SPEER: At this moment I cannot recollect it. Could I see the document?
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Yes, if you would like to. I just remind you that the evidence is to the contrary of your testimony on that subject.
Page 42, the paragraph which reads:
“Unfortunately the assignments for the Organization Todt on the basis of Article 52 of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare have for some time decreased considerably, because the larger part of the manpower allocated does not turn up. Consequently further compulsory measures must be employed. The prefect and the French labor exchanges co-operate quite loyally, it is true, but they have not sufficient authority to carry out these measures.”
SPEER: I think that I have perhaps not understood correctly. I do not deny that a large number of the people working for the Organization Todt in the West had been called up and came to their work because they had been called up, but we had no means whatsoever of keeping them there by force. That is what I wanted to say. So if they did not want to work, they could leave again; and then they either joined the resistance movement or went into hiding somewhere else.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Very well. But this calling-up system was a system of compulsion, was it not?
SPEER: It was the calling-up of French workers for service in the Reich or in France. But here again I must add something. This report is dated June 1943. In October 1943 the whole of the Organization Todt was given the status of a “blocked factory” and thereby received the advantages which other blocked factories had. I explained that sufficiently yesterday. Because of this, the Organization Todt had large offers of workers who went there voluntarily, unless, of course, you see direct coercion in the pressure put on them through the danger of their transfer to Germany, and which led them to the Organization Todt or the blocked factories.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Were they kept in labor camps?
SPEER: That is the custom in the case of such building work. The building sites were far away from any villages, and so workers’ camps were set up to accommodate the German and foreign workers. But some of them were also accommodated in villages, as far as it was possible to accommodate them there. I do not think that on principle they were only meant to be accommodated in camps, but I cannot tell you that for certain.
THE PRESIDENT: Has the document been introduced before?