Final Statement of the Accused Oswald Pohl Stated Before the Military Tribunal

Authors

Object ID

2015.2.171

Object Name

Statement

Date

9-22-1947

Files

Content Warning

The Bulmash Family Holocaust Collection consists of images, documents, and artifacts related to the Holocaust. The collection contains materials that depict a number of topics that may be difficult for viewers to engage with, including: antisemitic descriptions, caricatures, and representation of Jewish people; Nazi imagery and ideology; descriptions and images of German ghettos; graphic images of the violence of the Holocaust; and the creation of the State of Israel. For more information, see our policy page.

Description

Typewritten pages with Oswald Pohl's unrepentant final statement.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Oswald Pohl (1892-1951). Pohl was the head of the Economic Office of the SS and ultimate overseer of the concentration camp system. He was responsible for turning his victims' gold teeth, eyeglasses, hair, etc. into cash for the SS, using the "Max Heliger" Swiss accounts. He was captured by British troops in 1946 and sentenced to death by an American military tribunal for crimes against humanity, as well as war crimes, mass murder, and crimes committed in the concentration camps. Despite repeated appeals, he was executed in 1951. This document is from Nuremberg, October 1948, in German, entitled "Final Statement of the Accused Oswald Pohl Stated Before the Military Tribunal..." At the top of the first page he writes in blue ink: "(M)eine (L)ieben... in thankfulness. Nuremberg Justice Prison June 46-October 48." He pens two paragraphs from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: "What our spirit of confusion reclaims/Will eventually benefit the living/Even if it is sometimes just our thoughts/They dissolve in that great blood..." Unrepentant, Pohl claims in his statement: "... I studied the essays that Henry Ford had published in the newspaper The Dearborn Independent in the years 1924/26 and as a book entitled The International Jew ... It is this attitude that great practical American who was not an anti-Semite had then impressed upon me and strengthened my belief that racial and the Jewish problem were not only gray theories. On the basis of this knowledge, and given the increasingly obvious phenomena in Germany, I became convinced that the influence of Judaism was disproportionate to its population and therefore, that containment is necessary. I considered such by legislative methods possible and also sufficient... I have therefore never been involved in acts of violence against Jews, nor endorsed this or knowingly promoted them. On the legislative measures of any kind I was also not involved... I am not conscious of having committed a crime..." In another document he traces his ancestry back several generations.

Dimensions

13 x 8"

Keywords

Economic Office of the SS, Max Heliger, accounts, Nuremberg Military Tribunal, Pohl

Subcollection

Post

Recommended Citation

"Final Statement of the Accused Oswald Pohl Stated Before the Military Tribunal" (1947). Bulmash Family Holocaust Collection. 2015.2.171.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/bulmash/259