DR. JAHRREISS: Was there a special reason why you received that task?
SCHRAMM: My appointment to the Armed Forces Operations Staff was due to the fact that my civilian profession is professor of history at the University of Göttingen. At that time an expert was sought whose name would constitute a guarantee for expert work. General Jodl appointed me to the position at the suggestion of the deputy chief.
DR. JAHRREISS: If you were to write a war diary in the way a historian would wish to do, you would require an insight into all the events connected with that staff, would you not?
SCHRAMM: Yes. I did not attend the Führer’s situation discussions or the internal conferences; but I did participate every day in the situation discussions of the Armed Forces Operations Staff, and every important document passed through my office during those two years.
DR. JAHRREISS: Witness, considering that you had perhaps more insight into the activities of the Armed Forces Operations Staff than anyone else, I should like you to tell us here what you know of the range of General Jodl’s activities.
SCHRAMM: It is impossible to overestimate the range of the General’s activities. As proof of this, I may say that in 1944 alone, according to information which I received from a competent officer, 60,000 teleprint messages went through the teleprint department of the Armed Forces Operations Staff. There was also a large courier correspondence which, of course, was even larger. Then there was internal correspondence between individual departments. The bulk of that correspondence appeared on the General’s desk at some time or other. To look at it from another angle, the General was responsible for four theaters of war: North Finland and Norway; West Holland, Belgium, France; then the Southwest, in the first place Africa and Italy; and then the Southeast.
DR. JAHRREISS: Please speak more slowly.
SCHRAMM: It was the General’s task not only to have up-to-date information based on incoming reports, but also to act as operational adviser to the Führer.
DR. JAHRREISS: Did I understand you correctly as saying that the four theaters you have just mentioned were the so-called OKW main theaters of war?
SCHRAMM: Precisely. The East was under the General Staff of the Army, and the General was concerned only insofar as the main difficulty always lay in co-ordinating the interests of the other theaters of war with those of the Eastern Front.