MR. DODD: Mr. Witness, at the close of the session on Friday we had just handed to you a copy of the teletype message to Martin Bormann. I had read it to you over this transmission system. I wish to ask you now if you sent that message to Bormann.
VON SCHIRACH: Yes, I dispatched that teletype message, and I should like to give an explanation in this connection. First...
MR. DODD: May I interrupt you just for a minute and ask that for the little while that we will be talking today, that you wait just a minute after your answer. I think it would help a little bit with the interpreting. I do not think we will have any trouble this morning. I will try to do the same thing, and perhaps we will work a little better together.
VON SCHIRACH: First of all, then, I want to explain why I addressed Bormann with “Du,” in the friendly form. Bormann and I come from the same town; I knew him from Weimar, but only slightly. And when in 1928 or ’29 he came to Munich, he paid me a visit, and because he was the elder of us he suggested to me that we should call one another “Du.” We maintained that form until 1943, when on his own initiative he dropped it and addressed me in his letters only with “Sie.”
Now, the text of this teletype message: We were in the third year of the war; the Czech population both in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and in Vienna had remained perfectly quiet; in the Protectorate conditions were almost like those in peacetime. I had a very large Czech population in Vienna, and as a result of the attempt on Heydrich’s life I feared that in the Protectorate there might be unrest which would no doubt have serious repercussions in Vienna. This was the time when German troops were advancing on the peninsula of Kerch; it was a time when we could not afford to have anything happen behind our front. And simultaneously with the news of the murder of the Protector I received official notification that the attempt, as is mentioned in this document, had been carried out by British agents and with British weapons.
During the same month we heard, and it was also mentioned in the Wehrmacht communiqués, that British bombers had bombed residential areas in Hamburg and Paris and had attacked German cultural sites at Kiel. And so I suggested a reprisal measure to establish before the world British guilt in this attempt and to prevent serious unrest in Czechoslovakia. That is all I have to say. This teletype message is genuine.
May I at this point also comment on a difficulty of translation which occurred during the last cross-examination on Friday? The German word “Retter” was at that time translated into the English “savior.” It is an expression which I used in my book when I described the Führer as a “Retter,” and the difficulty lies in the translation of that word into English: it can only be translated into English as “savior.” But retranslated into German, “savior” means “Heiland.” In order to make quite clear what the German “Retter” is meant to express in English, I should have to use an explanatory phrase. If I say that the exact translation is “rescuer,” then the real meaning of the word “Retter” is clearly set forth; and there is nothing blasphemous in the comparison or the description of the head of the State as a “rescuer.” But if I had written in German that the head of the State was a “Heiland,” then, of course, that would be blasphemy.
THE PRESIDENT: This sort of explanation should be kept for re-examination. It is not a matter which ought to interrupt the cross-examination.
MR. DODD: Now, I have only one or two questions to ask you in addition about this message.
Were you thinking of some particular cultural city in Britain, like Cambridge, Oxford, Stratford, Canterbury?