My name is Helmut Knochen. I was the senior commander of the security police in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France between 1940 and 1944. My jurisdiction extended from northern France to Belgium. Until the appointment of Carl Oberg as supreme leader of the SS and the German police in France I had full responsibility for keeping order and upholding the rule of law. As a policeman I tried to ensure that relations between the French and the Germans were without friction and that the proper administration of justice was unhindered by the occupation. This was not easy. I was not always made privy to senior policy decisions. And the most profound tragedy of my life has been the fact that, in an indirect way, and without being aware of it, I was involved in the persecution of the Jews of France. At no point did I know or even suspect that Jews deported to the east were to be exterminated. If I had known this I should never have gone along with their deportation. Let me say that the greatest crime in history was the systematic murder of Jews by Adolf Hitler.

Of course, there were many other crimes inflicted upon the French people and I always saw my job as being to help restrain some of my colleagues from acting with excessive zeal, not least because I was always fearful of the impact of heavy-handed policing on French public opinion, and on those Vichy officials whose willing collaboration was needed in all security matters. I was always reluctant to provoke an embarrassing confrontation. For example, in September 1942, I thwarted an early attempt to round up prominent French Jews in Paris. There were other occasions when this happened, but that was the largest, I think, involving as many as five thousand Jews. This often brought me into conflict with Heinz Röthke, who was chief of the Gestapo’s Jewish office in France. But my relationship with other fanatical elements in the SS and SD was no less fractious and difficult. Frequently I had to censure those officers who, arriving from Berlin, believed that the SD uniform permitted them to deal summarily with the French. I remember one junior officer from Berlin, Hauptsturmführer Bernhard Gunther, who, in the summer of 1940, was dispatched to the refugee camps at Gurs and Le Vernet in order to arrest a number of French and German communists and bring them back to Paris for questioning. But instead this officer ordered the men to be shot at the side of a French country road. When I heard about this I was shocked, then furious. When he subsequently murdered another German officer, Hauptsturmführer Gunther was sent back to Berlin.

HELMUT KNOCHEN, interviewed April 1954

My name is Helmut Knochen and I have been asked to make a statement concerning information I gave regarding another German officer, Captain Bernhard Gunther, in a previous statement.