DR. SAUTER: Was that company of the Wehrmacht, which you have just mentioned, placed at your disposal in place of the police protection previously afforded you?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes.
DR. SAUTER: Witness, I have to refer once more to your Vienna speech of September 1942. In that speech you speak of the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to the Eastern ghetto. You did not speak about the extermination or the murder of the Jews. When did you discover that Hitler’s plan aimed at extermination or destruction?
VON SCHIRACH: Counsel, if I at that time had known anything about the destruction—that is the extermination of the Jews—I would not be sitting here today. As far as I can recall, I heard about an extermination of the Jews for the first time through the following incident.
Dr. Ross came to see me...
DR. SAUTER: Who?
VON SCHIRACH: Dr. Colin Ross came to Vienna in 1944 and told me that he had received information, via the foreign press, that mass murders of Jews had been perpetrated on a large scale in the East. I then attempted to find out all I could. What I did discover was that in the Warthegau executions of Jews were carried out in gas vans. These shootings in the East...
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Sauter, what was the Gau that he spoke of? The Wart Gau?
DR. SAUTER: The Warthegau, My Lord.
VON SCHIRACH: The Warthegau.