DR. FRITZ: In the same connection, and with the same tendency, the Prosecution then quotes a sentence from a paragraph of your radio speech of 10 July 1941.
Mr. President, that is in Document Book 1—the speech of 10 July 1941—also in its full text, on Pages 14 to 19.
[Turning to the defendant.] What do you have to say to this charge?
FRITZSCHE: What I just said becomes even clearer in this quotation, and in this whole speech. I referred once more to the reports just mentioned. I also referred to the descriptions coming from foreign correspondents. I then quite frankly reported Moscow’s attitude toward these events and I said, quite honestly, “Radio Moscow says that these atrocities are facts, but it maintains that these atrocities were not committed by Russians but by Germans.”
In view of this attitude of Moscow, I, so to speak, took the public into my confidence. I called upon millions of German soldiers as witnesses; I called upon their mothers and fathers and wives as witnesses. I formally called as witnesses the inhabitants of the occupied territories in which Germans were in power at the time, and in which, as I said, they were subordinated only to the moral laws in their own breasts. Then I drew the conclusion: These German soldiers cannot have committed the atrocities which were described by Berlin and Moscow in the same way.
The Prosecution asserted that this attempt to ascribe German atrocities to the Russians was ridiculous. I do not consider it ridiculous; I consider it tragic. It shows clearly, as I understand it, the absolute cleanliness and honesty of the whole German conduct of the war. I still believe today that murder and violence and Sonderkommandos only clung like a foreign body, like a boil, to the morally sound body of the German people and their Armed Forces.
DR. FRITZ: Finally, the Prosecution quotes a passage from your speech of 9 October 1941, another quotation from which was brought out elsewhere.
Mr. President, this is in the Fritzsche Document Book Number 1; the speech in its full text is on Pages 20 to 25. The quotations of the Prosecution are summed up in a document in the Fritzsche document book of the Prosecution. I think the Tribunal can easily compare it.
[Turning to the defendant.] The Prosecution concludes from this quotation that you had approved of the policy of the Nazi conspirators in their ruthless exploitation of the occupied territories. What have you to say to that?
FRITZSCHE: There is no question of ruthlessness either in the quotation given by the Prosecution or in the rest of the text of the speech of 9 October 1941. I refer to my affidavit 3469-PS, Paragraph 39, a paragraph which the Prosecution very fairly quoted in this connection.