DR. SERVATIUS: Did you or your Gau supervisor discover the existence of shocking conditions?
LAUTERBACHER: Yes. After the air raids from which Hanover and Brunswick suffered particularly badly from 1943 onwards, I found conditions in foreign civilian labor camps—just as I did in the living quarters of German people—to be what I would call, perhaps not shocking, but certainly very serious; and after that I tried as far as possible to have these destroyed dwellings repaired, for instance, or to have new ones built.
DR. SERVATIUS: Did you see any abuses for which these industrial enterprises of the supervisory agencies were directly responsible?
LAUTERBACHER: Yes, I do remember two such cases.
Several firms in Hanover had formed a kind of industrial association—a kind of union—and had established a camp for their foreign civilian workers. The trustees of these firms were responsible for this camp. One day the Gau supervisor of the German Labor Front reported to me that living conditions did not comply with instructions received and asked my permission to intervene, that is to say, to be allowed to assume responsibility through the German Labor Front for that collective camp. I gave him this assignment; and sometime afterwards he reported that these difficulties had been overcome.
The Hermann Göring Works constitute another example of this kind. Since I am speaking under oath here, I must mention the fact that that firm disregarded Sauckel’s instructions in many respects. On one occasion they recruited workers independently, outside the jurisdiction of the labor administration through their branches in the Ukraine and other countries. These laborers came to Watenstedt, in the area supervised by the Executive Board of the Party, outside the quota fixed by the Plenipotentiary for Labor, and consequently outside of his jurisdiction.
I myself had very considerable difficulty in obtaining entry to the works and the camp. For although Gauleiter and Plenipotentiary, I was not by any means in a position simply to...
THE PRESIDENT: Wait a minute. What has this got to do with the Defendant Sauckel?
DR. SERVATIUS: I asked him about any abuses which he had found, for as plenipotentiary for the recruitment of foreign workers it was his duty to ascertain where such bad conditions existed and to report them so that they would finally be brought to Sauckel’s notice. He has digressed rather widely and has just been describing the Hermann Göring Works.
THE PRESIDENT: You should stop him, Dr. Servatius. You know the question you were asking.