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MAJOR JONES: Witness, I want to ask you some questions about the Defendant Frank. Frank is a friend of yours, is he not?

LAMMERS: Frank?

MAJOR JONES: Yes.

LAMMERS: No, I have no very close connection with Frank.

Before answering this question, I would like permission to return to a document which you submitted to me previously, and which I have just now been able to finish reading. I would like to say just two sentences in connection with that document.

MAJOR JONES: If the Counsel for the Defense desire you to return to it, I have no doubt they will draw your attention to the matter in due course.

Will you now deal with the question that I put to you on the Defendant Frank? You say he is not a friend of yours?

LAMMERS: I did not know him particularly well, and I had no closer relation to him than with any of the other people in the Reich Government.

MAJOR JONES: Would it be right to say, like yourself, he was one of the leading Nazi jurists?

LAMMERS: Well, I never really thought of myself as a leading National Socialist jurist.

MAJOR JONES: Are you saying that you were not a leading jurist, or that you were not a National Socialist?

LAMMERS: I considered myself in the first place as a lawyer, an expert on constitutional law, which I have been for many years, in fact, since the year 1920 and under other governments; then I joined the National Socialist Party and naturally in my position in the National Socialist State, I made every effort to propagate the National Socialist idea of law.

MAJOR JONES: And you have said that so far as Hans Frank was concerned, he was a jurist who opposed the arbitrary use of power by the Police.

LAMMERS: He did that in some of his speeches; and the Führer did not approve of these speeches.

MAJOR JONES: He was a man who believed in fair trials, was he?

LAMMERS: What kind of trials do you mean? I cannot hear you; there is such noise.

MAJOR JONES: Criminal trials.

LAMMERS: I did not hear the word.

MAJOR JONES: He was in favor of fair trials and he resisted, the arbitrary power of the SS? That is your evidence, is it?

LAMMERS: He told me that repeatedly, and he frequently expressed this view in his speeches, too.

MAJOR JONES: And you say he was a man who favored a liberal administration in the territory of which he was Governor General? Is that so?

LAMMERS: I am sorry, but I cannot follow this. There is so much noise that I can barely hear half of what you are saying; the other half is completely lost.

MAJOR JONES: Well, we will try again. Did you ever hear of the “AB Action,” for which Frank was responsible in the Government General?

LAMMERS: That is an action of which I know nothing at all. Someone mentioned this name to me about a week ago and said that Frank was accused of this AB Action. I do not know of any AB Action.

MAJOR JONES: You were getting frequent reports by Frank as to the administration of his territory, were you not?

LAMMERS: Reports were occasionally sent in.

MAJOR JONES: Are you saying that Frank never informed you about the AB Action?

LAMMERS: Yes. I do not know what the AB Action is.

MAJOR JONES: I will remind you. It was an action which resulted in the slaughter of the flower of the Polish race, of the Polish intelligentsia.

LAMMERS: I know nothing about such an action.

MAJOR JONES: If you will look at the Document 2233-PS, which has already been exhibited as USSR-223, and which is Frank’s diary, you will see the history of this action and perhaps you will then remember something of the circumstances of it.

LAMMERS: What page is that, please?

MAJOR JONES: On Page 8 of the annex to that text. You will see on that page that the action started on the 16th of May with a conference at which Frank, the Governor General, and Reich Minister Dr. Seyss-Inquart, Secretary of State Bühler, SS Brigadeführer Streckenbach, and a Colonel Müller were present. You will see there that Frank decreed, with immediate effect, that the task of carrying out an extraordinary pacification program be given to the Chief of the Security Police, to commence immediately. The more important details of the action were then discussed, and Brigadeführer Streckenbach was formally given the necessary authority by the Governor General. The Governor General ordered a detailed report to be made on the 30th of May.

Then, I want you to look at Page 2 of that text, at a report of the conference on the 30th of May, where you, and what is more important, this Tribunal, may be able to judge what kind of jurisprudence Nazi jurists believed in.

You will see, on Page 43 of the English text of 2233-PS, a report of the Police conference on the 30th of May, where Frank and Krüger and others were present.

LAMMERS: I was never present at these conferences of the Government.

MAJOR JONES: I want you to see how far removed Frank, the apostle of decency in administration, was from the true Frank that was Governor General of Poland. You will see there that Frank states, “If I had not the old Nazi guard of fighters of the Police and SS here in the country, with whom could we then carry out this policy”? The report, which the Tribunal is already familiar with, goes on to describe how, now that the German aggressions in the West were in full swing, it was possible for Frank to go through with this action against the Polish intelligentsia.

LAMMERS: If the entries in the Governor General’s diary do not agree with what I gathered from the speeches which he made in public, I cannot make any comment. I do not know what he said about this. It may be that many of his speeches contradict other speeches which he made at a different time. What I said concerned only those speeches of which the Führer disapproved, to which he objected, and which led to Frank’s being forbidden to make speeches or to have them printed. I was referring to those speeches. I cannot say at the moment what other speeches the Governor General made and what he entered in his diary.

MAJOR JONES: Let us be quite clear. Do you know that the regime of Frank in the Government General was a murderous one?

LAMMERS: I never heard anything about that.

MAJOR JONES: Did you receive any reports from him, or from other sources, of misgovernment in the Government General?

LAMMERS: Complaints about misgovernment in the Government General came in frequently from Frank himself as well as from other departments against Frank.

MAJOR JONES: Did you have knowledge of the utter ruthlessness of Frank’s methods in the Government General?

LAMMERS: I only heard half your question.

MAJOR JONES: You were receiving reports from Frank as to what he was doing in the Government General, were you not?

LAMMERS: Yes. Reports came in frequently and I immediately passed them on to the Führer as transmit matters. Most of them went to Reichsleiter Bormann or the adjutant office of the Führer. These were reports...

MAJOR JONES: Just a moment. If you deal with the questions I put to you, we shall get on much faster, you know. Just answer the question I put, briefly. I am going to put to you one message which Frank’s diary indicated that you received. At Page 41 of the English text of Frank’s diary, there is this entry for the 5th of August: