dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
CAPPELEN: I said, "My comrade is very ill, could not he have some aspirins?" "Oh no," he said, "it is a waste to give him aspirin, because he is to be shot in the morning." Next morning he was brought out of the cell, and after the war they found him up at Trondheim together with other Norwegians in a grave there with a bullet through his neck. Well, the Moellergate 19, in Oslo, the prison where I was for about 25 months, was a house of horror. I heard every night nearly every night-people screaming and groaning. One day, it must have been in December 1943, about the 8th of December, they came into my cell and told me to dress. It was in the night. I put on my ragged clothes, what I had. Now I had recovered, practically. I was naturally lame on the one side, could not walk so well, but I could walk; and I went down in the corridor and there they placed me as usual against the wall, and I waited that they would bring me away and shoot me. But they did not shoot me; they brought me to Germany together with lots of other Norwegians. I learned afterward s about some few of my friends-and by friends, I mean Norwegians. We were so-called " Nacht und Nebel " prisoners, "Night and Mist" prisoners. We were brought to a camp called Natzweiler, in Alsace. It was a very bad camp, I must say. We had to work to take stones out of the mountains. But I shall not bore you about my tales from Natzweiler, My Lord, I will only say that people of all other nations-French, Russians, Dutch, and Belgians-were there and we are about five hundred Norwegians who have been there. Between 60 and 70 percent died there or in other camps of concentration. Also, two Danes were there. Well, we saw many cruel things there, so cruel that they need they are well known. The camp had to be evacuated in September 1944. We were then brought to Dachau near Munich, but we did not stay long there; at least, I didn't stay long there. I was sent to a Kommando called Aurich in East Friesland, where we were about-that was an under-Kommando of Neuengamme, near Hamburg. We were about fifteen hundred prisoners.
CAPPELEN: We had to dig tank traps. Well, we had to walk every day about 3 or 4 hours, and go by train for 1 hour to the Panzer Graben where we worked. The work was so strong and so hard and the way they treated us so bad, that most of them died there. I suppose about half of the prisoners died of dysentery or of ill-treatment in the five or six weeks we were there. It was too much even for the SS, who had to take care of the camp, so they gave it up, I suppose; and I was sent from Neuengamme, near Hamburg, to a camp called GrossRosen, in Silesia; it is near Breslau. That was a very bad camp, too. We were about 40 Norwegians there; and of those 40 Norwegians we were about 10 left after 4 to 5 weeks.
THE PRESIDENT: You will be some little time longer, so I think we better adjourn now for 10 minutes. [A recess was taken.]
M. DUBOST: M. Cappelen, will you continue to speak to us of your passage through those camps, particularly of what you know of the camp of Natzweiler and the role at Natzweiler of Dr. Hirt, Hirch, or Hirtz of the German medical faculty of Strasbourg?
CAPPELEN: Well, in Natzweiler, yes, there were also carried on experiments. Just beside the camp there was a farm they called Struthof. That was practically a part of the camp; and some of the prisoners had to work there to clean up the rooms; and-well not so often, but sometimes-they were taken out. For instance, one day, I remember, all the Gypsies were taken out, and then they were brought down to Struthof. They were very afraid of being brought down there. Well, one friend of mine, a Norwegian called Hvidding, who had a job in the hospital-so-called hospital-in the camp, told me the day after the Gypsies were taken and brought to Struthof, "I tell you something. They have, so far as I understand, tried some sort of gas on them." "How do you know that?" I asked. "Well, come along with me." And then, through the window of the hospital, I could see four of the Gypsies lying in beds. They did not look well, and it was not easy to look through the glass, but they had some mucus, I suppose, around their mouths. And he told me that they had Hvidding told me-that the Gypsies could not tell much because they were so ill, but so far as he understood, it was gas which they had used upon them. There had been 12 of them, and 4 were living; the other 8, so far as he understood, died down there at Struthof. Then he told further on, "You see that man who sometimes walks through the camp together with some others?" "Well, I have seen him," I said. "That is Professor Hirtz from the German University in Strasbourg." I am quite sure Hvidding said that this man is Hirt or Hirtz. He is coming here now nearly daily with a so-called commission to see those who are coming back again from Struthof, to see the result. That is all I know about that so far.
M. DUBOST: How many Norwegians died at Gross-Rosen?
CAPPELEN: In Gross-Rosen, it is not possible for me to say here exactly; but I know about 40 persons who had been there, and I also know about ten who came back again. Well, Gross-Rosen was a bad camp. But nearly the worst of it all was the evacuation of Gross-Rosen. I suppose it must have been in the middle of February of that year. The Russians came nearer and nearer to Breslau.
THE PRESIDENT: You mean 1945?
CAPPELEN: Yes, 1945 1 mean. One day we were placed upon a so-called "Appellplatz" (roll call ground). We were very feeble, all of us. We had hard work, little food, and all sorts of ill-treatment. Well, we started to walk in parties of about 2,000 to 3,000. In the party I was with, we were about 2,500 to 2,800. We heard so and so many when they took up the numbers. Well, we started to walk, and we had SS guards on each side. They were very nervous and almost like mad persons. Several were drunk. We couldn't walk fast enough, and they smashed in the heads of five who could not keep up. They said in German, "That is what happens to those who cannot walk." The others would have been treated in the same way if they had not been able to follow. We walked the best we could. We attempted to help one another, but we were all too exhausted. After walking for 6 to 8 hours we came to a station, a railway station. It was very cold and we had only striped prison clothes on, and bad boots; but we said, "Oh, we are glad that we have come to a railway' station. It is better to stand in a cow truck than to walk, in the middle of winter." It was very cold, 10 to 12 degrees below zero (centigrade). It was a long train with open cars. In Norway we call them sand cars, and we were kicked on to those cars, about 80 on each car. We had to sit together and on this car we sat for about 5 days without food, cold, and without water. When it was snowing we made like this [indicating] just to get some water into the mouth and, after a long, long time-it seemed to me years-we came to a place which I afterwards learned was Dora. That is in the neighborhood of Buchenwald. Well, we arrived there. They kicked us down from the cars, but many were dead. The man who sat next to me was dead, but I had no right to get away. I had to sit with a dead man for the last day. I didn't see the figures myself, naturally, but about one-third of us or half of us were dead, getting stiff. And they told us that one third-I heard the figure afterwards in Dora-that the dead on our train numbered 1,447.
CAPPELEN: Well, from Dora I don't remember so much, because I was more or less dead. I have always been a man of good humor and high spirited, to help myself first and my friends; but I had nearly given up. I do not remember so much before, so I had a good chance, because Bernadotte's action came and we were rescued and brought to Neuengamme, near Hamburg; and when we arrived, there were some of my old friends, the student from Norway who had been deported to Germany, other prisoners who came from Sachsenhausen and other camps, and the few, comparatively few, Norwegian "NN" prisoners who *ere living, all in very bad condition. Many of my friends are still in the hospital in Norway. Some died after coming home. That's what happened to me and my comrades in the three and three-quarter years I was in prison. I am fully aware that it is impossible for me to give details more than I have done; but I have taken, so to say, the parts of it which show, I hope, the way they behaved against Norwegians, and in Norway, the German SS.
M. DUBOST: For what reason were you arrested?
CAPPELEN: I was arrested the 29th of November 1941, in a place called then Hoistly. That is a sort of sanitarium where one goes skiing.
M. DUBOST: What had you done? What was held against you? CAPPELEN: Well, what I had done. Like most of us Norwegians, we regarded ourselves to be at war with Germany in one way or another; and naturally we, most of us, were against them by feelings; and also, as the Gestapo asked me, I remember, "Mat do you think of Mr. Quisling?" I only answered, "What would you have done if a German officer-even a major-when your country was at war and your government had given an order of mobilization, he came and said, 'Better forget the Mobilization Order?"' A man can't do that with respect.
M. DUBOST: On the whole, did the German population know of, or were they unaware of, what went on in the camps?
CAPPELEN: That is, naturally, very difficult for me to answer. But in Norway, at least, even at the time when I was arrested, we knew quite a lot about how the Germans treated their prisoners. And there is one thing I remember in Munich where I was working. I was not working; I was in Dachau for that short period. With some others, I was once brought to the town of Munich to go into the ruins to seek for persons and find bombs and things like that. I suppose that was the idea. They never told us anything, but we knew what was on. We were about one hundred persons, prisoners. We were looking like dead persons, all of us looking very bad. We went through the streets and people could see us; and they also could see what we were going to do, the sort of work which one should think was very dangerous and which should in some way help them; but it was no fun for them to see us. Some of them were hollering to us, "It is your fault that we are bombed."
M. DUBOST: Were there any chaplains in your camp? Were you allowed to pray?
CAPPELEN: Well, we had among the "NN" prisoners in Natzweiler a priest from Norway. He was, I suppose, what you call in English a Dean. He was of quite high rank. In Norwegian we call it "Prost." From the west coast of Norway. He was also brought to Natzweiler as an "NN" prisoner, and some of my comrades asked him if they could not meet sometimes so he could preach to them. But he said, "No, I don't dare to do it. I had a Bible. They have taken it from me and they joked about it and said, 'You dirty churchman, if you show the Bible and things like that..."' You know, therefore, we did not do anything in that way.
M. DUBOST: Those who were dying among you, did they have the consolation of their religion at the time of their death?
CAPPELEN: No.
M. DUBOST: Were the dead treated with decency?
CAPPELEN: No.
M. DUBOST: Was there any religious service conducted? CAPPELEN: No.
M. DUBOST: I have no further questions to ask.
THE PRESIDENT: Does counsel for the U.S.S.R. desire to cross-examine?
GEN. RUDENKO: I have no question, Mr. President. THE PRESIDENT: Has the United States? [No response.] Then does any member of the defendants' counsel wish to ask the witness any questions?
DR. MERKEL: Witness, at your first interrogations which as a rule took place about ten days after arrest, were you interrogated by German or by Norwegian Gestapo men?
CAPPELEN: It was made by two Norwegians who belonged to, as I learned afterward, the so-called State Police. That was not the police in Norway. They were working together with the Gestapo; in fact, it was the same. But it was by them I was interrogated after the 10 days. But they, as I heard afterwards, usually did it in that way, because it was easy to do it in Norwegian; and some of the Germans could not speak Norwegian. Most of them could not. I think it was, therefore, that they took the Norwegian; and you can call them Gestapo, practically. They let them handle the persons first.
DR. MERKEL: Then at the Victoria Terrace, which name I believe you used to designate the Gestapo headquarters in Oslo, were there Norwegian or German officials present during your interrogation?
CAPPELEN: I dare say there may have been one Norwegian as a sort of interpreter; but as I spoke the German language, I cannot, with 100 percent surety, say if there were one or two Norwegian policemen there. It is difficult. But as Victoria Terrace was the headquarters of the Gestapo, naturally they had some Norwegian Nazis to help them there. But most of them were German.
DR. MERKEL: Were the persons who interrogated you in uniform or in civilian clothes?
CAPPELEN: During my interrogation I have sometimes seen them in uniform, too. But when they tortured me they were mostly in civilian clothes. So far as I remember, there was only one person in uniform during one of the torture interrogations.
DR. MERKEL: You stated that you were then treated by a physician. Did this physician come of his own free will or was he asked to come?
CAPPELEN: The first time I asked for a doctor, but then I did not get any. But at the time when I came back to consciousness, when I was supposed perhaps to be dead, the guard possibly had been looking at me because he was then running away; and afterwards they came with a doctor.
DR. MERKEL: Did you know that in the German concentration camps there was an absolute prohibition against talking about the conditions in the camp-among the prisoners as well as to outsiders, of course-and that any violation of the order not to talk was subject to most severe penalties?
CAPPELEN: Well, in the camps it was like this: It was naturally more or less understood that it was more or less forbidden to talk about the tortures we had gone through; but naturally in the camps, the Nacht und Nebel Camps where I was, the situation was so bad that even torture sometimes seemed to be better than dying slowly away like that, so almost the only thing we spoke about was: "When shall the war end; how to help our comrades; and are we to get some food tonight or not?"
DR. MERKEL: Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Does any other defendant's counsel wish to ask any questions? Mr. Dubost, have you anything you wish to ask?
M. DUBOST: I have nothing further to ask, Mr. President. I thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Then the witness can retire. [The witness left the stand.]
M. DUBOST: If the Tribunal will permit, we will now hear a witness, Roser, who will give a few details on the conditions under which they kept French prisoners of war in reprisal camps. [The witness, Paul Roser, took the stand.]
THE PRESIDENT: What is your name?
M. PAUL ROSER (Witness): Roser, Paul.
THE PRESIDENT: You swear to speak without hate or fear, to state the truth, all the truth, only the truth? Raise the right hand and say "I swear." [The witness raised his right, hand and repeated the oath in French.]
THE PRESIDENT: You may sit. down.
M. DUBOST: Your name is Paul Roser, R-o-s-e-r?
ROSER: R-o-s-e-r.
M. DUBOST: You were born on the 8th of May 1903? You are of French nationality?
ROSER: I am French.
M. DUBOST: You were born of French parents?
ROSER: I was born of French parents.
M. DUBOST: You were a prisoner of war?
ROSER: Yes.
M. DUBOST: You were taken prisoner in battle?
ROSER: Yes, I was.
M. DUBOST: In what year?
ROSER: 14 June 1940.
M. DUBOST: You sought to escape?
ROSER: Yes, several times.
M. DUBOST: How many times?
ROSER: Five times.
M. DUBOST: Five times. You were transferred finally to a disciplinary camp?
ROSER: Yes.
M. DUBOST: Will you indicate the regime of such a camp? Will you indicate your rank, and the treatment which French people of your rank in those disciplinary camps had to submit to, and for what reasons?
ROSER: Very well, I was an "aspirant," a rank which, in France, is between a first sergeant and a second lieutenant. I was in several disciplinary camps. The first was a small camp which the Germans called Strafkommando, in Linzburg in Hanover. It was in 1941. There we re about thirty of us. While I was in that camp during the summer of 1941, we attempted to escape. We were recaptured by our guards at the very moment when we were leaving the camp. We- were naturally unarmed. The Germans, our guards, having recaptured one of us, attempted to make him reveal the others who also had sought to escape. The man remained silent. The guards hurled t hemselves upon him, beating him with the butts of their pistols in the face, with bayonets, with the butts of their rifles. At that moment, not wishing to let our comrade be killed, several of us stepped forward and revealed that we sought to escape. I then received a beating with bayonets applied to my head and fell into a swoon. When I recovered consciousness one of the Germans was kneeling on my leg and was continuing to strike me. Another one, raising his gun, was seeking to strike my head. I was saved on that occasion through the intervention of my comrades, who threw themselves between the Germans and myself. That night we were beaten for exactly 3 hours with rifle butts, with bayonet blows, and with pistol butts in the face. I lost consciousness three times. The following day we were taken to work, nevertheless. We dug trenches for the draining of the marshes. It was a very hard sort of work, which started at 6:30 in the morning, to be completed at 6 o'clock at night. We had two stops, each of a half-hour. We had nothing to eat during the day. Soup was given to us, when we came back at night, with a piece of bread, a small sausage or 2 cubic centimeters of margarine, and that was all. Following our attempted escape, our guards held back from us all the parcels which our families sent to us for a month. We could not write nor could we receive mail. At the end of three and a half months, in September 1941, we were shipped to the regular Kommandos.
ROSER: I, personally, was quite ill at that time and I came back to Stalag X B at Sandbostel.
M. DUBOST: Why were you subjected to such a special regime, although you were an "aspirant"?
ROSER: Certainly because of my attempted escape.
M. DUBOST: Had you agreed to work?
ROSER: No, not at all. Like all my comrades of the same rank and like most of the noncommissioned officers and like all "aspirants," I had refused to work, invoking the provision of the Geneva Convention , which Germany had signed and which prescribed that noncommissioned officers who were prisoners cannot be forced to perform any labor without their consent. The German Army, into whose hands we had fallen, practically speaking, never respected that agreement undertaken by Germany.
M. DUBOST: Are you familiar with executions that took place in Oflag XI B?
ROSER: I was made familiar with the death of several French or Allied prisoners, specifically at Oflag XI at Grossborn in Pomerania. A French prisoner, Lieutenant Robin, who with some of his comrades- had prepared an escape and for that purpose had dug a tunnel, was killed in the following manner: The Germans having had information that the tunnel had been prepared, Hauptmann Buchmann, who was a member of the officer staff of the camp, watched with a few German guards for the exit of the would-be escapees. Lieutenant Robin, who was first to emerge, was killed with one shot while obviously he could in no manner attack anyone or defend himself. Other cases of this type occurred. One of my friends, a French Lieutenant Ledoux, who was sent to Graudenz Fortress where he was subjected to a hard detention regime, saw his best friend, British Lieutenant Anthony Thomson, killed by Hauptfeldwebel Ostreich with one pistol shot in the neck, in their own cell. Lieutenant Thomson had just sought to escape and had been recaptured by the Germans on the airfield. Lieutenant Thomson belonged to the RAF. I should like to state also that in the camp of Rawa-Ruska in Galicia, where I spent 5 months, several of our comrades ...
M. DUBOST: Would you tell us why you were at Rawa-Ruska?
ROSER: In the course of the winter, 1941-42, the Germans wanted to intimidate, first, the noncommissioned officers who were refractory in labor; second, those who had sought to escape; and third, the men who were being employed in Kommandos (labor gangs) and who were caught in the act of performing, sabotage. The Germans warned us that from I April 1942 onward all these escapees who were recaptured would be sent to a camp, a special camp called a Straflager, at Rawa-Ruska in Poland. It was following another attempt to escape that I was taken to Poland with about two thousand other Frenchmen. I was at Limburg- an-der-Lahii, Stalag XII A, where we were regrouped and placed in railway cars. We were stripped of our clothes, of our shoes, of all the food which some of us had been able to keep. We were placed in cars, in each of which the number varied from 53 to 56. The trip lasted 6 days. The cars were open generally for a few minutes in the course of a stop in the countryside. In 6 days we were given soup on 2 occasions only, once at Oppel, and another time at Jaroslan, and the soup was not -edible. We remained for 36 hours without anything to drink in the course of that trip, as we had no receptacle with us and it was impossible to get a supply of water. When we reached Rawa-Ruska on I June 1942, we found other prisoners-most of them French, who had been there for several weeks-extremely discouraged, with a ration scale much inferior to anything that we had experienced until then, and no International Red Cross or family parcel for anyone. At that time there were about twelve to thirteen thousand in that camp. There was for that number one single faucet which supplied, for several hours a day, undrinkable water. This situation lasted until the visit of two Swiss doctors, who came to the camp in September, I think. The billets consisted of 4 barracks, where rooms contained as many as 600 men. We were stacked in tiers along the walls, 3 rows of them, 30 to 40 centimeters for each of us.
ROSER: During our stay in Rawa-Ruska there were many attempts at escape, more than five hundred in 6 months. Several of our comrades were killed. Some were killed at the time when a guard noticed them. In spite of the sadness of such occurrences, no one of us contested the rights of our guards in such cases, but several were murdered. In particular, on 12 August 1942, in the Tarnopol Kommando, a soldier, Lavesque, was found bearing evidence of several shots and several large wounds caused by bayonets. On the 14th of August, in the Verciniec Kommando, 93 Frenchmen, having succeeded in digging a tunnel, escaped. The following morning three of them, Conan, Van den Boosch, and Poutrelle, were caught by German soldiers, who were searching for them. Two of them were sleeping; the third, Poutrelle, was not asleep. The Germans, a corporal and two enlisted men, verified the identity of the three Frenchmen. Very calmly they told them: "Now we are obliged to kill you." The three wretched men spoke of their families, begged for mercy. The German corporal gave the following reply, which we heard only too often: "Befehl ist Befehl" ("An order is an order"); and they shot down immediately two of the French prisoners, Van den Boosch and Conan. Poutrelle was left like a madman and by sheer luck was not caught again. But he was captured a few days later in the region of Krakow. He was then brought back to Rawa-Ruska proper, where we saw him in a condition close to madness. On the 14th of August, once again in the Stryj Kommando, a team of about twenty prisoners accompanied by several guards, were on their way to work ....