DR. SEIDL: Were you yourself a member of the Party?
BÜHLER: I have been a Party member since 1 April 1933.
DR. SEIDL: Did you exercise any functions in the Party or any of the affiliated organizations of the Party, particularly in the SA or the SS?
BÜHLER: I never held an office in the Party. I was never a member of the SA or the SS.
DR. SEIDL: I now come to the time during which you were state secretary to the chief of the government in the Government General. Will you please tell me what the relations were between the Governor General on the one side and the Higher SS and Police Leader on the other side?
BÜHLER: I might perhaps say in advance that my sphere of activity did not touch upon police matters, matters relating to the Party, or military matters in the Government General.
The relations of the Governor General to the Higher SS and Police Leader, Obergruppenführer Krüger, who was allocated to him by the Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police were, from the very beginning, made difficult by essential differences of opinion. These differences of opinion concerned the conception of the task and the position of the Police in general in an orderly state system, as well as the conception in particular of the position and tasks of the Police in the Government General. The Governor General held the view that the Police must be the servant and the organ of the executive of the state and that accordingly he and the state authorities should give orders to the Police and that this assignment of tasks involved a limitation of the sphere of activity of the Police.
The Higher SS and Police Leader Krüger, on the other hand, held the view that the Police in general had, of course, to fulfill tasks originating with the executive of the state but that in fulfilling these tasks it was not bound by the instructions of the administrative authorities, that this was a matter of technical police questions, decisions about which administrative authorities could not make and were not in a position to make.
Regarding the power to give orders to the Police, it was Krüger’s view that because of the effectiveness and unity of police activity in all occupied territories, such power to issue orders had to rest with the central authority in Berlin and that he and only he could issue orders.
As far as the duties of the Police were concerned, it was Krüger’s opinion that the Governor General’s view regarding the limitation of these duties as unfounded for the very reason that he, as Higher SS and Police Leader, was simultaneously the deputy of the Reichsführer SS in the latter’s capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Preservation of German Nationality.