DUPONT: He was chief of the SS administration in Berlin, Division D 2.
M. DUBOST: Could the German people as a whole have been in ignorance of
these atrocities, or were they bound to know of them?
DUPONT: As these camps had been in existence for years, it is impossible
for them not to have known. Our transport stopped at Trèves on its way
in. The prisoners in some vans were completely naked while in others
they were clothed. There was a crowd of people around the station and
they all saw the transport. Some of them excited the SS men patrolling
the platform. But there were other channels through which information
could reach the population. To begin with, there were squads working
outside the camps. Labor squads went out from Buchenwald to Weimar,
Erfurt, and Jena. They left in the morning and came back at night, and
during the day they were among the civilian population. In the
factories, too, the technical crew were not members of the armed forces.
The “Meister” were not SS men. They went home every night after
supervising the work of the prisoners all day. Certain factories even
employed civilian labor—the Gustloff works in Weimar, for instance.
During the work, the internees and civilians were together.
The civil authorities were responsible for victualling the camps and
were allowed to enter them, and I have seen civilian trucks coming into
the camp.
The railway authorities were necessarily informed on those matters.
Numerous trains carried prisoners daily from one camp to another; or
from France to Germany; and these trains were driven by railway men.
Moreover, there was a regular daily train to Buchenwald as a terminal
station. The railway administrative authorities must, therefore, have
been well informed.
Orders were also given in the factories, and industrialists could not
fail to be informed regarding the personnel they employed in their
factories. I may add that visits took place; the German prisoners were
sometimes visited. I knew certain German internees, and I know that on
the occasion of those visits they talked to their relatives, which they
could hardly do without informing their home circle of what was going
on. It would appear that it is impossible to deny that the German people
knew of the camps.