The Nuremberg Interviews (19 page)

“I became minister of economics in February 1938, and almost at once, Goebbels and Robert Ley demanded that Jews be eliminated from economic life and their stores shut. It led to difficulties because people were refusing to buy in Jewish shops. There had been a national labor
law enacted before I entered the cabinet, which stated that the owner or manager of a business must have allegiance to the party. Therefore Jews could not own businesses. I was in favor of the program going slowly, and adequate payment should be given Jews whose businesses were to be sold. I even went so far as to believe that certain economic rights should be held by Jews.

“The events of November 9–10, 1938, were a complete surprise and frightful to me. It all began in Munich.
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I tried to call Goering and Himmler, but both were away. I finally talked with Goebbels and said I disapproved of this measure and it hurt our economic prestige abroad and was a waste of goods. Goebbels told me it was my own fault because I should have eliminated Jews from business long ago. He told me that new Führer decrees were forthcoming.
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“The next day a meeting was scheduled for November 12, 1938. The minutes of that meeting are here and the prosecution has them. After that meeting, in which Goebbels was most radical, I saw that it was up to me to produce laws for the elimination of Jews from business for the protection of these Jews — to prevent plundering and exploitation.

“Thus I, as minister of economics, along with the finance minister and the minister of interior and justice, drew up the new laws. Jewish businesses were handed over to trustees and Jews were paid. These laws were necessary to protect the Jews from being robbed.”

I asked Funk whether the Jews were paid the full value of the property and businesses which were taken away from them. He replied that it was done on a percentage basis, but that was all he could tell me on that score.

“But as far as extermination! I had no idea. True, at that meeting on November 12 it was mentioned that Jews should emigrate out of Germany. But to exterminate them! Never! As far as ghettos were concerned! That was Heydrich’s idea. I told myself, if there are 3 million Jews among 70 million Germans, we can let them live without ghettos. But my only function anyway was to execute the directives of Goering’s Four Year Plan. I do feel ashamed of having participated to the slightest even as a tool in those dark days. But I was obliged to serve the state to which I had taken an oath. It was a tragic fate.”

He was absorbed in self-pity and a desire to shape arguments he felt he might have to use when he took the stand.

“There’s one thing I must say. When the prosecution states that dispossessing the Jews economically was the first step in a planned extermination
of the Jews, they are wrong. I just had nothing to do with exterminating a single Jew. Anyway, as Goering said, he was responsible for anything that came from my office as minister of economics and Reichsbank president.”

I asked him whether that was to his defense, namely that anything which stemmed from his office was not his responsibility but Goering’s. Funk looked shifty-eyed and helpless. “Well, but I had no direct authority except through the plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan.”

Funk looked over his notes and smiled. “What kind of a defense can one make, anyway? What difference does it make? I like to eat well, not a lot, but well, and here we get such food! Not that I’m complaining. The German people during the war, and I imagine now, eat a lot worse than we do. But I was always such a fussy eater.

“Do you know I have proof that I opposed inflation in the occupied countries, Denmark for instance?” No, I replied, I had not. “Yes. I did my best. Finally inflation came to occupied countries, but it was the doing of the Foreign Office, and the armed forces, not the Economics Ministry. I fought against black markets.

“My lawyer will ask me about slave labor. In some way or other the prosecution thinks I had something to do with that problem. Well, I did not. I was against it. For business as well as humane reasons. Labor should be where it is, because in the first place so many of our factories were being moved, because of bombings of Germany, to outlying lands. Besides, the French or Belgians were working adequately for the German nation in their own lands.

“What else can I say? If they ask, and my lawyer may, why I didn’t clear out, leave my post until the end, I’ll state that it was for patriotic reasons. I refused a Führer order that acceptance of invasion currency was high treason. I refused to encourage a scorched earth policy, so that after the Allies occupied, the Germans would not be in want. I saved the deposits of the Reichsbank.”

Funk seemed to be reciting. He lacked any spark of enthusiasm or much affect of any sort. I asked him, when he paused after the last statement, whether or not he was not guilty of at least some misdeed, since he was denying everything. I said that it seemed to me that it was a matter of a sense of values being applied to the charges against him, and did he not consider that in some way or other he was guilty of something?

He hesitated, looked at the hard stone floor, shifted on his seat. “I am
guilty of one thing — that I should have cleared out and not had anything to do with these criminals in the first place. Later it was too late. I was in up to my neck. But as for the atrocities, I had not a thing to do with them, did not know about them. And as for conspiring against peace, that is false, too. And that is my main line of defense.

“But I must make a statement to the court about my guilt. I will explain why I stayed on as minister of economics and president of the Reichsbank until the collapse. I did it to help the nation. I felt it was my responsibility to stay on and do everything I could so that conditions would be not too unbearable economically after the lost war. It was my duty to save as much as possible up to the very end. Especially in view of the proposed Morgenthau Plan,
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which would destroy German industry, impoverish our people. Also Churchill made a speech in which he said the Germans will suffer from hunger.”

I observed at this point that it would seem to me he was going to defend himself by patriotic raisons d’être. I wondered whether, actually, personal opportunity and power did not play a part in his being in his present fix. He said, with mechanical force, “Never. I’ve never been ambitious. I was never one of the big people, nor did I have a desire to become one.”

I saw Funk this afternoon. He looked somewhat relieved that his case was over, that Doenitz was now defending himself. He smiled wanly, and talked of his prostate, stricture, and so forth, with the usual complaints, which have been aggravated by the tension of the five days during which his defense was held, May 3 to 8.

I asked him how he felt about his defense and he said: “It’s a relief anyway to have that over with. Of course, about the gold deposit from the SS in the vaults of the Reichsbank — I never knew anything about it. The movie was the first I ever heard of it.”

I asked him what he thought of Mr. Dodd, who had cross-examined him for the American prosecution. “He’s very nice. But when he asked me about whether I am guilty, self-declared, about Jewish persecutions, I think I didn’t answer clearly. He asked whether I accepted being guilty. I said that I had conscience trouble at the time of the persecutions and afterward, but not because I signed those laws, which were for the protection of the Jews themselves.”

I said that, from what I heard in court and elsewhere, it seemed rather doubtful that anti-Semitic laws were for the protection of Jews. He said then that was exactly what he was afraid of, that he would be misunderstood. The laws were discriminatory against Jews, granted, but that was not his invention. He signed them and passed them on in order “that fresh spontaneous outbreaks against the Jews should not occur.” I stated that I was sorry but I could not follow him. The logical thing, it seemed to me, was to suppress the outbreaks and punish the wrongdoers, not make anti-Jewish economic laws to dispossess Jews.

“Yes, of course,” Funk said, “but all I could do was hand down what had been given to me from above. In that sense I am not guilty of crimes against humanity.”

I had a copy of the transcript of Funk’s testimony with me, in English, and I asked him a few questions in glancing through it. Now that these things are over, I said, you might care to comment on them.

I asked him about the business of his accepting some half a million marks as a birthday present from Hitler. “That I did not deny in court at all,” said Funk. I said I knew that, but how did it happen? In our state, officials do not receive large gifts from our president, and if they did, an investigation and scandal would ensue, I added.

Funk seemed slightly depressed by this statement. “Ach! We all make mistakes. Besides, if the Führer wanted to give me a present on my fiftieth birthday, could I refuse? Besides, I gave this money to charity … to the families of men who died connected with the Reichsbank and Economics Ministry.”

I asked him too how it was he knew nothing of the quarter million marks which were given to various other defendants — Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Frick, Constantin von Neurath — and the 600,000 marks each given to Hans Heinrich Lammers and Wilhelm Keitel. He replied without facial expression and in a blank manner that his replies in court were accurate, that he himself did not dispense these funds, that they did not emanate from the Reichsbank, but were dispensed by Lammers on order of Hitler from other funds. I asked where these other funds were kept, and he replied that there was a special fund for gifts and he only knew it was not connected with his own activities.

I passed on to the part of the court record where Dodd obtained a statement from Funk that Schacht took up a collection from a group of industrialists who were gathered at a meeting to greet Hitler.
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This was
in contradistinction to Schacht’s testimony on the stand, in which he stated he had not taken up the collection. I asked Funk for his opinion of Schacht and why he had made that statement.

“Schacht is now attempting to get out of an embarrassing situation. He founded the economic policies that I continued. Either he did not remember taking up that collection or he was lying. I know, and so do the others present at the time, that he did take up the collection. At least in my defense I don’t try to make a hero out of myself. That’s so disgusting.”

Funk was quite heated in his remarks about Schacht. He said further that Schacht was a man who was personally ambitious, in contrast to himself, who was never ambitious. Schacht lacked loyalty and would be on any winning side, he said. As for Schacht’s assertion in his testimony that had he, Schacht, been finance minister at the time of the great anti-Jewish actions of November 1938, they would not have taken place, Funk was scornful. “As I said on the stand the other day, if Schacht could have prevented those things, the anti-Jewish measures, he was more powerful in the party than I was. But the things which led up to those measures, and the necessity for my issuing such orders, which in a sense protected what little rights the Jews had, were they not born in the economic program which Schacht, not I, started?”

I asked him why, then, if he recognized the evil therein, did he accept, and continue until the very end, the wrongs that Schacht had conceived? “At that time there was no thought of atrocities and it is in retrospect only that I see — anyone can see — the beginning of these anti-Jewish economic measures were in Schacht’s time.”

I shuffled through the transcript pages of cross-examination by Mr. Dodd. I had marked certain passages about which I wanted Funk’s comments. On one occasion Dodd asked Funk if he had been making economic plans for a war against Poland more than a year before war started. Funk had replied that he didn’t know, and that he could not remember. Then the court presented a speech of Funk’s in October 1939 saying that his ministry had been secretly planning Germany’s economic preparation for war. Funk had answered it finally by admitting the statement, but said that it had not referred to a specific war against Poland, but any war. Funk now commented: “Well, what could I say? Naturally war was in everyone’s mind. Preparations for a war were our main concern because of Hitler’s driving such hard bargains. We wanted to be
prepared. Because Hitler was relentless. He would go on and on, and we thought he would get away with it. But to be prepared for a possible war was only sensible. But that is not the same as saying I prepared secretly economically or otherwise for a war with Poland for a year before the war.”

I remarked that actually what it amounted to was a statement to the effect that for a year he did prepare secretly for war. Again Funk repeated that he said a lot of things for public consumption which were for propaganda purposes. Actually he had made no preparations, and not against Poland at any rate. “It was not against any country in particular. It was to ensure our economic life in event of a war. That could be done by any minister of economics in any land. But I don’t deny and haven’t denied in court that the direction of our foreign policy was so strenuous, and false, that a war could be expected even a year before it occurred. So I had to be prepared.”

We then went on to Dodd’s important questions regarding the gold in the Reichsbank. Here Funk began to walk up and down the cell. I said that if he preferred, we should cut off this interview; that all I wanted was his psychological reactions to the matters, and my purpose was far from conducting a review of the cross-examination. “Surely go on, it is very nice to have company. I just feel better with my bladder if I walk a bit. If you don’t mind. It also helps me to think clearly. That was one trouble on the stand. I had to sit there and answer important questions and half the time I had a feeling to urinate.” Funk smiled.

I asked him for his feelings about Dodd’s evidence that he knew about the SS deposits of gold dentures, eyeglass frames, personal property of Jews and other concentration camp victims who had been exterminated. Funk had a woebegone expression as he began. He stammered a bit, and he did not look at me directly but walked up and down the cell, preoccupied. “Quite as I said, and I was speaking the absolute truth, from the bottom of my heart. My God, if I had known such things!” I interrupted to ask, yes, if he had known such things, what would he have done? He did know of the actions against the Jews in 1938, felt they were criminal, but what had he done then? At that point Funk seemed crestfallen. “I am a German patriot,” he began, “as I’ve said, and I think in time of war nobody should desert his post. Country right or wrong, that was not invented by the Germans but by the British. But if I connected the gold deposits of the SS with the extermination program, or
even with robbing of Jews of their possessions unlawfully, I would have refused the deposit in the Reichsbank.” I asked him if that were all he would have done, merely refused them a storage house? “I mean I would have gone to Hitler and protested in the strongest terms. But I had no idea where this SS gold was coming from.” I asked him where in God’s name he thought such merchandise could possibly come from. Surely people weren’t donating their gold dentures or eyeglasses. “People might die naturally and it might come that way, or it might come from pawnshops or something. Extermination camps were not even in my mind.”