Now, at Page 87 there is Herr Von Tschirschsky’s own letter to you, in which he says, at the end of the second paragraph: “I am not in a position ... to comply with the Gestapo demand to report to Berlin for interrogation.”
And then he says that—to quote his own words—that he has been influenced only by the “human, understandable desire to live” and then he sends a report, he encloses a report, to you of what had happened to him on 30 June which got him into the bad books of the Gestapo.
Do you remember that?
VON PAPEN: Yes.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: And summarizing the beginning of it, which would be almost humorous if it did not show such a dreadful state of affairs, your secretary, Herr Von Tschirschsky, was arrested simultaneously by two competing groups of Reich policemen, I think the Criminal Police and the Gestapo, and there was a severe danger of Herr Von Tschirschsky and some of the police being shot before they could decide who was to take him into custody. But I want you to come to when he is taken into custody.
My Lord, it is at Page 89, and it is at the end of Page 65 of the German version, Defendant.
You see, this is after, I think, the Gestapo had won the internecine struggle and it got possession of the body of Herr Von Tschirschsky, and then he says, just toward the end—My Lord, it is the middle of Page 89.
He is told the other police are following the Gestapo and he says:
“....we went to the Gestapo building in the Prinz Albrecht-Strasse and through a courtyard to a back entrance. There was another exchange of words between the two groups of Criminal Police. I again joined in this debate and suggested as a way of clearing up the misunderstanding that a man from each of the groups should see some higher authority in the building and let him decide what should be done. There would still be three Criminal Police officials and four SS men available to guard me and the other two gentlemen. This course was adopted; and eventually they came back and explained that the misunderstanding was now cleared up and we could be taken away. Whereupon we were taken by three SS men, not accompanied by the Criminal Police officials, on a lengthy trip through the building into the basement. There we were handed over without comment and were ordered by the SS men on duty there to go and sit on a bench against the wall, in the passage. We were then forbidden to talk to each other. I spent a few hours like this sitting on the bench. It would make too long a story to give further details of the events which took place during this time. I will therefore restrict myself to the case of the shooting of a well-known personality who was publicly stated to have committed suicide.
“The person in question was brought in under the escort of three SS men and led past us into a cell running parallel to our corridor. The leader of the detachment was an SS Hauptsturmführer, short, dark, and carrying an Army pistol in his hand. I heard the command ‘Guard the door!’ The door leading from our corridor into the other one was shut. Five shots were fired and immediately after the shots the Hauptsturmführer came out of the door with the still smoking pistol in his hand, muttering under his breath, ‘That swine is settled.’ Feverish excitement reigned all around; cries and shrieks of terror were heard from the cells. One of the SS men on duty, a comparative youngster, was so excited that he apparently lost all consciousness of the entire situation and informed me, illustrating his remarks with his fingers, that the person concerned had been liquidated by means of three shots in the temple and two in the back of the head.”