dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
LAMPE: As regards your first question, we all knew Himmler; and even if we had not known him, everyone in the camp knew of his visit. Also the SS told us a few days before that his visit was expected. Himmler was present at the beginning of the executions of the Soviet officers; but as I said a little while ago, these executions lasted throughout the afternoon; and he did not remain until the end. With regard to ...
M. DUBOST: Is it possible that only the SS knew what happened in the camp? Was the camp visited by other personalities than the SS? Did you know the SS uniforms? The people you saw, the authorities you saw-did they all wear uniforms?
LAMPE: The personalities that we saw at the camp were, generally speaking, soldiers and officers. Some time afterward, a few weeks before the liberation, we had a visit from the Gauleiter of the Gau Oberdonau. We also had frequent visits from members of the Gestapo in plain clothes. The German population, that is, the Austrian population; were perfectly aware of what was going on at Mauthausen. The working squads were nearly all for work outside. I said just now that I was working at Messerschmidt's. The foremen were mobilized German civilians who, in the evening, went home to their families. They knew quite well of our sufferings and privations. They frequently saw men fetched from the shop to be executed, and they could bear witness to most of the massacres I mentioned a little while ago. I should add that once we received - I am sorry I put it like that-once there arrived in Mauthausen 30 firemen from Vienna. They were imprisoned, I think, for having taken part in some sort of workers' activity. The firemen from Vienna told us that, when one wanted to frighten children hi Vienna, one said to them, "If you are not good, I will send you to Mauthausen." Another detail, a more concrete one: Mauthausen Camp is built on a plateau and every night the chimneys of the crematorium would light up the whole district, and everyone knew what the crematorium was for. Another detail: The town of Mauthausen was situated 5 kilometers from the camp. The convoys of deportees were brought to the station of the town. The whole population could see these convoys pass. The whole population knew in what state these convoys were brought into the camp.
M. DUBOST: Thank you very much.
THE PRESIDENT: Does the Soviet Prosecutor wish to ask any questions?
GENERAL R. A. RUDENKO (Chief Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.): I should like to ask a few questions. Can you tell me, Witness, why was the execution of the 50 Soviet officers ordered? Why were they executed?
LAMPE: As regards the specific case of these 50 officers, I do not know the reasons why they were condemned and executed; but as a general rule, all Soviet officers, all Soviet commissars, or members of the Bolshevist Party were executed at Mauthausen. If a few among them succeeded in slipping through, it is because their records were not known to the SS.
GEN. RUDENKO: You affirm that Himmler was present at the execution of those 50 Soviet officers?
LAMPE: I testify to the fact because I saw him with my own eyes.
GEN. RUDENKO: Can you give us more precise details about the execution of the 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war which you have just mentioned?
LAMPE: I cannot add much to what I have said, except that these men were assassinated on the job probably because the work demanded of them was beyond their strength and they were too underfed to perform these tasks. They were murdered on the spot by blows with a cudgel or struck down by the SS; they were driven by the SS to the wire fence and shot down by the sentinels in the watch towers. I cannot give more details because, as I said, I was not a witness, an eye witness.
GEN. RUDENKO: That is quite clear. And now one more question: Can you give me a more detailed statement concerning the destruction of the Czech colony?
LAMPE: I speak with the same reservation as before. I was not in the camp at the time of the extermination of the 3,000 Czechs; but the survivors with whom I spoke in 1944 were unanimous in confirming the accuracy of these facts, and probably, as far as their own country is concerned, have drawn up a list of the murdered men.
GEN. RUDENKO: This means, if I have understood you correctly, that in the camp where you were interned executions were carried out without trial or inquiry. Every member of the SS had the right to kill an internee. Have I understood your statement correctly?
LAMPE: Yes, that is so. The life of a man at Mauthausen counted for absolutely nothing.
GEN. RUDENKO: I thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Does any member of the defendants' counsel wish to ask any questions of this witness? ... Then the witness can retire. Witness, a moment.
THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Francis Biddle): Do you know how many guards there were at the camp?
LAMPE: The number of the guard varied, but as a general rule there were 1,200 SS and soldiers of the Volkssturm. However, it should be said that only 50 to 60 SS were authorized to come inside the camp.
THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle): Were they SS men that were authorized to go into the camp?
LAMPE: Yes, they were.
THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle): All SS men?
LAMPE: All of them were SS.
THE PRESIDENT: The witness can retire.
M. DUBOST: Thank you. With your permission, gentlemen, we shall proceed with the presentation of our case on German atrocities in the western countries of Europe from 1939 to 1945 by retaining from these testimonies the particular facts, which all equally constitute crimes against common law. The general idea, around which we have grouped all our work and our statement, is that of German terror intentionally conceived as an instrument for governing all the enslaved peoples. We shall remember the testimony brought by this French witness who said that in Vienna, when one wished to frighten a child, one told it about Mauthausen. The people who were arrested in the western countries were deported to Germany where they were put into camps or into prisons. The information that we have concerning the prisons has been taken from the official report of the Prisoners of War Ministry, which we have already read; it is the bound volume which was in your hands this morning. In it you will find, on Page 35, and Page 36 to Page 42, a detailed statement as to what the prisons were like in Germany. The prison at Cologne is situated between the freight station and the main station and the Chief Prosecutor in Cologne, in a report ...
THE PRESIDENT: F-274?
M. DUBOST: Yes, Your Honor, F-274, on Page 35. The Document was submitted under Exhibit Number RF-301. The Tribunal will see that the prison at Cologne, where many Frenchmen were interned, was situated between the freight station and the main station so that the Chief Prosecutor in Cologne wrote, in a report which was used by the Ministry of Deportees and Prisoners of War when compiling the book which is before you, that the situation of that prison was so dangerous that no enterprise engaged in war work would undertake to furnish its precious materials to a factory in this area. The prisoners could not take shelter during the air attacks. They remained locked in their cells, even in case of fire. The victims of air attacks in the prisons were numerous. The May 1944 raid claimed 200 victims in the prison at Alexander Platz in Berlin. At Aachen the buildings were always dirty, damp, and very small; and the prisoners numbered three or four times as many as the facilities permitted. In the Munster prison the women who were there in November 1943 lived underground without any air. In Frankfurt the prisoners had as cells a sort of iron cage, 2 by 1.5 meters. Hygiene was impossible. At Aachen, as in many other prisons, the prisoners had only one bucket in the middle of the room, and it was forbidden to empty it during the day. The food ration was extremely small. As a rule, ersatz coffee in the morning with a thin slice of bread; soup at noon; a thin slice of bread at night with a little margarine or sausage or jam. The prisoners were forced to do extremely heavy work in war industries, in food factories, in spinning mills. No matter what kind of work it was, at least twelve hours of labor were required--at Cologne, in particular, from 7 o'clock in the morning to 9 or 10 o'clock in the evening, that is to say, 14 or 15 consecutive hours. I am still quoting from the file of the Public Prosecutor of Cologne, a document, Number 87, sent to us by the Ministry of Prisoners. A shoe factory gave work to the inmates of 18 German prisons...
M. DUBOST: I quote from the same document: "Most of the French flatly refused to work in war industries, for example, the manufacture of gas masks, filing of cast iron plates, slides for shells, radio or telephone apparatus intended for the Army. In such cases Berlin gave orders for the recalcitrants to be sent to punishment camps. An example of this was the sending of women from Kottbus to Ravensbruck on 13 November 1944. The Geneva Convention was, of course, not applied. "The political prisoners frequently had to remove unexploded bombs." This is the official German text of the Public Prosecutor of Cologne. There was no medical supervision. There were no prophylactic measures taken in these prisons in case of epidemics, or else the SS doctor intentionally gave the wrong instructions. At the prison of Dietz-an-der-Lahn, under the eyes of the director, Gammradt, a former medical officer in the German Army, the SS or SA guards struck the prisoners. Dysentery, diphtheria, pulmonary diseases, and pleurisy were not reasons for stopping work; and those who were dangerously ill were forced to work to the very limit of their strength and were only admitted to the hospital in exceptional cases. There were many petty persecutions. In Aachen the presence of a Jewish woman prisoner in a cell caused the other prisoners to lose half of their ration. At Amrasch they had to go to toilets only when ordered. At Magdeburg recalcitrants had to make one hundred genuflexions before the guards. Interrogations were carried out in the same manner as in France, that is, the victims were brutally treated and were given practically no food. At Asperg the doctor had heart injections given to the prisoners so that they died. At Cologne those condemned to death were perpetually kept in chains. At Sonnenburg those who were dying were given a greenish liquor to drink which hastened their death. In Hamburg sick Jews were forced to dig their own graves until, exhausted, they fell into them. We are still speaking of French, Belgians, Dutch, Luxembourgers, Danes, or Norwegians interned in German prisons.
M. DUBOST: These descriptions apply only to citizens of those countries. In the Borse prison in Berlin, Jewish babies were massacred before the eyes of their mothers. The sterilization of men is confirmed by German documents in the file of the Prosecutor of Cologne, which contains a ruling to the effect that the victims cannot be reinstated in their military rights. These files also contain documents which show the role played by children who were in prison. They had to work inside the prison. A German functionary belonging to the prison service inquired as to the decision to be taken with regard to a 4-month-old baby, which was brought to the prison at the same time as its father and mother. What kind of people were the prison staff? They were "recruited amongst the NSKK (National Socialist Motor Corps) and the SA because of their political views and because they were above suspicion and accustomed to harsh discipline." This is also to be found in the file of the Public Prosecutor at Cologne, Page 39, last paragraph. At Rheinbach those condemned to death and to be executed in Cologne were beaten to death for breaches of discipline. We can easily imagine the brutality of the men who were in charge of the prisoners. The German official text will furnish us with details regarding the executions. The condemned were guillotined. Nearly all the condemned showed surprise, so say the German documents of which we are giving you a summary, and expressed their dissatisfaction at being guillotined instead of being shot for the patriotic deeds -of which they were declared guilty. They thought they deserved to be treated as soldiers. Among those executed in Cologne were some young people of eighteen and nineteen years of age and one woman. Some French women, who were political prisoners, were taken from the Lubeck prison in order to be executed in Hamburg. They were nearly 'always charged with the same thing, "helping the enemy." The files are incomplete, but we have those of the chief Prosecutor of Cologne. In every case the offenses committed were of the same nature.
M. DUBOST: Keitel systematically rejected all appeals for mercy which were submitted to him. Although the lot of those who were held in the prisons was very hard and sometimes terrible, it was infinitely less cruel than the fate of those Frenchmen who had the misfortune to be interned in the concentration camps. The Tribunal is well informed about these camps; my colleagues of the United Nations have presented a long statement on this matter. The Tribunal will remember that it has already been shown a map indicating the exact location of every camp which existed in Germany and in the occupied countries. We shall not, therefore, revert to the geographical distribution of the camps. With the permission of the Tribunal I should now like to deal with the conditions under which Frenchmen and nationals of the western occupied countries were taken to these camps. Before their departure the victims of arbitrary arrests, such as I described to you this morning, were brought together in prisons or in assembly camps in France. The main assembly camp in France was at Compiegne. It is from. there that most of the deportees left who were to be sent to Germany. There were two other assembly camps, Beaune-La-Rolande and Pithiviers, reserved especially for Jews, and Drancy. The conditions under which people were interned in those camps were somewhat similar to those under which internees. in the German prisons lived. With your permission, I shall not dwell any longer on this. The Tribunal will have taken judicial notice of the declarations made by M. Blechmann and Mine. Jacob in Document Number F- 457, which I am now lodging as Exhibit Number RF-328. To avoid making these discussions too long and too ponderous with long quotations and testimonies which, after all, are very similar, we shall confine ourselves to reading to the Tribunal a passage from the testimony of Mme. Jacob concerning the conduct of the German Red Cross.
M. DUBOST: This passage is to be found at the bottom of Page 4 of the French document: "We received a visit from several German personalities, such as Stulpnagel, Du Paty de Clam, Commissioner for Jewish Questions, and Colonel Baron Von Berg, Vice President of the German Red Cross. This Von Berg was very formal and very pompous. He always wore the small insignia of the Red Cross, which did not prevent his being inhuman and a thief." And on Page 6, the penultimate paragraph, Colonel Von Berg was, as we have already said earlier, very pompous. I skip two lines. "In spite of his title of Vice President of the German Red Cross, of which he dared to wear the insignia, he selected at random a number of our comrades for deportation." Concerning the assembly center of Compiegne, the Tribunal will find in Document F-274, Exhibit Number 301, Pages 14 and 15, some details about the fate of the internees. I do not think it is necessary to read them. In Norway, Holland, and Belgium there were, as in France, assembly camps. The most typical of these camps, and certainly the best known, is the Breendonck Camp in Belgium, about which it is necessary to give the Tribunal a few details because a great many Belgians were interned there and died of privations, hardships, and tortures of all kinds; or were executed either by shooting or by hanging. This camp was established in the Fortress of Breendonck in 1940, and we are now extracting from a document which we have already deposited under Document Number F-231 and which is also known under UK-76 (Exhibit Number RF-329), a few details about the conditions prevailing in that camp. It is the fourth document in .your document book and is entitled "Report on the Concentration Camp of Breendonck."
THE PRESIDENT: What did you say the name of the camp is?
M. DUBOST: Breendonck, B-r-e-e-n-d-o-n-c-k. We will ask the Tribunal to be good enough to grant us a few minutes. Our duty is to expose in rather more detail the conditions at this camp, because a considerable number of Belgians were interned there and their internment took a rather special form. The Germans occupied this fort in August 1940, and they brought the internees there in September. They were Jews. The Belgian Government has not been able to find out how many people were interned from September 1940 to August 1944, when the camp was evacuated and Belgium liberated. Nevertheless, it is thought that about 3,000 to 3,600 internees passed through the camp of Breendonck. About 250 died of privation, 450 were shot, and 12 were hanged. But we must bear in mind the fact that the majority of the prisoners in Breendonck were transferred at various times to camps in Germany. Most of these transferred prisoners did not return. There should, therefore, be added to those who died in Breendonck, all those who did not survive their captivity in Germany. Various categories of prisoners, were taken into the camp: Jews-for whom the regime was more severe than for the others-Communists and Marxists, of which there were a good many, in spite of the fact that those who interrogated them had nothing definite against them; persons who belonged to the resistance, people who had been denounced to the Germans, hostages-among them M. Bouchery, former minister, and M. Van Kesbeek, who was a liberal deputy, were interned there for ten weeks as a reprisal for the throwing of a grenade on the main square of Malines. These two died after their liberation as a result of the ill-treatment which they endured in that camp. There were also in that camp some black market operators, and the Belgian Government says of them that "they were not ill-treated, and were even given preferential treatment." That is in Paragraph (e) of Page 2. The prisoners were compelled to work. The most repugnant collective punishments were inflicted on the slightest pretext.
M. DUBOST: One of these punishments consisted in forcing the internees to crawl under the beds and to stand up at command; this was done to the accompaniment of whipping. You will find that at the top of Page 10. In the same page is a description of the conditions of the prisoners who were isolated from the others and kept in solitary confinement. They were forced to wear hoods every time they had to leave their cells or when they had to come in contact with other prisoners.
THE PRESIDENT: This is a long report, is it not?
M. DUBOST: That is why I am summarizing it rather than reading it; and I do not think I can make it any shorter, as it was given to me by the Belgian Government, which attaches a great importance to the brutalities, excesses, and atrocities that were committed by the Germans in the Camp of Breendonck and suffered by the whole of the population, especially the Belgian elite.
THE PRESIDENT: Very well, I understand. You are summarizing it?
M. DUBOST: I am now summarizing it, Mr. President. I had reached, in my summary, the description of the life of these prisoners who had been put into cells and who sometimes wore handcuffs and had shackles on their feet attached to an iron ring in the wall. They could not leave their cells without being forced to wear hoods. One of these prisoners, M. Paquet, states that he spent eight months under such a regime; and when, one day, he tried to lift the hood to see his way, he received a violent blow with the butt of a gun which broke three vertebrae in his neck. Page 12 concerns the following: discipline, labor, acts of brutality, murders. We are told that the work of the prisoners consisted in removing the earth covering the fort and carrying it outside the moat. This work was done by hand. It was very laborious and dangerous and caused the loss of a great many human lives. Small trucks were used. The trucks were hurled along the rails, by the SS and often broke the legs of the prisoners who were not warned of their approach. The SS made a game of this, and at the slightest stoppage of work they would rush at the internees and beat them. On the same page we are told that frequently, for no reason at all, the prisoners were thrown into the moat surrounding the fort. According to the report of the Belgian Government, dozens of prisoners were drowned. Some prisoners were killed after they had been buried up to their necks, and the SS finished them off by kicking them or beating them with a stick. Food, clothing, correspondence, and medical care -.all this information is given in this report as in all the other similar reports which I have already read to you. The conclusion is important and should be read in part-second paragraph: "The former internees of Breendonck, many of whom have had experience of the concentration camps in Germany Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Oranienburg-state that, generally speaking, the conditions prevailing at Breendonck in regard to discipline and food were worse.
M. DUBOST: They add that in the camps in Germany, which were more crowded, they felt less under the domination of their guards and had the feeling that their lives were less in danger." The figures given in this report are only minimum figures. To give but one example (last paragraph of the last page), M. Verheirstraeten declares that he put 120 people in their coffins during the two months of December 1942 and January 1943. If one bears in mind the executions of the 6th and 13th of January, each of which accounted for the lives of 20 persons, we see that at that time, that is to say, over a period of two months, 80 persons died of disease or ill-treatment. From these camps the internees were transported to Germany in convoys, and a description of these should be given -to the Tribunal. The Tribunal should know, first of all, that from France alone, excluding the three Departments of the Haut-Rhin, Bas-Rhin, and Moselle, 326 convoys left between I January 1944 and 25 August of the same year, that is to say, an average of ten convoys a week. Now each convoy transported from 1,000 to 2,000 persons; and we know now, from what our witness said just now, that each truck carried from 60 to 120 individuals. It appears that there left from France, excluding the above-mentioned three northern departments, 3 convoys in 1940, 19 convoys in 1941, 104 convoys in 1942, and 257 convoys in 1943. These are the figures given in the documents submitted under Number F-274, Exhibit Number RF-301, Page 14. These convoys nearly always left from the Compiegne. Camp where more than 50,000 internees were registered and from there 78 convoys left in 1943 and 95 convoys in 1944. The purpose of these deportations was to terrorize the populations. The Tribunal will remember the text already read; how the families, not knowing what became of the internees, were seized with terror and advantage was taken of this to round-up more workers to help German labor which had become depleted owing to the war with Russia.