Murder And Ill-Treatment
[Page 48]
Article 6 (b) of the Charter provides that "ill-treatment
..of civilian population of or in occupied territory..
killing of hostages ..wanton destruction of cities, towns,
or villages" shall be a war crime. In the main, these
provisions are merely declaratory of the existing laws of
war as expressed by the Hague Convention, Article 46, which
stated:
The territories occupied by Germany were administered in
violation of the laws of war. The evidence is quite
overwhelming of a systematic rule of violence, brutality,
and terror. On 7th December, 1941 Hitler issued the
directive since known as the "Nacht und Nebel Erlass" (Night
and
[Page 49]
Fog Decree), under which persons who committed offenses
against the Reich or the German forces in occupied
territories, except where the death sentence was certain,
were to be taken secretly to Germany and handed over to the
SIPO and SD for trial for punishment in Germany. This decree
was signed by the defendant Keitel. After these civilians
arrived in Germany, no word of them was permitted to reach
the country from which they came, or their relatives; even
in cases when they died awaiting trial the families were not
informed, the purpose being to create anxiety in the minds
of the family of the arrested person. Hitler's purpose in
issuing this decree was stated by the defendant Keitel in a
covering letter, dated 12th December, 1941, to be as
follows:
Even persons who were only suspected of opposing any of the
policies of the German occupation authorities were arrested,
and on arrest were interrogated by the Gestapo and the SD in
the most shameful manner. On 12th June, 1942 the Chief of
the SIPO and SD published, through Mueller, the Gestapo
Chief, an order authorising the use of "third degree"
methods of interrogation, where preliminary investigation
had indicated that the person could give information on
important matters, such as subversive activities, though not
for the purpose of extorting confessions of the prisoner's
own crimes. This order provided:
The brutal suppression of all opposition to the German
occupation was not confined to severe measures against
suspected members of resistance movements themselves, but
was also extended to their families. On 19th July, 1944 the
Commander of the SIPO and SD in the district of Radom, in
Poland, published an order, transmitted through the Higher
SS and Police Leaders, to the effect that in all cases of
assassination or attempted assassination of Germans, or
where saboteurs had destroyed vital installations, not only
the guilty person, but also all his or her male relatives
should be shot and female relatives over 16 years of age put
into a concentration camp.
In the summer of 1944 the Einsatz Commando of the SIPO and
SD at Luxembourg caused persons to be confined at
Sachsenhausen concentration camp because they were relatives
of deserters, and were therefore "expected to endanger the
interest of the German Reich if allowed to go free."
The practice of keeping hostages to prevent and to punish
any form of
civil disorder was resorted to by the Germans; an order
issued by the
defendant Keitel on the 16th September, 1941, spoke in terms
of fifty or a hundred lives from the occupied areas of the
Soviet Union for one German life taken. The order stated
that "it should be remembered that a human life in unsettled
countries frequently counts for nothing, and a deterrent
effect can be obtained only by unusual severity." The exact
number of persons killed as a result
[Page 50]
of this policy is not known, but large numbers were killed
in France and the other occupied territories in the West,
while in the East the slaughter was on an even more
extensive scale. In addition to the killing of hostages,
entire towns were destroyed in some cases; such massacres as
those of Oradour-sur-Glane in France and Lidice in
Czechoslovakia, both of which were described to the Tribunal
in detail, are examples of the organized use of terror by
the occupying forces to beat down and destroy all opposition
to their rule.
One of the most notorious means of terrorizing the people in
occupied territories was the use of concentration camps.
They were first established in Germany at the moment of the
seizure of power by the Nazi Government. Their original
purpose was to imprison without trial all those persons who
were opposed to the Government, or who were in any way
obnoxious to German authority. With the aid of a secret
police force, this practice was widely extended, and in
course of time concentration camps became places of
organized and systematic murder, where millions of people
were destroyed.
In the administration of the occupied territories the
concentration camps were used to destroy all opposition
groups. The persons arrested by the Gestapo were as a rule
sent to concentration camps. They were conveyed to the camps
in many cases without any care whatever being taken for
them, and great numbers died on the way. Those who arrived
at the camp were subject to systematic cruelty. They were
given hard physical labor, inadequate food, clothes and
shelter, and were subject at all times to the rigors of a
soulless regime, and the private whims of individual guards.
In the report of the war crimes Branch of the Judge
Advocate's Section of the Third US Army, under date the 21st
June, 1945, the conditions at the Flossenburg concentration
camp were investigated, and one passage may be quoted:
A certain number of the concentration camps were equipped
with gas chambers for the wholesale destruction of the
inmates, and with furnaces for the burning of the bodies.
Some of them were in fact used for the extermination of Jews
as part of the "final solution" of the Jewish problem. Most
of the non-Jewish inmates were used for labor, although the
conditions under which they worked made labor and death
almost synonymous terms. Those inmates who became ill and
were unable to work were either destroyed in the gas
chambers or sent to special infirmaries, where they were
given entirely inadequate medical treatment, worse food if
possible than the working inmates, and left to die.
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Of Civilian
Population
(Part 1 of 4)
"Family honor and rights, the lives of persons and
private property, as well as religious convictions
and practice must be respected."
"Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be
achieved either by capital punishment or by
measures by which the relatives of the criminal
and the population do not know the fate of the
criminal. This aim is achieved when the criminal
is transferred to Germany."
" Third degree may, under this supposition,
only be employed against Communists, Marxists,
Jehovah's Witnesses, saboteurs, terrorists,
members of resistance movements, parachute agents,
anti-social elements, Polish or Soviet Russian
loafers or tramps; in all other cases my
permission must first be obtained .... Third
degree can, according to circumstances, consist
amongst other methods of very simple diet (bread
and water), hard bunk, dark cell, deprivation of
sleep, exhaustive drilling, also in flogging (for
more than twenty strokes a doctor must be
consulted)."
"Flossenburg concentration camp can best be
described as a factory dealing in death. Although
this camp had in view the primary object of
putting to work the mass slave labor, another of
its primary objects was the elimination of human
lives by the methods employed in handling the
prisoners. Hunger and starvation rations, sadism,
inadequate clothing, medical neglect, disease,
beatings, hangings, freezing, forced suicides,
shooting, etc. all played a major role in
obtaining their object. Prisoners were murdered at
random; spite killings against Jews were common,
injections of poison and shooting in the neck were
everyday occurrences; epidemics of typhus and
spotted fever were permitted to run rampant as a
means of eliminating prisoners; life in this camp
meant nothing. Killing became a common thing, so
common that a quick death was welcomed by the
unfortunate ones."
The
original plaintext version of this file is available via
ftp.