THE PRESIDENT: What was your question, Colonel Pokrovsky? It was whether the draft did not...
COL. POKROVSKY: I asked a question to which I received no answer. My Lord, I asked him what he could say about the actual part which Spain was to play in the seizure of Gibraltar in 1941.
JODL: I cannot make a statement on what other people thought. I can only talk about serious intentions in connection with Spain in 1940. That I can talk about. But as far as this paper is concerned, I can say nothing about it. For at the time I had long ago dismissed the thing as impossible. I know of it only since I have been in Nuremberg; I never saw it before.
COL. POKROVSKY: Whether that plan could not be fulfilled is quite another question. Defendant Keitel said that you could give an explanation. You declare that you cannot say anything.
JODL: As I have just said, it is some preliminary work carried out by the younger General Staff officers, which I saw here in the document room for the first time with great interest and some amusement. It was not shown to me at the time, because it could already be seen that in a week’s time the situation would change.
COL. POKROVSKY: You know nothing about the proposed dispatch of an expeditionary corps to Egypt, Iran, and Iraq, through Trans-Caucasia in the direction of the Persian Gulf, if the Soviet Union had fallen, as is stated here; you did not know anything about that either?
JODL: It was never a really serious proposition. On the contrary, I had the biggest row of my life with the Führer because I refused to attack beyond the Caucasus in the direction of Baku. But the General Staff officers did entertain such ideas in the first flush of optimism because of the big victories in the summer. That is what they are there for—to have ideas. But the decisions are made by the older and more level-headed men.
COL. POKROVSKY: So you confirm that the success of the Red Army upset what you call “the bold and far-reaching plans” of Hitler to send an expeditionary corps to Syria and Egypt? Is that right?
JODL: If the Soviet Union had collapsed, then one might have entertained such ideas for continuing the war. But never the idea, for instance, of attacking Turkey. She would have come over to our side anyway voluntarily. That was the opinion of the Führer.
COL. POKROVSKY: How do you know that?