With your permission, Your Honors, I shall read two more excerpts into
the record from a letter of the Reich Minister for the Occupied
Territories, dated 7 April 1942, and signed by order of the Minister, by
Laibrandt, closest assistant of the Defendant Rosenberg. This letter,
Your Honors, is in your document book, on Pages 12 and 13, and was
submitted on 18 December last year by the United States Prosecution as
Exhibit Number USSR-408 (Document Number USSR-408).
This document is very revealing in that it indicates the scale of the
projected pillage and disguises this pillage which, in the document, is
shamelessly referred to as “the preservation of objects of culture,
research material, and of scientific institutions in the Occupied
Eastern Territories.”
This document is also characteristic in that Rosenberg, fearing that he
might miss some of the booty, established his own monopoly to plunder
and only made concessions to the quartermaster general of the Army, in
conjunction with whom—as the letter reveals—Operational Staff
Rosenberg carried on its “work.”