dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
JUDGE JOHN. J. PARKER (Alternate Member of the Tribunal for the United States): On 12 June 1942 the Chief of the Sipo, and SD published, through Mueller, the Gestapo Chief, an order authorizing the use of "third degree" methods of interrogation, where preliminary investigation had indicated that the person could give information on important matters, such as subversive activities, though not for the purpose of extorting confessions of the prisoner's own crimes. This order provided: "...Third degree may, under this supposition, only be employed against Communists, Marxists, Jehovah's Witnesses, saboteurs, terrorists, members of resistance movements, parachute agents, anti-social elements, Polish or Soviet Russian loafers or tramps[8]); in all other cases my permission must first be obtained.... Third degree can, according to circumstances, consist amongst other methods of very simple diet (bread and water), hard bunk, dark cell, deprivation of sleep, exhaustive drilling, also in flogging (for more than 20 strokes a doctor must be consulted)." The brutal suppression of all opposition to the German occupation was not confined to severe measures against suspected members of resistance movements themselves, but was also extended to their families. On 19 July 1944, the Commander of the Sipo and, SD in the district of Radom, in Poland, published an order, transmitted through the Higher SS and Police Leaders, to the effect that in all cases of assassination or attempted assassination of Germans, or where saboteurs had destroyed vital installations, not only the guilty person, but also all his or her male relatives should be shot, and female relatives over 16 years of 'age put into a concentration camp.
JUDGE JOHN. J. PARKER (Alternate Member of the Tribunal for the United States): In the summer of 1944 the Einsatzkommando of the Sipo and SD at Luxembourg caused persons to be confined at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp because they were relatives of deserters, and were therefore "expected to endanger the interest of the German Reich if allowed to go free." The practice of keeping hostages to prevent and to punish any form of civil disorder was resorted to by the Germans; an order issued by the Defendant Keitel on 16 of September 1941 spoke in terms of fifty or a hundred lives from the occupied areas of the Soviet Union for one German life taken. The order stated that "it should be remembered that a human life in unsettled countries frequently counts for nothing and a deterrent effect can be obtained only by unusual severity." The exact number of persons killed as a result of this policy is not known, but large numbers were killed in France and the other occupied territories in the West, while in the East the slaughter was on an even more extensive scale. In addition to the killing of hostages, entire towns were destroyed in some cases; such massacres as those of Oradour-sur-Glane in France and Lidice in Czechoslovakia, both of which were described to the Tribunal in detail, are examples of the organized use of terror by the occupying forces to beat down and destroy all opposition to their rule. One of the most notorious means of terrorizing the people in occupied territories was the use of concentration camps. They were first established in Germany at the moment of the seizure of power by the Nazi Government. Their original purpose was to imprison without trial all those persons who were opposed to the Government, or who were in any way obnoxious to German authority. With the aid of a secret police force, this practice was widely extended, and in the course of time concentration camps became places of organized and systematic murder, where millions of people were destroyed. In the administration of the occupied territories the concentration camps were used to destroy all opposition groups.
JUDGE JOHN. J. PARKER (Alternate Member of the Tribunal for the United States): The persons arrested by the Gestapo were as a rule sent to concentration camps. They were conveyed to the camps, in! many cases without any care whatever being taken for them, and great numbers died on the way. Those who arrived at the camp were subject to systematic cruelty. They were given hard physical labor, inadequate food, clothes, and shelter, and were subject at all times to the rigors of a soulless regime, and the private whims of individual guards. In the report of the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate's Section of the 3d US Army, under date 21 June 1945, the conditions at the Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp were investigated, and one passage may be quoted: "Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp can best be described as a factory dealing in death. Although this camp had in view the primary object of putting to work the mass slave labor, another of its primary objects was the elimination of human lives by the methods employed in handling the prisoners. Hunger and starvation rations, sadism, inadequate clothing, medical neglect, disease, beatings, hangings, freezings, forced suicides, shooting, et cetera, all played a major role in obtaining their object. Prisoners were murdered at random; spite killings against Jews were common, injections of poison and shooting in the neck were everyday occurrences; epidemics of typhoid and spotted fever were permitted to run rampant as a means of eliminating prisoners; life in this camp meant nothing. Killing became a common thing, so common that a quick death was welcomed by the unfortunate ones." A certain number of the concentration camps were equipped with gas chambers for the wholesale destruction of the inmates, and with furnaces for the burning of the bodies. Some of them were in fact used for the extermination of Jews as part of the "final solution" of the Jewish problem. Most of the non-Jewish inmates were used for labor, although the conditions under which they worked made labor and death almost synonymous terms.
JUDGE JOHN. J. PARKER (Alternate Member of the Tribunal for the United States): Those inmates who became ill and were unable to work were either destroyed in the gas chambers or sent to special infirmaries, where they were given entirely inadequate medical treatment, worse food if possible than the working inmates, and left to die. The murder and ill-treatment of civilian populations reached its height in the treatment of the citizens of the Soviet Union and Poland. Some four weeks before the invasion of Russia began, special task forces of the Sipo and SD, called Einsatzgruppen, were formed on the orders of Himmler for the purpose of following the German armies into Russia, combating partisans and members of resistance groups, and exterminating the Jews and Communist leaders, and other sections of the population. In the beginning, four such Einsatzgruppen were formed, one operating in the Baltic states, one toward Moscow, one toward Kiev, and one operating in the south of Russia. Ohlendorf, former Chief of Amt III of the RSHA, who led the fourth group, stated in his affidavit: "When the German Army invaded Russia, I was leader of Einsatzgruppe D, in the southern sector, and in the course of the year during which I was leader of the Einsatzgruppe D it liquidated approximately 90,000 men, women, and children. The majority of those liquidated were Jews, but there were also among them some Communist functionaries." In an order issued by the Defendant Keitel on 23 July 1941 and drafted by the Defendant Jodl, it was stated that: "In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East, the forces available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished, not by legal prosecution of the guilty, but by the spreading of such terror by the Armed Forces as is alone appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist among the population.... Commanders must find the means of keeping order by applying suitable draconian measures." The evidence has shown that this order was ruthlessly carried out in the territory of the Soviet Union and in Poland.
JUDGE JOHN. J. PARKER (Alternate Member of the Tribunal for the United States): A significant illustration of the measures actually applied occurs in the document which was sent in 1943. to the Defendant Rosenberg by the Reich Commissioner for Eastern Territories, who wrote: "It should be possible to avoid atrocities and to bury those who have been liquidated. To lock men, women, and children into barns and set fire to them does not appear to be a suitable method of combating bands, even if it is desired to exterminate the population. This method is not worthy of the German cause, and damages our reputation severely." The Tribunal has before it an affidavit of one Hermann Graebe, dated 10 November 1945, describing the immense mass murders which he witnessed. He was the manager and engineer in charge of the branch of the Solingen firm of Joseph Jung in Sdolbunov, Ukraine, from September 1941 to January 1944. He first of an described the attack upon the Jewish ghetto at Rovno: "... then the electric floodlights which had been erected all round the ghetto were switched on. SS and militia details of four to six members entered, or at least tried to enter, the houses. Where the doors and windows were closed, and the inhabitants did not open upon the knocking, the SS men and militia broke the windows, forced the doors with beams and crowbars, and entered the dwellings. The owners were driven on to the street just as they were, regardless of whether they were dressed or whether they had been in bed.... Car after car was filled. Over it hung the screaming of women and children, the cracking of whips and rifle shots." Graebe then described how a mass execution at Dubno, which he witnessed on 5 October 1942, was carried out: "Now I heard shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks, men, women, and children of all ages, had to undress upon the orders of an SS man, who carried a riding or dog whip....
JUDGE JOHN. J. PARKER (Alternate Member of the Tribunal for the United States): Without screaming or crying, these people undressed, stood around by families, kissed each other, said farewells, and waited for the command of another SS man, who stood near the excavation, also with a whip in his hand.... At that moment the SS man at the excavation called something to his comrade. The latter counted off about 20 persons, and instructed them to walk behind the earth mound.... I walked around the mound and stood in front of a tremendous grave; closely pressed together, the people were lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. The excavation was already two-thirds full; I estimated that it contained about a thousand people.... Now already the next group approached, descended into the excavation, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot." The foregoing crimes against the civilian population are sufficiently appalling, and yet the evidence shows that at any, rate in the East, the mass murders and cruelties were not committed solely for the purpose of stamping out opposition or resistance to the German occupying forces. In Poland and the Soviet Union these crimes were part of a plan to get rid of whole native populations by expulsion and annihilation, in order that their territory could be used for colonization by Germans. Hitler had written in Mein Kampf on these lines, and the plan was clearly stated by Himmler in July 1942, when he wrote: "It is not our task to germanize the East in the old sense, that is to teach the people there the German language and the German law, but to see to it that only people of purely Germanic blood live in the East." In August 1942 the policy for the Eastern Territories as laid down by Bormann was summarized by a subordinate of Rosenberg as follows: "The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous.
JUDGE JOHN. J. PARKER (Alternate Member of the Tribunal for the United States): The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable." It was Himmler again who stated in October 1943: "What happens to a Russian, a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest.[9]) What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take. If necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture, otherwise it is of no interest to me." In Poland the intelligentsia had been marked down for extermination as early as September 1939, and in May 1940 the Defendant Frank wrote in his diary of "taking advantage of the focussing of world interest on the Western Front, by wholesale liquidation of thousands of Poles, first leading representatives of the Polish intelligentsia." Earlier, Frank had been directed to reduce the "entire Polish economy to an absolute minimum necessary for bare existence. The Poles shall be the slaves of the Greater German World Empire." In January 1940 he recorded in his diary that "cheap labor must be removed from the Government General by hundreds of thousands. This will hamper the native biological propagation." So successfully did the Germans carry out this policy in Poland that by the end of the war one third of the population had been killed, and the whole of the country devastated. It was the same story in the occupied area of the Soviet Union. At the time of the launching of the German attack in June 1941 Rosenberg told his collaborators: "The object of feeding the German people stands this year without a doubt at the top of the list of Germany's claims on the East, and there the southem territories and the northern Caucasus will have to serve as a balance for the feeding of the German people....
JUDGE JOHN. J. PARKER (Alternate Member of the Tribunal for the United States): A very extensive evacuation will be necessary, without any doubt, and it is sure that the future will hold very hard years in store for the Russians." Three or four weeks later Hitler discussed with Rosenberg, Goering, Keitel, and others his plan for the exploitation of the Soviet population and territory, which included among other things the evacuation of the inhabitants of the Crimea and its settlement by Germans. A somewhat similar fate was planned for Czechoslovakia by the Defendant Von Neurath, in August 1940; the intelligentsia were to be "expelled," but the rest of the population was to be germanized rather than expelled or exterminated, since there was a shortage of Germans to replace them. In the West the population of Alsace were the victims of a German "expulsion action." Between July and December 1940, 105,000 Alsatians were either deported from their homes or prevented from returning to them. A captured German report dated 7 August 1942 with regard to Alsace states that: "The problem of race will be given first consideration, and this in such a manner that persons of racial value will be deported to Germany proper, and racially inferior persons to France."
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn. for 10 minutes. [A recess was taken.]
THE PRESIDENT: I now ask General Nikitchenko, to continue the reading of the Judgment. Pillage of Public and Private Property
MAJOR GENERAL I. T. NIKITCHENKO (Member of the Tribunal for the U.S.S.R.): Article 49 of the Hague Convention provides that an occupying power may levy a contribution of money from the occupied territory to pay for the needs of the army of occupation, and for the administration of the territory in question. Article 52 of the Hague Convention provides that an occupying power may make requisitions in kind only for the needs of the army of occupation, and that these requisitions shall be in proportion to the resources of the country. These articles, together with Article 48, dealing with the expenditure of money collected in taxes, and Articles 53, 55, and 56, dealing with public property, make it clear that under the rules of war, the economy of an occupied country can only be required to bear the expenses of the occupation, and these should not be greater than the economy of the country can reasonably be expected to bear. Article 56 reads as follows: "The property of municipalities, of religious, charitable, educational, artistic, and scientific institutions, although belonging to the state, is to be accorded the same standing as private property. All premeditated seizure, destruction, or damage of such institutions, historical monuments, works of art and science, is prohibited and should be prosecuted." The evidence in this case has established, however, that the territories occupied by Germany were exploited for the German war effort in the most ruthless way, without consideration of the local economy, and in consequence of a deliberate design and policy. There was in truth a systematic "plunder of public or private property," which was criminal under Article 6 (b) of the Charter. The German occupation policy was clearly stated in a speech made by the Defendant Goering on 6 August 1942 to the various German authorities in charge of occupied territories: "God knows, you are not sent out there to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live. That is what I expect of your exertions.
MAJOR GENERAL I. T. NIKITCHENKO (Member of the Tribunal for the U.S.S.R.): This everlasting concern about foreign people must cease now, once and for all. I have here, before me reports on what you are expected to deliver. It is nothing at all when I consider your territories. It makes no difference to me in this connection if 'you say that your people will starve." The methods employed to exploit the resources of the occupied territories to the full varied from country to country. In some of the occupied countries in the East and the West, this exploitation was carried out within the framework of the existing economic structure. The local industries were put under German supervision, and the distribution of war materials was rigidly controlled. -The industries thought to be of value to, the German war effort were compelled to continue, and most of the rest were closed down altogether. Raw materials and the finished products alike were confiscated for the needs of the German industry. As early as 19 October 1939 the Defendant Goering had issued a directive giving detailed instructions for the administration of the occupied territories; it provided: "The task for the economic treatment of the various administrative regions is different, depending on whether a country is involved which will be incorporated politically into the German Reich, or whether we are dealing with the Government General, which in all probability will not be made a part of Germany. In the first-mentioned territories, the ... safeguarding of all their productive facilities and supplies must be aimed at, as well as a complete incorporation into the Greater German economic system at the earliest possible time. On the other hand, there must be removed from the territories of the Government General all raw materials, scrap materials, machines, et cetera, which are of use for the German war economy.
MAJOR GENERAL I. T. NIKITCHENKO (Member of the Tribunal for the U.S.S.R.): Enterprises which are not absolutely necessary for the meager maintenance of the naked existence of the population must be transferred to Germany, unless such transfer would require an unreasonably long period of time, and would make it more practicable to exploit those enterprises by giving them German orders, to be executed at their present location." As a consequence of this order, agricultural products, raw materials needed by German factories, machine tools, transportation equipment, other finished products, and even foreign securities and holdings of foreign exchange were all requisitioned and sent to Germany. These resources were requisitioned in a manner out of all proportion to the economic resources of those countries, and resulted in famine, inflation, and an active black market. At first the German occupation authorities attempted to suppress the black market, because it was a channel of distribution keeping local products out of German hands. When attempts at suppression failed, a German purchasing agency was organized to make purchases for Germany on the black market, thus carrying out the assurance made by the Defendant Goering that it was "necessary that all should know that if there is to be famine anywhere, it shall in no case be in Germany." In many of the occupied countries of the East and the West, the authorities maintained the pretense of paying for all the property which they seized. This elaborate pretense of payment merely disguised the fact that the goods sent to Germany from these occupied countries were paid for by the occupied countries themselves, either by the device of excessive occupation costs or by forced loans in return for a credit balance on a "clearing account," which was an account merely in name. In most of the occupied countries of the East even this pretense of legality was not maintained; economic exploitation became deliberate plunder. This policy was first put into effect in the administration of the Government General in Poland.
MAJOR GENERAL I. T. NIKITCHENKO (Member of the Tribunal for the U.S.S.R.): The main exploitation of the raw materials in the East was centered on agricultural products, and very large amounts of food were shipped from the Government General to Germany. The evidence of the widespread starvation among the Polish people -in the Government General indicates the ruthlessness and the severity with which the policy of exploitation was carried out. The occupation of the territories of the U.S.S.R. was characterized by premeditated and systematic looting. Before the attack on the U.S.S.R., an economic staff--Oldenburg--was organized to insure the most efficient exploitation of Soviet territories. The German armies were to be fed out of Soviet territory, even if "many millions of people will be starved to death." An OKW directive issued before the attack said: "To obtain the greatest possible quantity of food and crude oil for Germany--that is the main economic purpose of the campaign." Similarly, a declaration by the Defendant Rosenberg of 20 June 1941 had advocated the use of the produce from southern, Russia and of the northern Caucasus to feed the German people, saying: "We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings." When the Soviet territory was occupied, this policy was put into effect; there was a large-scale confiscation of agricultural supplies, with complete disregard of the needs of the inhabitants of the occupied territory. In addition to the seizure of raw materials and manufactured articles, a wholesale seizure was made of art treasures, furniture, textiles, and similar articles in all the invaded countries. The Defendant Rosenberg was designated by Hitler on 29 January 1940 head of the Center for National Socialist Ideological and Educational Research, and thereafter the organization known as the "Einsatzstab Rosenberg" conducted its operations on a very great scale.