SAUCKEL: When I assumed office, the camps, particularly of the Eastern Workers, were very much shut off from the world and were fenced in with barbed wire. To me this was incompatible with the principle of employing productive and willing workers; and with all the personal energy I could muster, I succeeded in having the fences and barbed wire removed; and I also reduced the limits of the curfew regulations for Eastern Workers, so that the picture which was presented here yesterday could eventually be realized. Anything else would have been incompatible, technically speaking, with the workers’ willingness to work, which I wanted.
DR. SERVATIUS: Now the question of food. What was the food of these foreign workers?
SAUCKEL: The feeding of the foreign workers came under the system that was applied to the feeding of the German people, and accordingly additional rations were allotted to people doing heavy, very heavy, or overtime work.
DR. SERVATIUS: Did this situation exist when you assumed office?
SAUCKEL: When I assumed office and received the order from the Führer that in addition to the foreign workers who were already in the Reich I was to bring further quotas into the Reich, the first step I took was to visit the Reich Minister for Food, for it was obvious to me that bringing in foreign workers was in the first place a question of feeding; poorly fed workers, even if they want to, cannot turn out satisfactory work. I had many detailed conversations with him; and by referring to the Führer and the Reich Marshal, I succeeded in obtaining suitable food for the workers, and food quotas were legally fixed. It was not easy to do this because the food situation, even for Germans, was always strained; but without these measures it would not have been possible for me, also from a personal point of view, to carry through my task.
DR. SERVATIUS: Details with regard to the food situation were mentioned here which would justify the assumption that extremely bad conditions existed. Was nothing of this sort brought to your attention, or did you yourself not hear anything?
SAUCKEL: As far as bad feeding conditions in the work camps of civilian laborers is concerned I never had any very unfavorable reports. I personally made repeated efforts to have this matter in particular constantly looked into. The works managers themselves took the problem of food very seriously.
DR. SERVATIUS: Did you not, in a decree and letter to the Gau labor offices and Gauleiter, deal with the subject of good treatment of foreigners; and did you not on that occasion criticize existing conditions?
SAUCKEL: Immediately after I assumed office, when the Gauleiter were appointed as plenipotentiaries for the Allocation of Labor in their Gaue, I called their attention to the food situation and ordered them to give their attention to that question and also to the question of accommodation. I heard that in two Gaue my instructions were not being taken seriously enough. In one case I myself went immediately to Essen and remedied the situation there—it concerned the barbed wire—and in another case, in eastern Bavaria, I also intervened personally. Besides that, I made use of these two incidents to write to the Gauleiter and the governments of the German Länder and provinces and again pointed out the importance of observing these instructions.
DR. SERVATIUS: I refer to Document 19, that is in the English Book Number 1, Page 54; Document Sauckel-19.