MR. DODD: This is something you will be interested in. Will you look up and read out to the Tribunal what the definition of “Ausrottung” is?
ROSENBERG: I do not need a foreign dictionary in order to explain the various meanings “Ausrottung” may have in the German language. One can exterminate an idea, an economic system, a social order, and as a final consequence, also a group of human beings, certainly. Those are the many possibilities which are contained in that word. For that I do not need an English-German dictionary. Translations from German into English are so often wrong—and just as in that last document you have submitted to me, I heard again the translation of “Herrenrasse.” In the document itself “Herrenrasse” is not even mentioned; however, there is the term “ein falsches Herrenmenschentum” (a false master mankind). Apparently everything is translated here in another sense.
MR. DODD: All right, I am not interested in that. Let us stay on this term of “Ausrottung.” I take it then that you agree it does mean to “wipe out” or to “kill off,” as it is understood, and that you did use the term in speaking to Hitler.
ROSENBERG: Here I heard again a different translation, which again used new German words, so I cannot determine what you wanted to express in English.
MR. DODD: Are you very serious in pressing this apparent inability of yours to agree with me about this word or are you trying to kill time? Don’t you know that there are plenty of people in this courtroom who speak German and who agree that that word does mean to “wipe out,” to “extirpate?”
ROSENBERG: It means “to overcome” on one side and then it is to be used not with respect to individuals but rather to juridical entities, to certain historical traditions. On the other side this word has been used with respect to the German people and we have also not believed that in consequence thereof 60 millions of Germans would be shot.
MR. DODD: I want to remind you that this speech of yours in which you use the term “Ausrottung” was made about 6 months after Himmler told Hoess, whom you heard on this witness stand, to start exterminating the Jews. That is a fact, is it not?
ROSENBERG: No, that is not correct, for Adolf Hitler said in his declaration before the Reichstag: Should a new world war be started by these attacks of the emigrants and their backers, then as a consequence there would be an extermination and an extirpation. That has been understood as a result and as a political threat. Apparently, a similar political threat was also used by me before the war against America broke out. And, when the war had already broken out, I have apparently said that, since it has come to this, there is no use to speak of it at all.
MR. DODD: Well, actually, the Jews were being exterminated in the Eastern Occupied Territories at that time and thereafter, weren’t they?
ROSENBERG: Then, may I perhaps say something about the use of the words here? We are speaking here of extermination of Jewry; there is also still a difference between “Jewry” and “the Jews.”