Your Honor, it is 388-PS, and it is on Page 35 of the first volume. It is an extract from the often quoted Document 388-PS: It is a report made at the time of the “X” Order and the preliminary measures.
[Turning to the defendant.] Please, will you state what you intended in this work of the General Staff?
JODL: The Führer’s order of 30 May which I have already explained, assuming that it ever came to this action, left no other choice than to attack on a previously decided date. This could only follow as the result of an incident, because without provocation the operation was out of the question; and it was not to be attempted if too long a time had passed.
The Army, in order to be ready for such a surprise break-through of the Czech fortifications, required 4 days of preparation. If nothing happened after those 4 days, the military preparations could no longer be kept secret and the surprise element would disappear. Therefore, nothing else remained but either a spontaneous incident in Czechoslovakia, which would then 4 days later have resulted in military action, or a date which had to be decided on previously. In that case an incident had to happen during those 4 days which the Army required for deployment.
The Führer’s demands could, in fact, not be solved in any other way from the point of view of the General Staff. My letter to Major Schmundt was meant to explain that difficult situation to the Führer.
At that time incidents occurred every day. May I remind you that since the first partial mobilization in Czechoslovakia the Sudeten Germans liable to be called for military service had mostly evaded the order. They escaped over the border into Germany, and the Czechoslovakian border police shot at them. Bullets were shot over daily into Germany. All together, more than 200,000 Sudeten Germans crossed the border in that manner.
From that point of view the conception of an incident was not so mean and criminal as it might have been, for instance, if peaceful Switzerland had been involved. If I said, therefore, how keenly interested we would be in such an incident, that was meant to express that if one resorted to military action at all—all this is, of course, purely theoretical—one might use just such an incident as a casus belli.
DR. EXNER: And how do you explain this remark of yours: “...unless the intelligence department is ordered to organize this incident in any case”?
That is at the end of Page 38 in the second paragraph. It is an extract from 388-PS.
JODL: Yes, I had too much knowledge of European military history not to know that the question of the first shot—the apparent cause of war, not the inner cause of war—has played an important part in each war and on each side.