VON NEURATH: I received continual requests from President Hacha, the Czech Government, and private persons. My office was for the most part busy working on these cases. I had every request presented to me personally, and in all cases in which intervention was at all justified, I had Frank or the commander of the Security Police report to me and tried to influence them in favor of releasing the arrested person. It was, however, an incessant struggle with Frank and the Police, although it was successful in many cases. In the course of time many hundreds of persons who had been arrested were released at my instigation. In addition many sentences were mitigated with respect to postal communication, sending of food, and so forth.
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: Soon after you took office did you not prevent the arrest and subjection to so-called atonement measures of the members of the families remaining in Prague of the Ministers Netschas and Feierabend, who had fled abroad?
VON NEURATH: Yes, that is right. Frank had ordered the arrest of the members of the families of these two ministers. When I learned about it I induced him to desist from taking this step.
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: Mr. President, may I make a suggestion to break off now, because this section is finished and I come now to individual questions?
[A recess was taken.]
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: Now, first of all, I should like to refer to individual police measures for which you have been held responsible to a greater or lesser degree by the Prosecution. Were there many arrests of Czechoslovak nationals already in the summer of 1939?
VON NEURATH: No; the activity of the Police in the summer of 1939 was slight, and I hoped that it would be possible to restrict these police measures increasingly.
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: The Czechoslovakian Indictment, under USSR-60, in Appendix Number 6, Supplement 1, submits a proclamation which you, as Reich Protector, issued in August 1939, that is, just prior to the outbreak of the war. This is a proclamation which was to serve as a warning to the people of the Protectorate against acts of sabotage. I shall have this proclamation submitted to you at this point.
I should like you to comment on it. This appendix is attached to the Document USSR-60 as Appendix 1. The proclamation, which I have just had given to the defendant, reads as follows—if I may, with the permission of the Tribunal, read the most important part:
“1.) Each act of sabotage against the interests of the Greater German Reich, against German administration in the Protectorate, and against the German Wehrmacht will be prosecuted with unrelenting harshness, and will be punished most severely.