“Naturally, after the termination of the economic demands of the Wehrmacht, the SD and I would like it best definitely to eliminate Jewry in the District General of White Ruthenia. For the time being, the necessary demands of the Wehrmacht, which are the main employers of Jews, are considered.”
I ought to tell you as well that this document was also found in your office in Berlin. Now, that is a letter...
ROSENBERG: That seems very improbable to me, that it has been found in my office in Berlin. If so, it can be at most only that the Reich Commissioner for the Ostland had sent all his files to Berlin, packed in boxes. It was not in my office at that time, and this letter was also never presented to me. There is stamped here, “The Reich Commissioner for the Ostland,” not the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. I stated yesterday, however, that a number of such happenings were reported to me as individual actions in the fighting, and that I received this one report from Sluzk personally, and Gauleiter Meyer was immediately charged to protest to Heydrich and to order an investigation. That presupposes that he, the Gauleiter Meyer, did not know of and did not think of such a general action on order of a central command.
MR. DODD: Well, I only want to suggest to you that it is a strange coincidence that two of your top men were in communication in this tone in 1942 without your knowledge.
Did you also tell the Tribunal yesterday that you understood that most of the difficulty or a large part of the difficulty in the East for the Jewish people came from the local population? Do you remember saying that yesterday?
ROSENBERG: I did not receive this translation.
MR. DODD: I asked you if it was not a fact that yesterday you told the Tribunal that much of the difficulty for the Jews in the East came from the local population of those areas.
ROSENBERG: Yes. I was informed about that in the beginning by returning personalities, that it was not due to local authorities but to parts of the population. I knew the attitude in the East from before and could well imagine that this was true.
Secondly, I have stated that I had been informed that along with executions of various other nests of resistance and centers of sabotage in various cities, a large number of Jews were shot by the police. And then I have treated the case of Sluzk here.
MR. DODD: I think you will agree that in the Ukraine your man Koch was doing all kinds of terrible things, and now I don’t understand that you dispute that Lohse and Kube were helping to eliminate or liquidate the Jews, and that Bräutigam, an important member of your staff, and that Leibbrandt, another important member of your staff, were informed of the program. So that five people at least under your administration were engaged in this kind of conduct, and not small people at that.