GISEVIUS: Yes, indeed.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: I think you also used the term “Bunker,” and it is a slightly technical term with which some of us are not familiar. Will you tell the Tribunal what this Bunker system of the SA was?
GISEVIUS: Bunkers were those cellars or other dungeons with thick walls in which the poor prisoners were locked up, where they were then beaten and in a large measure beaten to death. They were these private jails in which, during the first months, the leaders of the leftist parties and of the trade unions were systematically rendered harmless, which explains the phenomenon that the leftist groups did not act again for so long a time, for there, at the outset and most thoroughly, the entire leadership was done away with.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: You also use the expression “ ‘taking away’ became the inalienable right of the SA,” and “taking away” is in quotation marks. Will you tell us about this “taking away,” what it means?
GISEVIUS: That was the arbitrary arrest, whereby the relatives often for periods of weeks or months did not know where the poor victims had disappeared to, and could be glad if they ever returned home.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: I think you also make this observation in your book:
“Every excess, pardoned as ‘overzealousness in the cause of the National Socialist Revolution,’ was a demonstration of official sanction and necessarily drew in its wake a new excess. It was the bestiality tolerated during the first months that later encouraged the sadistic murderers in the concentration camps. The growth in brutality and insensibility of the general public, which toward the end of the revolution extended far beyond the domain of the Gestapo, was the unavoidable consequence of this first irresponsible attempt to give free rein to the Brown Shirts for their acts of violence.”
Does that, too, represent your observation of the SA?
GISEVIUS: Yes—not of the SA alone but also of general conditions in Germany.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, will you tell us about—as I understand you, after the Röhm Purge the SA was rather abandoned as the private army, and a more reliable and smaller and more compact private army was created under Himmler.