dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
COL. POKROVSKY: Many occasions were observed when prisoners, worn out by starvation, would collapse under the strain of work beyond their strength and were immediately shot by Sonderfuehrer Szepalsky, Sonderfuehrer Bram, Hoimann Mauser, and Sonderfuehrer Wagner. "There was, in Smolensk, a hospital for prisoners of war; Soviet doctors working at that hospital stated: Up to July 1942, the patients lay unbandaged on the floor. Their clothes and bedding were covered not only with dirt but with pus. The rooms were unheated and the floors of the corridors coated with ice." A report of a medico-legal examination is appended, Your Honors, to the statement of the Extraordinary State Commission which I have just quoted. Experts such as Academician Burdenko, member of the Extraordinary Commission, Dr. Prosorovsky, chief medico-forensic expert of the People's Commissariat for the Care of Public Health in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Smolianov, Professor of Forensic Medicine at the Second Moscow Medical Institute, and other specialists, conducted-from 1 to 16 October 1943-numerous exhumations and medico-legal autopsies on the corpses in Smolensk and the vicinity of Smolensk. A great many mass graves were opened which contained the corpses of such persons who had been killed during the German fascist occupation. The number of corpses which were found in these graves was between 500 and 4,500 at each place where such mass executions took place. I shall read into the Record only such excerpts from the findings of the experts' investigation as have a direct bearing on my subject. You will find the paragraph which I am now quoting on Page 61 of your document book, corresponding to Page 9 of our Exhibit Number USSR-56 (Document Number USSR-56).
COL. POKROVSKY: "The corpses found in the pits were for the most part either partially or completely naked, or else clothed in worn-out underwear; only in the minority of cases did the bodies disinterred wear clothes or military uniforms." It is stated in Paragraph 2 on the next page of the Document Number USSR-56-page 62 of the document book-Paragraph 2: "Identity documents were found in 16 cases only-3 passports, 1 Red Army book, and 12 military identity 'medallions.' By 'medallions' I mean the small tube-like cases, not unlike a needle case in appearance, issued to each soldier in the Red Army. A document giving the soldier's name, his father's name, surname, and rank, together with his home address, is slipped into this tube. "In some cases partly preserved articles of clothing and tattoo marks alone could help in establishing the identity of the deceased." This circumstance confirms the fact that the Germans endeavored to make the identification of their victims impossible, as demanded in special German directives. The fist paragraph on Page 11 of Document Number 56, corresponding to your Page 63 in the document book, says: "The autopsies performed on corpses taken from graves in the area of the large and small concentration camps at Plant 35, of the former German hospital for prisoners of war,, of a sawmill, and of concentration camps near the villages of Becherskaya and Rakyina, revealed that, according to the data of the autopsies, death in an overwhelming majority of cases could be ascribed to hunger, starvation, and acute infectious diseases.
COL. POKROVSKY: "An objective proof of death from starvation, over and above the total absence of all subcutaneous fatty tissues, as disclosed during the autopsies, was the discovery, in a number of cases, of grassy substances, remains of rough leaves and plant stalks in the abdominal cavity." On the same page, but rather lower down, in Paragraph 4, we read: "The considerable number of burial-pits opened (87), filled with masses of corpses, together with the estimated differences in the time of burial, differences ranging from the second half of 1941, 1942, and 1943, testify to the systematic extermination of Soviet citizens. "The victims, in an overwhelming majority of cases, were men and men mostly in the prime of life, that is, between the ages of 20 and 40." Somewhat lower, on the same page: "Special attention was attracted by the fact that the exhumed corpses, with few exceptions, regularly lacked footwear. Clothing, too, was absent, as a rule, or consisted of worn-out underwear or parts of outer garments. The natural conclusion drawn from these facts is that the removal of clothes and footwear of any value had become the usual and officially recognized procedure preceding the extermination of Soviet citizens." In conclusion, the commission deals with the means of extermination, that is, shooting, asphyxiation by gas, and so forth. All this is not new to us and it is not necessary at present to read this part of the conclusion. In our document, Exhibit Number USSR-6(c) (Document Number USSR-6(c)), minutes are quoted from the report of the medicolegal experts as well as the findings of the board of medical experts. We find them on Pages 9, 10, 11, and 12 of the document. I shall set forth, in brief, the contents of the minutes and shall quote a few words from the findings. According to the minutes, the Hitlerites had set up a large camp for prisoners of war in the town of Rawa-Ruska, 52 kilometers northeast from the city of Lvov.
COL. POKROVSKY: In this camp a large number of Soviet and French prisoners of war were interned, and there they perished; they were shot, died of infectious diseases, or starved to death. The commission of medico-legal experts opened up a large number of graves. Some of these graves had been camouflaged by green shrubs and grass. A considerable number of bodies unearthed were dressed in military or semimilitary clothing. In some cases identity medallions of Red Army soldiers were discovered inside the clothes. The ages of the prisoners whose bodies were recovered from the graves ranged from 20 to 40 years. It is said in the findings-the extract quoted is on Page 70 of the document book: "The data of the autopsies performed on the exhumed bodies justify the conclusion that bodies of Soviet prisoners of war had, in effect, been buried in the forementioned graves. The burial was on a mass scale. The bodies were placed in each grave at a rate of 350-400 corpses (the grave measuring 7 by 4 meters), in layers, one layer on the other. The bodies were buried in the clothes they had worn at the time of death. The absence of footwear on all the corpses indicates that the Soviet prisoners, when alive, were kept unshod or else that their footwear was removed after death. The prisoners were interned in appallingly unsanitary conditions, since all the clothing found was vermin-infested. Judging by the clothes, death, in the majority of cases, must have occurred during the cold season of the year. Nevertheless, practically no warm clothing was found on any of the bodies. To escape the cold, the prisoners of war had dressed in two or three sets of summer uniforms, had wrapped themselves UD in sacking, towels . . ." I omit a few sentences from this statement and wish to read into the Record the part dealing with the total number of corpses. It is on Page 70 of your document book: "The number of graves (36), their size, and the number of bodies discovered justify us in believing that from 10,000 to 12,000 bodies of Soviet prisoners of war were buried in this area.
COL. POKROVSKY: The degree of their decomposition points to the fact that the corpses had been buried underground for about 3 years, that is, the time of burial must be placed somewhere in the late autumn or in the winter of 1941-1942." A special section of the report of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union for the determination and investigation of atrocities committed by the German fascist invaders in the city and region of Orel-which I submit to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-46 (Document Number USSR-46)-records the mass extermination of prisoners of war carried out over a long period of time. The prisoner-of-war camp was set up in the city jail of Orel. After the Hitlerite invaders had been driven from Orel, the Extraordinary Commission was able to secure the testimony of doctors who had been in this camp and who had fortuitously escaped with their lives. Included in this report are the personal observations of a member of the Extraordinary State Committee, Academician Burdenko, who personally examined people liberated by the Red "Army from the camp, from the camp premises, and from the socalled camp hospital. The general conclusion is that in the camp of 13 Feb. 4G Oreland in others the Hitlerites bodily exterminated the Soviet people with characteristic German thoroughness. The prisoners received 200 grams of bread and a liter of soup made from rotten soy beans and moldy flour. The bread was baked with an admixture of sawdust. The camp administration, doctors included, treated the prisoners atrociously. I should like to quote a few excerpts from the report of the commission, and I shall start from Paragraph 5, Page 2 of the document, which you will find on Page 72 of the document book: "The camp commander, Major Hoffmann, flogged the prisoners and forced persons exhausted by hunger to carry out heavy manual work in the local quarries and in the unloading of ammunition. "Boots and shoes were taken from the prisoners and replaced by wooden clogs.
COL. POKROVSKY: "In the winter these clogs became slippery and the prisoners, when walking, and especially when going up to the ad and 3rd floor, would slip on the stairs and be lamed." Dr. H. I. Zvetkov, a former inmate of the prisoner-of-war camp, testified as follows. I quote, and you will find the excerpt quoted on Page 72 and at the beginning of Page 73: "I can only describe the attitude of the German Command towards the prisoners of war, during my stay in the camp at Orel, as one of deliberate extermination of manpower in the person of the prisoners. The food ration, which at best contained a maximum of only 700 calories, led, when work was hard and beyond their strength, to complete exhaustion of the organism (cachexia) and to death.... "Despite our categorical protests and our struggle against this mass murder of the people of the Soviet, the German camp doctors, Kuper and Beckel, maintained that the diet was perfectly satisfactory. Moreover, they denied that the oedemata from which so many of the prisoners suffered were due to starvation and quite calmly ascribed the condition entirely to heart or kidney troubles. The very mention of the term 'hunger oedema' was forbidden in the diagnosis. Mortality in the camp assumed mass proportions. Of the total number of persons murdered, 3,000 died of starvation and of complications arising from malnutrition. "The prisoners lived in indescribably appalling conditions. The overcrowding was incredible. Fuel and water were completely lacking. Everything was infested by vermin. From 50 to 80 people were crammed into a ward 15 to 20 square meters in size. Prisoners would die at the rate of five or six per ward, and the living would have to sleep on the dead." It is further said that a particularly terrible regime existed for those included in the category of recalcitrants. They were put into a special building, named the death block. The inmates of this block were shot on schedule, five to six persons being taken to execution every Tuesday and Friday. The German physician Kuper was one of those present at the shootings.
COL. POKROVSKY: Academician Burdenko established that in the so-called hospital people were exterminated in the same manner as in the rest of the camp. In the penultimate paragraph, on Page 3, we read-members of the Tribunal will find this passage on Page 73 of the document book: "The scenes which I had to witness defy all imagination. My joy at the sight of the liberated people was marred by the fact that their faces bore an expression of utter stupor. This made me think, 'What is the matter here?' Evidently the sufferings they had undergone erased from their minds all distinction between life and death. "I observed these people for 3 days and bandaged their wounds while moving them from the camp, but the mental stupor remained. Something similar could also be seen on the faces of the doctors during the first few days. "People perished in the camp from disease, starvation, and floggings. In the so-called 'hospital' prison they died of wound infection, sepsis, and starvation." On the 2d day of May 1945, there was captured in Berlin a member of the SS, Paul Ludwig Gottlieb Waldmann. The son of a shopkeeper, Ludwig Waldmann, he was born in Berlin on 17 October 1914. From information received, his mother, up to the time of his capture, was living in the city of Brunswick, Donnerburweg 60. He testified personally to facts known to him regarding the mass extermination of Soviet prisoners of war. He witnessed these exterminations while working as a driver in different camps and himself participated in the mass killings. His testimony is on Page 9 of Exhibit Number USSR-52 (Document Number USSR-52), entitled, "Camp Auschwitz." He provides more detailed information on the murders in the camp at Sachsenhausen. Towards the end of summer 1941, the Sonderkommando of the Security Police in this camp exterminated Russian prisoners of war daily for a whole month. Paul Ludwig Gottlieb Waldmann testified-you will find the excerpt I am quoting on Page 82-that: "The Russian prisoners of war had to walk about one kilometer from the station to the camp.
COL. POKROVSKY: In the camp they stayed one night without food. The next night they were led away for execution. The prisoners were constantly being transferred from the inner camp on three trucks, one of which was driven by me. The inner camp was approximately one and three-quarters of a kilometer from the execution grounds. The execution itself took place in the barracks which had recently been constructed for this purpose. "One room was reserved for undressing and another for waiting; in one of them a radio played rather loudly. It was done purposely so that the prisoners could not guess that death awaited them. From the second room they went, one by one, through a passage into a small fenced-in room with an iron grid let into the floor. Under the grid was a drain. As soon as a prisoner of war was killed, the corpse was carried out by two German prisoners while the blood was washed off the grid. "In this small room there was a slot in the wall, approximately 50 centimeters in length. The prisoner of war stood with the back of his head against the slot and a sniper shot at him from behind the slot. In practice this arrangement did not prove satisfactory, since the sniper often missed the prisoner. After 8 days a new arrangement was made. The prisoner, as before, was placed against the wall; an iron plate was then slowly lowered onto his head. The prisoner was under the impression that he was being measured for height. The iron plate contained a ramrod which shot out suddenly and poleaxed the prisoner with a blow on the back of the head. He dropped dead. The iron plate was operated by a foot lever in a corner of the room. The personnel working in the room belonged to the above-mentioned Sonderkommando. "By request of the execution squad, I was also forced to work this apparatus. I shall refer to the subject later. The bodies of prisoners thus murdered were burned in four mobile crematories transported in trailers and attached to motor cars. I had to ride constantly from the inner camp to the execution yard. I had to make 10 trips a night with 10 minutes' interval between trips.
COL. POKROVSKY: It was during these intervals that I witnessed the executions...." It is a long way from these individual murders to the death factories of Treblinka, Dachau, and Auschwitz, but the tendency, the line of action are identical. Methods and extent of the killings varied. The Hitlerites endeavored to discover ways and means for the rapid mass extermination of human beings. They spent much time on the solution of this problem. To realize their ambition they began to work on the solution even prior to their attack on the Soviet Union by inventing different implements and instruments of murder, while peaceful inhabitants and prisoners of war alike ended up as victims of Hitler's executioners. I present to the Tribunal the report of the Extraordinary Commission on the German atrocities in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. This is Exhibit Number USSR-7 (Document Number USSR-7). Here, as in other places, the mass extermination of Soviet prisoners of war formed part of the savage plan of the fascist aggressors. I shall quote a few sentences from Page 6 of this document. In your copy it is marked with pencil, on Page 86 of the document book: "In Kaunas, in Fort Number 6, there was a camp, Number 336, for Soviet prisoners of war. The prisoners in the camp were subjected to cruel torture and insult, in strict accordance with the inhuman 'directions to the supervisors and escorts attached to labor detachments.' The prisoners of war in Fort Number 6 were doomed to inanition and death from starvation.
COL. POKROVSKY: ° "The witness, Medishevskaja, informed the Commission: 'The prisoners of war were terribly starved; I saw them pluck grass and eat it."' I omit a few sentences and read on: "At the entrance to Camp Number 336, there still exists a board with the following inscription in German, Lithuanian, and Russian: 'All those who maintain contact with prisoners of war, especially those who try to give them food, cigarettes, or civilian clothes, will be shot!' "There was in the camp at Fort Number 6 a 'hospital' for prisoners of war which in reality served as a point of transfer from the camp to the grave. The prisoners of war thrown into this 'hospital' were doomed to death. "According to monthly statistics of sickness among the prisoners of war in Fort Number 6, from September 1941 to July 1942, that is, over a period of 11 months only, the number of dead Soviet prisoners amounted to 13,936." I shall abstain from reading the list of graves opened; I shall merely quote the sentence indicating the sum total of the graves, "All told, 35,000 prisoners of war were buried in these graves, according to the camp documents." Besides Camp Number 336, in the same town of Kaunas, there existed another, unnumbered camp on the southwestern border of the airfield. It is stated, in connection with this camp, that: "As in Fort Number 6, starvation, the lash, and the truncheon reigned in this camp.
COL. POKROVSKY: Exhausted prisoners of war, no longer able to move, were carried out every day beyond the precincts of the camp, placed alive in previously prepared pits, and covered with earth." The last three lines of the left column, on Page 6 of the Document Number USSR-7-Page 86 of your document book-state as follows: "The records, documents, and testimonies of witnesses enabled the commission to establish that here, within the precincts of the airfield, nearly 10,000 Soviet prisoners had been tortured to death and buried." The report mentions one more camp, Number 133, near the town of Alitus, and a few more which had been established in July 1941 and existed up to April 1943. In these camps the prisoners froze to death. When unloaded from the railway coaches, such prisoners of war who were unable to walk were shot out of hand. The remaining prisoners were tortured until they lost consciousness, hanged by their feet on chains, brought back to consciousness by having cold water dashed over them; then the whole process would be repeated all over again. Giving the sum total of prisoners murdered, the commission writes-the few lines which I am about to quote are likewise on the same page, 86, of the document book: "It had been established that no less than 165,000 Soviet prisoners of war were executed by the Germans in the abovementioned camps of the Lithuanian S.S.R." The extermination of Soviet prisoners of war was, quite literally, carried out in every camp. Thousands of Soviet soldiers likewise perished in the extermination camp of Maidanek. The second paragraph of Page 5 of the joint Polish and Soviet communiqué of the Extraordinary Commission, which is presented to you as Exhibit Number USSR-29 (Document Number USSR-29)-corresponding to your Page 92 of the document book-states that: "The entire blood-stained history of this camp begins with the mass shooting of Soviet prisoners of war, organized by the SS in November and December 1941. Out of a group of 2,000 Soviet war prisoners, only 80 remained alive.
COL. POKROVSKY: All the rest were shot except a few who were racked and tortured to death. "Between January and April 1942 more transports of Soviet prisoners of war were brought to the camp and shot. Nedzelek Jan, hired to work in the camp as a truck driver, testified: "'About 5,000 Russian prisoners of war were exterminated by the Germans in the winter of 1942 by the following method: They were taken from their barracks in trucks and driven to the pits of a former stone quarry, and in these pits they were shot.' "Prisoners of war of the former Polish Army, captured as far back as 1939 and imprisoned in various German camps, were already concentrated, in 1940, in the Lublin camp on Lipovoja Street and were soon after transferred, in batches, to the extermination camp of Maidanek, where they suffered the same fate: systematic torture, murder, mass shooting, et cetera. "The witness, Reznik, testified as follows: " 'In January 1941, we, a party of approximately 4,000 Jewish prisoners of war, were placed into railway coaches and sent to the East....We were brought to Lublin, unloaded and handed over to the SS. About September or October 1942, it was decided that only those people who were qualified as skilled plant and factory workers, and therefore needed in the town, were to be left in the camp on Number 7 Lipovoja Street, while the rest, and I among them, were transferred to Maidanek Camp. All of us already knew-and knew far too well-that deportation to Maidanek meant death. Of this party of more than 4,000 prisoners of war, only a few individuals, who had managed to escape while engaged in work outside the camp, remained alive. "'In the summer of 1943, 300 Soviet officers, including two colonels, four majors, with the remainder consisting of captains and senior lieutenants, were brought to Maidanek. The officers in question were shot in the camp."' Huge camps for the extermination of Soviet prisoners of war had been organized by German fascists in the territory of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic.