THE PRESIDENT: Were you meaning that you should see, or that we should examine, the whole of those three affidavits, or were you meaning that you wanted one of the people who made the affidavits to come here in order to give evidence and be cross-examined? Which do you mean?
DR. FRITZ: The latter, Mr. President. I should merely like to request that all three be summoned.
FRITZSCHE: All three. I can only ask to have all three called.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will consider your application.
DR. FRITZ: Apart from this, Mr. President, I do not wish to carry out any further redirect examination.
THE PRESIDENT: There is one thing, Defendant. You referred to the Commissar Decree, or order, and you spoke of it as though it were an order not to treat commissars as prisoners of war. That was not the order, was it? The order was to kill them.
FRITZSCHE: The order which I got to know about in the 6th Army was an order saying that commissars who had been captured should be shot.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. That is a very different thing from not being treated as prisoners of war. The answer you gave was that you imagined the Commissar Order came from Hitler, but it is a very different thing, an order not to treat commissars as ordinary prisoners of war and to kill 5 million Jews. That was not a fair comparison at all, was it?
FRITZSCHE: In this case I must admit that my way of expressing myself with reference to these commissars was not correct.
THE PRESIDENT: There is one other thing I want to ask you. In October 1939 this untruthful statement about the Athenia was published in a German newspaper. That is right, is it not?