dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
VAN DER ESSEN: The burgomaster appointed the aldermen; the aldermen appointed the communal officials and employees, and the moment the burgomaster belonged to that Party and was appointed by that Party, he appointed as communal officials members of the Party who could refuse ration cards to refractory people, or order the police to give, for instance, the list of Communists, or of those suspected of being Communists; in short, they could interfere in almost any way they wished, and by every possible means, in the communal life of Belgium. If we examine the big towns and the small towns, we can say that everywhere there was truly a veritable network of espionage and interference following the events or acts of which I have just informed you.
M. FAURE: It is true, then, to say that this meddling by the Germans with the administration of the communes constituted a seizure of Belgian national sovereignty?
VAN DER ESSEN: Certainly, since it made the fundamental principle of the Belgian constitution disappear, that is to say, the sovereignty that belongs to the nation and more especially to the Communal Council which appointed aldermen and burgomasters. From then on it was impossible for them to make themselves heard in the normal way, so that the sovereignty of the Belgian people was directly attacked by the fact itself.
M. FAURE: Since you are a professor of higher education, can you give us information concerning the interference in education?
VAN DER ESSEN: Yes, sir, certainly. First, there was interference in the domain of elementary and secondary education through the General Secretary of Public Education, on whom the Germans exercised pressure. A commission was set up which was entrusted with the task of purging the text books. It was forbidden to use text books which mentioned what the Germans did in Belgium during the 1914-18 war; this chapter was absolutely forbidden. The booksellers and publishing houses could still sell these books, but only on the condition that the bookseller or library should tear out this chapter. As for new books which had to be reprinted or republished, this commission indicated exactly which ones should be cancelled or removed. That was serious and alarming interference with primary and secondary education. As regards higher education, the interference was unleashed, so to speak, from the very beginning of the occupation; and first of all, for motives which I need not explain here but which are well known, in the free University of Brussels. The Germans first imposed on the University of Brussels a German Commissioner, who thus had in his hands the whole organization of the university and even controlled it, as far as I know, from the point of view of accountancy. Moreover they imposed exchange professors. But serious difficulties began the day when, in Brussels as elsewhere, they required that they should be informed of all projects of new appointments and all new appointments of professors, in the same way as the assignment of lecture courses and other subjects taught in the university. The result was that in Brussels, by virtue of this right which they had arrogated, they wished to impose three professors, of whom two were obviously not acceptable to any Belgian worthy of the name. There was one, notably, who, having been a member of the Council of Flanders during the occupation of 1914-18, had been condemned to death by the justice of this country and whom they wanted to impose as a professor in the University of Brussels in 1940.
VAN DER ESSEN: Under these conditions the university refused to accept this professor, and this was considered by the occupying authorities as sabotage. As a penalty, the President of the Board of the University, the principal members of the board, the deans of the principal faculties, and a few other professors, who were especially well known as being anti-Fascists, were arrested and imprisoned in the prison of Witte with the aggravating circumstance that they were considered as hostages and that, if any act whatsoever of sabotage or resistance occurred, they, being hostages, could be shot. As far as the other universities were concerned, as I have just said here, they wished to impose exchange professors. There were none at Louvain because we refused categorically to receive them, the more so as it appeared that these exchange professors were not, primarily, scholars who had come to communicate the result of their researches and their scientific work, but a great many of them were observers for the occupying authorities.
M. FAURE: In this connection, is it true that the Belgian authorities discovered the report made by one of these so-called "invited" professors?
VAN DER ESSEN: That is indeed the case. The Belgian authorities got hold of a report by Professor Von Mackensen, who was sent as an exchange professor to the University of Ghent. In this report-drawn up with infinite care and which is extraordinarily interesting to read because of the personal and psychological observations which it contains concerning the various members of the faculty of Ghent-in this report we see that everyone was observed and followed day by day, that his tendencies were labeled, that a note was made as to whether he was for or against the system of the occupying power, or whether he had any relations with students who were N.P. or Rexists. The slightest movements and actions of all the professors were carefully noted; and I add, with great care and precision. It was almost a scientific piece of occurred, they, being hostages, could be shot.
M. FAURE: M. Van der Essen, I described this morning to the Tribunal various incidents which occurred in the University of Louvain, of which you were the General Secretary. Therefore I should like you to tell the Tribunal briefly the actual facts connected with these incidents, especially, those connected with the imprisonment of the Rector Monseigneur Van Wayenberg.
VAN DER ESSEN: Yes, indeed, sir. Serious difficulties began in the University of Louvain after the appearance of the decree of compulsory labor of 6 March 1943, by which students of the university were forced to accept compulsory labor. I would add, not in Reich territory, but in Belgium. But this action, which was held out to the university students as a sort of privilege, was entirely inacceptable to Belgian patriots for the simple reason that, if the university students accepted to go and work in the Belgian factories, they automatically expelled workmen, who were then sent to Germany as the students took their place. That was the first reason why they did not wish to work for the enemy; the second was because, from a social point of view, they wanted to show solidarity with the workers, who suffered very much because the students had refused. At least two-thirds of the students of Louvain refused to do compulsory work. They became refractory, the classes became empty, they hid themselves as best they could, and several went into the Maquis. The German authorities, when they saw the way things were going, demanded that the list of students be given to them, with their addresses, so that they could arrest them in their homes or, if they couldn't find them, they could arrest a brother, or sister, or father, or any member of the family in their place. This was the principle of collective responsibility which was applied here the same as in all other cases. After having used gentle means, they resorted to blackmail and ended up by adopting really brutal measures. They renewed the raids, they dismissed Dr. Tschacke and Dr. Kalische, I think, and many others. They ordered searches to be made in the university offices to lay their hands on the list of students; but as this list was carefully bidden, they had to go away empty-handed. It was then that they decided to arrest the Rector of the University, Monseigneur Van Wayenberg, who had hidden the lists in a place known only to him.
VAN DER ESSEN: He declared that he alone knew the place so as not to endanger his colleagues and the members of the faculty. One morning in June two members of the Secret Police from Brussels, accompanied by Military Police, came to the Hall. They arrested the rector in his office and transferred him to the prison of Saint-Gilles in Brussels, where he was imprisoned. Shortly afterwards he appeared before a German tribunal which condemned him to 18 months imprisonment for sabotage. To tell the truth, he was in jail for only 6 months, because the doctor of Saint-Gilles saw that the rector's health was beginning to fail and it would be dangerous to keep him longer if one wished to avoid a serious incident, also because of the many petitions by all sorts of authorities. Thus the rector was freed. However, he was forbidden to set foot on the territory of Louvain; and they enjoined the university to appoint, immediately, another rector. This was refused.
M. FAURE: Very well. Is it true to say that the German authorities persecuted, more systematically, persons who belonged to the intellectual elite?
VAN DER ESSEN: Yes, there can be no doubt as to this. I might give, as examples, the following facts: When hostages were taken it was nearly always university professors, doctors, lawyers, men of letters, who were taken as hostages and sent to escort military trains. At the time when the resistance was carrying out acts of sabotage to railways and blowing up trains, university professors from Ghent, Liege, and Brussels, whom I know, were taken and put in the first coach after the locomotive so that, if an explosion took place, they could not miss being killed. I know of a typical case, which will show you that it was not exactly a pleasure trip. Two professors of Liege, who were in a train of this kind, witnessed the following scene: The locomotive passed over the explosive. The coach in which they were, by an extraordinary chance, also went over it; and it was the second coach containing the German guards which blew up, so that all the German guards were killed. On the other hand, several professors and intellectuals were deported to that sinister camp of Breendonck, about which you know, some for acts of resistance, others for entirely unknown reasons; others were deported to Germany. Professors from Louvain were sent to Buchenwald, to Dora, to Neuengamme, to Gross-Rosen, and perhaps to other places too. I must add that it was not only professors from Louvain who were deported, but also intellectuals who played an important role in the life of the country. I can give you immediate proof. At Louvain, on the occasion of the reopening ceremony of the university this year, as Secretary General of the University, I read out the list of those who had died during the war. This list included 348 names, if I remember rightly. Perhaps some thirty of these names were those of soldiers who died during the Battles of the Scheldt and the Lys in 1940, all the others were victims of the Gestapo, or had died in camps in Germany, especially in the camps of Gross-Rosen and Neuengamme.
VAN DER ESSEN: Moreover, it is certain that the Germans hated particularly the intellectuals because, from time to time, they organized a synchronized campaign in the press to give prominence to the fact that the great majority of intellectuals refused categorically to rally to the New Order and refused to understand the necessity for the struggle against bolshevism. These articles always concluded by stressing the necessity of taking measures against them. I remember well certain newspaper articles which simply proposed to send these intellectuals to concentration camps. There can be no doubt therefore that the intellectuals were deliberately selected.
M. FAURE: I shall ask you no questions on anything relating to deportations or to camps, because all that is already well known to the Tribunal. I shall ask you, when replying to the following question, not to mention deportation. Now, my question concerns the whole of the atrocities which were committed by the Germans in Belgium and, especially, at the time of the December 1944 offensive by the German armies. Can you give information concerning these atrocities?
VAN DER ESSEN: Yes, sir. As a matter of fact, I can give you exact and detailed information, if necessary, on the crimes and atrocities committed during the offensive of Von Rundstedt in the Ardennes, because as a member of the War Crimes Commission I went there to make an inquiry, and I questioned witnesses and survivors of these massacres; and I know perfectly well, from personal knowledge, what happened. During the Von Rundstedt offensive in the Ardennes they committed crimes which were truly abominable in 31 localities of the Ardennes, crimes committed against men, women, and children These crimes were committed, on the one hand, as it happened elsewhere and as it happens in all wars, by individual soldiers, so I shall let that pass; but what I particularly want to stress are the crimes committed by whole units who received formal instructions, as well as crimes committed by known organizations; if I remember rightly, I think they were called Kommandos zur besonderen Verwendung, that is to say, commandos with special tasks which operated unchecked not only in the Belgian Ardennes but which also committed the same kind of crimes, carried out in the same way, in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. As regards the first, the crimes committed by whole units, I should like merely to give one very typical example, in order not to take up the time of the Tribunal. It happened at Stavelot, where about 140 persons-the number varies, let us say between 137 and 140-first it was 137, then they discovered some more bodies-about 140 persons, of whom 36 were women and 22 were children, of which the oldest was 14 years and the youngest 4 years, were savagely slaughtered by German units belonging to SS tank divisions, one the Hohenstaufen Division, the, other the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division. This is what the divisions did. We have full information about this from the testimony of a soldier who took part in it. He was arrested by the Belgian Security Police.
VAN DER ESSEN: He deserted during the Von Rundstedt campaign, dressed himself as a civilian, and then worked as a laborer on an Ardennes farm. One day as he was working stripped to the waist, he was seen by Belgian gendarmes, who saw by the tattooing on his body that he was an SS man. He was immediately arrested and interrogated. This is the method used by the soldiers of the Hohenstaufen Division. There was a line of tanks, some were Konigstiger (Royal Tigers), followed and preceded by Schutzenpanzer. At a certain moment the ObersturmFuehrer of this group stopped his men and delivered them a little speech telling them that all civilians whom they encountered should be killed. They then went back to their tanks, and as the tanks advanced along the road, the ObersturmFuehrer would point to a house. Then the soldiers entered it with machine guns in their hands. If they found people in the kitchen, they killed them in the kitchen; if they found them sheltering in the cellar, they machine-gunned them in the cellar; if they found them on the road, they killed them on the road. Not only the Hohenstaufen Division, but also the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division, and others acted in this manner on formal orders according to which all civilians were to be killed. And what was the reason for this measure? Precisely because, during the retreat in September, it was mainly in that part of the Ardennes that the resistance went into action and quite a number of German soldiers were killed during that retreat. It was therefore to revenge this defeat, to avenge themselves for th e action of the resistance, that orders were given that all civilians should be killed without mercy during the offensive launched in this region.
VAN DER ESSEN: As far as the other method is concerned, this is still more important from the point of view of responsibility, for it concerns persons commanding troops of the Sicherheitspolizei, that is to say, of the Security Police, who in most villages they came to immediately set about questioning the people as to those who had taken part in the resistance, about the secret army, where these people lived, whether they were still there or whether they had fled. In short, they had special typed questionnaires with 27 questions, always the same, which were put to everyone in the villages to which they came. Here again I shall proceed as I did in the first case. In order not to take up too much of the Tribunal's time, I shall simply give the example of Bande, in the Arrondissement of Marche. At Bande one of these SD detachments, the officers of which said they were sent especially by Himmler to execute members of the resistance, seized all men between 17 and 32 years of age. After having questioned them thoroughly and after sorting them out in a quite arbitrary manner-they didn't keep any people belonging to the resistance, for most of them had never taken part in it; there were only four who were members of the resistance-they led them away along the road from Marche to Basteuil with their hands raised behind their heads. When they reached a ruined house, which had been burned down in September, the officer who commanded the detachment posted himself at the entrance of the house, a Feldwebel joined him and put his hand on the shoulder of the last man of the third row who was making his way towards the entrance to the house; and there the officer, armed with a machine gun, killed a prisoner with a bullet in the neck. Then this same officer executed in this manner the 34 young men who had been kept back. Not content with killing them, he kicked the bodies into the cellar; and then fired a volley of machine gun bullets to make sure that they were dead.
M. FAURE: M. Van der Essen, you are a historian; you have taught scholars; therefore you are accustomed to submitting the sources of history to criticism. Can you say that your inquiry leaves no doubt in your mind, that these atrocities reveal that there was an over-all plan and that instructions were certainly given by superior officers?
VAN DER ESSEN: I think that I can affirm it, I am quite convinced that there was an over-all plan.
M. FAURE: I would like to ask you a last question: I think I understood that you yourself were never arrested or particularly worried by the Germans. I would like to know if you consider that a free man, against whom the German administration or police have nothing in particular, could during the Nazi occupation lead a life in accordance with the conception a free man has of his dignity?
VAN DER ESSEN: Well, you see me here before you, I weigh 67 kilos, my height is 1 meter 67 centimeters. According to my colleagues in the Faculty of Medicine that is quite normal Before the 10th of May 1940; before the airplanes of the Luftwaffe suddenly came without any declaration of war and spread death and desolation in Belgium, I weighed 82 kilos. This difference is incontestably the result of the occupation. But I don't want to dwell on personal considerations or enter into details of a general nature or of a theoretical or philosophical nature. I should like simply to give you an account-it will not take more than 2 minutes-of the ordinary day of an average Belgian during the occupation. I take a day in the winter of 1943: At 6 o'clock in the morning there is a ring at the door. One's first thought-indeed we all had this thought-was that it was the Gestapo. It wasn't the Gestapo. It was a city policeman who had come to tell me that there was a light in my office and that in view of the necessities of the occupation I must be careful about this in the future. But there was the nervous shock. At 7:30 the postman arrives bringing me my letters; he tells the maid that he wishes to see me personally. I go downstairs and the man says to me, "You know, Professor, I am a member of the secret army and I know what is going on. The Germans intend to arrest today at 10 o'clock all the former soldiers of the Belgian Army who are in this region. Your son must disappear immediately." I hurry upstairs and wake up my son. I make him prepare his kit and send him to the right place. At 10 o'clock I take the tram for Brussels. A few kilometers out of Louvain the tram stops. A military police patrol makes us get down and lines us up-irrespective of our social status or position-in front of a wall, with our arms raised and facing the wall. We are thoroughly searched, and having found neither arms nor compromising papers of any kind, we are allowed to go back into the tram. A few kilometers farther on the tram is stopped by a crowd which prevents the tram from going on.
VAN DER ESSEN: I see several women weeping, there are cries and wailings. I make inquiries and am told that their men folk living in the village had refused to do compulsory labor and were to have been arrested that night by the Security Police. Now they are taking away the old father of 82 and a young girl of 16 and holding them responsible for the disappearance of the young men. I arrive in Brussels to attend a meeting of the academy. The first thing the president says to me is: "Have you heard what has happened? Two of our colleagues were arrested yesterday in the street. Their families were in a terrible state. Nobody knows where they are." I go home in the evening and we are stopped on the way three times, once to search for terrorists, who are said to have Red, the other times to see if our papers are in order. At last I get home without anything serious having happened to me. I might say here that only at 9 o'clock in the evening can we give a sigh of relief, when we turn the knob of our radio set and listen ten to that reassuring voice which we hear every evening, the voice of Fighting France: "Today is the 189th day of the struggle of the French people for their liberation," or the voice of Victor Delabley, that noble figure of the Belgian radio in London, who always finished up by saying, "Courage, we will get them yet, the Boches!" That was the only thing that enabled us to breathe and go to sleep At night. That was an average day, a normal day of an average Belgian during the German occupation. And you can well understand that we could hardly call that time the reign of happiness and felicity that we were promised when the German troops invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940.
M. FAURE: Excuse me, M. Van der Essen. The only satisfaction that you had was to listen to the London radio; this was punished by a severe penalty, if you were caught, I suppose?
VAN DER ESSEN: Yes, it meant imprisonment.
M. FAURE: Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Are you finished, M. Faure?
M. FAURE: No more questions, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: General Rudenko? The American and British prosecutors? [Each indicated that he had no question.]
THE PRESIDENT: Do any of the defendants' counsel wish to ask any questions?
DR. EXNER: You have been speaking about the university library at Louvain. I should like to ask something: Were you yourself in Louvain when the two batteries were firing at the library, and at the library only, in 1940?
VAN DER ESSEN: I was not in Louvain, but I should say this: Louvain was in the K. 0. line, that is in the very front line; and the population of Louvain was obliged by the British military authorities to evacuate the town on the 14th so that nearly all the inhabitants of Louvain had left at the time when these events took place and only paralytics and sick persons, who could not be transported and who had hidden in their cellars, were left; but what I said concerning these batteries, I know from the interrogation of the two witnesses who were on the spot just outside Louvain. The library was not set on fire from within, but shelled from without. And these witnesses of whom I speak lived in these two villages outside the town where the batteries were located.
DR. EXNER: Were there any Belgian or British troops still left in the town?