A. I said that already. From the answer of the head office of the border police in Stuttgart, it was apparent without doubt that according to the information which they had from Switzerland that there was an illegal recruiting and transport service which helped Poles to get to Switzerland and to Africa; to that extent, Switzerland apparently did everything that it was possible to do, and as far as it could; and from the files it is occasionally apparent that the Swiss border officials returned the Poles who had crossed the border from Germany; but in all cases they probably did not succeed.
Q. Had the Ministry of Justice also informed you to what extent recruiting offices for the Polish Legion existed in Switzerland?
A. If I remember correctly, the same information had also reached us from the Foreign Office via the Ministry of Justice.
Q. Thank you. The prosecution seems to assume that the indictments were not the results of attempts to join the Polish Legion, but were a means to prosecute Poles because of their flight from Germany and their places of work. Please comment on this.
A. For us, that certainly was not the motive for the filing of an indictment, because we were convinced that the suspicion was justified. Moreover, against such allegations the fact probably speaks which can be gathered from Exhibit 259[528] of the prosecution. From that it can be gathered that particularly at the time in question here, hundreds perhaps thousands of Poles left their places of work in the Reich; and if only a very small number of these were tried before a court because they wanted to join the legion, this makes it apparent that they were not tried only because they left their place of work. The other participating offices, that is the police and the counterintelligence of the OKW, were probably also of the opinion that here we were faced not only with flight from the place of work, but flight for a special purpose.
The general situation was just as I described it. During the war the German Reich, as any warring power, had closed its borders and this had been done for reasons of the security of the State and was therefore necessary because everybody who crossed the border and reached neutral country or an enemy country took along with him important experiences and knowledge which he had gained in the warring country. Poles knew that too.
Q. Witness, you have already stated before that a Pole, only for the reason that he had left his place of work on his own, could not be tried and sentenced by the People’s Court. Now, according to your determinations in the individual cases in which Poles were indicted because of attempts to reach the Polish Legion, did other reasons for suspicion also play a role which supported the suspicion on the basis of which then in accordance with the law you were obliged to raise an indictment?
A. I just wanted to talk about that.
Q. Will you please state what reasons for suspicion have regularly played a role also?
A. If somebody crosses the border with a certain purpose in mind and he is caught in the act, then, in the most infrequent of cases will he be inclined to say and be ready to say what intentions he had in mind, for in so doing he would damage his own case. Criminal cases which were conducted under this point of view—and this is probably not the case only in Germany—therefore are based to a large extent on the justified conclusions one can draw from the facts available.