The proof in this case that foreign workers were brought into Germany against their will generally does not come from them, but almost exclusively from their abductors. At one of the meetings of the Central Planning Board, Mr. Timm, representing the Plenipotentiary General for Labor, reports that they are encountering resistance to recruitment—
“In all countries we have to change over more or less to registering the men by age groups and to conscripting them in age groups. They do appear for registering as such, but as soon as transport is available, they do not come back so that the dispatch of the men has become more or less a question for the police. Especially in Poland the situation at the moment is extraordinarily serious. It is well known that vehement battles occurred just because of these actions.” (T-197-198.)
The word “recruitment” will be used in this opinion not in its literal sense of voluntary enlistment, but in the broad sense of both voluntary and involuntary gathering up of workers.
It is the contention of the defense that Milch had nothing to do with the actual recruitment. It is, of course, true that he did not go into France, Italy, Hungary, Russia, and other countries, to physically rope the workers and drag them into Germany, but is the guilt any less if one sits back in his office and signs the order which casts the uncoiling rope for the far-reaching lasso?
Goering, in an interrogation conducted 6 September 1946, stated that after the death of Udet it was Milch, as Chief of Supply for the air forces, who put forward the needs of the Luftwaffe for workers. The requests were forwarded to Speer, and Speer would ask Sauckel for the workers for the entire armament branch. Sauckel, on 24 September 1946, made a very important declaration in an affidavit on the part Milch played in the matter of obtaining workers—
“Milch produced the figures for aviation. The same was done by Speer in his sphere of activity. Speer and Milch, however, also exerted influence on the allocation of workers. How far this came within their capacity as members of the Central Planning Board I cannot say; in any case they did this in their ministerial capacity.” (T-281.)
Thus, if Milch knew how workers were actually being recruited, how they were being transported, and to what they were being transported, he cannot claim exoneration in the assertion that he did not take them in hand personally. And, if this knowledge is established, then he, when he asked for workers, was, in effect, consigning foreign workers to the suffering and torture of which he had cognizance. Behind each requisition for foreign labor there shone the inevitable backdrop of the lurid scenes of labor camps with their “special treatment,” disease, vermin, starvation, whipping, illness, and death.
On 8 April 1943, Milch wrote Sauckel and Goering, announcing that in certain sections he had proclaimed an 84-hour week in the air force industry. (T-196.) The defendant has explained that this applied only to those engaged in guard work. Witness Krysiak testified that he worked 84 hours a week.
At the 1 March 1944 meeting of the Central Planning Board, Sauckel particularly addressed himself to Milch who was presiding, and said—
“Thereupon I even proceeded to employ and train a whole batch of French male and female agents who for good pay, just as was done in olden times for ‘shanghaiing’, went hunting men and made them drunk by using liquor as well as words, in order to dispatch them to Germany.” (T-228.)