A. Yes. That was true of my organization, for he protected and covered me as its chief, and, secondly, as far as I know, he was the only man belonging to any resistance movement who was as close as he to the Reich Leader SS. If any other group had brought any such information as he did, I would have noticed that it could have only come from the same source.
Q. Witness, I shall have a document handed to you which was submitted by the prosecution. This is Document NO-975, Prosecution Exhibit 479. It is a letter sent by Sievers to Dr. Hirt. Would you please look at that letter?
A. Yes.
Q. This letter contains a tone of voice which seems to indicate that he tried to cover Dr. Hirt’s activity. Dr. Hirt was working in the Anatomical Institute of the Strasbourg University. I assume, for reasons which we shall mention later, that you know Hirt’s name. How do you explain that tone in this letter?
A. I think that this is very proper and praiseworthy. I would have thought it very foolish of Sievers if he adopted any other tone in any of his official correspondence. It was his task to say “yes” but act in a negative way. There couldn’t have appeared any pretense of any disapproval on his part. The more active one had to be in an anti-National Socialist way, the more one had to speak in favor of National Socialism.
Q. I shall now turn to another complex of questions. Sievers is indicted in this trial as having participated in a number of crimes. Did Sievers at any time tell you about the so-called research assignments of Dr. Rascher and Dr. Hirt who was just mentioned? These were experiments carried out in the concentration camps.
A. Sievers, as far as I remember, came to me in the year 1942 and told me very excitedly that Himmler in his desire to extend the Ahnenerbe Society had embarked on the thought of including experiments on human beings in the work of the Ahnenerbe Society. He said that he did not succeed in frustrating that. He said that he had no desire whatsoever to participate in these horrible acts and asked me what to do. At that time we considered this horrible situation very thoroughly and thought of what we could do. It was quite clear to us what the SS intended here, and it was questionable whether responsibility could be assumed for any such acts, whether it would be advisable to be the instrument of Himmler if he embarked on any such acts, measures where human beings were degraded to the level of insects.
The following considerations proved to be decisive for us: If Sievers left, not one person, not one subject in these experiments would be saved. If Sievers stayed there as a technical secretary, he could throw sand into that machinery and would, perhaps, be in a position to save somebody. In addition, the entire plan and the entire overthrow of the Party stood or fell with Sievers staying at his post. The experiments on human beings were only part of this horrible Party system, and one had to concentrate on the decisive points in order finally to remove everything, and, as I have said before, there was no other way into the staff of the Reich Leader SS. We therefore concluded that if Sievers resigned because of that, it was sure that he would be eliminated and probably all the people he had ever entrusted with a research assignment, and everything that we had done so far would be lost if he left, and if anyone was to be saved at all, he could only be saved by Sievers remaining at his post.
Q. If I have understood you correctly, Sievers at first wanted to resign from his position as Reich Business Manager of the Ahnenerbe?
A. Yes. That is correct.