In France, from 1942 to 1944, 963,813 persons were compelled to work in
Germany and 737,000 to work in France for the German Army.
In Luxembourg, in 1944 alone, 2,500 men and 500 girls were conscripted
for forced labor.
(I) Forcing civilians of occupied territories to swear allegiance to a
hostile power.
Civilians who joined the Speer Legion, as set forth in Paragraph (H)
were required, under threat of depriving them of food, money, and
identity papers, to swear a solemn oath acknowledging unconditional
obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany, which was to them a
hostile power.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will now adjourn until 2 o’clock.
[_The Tribunal recessed until 1400 hours._]
_Afternoon Session_
THE PRESIDENT: Will the Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic
continue the reading of the Indictment.
M. MOUNIER: In Lorraine, civil servants were obliged, in order to retain
their positions, to sign a declaration by which they acknowledged the
“return of their country to the Reich”, pledged themselves to obey
without reservation the orders of their chiefs and put themselves “at
the active service of the Führer and of National Socialist greater
Germany.”
A similar pledge was imposed on Alsatian civil servants, by threat of
deportation or internment.
These acts violated Article 45 of the Hague Regulations, 1907, the laws
and customs of war, the general principles of international law, and
Article 6 (b) of the Charter.
(J) Germanization of occupied territories.
In certain occupied territories purportedly annexed to Germany the
defendants methodically and pursuant to plan endeavoured to assimilate
those territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically
into the German Reich. They endeavoured to obliterate the former
national character of these territories. In pursuance of these plans,
the defendants forcibly deported inhabitants who were predominantly
non-German and replaced them by thousands of German colonists.
Their plan included economic domination, physical conquest, installation
of puppet governments, purported _de jure_ annexation and enforced
conscription into the German Armed Forces.
This was carried out in most of the occupied countries especially in
Norway, France (particularly in the Departments of Upper Rhine, Lower
Rhine, Moselle, Ardennes, Aisne, Nord, Meurthe and Moselle), in
Luxembourg, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland.
In France in the Departments of Aisne, Nord, Meurthe and Moselle, and
especially in that of the Ardennes, rural properties were confiscated by
a German state organization which tried to work them under German
management.
The landowners of these holdings were dispossessed and turned into
agricultural laborers. In the Departments of Upper Rhine, Lower Rhine,
and Moselle the methods of Germanization were those of annexation
followed by conscription.
1. From the month of August 1940 officials who refused to take the oath
of allegiance to the Reich were expelled. On September 21st the
expulsion and deportation of population began, and on November 22d, 1940
more than 70,000 Lorrainers or Alsatians were driven into the south zone
of France. From July 31, 1941 onwards, more than 100,000 persons were
deported into the eastern regions of the Reich or to Poland. All the
property of the deportees or expelled persons was confiscated. At the
same time, 80,000 Germans coming from the Saar or from Westphalia were
installed in Lorraine and 2,000 farms belonging to French people were
transferred to Germans.
2. From 2 January 1942 all the young people of the Departments of Upper
Rhine and Lower Rhine, aged from 10 to 18 years, were incorporated in
the Hitler Youth. The same measures were taken in the Moselle from 4
August 1942. From 1940 all the French schools were closed, their staffs
expelled, and the German school system was introduced in the three
departments.
3. On the 28th of September 1940 an order applicable to the Department
of the Moselle ordained the Germanization of all the surnames and
Christian names which were French in form. The same measure was taken on
the 15th January 1943 in the Departments of Upper Rhine and Lower Rhine.
4. Two orders of the 23rd and 24th August 1942 imposed by force German
nationality on French citizens.
5. On the 8th May 1941 for Upper Rhine and Lower Rhine, and on the 23rd
April 1941 for the Moselle, orders were promulgated enforcing compulsory
labor service on all French citizens of either sex aged from 17 to 25
years. From the 1st January 1942 for young men, and from the 26th
January 1942 for young women, national labor service was effectively
organized in the Moselle. This measure came into force on the 27th
August 1942 in Upper Rhine and Lower Rhine, but for young men only. The
classes of 1940, 1941, 1942 were called up.
6. These contingents were drafted into the Wehrmacht on the expiration
of their time in the labor service.
On the 19th August 1942 an order instituted compulsory military service
in the Moselle, and on the 25th August 1942 the contingents of 1940 to
1944 were called up in the three Departments.
Conscription was enforced by the German authorities in conformity with
the provisions of German legislation. The first induction board took
place on the 3rd September 1942. Later, in the Upper Rhine and Lower
Rhine new levies were effected everywhere of the contingents from 1928
to 1939 inclusive. The French men who refused to obey these laws were
considered as deserters and their families were deported, while their
property was confiscated.
These acts violated Articles 43, 46, 55, and 56 of the Hague
Regulations, 1907, 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 Article 6 (b) of the Charter.
IX. _Individual, Group and Organization Responsibility for the Crimes
Stated in Count Three._
Reference is hereby made to Appendix A of this Indictment for a
statement of the responsibility of the individual defendants for the
charge set forth in Count Three of the Indictment.
Reference is hereby made to Appendix B of this Indictment for a
statement of the responsibility of the groups and organizations named
herein as criminal groups and organizations for the crime set forth in
this part three of the Indictment.
THE PRESIDENT: I will now call upon the Chief Prosecutor for the Soviet
Union.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL J. A. OZOL (Assistant Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.):
COUNT THREE—WAR CRIMES.
All the defendants committed War Crimes between 1 September 1939 and 8
May 1945 in Germany and in all those countries and territories occupied
by the German Armed Forces since 1 September 1939, and in Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Italy, and on the High Seas.
All the defendants, acting in concert with others, formulated and
executed a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit War Crimes as defined in
Article 6 (b) of the Charter. This plan involved, among other things,
the practice of “total war” including methods of combat and of military
occupation in direct conflict with the laws and customs of war, and the
commission of crimes perpetrated on the field of battle during
encounters with enemy armies, and against prisoners of war, and in
occupied territories against the civilian population of such
territories.
The said War Crimes were committed by the defendants and by other
persons for whose acts the defendants are responsible (under Article 6
of the Charter) as such other persons when committing the said War
Crimes performed their acts in execution of a common plan and conspiracy
to commit the said War Crimes, in the formulation and execution of which
plan and conspiracy all the defendants participated as leaders,
organizers, instigators, and accomplices.
These methods and crimes constituted violations of international
conventions, of internal penal laws, and of the general principles of
criminal law as derived from the criminal law of all civilized nations,
and were involved in and part of a systematic course of conduct.
(A) Murder and ill-treatment of civilian populations of or in occupied
territory and on the High Seas.
Throughout the period of their occupation of territories overrun by
their armed forces the defendants, for the purpose of systematically
terrorizing the inhabitants, murdered and tortured civilians, and
ill-treated them, and imprisoned them without legal process.
The murders and ill-treatment were carried out by divers means,
including shooting, hanging, gassing, starvation, gross overcrowding,
systematic undernutrition, systematic imposition of labor tasks beyond
the strength of those ordered to carry them out, inadequate provision of
surgical and medical services, kickings, beatings, brutality, and
torture of all kinds, including the use of hot irons and pulling out of
fingernails and the performance of experiments by means of operations
and otherwise on living human subjects. In some occupied territories the
defendants interfered with religious services, persecuted members of the
clergy and monastic orders, and expropriated church property. They
conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz. the extermination of
racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain
occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of
people, and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews,
Poles, and Gypsies and others.
Civilians were systematically subjected to tortures of all kinds, with
the object of obtaining information.
Civilians of occupied countries were subjected systematically to
“protective arrests” whereby they were arrested and imprisoned without
any trial and any of the ordinary protections of the law, and they were
imprisoned under the most unhealthy and inhumane conditions.
In the concentration camps were many prisoners who were classified
“Nacht und Nebel”. These were entirely cut off from the world and were
allowed neither to receive nor to send letters. They disappeared without
trace and no announcement of their fate was ever made by the German
authorities.
Such murders and ill-treatment were contrary to international
conventions, in particular to Article 46 of the Hague Regulations, 1907,
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 to
Article 6 (b) of the Charter.
The following particulars and all the particulars appearing later in
this Count are set out herein by way of example only, are not exclusive
of other particular cases, and are stated without prejudice to the right
of the Prosecution to adduce evidence of other cases of murder and
ill-treatment of civilians.
[2.] In the U.S.S.R., i.e. in the Bielorussian, Ukrainian, Estonian,
Latvian, Lithuanian, Karelo-Finnish, and Moldavian Soviet Socialist
Republics, in 19 regions of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist
Republic, and in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the
Balkans (hereinafter called the “Eastern Countries”).
From the 1st September 1939, when the German Armed Forces invaded
Poland, and from the 22nd June 1941, when they invaded the U.S.S.R., the
German Government and the German High Command adopted a systematic
policy of murder and ill-treatment of the civilian populations of and in
the Eastern Countries as they were successively occupied by the German
Armed Forces. These murders and ill-treatments were carried on
continuously until the German Armed Forces were driven out of the said
countries.
Such murders and ill-treatments included:
(a) Murders and ill-treatments at concentration camps and similar
establishments set up by the Germans in the Eastern Countries and in
Eastern Germany including those set up at Maidanek and Auschwitz.
The said murders and ill-treatments were carried out by divers means
including all those set out above, as follows:
About 1½ million persons were, exterminated in Maidanek and about 4
million persons were exterminated in Auschwitz, among whom were citizens
of Poland, the U.S.S.R., the United States of America, Great Britain,
Czechoslovakia, France, and other countries.
In the Lwow region and in the city of Lwow the Germans exterminated
about 700,000 Soviet people, including 70 persons in the field of the
arts, science, and technology, and also citizens of the U.S.A., Great
Britain, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Holland, brought to this region
from other concentration camps.
In the Jewish ghetto from 7 September 1941 to 6 July 1943 over 133,000
persons were tortured and shot.
Mass shooting of the population occurred in the suburbs of the city and
in the Livenitz forest.
In the Ganov camp 200,000 citizens were exterminated. The most refined
methods of cruelty were employed in this extermination, such as
disembowelling and the freezing of human beings in tubs of water. Mass
shootings took place to the accompaniment of the music of an orchestra
recruited from the persons interned.
Beginning with June 1943 the Germans carried out measures to hide the
evidence of their crimes. They exhumed and burned corpses, and they
crushed the bones with machines and used them for fertilizer.
At the beginning of 1944, in the Ozarichi region of the Bielorussian
S.S.R., before liberation by the Red Army, the Germans established three
concentration camps without shelters, to which they committed tens of
thousands of persons from the neighbouring territories. They
intentionally brought many people to these camps from typhus hospitals,
for the purpose of infecting the other persons interned and for
spreading the disease in territories from which the Germans were driven
by the Red Army. In these camps there were many murders and crimes.
In the Estonian S.S.R. they shot tens of thousands of persons and in one
day alone, 19 September 1944, in Camp Kloga, the Germans shot 2,000
peaceful citizens. They burned the bodies on bonfires.
In the Lithuanian S.S.R. there were mass killings of Soviet citizens,
namely: in Panerai at least 100,000; in Kaunas more than 70,000; in
Alitus about 60,000; at Prenai more than 3,000; in Villiampol about
8,000; in Mariampol about 7,000; in Trakai and neighbouring towns
37,640.
In the Latvian S.S.R. 577,000 persons were murdered.
As a result of the whole system of internal order maintained in all
camps, the interned persons were doomed to die.
In a secret instruction entitled “The Internal Regime in Concentration
Camps”, signed personally by Himmler in 1941 severe measures of
punishment were set forth for the internees. Masses of prisoners of war
were shot, or died from the cold and torture.
(b) Murders and ill-treatments at places in the Eastern Countries and in
the Soviet Union, other than in the camps referred to in (a) above,
included, on various dates during the occupation by the German Armed
Forces:
The destruction in the Smolensk region of over 135,000 Soviet citizens.
Among these, near the village of Kholmetz of the Sychev region, when the
military authorities were required to remove the mines from an area, on
the order of the commander of the 101st German Infantry Division, Major
General Fisler, the German soldiers gathered the inhabitants of the
village of Kholmetz and forced them to remove mines from the road. All
of these people lost their lives as a result of exploding mines.
In the Leningrad region there were shot and tortured over 172,000
persons, including 20,000 persons who were killed in the city of
Leningrad by the barbarous artillery barrage and the bombings.
In the Stavropol region in an anti-tank trench close to the station of
Mineralniye Vodi, and in other cities, tens of thousands of persons were
exterminated.
In Pyatigorsk many were subjected to torture and criminal treatment,
including suspension from the ceiling and other methods. Many of the
victims of these tortures were then shot.
In Krasnodar some 6,700 civilians were murdered by poison gas in gas
vans, or were shot and tortured.
In the Stalingrad region more than 40,000 persons were killed and
tortured. After the Germans were expelled from Stalingrad, more than a
thousand mutilated bodies of local inhabitants were found with marks of
torture. One hundred and thirty-nine women had their arms painfully bent
backward and held by wires. From some their breasts had been cut off and
their ears, fingers, and toes had been amputated. The bodies bore the
marks of burns. On the bodies of the men the five-pointed star was
burned with an iron or cut with a knife. Some were disembowelled.
In Orel over 5,000 persons were murdered.
In Novgorod and in the Novgorod region many thousands of Soviet citizens
were killed by shooting, starvation, and torture. In Minsk tens of
thousands of citizens were similarly killed.
In the Crimea peaceful citizens were gathered on barges, taken out to
sea and drowned, over 144,000 persons being exterminated in this manner.
In the Soviet Ukraine there were monstrous criminal acts of the Nazi
conspirators. In Babi Yar, near Kiev, they shot over 100,000 men, women,
children, and old people. In this city in January 1941, after the
explosion in German headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Street the Germans
arrested as hostages 1,250 persons—old men, minors, women with nursing
infants. In Kiev they killed over 195,000 persons.
In Rovno and the Rovno region they killed and tortured over 100,000
peaceful citizens.
In Dnepropetrovsk, near the Transport Institute, they shot or threw
alive into a great ravine 11,000 women, old men, and children.
In Kamenetz-Podolsk region 31,000 Jews were shot and exterminated,
including 13,000 persons brought there from Hungary.
In the Odessa region at least 200,000 Soviet citizens were killed.
In Kharkov about 195,000 persons were either tortured to death, shot, or
gassed in gas vans.
In Gomel the Germans rounded up the population in prison, and tortured
and tormented them, and then took them to the center of the city and
shot them in public.
In the city of Lyda in the Grodnen region, on 8 May 1942, 5,670 persons
were completely undressed, driven into pens in groups of 100, and then
shot by machine guns. Many were thrown in the graves while they were
still alive.
Along with adults the Nazi conspirators mercilessly destroyed even
children. They killed them with their parents, in groups and alone. They
killed them in children’s homes and hospitals, burying the living in the
graves, throwing them into flames, stabbing them with bayonets,
poisoning them, conducting experiments upon them, extracting their blood
for the use of the German Army, throwing them into prison and Gestapo
torture chambers and concentration camps, where the children died from
hunger, torture, and epidemic diseases.
From 6 September to 24 November 1942, in the region of Brest, Pinsk,
Kobren, Dyvina, Malority, and Berezy-Kartuzsky about 400 children were
shot by German punitive units.
In the Yanov camp in the city of Lwow the Germans killed 8,000 children
in two months.
In the resort of Tiberda the Germans annihilated 500 children suffering
from tuberculosis of the bone, who were in the sanatorium for the cure.
On the territory of the Latvian S.S.R. the German usurpers killed
thousands of children, which they had brought there with their parents
from the Bielorussian S.S.R., and from the Kalinin, Kaluga, and other
regions of the R.S.F.S.R.
In Czechoslovakia as a result of torture, beating, hanging, and
shooting, there were annihilated in Gestapo prisons in Brno, Seim, and
other places over 20,000 persons. Moreover many thousands of internees
were subjected to criminal treatment, beatings, and torture.
Both before the war as well as during the war thousands of Czech
patriots, in particular Catholics and Protestants, lawyers, doctors,
teachers, et cetera, were arrested as hostages and imprisoned. A large
number of these hostages were killed by the Germans.
In Greece in October 1941 the male populations between 16 and 60 years
of age of the Greek villages Amelofito, Kliston, Kizonia Mesovunos,
Selli, Ano-Kerzilion, and Kato-Kerzilion were shot—in all 416 persons.
In Yugoslavia many thousands of civilians were murdered. Other examples
are given under Paragraph (D), “Killing of Hostages”, below.
THE PRESIDENT: Paragraph (B) on Page 16 was read by the Chief Prosecutor
for the French Republic. Paragraph 2 on Page 17 was omitted by him. So
had you better not go on at Paragraph 2 at Page 17?
LT. COL. OZOL: 2. From the Eastern Countries:
The German occupying authorities deported from the Soviet Union to
slavery about 4,978,000 Soviet citizens.
Seven hundred fifty thousand Czechoslovakian citizens were taken away
from Czechoslovakia and forced to work in the German war machine in the
interior of Germany.
On June 4, 1941 in the city of Zagreb, Yugoslavia, a meeting of German
representatives was called with the Councillor Von Troll presiding. The
purpose was to set up the means of deporting the Yugoslav population
from Slovenia. Tens of thousands of persons were deported in carrying
out this plan.
Murder and ill-treatment of prisoners of war, and of other. . . .
THE PRESIDENT: Will you read Paragraph 2 at page 18?
LT. COL. OZOL: 2. In the Eastern Countries:
At Orel prisoners of war were exterminated by starvation, shooting,
exposure, and poisoning.
Soviet prisoners of war were murdered _en masse_ on orders from the High
Command and the headquarters of the SIPO and SD. Tens of thousands of
Soviet prisoners of war were tortured and murdered at the “Gross
Lazaret” at Slavuta.
In addition, many thousands of the persons referred to in Paragraph VIII
(A) 2, above, were Soviet prisoners of war.
Prisoners of war who escaped and were recaptured were handed over to
SIPO and SD for shooting.
Frenchmen fighting with the Soviet Army who were captured were handed
over to the Vichy Government for “proceedings.”
In March 1944, 50 R.A.F. officers who escaped from Stalag Luft III at
Sagan were murdered when captured.
In September 1941, 11,000 Polish officers who were prisoners of war were
killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.
In Yugoslavia the German Command and the occupying authorities in the
person of the chief officials of the police, the SS troops (Police
Lieutenant General Rosener) and the Divisional Group Command (General
Kubler and others) in the period 1941-43 ordered the shooting of
prisoners of war.
THE PRESIDENT: Now, Paragraph 2 of (D).
CAPTAIN V. V. KUCHIN (Assistant Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.)
[_Continuing the reading of the Indictment_]: 2. In the Eastern
Countries:
At Kragnevatz in Yugoslavia 2,300 hostages were shot in October 1941. At
Kraljero in Yugoslavia 5,000 hostages were shot.
THE PRESIDENT: Will you turn now to (E), Paragraph 2, page 21?
CAPT. KUCHIN: 2. Eastern Countries:
During the occupation of the Eastern Countries the German Government and
the German High Command carried out, as a systematic policy, a
continuous course of plunder and destruction including:
On the territory of the Soviet Union the Nazi conspirators destroyed or
severely damaged 1,710 cities and more than 70,000 villages and hamlets,
more than 6 million buildings and rendered homeless about 25 million
persons.
Among the cities which suffered most destruction are Stalingrad,
Sevastopol, Kiev, Minsk, Odessa, Smolensk, Novgorod, Pskov, Orel,
Kharkov, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, Stalino, and Leningrad.
As is evident from an official memorandum of the German Command, the
Nazi conspirators planned the complete annihilation of entire Soviet
cities. In a completely secret order of the Chief of the Naval Staff
(SKL Ia No. 1601/41, dated 29 September 1941) addressed only to Staff
officers, it was said:
“The Führer has decided to erase Petersburg from the face of the
earth. The existence of this large city will have no further
interest after Soviet Russia is destroyed. Finland has also said
that the existence of this city on her new border is not
desirable from her point of view. The original request of the
Navy that docks, harbor, et cetera, necessary for the fleet be
preserved is known to the Supreme Command of the German Armed
Forces, but the basic principles of carrying out operations
against Petersburg do not make it possible to satisfy this
request.
“It is proposed to approach near to the city and to destroy it
with the aid of an artillery barrage from weapons of different
calibers and with long air attacks. . . .
“The problem of the lives of the population and of their
provisioning is a problem which cannot and must not be decided
by us.
“In this war . . . we are not interested in preserving even a
part of the population of this large city.”
The Germans destroyed 427 museums, among them the wealthy museums of
Leningrad, Smolensk, Stalingrad, Novgorod, Poltava, and others.
In Pyatigorsk the art objects brought there from the Rostov museum were
seized.
The losses suffered by the coal mining industry alone in the Stalin
region amount to 2 billion rubles. There was colossal destruction of
industrial establishments in Makerevka, Carlovka, Yenakievo,
Konstantinovka, Mariupol, from which most of the machinery and factories
were removed.
Stealing of huge dimensions and the destruction of industrial, cultural,
and other property was typified in Kiev. More than 4 million books,
magazines, and manuscripts (many of which were very valuable and even
unique) and a large number of artistic productions and divers valuables
were stolen and carried away.
Many valuable art productions were taken away from Riga.
The extent of the plunder of cultural valuables is evidenced by the fact
that 100,000 valuable volumes and 70 cases of ancient periodicals and
precious monographs were carried away by Rosenberg’s staff alone.
Among further examples of these crimes are:
Wanton devastation of the city of Novgorod and of many historical and
artistic monuments there; wanton devastation and plunder of the city of
Rovno and of its province; the destruction of the industrial, cultural,
and other property in Odessa; the destruction of cities and villages in
Soviet Karelia; the destruction in Estonia of cultural, industrial, and
other buildings; the destruction of medical and prophylactic institutes;
the destruction of agriculture and industry in Lithuania; the
destruction of cities in Latvia.
The Germans approached monuments of culture, dear to the Soviet people,
with special hatred. They broke up the estate of the poet Pushkin in
Mikhailovskoye, desecrated his grave, and destroyed the neighboring
villages and the Svyatogor monastery.
They destroyed the estate and museum of Leo Tolstoy, “Yasnaya Polyana”
and desecrated the grave of the great writer. They destroyed, in Klin,
the museum of Tchaikovsky and, in Penaty, the museum of the painter
Repin and many others.
The Nazi conspirators destroyed 1,670 Greek Orthodox churches, 237 Roman
Catholic churches, 67 chapels, 532 synagogues, _et cetera_.
They also broke up, desecrated and senselessly destroyed the most
valuable monuments of the Christian Church, such as the
Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra, Novy Jerusalem in the Istrin region, and the
most ancient monasteries and churches.
Destruction in Estonia of cultural, industrial, and other premises;
burning down of many thousands of residential buildings; removal of
10,000 works of art; destruction of medical and prophylactic
institutions; plunder and removal to Germany of immense quantities of
agricultural stock including horses, cows, pigs, poultry, beehives, and
agricultural machines of all kinds.
Destruction of agriculture, enslavement of peasants, and looting of
stock and produce in Lithuania.
In the Latvian Republic destruction of the agriculture by the looting of
all stock, machinery, and produce.
Carrying away by Rosenberg’s headquarters of 100,000 valuable volumes
and 70 cases of ancient periodicals and precious monographs; wanton
destruction of libraries and other cultural buildings.
The result of this policy of plunder and destruction was to lay waste
the land and cause utter desolation.
The over-all value of the material loss which the U.S.S.R. has borne, is
computed to be 679 billion rubles, in State prices of 1941.
Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 the
defendants seized and stole large stocks of raw materials, copper, tin,
iron, cotton, and food; caused to be taken to Germany large amounts of
railway rolling stock, and many engines, carriages, steam vessels and
trolley buses; robbed libraries, laboratories, and art museums of books,
pictures, objects of art, scientific apparatus, and furniture; stole all
gold reserves and foreign exchange of Czechoslovakia, including 23,000
kilograms of gold, of a nominal value of 5,265,000 Pounds; fraudulently
acquired control and thereafter looted the Czech banks and many Czech
industrial enterprises; and otherwise stole, looted, and misappropriated
Czechoslovak public and private property. The total sum of defendants’
economic spoliation of Czechoslovakia from 1938 to 1945 is estimated at
200 billion Czechoslovak crowns.
(G) Wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages, and devastation
not justified by military necessity.
The defendants wantonly destroyed cities. . . .
THE PRESIDENT: Will you go to Paragraph 2 of (G)? The French read the
first paragraph. Do you want to go to Paragraph 2 of (G)?
CAPT. KUCHIN: I have begun. . . .
THE PRESIDENT: I thought we had read Paragraph 1. We might take up at
Paragraph 2, beginning “In the Eastern Countries the defendants
pursued. . . .”
CAPT. KUCHIN: 2. Eastern Countries:
In the Eastern Countries the defendants pursued a policy of wanton
destruction and devastation; some particulars of this, without prejudice
to the production of evidence of other cases, are set out above under
the heading “Plunder of Public and Private Property”.
In Greece in 1941 the villages of Amelofito, Kliston, Kizonia,
Messovunos, Selli, Ano-Kerzilion, and Kato-Kerzilion were utterly
destroyed.
In Yugoslavia on 15 August 1941 the German military command officially
announced that the village of Skela was burned to the ground and the
inhabitants killed on the order of the command.
On the order of the Field Commander Hoersterberg a punitive expedition
from the SS troops and the field police destroyed the villages of
Machkovats and Kriva Reka in Serbia and all the inhabitants were killed.
General Fritz Neidhold (369 Infantry Division), on 11 September 1944,
gave an order to destroy the villages of Zagniezde and Udora, hanging
all the men and driving away all the women and children.
In Czechoslovakia the Nazi conspirators also practiced the senseless
destruction of populated places. Lezaky and Lidice were burnt to the
ground and the inhabitants killed.
(H) Conscription of civilian labor.
Throughout the occupied territories the defendants conscripted and
forced the inhabitants to labor and requisitioned their services. . . .
THE PRESIDENT: I think Paragraph (H) has been read, the first paragraph
of it. There only remains for you to read Paragraph 2 of (H).
CAPT. KUCHIN: 2. Eastern Countries:
Of the large number of citizens of the Soviet Union and of
Czechoslovakia, referred to under Count Three VIII (B) 2 above, many
were so conscripted for forced labor.
IX. Individual, group and organization responsibility for the offense
stated in Count Three.
Reference is hereby made to Appendix A of this Indictment for a
statement of the responsibility of the individual defendants for the
offense set forth in this Count Three of the Indictment. Reference is
hereby made to Appendix B of this Indictment for a statement of the
responsibility of the groups and organizations named herein as criminal
groups and organizations for the offense set forth in this Count Three
of the Indictment.
COUNT FOUR—CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, Charter, Article 6, especially 6
(c).