SEVERING: On the next day I had to appear for further interrogations. I was permitted to leave Berlin on the second day and was given the order to hold myself ready at my home in Bielefeld for further interrogations.
DR. SIEMERS: Despite your well-known anti-Nazi attitude, you were not arrested later and put in a concentration camp, if I am not mistaken.
SEVERING: I was never in a concentration camp, thanks to the respect—and I say this with all modesty—which the old Prussian officials, my previous subordinates, had for me. At the end of October 1933 I heard from the Police Chief in Bielefeld that trouble was brewing for me. The police notified me that they would not be able to give me any protection and advised me, therefore, to leave Bielefeld for several months. I followed this advice and, from October 1933 until the end of March 1934, I lived in Berlin using a false name. I first stayed with friends, and then I went to a small Jewish sanatorium at Wannsee. I feared another arrest in August 1944; according to someone whom I knew in the police my name was on a list of people who were to be arrested summarily—men and women who were suspected of having plotted against Hitler in July 1944.
THE PRESIDENT: Did you say ’44 or ’34?
DR. SIEMERS: ’44. After the attempted assassination of Hitler of July 1944.
SEVERING: May I continue?
DR. SIEMERS: Please do.
SEVERING: After the attempted assassination of Hitler orders were given to the police to arrest certain people. My name was on the Bielefeld list. Then a police official whom I knew from the past pointed out that I was close to my seventieth year and had lost my son in the war. Thus he succeeded in having my name struck off the list.
DR. SIEMERS: Aside from what you have told us now, did you suffer any further disadvantage at the hands of the National Socialists?
SEVERING: Well, I was considerably hindered in my movements. I was not especially surprised that my mail was censored and my telephone tapped. I considered that as a matter of course. But I could not even take a trip without being followed and watched by the police.