DR. SAUTER: The one who, a few days ago, is supposed to have been condemned to death? Did you know that?
VON SCHIRACH: I heard it yesterday.
DR. SAUTER: Did you have to issue any orders to this Brunner who was an SS leader, or could you give him any kind of instructions?
VON SCHIRACH: It was entirely impossible for me to stop the deportation of the Jews or to have any influence thereupon. Once, as early as 1940, I told the chief of my Regional Food Supply Office that he should see to it that departing Jewish people be provided with sufficient food. Frequently, when Jews wrote to me requesting to be exempted from deportation, I charged my adjutant or some assistant to intervene with Brunner so that possibly an exception might be made for these persons. More I could not do. But I have to admit frankly, here and now, that I was of the opinion that this deportation was really in the interests of Jewry, for the reasons which I have already stated in connection with the events of 1938.
DR. SAUTER: Did the SS, which in Vienna too was charged with the evacuation of the Jews, send continuous reports as to how and to what extent this evacuation of the Jews was carried out?
VON SCHIRACH: No. I am, therefore, also not in a position to state when the deportation of the Jews was concluded and whether the entire 60,000 were dragged out of Vienna or if only a part of them was carried off.
DR. SAUTER: Did not the newspapers in Vienna report anything at all about these deportations of the Jews, about the extent of the deportations and the abuses occasioned in this connection?
VON SCHIRACH: No.
DR. SAUTER: Nothing? But, Witness, I must put a document to you which has been submitted by the Prosecution. It is Document Number 3048-PS, an excerpt from the Viennese edition of the Völkischer Beobachter, on a speech which you, Witness, made on 15 September 1942 in Vienna, and in which occurs the sentence—I quote from the newspaper:
“Every Jew who operates in Europe is a danger to European culture. If I were to be accused of having deported tens of thousands of Jews from this city, once the European metropolis of Jewry, to the Eastern ghetto, I would have to reply, ‘I see in that an active contribution to European culture.’ ”