These measures were never applied, possibly because from planes, with the object of producing widespread failures of crops and of the rapid deterioration of Germany's military position.
ill-treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, that the USSR was not a party to the Geneva Convention, it quite without foundation. On the 15th September 1941 Admiral Canaris protested against the regulations for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, signed by General Reinecke on the 8th September 1941. He then stated:
"The Geneva Convention for the treatment of ship between Germany and the USSR.
Therefore on the treatment of prisoners of war apply.
Since cipation in the war.
This principle was developed or injure helpless people.
.. The decrees for the based on a fundamentally different view-point."
This protest, which correctly stated the legal position, was ignored. The defendant Keitel made a note on this memorandum:
"The objections arise from the military concept of chivalrous warfare.
This is the destruction of an ideology.
Therefore I approve and back the measures."
Article 6(b) of the Charter provides that "ill-treatment... of civilian population of or in occupied territory ... killing of hostages ... wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages" shall he a war crime. In the main, these provisions are merely declaratory of the existing laws of war as expressed by the Hague Convention, Article 46, which stated:
"Family honor and rights, the lives of persons convictions and practice, must be respected."
the laws of war. The evidence is quite overwhelming of a systematic rule of violence, brutality and terror. On the 7th December 1941 Hitler issued the directive since known as the "Nacht und Nebel Erlass" (Night and Fog Decree), under which persons who committed offences against the Reich or the German forces in occupied territories, except where the death sentence was certain, were to be taken secretly to Germany and handed over to the SIPO and SD for trial or punishment in Germany. This decree was signed by the defendant Keitel. After these civilians arrived in Germany, no word of them was permitted to reach the country from which they came, or their relatives; even in cases when they died awaiting trial the families were not informed, the purpose being to create anxiety in the minds of the family of the arrested person. Hitler's purpose in issuing this decree was stated by the defendant Keitel in a covering letter, dated 12th December 1941, to be as follows:
"Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be criminal is transferred *---* Germany."
criminal. This aim is achieved when the of the German occupation authorities were arrested, and on arrest were interrogated by the Gestapo and the SD in the most shameful manner. On the 12th 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 elements, Polish or Soviet Russian loafers or tramps;obtained.
..Third degree can, according to circum simple diet (bread and water), hard bunk, dark cell, flogging (for more than twenty strokes a doctor must be consulted)." not confined to severe measures against suspected members of resistance movements themselves, but was also extended to their families.
On the 19th 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 sixteen years of age put into a concentration camp.
because they were relatives of deserters, and were therefore "expected to Lusemburg caused persons to be confined at Sachsenhausen concentration camp en danger the interest of the German Reich if allowed to go free."
civil disorder was resorted to by the Germans; an order issued by the defendant Keitel on the 16th 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. 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 course of time concentration camps became places of organized In the administration of the occupied territories the concentration and systematic murder, Where millions of people were destroyed.
camps were used to destroy all opposition groups. 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 3rd U.S. Army, under date 21st June 1945, the conditions at the Flossenburg concentration camp were investigated, and one passage may be quoted:
"Flossenburg concentration camp can best be described as a factory dealing in death.
Although this camp in handling the prisoners.
Hunger and starvation cides, shooting etc.
all played a major role in ob taining their object.
Prisoners were murdered at random; spite killings against Jews were common, in everyday occurrences; epidemics of typhus and spotted eliminating prisoners; life in this camp meant nothing.
Killing became a common thing, so common ones."
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. 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. 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 Einsatz Groups, 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 Einsatz Groups were formed, one operating in the Baltic States, one towards Moscow, one towards 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 90,000 men, women and children.
The majority of among them some communist functionaries."
drafted by the defendant Jodl, it was stated that "in view of the vast size of the occupied areas in applying suitable draconian measures."
the territory of the Soviet Union and in Poland. A significant illustration of the measures actually applied occurs in the document which was sent in 1943 to the defendant Rosenberg by the Reich Commissar for Eastern Territories, who wrote:
"It should be possible to avoid atrocities and to bury those who have been liquidated.
To lock exterminate the population.
This method is reputation severely."
10th 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 Josef Jung in Spolbu now, Ukraine, from September 1941 to January 1944. He first of all described the attack upon the Jewish ghetto at Rowno:
"...Then the electric floodlights which had been Where the doors and windows were closed, and the dwelling.
The owners were driven on to the ... Car after car was filled.
Over it hung the whips and rifle shots."
which he witnessed on the 5th October 1942, was carried out:
"...Now we heard shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds.
The people who also with a whip in his hand.
.. At that moment his comrade.
The latter counted off about 20 earth mound.
.. I walked around the mound and stood in front of a tremendous grave; closely visible.
The excavation was already two-thirds full; I estimated that it contained about a thousand people.
.. Now already the next group were shot."
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 in the East."
as laid down by Bormann was summarized by a subordinate of Rosenberg as follows:
"The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die.
Therefore, com are superfluous.
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.
What the nations will take.
If necessary, by kidnapping their chil dren and raising them here with us.
Whether interest to me."
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 first leading representatives of the Polish intelligentsia."
Front, by wholesale liquidation of thousands of Poles, Earlier, Frank had been directed to reduce the "entire Polish economy to 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 General Government 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. 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 of Germany's claims on the East, and there the of the German people.
.. A very extensive evac 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 a nd territory, which included among other things the evacuation of the inhabitants of the Crimea and its settlement by Germans. 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. of a German 105,000 Alsatians were either deported from their homes "expulsion action."
Between July and December 1940, or prevented from returning to them. A captured German report dated 7th August 1942 with regard to Alsace states that:
"The problem of race will be given first inferior persons to France."
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn for ten minutes.
(A recess was taken.)
THE PRESIDENT: I now ask General Nikitchenko to continue the reading of the judgment.
GENERAL NIKITCHENKO: Article 49 of the Hague Convention provides that an occupied territory to pay for the needs of the army of occupying power may levy a contribution of money from the 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, property.
All pre-meditated seizure, destruc hibited and should be prosecuted."
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 the 6th August 1942, to the various German authorities in clearly stated in a speech made by the defendant Goering on charge of occupied territories:
"God knows, you are not sent out there to work for people can live.
That is what I expect of your exertions.
This everlasting concern about foreign people must cease now, once and for all.
I have deliver.
It is nothing at all, when I consider your territories.
It makes no difference to me in starve."
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 the 19th 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 Germany.
In the first mentioned territories, the ...
incorporation into the Greater German economic system, at the earliest possible time.
On the materials, scrap materials, machines, etc.
, which are of use for the German war economy.
Enter location."
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."
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 there 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. 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. 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. Polish people in the Government General indicates the ruthlessness and the severity with which the policy of exploitation was carried out. characterized by premeditated and systematic looting. Before the attack on the USSR, an economic staff--Oldenburg-was organized to ensure 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 staved to death." An OKW directive issued before the attack said:
of food and crude oil for Germany--that is "To obtain the greatest possible quantity the main economic purpose of the campaign."
Similarly, a declaration by the defendant Rosenberg of the 20th 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 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. manufactured articles, a wholesale seizure was made of art treasures, furniture, textiles and similar articles in all the invaded countries. the 29th 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. Originally designed for the establishment of a research library, it developed into a project for the seizure of cultural treasures. On the 1st March 1942, braries, lodges and cultural establishments, to seize material from Hitler issued a further decree, authorizing Rosenberg to search lithese establishments, as well as cultural treasures owned by Jews.
Similar directions were given where the ownership could not be clearly established. The decree directed the co-operation of the Wehrmacht High Command, and indicated that Rosenberg's activities in the West were to be conducted in his capacity as Reichsleiter, and in the East in his capacity as Reichsminister. Thereafter, Rosenberg's activities were extended to the occupied countries. The report of Robert Scholz, Chief of the special staff for Pictorial Art, stated:
"During the period from March 1941 to July 1944 137 freight cars with 4,174 cases of art works."
The report of Scholz refers to 25 portfolios of pictures of the most valuable works of the art collection seized in the West, which portfolios were presented to the Fuehrer. Thirty-nine volumes, prepared by the Einsatzstab, contained photographs of paintings, textiles, furniture, candelabra and numerous other objects of art, and illustrated the value and magnitude of the collection which had been made. In many of the occupied countries private collections were robbed, libraries were plundered, and private houses were pillaged. the USSR were systematically looted. Rosenberg's Einsatzstab, Ribbentrop's special "Battalion", the Reichscommissars and representatives of the Military Command seized objects of cultural and historical value belonging to the people of the Soviet Union, which were sent to Germany.
of art from Kiev and Kharkov and sent them to East Prussia. Rare volumes Thus, the Reichscommissar of the Ukraine removed paintings and objects and objects of art from the palaces of Peterhof, Tsarskoye Selo, and Pavlovsk were shipped to Germany.
In his letter to Rosenberg of the 3rd October 1941 Reichscommissar Kube stated that the value of the objects of art taken from Byelorussia ran into millions of roubles. The scale of this plundering can also be seen in the letter sent from Rosenberg's department to von Milde-Schreden in which it is stated that during the month of October 1943 alone, about 40 box-cars loaded with objects of cultural value were transported to the Reich. art treasures was protective and meant for their preservation, it is necessary to say a few words. On the 1st December 1939 Himmler, as the Reich Commissioner for the "strengthening of Germanism," issued a decree to the regional officers of the secret police in the annexed eastern territories, and to the commanders of the security service in Radom, Warsaw and Lublin. This decree contained administrative directions for carrying out the art seizure programme, and in Clause 1 it is stated:
"To strengthen Germanism in the defense of the this decree are hereby confiscated . . . They are for the strengthening of Germanism."
The intention to enrich Germany by the seizures, rather than to protect the seized objects, is indicated in an undated report by Dr. Hans Posse, director of the Dresden State Picture Gallery:
"I was able to gain some knowledge on the public and in Cracow and Warsaw.
It is true that we cannot paintings and sculptures, with the ex-of Maria in Cracow . . . and several other works from the national museum in Warsaw."
Article 6 (b) of the Charter provides that the "ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose, of civilian population of or in occupied territory" shall be a War Crime. The laws relating to forced labor by the inhabitants of occupied territorie s are found in Article 52 of the Hague Convention, which provides:
"Requisition in kind and services shall not be their own country."
The policy of the German occupation authorities was in flagrant violation of the terms of this convention. Some idea of this policy may be gathered from the statement made by Hitler in a speech on November 9th, 1941:
"The territory which now works for us contains more than 350,000,000.
In the measure in harnessing the very last man to this work."
The actual results achieved were not so complete as this, but the German occupation authorities did succeed in forcing many of the inhabitants of deporting at least 5,000,000 persons to Germany to serve German industry the occupied territories to work for the German war effort, and in and agriculture.
was under the control of various occupation authorities, and the procedure varied from country to country. In all the occupied territories compulsory labor service was promptly instituted. Inhabitants of the occupied countries were conscripted and compelled to work in local occupations, to assist the German war economy. In many cases they were forced to work on German fortifications and military installations. As local supplies of raw materials and local industrial capacity became inadequate to meet the German requirements, the system of deporting laborers to Germany was put into force. By the middle of April 1940 compulsory deportation of laborers to Germany had been ordered in the Government General; and a similar procedure was followed in other eastern territories as they were occupied. A description of this compulsory deportation from Poland was given by Himmler. In an address to SS officers he recalled how in weather 40 degrees below zero they had to "haul away thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands." On a later occasion Himmler stated:
"Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down for Germany is finished.
. . We must realize that we have 6-7 million foreigners in Germany.
. . They are none at the merest trifles."