FELBERT: Do you think it all comes from HIMMLER?
KITTEL: Naturally. It someone at the top says: ‘Exterminate those cattle’ – off they all go. I had rows about the thing with every single chief of police. The chief of police in WEIMAR[292] came to me, an unparalleled DON QUIXOTE, wearing the uniform of a ‘Generalleutnant’ – I was ‘Generalmajor’ in LAMMERSDORF(?).[293] I said: ‘What do you want to discuss with me?’ – ‘Well, well, etc., the whole situation here displeases me, it will be fundamentally altered immediately, it’s disgraceful,’ etc. – ‘I’m sorry if you do not agree with some of my measures; you can naturally tell me that quite calmly but not in this way. I will send for my “Kriegsverwaltungsrat”.’ – ‘Who is that?’ I said: ‘You shall meet him directly.’ It was Dr SCHMIDTHUBER(?), a MUNICH notary. Well, he came in and the General turned round and said: ‘So that’s what the fellow looks like.’ I said: ‘Excuse me, General, this is my “Kriegsverwaltungsrat”. I do not wish my subordinates to be spoken of in that tone in my house.’ – ‘I’ve already heard all kinds of things about him.’ SCHMIDTHUBER(?) smilingly stood in front of him and said: ‘Sir, I would point out that I am senior in SS rank to you.’ He is the only SS man whom I have met who managed things charitably and sensibly. The man was worth his weight in gold to me. I was still inexperienced in all those things. How should I know all about the administration of the town; how should I know about the administration of a province half as large as BAVARIA? He knew something about it, for in BAVARIA he was the big man for concluding contracts. He drew up government contracts and so on. He, too, always said: ‘Sirs, everything will have its revenge; let us keep clear. Let us accept no invitations from the SD; let us accept no invitations to houses where Jewish loot is to be found; let us never remove furniture from Jewish homes; instead we will live simply and modestly with whatever we happen to find.’ I could go on telling you things for days on end.
FELBERT: What happened to the young, pretty girls? Were they formed into a harem?
KITTEL: I didn’t bother about that. I only found that they did become more reasonable. At least they had concentration camps for the Jews at CRACOW.[294] At any rate, from the moment I had chosen a safe place and I built the concentration camp, things became quite reasonable. They certainly had to work hard. The women question is a very shady chapter.
FELBERT: If people were killed simply because their carpets and furniture were needed, I can well imagine that if there is a pretty daughter who looks Aryan, she would simply be sent somewhere as a maid-servant.
KITTEL: You’ve no idea what mean and stupid things are done. You can’t get at the people concerned. If you go for a fellow like that, he’ll hang a political… on you. I have politically a… because I have made trouble about various things.
FELBERT: What happens to the people who complain?
KITTEL: They are simply undermined. They can’t maintain their position. Some dirty work is started, an anonymous letter is written ‘Semper aliquid haeret’. Now and again you are compelled to take drastic measures to catch one of those fellows. At every attack which you make upon a certain class in our State administration, you get in return three or four unfounded, either anonymous or somehow raked together, counter-blows.
I had an Oberst BIERKAMP(?)[295] as head of the Security Services at CRACOW.
BRUHN: What sort of people are they?
KITTEL: They are Party members and civilians; they are Security Service people. When HIMMLER formed his state within the state, the Security Service was founded like this: they took 50 per cent good police officials who were not politically tainted, and added to them 50 per cent criminals. That’s how the Security Service arose. (Laughter) There’s one man in the criminal department in BERLIN, in that famous ‘Z’ section whom I frequently used when espionage cases were being held by us in the Ordnance Branch; and the question then arose of nationality and of whether they had not already got a file, whether the man had not cropped up somewhere before. There is the so-called ‘Z’ section for foreigners. I don’t know what ‘Z’ means. It was called ‘Z’ section ‘K’. After 1933 he said to me: ‘We have been sifted through now. The politically tainted officials of the State Police have been got rid of and have either been pensioned off or put into positions where they can no longer do any harm. The sound nucleus of police officials, which every State needs, is now intermingled with people from the underworld of BERLIN, who, however, made themselves prominent in the movement at the right time. They have now been put to work with the others.’ He said straight out: ‘50 per cent of us are decent people and 50 per cent are criminals.’
SCHAEFER: I think, if such conditions are permitted in a modern State, one can only say that the sooner this pack of swine disappear, the better.
KITTEL: We fools have just watched all these things going on. Did you never know that HIMMLER is a state within the state?
SCHAEFER & BRUHN: No.
KITTEL: I’ve often sat up all night discussing with people how the THIRD REICH came into existence. I had pangs of conscience as to whether I should in those circumstances remain in the Army at all.
FELBERT: It wasn’t possible to remain in the Army in this State of ours; one was compelled to take measures against it.
SCHAEFER: At the time when you saw those murders at DVINSK, surely you had someone in authority over you?
KITTEL: The ‘Heeresgruppe’.
SCHAEFER: You must have gone to official lectures about the construction of field works, etc. – was not a position like yours important enough for you to report the murders and add an expression of your horror?
KITTEL: I told the people that.
SCHAEFER: How do our C-in-Cs react to that?
KITTEL: ‘We can’t do anything about it; it’s nothing to do with us.’ It’s a matter of organisation. In the POLAND that remains there is the Generalgouverneur Dr FRANK,[296] who is personally a right-thinking man, and he said to me quite clearly – although I’m actually of the opposite school of thought: ‘If what I want to do here is carried out, there will be no bands in POLAND. My powers have a certain limit which you yourself know.’ It is like this: the Generalgouverneur at the present moment has Obergruppenführer KOPPE, with the rank of a GOC, in the position of a Secretary of State, with unlimited police authority at the same time.[297] So I said to myself that KOPPE has creative power in the whole of POLAND under FRANK. Some stupid question about competence cropped up. I went to KOPPE and said: ‘I have a case which comes under your jurisdiction and that of the Generalgouverneur.’ So he said: ‘The Generalgouverneur is not the competent authority for that, but Herr HIMMLER in BERLIN. I only come under the Generalgouverneur to the extent that he has the right to give me directions but I come under HIMMLER.’ KOPPE was appointed as successor to Obergruppenführer KRÜGER,[298] and he (KRÜGER) did everything he could to annoy FRANK. If FRANK considered it necessary to take some sort of governmental measures, then KRÜGER, via HIMMLER, would simply muck it up for him through official police channels. He was continually throwing a spanner into the works.
BRUHN: Then HIMMLER must be the man responsible.
KITTEL: He is the man. There is no other man in GERMANY who has a word to say on questions of executive powers to a man in the Security Service, in the Police, the Traffic Police, the Gestapo—
292
Here meaning SS-Gruppenführer and Generalleutnant der Polizei Paul Hennicke (31.1.1883–25.7.1967), Police President of Weimar, April 1938 – October 1942.
294
Kittel means the concentration camp at Cracow-Plaszow that was built in 1942 as a forced-labour camp and was turned into a death camp in 1944. Between 22,000 and 24,000 were interned there that summer. About 8,000 were murdered there. ‘Enzykloädie des Holocaust’, Vol. 2, p. 118f. Kittel was commandant of Cracow city on 8.8.1944.
295
SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor der Polizei (8.11.1944) Dr (Law) Walter Bierkamp (17.12.1901–16.4.1945), Sipo and SD Cdr, Cracow, June 1943 – February 1945.
296
Hans Frank (23.5.1903–16.10.1945) from 12.10.1939 General Governor of Poland. Housden, ‘Hans Frank’.
297
SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe (15.6.1896–2.7.1975) HSSPF (Higher SS Police Chief). For the wrangling over jurisdiction between Hans Frank and the HSSPF in Poland see Birn, ‘Die Höheren SS und Polizeiführer’, pp. 197–206.
298
SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger (8.5.1894–10.5.1945), 4.10.1939–9.11.1943 HSSPF East.