Newsgroups: alt.revisionism Subject: Holocaust Almanac: The Impoverishment of Europe Summary: The French case against the Nazis notes the vast pillage, leaving Western Europe incapable of feeding either itself or a defeated Germany. Reply-To: kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac, Vancouver Island, CANADA Keywords: Archive/File: holocaust/germany/nuremberg west.001 Last-Modified: 1994/12/04 During their discussion of the French presentation of the case relating to Crimes Against Humanity in Western Europe, the Tusas included the following material. (In light of discussions about Bacque's "Other Losses," and conditions in Europe immediately following the surrender of Germany, I feel it is important to understand the situation clearly. knm) "More than any other case, theirs [the French] was based on documents. It was reckoned that of the 2,100 finally submitted to the court during the prosecution case, 800 had been introduced by the French. The onslaught of their documents was inexorable. Nearly all of them were German - unanswerable. Backing them, providing the statistics of Nazi crime, were the national reporters from each of the countries for whom France spoke. The facts and figures of the economic spoilation of Europe told of theft and destruction almost beyond imagining - the more so because each report warned that the scale of pillage and havoc had been so great that it was still not possible to estimate the final totals. Some of the figures were difficult to grasp and they certainly made little impact on many in court or in the Press. For instance, it needed a degree of financial knowledge and understanding of each country's economy to absorb such figures as those for financial seizures over and above what was legally permitted for occupation costs; in Denmark, the illegal seizures had been 8,000 million crowns, in Belgium 130,000 million Belgian francs. It helped when such figures were put into perspective: in France, the maximum sum which Germany could legally demand for the maintenance of her army of occupation was 74,000 million francs; yet the final French payment had come to 745,000 million, ten times larger. It was hard to picture information such as that the Germans had requisitioned without payment 70 million crowns worth of Danish agricultural produce each month or seized 1,100 million guilders worth of machinery and oil as they left Holland. The specific was easier to envisage: from Norway alone the Nazis had taken 30,000 tons of meat, 61,000 tons of dairy produce, 26,000 tons of fish, 68,000 tons of fruit and vegatables, 112,000 tons of fats, 300,000 tons of hay and straw, 13,000 tons of soap; in Holland they seized 600,000 hogs, 275,000 cows, 489 locomotives, 28,950 freight cars, and even 1 million bicycles and 600,000 radio sets. As the torrent of statistics poured out, the mind tended to block off. Yet those who stopped to reflect realized what these figures had finally added up to. As J. Emlyn Williams, of the 'Christian Science Monitor' put it, this part of the French case explained why Europe was now in 'such a gigantic mess. It was not simply the result of the war but also the manner in which the Germans waged it, leaving those people they overran without means for their own recovery at the war's end and therefore of supplying help to the defeated Germans themselves.'<26> Bombing and fighting by both sides had done much to destroy Europe. But pillage by the Germans alone also wrought a terrible destruction and left a legacy of poverty and hunger."(Tusa, 190-1) <26> The Christian Science Monitor, 24 January. Work Cited Tusa, Ann & John. The Nuremberg Trial. Birmingham, Alabama: The Notable Trials Library, Division of Gryphon Editions, Inc., 1990
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