feb 16, 1946 - Albert Interrogated
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Further evidence that Hermann might indeed have possessed a conscience comes from Albert’s interrogation testimony at Nuremberg. On 3 September 1945, he said Hermann ‘always had a warm heart and when he heard something that was unjust and I called it vehemently to his attention, he always tried to right things’.43 On the 25th, Albert was asked about a report he had written, ‘as a humanitarian act in accordance with my religion’
Albert: ‘I met one day a Doctor Max Winkler . . . He had just come back from Poland, and he told me what terrible things he had heard there about what was happening . . . Whole train loads of Jews, men, women and children, old and young, had been taken up into the mountains and they had been shot by machine guns . . . At once I said I’m going to make a report on it.’ Interrogator: ‘What is the date of the report?’ Albert: ‘It may have been 1941 or 1942.’ Interrogator: ‘Well, which year did you think it was?’ Albert: ‘I know it was at the same time when the German Jews were collected from Berlin and other towns and deported.’45 The first trains intended for the death camps left Vienna between 15 October and 2 November 1941 carrying 20,000 Jews. Five trainloads of Austrian gypsies followed over the 8th and 9th. Between the 15th and the 23rd trains began rolling out of Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin and Breslau. Transports continued until 15 December, then began again on 21 January for another four weeks. Out of a total of thirty trains, eleven went from Vienna. Most of those aboard were murdered on arrival, dispatched with a single bullet. At Nuremberg, the interrogator let Albert continue his story. Albert: ‘I filed the report with the Air Ministry, and requested that it be given to my brother. Then when I came back some time later, I asked what had happened . . . I received the answer that it had been transferred to the competent department, which in my mind could only mean Himmler, and thus the vicious circle was completed . . . The thing ended where the murder had started.’
Albert: ‘Well, his reaction was always that those things were exaggerated, because he had exact reports on them. He said for me not to mix into affairs of state, and affairs of history.’
Albert: ‘He told me if I wanted to protect the Jews and wanted to help them, that was my affair, but I would have to be much more careful and more tactful, because I made endless difficulties for him in his position.’
The SS leader had prevented Hermann from acting: ‘At the beginning he had the power to do so; later he did not because Himmler was so powerful.’50 Albert’s statement of Hermann’s ‘weakness towards Himmler’ regarding Jewish policy, does bear some truth, especially in the last years of the war when Hermann was increasingly yesterday’s man. His wife’s efforts to free a Jewish actress friend, Rose Korwan, during March 1943, give an indication of where power lay by this point. Rose was arrested after her husband was picked up with false papers and no star of David. Emmy Goering called Himmler straight away: ‘I begged and implored him to do me this one favour.’51 Himmler promised to send them both to Theresienstadt, ‘one of our best camps’. However, the next day Emmy heard that their train had gone in the opposite direction. She told Hermann, ‘who called Himmler . . . during the evening he received a note informing him that Himmler had telephoned . . . and that Rose and her husband
had arrived safely.’52 Of course, their actual destination was the gas chamber.
I have helped people from Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, whenever I could, whether they were poor or whether they wanted to emigrate . . . and I never expected or received any compensation for it . . . because I did this for religious reasons.
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Mein Bruder
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