FUNK: I did not know that at the time. At that time I still believed that it was really something favored by large elements of the population. Very much later I found out that routine machinery had been put in motion.
MR. DODD: Are you telling this Tribunal now that on the morning of your telephone call to Goebbels, when you in effect blamed him for these uprisings, you were not well aware then that he had started it? Is that your position?
FUNK: At that time I did not know who had started this regime of terror and how it had been carried through; that was entirely new to me.
MR. DODD: If you did not know who started it, you knew that somebody started it and that it was not spontaneous?
FUNK: Yes.
MR. DODD: And still in your speech of 15 November you tried to make it appear to the public that it was just an uprising on the part of the German people, did you not?
FUNK: I based that on the attempted assassination of—I do not know who he was; some attaché in Paris—and actually the attempt caused much agitation. There is no doubt of it.
MR. DODD: Now I think you understand my question, Witness. You said on that occasion, you used these words: “The fact that the last violent explosion of the indignation of the German people because of a criminal Jewish attack against the German people took place,” and so on, and you went on. You were trying to make it appear there that this was a spontaneous reaction of the German people, and I insist that you knew better and had known it for some days, had you not?
FUNK: But I did not know that that is what took place. I admit that I knew that an impulse had come from some office or other.
MR. DODD: Well, all right. When did you coin the expression “crystal week”? Do you know what that expression is; where it came from?