Q. Please answer this question. Did you have any difficulty with the securing of the evidence concerning the actual shooting? As you have told us you apparently had plenty of evidence as to that one person.
A. Yes, against this one man I had the evidence, but as it was possible that another man was involved—the Kreisleiter—it was important that we should not just indict one man and deal with him alone, but to indict them together. We always did that in principle.
Q. Well, let me ask you this. Was that a matter of German law, that when you knew one man had committed a crime you didn’t prosecute him because perhaps someone else might have helped him?
A. But we did intend to indict him. We only wanted to await the result of the investigations concerning the other person, so that we could indict them both, because if we only indicted one, the proceedings against the other one would have been confronted with a great many difficulties. That was the way in which we proceeded, I should say, almost regularly.
Presiding Judge Brand: Very interesting.
Dr. Schilf: Herr Hagemann, I would like to ask one more question. The President has asked you whether you were confronted with any difficulties in prosecuting one person. I am referring to Kluettgen now.
Witness Hagemann: Yes.
Q. May I ask you to tell us whether you had an opportunity to talk to Kluettgen yourself, or to interrogate him?
A. I asked the legal adviser of the SA, if possible, to make Kluettgen come to see me. At first, Kluettgen had worked near Kranenburg, but afterwards the SA had sent him to the district of Aix-la-Chapelle [Aachen]. He had some special transport mission there, and when he came to Duesseldorf on one of those transportation errands, he came to see me in my apartment one Saturday evening. I was ill; that is why I was at home. I had a short talk with him, and I was not favorably impressed with him. He told me that he had killed those two Canadians because he had been afraid that foreign civilian workers who were loafing around in that district might have set those Canadians free. I wanted to refute that statement, and I did refute it by the testimony obtained from witnesses. However, that motive would have been quite indifferent for the legal evaluation of the case.
As regards the clearing up of the case, it seemed important to me to convict the man and prove to him that that motive could not have been true.