Copy of document 3723-PS

Testimony of GOTTLIEB BERGER, taken at Nurnberg, Germany, on
20 September 1945, 1030-1207, by Col. Howard A. Brundage,
JAGD, OUSCC. Also present: Siegfried Ramler, Interpreter and
Pvt. Clair Van Vleck, Court Reporter.

            COLONEL BRUNDAGE TO THE INTERPRETER:

Q. Will you state your name?

A. Siegfried Ramler.

Q. By whom are you employed?

A. Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel.

Q. What are your present duties?

A. Interpreter.

Q. Will you stand, please. Do you solemnly swear that you
will truly and accurately translate from German into English
and English into German, all of the testimony to be given at
this hearing?

A. I do, so help me God.

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               COLONEL BRUNDAGE TO THE WITNESS
                  THROUGH THE INTERPRETER:

Q. You are the same Gottlieb Berger, who appeared before me
yesterday?

A. Yes, I was here yesterday.

Q. During 1944, will you tell me what your duties and
functions were in conjunction with prisoners of war?

A. Yes. May I first present to you for the record a chart of
my chief office, as I mentioned yesterday.

Q. Yes.

A. I testified under oath yesterday and I do not want to
give the impression that I want to keep quiet about anything
regarding my office.

Q. Let the record show that the witness has presented a hand-
written chart, showing the organization of the SS office.

A. SS Chief Office.

Q. And on the reverse side is the whole organizational frame
of the Reichsfuehrer SS Heydrich [sic] Himmler. Was
Kaltenbrunner the superior of Pohl?

A. No. All these twelve chiefs that I mentioned here were
always directly responsible to Himmler.

Q. Do you know what the duties and functions of
Kaltenbrunner were?

A. He was Chief of the whole Security Police.

Q. What did he have to do with concentration camps?

A. He was the man who executed orders. He was the last man
because Mueller was subordinate to him.

Q. Then Pohl didn’t fit into that chain of command?

A. Yes; Pohl did not fit into that chain because the whole
organization is not organic. It was a specialty of Himmler
to give one task to two different people.

Q. Just what did Kaltenbrunner do?

A. This is very difficult to answer. He had his service post
in Berlin there. The different group chiefs that I have
mentioned here, such as Mueller, Nebe, I have written it all
down, Dr. Schellenberg, they conferred with him daily; and
there, in this conference, all the difficulties, shall I
say, the more important problems that occurred in the
different groups, were discussed and decided upon. Starting
early summer 1944, Kaltenbrunner personally conferred with
Hitler without having Himmler there. While otherwise,
Himmler was always careful to see that none of his men had
conferences with the Fuehrer, without his being present
too.

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Q. As Security Police, what were, normally, his duties?

A. He was the guarantor of the interior security and order
inside Germany.

Q. That put him at the head of the Gestapo; is that right?

A. Yes. He had all the interior police under him, not only
the Gestapo, but also the criminal police and the SD under
him.

Q. When people were arrested and put into concentration
camps, that was done with Kaltenbrunner’s men?

A. Yes.

Q. Did he also have the authority to name the camp in which
these men were going to be placed?

A. Certainly.

Q. Did he also have the authority to issue orders to the
commandant of the camp?

A. Certainly.

Q. He was also superior to the Death-head Guards and,
likewise, the civilian employees of the camps?

A. No; that was Glucks. May I add something to this?

Q. Yes.

A. When I say that he certainly had the right to give orders
to camp commandant, I mean to say that whenever I tried to
get somebody out of a concentration camp, I have never been
able to do so without the consent of Mueller, and that also
means Kaltenbrunner.

Q. Mueller was his direct assistant?

A. Yes; directly under him.

Q. Assuming, only for the purposes of this discussion, that
these atrocities that we hear about are true, who did you
think is primarily responsible?

A. The first one, the commandant; the second one, Glucks,
because he was practically responsible for all the interior
direction of the camps. If one wants to be exact, one would
have to find out how the information service between the
camp commandant and Glucks actually operated. I want to give
you the following example; during the night of the 22nd and
23rd of April, I was sent to Munich. As I entered the city,
I met a group of perhaps 120 men dressed in the suit of the
concentration camps. These people made a very starved
impression on me. I asked the guard who was with them: “What
about those men.” He told me that these men were marching,
by foot, to the Alps. Firstly, I sent him back to Dachau.
Then I wrote a letter to the commandant, to send no more
people by foot to any place, but whenever the Allies
advanced any further, to give over the camp completely. I

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did that on my own responsibility and I told him that I came
straight from Berlin and that I can be found in my service
post in Munich. The commandant, or his deputy, telephoned at
about twelve o'clock and told me that he had received this
order from Kaltenbrunner, after he had been asked by the
Gauleiter of Munich, the Reichskommissar. It could be that
even Gauleiters, in their nature as Reich Defense
Commissars, have directly mixed up in concentration camps
and have also given direct orders to the concentration
camps.

A. What was the result of this letter that you wrote to the
commandant of Dachau?

A. Everything went in order for two days, and about on the
28th of April, when I returned from Kesselring, I saw,
perhaps, 500 men in terrible condition near Wolfratshausen,
60 kilometers south of Munich. I held them up. At that time
they were at an explosive works and I have the order to the
group leader to house the men immediately in the empty
barracks that were near the street and to hold up further
troops. I got in touch with the Kreisleiter in
Wolfratshausen myself, as I could not get in touch with the
Landrat, and he promised me to care for them. He actually
kept his promise, as I found out in the following days. In
spite of my order to keep the men there, and in spite of the
same order that came from Kaltenbrunner, the Reich defense
commissar said that he supposedly got an order from the
Fuehrer, in which it was stated that these camps have to be
cleared immediately. There was quite a clear mix-up where
the Gauleiter dealt with things directly.