SPEER: The administrative sectors in the various armament offices retained their tasks. In that way, for example, in the Army, the Heereswaffenamt—the Army Ordnance Office—which contained several thousand workers, gave the orders, supervised the carrying out of these orders, and saw to it that delivery of the orders and payment were carried out in a proper manner. Only in that way did I succeed in having the entire armament production—which amounted to 3,000 or 4,000 million marks a month—carried through with an honorary co-worker staff of 6,000 people.
DR. FLÄCHSNER: Were all armament enterprises of a Wehrmacht branch subordinate to you?
SPEER: No. There actually was a small group of enterprises which were run directly by the Wehrmacht branches with their own workers. These were excepted. They were the munition plants and similar industries, and also the enterprises of the SS.
DR. FLÄCHSNER: The Prosecution is changing you with the fact you share the responsibility for the recruiting of foreign workers and prisoners of war and for taking manpower from concentration camps. What do you say to this?
SPEER: Neither I nor the Ministry was responsible for this. The Ministry was a new establishment, which had a technical problem to deal with. It took no competence in any field away from an existing authority. The conditions of work were still handled through the old existing authorities. The Food Ministry and the various offices connected with it were responsible for the food supply, and the occupation-supervising agencies in the Reich Labor Ministry were responsible for the maintenance of safe and bearable conditions at the places of work; the Trustees of Labor, working under the Plenipotentiary for Labor Commitment, were responsible for the salaries and the quality and quantity of work done; and the Health Office of the Reich Ministry of the Interior was responsible for health conditions. The Justice Department and the Police Department were responsible for violations against labor discipline, and, finally, the German Labor Front was responsible for representing the interests of labor with the employers.
The centralizing of all of these authorities lay in the hands of the Gauleiter as Reich Defense Commissioner. The fact that the SS put itself and its concentration camp internees outside the control of the State is not a matter with which I or my Ministry was concerned.
DR. FLÄCHSNER: Your Codefendant Sauckel testified to the effect that with the carrying out of the recruiting of workers for the industries, his task was finished. Is that correct in your opinion?
SPEER; Yes, certainly, as far as the placing of workers is concerned, for one of the subjects of dissension between Sauckel and me was that the appropriate employment of workers in industry itself had to be a matter of the works manager and that this could not be influenced by the labor office. It applied however only to labor recruitment and not to the observance of labor conditions. In this connection, the office of Sauckel was partly responsible as supervising authority.
DR. FLÄCHSNER: To what extent could the works manager conform with the decrees of Sauckel as to labor conditions and so on?
SPEER: The decrees issued by Sauckel were unobjectionable, but the works managers did not always find it possible to carry through the decrees for reasons which were outside their power. The bombing attacks brought about difficulties, disorganized transportation, or destroyed living quarters. It is not possible to make the managers responsible for the observance of these decrees under circumstances which often took on catastrophic proportions after the summer of 1944. These were times of crises and it was a matter for the Reich authorities to determine just how far it was possible to carry through these decrees and it is not right to push this responsibility on the little works manager.