Q. About that appeal, did you have anything to do with that decision?
A. That decision was formally not correct, but substantially it is very interesting because by that decision the complaint against my arrest warrant was rejected; and rejected by the one person who now charges me with having issued that arrest warrant. That was signed—it happens to be signed by Mr. Ferber, who asserts that I had pulled a dirty deal with my arrest warrant.
Q. You yourself had nothing to do with that decision?
A. I had nothing to do with that decision; the case went on and was soon suspended after the defendant had been interrogated, and that was one thing we didn’t know when we issued the arrest warrant, he explained that for quite some time he was in the army, and it was granted him that he might not have been as well informed about the entire atmosphere around the question of Poles in Germany as one would have expected otherwise. The case was suspended on 27 August 1942, with the reason that it could not be proved that the defendant intended to demonstrate his opposition against the measures of the State concerning Poles.
Q. You have been charged that because that case was not successful, you had initiated a second proceeding, the one concerning the sermon. Will you please, first state what the prosecution had decided already on 9 July 1942, that is to say, before the end of the first proceeding. You find it on page 12 of the files, a disposition made by the prosecution on 9 July.
A. That is the worst part of the charges which are raised against me in this connection. As I have said, I can refute it by documents, by just mentioning several documents in chronological order which will clarify the connections. In the file concerned with the funeral of the Pole, on page 12, 9 July 1942, there is a short disposition on the part of the prosecutor where he requests a list of previous connections and political record. Therefore, for that funeral case, one wanted to have the political record of Schosser from the Party. The prosecutor shouldn’t have done that really, but he was new there, and he committed that blunder, and that was how the whole thing started. It was prohibited to request any political record of a clergyman because one considered—one knew generally that the clergy was against national socialism; that was no secret; but now in spite of that, the Party reacted upon that request and sent a certificate of that kind, not to me, but to the prosecutor who requested it.
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Q. What was the course of the second case, the case of the sermon? In that case, serious charges were also made against you concerning the treatment of the clergyman Schosser. Will you briefly describe the course of those proceedings, and will you please state whether the part you took in that case justifies the charge of being the main instigator leveled against you?
A. In the further course of the proceedings that charge cannot be considered since the proceedings were already started when the case came before me. On 25 August 1942, I issued the arrest warrant. We did not go as far at that time as the confession or the statements made by Schosser in the trial would have permitted us to go. If we had assumed that his entire sermon from beginning to end was directed against the wolves in sheep’s clothing, we could have characterized the case as one of high treason, and we would have had to pass it on for that reason to the competent authority. We only assumed that in the course of the sermon various doubtful statements had been made which had nothing to do with God the Father, and that was how it came to trial.
Nothing further happened. Investigations were carried out such as in every other case, and there was a defense counsel.