dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Mandeland Korn, former internees of the Yanovsky Camp, who dealt with the exhumation of the bodies, have told the Commission the following: "'During the night of 5 October 1943, acting on orders from the Gestapo, we opened a pit between Kadetskaya and Bouletskaya streets by the light of searchlights and took from it 35 bodies. We burned all these corpses. "'While lifting the corpses from the pit we found the documents of Professor Ostrovsky, of Otoshek, Doctor of Natural Science, and of Kasimir Bartel, Professor of the Polytechnical Institute.' "The investigation established that during the first few months of the occupation the Germans arrested or killed more than 70 of the most prominent scientists, technologists, and artists in the city of Lvov." What I have just said does not in any way infer that the leaders of local organizations and representatives of the intelligentsia alone were victims of the fascist terror. I only wanted to make it clear that the fascist terror was directed in the first instance against these people. But one of the characteristic features of Hitlerite terrorism was the fact that it was decreed by the German fascist leaders and materialized by the executioners as a general reign of terror. To confirm this I refer to a document previously submitted to the Tribunal but not read into the record. It is Document Number USSR-63, which is a report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the investigation of German atrocities in the town of Kerch. Kerch is a comparatively small town. It is separated from Lvov by many hundred of kilometers. Although the German invaders arrived in Lvov in the beginning of July 1941, they only reached Kerch in November. In January 1942 they had already been driven out by Red Army units. Thus, the entire period of the first occupation of the city of Kerch-the city of Kerch has been occupied two times-by the Germans was short-lived and did not last more than 2 months. But here are the crimes perpetrated by the German fascists in this town. I begin the quotation.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: The Tribunal will find the passage in question on Page 227 of the document book, Column 2, Paragraph 5: "After capturing the city in November 1941, the Hitlerites immediately issued an order to the following effect: "The inhabitants of Kerch are ordered to deliver all family food stocks to the German Kommandos. Owners of undelivered and detected supplies will be shot. "By the next order, Number 2, the town council ordered the inhabitants to register immediately all hens, roosters, ducks, chickens, turkeys, geese, sheep, cows, calves, and came. Poultry owners were strictly prohibited from using fowl and cattle for their own needs without special permission of the German commandant. After the publication of these orders a wholesale search of all apartments and houses began. "The members of the Gestapo behaved outrageously. For each kilogram of beans or flour discovered in excess, the head of the family was shot. "The Germans initiated their monstrous atrocities by poisoning 245 children of school age." Later on you will see the small bodies of these children in our documentary film. The infants' bodies were thrown into the city moat. "According to instructions issued by the German commandant, all the school children were ordered to appear at the school at a given time. On arrival, the 245 children, school books in hand, were sent to a factory school outside the town, allegedly for a walk. There the cold and hungry infants were offered coffee and poisoned pies. Since there was not enough coffee to go round, those who did not get any were sent to the infirmary where a German orderly smeared their lips with a quick-acting poison. In a few minutes all the children were dead. School children of the higher grades were carried off in trucks and shot down by machine gun fire 8 kilometers outside of the town. The bodies of the first batch of murdered children were brought to the same spot-a very large, very long, antitank trench." I continue the quotation: "On the evening of 28 November 1941 an order, Number 4, of the Gestapo was posted in the town.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: In compliance with this order the inhabitants who had been previously registered with the Gestapo were to present themselves on 29 November between 0800 and 1200 hours at the Sennaya Square, with a 3 days' supply of food. All the men and women were to appear, regardless of their age or state of health. Those who did not present themselves were threatened with public execution. Those who arrived at the square on 29 November were persuaded that they had been summoned in order to be sent to work. At noon over 7,000 people assembled in the square. There were young boys, young girls, children of all ages, very old men, and pregnant women. All were transferred to the city prison by the men of the Gestapo. This monstrous extermination of the peaceful population. in the prison was carried out by the Germans according to a previously for mulated plan of the Gestapo. First of all, the prisoners were asked to hand over the keys of their apartments and to give their exact addresses to the prison commandant. Then all the valuables were taken from the arrested people, including watches, rings, and ornaments. In spite of the cold, boots, felt-boots, shoes, costumes, and coats were removed from all the persons incarcerated. Many women and girls in their teens were separated from the rest of the internees by the fascist blackguards and locked in separate cells, where the unfortunate creatures were subjected to particularly outrageous forms of torture. They were raped, their breasts cut off, their stomachs ripped open, their feet and hands cut off, and their eyes gouged out. "After the Germans had been thrown out of Kerch, on 30 December 1941, Red Army soldiers discovered, in the prison yard, a formless mass of bodies of young girls, naked, mutilated, and unrecognizable, who had been savagely and cynically tortured to death by the fascists. "As a site for the mass execution, the Hitlerites selected an antitank ditch near the village of Baguerovsko where for 3 days on end autobuses brought entire families which had been condemned to death.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: "When the Red Army entered Kerch, in January 1942, the Baguerovsko trench was investigated. It was discovered that this trench-1 kilometer in length, 4 meters in width, and 2 meters in depth-was filled to overflowing with bodies of women, children, old men, and boys and girls in their teens. Near the trench were frozen pools of blood. Children's caps, toys, ribbons, torn-off buttons, gloves, milk bottles, and rubber comforters, small shoes, galoshes, together with torn-off hands, feet, and other parts of human bodies were lying nearby. Everything was spattered with blood and brains. "The fascist savages shot down the defenseless population with dum-dum bullets. Near the edge of the trench lay the mutilated body of a young woman. In her arms was a baby carefully wrapped up in a white lace cover. Next to this woman lay an 8-year-old girl and a boy of 5, killed with . dum-dum bullets. Their hands still gripped the mother's dress." The circumstances of the executions are confirmed by the statements of numerous witnesses who were lucky enough to escape IS Feb. 46 unharmed from the open grave. I am going to quote two statements. Twenty-year-old Anatol Ignatievich Bondarenko, now a soldier in the Red Army, states: "When we were brought up to the antitank trench and lined up alongside this fearful grave, we still believed that we had been fetched in order to fill in the trench with earth or to dig new ones. We did not think we had been brought there to be shot, but when we heard the first shots from the automatic guns trained on us, I realized we were about to be murdered. I immediately hurled myself into the trench and hid between two corpses. Thus, unharmed and half fainting, I lay nearly until the evening. While lying in the trench I heard several of the wounded call to the gendarmes shooting them, 'Finish me off, blackguard!' 'You missed me, scoundrel!
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Shoot again!' Then, when the Germans went off to dinner, an inhabitant of my village called out from the trench, 'Get up, those of you who are still alive.' I got up and the two of us began to drag out the living from underneath the corpses. I was covered with blood. A light mist hung over the trench -steam arising from the rapidly-congealing mass of dead bodies, from the pools of blood, and from the last breath of the dying. We dragged out Theodor Naoumenko and my father, but my father had been killed outright by a dum-dum bullet in the heart. Late at night I reached the house of some friends in the village of Baguerovsko and stayed with them until the arrival of the Red Army." Witness A. Kamenev stated: "The chauffeur stopped the car behind the airdrome, and we saw Germans shooting people near the trench. We were dragged out of the car and pushed toward the trench in batches of 10. My son and I were among the first 10. We reached the trench. We were lined up facing it, and the Germans began their preparations to shoot us in the nape of the neck. My son turned to them and shouted, 'Why are you shooting the peaceful population?' But the shots rang out and my son instantly jumped into the trench. I threw myself in after him. Dead bodies began to fall upon me in the trench. About 3 p.m. an 11-year-old boy stood up from among the pile of corpses and began to call, 'Little fathers, those of you who are still alive, get up. The Germans have gone.' I was afraid to do so, since I thought that the boy was shouting by order of the policeman. The boy called out a second time, and then my son answered him. He stood up and asked, 'Dad, are you alive?' I could not say anything and merely nodded. My son and the other boy dragged me out from under the bodies. We saw some others who were still alive and who were shouting, 'Help us.' Some were wounded. All the time, while I had been lying in the trench, under the bodies of the dead, I could hear the shrieks and wails of the women and children.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: The Germans had started shooting old men, women, and children after shooting us." I interrupt the quotation here. Although the subsequent text does deal with many other appalling atrocities committed by the Germans, it is, in substance, analogous to the passages which I have already read into the record, relating to crimes perpetrated by the Germans in the town of Kerch. I would, however, invite the Tribunal's attention to the part referring to the ill-treatment of children. On the whole, these crimes are highly characteristic of the German fascist terror. I quote: "The German barbarians, in their atrocious ill-treatment of the Soviet people, did not even spare the children. A school teacher, M. N. Kolessnikova, stated that the Germans killed a 13-year-old boy for taking an old car tire and trying to swim in it while bathing in the sea. "The following incident happened, according to the testimony of E. N. Sapelnikova: "Maria Bondarenko, who lived in the village of Adjimushkaya, in an attempt to save her three children from starvation, appealed to some Germans working in the kitchen, for a little food. They poured some thin gruel into a small bowl. The Bondarenko family ate it greedily. A few hours later the mother and all three children were dead. The fascist henchmen had poisoned them. "It has been ascertained from the testimony of N. H. Shoumilova that in July a German officer shot a 6-year-old boy merely because he was singing a Soviet song in the streets of the town. "Practically all summer long the dead body of a 9-year-old boy dangled in the 'Sac and Vanzetti' garden; the child had been hanged for plucking some apricots from a tree." Here I end my quotation from the report on the town of Kerch. In my statement I have dwelt on the example of Kerch not because the atrocities committed by the Hitlerites in this town were on a particularly large scale or because they stood out, by reason of their cruelty, among the other crimes perpetrated by the Germans-the documents relevant to these latter crimes are at our disposal. Certainly not.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: On the contrary, I have quoted the report of the Extraordinary State Commission only because it gives a detailed and objective record of Hitlerite military crimes committed against peaceful citizens of one of the many towns which, as a result of a monstrous war unleashed by the German fascist criminals, were doomed to become the victims of a terrorist regime. Such atrocities were perpetrated by the Hitlerites in all the temporarily occupied cities of the Soviet Union. In confirmation of this statement I now turn to a document of a general nature, which has already been submitted to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-51 (Document Number USSR-51) but parts of which have not yet been read into the record. I am referring to the note of the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, V. M. Molotov, of 27 April 1942. In their introduction to this note, the Soviet Government made the following statement-I start my quotation from Paragraph 2 of the reverse side of the Russian text, Paragraph 3 after the heading of the document book. There you will find the following remarks: "Fresh information and documents are being submitted to the Soviet Government to the effect that the Hitlerite invaders are carrying on a wholesale looting of the Soviet population and do not shrink from any crimes and acts of cruelty or violence on the territories which they temporarily occupied or which they still continue to occupy. The Soviet Government have already declared that these atrocities do not represent accidental excesses perpetrated by single undisciplined military units or by individual German officers or men. The Soviet Government are now in possession of documents recently seized in the staffs of routed German formations, which prove that the carnage and atrocities committed by the fascist German Army were perpetrated in accordance with carefully elaborated plans issued by the German Government, in pursuance of orders from the German High Command." I omit the subsequent parts and continue with Section V of the note.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: The Tribunal will find the passage which I am about to quote on Page 8 of the document book, Column 1 of the text, Paragraph 5. I should like to add a few introductory words to the quotation. It is quite evident from the text of this note how the orders of the Reich leadership concerning the establishment of a regime of terror were executed, in the occupied territories, by the various commissioners of the occupied territories, by the Gauleiter, and by the commanders of German military units. I quote the beginning of Section V of this note-Page 8 of your document book, Column 1, Paragraph 5: "The inhuman cruelty which the Hitlerite clique-begotten in violence and against the will of the German people- displayed against the inhabitants of the European countries temporarily occupied by the German Army was multiplied a hundredfold by the enemy forces after their invasion of the Soviet Union. "The carnage to which the Hitlerites exposed the peaceful population of the Soviet Union has far overshadowed the most bloodstained pages of the annals of mankind, as well as of the current world war, and fully reveals the bloodthirsty and criminal plans of the fascists, aimed at the extermination of the Russian, Ukrainian, Bielorussian, and other nationals of the Soviet Union. "These monstrous fascist plans inspired the orders and instructions of the German High Command for the extermination of the peaceful Soviet citizens. "Thus, for instance, the instructions of the German Supreme Command, entitled, 'Treatment of the Civilian Population and of Enemy Prisoners of War,' reads to the effect that officers are responsible that the treatment of the civilian population be absolutely merciless, and commands that 'force be used against the entire mass of the population.' The instructions issued by the German High Command as a directive for the occupational authorities on Bielorussian territory read as follows: "'All hostile behavior on the part of the population toward the German Armed Forces and their organizations will be punished by death.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Whosoever shelters Red Army soldiers or partisans will be punished by death. If the partisan cannot be found, hostages must be taken from among the population."'
THE PRESIDENT: What is the exhibit number of what you are reading now? What is the U.S.S.R. number of what you are reading now?
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: This document was submitted as Exhibit Number USSR-51. It is one of the notes of the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Molotov, dated 27 April 1942. All together, four notes have been submitted to the Tribunal under this number. The beginning of the note which I am now quoting is on Page 4 of your document book. The quotation which I am now reading into the record is on Page 8 of your document book.
THE PRESIDENT: It is thought that this is part of the document you read yesterday. Are you sure that it is not?
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: No, Mr. President. Yesterday I read into the record a note dated 6 January 1942, and the note which I am quoting now is dated 27 April. Have I your permission to continue?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. IS Feb. 46
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: "'These hostages must be hanged if the guilty parties or their accomplices are not found within 24 hours. During the following 24 hours, double the number of hostages will be hanged on the same spot.' "Point 7 of Order Number 431/41 of the German commandant of the town of Feodosia, Captain Eberhard, states: "'During an alarm every citizen appearing on the street must be shot. Groups of citizens who appear must be surrounded and mercilessly shot. Leaders and inciters are to be publicly hanged.' "In a directive addressed to the 260th German Infantry Division, concerning the treatment of the civilian population, it is pointed out to the individual officers that 'sufficient severity is not being applied everywhere.' "Orders posted by the occupants in the Soviet towns and villages announce the death penalty for the most varied reasons: For being on the streets after 1700 hours; for offering lodging for the night to strangers; for not handing over Red Army soldiers to the authorities; for failing to hand over property; for attempting to put out a fire in an inhabited spot intended to be burned down; for travelling from one inhabited spot to another; for refusing to do forced labor; and so on." I continue this quotation on Page 8, reverse side of the second column of the text, Paragraph 2: "The German fascist High Command not only tolerates but actually orders the murder of women and children. Organized infanticide in some of the orders is presented as a means for fighting the partisan movement.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Thus, an order of the commander of the 254th German Division, Lieutenant General Von Beschnitz, dated 2 December 1941, considers the fact that 'old people, women, and children of all ages' move about behind the German lines as proof of 'careless good nature,' and orders the shooting without warning of 'every civilian person regardless of age or sex approaching our front lines.' It also orders that the 'mayors be made responsible for reporting immediately the appearance of any unknown persons, and especially of children, to the local Kommandantur' and to 'shoot immediately any person suspected of espionage."' Some data regarding the directives received from the Reich authorities by the fascist authorities in the temporarily occupied territories are also contained in the note. I quote from Page 9 of your document book, Paragraph 3, Column 1 of the text: "Some of the crimes of the German occupiers committed by them during the very first weeks of their piratical attack on the U.S.S.R., and their savage extermination of the civilian population of Bielorussia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic Soviet republics, have only now been documentarily established. Thus, when units of the Red Army in the district of the town of Toropetz, in January 1942, smashed a German SS cavalry brigade, among the documents captured was found a report of the 1st Cavalry Regiment of this brigade concerning the 'pacification' by this unit of the Starobinsk district in Bielorussia. The commander of the regiment reports that besides taking 239 prisoners a detachment of his regiment has also shot 6,504 peaceful civilians. The report further states that the detachment acted in pursuance of Order Number 42 issued to the regiment, dated 27 July 1941.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: The commander of the 2d Regiment of this brigade, Von Magill, states, in his 'Report Concerning the Execution of Repressive Operations on the River Pripet between 27 July and 11 August 1941,' the following: "'We drove the women and children into the swamp, but that did not produce the desired result, since the swamp was not deep enough for them to drown. One can usually feel bottom (possibly sand) at a depth of 1 meter.' "In the same headquarters a telegram, Number 37, was found, sent by the commander of the SS Cavalry Brigade."
THE PRESIDENT: Shall we adjourn now for 10 minutes? [A recess was taken.]
MARSHAL: May it please the Court, regarding the Defendant Hess, he will be absent until further notice on account of illness.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: I continue the quotation: "In the same headquarters there was discovered a telegram, Number 37, from the commander of the Cavalry Brigade, an SS-Standartenfuehrer, to a cavalry unit of the above-mentioned 2d Cavalry Regiment, dated 2 August 1941. It mentioned that the Reichsfuehrer of the SS and the Police, Himmler, considers the number of the exterminated peaceful civilians far too insignificant; and it points out that 'it is necessary to take radical measures' and 'the unit commanders conduct the operations too mildly.' He also orders to report every day on the number of people shot." In this connection we cannot abstain from mentioning the criminal activities of the Defendant Rosenberg in carrying out the general instructions of the Reich leadership for establishing a regime of terror in, the Occupied Eastern Territories or rather, if we wish to be more accurate, for issuing, in his capacity as chief author of these instructions, a series of laws in Ostland-this, as we know, was the name given to the occupied regions of the Baltic States- while similar orders and instructions of a terroristic nature were also issued by high ranking officials of the fascist administration set up by Rosenberg. I submit to the Tribunal Exhibit Number USSR-39 (Document Number USSR-39), the report of the Extraordinary Commission on the atrocities of the German fascist invaders in the territory of the Estonian S.S.R. I quote an excerpt which Your Honors will find on Page 232 of the document book in the first column of the text, Paragraph 3. It begins as follows: "On 17 July 1941 Hitler issued a decree turning over the legislative powers of the territory of Estonia to Reich Minister Rosenberg, who later turned over this legislative power to the German district authorities. "Despotism was introduced into Estonia and the peaceful population subjected to brutal terrorism.