Amtsgruppe B, among other things, was responsible for the supply of food and clothing for inmates of the concentration camps, and of food, uniforms equipment, billets, and camp quarters for the members of the SS. It was subdivided into five offices or Aemter. The defendant Georg Loerner was the Chief of Amtsgruppe B, and the defendant Tschentscher was his deputy and chief of one of the offices or Aemter within this Amtsgruppe B. The defendant Scheide was head of Amt B-V within Amtsgruppe B.
Amtsgruppe C, among other things, was charged with the construction and maintenance of houses, buildings, and structures of the SS, the German Police, and of the concentration camps and prisoner of war camps. It was sub-divided into six offices or Aemter. The defendants Kiefer and Eirenschmalz were heads of Aemter or offices within this Amtsgruppe C.
Amtsgruppe D, which prior to March 1942 was known as the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, was responsible, among other things, for the administration of the concentration camps and of the concentration camp inmates. It was responsible for the food, clothing, housing, sanitation, and medical care of the concentration camp inmates, and of the order, discipline, and regulation of the lives of the inmates. It was charged with the supply of the forced services and labor of the concentration camp inmates to public and private employers throughout Germany and the occupied countries. It was sub-divided into six offices or Aemter. The defendant Sommer was the deputy chief of one of the offices or Aemter of Amtsgruppe D, responsible for the supply of the services and labor of concentration camp inmates. The defendant Pook was in charge of matters relating to dentistry affecting the concentration camp inmates.
Amtsgruppe W, among other things, was responsible for the operation and maintenance of various industrial, manufacturing, and service enterprises throughout Germany and the occupied countries. In the operation of the enterprises under its control, this Amtsgruppe employed many concentration camp inmates. It was sub-divided into eight offices or Aemter. The defendant Pohl was the head of Amtsgruppe W, the defendant Georg Loerner was his deputy, and the defendants Hohberg and Baier were his executive assistants. The defendant Volk was personal adviser on the staff of Oswald Pohl and head of the legal section of the Executive Office of Amtsgruppe W, and the defendants Mummenthey, Bobermin, and Klein were heads of offices or Aemter within this Amtsgruppe.
The indictment then goes on to charge that these defendants, acting concertedly within the framework of WVHA and in pursuance of a common criminal design, perpetrated and aided and abetted in the perpetration of atrocities and offenses against persons and property, including plunder of public and private property, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, unlawful imprisonment, torture, persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds, illtreatment of, and other inhumane and unlawful acts against thousands of persons, including German civilians, nationals of other countries, and prisoners of war. The indictment then relates in detail the means and methods by which the above criminal acts were accomplished.
Counts II and III of the indictment conclude with the averment that these crimes and atrocities "constitute violations of international conventions.., the laws and customs of war, the general principles of criminal law as derived from the criminal laws of all civilized nations, the internal penal laws of the countries in which such crimes were committed, and of Article II of Control Council Law No. 10."
Count IV -- Membership in Criminal Organization The fourth count of the indictment avers that all of the defendants herein named except defendant Hohberg were members subsequent to September 1, 1939, of the SS, declared to be criminal by the International Military Tribunal and Paragraph 1 (d) Article II of Control Council Law No. 10.
The law, as pronounced by the International Military Tribunal with reference to membership in an organization declared criminal, is as follows:
"In dealing with the SS the Tribunal includes all persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS including the members of the Allgemeine SS, members of the Waffen-SS, members of the SS Totenkopf Verbande, and the members of any of the different police forces who were members of the SS. The Tribunal does not include the so-called riding units....
"The Tribunal declares to be criminal within the meaning of the Charter the group composed of those persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS as enumerated in the preceding paragraph who became or remained members of the organization with knowledge that it was being used for the commission of acts declared criminal by Article 6 of the Charter, or who were personally implicated as members of the organization in the commission of such crimes, excluding, however, those who were drafted into membership by the State in such a way as to give them no choice in the matter, and who had committed no such crimes. The basis of this finding is the participation of the organization in war crimes and crimes against humanity connected with the war; this group declared criminal cannot include, therefore, persons who had ceased to belong to the organizations enumerated in the preceding paragraph prior to 1 September 1939."
Under the American concept of liberty, and under the Anglo-Saxon system of jurisprudence, every defendant in a criminal case is presumed to be innocent until the prosecution by competent and credible proof has shown his guilt to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt. This presumption of innocence follows him throughout the trial until such degree of proof has been adduced. Beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean beyond a vain, imaginary or fanciful doubt, but means that the defendant's guilt must be fully proved to a moral certainty, before he is condemned. Stated differently, it is such a doubt as, after full consideration of all the evidence, would leave an unbiased, reflective person charged with the responsibility of decision, in such a state of mind that he could not say that he felt an abiding conviction amounting to a moral certainty of the truth of the charge.
If any defendant is to be found guilty under Counts II or III of the indictment, it must only be because the evidence in the case has clearly shown beyond a reasonable doubt that such defendant participated as a principal in, accessory to, ordered, abetted, took a consenting part in, or was connected with plans or enterprises involving the commission of at least some of the war crimes and crimes against humanity with which the defendants are charged in the indictment. Only under such circumstances may he be convicted.
If any defendant is to be found guilty under Count IV of the indictment, it must be because the evidence has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that such defendant was a member of an organization or group subsequent to September 1, 1939, declared to be criminal by the International Military Tribunal, as contained in the judgment of said Tribunal.
THE PRESIDENT: The Presiding Judge continues the reading.
The defendants are charged in the indictment as officials of the Wirtschafts und Verwaltungshauptamt (commonly called the WVHA) of the Schutzstaffeln der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei (commonly knows as the SS). The whole sordid history of the SS and its criminal activities has been told in detail in the judgement of the International Military Tribunal (pp. 368-273, Official Edition), and need not be repeated here. In this case, the Tribunal is concerned only with the members of the WVHA, or Economic Administration Main Office, and its predecessors, the Hauptamt Verwaltung and Wirtschaft, or Administrative and Economic Main Office, and the Hauptamt Haushalt und Bauten, or Budget and Building Main Office.
Early in 1942, the WVHA was organized under Himmler's order to coordinate and consolidate the administrative work of the SS. The organization of the former Administrative Department and Department of Budget and Building of the SS was taken over intact, and, in addition, another main office of the SS was incorporated into the WVHA, namely, the Inspekteur der Konzentrationslager, or Inspector of Concentration Camps. Of this revamped organization, the defendant Pohl was continued as Chief and was in supreme command. The WVHA was divided into five Amtsgruppen, or departments, namely:
Amtsgruppe A - Budget, Law and Administration Amtsgruppe B - Supply, Billeting and Equipment Amtsgruppe C - Works and Buildings Amtsgruppe D - Concentration Camps Amtsgruppe W -- Economic Enterprises Each amtsgruppe was headed by a Chief and was, in turn, divided into aemter or offices.
For example, Amtsgruppe A was subdivided into Amt A I to Amt A V, Amtsgruppe B was likewise subdivided, while Amtsgruppe W was subdivided into Amts W I to Amt W VIII. Each amt or office was Each amt or office was charged with some specialized phase of the general field covered by its amtsgruppe.
The WVHA, as one of the twelve main offices of the SS Central Organization, was charged with the administrative needs of the entire SS, including supplies of every kind, billeting, transportation, and also the administration of the entire system of concentration camps. This did not involve the commitment to or release of inmates from concentration camps, but it did involve the maintenance and administration of the camps and the use of the inmates as a source of forced labor.
In addition to its functions as an administrative agency, WVHA managed and controlled a vast number of economic enterprises which were either owned or controlled by the SS. These enterprises embraced an extensive industrial empire, extending from Holland to Poland and Hungary, and were operated almost entirely by the use of concentration camp labor. The operation and administration of these enterprises was the task of Amtsgruppe W, of which defendant Pohl was the Chief and defendant Georg Loerner the Deputy Chief. Ancillary to Amtsgruppe W was an amorphous organization called Staff W, headed by the Chief of Staff W, or Chief W. This staff exercised general administrative supervision of the W industries, negotiated for and procured new enterprises, arranged financing, floated loans, negotiated financial matters with the Reich Minister of Finance, and in other ways performed broad coordinating functions within the framework of the SS industries. The Chief of Staff W was at one time the defendant Hohberg and later the defendants Volk and Baier.
More than 25 of the SS industries were controlled, through stock ownership, by a parent holding company, known as Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe, or DWB, of which defendant Pohl was the chief officer. These industries included a wide range of projects: Stone quarries, brick manufacturing plants, cement mills, pharmaceutical factories, real estate, housing, building materials, book printing and binding, porcelain and ceramics, mineral water and fruit juices, furniture, foodstuffs, textiles and leather, etc. For the purposes of this case, four of these industries are of particular significance:
(1) The Deutsche Erd-und-Steinwerke, known as DEST, which operated five granite quarries, six brick and tile plants and a stone-cutting plant.
(2) The Klinker Zement, manufacturing brick and cinder block, fireproof products, ceramics, lime and chalk. This company had large subsidiaries at Golleschau, Prague, Lemberg and Bialystock.
(3) Ostindustrie, or OSTI, organized in March 1943 and dissolved a year later, which operated and later liquidated all the confiscated Jewish industries in the Government General, including foundries, textile plants, quarries, glass works, and others. Enforces Jewish labor was employed in these enterprises.
(4) The Deutsche Ausruestungswerke, or DAW, the German Equipment Works, which operated various industries in seven concentration camps, using forced inmate labor.
The freedom of man from enslavement by his fellow men is one of the fundamental concepts of civilization. Any program which violates that concept, whether prompted by a false feeling of superiority or arising from desperate economic needs, is intolerable and criminal. We have been told many times, "Germany was engaged in total war. Our national life was endangered. Everyone had to work." This cannot mean that everyone must work for Germany in her waging of criminal aggressive war. It certainly cannot mean that Russian and Polish and Dutch and Norwegian noncombatants, including women and children, could be forced to work as slaves in the manufacture of war material to be used against their own countrymen and to destroy their own homelands. It certainly cannot mean, in spite of treaties and all rules of civilized warfare (if warfare can ever be said to be civilized), that prisoners taken in battle can be reduced to the status of slaves.
Even Germany prior to 1939 had repudiated any such fallacious position. And yet, under the hypnotism of the Nazi ideology, the German people readily became complaisant to this strange and inhuman system. Under the spell of National Socialism, these defendants today are only mildly conscious of any guilt in the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of civilians. The concept that slavery is criminal per se does not enter into their thinking. Their attitude may be summarized thus: "We fed and clothed and housed these prisoners as best we could. If they were hungry or cold, so were the Germans. If they had to work long hours under trying conditions, so did the Germans. What is wrong in that?" When it is explained that the Germans were free men working in their own homeland for their own country, they fail to see any distinction. The electrically charged wire, the armed guards, the vicious dogs, the sentinel towers - all those are blandly explained by saying, "Why, of course. Otherwise the inmates would have run away." They simply cannot realize that the most precious word in any language is "liberty". The Germans had become so accustomed to regimentation and government by decree that the protection of individual human rights by law was a forgotten idea. The fact that the people of the eastern territories were torn from their homes, families divided, property confiscated, and the able-bodied herded into concentration camps, to work without pay for the perpetrators of these outrages -- all this was complainsantly justified because a swollen tyrant in Berlin had scribbled "H.H." on a piece of paper. And these are the men who now keep repealing, "Nulla poena sine lege."
This Tribunal, in its judgment in the case of United States vs. Erhard Milch, had occasion to say:
"The German nation, before the ascendancy of the NSDAP, had repeatedly recognized the rights of civilians in occupied countries. At the Hague Peace Conference of 1907, an amendment was submitted by the German delegate, Maj. Gen, von Gundell, which read:
'A belligerent is likewise forbidden to compel the nationals of the adverse party to take part in the operations of war directed against their country, even when they have been in his service before the commencement of the war.'
The German manual for war on land (Kriegsbrauch in Landrecht, ed. 1902) stated:
'The inhabitants of an invaded territory are persons endowed with rights ......subject to certain restrictions .....but who otherwise may live free from vexations and, as in time of peace, under the protection of the laws.'" A faint effort has been made to show that, although no formal judicial proceeding in the nature of an accusation and trial was had in each case, nevertheless each commitment to a concentration camp was preceded by a sort of "cabinet trial" by the Gestapo and that this complied with German law.
To put it bluntly, the Tribunal does not believe a word of it. Commitments to concentration camps did not depend upon individual conduct but were the carrying out of a broad categorical Nazi political policy, frankly announced by Himmler. We can hardly be expected to believe that the thousands of Eastern women in Ravensbruck and the boys and girls who were liberated from the concentration camps by the Allied Armies were accorded even a "cabinet trial". When whole villages were deported, on masse, it is ridiculous to believe that each of the inhabitants was accused of some infraction of German law, given a hearing of even the "cabinet" variety, and then solemnly found guilty and committed. Could any rational person believe that this or any comparable procedure accompanied the annihilation of the ghetto at Warsaw?
Far from making any attempt at formal accusation and determination of guilt, a conscious effort was made to evade embarrassing steps which slowed up the program of extermination. On October 13, 1942, Thierack, Reich Minister of Justice, wrote to Martin Bormann, stating (Ex. 335):
"..... I intend to turn over criminal proceedings against Poles, Russians, Jews and Gypsies to the Reichfuehrer SS. In so doing I base myself on the principle that the administration of justice can only make a small contribution to the extermination of members of these peoples. The Justice Administration undoubtedly pronounces very severe sentences on such persons, but that is not enough to constitute any material contribution towards the realization of the above-mentioned aim.
.... I am ..... of the opinion that considerably better results can be accomplished by surrendering such persons to the police, who can then take the necessary measures unhampered by any legal criminal evidence. ........ The police may prosecute Jews and Gypsies irrespective of these conditions."
This specious and shallow excuse has been offered seriously in justification of a nation-wide policy of deportation and slavery. We have witnessed a strange anomaly in this case. Defendants and their witnesses have bowed their heads in profound shame at the evidence of mass murder and wholesale extermination, but as to the cruel enslavement of whole races, they evidence little or no feeling of guilt or culpability whatsoever. They spoke freely and made voluminous records of "prisoner labor" and "inmate labor". They made elaborate industrial plans and wrote without shame, "We have been promised 8000 Jewish laborers for this enterprise." They planned and started pretentious monuments to the Nazi ideology and wrote, "Sauckel says that Eastern laborers cannot be furnished now, but that there should be no difficulty after the war." The SS economic leaders carried on extended negotiations over what they euphemistically called "prisoners' wages". Elaborate sliding wage scales were drafted and published. But in fact all this had nothing to do with wages Not one mark was paid to the wage earners. The peons who wore the convicts' garb and carried the heavy stones up the hill from the quarry at Mauthausen received only potato soup and a pallet of straw for their work. "Wages" referred to the amount the SS and other industries should pay per hour to the German Reich, the owner of the slaves. It seems to have been taken for granted by the Nazi leaders and the SS that mass deportation to enforced labor was a natural and legitimate concommitant of successful invasion, and that the civilian population was merely a part of the victor's spoils.
Slavery may exist even without torture. Slaves may be well fed and well clothed and comfortably housed, but they are still slaves if without lawful process they are deprived of their freedom by forceful restraint.
We might eliminate all proof of ill-treatment, overlook the starvation and beatings and other barbarous acts, but the admitted fact of slavery - compulsory uncompensated labor - would still remain. There is no such thing as benevolent slavery. Involuntary servitude, even if tempered by humane treatment, is still slavery.
The extent of the deportation of eastern civilian laborers and the ruthless manner in which they were seized and abducted has been related in detail in the judgment of the International Military Tribunal (pp. 243-247, Official Edition). To repeat the shocking story in the judgment in this case would serve no useful purpose. It is sufficient simply to state that it has been repeatedly and conclusively proved before this and other Tribunals that about 5,000,000 men, women and children were violently seized and forcibly deported as slaves. As to the systematic extermination of the Jews, the International Military Tribunal has found (pp. 247-252, Official Edition) that, in pursuance of a fanatical public policy, it was deliberately decided to exterminate an entire race of human beings. There is no way to determine the total number of Jews who were killed, but in testimony before the International Military Tribunal it was stated that one military group operating in the East killed 90,000 people in one year and another group killed 135,000 Jews and Communists in the first four months of the program. With these findings of fact by the International Military Tribunal this court is in full accord and dopts them as found facts in the present case.
MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS The fact that criminal medical experiments were performed upon the involuntary inmates of concentration camps has been repeatedly proved and determined before these Tribunals, in the case of United States vs.
Karl Brandt, et al. (Tribunal I), in the case of United States vs. Erhard Milch, tried before this Tribunal, and by ample and convincing proof in the instant case. To completely document this finding of fact would result in unduly prolonging this judgment.
It is sufficient to state that the performance of such criminal medical experiments has not been seriously denied. Defendants have unanimously denied knowledge of or participation in such experiments, but the proof of their performance stands substantially uncontradicted. The names of Dr. Rascher, Dr. Grawitz and Dr. Beigelboeck have become infamous. The concentration camps furnished an unlimited supply of human subjects for these barbarous experiments, and inmates in large numbers were compelled to submit to so-called scientific tests which invariably involved torture and in thousands of cases maiming, disfigurement and death. Inmates were placed in tanks, where the air pressure was decreased in simulation of high altitudes. A careful chart was kept of their violent reactions, which indicated intense pain and suffering. The chart not infrequently ended with, "Subject died at 9:18". Others were exposed naked to freezing temperatures for hours, aided by ice-water immersion. As was to be expected, many subjects froze to death. Others were compelled to drink sea-water until they went mad from thirst. Inmates were exposed to artificial inoculation of yellow fever, cholera, malaria, typhus and spotted fever, and hundreds died as a result. Incisions were made in the legs of subjects and the development of gangrene accelerated by the introduction of septic foreign matter. Poison gas, mustard gas, phosphorous and sulphur were used on inmates in order to prove that these chemicals are dangerous and often fatal - by no means a novel scientific finding. This is but a part of the horrible inventory. As one means toward "a final solution of the Jewish problem," a program of wholesale sterilization of the Jews was instituted and various methods by which sterility could be accomplished without the knowledge of the victim were devised. Even deliberate castration was resorted to.
EUTHANASIA The wholesale extermination of those inmates who for any reason had become economically valueless to the Reich was accomplished by the euthanasia program.
This plan was originally adopted to dispose of the insane, but it was expanded to include the incurables, the aged, the "idle caters", the habitual criminals, and finally the political irreconcilables. It was a national Reich-approved plan for deliberate and premeditated murder on a large scale. Elaborate case histories of inmates were prepared and screened at the camps by traveling physicians, who by a process of snap judgment determined whether men and women should live or die. Those whose records happened to fall in the extermination file were shipped, like cattle to market, to an institution at Bernberg where "Action 14 f 13" was applied. This often was done by the injection of phenol or gasoline into the bloodstream, causing immediate death. After the extermination, the victim's personal effects, including the gold in his teeth, were shipped back to the concentration camp and a report of "death from natural causes" was made out. This program was also extensively carried out directly in the concentration camps by the camp physicians.
TREATMENT OF CONCENTRATION CAMP PRISONERS The only interest which the SS and the Reich had in concentration camp inmates was as productive units.
They were regarded as so many machines, not as human beings. The only concern with the collapse or death of an inmate was with the loss of a productive laborer. Their arrogant attitude that all non-Germans were sub-humans made them wholly indifferent to the fate of those whose right to live out their lives was as sacred as that of any German. This attitude was epitomized by Himmler when he said:
"Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished."
And later, at Posen, in October 1943, he said:
"At that time we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labor. What, after all, thinking in terms of generations, is not to be regretted, but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger."
When grinders or lathes broke down under hard use, they were scrapped; when inmates collapsed from exhaustion or hunger, they were shot or gassed.
There was nothing incongruous in this to the twisted Nazi Psychology. They talked and wrote frankly and voluably about it. True, there were some who professed a humanitarian interest in the welfare and comfort of the inmates and who made some effort to alleviate their intolerable condition, but they still kept them hard at work. Tasks were found even for the bedridden, while they awaited their turn at the gas chambers. The ghastly story of Germany's mistreatment of the millions of slaves who filled her concentration camps to bursting - the endless hours of exhausting labor, the beatings and killings, the starvation, the degradation - this has become stale from retelling. That's the pity of it. It can be so soon forgotten. But let it be recorded here once more, for generations unborn to read and ponder, that millions of human beings between 1939 and 1945 were cast into slavery and treated with inhuman cruelty by a nation whose only excuse was economic need - the Nazi credo of "the state above humanity."
The story has come to the Tribunal from the lips of witnesses who personally experienced the horrors of the concentration camps -
Victor Abend - Polish inmate of three camps Barnhard Lauber - Polish inmate of two camps Jerzy Bielski - Polish inmate of two camps Henry Kruse -- German inmate at Neuengamme Chaim Balizki - Polish inmate of two camps Herbert Engler - German inmate of Sachenhausen Eugen Kogen - Austrian inmate of Buchenwald Josef Ackerman - German inmate of two camps Wolfgang Sanner - German inmate of Mauthausen Franz Mis - Yugoslav inmate of Dachau Helmut Beckel - German inmate of two camps We have had proof from camp commanders and physicians Karl Kahr - Doctor at Dachau, Buchenwald and Nordhausen Otto Barnewald - Administrative Chief at Mauthausen, Neuengamme and Buchenwald Hermann Pister - Commandant at Buchenwald Gerhard Schiedlausky - Doctor at Mauthausen, Natzweiler and Buchenwald Max Pauly - Commandant at Neuengamme Rudolf Hoess - Commandant at Auschwitz.
Phillip Grimm - Commandant at Buchenwald We have seen the motion pictures of the frightful conditions in some of the camps when they were captured by the Allies - conditions so ghastly that they defy description.
The proof is overwhelming that in the administration of the concentration camps the German war machine, and first and foremost the SS, resorted to practices which would shame the most primitive race of savage barbarians. All the instincts of human decency which distinguish men from beasts were forgotten and the law of the jungle took command. If there is such a thing as a crime against humanity, here we have it repeated a million times over.
TREATMENT OF THE JEWS This disgraceful chapter in the history of Germany has been vividly portrayed in the judgment of the International Military Tribunal (pp.
247-253, 303, Official Edition). Nothing can be added to that comprehensive finding of facts, in which this Tribunal completely concurs. From it we see the unholy spectacle of six million human beings deliberately exterminated by a civilized state whose part of the world of forebears whom the murderers detested.
Never before in history has man's inhumanity to man reached such depths. Had Germany rested content with the exclusion of Jews from her own territory, with denying them German citizenship, with excluding them from public office, or any like domestic regulation, no other nation could have been heard to complain. But such prejudice and hatred, once fanned into flame, is difficult to control. And so, when the Nuernberg decrees against the Jews were pronounced, the fuse was lighted and seen the program of world-wide pronounced, the fuse was lighted and seen the program of world-wide extermination of Jews was launched. Had Germany not been checked, one wonders what race or creed or nation would next have been branded as sub-human and marked for extermination.
In his own affidavit of April 1, 1947 (Ex. 523), Pohl states:
"The liquidation in the Auschwitz concentration camp in the years 1942 and 1943, when Rudolf Hoess was commander, was known to me through Himmler's speech, and I myself also saw the gas chambers and the crematorium in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944."
The most lurid descriptions of the Jewish extermination program are found in the reports of German officers themselves, in which, it can be assumed, the cruelties and atrocities are not exaggerated. Lieutenant General of Police Katzman, reporting with evident pride in June 1943 on progress in murder in Galacia, writes:
"I report that the District of Galacia with the exception of those Jews in the camps under the control of the SS and Police is free Jews. Jews still caught small numbers are given special treatment by the competent detachments of police.
"Up to June 1943, 434,329 Jews have been evacuated. 21,156 are still in concentration camps. This number is being reduced 'currently.'
"Since we received more and more alarming reports on the Jews becoming armed in an ever increasing manner, we started during the last fortnight in June 1943 an action throughout the whole of the district of Galicia with the intent to use strongest measures to destroy the Jewish gangsterdom. Special measures were found necessary during the action to dissolve the Ghetto in Lwow where the dugouts mentioned above had been established. Here we had to act brutally from the beginning, in order to avoid losses on our side; we had to blow up or to burn down several houses. On this occasion the surprising fact arose that we were able to catch about 20,000 Jews instead of 12,000 Jews who had registered. We had to pull at least 3,000 Jewish corpses out of every kind of hiding places; they had committed suicide by taking poison."
The "special treatment" referred to means slaughter on the spot. The periodic reports of Stroop, SS Brigadefuehrer and Major General of Police, who was charged with the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, portray an astounding adventure in wholesale murder and robbery, ending with the terse statement, "There is no Jewish ghetto in Warsaw any more." The action terminated, he says, by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue. He then submits an inventory of his victims: 56,065 Jews exterminated plus an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 destroyed by being blown up or dying in burning buildings. 4,400,000 zlotys (Polish units of currency) seized and counted, with five to six million more uncounted. Also gold and paper money and large amounts of jewelry are listed. What strange mental twist induces this man to constantly refer to the inmates of the ghetto as "bandits"? The German Inspector of Armament in the Ukraine reports in December 1941:
".....later specially detached formations of the police executed a planned shooting of Jews. It was done entirely in public .... and in many instances with members of the armed forces taking part voluntarily. The way these actions, which included men, old men, women and children of all ages, were carried out was horrible. So far about fifteen to twenty thousand Jews have been executed in the part of the Ukraine belonging to the Reich."
In October 1941, Reich Commissioner Carl for the Territory of Sluzk, reports:
"The town itself offered a picture of horror during the action. With indescribable brutality.......the Jewish people were taken out of their dwellings and herded together. Everywhere in the town shots were to be heard and in different streets the corpses of shot Jews accumulated. .....The police battalion has looted during the action in an unheard of manner.... Everything of use such as boots, leather, cloth, gold and other valuables has been taken away."
The Tribunal is quite willing to accept these statements of these high-ranking German officers, who were eye-witnesses, as conclusive proof of the facts related.
LOOTING OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PROPERTY The story of systematic pillage of occupied countries is related in the judgment of the International Military Tribunal (pp.
238-243, Official Edition), which this Tribunal adopts as findings of fact in this case. It is a tale of ruthless depravity unequalled in history. It was not confined to looting by individuals or isolated detachments. It was the carrying out of a general military policy, announced by the top command at the outset of the war. As early as October 1939, Goering issued the following directive:
"The task for the economic treatment of the various administrative regions is different, depending on whether the country which is involved will be incorporated politically into the German Reich, or whether we will deal 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, etc., which are of use for the German war economy. Enterprises which are not absolutely necessary for the meager maintenance of the naked existence of the population must be transferred to Germany............."
In pursuance of this policy of deliberate plunder, Poland, the Ukraine and the occupied parts of Russia were stripped of agricultural supplies, food, raw materials, manufactured articles and such machinery as could not be used for German purposes where it stood. Obviously, this left large numbers of the population of these countries to starve, a fact which did not concern the German forces in the least. Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the occupied eastern territories, bluntly stated in 1941 that the produce of Southern Russian and the Northern Caucasus should be taken to the Reich to feed the German people. He said:
"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."
To call such inhuman policy "a harsh necessity" is the acme of understatement. It was deliberate murder by starvation, nothing less. To show that the policy of plunder was not prompted by economic needs alone or the necessity of supplying the German army and population with necessaries, we find that churches, libraries, art galleries and museums, not only in the East but in France, Belgium and Holland, were systematically looted of their treasures. This thievery was ordered, as the decree of Himmler put it, "for the strengthening of Germanism." The connection between the avowed purpose and the crime is not entirely clear. The experience of Prince Max Lobkowicz of Bohemia is typical. In his affidavit (Ex. 733) he states:
"I am the owner of landed property, situated in several districts of Bohemia....Over two-thirds of this property came under German rule in October 1938 as a result of the occupation by the Germans after Munich.
"The rest of my property, including my chief residence at Rondnice and my house at Prague, came under German rule in March 1939, just after I had escaped with my family (wife and 3 sons) to London.
"I remained in the Czechoslovak diplomatic service, which I had entered in 1920, in London and during the war was appointed first Minister and liter Ambassador to the Court of St. James. In February 1947, I was transferred from London to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Prague, to which I am attached now.
"The whole of my property was confiscated by the Germans.
"This confiscation included farm land, forests, vineyards, etc., as well as natural mineral springs, breweries, saw-mills and several large houses, with old family collections (over 100 pictures, furniture, a library of over 100,000 volumes, historical archives, etc.)."