with the request.”
On Pages 15 and 16:
“Hence, I found it strange”—writes Gauleiter Koch—“to have the decree I/41 of 22 November 1941 state that the Ukrainian people were strongly permeated with German blood, which fact is to account for their remarkable cultural and scientific achievements. But when on top of this a secret decree of July 1942, to which I will refer more closely at the end of this section, declares that very many points of contact exist between the German Ukrainian people, one is no longer only surprised but astonished. This decree demands not only correct but even amiable manners in dealing with Ukrainians.”