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david irving Secretly Overheard:
that’s to say the tragedy had already taken place, and it had also already
taken place at Rostov: the people had already been killed there, but
it was put down to my account. I shall certainly be named as a war
criminal. 18,000 Jews were killed at Rostov. Of course I had nothing to
do with the whole affair! But it is down on my account because I was
the only known General there.
EBERBACH: Who is really responsible for the affair? There’s no
doubt at all that the Führer knew all about this massacre of the Jews.
KITTEL: Well, those Jews were the pest of the east! They should
have been driven into one area and employed on some useful occupation.
By the way, I am going to hold my tongue about what I do know of
these things, until such time as they pick me out.
After the fall of Rostov the Russians accused me, in a great official
solemn declaration on the radio, of having poisoned 18,000 Russians.
As regards that I can only say: until then I knew nothing whatsoever
about the whole affair in which so many people were killed, and was
actually not under the impression either that so many people had been
beseitigt there. They were probably carried off. I don’t know. Anyhow
I’m certainly one of the best nominees for a war criminal – although
there are quite a number of them: Oberst Eberhard Wildermuth also
told me in the strictest secrecy that he had signed about forty sentences
of death in his official capacity as Feldkommandant [der Festung Le
Havre]. Jawohl, I have some anxiety on that score!
I deprived the Sicherheitsdienst people of every possibility of
maltreating the population. But I could not overcome the fact that my
own superiors made arrangements with the General der Polizei which
simply knocked me off my feet. I said to General [der Kavallerie Graf
Edwin] von Rothkirch, who played a part down there in the defence of
the Dnieper line in the winter of 1941�2:
“Well, Sir, with the signing of this agreement with the police you are
handing over all your executive power, and we are responsible for it!”
And now this is what happens! I wrote that quite clearly to the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht too. .
So just what a State needs, namely a legislative power and a vollziehende
Gewalt, was lacking. And that was lacking in the whole of
the east, and that’s the secret of our whole failure. When I think of
that Don Quixote we had at Rostov, General [der Polizei] Hennecke,
Polizeipräsident von Weimar and then subsequently Polizeipräsident
this is a copyright manuscript © david irving 2007