Gentlemen, in this connection I may call your attention to another important point. If I visit an office and find out that something is being hidden there, then I ask for the death penalty for such a crime today! That is fraud! That is sabotage of the German armament industry!
Then there is still the human factor. We often had considerable difficulty with the human factor. The fluctuation there is very considerable. The quota of the Luftwaffe in the distribution of manpower is constantly lowered. The foreigners run away. They do not keep to any contract. There are difficulties with Frenchmen, Italians, Dutch. The prisoners of war are partly unruly and fresh. These people are also supposed to be carrying on sabotage. These elements cannot be made more efficient by small means. They are just not handled strictly enough. If a decent foreman would sock one of those unruly guys because the fellow won’t work, then the situation would soon change. International law cannot be observed here. I have asserted myself very strongly, and with the help of Saur I have very strongly represented the point of view that the prisoners, with the exception of the English and the Americans, should be taken away from the military authorities. Soldiers are not in a position, as experience has shown, to cope with these fellows who know all the answers. I shall take very strict measures here and shall put such a prisoner of war before my court martial. If he has committed sabotage or refused to work, I will have him hanged, right in his own factory. I am convinced that that will not be without effect.
Anyhow, the strangest things occur in the treatment of the workers. It is said that the people collapse, and then one has to find out that they have a furlough of three or four days every eight weeks. That is dirty business of the first order and treason to the country! Then perhaps a construction battalion arrives and is supposed to be put to work. The commanding officer, perhaps some overfed grade-school teacher, declares that the men must drill and must take part in sports! Damn it, the fellows are there to work so that the maximum amount of work will result. One has to act very strictly here. A construction battalion was ordered to Regensburg. The commanding officer was one of those scholars who said he could not billet the men in peacetime conditions and, therefore, he refused to start work. Such a guy should be convicted by a court martial and hanged. I would be grateful if the gentlemen would proceed in that manner. As with me in industry, so every stupidity is possible everywhere else also. As chief, one has to take up these matters. I know what kind of obstacles become apparent. There is bureaucracy. It is not easy to go against bureaucracy. But we have to cut through that also, and if you, Gentlemen, proceed with the right attitude here, then we are already assured of success.
* * * In saying this I do not even consider the fact that the workshops have first-class personnel, whereas we in the Luftwaffe armament industry have Russians, French prisoners of war, Dutch, and members of 32 other nations. Obtaining interpreters alone presents a big difficulty there. * * *
A further question concerns the efforts for housing the machines. That is very important, and I would be very grateful if you would think this matter over also. In this manner you would not only facilitate the question of spare parts but also the scarce supply of materials. Each fighter plane contains about one ton of aluminum. Every small bomber contains four tons of aluminum; and a larger bomber, seven to eight tons. The captured bombers contain eleven to twelve tons of aluminum. There are in any case tremendous amounts of material involved here. Let us take twelve tons as normal for an American heavy bomber, or let us say only ten tons, and let us assume that we actually shoot down 500 such American bombers a month and that we can salvage them over our own territory; that alone means 5,000 tons of aluminum, 5,000 tons: that is 25 percent of the aluminum quota at the disposal of the Luftwaffe. You can see how important these questions are, too. We can certainly count on more Americans being shot down in the future because we will have more fighter planes.
I further ask for support by the Luftwaffe physicians. With all the rabble that we have among the foreign workers there is of course a lot of shirking. At the moment the Russians—that is, the Russian prisoners of war—are feigning a lot of fatigue and illness. The incidence of sickness of one-and-a-half to two percent which we have had up to now has at least doubled and in some factories it has been increased to eight, nine, and ten percent. That is, of course, done by previous agreement. There the official physicians must undertake an examination and if the physicians, who have to be very strict, find out that it is not true, then we return the fellows to work by means of the whip. Then the whip serves as cure.
A further request which is very important from the point of view of leadership! Sometimes we do not know in case of an alert what orders we want to give for our factories. If a factory knows that it is about to be attacked, and it has a few trench shelters but does not have a bomb-proof shelter or the like, then the people simply run away from the factory, automatically at each raid, after the first one, and they usually cannot be caught the next day, either. That applies particularly to the foreigners. We have, therefore, now issued the following order, and have equipped the superiors accordingly with weapons and pistols: as soon as a factory which has already been attacked a few times can count on the raids being aimed at that particular factory again, then the personnel leave the factory; but in closed groups by shops, under the leadership of the man in charge of the shop, and, to the extent that they are German personnel, they leave singing military songs. The people are led away from the factory to a distance of 1,000 or 1,500 meters. There they have to lie down in slit trenches and watch their factory from there, so that they can immediately rush to it after the raid in order to help and to save what can be saved. That is the only correct way to do it. * * *