JODL: I do not hold that view. I have already said that I, personally, and half an hour or an hour later the Reich Foreign Minister, suggested an ultimatum.
MR. ROBERTS: When you lost air superiority and people were able to hit back, you Germans made a great deal of fuss then about terror attacks, did you not?
JODL: This city was at the same time the center of a Putsch government which had annulled a treaty concluded with Germany, and which from that moment on had made preparations along the whole front for war with Germany.
MR. ROBERTS: Well, I am going to leave the incident. Do you remember how you referred to it in the notes for your lecture? It appears on Page 127—no, My Lord, it does—I beg your pardon, it appears on 292 of Book 7 and at 304 of the German. You refer to it as “an interlude.” Do you remember? The German word is “Zwischenspiel,” “interlude.” Is that your idea of an interlude?
JODL: To be juridically exact, you mean the first draft of my lecture and not my lecture which you do not know. However, even in this first draft I cannot recall mentioning an interlude.
MR. ROBERTS: How many civilians, how many thousands, do you think were killed in the first movement of that “interlude”—in the bombing of Belgrade without warning?
JODL: I cannot say, but surely only a tenth of the number killed in Dresden, for example, when you had already won the war.
MR. ROBERTS: Now I come to the alleged aggression against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Republic in July of 1940, did he not?
JODL: In July of 1940 he had not yet reached that decision.
MR. ROBERTS: But at any rate—I do not want to waste time—we know that on the 22d of June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union contrary to her nonaggression pact. That is history, is it not?