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a good shot, and that was enough.
    Captain Schmidt
: Can you, in your own words, tell us about the formation of the militia and the circumstances within the force?
    Commander Kampenmann
: Especially in connection with your relations to Velder.
    Roth
: The militia came about more or less … well, if not exactly at random—but anyhow very hastily and in a strange way. The whole idea of liberation, and all that, was said to be pacifist and—yes, sorry—anti-militaristic. We were short of arms and had no trained men, and there was never any question of being able to offer any resistance if the mainland lot decided to start bombing and landing troops from the sea. We simply had to rely on them being completely foxed over there, at least for a few days. Then our proclamations and international pressure would do the trick, and that’s what happened, too. We relied on the armed forces not daring to do anything until they’d got clearance from the politicians and that that would take at least a couple of days before the politicians had had time to realise what had happened. We’d reckoned all that out, and we were right, too.
    Captain Schmidt
: You keep saying ‘we’ all the time—I suppose you mean the Liberation Committee.
    Roth
: Well, at that time, we all felt very much welded together as a group, all of us. What I said just now about not offering resistance was only in reference to the Army, of course. There was one thing we were much more scared of, and that was the police. There were several towns on the mainland only a few hours away from here, and we could almost certainly reckon on the police there not standing about with their hands in their pockets while we annexed a bit of the country for ourselves. In some way or other, we had to repulse purely police actions—otherwise a hundred ortwo hundred policemen could just come ashore and arrest us and put an end to the revolution within a few hours. So the only answer was to form a militia. They say that the members of the Council—or the Liberation Committee as it was called right at the beginning—drew lots out of a hat for who should be chief of the militia. The woman, Aranca Peterson, was there too, but it was Oswald who won … so to speak.
    Major von Peters
: General Oswald, if you don’t mind. And listen to me …
    Colonel Pigafetta
: Calm down, von Peters, and let the witness tell his story in his own way.
    Roth
: He wasn’t in fact a general then. About half of the soldiers that were here on the island joined us, about fifty men, and some of the policemen. Then we started at about midnight, opening the stores and arming ourselves. The division into groups had been done beforehand roughly. Most of the two thousand five hundred, who belonged to the so-called inner section, had dropped in during the week. At about three in the morning, we’d managed to get hold of members of the resident population who were considered to be directly in opposition and dangerous, and collected them up into a temporary camp. That was easy, as there weren’t many of them, and the lists had been ready ages beforehand. No one offered any resistance. Not a shot was fired.
    Commander Kampenmann
: Was the accused already under your command at the time?
    Roth
: Command—oh—well. Velder was in my group. He had volunteered because he was big and strong and could handle a machine-gun. In the morning at half-past five, the declaration of independence and our appeal to the United Nations for a peaceful settlement went out over our own and a lot of foreign radio stations—our own, incidentally, was extremely temporary. The militia was to be in place by then, and it was, too. But it didn’t look up to much. We probably had altogether about four hundred men, pretty well armed, they were, ten machine-guns and four or five artillery pieces which had been brought ashore during the night. I still don’t know who gave them to us, for that matter.
    Colonel Pigafetta
: We know. That’s