VON SCHIRACH: You have already, Counsel, put this question to me during an interview, and I can only tell you the following under oath: I cannot remember, but you may take it for granted that, on an occasion of this kind, I would certainly ask after prisoners from my own Gau. But I cannot remember. Herr Marsalek mentioned it in his testimony, and I consider it probable.
I should, in connection with this visit, like to add the following: I have always been rather hampered in my recollections of Mauthausen...
DR. SAUTER: What hampered you?
VON SCHIRACH: After May 1945 I heard innumerable radio reports on Mauthausen and other concentration camps, and I read everything I could lay my hands on in the way of written reports about Mauthausen—everything that appeared in the press—and I always pondered on the question, “Did you see anything there which might have pointed to a mass destruction of human beings?” I was, for instance, reading the other day about running belts for the conveyance of corpses. I did not see them.
I must add that I also visited Dachau; I must not forget that. In 1935, together with the entire Party leadership group, I paid a visit to Dachau from Munich. This visit was a result of the objections against existing preventive custody measures expressed by certain political leaders to the Deputy of the Führer Hess who, in turn, passed these objections on to Himmler who subsequently sent out an invitation to inspect Dachau. I believe that there were, at that time, 800 or 1,000 internees at Dachau.
I did not participate in the entire official visit for I was conversing with some of the Gauleiter who were being shown about the camp. I saw quite excellent living quarters at Dachau and, because the subject interested me particularly, I was shown the building which housed the camp library. I saw that there were also good medical facilities. Then—and I believe this fact is worthy of mention—after the visit I spoke with many Gau- and Reichsleiter about the impression they had formed of Dachau. All impressions gained were to the effect that all doubts as to Himmler’s preventive custody measures were definitely dispersed, and everybody said that the internees in the camp were, on the whole, better accommodated than they would have been in a state prison. Such was my impression of Dachau in 1935, and I must say that ever since that visit my mind was far more at ease regarding conditions in the concentration camps. In conclusion, I feel I must add the following:
Up to the moment of the final collapse I firmly believed that we had 20,000 people in the Mauthausen Camp, 10,000 at Oranienburg and Dachau—two more large camps whose existence was known to me and one of which I had visited—and possibly 10,000 more at Buchenwald, near Weimar, a camp I knew by name but which I had never visited. I therefore concluded that we had roughly 50,000 people in the German camps, of which I firmly believed that two-thirds were habitual criminals, convicts, and sexual perverts, and one-third consisted of political prisoners. And I had arrived at this conclusion primarily because I myself have never sent a single soul to the concentration camps and nourished the illusion that others had acted as I did. I could not even imagine, when I heard of it—immediately after the collapse—that hundreds of thousands of people in Germany were considered political offenders.
There is something else to be said on the whole question of the concentration camps. The poet Hans Carossa has deposed an affidavit for me, and this affidavit contains a passage about a publisher whom I had liberated from a concentration camp. I wish to mention this because it is one of many typical cases where one exerted one’s entire influence to have a man freed from a concentration camp, but then he never tells you afterwards how he fared in the camp. In the course of the years, I have received many letters from people having relatives in the concentration camps. By establishing, in Vienna, a fixed day on which audience was granted to anybody from the population who wished to speak to me, I was able to talk to thousands of people from every class and standing.
On one such occasion I was approached by someone who requested me personally to free some friend or relative in a concentration camp. In cases like that I usually wrote a letter to the Reich Security Main Office—at first to Herr Heydrich and later to Herr Kaltenbrunner—and after some time I would be informed that the internee in question had or had not been released, according to the gravity of the charges brought against him. But the internees released never told me their experiences in the camp. One never saw anybody who had been ill-treated in the camps, and that is why I myself, and many others in Germany with me, was never able to visualize conditions in the concentration camps at all.
DR. SAUTER: Mr. President, this affidavit of the poet Hans Carossa, just mentioned by the defendant, is Document Number Schirach 3(a). I repeat, Schirach 3(a) of the Schirach document book. It is a sworn affidavit by the poet Carossa, and I ask the Tribunal to put the entire contents of the document into the evidence. In the last paragraph, mention is made of the case about which the defendant has just been speaking—that is, the liberation of a publisher named Suhrkamp from a concentration camp.