"Shrewdness and severity must be the maxims in this racial struggle in order to spare us from going to battle on account of Poland again."
in his conversation with Hermann Rauschning:
"The French complained after the war that there were twenty million Germans too many.
We accept the criticism. We favour the planned control of population movements.
But our friends will have to excuse us if we subtract the twenty millions elsewhere.
After all these races.
Natural instincts bid all living beings not merely to conquer their enemies, but also destroy them.
In former days, it was the victor's prerogative to destroy entire tribes, entire peoples.
By humanity."
Himmler's vision was similar:
"For us the end of this War will mean an open road to the East, the creation of the Germanic Reich in this way or that.
... the fetching That means that we shall be the sole decisive power in Europe.
That our German race 500 kilometers further out to the East."
Their aims wont beyond mere Germanisation, the imposing of the German cultural pattern upon other peoples. Hitler was resolved to expel non-Germans from the soil he required, but that they owned, and colonize it by Germans. This is plainly stated in "Mein Kampf".
"... The Polish policy in the sense of a Germanisation of the East, demanded by so many, was rooted unfortunately almost always in the same wrong conclusion.
Here too it was believed that one could bring about a into the German nationality.
Here too the result would have been an unfortunate one; people of an alien race, expressing its alien of our own nationality by its own inferiority."
Himmler put it even more clearly:
"It is not our task to Germanise the East in the old sense, that is in the East."
The defendants were careful to conceal their true aims from their victims. In January 1940 a captured report reads:
"In order to relieve the living space of Poles in the Government propagation," and it concludes "Strictest care is to be taken that secret circulars, memoranda and day fill the White Books printed in Paris or the U.S.A. Again, the day before the appointment of Rosenberg as Minister for the East, Hitler told him in the presence of Keitel, Goering and Bormann:
"We ought to act here in exactly the same way as we did in the case of Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium.
In these cases too we did Way.
Therefore we shall emphasize again that we were forced to occupy, administer or secure a certain area.
It was in the interests of the inhabitants that we provided order, food, communications, etc.
Hence our measures.
Nobody shall be able to recognise that it initiates a final settlement.
This need not prevent our taking all necessary measures - shooting at sight, etc.
, and we shall take them."
remember how Hitler went on to elaborate his plans for the destruction of the Soviet peoples. The Crimea, he said, must be evacuated of all foreigners and settled by Germans only.
"We now have to face the task of cutting up the giant cake according thirdly, to exploit it," for Bohemia and Moravia -- the same Neurath whose Counsel the day before yesterday asked you to respect the holiness of the individual.
The pattern, I say, was exemplified in their plan for Bohemia and Moravia. No more terrible document has been put in evidence in this trial nor one which more completely exposes the falsity of the slogan "Lebensraum", which constituted the excuse for the cape of Czechoslovakia. That plan required the elimination of the intelligentsia, the bears of Czechoslovakia history and tradition, and since the long term solution of evacuating all Czechs completely from the country and replacing them by Germans could not be effected immediatelu because of shortage of Germans, a short term solution of Germanising the remainder of the population. This was to be dine by rendering their language a dialect, by abolition of higher education, by instituting a stringent marriage policy after previous racial examination. You will remember Frank's summary:
"Apart from the continuance of the propaganda for Germanization and with exile and special treatment for all saboteurs.
Principle:
"Pastry and Whip".
You will remember too the plan for Poland discussed in Hitler's train on 12th September 1939 by Ribbentrop, Keitel and Jodl as described in the evidence of the witness Lahausen and the discussion between Hitler, Schirach and Frank three weeks later after dinner in the Fuehrer's apartment.
"There shouldbe one master only for the Poles -- the Ferman: two This sounds cruel but such is the law of life," slovakia.
Genocide was not restricted to extermination of the Jewish people or of the gypsies. It was applied in different forms to Yugoslavia, to the non-German inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, to the people of the Low Countries and of Norway. The technique varied from nation to nation, from people to people. The long term aim was the same in all cases.
The methods followed a similar pattern: first a deliberate programme of murder, of outright annihilation. This was the method applied to the polish intelligentsia, to gypsies and to Jews. The killing of millions, even by the gas chambers and mass shootings, employed was no easy matter. The defendants and their confederates also used methods of protracted annihilation, the favourite being to work their victims to death, hence Himmler's bond with the Minister of Justice in September 1942 under which anti-social elements were handed over to the SS "to be worked to death. On the 14th of the same month Goebbels was recommending this method in terms:
"With regard to the destruction of social life Dr. Goebbels has the opinion thatthe following groups should be exterminated:
Jews and servitude for life or to security custody for life.
The idea of exterminating them by labour is the best."
berg, the great architect of this policy of national murder, told his collaborators in June 1941:
"The object of feeding the German people stands this year without a count at the top of the list of German's claims on the East, and serve as a balance for the feeding of the German people.
We see We know that this is a harsh necessity bare of any feelings.
A for the Russians."
The method applied in Alsace was deportation. A captured report reads:
"The first expulsion action was carried out in Alsace in the period from July to December, 1940:
in the course of it, 105,000 persons were either expelled or prevented from returning.
They were in the and Francophiles.
The Patois-speaking population was combed out by these series of deportations in the same way as the other Alsations."
The report goes on to state that new deportations are being prepared and after reciting the categories affected, sums up the measures being taken:
"The problem of race will be given first consideration and this in Germany proper and racially inferior persons to France."
to achieve genocide. They deliberately decreased the birthrate in the occupied countries by sterilization, castration and abortion, by separating husband from wife and man from women and obstructing marriage.
"We are obliged to depopulate", said Hitler to Rauschning, "as part of our mission of preserving the German population.
We shall have to develope a technique of depopulation.
If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units.
And that is cruel; therefore, we, too, must be cruel.
If I can send the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin."
You have seen Neurath's use of this biological device in his plan for Czechoslovakia. Listen to Bormann's directives for the Eastern Territory summarized by one of Rosenberg's subordinates:
"The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don't need them, they may die.
Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German Health Services are superfluous.
The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practise abortion; the more the better.
Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to a hundred.
At best an education which produces useful stooges for us is admissible".
Himmler speaks with the same voices:
"We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood, to nobody else.
What happens to a Russian, a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest.
That 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 need them as slaves for our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me," territories was the artificial increase in the birthrate of Germans.
In February, 1941, the defendant Seyss-Inquart organised a system of giving away Dutch girls to German soldiers. In violation of Article 43 of the Hague Convention, he ordered changes in the Law of the Netherland so that he could assume parental and guardianship rights over girls, substituting himself for their parents if the parents regused their daughters permission to marry German soldiers.
This policy of Seyss-Inquart's was later confirmed by the supreme authorities of the German Reich, Hitler, Keitel and Lammers on July 28th, 1942. A decree was issued granting subsidies and employment privileges for Dutch and Norwegian women bearing children to members of the German Armed Forces. And they have the impudence to talk now about the holiness of the individual. This was simply a plan to transfer, as if it were some mercantile commodity, the biological resources of Holland and Norway to the use of the German people. Himmler was one of the advocates of stealing children: as he said on the 14th October 1943:
"Obviously in such a mixture of peoples there will always be some racially good types.
Therefore I think that it is our duty to take their children with us to remove them from their environment, if necessary by robbing or stealing them... Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people or .... we destroy this blood."
In the case of Russia, Keitel who had learned the phrase "Shrewdness and severity" as the maxim for the exploitation of Poland, paved the way by his orders of the 13th May and 23rd July, 1941.
I quote from the latter, drafted on his own admission by Jodl:
"In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East the forces appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist among the population.
Commanders must find the means of keeping order. .. not by demanding more security forces but by applying suitable draconic methods."
Territories from similar destruction but the Tribunal have ample evidence of the plunder of France, the Low Countries and the other territories which these men exploited to the utmost possible extent. In view of the nature of their murderous policy, it is not surprising that the men charged by the defendants to carry it out were brutes. In Rosenberg's domain, for instance, there was Koch, who was recommended by Rosenberg for the post of Commissar in Moscow because of the very fact of his "absolute ruthlessness." It was Koch who caused the slaughter of several hundred innocent human beings in the Zuman wood area so that he could have a private hunting reserve. Another of Rosenber's agents was Kube, who wrote:
"We have liquidated in the last ten weeks about 55,000 Jews in White Ruthenia.
In the territory Minskland, Jewry has been eliminated without endangering the manpower demands:
in the pre-eminently Polish liquidated," As to Poland, the orders given to Frank were as follows:
"Ruthless expansion.... reduction of entire Polish economy to absolute minimum necessary for bare existence.
.. The Poles shall be the slaves of the greater German World Empire."
And we know how he carried it out. In January 1940 he records:
"Cheap labour must be removed from the General Government by hundreds of thousands.
This will hamper the native biological propagation." In May he speaks of:
"taking advantage of the focussing of world interest on the Western leading representatives of the Polish intelligentsia". and in December:
"Poles must feel they have only one duty; to work and to behave. We must carry out all measures ruthlessly:
rely on me understand this:
The details of the martyrdom of Poland cannot be described: A third of the people murdered; millions left impoverished, sick, maimed and helpless; liberation was just in time to save this ancient people from the terrible fulfilment of the programme which these men had plotted.
THE PRESIDENT: Certainly.
(A recess was taken.)
a scale so immense that it is my duty to refer separately to the evidence. I mean the extermination of the Jews. If there were no other crime against these men, this one alone, in which all of them were implicated, would suffi History holds no parallel to these horrors. Streicher, who had preached this infamous doctrine as far back as 1925, bega in earnest to advocate annihilation. As he, on his own admission, had been instrumental in effecting the Nurnberg Decrees by years of propaganda in favour of racial laws, so now, in January 1939, anticipatin the war which was to come, he began, in articles published in the Sturmer with "the full Support of the highest Reich authority", to demand with all vehemence the physical extinction of the Jewish race. Unless words have completely lost their meanin, what do these mean but murder :
"They must be exterminated root and branch" "Then will the criminal race be forever eradicated" "Then will they slay the Jews in masses" "Prepare a rave from which there can be no resurrection" Almost immediately after the war had started the organised extermination on the Jewish race began : Hoess has told you :"The final solution of the Jewish question means the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe.
I was ordered to establish extermination facilities in Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already in the General Government 3 other extermination camps, Belsek, Treblinka and Welzek." Already the Jews in Germany and Poland had been concentrated in the ghettos of the Government General. Over dinner in the fuehrer's apartment in October 1940, Frank had explained and I quote :
"The activities in the Government General could be termed very successful. The Jews in Warsaw and other cities were now locked up in ghettos, Krakow would very shortly be cleared of them. Reichslieter von Schirach remarked that he still had more than 50,000 Jews in Vienna when Dr. Frank would have to take over from him."
far as they affected Poland and Germany, had already been taken. Of the destruction of the ghettos and the slaughter of their populations General Stroop's report on the Warsaw action is eloquent evidence. But the fate of the Jews in Warsaw was only typical of the fate of the Jews in every othe ghetto in Poland. transported to the gas chambers. Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, described the procedure :
"I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their exterminations. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one half-year. He was principally concerned with the liquidation of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto." Hoess describes the improvements that he made at Auschwitz. He introduced the new gas, Cyclone B which "took from 3-15 minutes tc kill the people in the death chamber, dependent upon climatic conditions.
We knew when the people were dead because their screaning stopped ...... Another improvement we made over Treblinka wa that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at a time, where at Treblinka their 10 as chambers only accommodated 200 people each". And he describes the selection of the victims from the daily transports that arrived :
"Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp. Other were sent immediately to the extermination plant. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since, by reason of their youth, they were unable to wor Still another improvement we made over Trablinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavoured to fool the victims into thinking that they were going thourgh a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realised our true intentions. Very frequently the women wouldhide their children under their clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminat We were required to carry out these exterminations in great secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodie permeated the entire area and all the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations *---* going on at Auschwitz."
So also must they have known in the districts surrounding Belzek, Treblinka, Welzek, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Flossenburg, Neuengamme, Gusen, Natzweiler Lublin, Buchenwlad and Dachau.
I do not repeat these things in order to make the blood run cold. It is right that a few of these typical matters should be extracted from the great mass of the evidence which is accumulated here so that one may see this thing in its true perspective and appreciate the cumulative effect of what has been proved. Einsatz Commandos followed in their wake. Their dreadful work had been planned and prepared in advance. In the file describing the operations of the Task Force A there is a map of the Baltic countries showing the number of Jews that were living in each State who were to be hounded out and killed. Another map shows the results achieved after those two or three month's work -a total of 135,567 Jews destroyed. In another report on their operations during October 1941 it is proudly stated that they continued "on the march with the advancing troops into the sectors which have been assigned to them". They were carried out in co-operation with the Army Commanders with the full knowledge of Keitel and Jodl and, indeed, because every soldier fighting in the East must have known about them, with the knowledge also of every member of the Government and of the commanders of its Armed Forces.
"Our task", so states the report of the Task Force A. "was hurriedly to establish personal contact with the commanders of the armies and with the commander of the rear army. It must be stressed from the beginning that cooperation with the armed forces was generally good. In some cases, for instance, with Panzer Group 4 under Col. Gen. Hoeppner, it was very close, almost cordial."
The German Generals were "almost cordial" as they weltered in the blood of hundreds of thousands of helpless, innocent men, women and children. Perhaps they enjoyed this work -in the same way as the members of the Einsatz Commandos themselves apparently enjoyed it.
"It should be mentioned", states the report, "that the leaders of the armed SS and of the uniformed police, who are reserves, have declared their wish to stay on with the Security Police and the SD".
Again and again in the reports of the Einsatz Commandos,'progress, cooperation with the army authorities *---* emphasized. After describing how thousands of Lithuanian Jews had been made harmless durirg a particular person in June, it is stated :
"These self-cleansing actions went smoothly because the army authorities who had been informed showed understanding for this procedure". Nor was it only cordiality and understanding that the army authorities showed In some cases they themselves took the initiative. After describing the murder of inmates of lunatic asylums that had fallen into their hands, the Einsatz Commando report continues :
"Sometimes authorities of the Armed Forces asked us to clear out in a similar way other institutions which were wanted as billets. However, as the interests of the Security Police did not require any intervention, it was left to the authorities of the Armed Forces to take the necessary action with their own forces." And again :
"The advance of the forces of Action Group A which were intended to be used for Leningrad was effected in agreement with and on the express wish of Panzer Group 4. vast territories, carried out with the co-operation of the Armed Forces as they advanced and in the rear areas that they administered have remained unknown to the leaders in Germany? Even their own Commissioners in the occupied territories protested. In October 1941 the Commissioner for White Ruthenia was forwardin to the Reich Commissioner for Eastern Territories at Rica a report on the operations in his district. Some idea of the horror of those operations can be seen frm the report.
"Regardless of the fact that the Jewish people, among whom were also tradesmen were mistreated in a terribly barbarous way in the face of the White Rutbenian people, the White Rutbenians themselves were also worked over with rubber clubs and rifle butts.
.... the whole picture was generally more than ghastly .... I was not present at the shooting before the twon. Therefore I cannot make a statement on its brutality. But it should suffice if I point out that persons shot have worked themselves out of their graves some time after they had been covered." But protests such of this kind were of no avail; the slaughter continued with unabated hastliness.
In February 1942, in Heydrich's activity and situation report on the Einsatz Commandos in the U.S.S.R. of which a copy was addressed to Kaltenbrunner personally, it was stated :
"We are aimin at cleansing the Eastern Countries completely of Jews... Estonia has already been cleared of Jews. In Latvia the number of Jews in Rica, of wich there were 29,500 has now been reduced to 2,500." By June 1943, the Commissioner for White Ruthenia was again protesting. Afte referring to 4,500 enemy dead, he says :
"The political effect of this large scale operation upon the peaceful population is simply dreadful in viewof the many shootings of women and children". to Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for Occupied Eastern Territories in Berlin, added :
"The fact that Jews receive special treatment requires no further discussions. However, it appears ahrdly believable that this is done in the way described in the report of the General Commissar. What is Katyn against that? Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to the other side and exploited by them. Most likely such propaganda would have no effect if only because people who read and heard about it simply would not be ready to believe it." How true that comment is. Are we ready even now to believe it? Describing the difficulty of distinguishing between friend and foe, he says:
"Nevertheless, 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 combatting bands, even if it is desired to exterminate the population. This method is not worthy of the German cause and hurts our reputation severely." in the district of Libau, and 7,000 of them had been killed in the naval port itself.
How can any of these Defendants plead Ignorance of these things? Wh Himmler was speaking of these actions openly amongst his SS Generals and all the officers of his SS Divisions in April 1943, he told them :
"Anti-semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology: It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, anti-semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished off within the whole of Germany." And again in October of that year:
"Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000." termination centres was becoming a State industry with many by-products. Bales of hair, some of it, as you will remember, still plaited as it had be shorn off the girls' heads, tons of clothing, toys, spectacles and other articles went back to the Reich to stuff the chairs and clothe the people of the Nazi State.
The gold from their victims' teeth, 72 transports full, went to fill the coffers of Funk's Reichsbank. On occasion, even the bodies of their victime were used to make good the wartime shortage of soap.
The victims came from all over Europe. Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia Hungary, Rumania, Holland, Soviet Russia, France, Belgium, Poland and Greece were being herded together to be deported to the extermination centers or to be slaughtered on the spot. take action against the Jews in Hungary. Horthy asked:
"What should he do with the Jews now that he had deprived them of almost all possibilities of livelihood; he could not kill them off.
The Reich Foreign Minister declared concentration camps.
There was no other possibility."
Hitler explained:
"In Poland the state of affairs had been fundamentally cleared up.
If the Jews there did not want to work they were shot.
If they could not work they had to succomb.
They had to be treated like tuberculosis baccillae. This that no harm is caused by them."
In September 1942, Ribbentrop's State Secretary, Luther, was writing:
"The Reich Foreign minister has instructed me today by the Jews from different countries.
.... After a short of getting evacuation started in those countries."
Auschwitz. In the German Embassy in Bucharest, the files contained a memorandum:
"110,000 Jews are being evacuated from Bukovina and The purpose of the action is the liquidation of these Jews."
pointing to the sky while they waited to take their place in blood-soaked, communal graves. 12,000,000 men, women and children have died thus, murdered in cold blood; millions upon millions more today mourn their fathers and mothers, their husbands, their wives end their children.
What rights has any man to mercy who has played a part -- however indirectly -- in such a crime?
Let Graebe speak again of Dubno:
"On 5th October 1942, when I visited the building office at long and 3 metres deep.
About 1,500 persons had been killed daily.
All of the 5,000 Jews who had still been living in Dubno before the pogrom were to be liquidated.
As the metres high.
Several trucks stood in front of the mounds.
the supervision of an S.S. man. The militia men acted as guards on the trucks and drove them to and from the pit.
All these My foreman and I went directly to the pits.
Nobody bothered us.
the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks -- men, of an S.S. man, who carried a riding or dog whip.
They had to top clothing and underclothing.
I saw a heap of shoes of about for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the put, also with a whip in his hand.
During the 15 minutes that I stood near I heard no complaint or piea for mercy.
I watched a family about 20 - 24.
An old woman with snow-white hair was holding tickling it.
The child was cooing with delight. The couple were looking on with tears in their eyes.
The father was him softly; the boy was fighting his tears.
The father something to him.
At that moment the SS man at the pit shouted something to his comrade.
The latter counted of about 20 persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound.
Among them was the family which I have mentioned.
I well remember a girl, slim herself and said, "23". I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave.
People were closely heads were visible.
Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads.
Some of the people shot were still moving.
Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive.
The pit was already two thirds full.
I estimated that it already contained about 1,000 people.
I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an SS man, who into the pit.
He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.
The people, complately naked, want down some steps directed them.
They laid down in front of the dead or injured people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice.
Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into motionless on top of the bodies which lay before them.
Blood was running away from their necks.
I was surprised that I was not uniform nearby.
The next batch was approaching already. They victims and were shot.
When I walked back round the mound I This time it included sick and infirm persons.
An old, very were already naked, while two people held her up.
The woman appeared to be paralysed.
The naked people carried the woman around the mound.
I left with my foreman and drove in my car metres away from it.
Some of them were still alive; they looked who stood a round.
A girl of about 20 spoke to me and asked me to give her clothes and help her escape.
At that moment we heard a fast car approach and I noticed that it was an SS detail.
I moved away to my site.
Ten minutes later we heard shots from the vicinity of the put.
The Jews still alive had been ordered to throw the corpses into the pit; then they had themselves to lie down in this to be shot in the neck."
perpetrated to support the Nazi war machine and the policy of genocide becomes the more clear when you consider the evidence with regard to another great crime little heard of during the course of this trial but which, as clearly as any other, illustrates the wickedness of these men and of their regime - the murder of some 275,000 persons by so-calld mercy killing.
To what base uses that beautiful word was put ! ill and aged people in Germany who were no longer of productive value for the German war machine. Frick, more than any other man in Germany, was responsible for what took place as a result of that decree. Of his knowledge and of the knowledge of a great many people in Germany there is abundant evidence. In July, 1940, Biship Wurm was writing to Frick:
"For some months past, insane, feeble-minded and epileptic the Reich Defense Council.
Their relatives, even when the transfer until after it has taken place.
Mostly they are the body has had to be cremated.
At a superficial estimate along must have met their death in this way ... Owing to stir in our small province.
Transports of sick people who can be noticed even from a considerable distance.
... all this Castle.
....Everybody is convinced that the causes of death which are published officially are selected at random.
When, notice that all endeavours to preserve the patients' life were in vain, this is felt as a mockery.
But it is above all the air of mystery which gives rise to the thought that some-cannot therefore be defended by the Government.