THE PRESIDENT: Don’t you think that is sufficient?
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: Yes, I just wanted to have it expressed once again in a somewhat stronger way; however, if the Tribunal is satisfied with the clarification of this problem, I am completely satisfied.
THE PRESIDENT: It would not make it any better if it was said twice.
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: Yes, if you—but, it is sufficient.
[Turning to the defendant.] Do you know anything about an alleged plan, mentioned in the Czech report, to turn the Czech people into a mass of workers and to rob them of their intellectual elite?
VON NEURATH: No. Only a madman could have made a statement like that.
DR. VON LÜDINGHAUSEN: The Czech indictment, or report, asserts that through your agencies, that is, with your consent and endorsement, destruction and plundering of Czech scientific institutions took place. On Page 58 of the German text, Page 55 of the English of this report, USSR-60, it says:
“The Germans occupied all universities and scientific institutions. They immediately got hold of the valuable apparatus, instruments, and scientific installations in the occupied institutions. The scientific libraries were plundered systematically and methodically. Scientific books and films were torn up or taken away. The archives of the academic Senate, the highest university authority, were torn up or burned; and the card indexes destroyed and scattered to the four winds.”
What can you tell us in regard to this?
VON NEURATH: In this connection, I can say only that I never heard of any plundering and destruction of the sort described either in Prague or later. The Czech Hochschulen, or institutions of higher education, were closed together with the universities in the year 1939 at Hitler’s order. The buildings and installations of the Prague Czech University, as far as I know, were partly put at the disposal of the German university which had been closed earlier by the Czechs, since, after the Czech Hochschulen were closed, they could not be used any longer for Czech scientific purposes.