In this courtroom, Dr. Kogon, a convinced Christian and a deeply religious man, said: “There was really no other possibility for the men of the illegal camp administration. I, as a convinced Christian, do not deny those men the right to have killed people in an emergency who in collaboration with the SS endangered the lives of individuals or of many.”
The witness Pieck stated: “It may be that the liquidation of many political prisoners and of SS spies employed in the camp may make Dr. Hoven a murderer in the eyes of many; yet, for me and others who understood the real situation he was a soldier fighting on our side and risking a great deal.”
Pieck expressed the same opinion also in a letter to the Dutch Ministry of Justice, a letter that was co-signed by the City Council of Amsterdam and Mr. Droering, head of a department of the State Institute for War Documentation in The Hague.
Pieck is one of the few who is best equipped to answer these questions, for he belonged to the committee of German and foreign political prisoners which formed itself at Buchenwald.
Father Katjetan, presently Supreme Abbot of one of the largest religious orders in Czechoslovakia, a former prisoner of the concentration camp Buchenwald, declared, in the presence of witness Dr. Horn, that those killings were an inevitable necessity for the preservation of the inmates who had been abandoned by justice in the camp.
Even the prosecution witness Roemhild had to admit on the stand that it would have been impossible to save 20,000 prisoners if those spies or traitors whom Dr. Hoven killed or of whose killing he knew had remained alive.
Let me ask in this connection: What would have happened if a man of Kushnir Kushnarev’s caliber had not been killed, and if the murder of the Russian prisoners of war in the Buchenwald camp had been continued? Would Dr. Hoven not stand before this Tribunal even then? Then, would not the same charge be made against Dr. Hoven as the one levelled against the Japanese Governor of the Philippines who was tried before an American Military Court for not having prevented atrocities and abuses?