A letter from the Codefendant Rosenberg to Reich Minister Lammers of 20 July 1944 (Document 345-PS) falsely refers to the “agreement” of the Plenipotentiary General for the Allocation of Labor; on the other hand it states that the Defendant Sauckel was not connected with an SS helper action and that he refused co-operation in this affair. According to this, as stated by Document 1137-PS of 19 October 1944, a special office in the Rosenberg Ministry with its own personnel attended to the seizure of juveniles. The Defendant Sauckel’s agency was by-passed and labor furnished directly to the armament industry.
In circumvention of the Defendant Sauckel’s agency certain measures also took place which Hitler caused by direct orders to the local offices of the Armed Forces and of the civil administration; this for instance applied to the labor commitment ordered in the occupied territories for the fortification of the Crimea (Document UK-68).
The enlistment of labor in Holland, which was carried out by the Armed Forces against the protest of the labor service offices, is another of these cases; this is shown in Document 3003-PS and is confirmed by the Defendant Seyss-Inquart.
An important sector, which is beyond the Defendant Sauckel’s responsibility, embraces all the actions undertaken as punitive measures against partisans and resistance groups. These are independent police measures; I already spoke about their judicial evaluation. Whether they were admissible and could be approved depends on the circumstances. For example, measures against the resistance movement in France, as described in Document UK-78 (French Government Report), cannot be included under the direct responsibility of Defendant Sauckel. Thus the most incriminating occurrences enumerated in Count 3, Paragraph VIII of the Indictment under “Deportation,” which ended in concentration camps, are not within the responsibility of the Defendant Sauckel.
The deportations for political and racial reasons, which are also mentioned under VIII (B) of the Indictment, such as the deportation of French citizens to concentration camps, do not come within the responsibility of the Defendant Sauckel either. The resettlement of Slovenes and Yugoslavs described under (B) 2, must also be excluded.
According to the Indictment (under VIII, (H) 2) only part of the approximately 5 million Soviet citizens mentioned are stated to have been seized for labor commitment, the remainder being removed in other ways to which the regulations of the Defendant Sauckel did not apply. This is important not so much on account of the number of people involved, but because the alleged bad conditions might have applied in that very sector, since there the danger of improper treatment was unquestionably greater.
THE PRESIDENT: Would that be a convenient time to break off?
[A recess was taken.]
DR. SERVATIUS: The prisoners of war are also exempted from the field of responsibility of the Defendant Sauckel. Such labor did not have to be enlisted but was only directed. This was done by means of special labor offices, which operated independently in connection with the prisoner-of-war camps and collaborated exclusively with the Armed Forces. Their task consisted only of employing prisoners of war where they were needed. The Defendant Sauckel could only request a transfer of prisoners of war. This is referred to in the Prosecution Document 1296-PS, of 27 July 1943, which mentions under Heading III the increase in the employment of prisoners of war in collaboration with the Army High Command.
The assignment of prisoners of war to plants took place under the supervision of the Armed Forces, who at the same time enforced observance of the Geneva Convention. Sauckel is in no way connected with the death of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war of the Soviet Union in 1941 of whom Himmler speaks in his Posen speech (Document 1919-PS) and for whose replacement workers had to be brought in.