Dachau was known even in the north of Germany as a concentration camp. Some Jewish inmates returned from Buchenwald in the spring of 1939, and in that way I learned of this camp. Columbia House at Berlin I figured to be a concentration camp also.
That was my only knowledge of camps and their horrors up until the time when the London radio started to report about concentration camps. I perhaps might mention another case. In 1944 a friend of mine, a member of the Reichstag, Stefan Meier, who had served 3 years in the penitentiary, was put into a concentration camp in or near Linz. After a brief stay there he was murdered, according to reports received by his family.
DR. SIEMERS: Herr Minister, you just heard of these and similar individual cases?
SEVERING: Yes.
DR. SIEMERS: You were not familiar with the fact that thousands were murdered every day in gas chambers or otherwise in the East?
SEVERING: I believed I should tell the High Tribunal only of those cases which were, so to say, authentically reported to me. Everything I learned of later through indirect reports, from my friend Seger or from the book of the now Generalintendant Langhoff, had been told me but I had no possibility of checking up on their accuracy.
DR. SIEMERS: Herr Minister, did you and your Party friends have the possibility...
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Siemers, are you going to finish this examination, or are you going on? Do you see the clock?
DR. SIEMERS: Yes, I should like to leave the decision to the High Tribunal as to whether we shall have a recess now. I understand there will be a cross-interrogation so that...
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, but presumably you know what questions you are going to ask; I don’t.