THE PRESIDENT: And after that, I understood you to say you received a secondary post to furnish reports to Heydrich.
SEYSS-INQUART: No, Heydrich sent four or five of his men to accompany me as a kind of guard escort, and these men had orders to report my movements to him.
THE PRESIDENT: I see; I must have misunderstood the translation.
DR. STEINBAUER: To sum up, I can say that apart from your appointment as SS Gruppenführer you received no awards, with the exception of a promise that you would become Reich Minister within a year? Is that correct?
SEYSS-INQUART: This promise was given at the end of April 1938. I refer to a question in the cross-examination of the Reich Marshal. Before 13 March 1938 I did not receive the slightest promise from the Reich on anything and was not in any way under obligation to anyone or bound to obey anyone in the Reich.
DR. STEINBAUER: And with that I can close the chapter on Austria and briefly discuss the Czechoslovakian question.
You are accused, on the basis of a congratulatory letter sent to the Führer by Henlein, of having taken an active part in the annexation of Czechoslovakia.
SEYSS-INQUART: In the affairs of September 1938 I had no other part at all than that of receiving, as Reichsstatthalter in Austria, the refugees from the border areas, lodging, and caring for them in Austria. Henlein, and a few other leaders, I knew personally but did not interfere in their politics and was not well acquainted with their relations to the Reich.
DR. STEINBAUER: What can you say about Slovakia?
SEYSS-INQUART: The relations between Vienna and Bratislava were very good even at the time of the old Austrian Monarchy. I myself had relatives in Bratislava. Hence the Slovaks and the Germans knew each other well. We knew in particular the complaint of the Slovaks that the promise of Pittsburgh had not been kept, that they had not received full autonomy of Slovakia. Father Hlinka was in favor of complete autonomy; he was venerated in Slovakia as a saint, and at least three-quarters of the Slovakian people were behind him; he advocated independence from the Parliament in Prague and the adoption of Slovakian as the official language. After March 1938—to be exact, after September 1938—I met a few Slovakian politicians, Sidor, Dr. Tiso, Dr. Churchansky, and perhaps one or two others. The Führer himself once asked me to inform him and to send him a report on Slovakian conditions; and I commissioned two of my colleagues, who had very good personal connections in Slovakia, to obtain the desired information. In March 1939 I talked to Sidor and Dr. Tiso, because they wanted to confer with me on possible Berlin-Prague developments and their consequences for Slovakia; at least, so I was told by my colleagues who had invited me. Mention was made in these discussions of the possibility of a Berlin-Prague clash and of the concern for the integrity of Slovakia, because there was the danger that the Hungarians, and the Poles too, might take advantage of the occasion by occupying Slovakian territory. The Slovakian gentlemen wanted assurances on what Berlin intended to do and what they could do to preserve the integrity of their country. I spoke very openly with these gentlemen; but I did not ask them to declare their independence, for they themselves had to make that decision. We discussed rather the question of whether differences between Slovakian and German interests existed, and we established that they did not exist.