M. DUBOST: Yes, Your Honor, F-274, on Page 35. The Document was
submitted under Exhibit Number RF-301. The Tribunal will see that the
prison at Cologne, where many Frenchmen were interned, was situated
between the freight station and the main station so that the Chief
Prosecutor in Cologne wrote, in a report which was used by the Ministry
of Deportees and Prisoners of War when compiling the book which is
before you, that the situation of that prison was so dangerous that no
enterprise engaged in war work would undertake to furnish its precious
materials to a factory in this area. The prisoners could not take
shelter during the air attacks. They remained locked in their cells,
even in case of fire.
The victims of air attacks in the prisons were numerous. The May 1944
raid claimed 200 victims in the prison at Alexander Platz in Berlin. At
Aachen the buildings were always dirty, damp, and very small; and the
prisoners numbered three or four times as many as the facilities
permitted. In the Münster prison the women who were there in November
1943 lived underground without any air. In Frankfurt the prisoners had
as cells a sort of iron cage, 2 by 1.5 meters. Hygiene was impossible.
At Aachen, as in many other prisons, the prisoners had only one bucket
in the middle of the room, and it was forbidden to empty it during the
day.
The food ration was extremely small. As a rule, ersatz coffee in the
morning with a thin slice of bread; soup at noon; a thin slice of bread
at night with a little margarine or sausage or jam.
The prisoners were forced to do extremely heavy work in war industries,
in food factories, in spinning mills. No matter what kind of work it
was, at least twelve hours of labor were required—at Cologne, in
particular, from 7 o’clock in the morning to 9 or 10 o’clock in the
evening, that is to say, 14 or 15 consecutive hours. I am still quoting
from the file of the Public Prosecutor of Cologne, a document, Number
87, sent to us by the Ministry of Prisoners. A shoe factory gave work to
the inmates of 18 German prisons . . . I quote from the same document:
“Most of the French flatly refused to work in war industries,
for example, the manufacture of gas masks, filing of cast iron
plates, slides for shells, radio or telephone apparatus intended
for the Army. In such cases Berlin gave orders for the
recalcitrants to be sent to punishment camps. An example of this
was the sending of women from Kottbus to Ravensbrück on 13
November 1944. The Geneva Convention was, of course, not
applied.
“The political prisoners frequently had to remove unexploded
bombs.”
This is the official German text of the Public Prosecutor of Cologne.
There was no medical supervision. There were no prophylactic measures
taken in these prisons in case of epidemics, or else the SS doctor
intentionally gave the wrong instructions.
At the prison of Dietz-an-der-Lahn, under the eyes of the director,
Gammradt, a former medical officer in the German Army, the SS or SA
guards struck the prisoners. Dysentery, diphtheria, pulmonary diseases,
and pleurisy were not reasons for stopping work; and those who were
dangerously ill were forced to work to the very limit of their strength
and were only admitted to the hospital in exceptional cases.
There were many petty persecutions. In Aachen the presence of a Jewish
woman prisoner in a cell caused the other prisoners to lose half of
their ration. At Amrasch they had to go to toilets only when ordered. At
Magdeburg recalcitrants had to make one hundred genuflexions before the
guards. Interrogations were carried out in the same manner as in France,
that is, the victims were brutally treated and were given practically no
food.
At Asperg the doctor had heart injections given to the prisoners so that
they died. At Cologne those condemned to death were perpetually kept in
chains. At Sonnenburg those who were dying were given a greenish liquor
to drink which hastened their death. In Hamburg sick Jews were forced to
dig their own graves until, exhausted, they fell into them. We are still
speaking of French, Belgians, Dutch, Luxembourgers, Danes, or Norwegians
interned in German prisons. These descriptions apply only to citizens of
those countries. In the Börse prison in Berlin, Jewish babies were
massacred before the eyes of their mothers. The sterilization of men is
confirmed by German documents in the file of the Prosecutor of Cologne,
which contains a ruling to the effect that the victims cannot be
reinstated in their military rights. These files also contain documents
which show the role played by children who were in prison. They had to
work inside the prison. A German functionary belonging to the prison
service inquired as to the decision to be taken with regard to a
4-month-old baby, which was brought to the prison at the same time as
its father and mother.
What kind of people were the prison staff? They were “recruited amongst
the NSKK (National Socialist Motor Corps) and the SA because of their
political views and because they were above suspicion and accustomed to
harsh discipline.” This is also to be found in the file of the Public
Prosecutor at Cologne, Page 39, last paragraph.
At Rheinbach those condemned to death and to be executed in Cologne were
beaten to death for breaches of discipline. We can easily imagine the
brutality of the men who were in charge of the prisoners. The German
official text will furnish us with details regarding the executions. The
condemned were guillotined. Nearly all the condemned showed surprise, so
say the German documents of which we are giving you a summary, and
expressed their dissatisfaction at being guillotined instead of being
shot for the patriotic deeds of which they were declared guilty. They
thought they deserved to be treated as soldiers.
Among those executed in Cologne were some young people of eighteen and
nineteen years of age and one woman. Some French women, who were
political prisoners, were taken from the Lübeck prison in order to be
executed in Hamburg. They were nearly always charged with the same
thing, “helping the enemy.” The flies are incomplete, but we have those
of the chief Prosecutor of Cologne. In every case the offenses committed
were of the same nature. Keitel systematically rejected all appeals for
mercy which were submitted to him.
Although the lot of those who were held in the prisons was very hard and
sometimes terrible, it was infinitely less cruel than the fate of those
Frenchmen who had the misfortune to be interned in the concentration
camps. The Tribunal is well informed about these camps; my colleagues of
the United Nations have presented a long statement on this matter. The
Tribunal will remember that it has already been shown a map indicating
the exact location of every camp which existed in Germany and in the
occupied countries. We shall not, therefore, revert to the geographical
distribution of the camps.
With the permission of the Tribunal I should now like to deal with the
conditions under which Frenchmen and nationals of the western occupied
countries were taken to these camps. Before their departure the victims
of arbitrary arrests, such as I described to you this morning, were
brought together in prisons or in assembly camps in France.
The main assembly camp in France was at Compiègne. It is from there that
most of the deportees left who were to be sent to Germany. There were
two other assembly camps, Beaune-La-Rolande and Pithiviers, reserved
especially for Jews, and Drancy. The conditions under which people were
interned in those camps were somewhat similar to those under which
internees in the German prisons lived. With your permission, I shall not
dwell any longer on this. The Tribunal will have taken judicial notice
of the declarations made by M. Blechmann and Mme. Jacob in Document
Number F-457, which I am now lodging as Exhibit Number RF-328. To avoid
making these discussions too long and too ponderous with long quotations
and testimonies which, after all, are very similar, we shall confine
ourselves to reading to the Tribunal a passage from the testimony of
Mme. Jacob concerning the conduct of the German Red Cross. This passage
is to be found at the bottom of Page 4 of the French document:
“We received a visit from several German personalities, such as
Stülpnagel, Du Paty de Clam, Commissioner for Jewish Questions,
and Colonel Baron Von Berg, Vice President of the German Red
Cross. This Von Berg was very formal and very pompous. He always
wore the small insignia of the Red Cross, which did not prevent
his being inhuman and a thief.”
And on Page 6, the penultimate paragraph, Colonel Von Berg was, as we
have already said earlier, very pompous. I skip two lines.
“In spite of his title of Vice President of the German Red
Cross, of which he dared to wear the insignia, he selected at
random a number of our comrades for deportation.”
Concerning the assembly center of Compiègne, the Tribunal will find, in
Document F-274, Exhibit Number 301, Pages 14 and 15, some details about
the fate of the internees. I do not think it is necessary to read them.
In Norway, Holland, and Belgium there were, as in France, assembly
camps. The most typical of these camps, and certainly the best known, is
the Breendonck Camp in Belgium, about which it is necessary to give the
Tribunal a few details because a great many Belgians were interned there
and died of privations, hardships, and tortures of all kinds; or were
executed either by shooting or by hanging.
This camp was established in the Fortress of Breendonck in 1940, and we
are now extracting from a document which we have already deposited under
Document Number F-231 and which is also known under UK-76 (Exhibit
Number RF-329), a few details about the conditions prevailing in that
camp. It is the fourth document in your document book and is entitled
“Report on the Concentration Camp of Breendonck.”
THE PRESIDENT: What did you say the name of the camp is?