The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

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Last-Modified: 1999/11/20

Q. You were a Red Army doctor and must have been quite aware
that the feeding of armies is not so simple a matter.

A. Yes, but I could not imagine anything like what actually
happened, especially as the Germans then had both the time
and the means to supply the prisoners of war with food. I
again say that, if the German authorities made no effort to
provide the prisoners of war with food, the peaceful
population did everything in their power to do so. However,
it is apparent that neither the German Authorities, nor the
German High Command issued any instructions on this matter.

As I have already reported, no opportunity was given for
friendly relations between the prisoners of war and the
peaceful citizens. On the contrary, any person who tried to
bring food to the prisoners or any prisoner who accepted the
food from the citizens was promptly shot.

Q. But you can certainly imagine that it must have presented
immense difficulties if, as you have just testified, 100,000
prisoners had been taken at that time in the area of Uman?

A. Not all the prisoners of war were concentrated at Uman at
one and the same time. There were several stationary and
permanent camps, only there were more of them at Uman than
elsewhere.

Q. I was not speaking about the food problem in Uman comp.
We are still talking about the feeding of prisoners during
the first days after their capture.

A. In captivity I was not singled out in any way from among
the other prisoners of war. I was fed and I was supplied in
exactly the same way as all the others. I was one of the
general crowd and the general column of the prisoners of
war. The German Command made no distinctions in the first
days of captivity.

Q. But you will have to admit that there were certain
difficulties connected with food supplies which would arise
if quite unexpectedly a column, such as yours, 5,000 strong,
had to be fed by rapidly advancing troops.

A. Even if the German Command had been faced with this
particular difficulty, the problem could always have been
solved by allowing the prisoners to accept the food which
the peaceful population, the Soviet citizens, were offering
them.

Q. We shall talk about that immediately. You say you were in
a column 5,000 strong. Can you tell me how strong the guard
was, the German guard, under whom this column of 5,000
matched?

A. I cannot state the exact figures. But there were a great
many German machine gunners. The column was too drawn out in
length and I am unable to state the figure.

Q. I realise that you cannot give the exact figures. But you
can describe to the Tribunal how great the distance was
between individual guards marching alongside the column?

                                                  [Page 324]

A. The distance would be as follows: two or three soldiers,
walking in a row, would march approximately five or six
steps behind a second row of the same number.

Q. Thus, every fifty or sixty metres, on either side of the
column, or perhaps only on one side of the column, German
troops marched in groups of two or three soldiers, as you
say, or have I not understood you correctly?

A. Not fifty to sixty metres, five to six.

Q. Were the guards elderly men or were there younger
soldiers among them?

A. They were soldiers of the German Army. They were of every
age.

Q. Were the Russian prisoners-of-war columns informed,
before they started, that they would be shot if they left
the ranks?

A. I have already said, and I repeat once again, there were
no warnings.

Q. Not even when the column set off?

A. No.

THE PRESIDENT: Perhaps it would be a good time to break off
till 2.0 o'clock.

(A recess was taken until 14.00 hours.)

THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal has made its decision upon the
witnesses and documents to be called and produced on behalf
of the first four defendants, and that decision will be
communicated as soon as possible this afternoon to counsel
for those defendants and will also be posted in the
Defendants' Information Centre.

Secondly, an application was made some time ago by the Chief
Prosecutor for France with reference to the calling of two
additional witnesses. The Tribunal would wish that if it is
desired to call any witnesses, after closing the case, on
behalf of any of the Chief Prosecutors, a written
application should be made to the Tribunal for the calling
of such witnesses, and the Tribunal also desires me to draw
the attention of counsel for the prosecution and counsel for
the defence to the terms of Article 24, Sub-section (e),
which refers to rebutting evidence. In the event of counsel
for the prosecution or counsel for the defence wishing to
call rebutting evidence, when the proper time comes after
the case for the prosecution and the defence has been
closed, such application to call rebutting evidence must be
made to the Tribunal in writing.

SIR DAVID MAXWELL FYFE: My Lord, I wonder if the Tribunal
would allow me to say something on a matter on which I
promised to get information yesterday.

Your Lordship will remember that Dr. Horn asked for a
withdrawn edition of the Daily Telegraph of 31 August, 1939,
and I promised the Tribunal that I would make inquiries. I
had a telegram from the Daily Telegraph which I received
this morning and it says :-

  "No edition of the Daily Telegraph withdrawn on 31
  August, 1939, or any other day thereabouts. The Telegraph
  of the 31st gave a brief paragraph saying 'Meeting
  Henderson-Ribbentrop had taken place' but without
  details.
  
  On 1 September carried summary of German's sixteen points
  for Poland as broadcast by the German radio. Actual text
  of the note did not appear until 2 September, when
  extracted from the Foreign Office White Paper of all
  relevant documents."

I thought it was only right, as I had promised to get the
information, that I should put it before the Tribunal and I
propose to send a copy of that to Dr. Horn.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Sir David. I think that may
necessitate a slight variation in the order which the
Tribunal was proposing to make.

DR. NELTE (Counsel for defendant Keitel): Regarding the
question of Generals Halder and Warlimont as witnesses, Mr.
President, permit me to ask you one question: that is
whether the Court has decided yet that the Generals Halder

                                                  [Page 325]

and Warlimont, whom I have named as witnesses, and whose
relevancy has been admitted by the prosecution, will be
approved as witnesses for Keitel, so that we can count with
certainty on their appearing in the proceedings.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, certainly. What I meant to state this
morning was that the defence counsel should decide whether
they wanted to have them for cross-examination now or to
call them as witnesses on behalf of one or other of the
defendants and therefore there was a decision that the
defence counsel would be able to call them on behalf of one
of the defendants if they determined to do so. They can,
therefore, be called for Keitel, unless, of course, they are
called before. If the defendant Goering wanted to call them,
then they would have to be examined on behalf of Keitel when
they were called for Goering, because of the fundamental
rule that a witness is only to be called once.

DR. NELTE: Very well. I wish to state that the defence
counsel who are interested in the examination of Generals
Halder and Warlimont are agreed that these generals should
be called in the course of the presentation of evidence by
the defence.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, very well. I beg your pardon Dr.
Laternser -

DR. LATERNSER (Counsel for the General Staff and the High
Command): I have only a few more questions to ask this
witness.

(Eugene Alexandrovich Kivelisha resumed the stand and
testified further as follows):-

By DR. LATERNSER:

Q. Witness, you said this morning that the four to five
thousand Russian prisoners were accommodated in a shed. Was
this shed roofed?

A. It was the usual type of country cattle-shed and since
the farm had previously been evacuated the shed had not been
cleaned for a very long time and was in a state of complete
neglect. When one adds that it had been pouring with rain
all that day, it follows that it was half-swamped in liquid
mud. It was quite impossible to settle down in the sheds and
barns since they were filled with left over manure, so that
the majority of the people stayed out of doors.

Q. Was it possible in this case to accommodate these
prisoners in a better way?

A. It is very difficult for me to answer that question, for
I am not at all acquainted with the locality where I was
captured; besides we were brought to this village late at
night and I do not know whether there were more convenient
places where we could have been quartered.

Q. That is to say, on this evening when you entered this
village, you yourself saw no possibility for better
accommodation?

A. It is not because I did not see better quarters but
because it was dark and I could not therefore estimate the
possibilities, although it was a rather large village and it
seems to me that there must have been some houses large
enough to billet 5,000 to 6,000 people for the night.

Q. I still have one last question. You said that in the
prison camp you were not employed in your capacity as a
physician. Did the German prisoner-of-war administration
ever place any medical supplies at your disposal so that you
could treat your sick comrades?

A. In the first stages, when we were being evacuated on foot
from one camp to another, we received no medical equipment
at all from the Germans, but, subsequently, when I was in a
stationary camp, Stalag 305, medical equipment was issued,
though never in sufficient quantities to meet the
requirements of all the wounded.

DR. LATERNSER: I have no further questions.

                                                  [Page 326]

DR. BABEL (Counsel for S.S.): I have only one question.

By DR. BABEL:

Q. The witness has stated that the shed was evacuated. What
do you mean by that?

A. By that I mean that all the cattle in the shed had been
driven off beyond the zone of military operations.

Q. By whom had this been done?

A. It had been done by the inhabitants of the village which
we had entered, who had fled Eastwards, together with Red
Army units who had not been surrounded as we had been.

Q. That is to say, the cattle had been brought to Russian
territory?

A. From this village, yes.

DR. BABEL: Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Do any other defendants' counsel wish to ask
questions?

By THE PRESIDENT:

Q. Witness, were any S.S. units used for guarding the
prisoners of war whilst you were one of them?

A. In the camp of Rakov in the district of the town of
Proskurov, where I was interned most of the time, the
escorting of working gangs was carried out by units which,
at that time, were named the S.S.

Q. Was that a stationary camp?

A. Yes, it was a stationary camp.

Q. But S.S. units were not used to guard you until you got
to that stationary camp?

A. I cannot say anything definite on the subject since I did
not know the distinctive insignia of the German Army.

THE PRESIDENT: Colonel Smirnov, do you want to ask anything
in re-examination?

COLONEL SMIRNOV: I have no further questions to ask the
witness.

THE PRESIDENT: Then the witness can retire.

COLONEL SMIRNOV: May I continue, Mr. President?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

COLONEL SMIRNOV: I request the Tribunal to accept, as one of
the proof of the Hitlerite crimes perpetrated in the
prisoner of war camps, certain documents which I would like
to submit to the Tribunal at the request of our British
colleagues. The Soviet prosecution does this all the more
readily in that it considers this documentation of the
British prosecution of essential importance in establishing
the criminal violation by the major war criminals of the
laws and customs of war, accepted by all civilised nations
for the treatment of prisoners of war. I would ask the
Tribunal to add to the documentation the documents of the
British Delegation which I have presented as Exhibit USSR
413 regarding the cruel murder of fifty prisoners of war,
officers of the Royal Air Force, who were captured while
attempting to escape from "Stalag Luft III" at Sagan, and
shot after their capture by the German criminals in the
night of 24th-25th March, 1944. These documents consist of
an official record of the Hitlerite crimes, certified by
Brigadier Chapcott, Representative of the British Armed
Forces, and the attached minutes of the Court of Inquiry
held in Sagan by order of the Senior British Officer in
"Stalag Luft III" and forwarded by the Protecting Power.

Included with these documents are the statements of the
following Allied witnesses:

                                                  [Page 327]
  Wing Commander Day
  Flight Lieutenant Tonder
  Flight Lieutenant Dowse
  Flight Lieutenant van Wymeersch
  Flight Lieutenant Green
  Flight Lieutenant Marshall Flight Lieutenant Nelson
  Flight Lieutenant Churchill
  Lieutenant Neely
  P.S.M. Hicks.

The material evidence is also corroborated by statements
taken from the following Germans:

  Major General Westhoff
  Oberregierungs- und Kriminalrat Wielen Oberst von
  Lindeiner.

There is also a photostatic copy attached of the official
list of those who perished, handed over by the German
Foreign Office to the Swiss Diplomatic Mission in Berlin and
the report of the representative of the Protecting Power
during his visit to "Stalag Luft III" on 5 June, 1944.

I will briefly summarise the circumstances of this infamous
crime of the Hitlerites by quoting from the report of
Brigadier Chapcott. Your Honours will find the passage which
I am about to quote on Page 163, paragraph 2 of the document
book.

  "On the night of 24/25 March, 1944, 76 Royal Air Force
  officers escaped from Stalag Luft III at Sagan, Silesia,
  where they had been confined as prisoners of war. Of
  these, 15 were recaptured and returned to the camp, 3
  escaped altogether, 8 were detained by the Gestapo after
  recapture. Of the fate of the remaining 50 officers the
  following information was given by the German
  authorities:-"

The German authorities stated that these fifty officers were
shot allegedly while attempting to escape. Actually this
statement was the customary routine lie, since the very
thorough investigation carried out by the British military
authorities proved indubitably that the British R.A.F.
officers had been vilely murdered after recapture by the
German police.

It was ascertained that this crime was committed by order of
Goering and Keitel.

The passage which I wish to submit to the Tribunal is on
Page 168 of the document book, Russian text.


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