dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: In the middle of each field stood a post with a cross beam 2 meters above ground, from which the victims were hanged. 'I saw from my barracks,' said witness Demashev, former camp internee and Soviet prisoner of war, 'how people were hanged from the beam in the middle of the field.' "Close to the laundry, in the entresol between the first and second floor, was a special shed with beams from the ceilings where prisoners were hanged in whole groups." The women interned in the camp were subjected to the same ill-treatment and torture; they suffered the same forms of control, of work beyond their strength, of beating, and ill-treatment. The greatest cruelty was exercised by the female personnel of the SS. The worst were the chief woman supervisor Erich, and the supervisors Braunstein, Anni David, Weber, Knoblick, Ellert, and Radli. The Commission has established many facts of unparalleled brutality perpetrated by the German executioners in the camp. The German, Heinz Stalbe, chief of the camp police, at a plenary meeting stated that he had seen with his own eyes how the director of the crematory, Oberscharfuehrer Mussfeld, tied the arms and legs of a Polish woman and threw her into the furnace alive. The witnesses Yelinski and Olech-workers in the camp-also stated that internees had been burned alive in the crematory ovens: "An infant was snatched from its mother's breast and dashed before her eyes against the wall of the barrack"-stated witness Atrochov-"I saw for myself how infants were taken from their mothers and murdered before their eyes: One small leg would be seized by a hand, the executioner would stand on the other and the infant would be torn in half"- stated witness Edward Baran. "The deputy camp commandant, SS-Obersturmfuehrer Tumann was particularly noted for his sadistic tendencies. He forced groups of internees to kneel in a row and then killed them by blows on the head with a stick. He set Alsatian dogs on the internees. He participated actively and energetically in all executions and killings of the prisoners.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: "Thus hunger, work beyond their strength, torture, torment, ill-treatment, and murder accompanied by unheard-of sadism were employed for the mass extermination of the captives in the camp." To prove that these sophisticated and sadistic crimes were not exclusively characteristic of the SS or the special police units, but that the major war criminals had deliberately plunged whole strata of the personnel of the German Armed Forces into the very depths of moral degradation, I turn to the contents of a note by the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the U.S.S.R., V. M. Molotov, dated 6 January 1942, which was submitted to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-51. Your Honors will find the passage I am about to quote on the reverse side of the document book, Paragraph 4, Column 1 of the text. I begin the quotation: "There are no bounds to the wrath and indignation aroused among the Soviet population and in the Red Army by the innumerable and despicable acts of violence, the foul outrages perpetrated against the honor of the women and the mass murders of Soviet citizens, both men and women, carried out by the German fascist officers and men. Wherever the rule of the German bayonet begins to hold sway, an unbearable regime of bloody terror, agonizing torture, and savage murder is introduced. The robberies committed everywhere by the German officers and men are invariably accompanied by the beating and murder of immense numbers of entirely innocent people. For failure to deliver up food supplies to the very last crumb, and all clothing, down to the very last shirt, the occupants torture and hang old and young, women and children. At forced labor they beat up and shoot for all defective execution of the established quota of work. "On 30 June Hitler's thugs entered the city of Lvov, and on the very next day they started a massacre under the slogan, 'Kill the Jews and the Poles.' After hundreds had been put to death the Hitler gangsters arranged an 'exhibition' of the murdered citizens by building an arcade.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: The mutilated bodies, mostly of women, were laid out along the walls of the houses. The place of honor in this ghastly 'exhibition' was occupied , by the corpse of a woman whose baby had been pinned to her with a bayonet. "Such were the monstrous atrocities of the fascists from the very outbreak of the war. Wallowing in innocent blood, the Hitlerite blackguards are still continuing their dastardly crimes. "In the hamlet of Krasnaya Polyana near Moscow, on 2 December, the German fascist dastards assembled all the local inhabitants between the ages of 15 and 16, locked them up in the icy premises of the district executive committee building in which all the window panes had been knocked out, and kept them there for 8 days without food or water. The infant children of the women workers of the Krasnaya Polyana factory, A. Zaitseva, T. Gudkina, O. Naletkina, and M. Mikhailova, died in the arms of their mothers during this ordeal. "Numerous instances are on record of Soviet children having been used as practice targets by the Hitlerites. "In the village of Bely Rast, in the Krasnaya Polyana district, a gang of drunken German soldiers put 12-year-old Volodia Tkachev up on the porch of one of the houses as a target and opened fire on the boy with an automatic rifle. The boy was riddled with bullets. After that the thugs began to fire random shots at the windows of houses. They stopped a collective farm woman, I. Mossolova, who was passing in the street with her three children, and there and then shot her and the children dead. "In the village of Voskressenskoye of the Dubinin District, the Hitlerites used a 3-year-old boy as their target, firing at him with their machine guns. "In the regional center of Volovo in the Region of Kursk, where the Germans stayed for a space of 4 hours, a German officer killed the 2-year-old son of a woman named Boikova by dashing the child's head against a wall merely because it was crying.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: , "In the village soviet of Zlobin, in the district of Orel, the fascists killed the 2-year-old child of a collective farmer, Kratov, because his crying disturbed their sleep. "In the village of Semenovskoe, in the region of Kalinin, the Germans bound with twine the arms of Olga Tikhonova, the 25-year-old wife of a Red Army man and mother of three children, who was in the last stage of pregnancy, and raped her. After violating her the Germans cut her throat, stabbed her through both breasts, and sadistically bored them out. In the same village the occupants shot a boy of 13 and cut out a five-pointed star on his forehead. "In November the telegraph operator of the town of Kalinin, Ivanova, went to visit relatives in the village of Burashevo, near Kalinin, together with her 13-year-old son Leonid. When they left the town they were noticed by some Hitlerites, who began shooting at them from a distance of 60 meters; as a result the boy was killed. The mother made several attempts to carry away the child's body, but whenever she tried to do so the Germans opened fire and she had to leave the body there. For 8 days the German soldiers would not let her remove the body. It was only removed and buried by the mother when the place was occupied by our troops." Mention is made, further on in the note, of another child victim of the fascists. The Tribunal will see this murdered boy in our filmed documentary evidence. I would ask the Tribunal to pay attention to the further words of the "note" which I shall read into the Record: "In Rostov-on-Don a pupil of the commercial school, 15-year old Vitya Cherevichny, was playing in the yard with his pigeons. Some passing German soldiers began to steal the birds. The boy protested. The Germans took him away and shot him, at the corner of 27th Line and 2d Maisky Street for refusing to surrender his pigeons. With the heels of their boots the Hitlerites trampled his face out of all recognition.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: "The village of Bassmanova, in the Glinka district of the Smolensk region, liberated by our troops early in September was one mass of ashes after the German occupation. On the very first day of their arrival, the fascist fiends drove into the fields over 200 schoolboys and girls who had come to the village to help in the harvesting. There they surrounded them and savagely shot them all. A large group of schoolgirls was abducted to the rear 'for their lordships, the officers.' "The seizure of towns or villages usually begins with the erection of a gallows on which the German executioners hang the first civilians they can lay their hands on. Moreover, they leave the bodies hanging on the gallows for days and even weeks. They do the same with the people they shoot in the streets of the towns and villages, leaving the bodies untended for days on end. "After the seizure of Kharkov, the German thugs hanged several people from the windows of a large house in the center of the city. Furthermore, in the same city of Kharkov on 16 November 19 persons, including one woman, were hanged from the balconies of a number of houses." The bestial acts of violence perpetrated against the women everywhere testify to the profound moral corruption of the criminals. I shall quote from that passage in the note which Your Honors will find on Page 4, Paragraph 4, of the document book: "Women and young girls are vilely outraged in all the occupied areas. "In the Ukrainian village of Borodayevka, in the Dniepropetrovsk region, the fascists violated every one of the women and girls. "In the village of Berezovka, in the region of Smolensk, drunken German soldiers assaulted and carried off all the women and girls between the ages of 16 and 30.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: "In the city of Smolensk the German Command opened a brothel for officers in one of the hotels into which hundreds of women and girls were driven; they were mercilessly dragged down the street by their arms and hair: "Everywhere the lust-maddened German gangsters break into the houses, they rape the women and girls under the very eyes of their kinfolk and children, jeer at the women they have violated, and then brutally murder their victims. "In the city of Lvov, 32 women working in a garment factory were first violated and then murdered by German storm troopers. Drunken German soldiers dragged the girls and young women of Lvov into Kesciuszko Park, where they savagely raped them. An old priest, V. I. Pomamew, who, cross in hand, tried to prevent these outrages, was beaten up by the fascists. They tore off his cassock, singed his beard, and bayonetted him to death. "Near the town of Borissov in Bielorussia, 75 women and girls attempting to flee at the approach of the German troops, fell into their hands. The Germans first raped and then savagely murdered 36 of their number. By order of a German officer named Hummer, the soldiers marched L. I. Melchukova, a 16-year-old girl, into the forest, where they raped her. A little later some other women who had also been dragged into the forest saw some boards near the trees and the dying Melchukova nailed to the boards. The Germans had cut off her breasts in the presence of these women, among whom were V. I. Alperenko, and V. H. Bereznikova. "On retreating from the village of Borovka, in the Zvenigorod district of the Moscow region, the fascists forcibly abducted several women, tearing them away from their lithe children in spite of their protests and prayers. "In the town of Tikhvin in the Leningrad region, a 15-yearold girl named H. Koledetskaya, who had been wounded by shell splinters, was taken to a hospital (a former monastery) where there were wounded German soldiers.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Despite her injuries the girl was raped by a group of German soldiers and died as a result of the assault." I omit one paragraph and continue: "But, the Hitlerites do not stop at the murder of individual Soviet citizens. Among the most appalling atrocities in the history of Hitlerite lawlessness and terrorism on German occupied Soviet territory are the nightmare mass murders of Soviet citizens which usually accompany the temporary seizure by the Germans of Soviet towns, villages, and other inhabited centers. "Here are a few instances of wholesale bloody murders carried out by the Germans against entire villages. In Yaskino, a village in the region of Smolensk, the Hitlerites shot all the old men and adolescents, and burnt the houses down to the ground. In the village of Pochinok of the same region, the Germans drove all the old men, old women, and children into the collective farm office, locked the doors and burnt them all alive. In the Ukrainian village of Yomelchino in the region of Zhitomir, the Germans locked 68 people into a small hut, sealed the doors and windows and asphyxiated to death everybody inside. In the village of Yershevo, of the Zvenigorod district in the Moscow region now liberated by our troops, the Germans prior to their withdrawal drove about 100 peaceful citizens and wounded Red Army men into a church, locked them in, and blew up the building. In the village of Agrafenovka of the Rostov region, on 16 November, the fascists arrested the entire male population between the ages of 16 and 70 and shot one man of every three." The subsequent part of the note deals with the mass German crimes known as "actions" and particularly to the "actions" in Kiev. I invite the attention of the Tribunal to the fact that the figure of those murdered in Babye Yar-as mentioned in this note- is an understatement. After the liberation of Kiev it was established that the extent of the atrocities perpetrated by the German fascist invaders far exceeds the German crimes as stated in the first instance.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Even after their expulsion from Rostov by our troops, German generals and officers publicly boasted that they would return to Rostov purposely to vent bloody retribution on the inhabitants, who had actively helped to drive their mortal enemy from their native city." On the immediate initiative of the command and officers of the units and formations of the German fascist armies, the advancing and retreating movements of their troops were often protected by the peaceful citizens, preferably by women,, old men, and children. I make no comment but I do consider it necessary to stress the fact that only those people acted like that who had perfectly understood Keitel's directive-so well known to the Tribunal-that human life "in the countries to which the directive refers, is worth exactly nothing at all." I quote further from the note of the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Page 7 of the document book, the last paragraph: "In addition to all that has already been stated, the Soviet Government have in their possession documentation bearing on the systematically repeated monstrous atrocities of the German fascist command, such as the use of Soviet civilians to cover German troops during battle with the Red Army. "On 28 August 1941 German fascist troops attempted to force the River Ipput. Powerless to overcome the stubborn resistance of the Red Army units, they assembled the population of the Bielorussian town of Dobrush in the Gomel region, and by threatening to shoot those who refused, drove women, children, and old people before them, using them as a shield when they attacked in battle formation. "The same dastardly crime against the civilian population was repeated by the German Command in the Vybori Collective Farm Sector of the Leningrad region as well as in the district of Yelna, in the region of Smolensk. The fascist thugs continue to resort to this brutal and cowardly method right up to the present day.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: On 8 December the Hitlerites made use of the local civil population to cover their retreat from the village of Yamnoye, in the region of Tula. On 12 December, in the same region, they assembled 120 persons-old people and children-and made them march in the vanguard of their troops during engagements with the advancing units of the Red Army. In the fight by our troops for the liberation of the city of Kalinin, units of the German 303rd Regiment, 162d Division, attempting to launch a counter-attack, assembled the women of one of the suburban villages, placed them in the vanguard of their troops, and then went into action. Fortunately the Soviet troops succeeded, when beating off the attack, in driving a wedge between the Hitlerites and their victims thereby saving the lives of the women." In order to satisfy the needs of the German fascist armies and in violation of all international conventions, the criminals employed the civil population for particularly dangerous work, especially for clearing the mine fields. I will quote an extract from the second part of this note, which the Tribunal will find on Page 2 of the document book, Paragraph 4. I quote: "Wherever German troops and German authorities made their appearance on Soviet territory, a regime of brutal exploitation, tyranny, and arbitrary rule was immediately established as far as the defenseless civil population was concerned. With a complete disregard for age or conditions of health, and after having taken or destroyed the houses of the Soviet citizens, a great number of these were brought to concentration camps by the Hitlerites and were compelled, under threat of torture, shooting, or death by starvation, to perform, gratuitously, various kinds of heavy labor, including work of a military nature. In a number of cases, civilians employed on one or another fob of a military nature were summarily shot to ensure secrecy.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: "Thus, for instance, in the village of Kolpino, in the region of Smolensk, the invaders drove all the farmers off to work on building bridges and dugouts for German units. Upon the completion of the construction of these fortifications, all these farmers were shot."
THE PRESIDENT: Perhaps this would be a good time to break off.
COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Yes, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: There are certain matters of a procedural nature which the Tribunal desire to consider before they consider the question of an adjournment. Accordingly they will not sit tomorrow in open session for consideration of the question of an adjournment, but they will sit tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock in closed session for consideration of these matters of a procedural character, and they will sit on Monday morning at 10 o'clock for half an hour to hear argument in open session on the question of an adjournment, one counsel being heard on each side and only for 15 minutes.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: I interrupted the quotation of a document on Page 3 of the document file, second paragraph, first column of the text. I consider it possible to skip many items contained in this document, as these facts simply confirm further the general conclusions which were expressed in the beginning of the document and which were already confirmed by many facts read into the record by me yesterday. I only beg the Tribunal to allow me to draw their attention to one of the stipulations in the note which the Tribunal will find on Page 3 of the book of documents, second paragraph, first column of the text. It states that the civilian inhabitants were forcibly sent to concentration camps, thus artificially and illegally increasing the number of prisoners of war and subjecting the peaceful population to the inhuman regime which was established by the German fascist authorities for the prisoners of war. I submit to the Tribunal further an extract from the minutes of the court-martial of a military tribunal of the 374th Liuban Infantry Division, held on 29 October 1944. This document is submitted as Exhibit Number USSR-162 (DocumentNumberUSSR-162). The Tribunal will find this document on Page 67 of the document file.
DR. KURT KAUFFMANN (Counsel for Defendant Kaltenbrunner): I would like to make two motions regarding the questions relative to the submission of evidence in this case as well as to the general procedure. The first motion is that I would like to ask, with reference to Article 21 , that the submission of documents to the investigation commission, as well as any reference to them, be prohibited inasmuch as these documents do not contain definite information about the source of the information discussed here; secondly, that the written statements, which contain only summary information be read without any personal observations, and that the reading of such statements be permitted only if the cross-examination of the author as a witness is possible. I should like to submit the following Article 19 of the Charter permits all evidence which has probative value. Article 21 gives the Court the right to ask for proof regarding documents submitted to the so-called "investigation committees." The purpose of both articles, however, is to facilitate the submission of proof. The admission of written statements of various kinds leads to the danger that such statements would discriminate against an entire people and an entire nation. Then the demand of the Defense that only such proof, such documents where this danger has been eliminated, as far as possible, be admitted, seems to be justified. Many of the written statements and excerpts from committee reports read by the Russian Prosecution have had no probative value; but, furthermore, since they cannot be checked-their contents cannot be checked-they design to give a wrong impression about historical events. THE PRESIDENT Why does it not come within the last two lines of Article 21 : "The records and findings of military or other tribunals of any of the United Nations?"
DR. KAUFFMANN: Yes, the Defense is of the opinion that Article 21 permits an interpretation. Article 21 permits the reading of such documents and such reports, but does not say anything about the extent to which it has been necessary for the defendants' counsel to check the sources upon which these reports of the investigating authorities are based. We are of the opinion that the witnesses who have been questioned, for reasons of compassion, of vengeance, et cetera, have not been in a position to describe the events objectively. As jurists we know that it is exceedingly difficult to describe even simple events truthfully. Therefore, we have the duty and the responsibility for the German people to try to check these sources and to help thereby to explain and clarify the real course of events, which we see somewhat differently.
TIIE PRESIDENT: Defendants' counsel will have the opportunity at the proper time of criticizing any evidence which is offered by the Prosecution. They will be able to point out whether it is possible that certain evidence was given out of sympathy; they will be able to criticize the evidence which is given in any way they choose at the proper time. But this is not the proper time. Article 21 is perfectly clear, and it directs the Tribunal to take judicial notice of the various documents which are there set out, and expressly refers to the records and findings of military or other tribunals of any of the United Nations. This is a record and finding of a military tribunal of a Soviet court. Therefore, the Tribunal is directed in express terms by Article 21 to take judicial notice of it. That does not prevent defendants' counsel, when they make their speeches in defense, from criticizing the evidence upon which that record and findings proceed; but to say it ought not to be admitted appears to me, at any rate, and I think to the other members of the Tribunal, to be really entirely unfounded as an objection.
DR. KAUFFMANN: I thank you.