dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
MR. DODD: Reading that last sentence again: "This harsh punishment was acceptable to the local population because previous to this step both families had ridiculed on every hand the duty-conscious people who sent their children partly voluntarily to the labor allocation." Turning to Paragraph 2 on Page 2, beginning about two-thirds of the way through the paragraph, I wish to read as follows-in the German text it appears at Page 3, Paragraph 1: "After initial successes, a passive resistance of the population started, which finally forced me to turn again to arrests, confiscations, and transfers to labor camps. After a whole transport of conscripted laborers overcame the police at the railroad station in Wassilkov and escaped, I saw again the necessity for strict measures. A few ring-leaders, who of course had long since escaped, were located in Plissezkoje and in Mitnitza. After repeated attempts to get hold of them, their houses were burned down." And finally, I wish to pass to the last paragraph on Page 3 of that same document. In the German text it appears at Page 5, Paragraph 7. Quoting from that last paragraph on the third page: "My actions toward fugitive labor draftees were always reported to District Commissioner Dohrer, of the Wassilkov office, and to the Commissioner General in Kiev. Both of them knew the circumstances and agreed with my measures because of their success." That is the end of that part of the quotation. That Generalkommissar in Kiev, as we indicated yesterday and again this morning, was the man Koch-we quoted his statement about the master race. Another document confirms arson as an instrument of enforcing this labor program in the village of Bielosersk in the Ukraine in cases of resistance to forced labor recruitment. Atrocities committed in this village are related in Document Number 018-PS, which is already in evidence as Exhibit USA-186. But in addition there is Document Number 290-PS, which bears Exhibit Number USA-189.
MR. DODD: This document consists of correspondence originating within the Rosenberg ministry, which was, of course, the office headquarters of the Defendant Rosenberg; and it is dated the 12th day of November 1943. I wish to quote from Page 1 of the English text, starting with the last line, as follows: "But even if Muller had been present at the burning of houses in connection with the Reich conscription in Bielosersk, this should by no means lead to the removal of Muller from office. It is mentioned specifically in a directive of the Commissioner General in Luck, of 21 September 1942, referring to the extreme urgency of national conscription, that farms of those who refuse to work are to be burned and their relatives are to be arrested as hostages and brought to forced labor camps." The SS troops were directed to participate in the abduction of these forced laborers and also in the raids on villages, burning of villages, and were directed to turn the entire population over for slave labor in Germany. We refer to Document Number 3012-PS, which bears Exhibit Number USA-l90. This document is a secret SS order and it is dated the 19th day of March 1943. I wish to quote from Page 3 of the English text starting with the third paragraph. In the German text it appears at Page 2, Paragraph 3. It says, and I quote it: "The activity of the labor offices, that is, of recruiting commissions, is to be supported to the greatest extent possible. It mill not be possible always to refrain from using force. During a conference with the chief of the labor avocation staffs, it was agreed that whatever prisoners could be released should be put at the disposal of the commissioner of the labor office. When searching villages or when it becomes necessary to burn down villages, the whole population will be put at the disposal of the commissioner by force."
THE PRESIDENT: Shouldn't you read Number 4 which follows it?
MR. DODD: Number 4 says: "As a rule, no more children will be shot." I might say to Your Honor that parts of these documents are going to be relied on for other purposes later and it sometimes may appear to the Tribunal that we are overlooking some of these excerpts, but nevertheless I am grateful to have them called to our attention because they are most pertinent to these allegations as well. From the community of Zhitomir where the Defendant Sauckel appealed for more workers for the Reich, the Commissioner General reported on the brutality of the conspirator's program, which he described as a program of coercion and slavery. And I now refer to Document Number 265-PS, which is Exhibit USA-191. This document is a secret report of a conference between the Commissioner General of Zhitomir and the Defendant Rosenberg in the community of Vinnitza on the 17th of June 1943. The report itself is dated the 30th of June 1943 and is signed by Leyser. I wish to quote from Page 1 of the English text, beginning with the last paragraph; and in the German text it appears at Page 2, Paragraph 3. Quoting it directly: "The symptoms created by the recruiting of workers are, no doubt, well known to the Reich Minister through reports and his own observations. Therefore I shall not repeat them. It is certain that a recruitment of labor in the true sense of the word can hardly be spoken of. In most cases it is nowadays a matter of actual conscription by force." Passing now to Page 2 of that same document, and to Paragraph 1, line 11-in the German text it appears at Page 3, Paragraph 2-it says; and I quote it directly: "But as the Plenipotentiary General for the Allocation of Labor explained to us the gravity of the situation, we had no alternative. I consequently have authorized the commissioners of the areas to apply the severest measures in order to achieve the imposed quota. That a lowering of morale is coupled with this needs no further proof. It is nevertheless essential to win the war on this front too.
MR. DODD: The problem of labor mobilization cannot be handled with gloves." The recruitment measures which we have been discussing enslaved so many citizens of occupied countries that whole areas were depopulated. I now wish to refer to our Document Number 3000-PS, which is Exhibit USA-192. This document is a partial translation of a report from the chief of Main Office III with the High Command in Minsk, and it is dated the 28th day of June 1943. It was sent to Ministerialdirektor Riecke, who was a top official in the Rosenberg Ministry. I wish to read from Page 1 of the English text, starting with the second paragraph, as follows: "Thus recruitment of labor for the Reich, however necessary, had disastrous effects, for the recruitment measures in the last months and weeks were absolute manhunts, which have an irreparable political and economic effect.... From... White Ruthenia approximately 50,000 people have been obtained for the Reich so far. Another 130,000 are to be taken. Considering the 2,400,000 total population. . . the fulfillment of these quotas is impossible.... Owing to the sweeping drives of the SS and police in November 1942, about 115,000 hectares of farmland. . . are not used, as the population is not there and the villages have been razed...." We have already referred to the conspirators' objective of permanently weakening the enemy through the enslavement of labor and the breaking up of families; and we invite the Tribunal's attention to Document 031-PS, which is in evidence as Exhibit USA-171, for we desire to emphasize that the policy was applied in the Eastern Occupied Territories with the Defendant Rosenberg's approval of a plan for the apprehension and deportation of 40,000 to 50,000 youths of the ages of 10 to 14. Now the stated purpose of this plan was to prevent a reinforcement of the enemy's military strength and to reduce the enemy's biological potentialities. We have already quoted from Page 3 of the English text of that document to establish that the Defendant Rosenberg approved that plan, the so-called Hay Action plan.
MR. DODD: We referred to it yesterday afternoon. Further evidence of the conspirators' plan to weaken their enemies, in utter disregard of the rules of international law, is contained in Document Number 1702-PS, which bears Exhibit Number USA-193. This document is a secret order, issued by a rear area military commandant to the district commissar at Kasatin, dated the 25th of December 1943. I quote from Page 3 of the English text at Paragraph 1. In the German text it appears at Page 12, Paragraph 1. "The able-bodied male population between 15 and 65 years of age and the live stock are to be shipped back from the district east of the line Belilovka-Berditchev-Zhitomir (exclusive of these places)." This program, which we have been describing, and the brutal measures that it employed were not limited to Poland and the Occupied Eastern Territories but covered and cursed Western Europe as well. Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Belgians, Italians, all came to know the yoke of slavery and the brutality of their slavemasters. In France these slavemasters intensified their program in the early part of 1943, pursuant to instructions which the Defendant Speer telephoned to the Defendant Sauckel at 8 o'clock in the evening on the 4th day of January 1943 from Hitler's headquarters. I now refer to Document Number 556(13)-PS, which is Exhibit USA-194. This document, incidentally, is a note for his own files, signed by the Defendant Sauckel, dated the 5th of January 1943. I wish to quote from Page 1 of the English text, Paragraph 1 as follows: "On 4 January 1943 at 8 p.m. Minister Speer telephones from the Fuehrer's headquarters and communicates that on the basis of the Fuehrer's decision, it is no longer necessary to give special consideration to Frenchmen in the further recruiting of specialists and helpers in France. The recruiting can proceed with vigor and with sharpened measures.".
MR. DODD: To overcome resistance to his slave labor program, the Defendant Sauckel improvised new impressment measures which were applied to both France and Italy by his own agents and which he himself labelled as grotesque. I now refer to Document Number 31-124, which is Exhibit USA-179, and particularly Page 2 and Paragraph 2 of the English text; in the German text it appears at Page 8, Paragraph 1. Quoting directly from that page and that paragraph a statement made by Sauckel on 1 March 1944 at a meeting of the Central Planning Board: "The most abominable point against which I have to fight is the claim that there is no organization in these districts properly to recruit Frenchmen, Belgians, and Italians and to dispatch them to work. So I have even proceeded to employ and train a whole staff of French and Italian agents of both sexes who for good pay, just as was done in olden times for 'shanghaiing,' go hunting for men and dupe them, using liquor as well as persuasion in order to dispatch them to Germany. "Moreover, I have charged several capable men with founding a special labor allocation organization of our own, and this by training and arming, under the aegis of the Higher SS and Police Fuehrer, a number of indigenous units; but I still have to ask the munitions ministry for arms for these men. For during the last year alone several dozens of highranking labor allocation officials of great ability have been shot All these means must be used, grotesque as it may sound, to refute the allegation that there is no organization to bring labor to Germany from these countries." His same slave labor hunt proceeded in Holland, as it did in France, with terror and abduction. I now refer to Document Number 1726-PS, which is Exhibit USA-195.
MR. DODD: This document is entitled, "Statement of the Netherlands Government in View of the Prosecution and Punishment of the German Major War Criminals." I wish to quote from enclosure "h," entitled "Central Bureau for Statistics-me Deportation of Netherlands' Workmen to Germany." It is Page 1 of the English text, starting with the first paragraph; and in the German text it appears at Page 1, also Paragraph 1. Quoting it directly, it reads as follows: "Many big and medium size large business concerns, especially in the metal industry, were visited by German commissions who selected workmen for deportation. His combing-out was called the 'Sauckel action,' so named after its leader, who was charged with the procurement of foreign workmen for Germany. "The employers had to cancel the contracts with the selected workmen; and the latter were forced to register at the labor offices, which then took charge of the deportation under supervision of German 'Fachberater.' "Workmen who refused-relatively few-were prosecuted by the Sicherheitsdienst-the SD. If captured by this service, they were mostly lodged for some time in one of the infamous prisoners' camps in the Netherlands and eventually put to work in Germany. "In these prosecutions the Sicherheitsdienst was supported by the German police service, which was connected with the labor offices and was composed of members of the NSB and the like. "At the end of April 1942 the deportation of workers started on a grand scale. Consequently, in the months of May and June, the number of deportees amounted to not less than 22,000 and 24,000 respectively, of which many were metal workers. "After that the action slackened somewhat, but in October 1942 another peak was reached (2,600). After the big concerns, the smaller ones had, in their turn, to give up their personnel . . . "This changed in November 1944. The Germans then started a ruthless campaign for manpower, passing by the labor offices.
MR. DODD: Without warning they lined off whole quarters of the towns, seized people in the streets or in the houses and deported them. "In Rotterdam and Schiedam where these raids took place on 10 and 11 November, the number of people thus deported was estimated at 50,000 and 5,000, respectively. "In other places where the raids were held later, the numbers were much lower, because one was forewarned by the events. The exact figures are not known as they have never been published by the occupants. "The people thus seized were put to work partly in the Netherlands, partly in Germany." A document found in the OKH files furnishes further evidence of the seizure of workers in Holland; and I refer to Document Number 3003-PS, which is Exhibit USA-196. This document is a partial translation of the text of a lecture, delivered by one Lieutenant Haupt of the German Wehrmacht, concerning the situation of the war economy in the Netherlands. I wish to quote from Page 1 of the English text, starting with the fourth line of Paragraph 1-quoting that directly, which reads as follows: "There had been some difficulties with the Arbeitseinsatz, that is, during the man-catching action, which became very noticeable because it was unorganized and unprepared. People were arrested in the streets and taken out of their homes. It has been impossible to carry out a uniform exemption procedure in advance, because for security reasons the time for the action had not been previously announced. Certificates of exemption, furthermore, were to some extent not recognized by the officials who carried out the action. Not only workers who had become available through the stoppage of industry, but also those who were employed in our installations producing things for our immediate need were apprehended or did not dare to go into the streets. In any case it proved to be a great loss to us." I might say to the Tribunal, that the hordes of people displaced in Germany today indicate, to a very considerable extent, the length to which the conspirators' labor program succeeded.
MR. DODD: The best available Allied and German data reveal that, as of January 1945, approximately 4,795,000 foreign civilian workers had been put to work for the German war effort in the Old Reich; and among them were forced laborers of more than 14 different nationalities. I now refer to Document Number 2520-PS, Exhibit USA-197, which is an affidavit executed by Edward L. Deuss, an economic analyst. At the top of the first page there are tables setting forth the nationality and then the numbers of the various nationals and other groupings or prisoners of war and politicals, so-called. The workers alone total, according to Mr. Deuss who is an expert in the field, the 4,795,000 figure to which I have just referred. In the second paragraph of this statement of Deuss, I should like to read for the record and quote directly: "I, Edward L. Deuss, for 3 years employed by the Foreign Economic Administration, Washington, as an economic analyst in London, Paris, and Germany, specializing in labor and population problems of Germany during the war, do hereby certify that the figures of foreign labor employed in the Old Reich have been compiled on the basis of the best available German and Allied sources of material. The accompanying table represents a combination of German official estimates of foreigners working in Germany in January 1945, and of American, British, and French figures of the number of foreigners actually discovered in the Old Reich since 10 May 1945." Only a very small proportion of these imported laborers came to Germany on a voluntary basis. At the March 1, 1944 meeting of this same Central Planning Board, to which we have made reference before, the Defendant Sauckel himself made clear the vast scale on which free men had been forced into this labor slavery. He made the statement, and I quote from Document Number R-124, which is in evidence as Exhibit USA-179 and from which I have quoted earlier this morning. I wish to refer to Page 11 of that document, the middle paragraph, Paragraph 3.
MR. DODD: In the German text it appears at Page 4, Paragraph 2-the Defendant Sauckel speaking-and I quote directly from that document: "Out of 5 million foreign workers who arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily." The Nazi conspirators were not satisfied just to tear 5 million odd persons from their children, from their homes, from their native land. But in addition, these defendants, who sit today in this courtroom, insisted that this vast number of wretched human beings who were in the so-called Old Reich as forced laborers must be starved, given less than sufficient to eat, often beaten and maltreated, and permitted to die wholesale for want of food, for want of even the fundamental requirements of decent clothing, for the want of adequate shelter or indeed sometimes just because they produced too little. Now these conditions of deportation are vividly described in Document Number 054-PS, which is a report made to the Defendant Rosenberg concerning the treatment of Ukrainian labor. I wish to refer to Document Number 054-PS, which bears the Exhibit Number USA-198. Before quoting from it directly-according to this report the plight of these hapless victims was aggravated because many were dragged off without opportunity to collect their possessions. Indeed, men and women were snatched from bed and lodged in cellars pending deportation. Some arrived in night clothing. Brutal guards beat them. They were locked in railroad cars for long periods without any toilet facilities at all, without food, without water, without heat. The women were subjected to physical and moral indignities and indecencies during medical examinations.
MR. DODD: I refer now specifically to this Document Number 054-PS, which consists of a covering letter to the Defendant Rosenberg, first of all, and is signed by one Theurer, a 1st lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, to which is attached a copy of a report by the commandant of the collecting center for Ukrainian specialists at Kharkov; and it also consists of a letter written by one of the specialists in the Rosenberg office-no, by one of the workers, not in the Rosenberg office, but one of the specialists they were recruiting, by the name of Grigori. I wish to quote from the report at Page 2, starting at Paragraph 4 of the English text-and in the German text it appears at Page 3, Paragraph 4. Quoting directly from that page of the English text: "The starosts , that is village elders, are frequently corruptible; they continue to have the skilled workers, whom they drafted, dragged from their beds at night to be locked up in cellars until they are shipped. Since the male and female workers often are not given any time to pick up their luggage and so forth, many skilled workers arrive at the collecting center for skilled workers with equipment entirely insufficient (without shoes or change of clothing, no eating and drinking utensils, no blankets, et cetera ). In particularly extreme cases, therefore, new arrivals have to be sent back again immediately to get the things most necessary for them. If people do not come along at once, threatening and beating of skilled workers by the above-mentioned local militia become a daily occurrence and are reported from most of the communities. In some cases women were beaten until they could no longer march. One bad case in particular was reported by me to the commander of the civil police here (Colonel Samek) for severe punishment (village of Sozolinkov, district of Dergatchi). The encroachments of the starosts and the militia are of a particularly grave nature because they usually justify themselves by claiming that all that is done in the name of the German Armed Forces.
MR. DODD: In reality, the latter have conducted themselves throughout in a highly understanding manner toward the skilled workers and the Ukrainian population. The same, however, cannot be said of some of the administrative agencies. To illustrate this,. be it mentioned that a woman once arrived dressed with barely more than a shirt." Passing now to Page 4 of this same document, starting with the 10th line of the third paragraph, and in the German text it appears at Page 5, Paragraph 2. Quoting directly again: "On the basis of reported incidents, attention must be called to the fact that it is inexcusable to keep workers locked in the cars for many hours, so that they cannot even take care of the calls of nature. It is evident that the people of a transport must be given an opportunity from time to time, to get drinking water, to wash, and to relieve themselves. Cars have been shown in which people had made holes so that they could attend to the calls of nature. When nearing bigger stations, persons should, if possible, relieve themselves far from these stations." Tuning to Page 5 of the same document, Paragraph 12 in the German text it appears at Page 6, Paragraph 1: "The following abuses were reported from the delousing stations: "In the women's and girls' shower rooms, services were partly performed by men, or men would mingle around or even help with the soaping, and vice versa there were female personnel in the men's shower rooms. Men also for some time were faking photographs in the-women's shower rooms. Since mainly Ukrainian peasants were transported in the last months, as far as the female portion of these are concerned, they were mostly of a high moral standard and used to strict modesty; they must have considered such a treatment as a national degradation. The above-mentioned abuses have been, according to our knowledge, settled by the intervention of the transport commanders. The reports of the photographing were made from Halle; the reports about the former were made from Kiwerce.