DR. SAUTER: May it please the Tribunal; before the adjournment on Friday, I explained in conclusion the position and the attitude of the Defendant Funk with respect to the Jewish question. On this occasion I pointed out that in connection with the executive instructions issued late in 1938 on the legal exclusion of the Jews from economic life, the Defendant Funk acted only in his capacity as a Reich official and in the performance of the duties of that office.
On Friday, I finished my statements in that respect with the words:
It was a sense of duty on the one hand, and humane feeling on the other, which kept the Defendant Funk in office and thus brought him into a situation where he is today charged with criminal action.
Now, Gentlemen of the Tribunal, I turn to the last chapter of my appraisal of the Defendant Funk, of his motives and actions, and will now deal with the gold deliveries by the SS to the Reichsbank, and with the relation of the Defendant Funk to the concentration camp question. That is to say, I am going to refer to Page 58 of the written speech which has been submitted to you.
It is a peculiar tragedy in the life of the Defendant Funk that he was not only forced by fate in the year 1938 to issue executive instructions for laws which he always inwardly condemned and repudiated more than anybody else, but that once again, in the year 1942, he became involved in a particularly horrible manner with Jewish persecutions. I am thinking now of the deposits made by the SS in the Reichsbank, that is to say, the matter on which a film was shown here of the steel vault of the Frankfurt Branch of the Reichsbank and about which two witnesses have testified, namely, Vice President Emil Puhl and Reichsbank Councillor Albert Thoms.
The Defendant Funk was already examined about this matter of the gold deposits at the preliminary proceedings on 4 June 1945, (see 2828-PS); at that time, however, no details were disclosed to him, and Funk made the same statement then as he did before this Tribunal, namely, that he was only briefly told about the matter in question on a few occasions, and that he had not attached any importance to it at all. That is also the reason why the Defendant Funk could not at first recall those happenings very well during the proceedings here. He did not know anything more about them than he had already said.
Nevertheless, Gentlemen of the Tribunal, Funk had to expect that this matter would be brought up in the Trial, at any rate in the cross-examination. And this was actually done by the American Prosecution on 7 May 1946, who submitted an affidavit by the witness Emil Puhl, Vice President of the Reichsbank, in which at first sight Puhl appeared to make serious accusations against the Defendant Funk. Now it is remarkable that since the beginning of this Trial the Defendant Funk has repeatedly referred to this very witness Puhl for various points, and that since December 1945 he has repeatedly requested that the latter be interrogated. Measured by ordinary human standards, Funk would certainly not have done this if he had had a bad conscience and had reason to expect to be compromised in the most damaging way by his own witness regarding the concentration camp matter. But the oral examination of the witness Emil Puhl here before this Tribunal showed beyond a doubt that Puhl could no longer in any way maintain the incriminating statements in his affidavit, as far as the character of the Defendant Funk and his knowledge of the particulars of the SS deposits were concerned.
It is true that Funk, as he recalled after Puhl’s testimony (and concerning this I submitted on 17 June 1946 a corrected copy of his sworn testimony), was once asked by Reichsführer SS Himmler whether articles of value which had been seized by the SS in the Eastern Territories could be deposited in the vaults of the Reichsbank. Funk answered this question in the affirmative and told Himmler that he should delegate somebody to discuss the matter with Vice President Puhl, and settle the details. Himmler at that time told Funk that his Gruppenführer Pohl could do this and that the latter would get in touch with Vice President Puhl. That was all that Funk at that time, I believe in 1942, had discussed with Reichsführer SS Himmler and which he on that occasion also repeated to his Vice President Puhl who was actually directing the business of the Reichsbank and therefore responsible for this affair.
There was nothing extraordinary in this question of Reichsführer SS Himmler, at least nothing which Funk could recognize. For, as far as Funk knew, the SS was at that time in charge of the entire police service in the Occupied Eastern Territories. For that reason it often had to confiscate valuables just as the ordinary police did in the interior, that is, within Germany. Moreover, all gold coins, foreign currency, et cetera, in the Occupied Eastern Territories had to be turned in according to law, and these deliveries in the Eastern Territories were naturally made to the SS, because there were no other state offices equipped for that purpose. Funk also knew that the concentration camps were under the direction of the SS and thought that the valuables which were to be given to the Reichsbank by the SS for safekeeping belonged very probably to that category of valuables which the entire population was obliged to deliver.
Finally, as has been ascertained in the course of this Trial, the SS was constantly just as much engaged in the fighting in the East as the Armed Forces, and like the latter the SS had also collected so-called booty in the abandoned and destroyed towns of the East and delivered it to the Reich. Therefore, there was nothing at all extraordinary for Funk in the fact that the SS possessed gold and foreign currency and brought it in for delivery in the regular way.