The evidence has shown that I neither knew a concentration camp nor had anything to do with concentration camps in my official capacity; nor had any influence on the system of the concentration camps, their administration and management, nor on the treatment of prisoners. For this reason I didn’t know the measure of the tragedies which were enacted there. Those matters, into which I had sufficient insight during my restless daily activities to permit me to distinguish between good and evil, were on a plane where they need not shun the light of sun. I do not deny that some of the documents submitted here by the prosecution went through my hands, but I do deny—and I pray the Tribunal may believe me—that I knew the contents of the documents particularly the reports and therefore the essential core of the human experiments. I know that appearances are against me. Only these external appearances led the prosecution to indict me in this trial and to pass their comment on me during their closing speech, without penetrating to the bottom of matters. This way they arrived at a completely wrong appraisal which does not correspond to the facts and overrates my position and my activities. These appearances which speak against me will be dispelled as soon as my real position will be considered in which I found myself as [administrative officer] so-called personal Referent of Himmler for many years. On the witness stand I testified to the truth, which has been confirmed by witnesses who knew the real facts from their own experience. It does not run counter to experience that among thousands of incoming and outgoing items of mail—that is, hundreds of thousands during the course of the years—there should be an insignificantly small number of documents which a personal Referent on the orders of his chief, passes on to third persons without knowing their contents more closely, the more so if they concern matters which have nothing to do with the normal duties of the personal Referent. I believe that an American tribunal will know how to appraise the foregoing, though I am rather afraid that the situation as it existed in Germany during the years before the collapse and prevailed in high government agencies will never really be brought home to American judges. Therefore, I refuse to discuss again my position at that time and the ignorance of criminal experiments on human beings which was the consequence thereof. In this respect I agree with my defense counsel. Neither need I fear Professor Ivy’s statement who declared that even a layman must have been outraged by reading the reports of Rascher, because the fact that the layman should have read the passages of the reports wherefrom the obvious violation of human dignity is evident was, as a matter of fact, the natural prerequisite for Professor Ivy’s opinion, and that prerequisite did not exist in my case.