DR. SAUTER: I do not know about the responsibility but, Witness, I asked you, did you ever have any doubts, and at what precise moment did you consider the whole affair criminal? Did you consider it criminal?
THOMS: We assumed that these were goods which the SS—after they had partly burned down towns in the East, particularly in the battle for Warsaw—we thought that afterwards they captured this booty in the houses and then delivered this booty to our Bank.
DR. SAUTER: As booty?
THOMS: Yes. If a military department delivers booty goods it does not follow that an official who is entrusted with the handling of these things would have to consider these deliveries as being criminal.
DR. SAUTER: When taking over these articles, did you think, or did Vice President Puhl tell you, or at least hint to you, that these gold articles might have been taken from victims in the concentration camps?
THOMS: No.
DR. SAUTER: You did not think of that, did you?
THOMS: No.
DR. SAUTER: Not at all?
THOMS: Once we saw the name “Auschwitz,” and another time the name “Lublin,” on some slips of paper which we found. I said that in connection with Lublin we found this inscription on some packets of bank notes which came in to be dealt with and which were then returned to the Polish Bank to be cashed. Strangely enough, the same packets came back later after they had been dealt with by the bank. Consequently, here the explanation was that these could not be deliveries from a concentration camp, since they had come to us through official bank channels. As regards the camp at Auschwitz—well, I cannot say today with what sort of deliveries these slips of paper were found, but it is possible that they were slips attached to some notes, and perhaps they may have been deliveries of foreign bank notes, from the concentration camps. But then there were arrangements according to which prisoners of war, or prisoners, could exchange their notes for other money in the camp, so that such deliveries could have been made through legal channels.