A. 2,000 or 3,000—I cannot remember.
Q. Your affidavit says 10,000.
A. No, that is incorrect. That cannot have been the number in France. The second time that I went to the Plenipotentiary General for chemistry, Prof. Krauch, and told him of the serious situation, and I finally brought him to the point of giving me 15,000 workers from his department.
Q. What workers were those?
A. First of all, in the Baltic States—that was a Todt Organization itself—I took away most of the German workers, and took some elsewhere as additional workers, engineers, experts of one sort or another, machinists. Then came the attack on Leuna on the 10th or 12th of May 1944. That was on the occasion of the first attack on Leuna. I had a talk with Hitler at that time. He said, “This cannot be tolerated—that, at the very moment when we are so in need of oil, workers are taken away from Leuna”.
I then answered him that, first of all, I had undertaken this measure before the air attack, and secondly, it was not a question of cutting down on oil production, but of oil capacity. Hitler took over and said, “No, that cannot be”. Then Speer said, “If we don’t get the workers, we can’t do the building”. Hitler said, “Quiet down, you will get 50,000 Italians,” and then I said, “I don’t believe that”, and I said that for the following reasons: We, the Todt Organization, had such workers from Italy for the construction program Riese in Silesia, but we did not do this via Sauckel but by applying to Italian firms to take over construction commissions in Germany, and then they automatically brought their workers, their directors and architects, and so on, with them particularly after we had assured them that we with our organization—that is to say, with the Todt Organization in Italy—would take care of paying wages, paying for the hospitalization fees, insurance, and so on, but at the moment when workers were fetched by Sauckel, I understood clearly that workers such as we needed would not be provided in any considerable numbers. At any rate, I told Hitler, “I do not believe in these Italian workers, and I won’t believe in them until they have crossed the Brenner Pass.” He then said to me, “You can believe in them because tomorrow Mussolini is signing an agreement that 1,000,000 workers will come to Germany.”
* * * If I may mention it, it is also worthy of mention, that in January, the beginning of January, I was at a conference with Hitler, or rather, I did not take part in it, but I knew of it. There, a new worker contingent was demanded, and in this conference Hitler himself named the number of 250,000 workers for the construction; for aircraft construction. In other words, it wasn’t Speer but Hitler who demanded those workers, especially, and it is possible—that, at any rate, is the way I construe it now—that he was thinking of these fighter plants. Then I asked Hitler to permit me to use 10,000 Todt Organization workers from Southern Russia. I must mention that here, because I did that as Speer’s representative with Hitler. I could not have said to Speer that he should give me these 10,000 workers. I had to do that through Hitler, because the commanders in chief, in this case the commander in chief of the army group in Southern Russia, were in charge of these people and they had to be released by them. Thereupon these 10,000 workers got under way toward Germany. However, they unfortunately arrived very slowly and some of them never got to the fighter plant, but were taken over by Speer to make ball bearings in Wellen, in Thuringia, and then, when no workers came, the plants were to be built by Hungarian Jews. I do not know precisely when it was, but I do remember an armaments conference in Linz—I guess it was about the middle of June or maybe later, but I can’t say for sure—and it was then that the first ones began to arrive.
Q. Were they approved by Hitler?
A. Yes.
Q. Witness, when you of the Todt Organization fetched Italians on your own initiative, were they volunteers or were they more or less forced labor?