Keeping the prisoners incommunicado had been ordered by the Fuehrer order and by the military authorities. The question of military necessity was not subject to review by us. International law puts these military interests above the personal interests of the inhabitants of the occupied territories.
From all these considerations I did not see that the NN regulations were contrary to international law.
Q. Since the prosecution has submitted documents about the conditions in concentration camps against all defendants who continued working in the Ministry of Justice after 1942, I have to ask you too what you knew about occurrences in concentration camps.
A. My various official positions could not afford me any knowledge about such events. Even at the time when members of the SS did not yet have their independent jurisdiction, when reports about these excesses in concentration camps could thus still reach the Ministry of Justice, my section was not affected by this, and this was entirely regardless of the fact that these reports only provided knowledge of a very small section of actual conditions.
In conversations, too, within the Ministry I heard very little about these matters, probably because they were treated as secret, and I was not in a special confidential relationship with the Referenten who were working on these matters. For those reasons, for example, the occurrences in the Kemna and Hohenstein camps being known to me only here during this trial. I myself never visited a concentration camp. As far as private knowledge is concerned, I considered being kept in the concentration camp, of course, as something unpleasant, especially since the camps were cut off from the outside world, the uncertainty of the period of detention, the lack of orderly legal recourse. That abuses might have occurred for those reasons I assumed without knowing anything definite about it. I did not have acquaintances who had been in a concentration camp and from whom I might have found out some definite details. Although I had quite good relationships with Protestant church circles, for example, I did not even know, did not gain any definite knowledge about Niemoeller’s[491] being kept in a concentration camp. About systematic killings and mass exterminations I heard only after the surrender.
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CROSS-EXAMINATION
Mr. Wooleyhan: Mr. von Ammon, last Friday you stated with regard to your relationship with the Nazi Party that you were a victim of Nazi propaganda and that you were not an enthusiastic Party member for ideological reasons. Weren’t you omitting some very important events in your political career?
Defendant von Ammon: First of all, I believe that I did not express myself in that cross manner, that I described myself as a victim of Nazi propaganda. I only stated that under the influence of Nazi propaganda I saw many a thing in a more favorable light than it actually was, and that I was not an enthusiastic National Socialist, because from my ideological point of view, much kept me apart from the Party. I am not aware of the fact that I left out anything important when making such a statement.
Q. Then you don’t consider it important, noteworthy enough to remember, that on 9 November 1923 you actively participated with Hitler and others in the famous Munich Putsch; why don’t you remember that, Dr. von Ammon?