And then:
“The High Command of the Army is asked: How many divisions ready for action?”
Not one token battalion as you said yesterday.
“Reinforcement of the necessarily inadequate forces there”—that is in the West—“by the East Prussian divisions which will be brought here at once by rail or sea transport... High Command of the Navy to look after the safe transport of the East Prussian troops by sea, in case the overland route is closed.”
What could that refer to, that secret instruction—so secret it had to be in manuscript—if it wasn’t the reoccupation of the Rhineland?
JODL: If you will permit me to make quite a brief explanation, then the Tribunal will be saved a tremendous lot of time.
MR. ROBERTS: Please, Witness, answer my question first and then make an explanation after, if it is brief. The question is, what could it refer to except the reoccupation of the Rhineland?
JODL: I am not here as a clairvoyant; I do not know the document; I have never read it; at this time I was not in the Armed Forces Department—that has entirely different signatures—I was in the operations section of the Army. I neither saw nor ever heard of this paper. If you look at the date, 2 May 1935, it is proven there in writing, for I entered the Armed Forces Department only in the middle of June 1935. Thus, only on the basis of my general staff training can I give you some assumptions; but the Court do not want assumptions.
MR. ROBERTS: Very good, if that is your answer. And are you saying that you, who heard General Field Marshal Von Blomberg’s staff talk, cannot help the Court at all as to what that secret operation order is about?
JODL: It was before my time. I was not with Von Blomberg then.