Presiding Judge Brand: One moment please, Witness. Tell us, please, what did you mean by clearing up the case? Did you mean prosecute and convict? Or what did you mean?
Witness Hagemann: What I meant first, was to establish the facts and once they were established to suggest to the Ministry that an indictment should be filed against Kluettgen and, if necessary, also against the Kreisleiter. I could not make a final suggestion at that stage because I did not yet know what part the Kreisleiter had played. That is to say, the Ministry agreed that I should carry out my plan to clear up the case, but because no approval was received from the Party Chancellery to interrogate the Kreisleiter, we could not close the proceedings.
There were, of course, also great difficulties of transportation. The further the war was brought into the country, the more difficult it was to have any correspondence with Berlin.
Q. What was the date of this case?
A. I am afraid I cannot tell you the exact date. I think one should be able to find out from the history of the war. It was that parachute attack near Arnhem. I think I am pretty certain it was in September. May I say that is the way I remember the case now. The files are in existence.
Q. It was in 1944?
A. Yes, 1944. I did something which, as far as I know, I never did in any other case. I had two copies made of that file, one original file and a copy of it. I gave the original to my senior clerk, and I told him to keep it, not to leave it in the courthouse at night but to take it home with him, and to take it with him to the air-raid shelter in case of an alert. I kept the duplicate myself, and whenever the alert came I took it with me to the air-raid shelter to make sure that if anything happened to either my senior clerk or to myself, one file would always be available, so that there should be no difficulty in prosecuting the case. I was convinced that this was an important case not only from the point of view of guilt and expiation in the individual concrete case, but also that was bound to be of importance for the German armed forces, for, although I was not a soldier, I could well imagine that if the Allied forces should come to hear that the German administration of justice had not prosecuted that case, they would take retaliation measures against German soldiers, or at least might do so. In that event, soldiers who were innocent in this connection might have suffered for what Kluettgen, and possibly also the Kreisleiter Hartmann, had done.
What may be of interest, is the reaction of the German population in Kranenburg. There were some German civilians standing in the street when this happened, who quite openly showed their indignation.
Q. Was any indictment filed against the one who actually did the shooting?
A. No, that was not done, because we had to wait. The role the Kreisleiter played—