. NMT04-T0265
Volume IV · Page 265
| operative reasons, however, it was in the end
always the highest authority which had the right to make the final decision.
Q. Could you tell us of the effect of the Barbarossa Decree on your own position and your activities and the activities and the position of the Einsatzkommando? A. In explaining one document I have already explained how the army tried from the very first day not to take notice of me at all as the Chief of the Einsatzgruppen and to treat the Einsatzkommandos as their own army units. We were auxiliary units of the counterintelligence officer. This becomes apparent also from another document. It is Document NOKW-584. It is in Document Book III-D, in which the counterintelligence officer gives us a picture of how in his own tasks of espionage of armed band activities and the setting up of plans for the combat against such bands, apart from the field constabulary and his own units, also the SD delivered news reports which he himself used for his own purposes. Q. What was your relationship with the Chief of Staff of the Army? A. As I have already pointed out, neither the Commander in Chief nor the Chief of Staff really took notice of me at all when I first reported to them. When, therefore, on the strength of the position as described by me just now the army made use of the Kommandos without my knowledge, I had a serious dispute with the intelligence officer. The consequence of this was that I was called to the Chief of Staff, Colonel Woehler,* and he received me by saying that if the collaboration between the army and myself would not improve, he would ask for my dismissal in Berlin. I believe that this fact gives a good picture of my relationship with the Chief of Staff. For although the Chief of Staff was a colonel, and I, as a Standartenfuehrer also held the rank of a colonel, the actual position held in the army becomes abundantly clear. By the army I was considered a unit leader of just about 500 men. That equals a commander of a battalion and I was treated accordingly. I was not only ordered to see Colonel Woehler but even a major who was the intelligence officer ordered me to come and see him and he avoided expressly to address me with my rank — a custom usually adhered to in the army — in order to show that he, even as a major, was above a Standartenfuehrer. PRESIDING JUDGE MUSMANNO: I understand you to say he was a colonel. DEFENDANT OHLENDORF: Who? |
* Woehler became Brigadier General in 1941. Defendant in case of Wilhelm von Leeb, et al. See Vol. .X, XI
