Fifty-Eighth Day: Wednesday, February 13, 1946
I present to the Court, as our Exhibit USSR 51, a Note
submitted by Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, People's
Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the U.S.S.R., dated 25th
November, 1941, concerning the outrageous atrocities
committed by the German authorities against Soviet prisoners
of war; and I quote several extracts from this note, which
you will find on Page 5 of the document presented to you:
The Soviet Military Command is aware of numerous cases
of the subjection of captured Red Army men, the
majority of them wounded, to savage torture, ill-usage,
and death at the hands of the German Military Command
and German military units. Captured Red Army men are
tortured with bars of red-hot iron; their eyes are
gouged out, their feet, hands, fingers, ears and noses
are hacked off, their stomachs ripped open, and they
are tied to tanks and torn asunder. Enormities and
shameful crimes of this sort are committed by German
Fascist officers and men along the whole front,
wherever they may be and wherever men and commanders of
the Red Army fall into their hands.
For example, in the Ukrainian S.S.R., on the Island of
Khortitsa, on the Dnieper, after the German troops were
forced to retreat by the Red Army, the bodies of
captured Red Army soldiers who had been tortured by the
Germans were found. The prisoners' hands had been cut
off, their eyes gouged out, their stomachs ripped open.
In a South-westerly direction, in the village of Repki
in the Ukraine, after the Germans had retreated from
the positions they had occupied, the bodies of
Battalion Commander Bobrov, Political Officer
Pyatigorsky, and two privates were found. Their arms
and legs had been nailed to stakes, and on their bodies
five-pointed stars had been cut with red-hot knives.
The faces of the dead men were cut and burnt. Near
these bodies was found the body of a Red Army man [Page 303]
At Greigovo Station (Ukrainian S.S.R.), German units
captured a small group of Red Army men and kept them
without food or drink for several days. A number of the
prisoners had their ears slashed off, eyes gouged out,
and hands cut off, after which they had been run
through with bayonets. In July of this year, at
Schumilino Station, German units captured a group of
severely wounded Red Army men and put them to death on
the spot. In the same month, in the vicinity of the
town of Borisov, (Byelorussian S.S.R.), the Hitlerites
captured 70 severely wounded Red Army men and poisoned
them all with arsenic. In August, near the township of
Zabolotye, the Germans captured 17 severely wounded Red
Army men on the battlefield. For three days they gave
them no food. The 17 men, their wounds still bleeding,
were then tied to telegraph posts, as a result of which
three of them died. The remaining 14 were saved from
certain death by the timely arrival of a Soviet tank
unit commanded by Senior Lieutenant Rybin. In the
village of Lagutino, in the vicinity of Bryansk, the
Germans tied a Red Army man to two tanks and tore him
to pieces. At a point west of Bryansk, not far from the
Krasni Oktyabr Collective Farm, 11 charred bodies of
men and officers of the Red Army captured by the
Fascists were found. The arms and back of one of these
Red Army men bore traces of torture with a red-hot iron
rod.
There are a number of cases on record where the German
Command has driven captured Red Army men in front of
their advancing columns, during an attack, on pain of
shooting. Such cases in particular have been registered
in the vicinity of the Vybor State Farm, in the
Leningrad region; in the vicinity of Yelna, in the
Smolensk region; in the Gomel region of the
Byelorussian S.S.R.; in the Poltava region of the
Ukrainian S.S.R., and in a number of other places.
Wounded and sick Red Army men in hospitals which fell
into the hands of the German invaders were also
systematically subjected to outrageous indignities,
torture, and savage ill-usage. On innumerable occasions
defenceless sick and wounded Red Army men in hospitals
have been bayoneted or shot on the spot by the Fascist
fiends. Thus, at Malaya Rudnya, in the Smolensk Region,
Fascist-German units captured a Soviet field hospital
and shot the wounded Red Army men, and the male and
female hospital attendants. Among the victims were
Privates Shalamov and Asimov and Lieutenant Dileyev,
who were wounded, and Varya Boiko, a 17-year-old
hospital attendant, and others.
There have been numerous cases of the abuse and
violation of woman's honour when female hospital nurses
and hospital workers fell into the hands of the
Hitlerite invaders." [Page 304]
Similar cases of unbridled tyranny and brutality are to
be observed in other camps, Zhitkiv, Demyan, and
others.
The German authorities and the German Government have
established a savage regime in the camps for Soviet
prisoners of war, with the object of exterminating the
Soviet prisoners of war en masse. The German High
Command and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture have
issued a regulation establishing a food ration for
Soviet prisoners of war far inferior in quantity and
quality to that for prisoners of war of other
countries. This ration consists of 6000 grams of bread
and 400 grams of meat per month, which dooms the Soviet
prisoners of war to a painful death from starvation.
While enforcing this disgraceful and obviously unlawful
regime for Soviet prisoners of war with inhuman
cruelty, the German Government is doing its utmost to
conceal from the public the regulation it issued on
this question. Thus, in reply to an inquiry made by the
Soviet Government, the Swedish Government stated that
the information concerning the aforesaid regulation of
the German Government published in the European and
American Press was correct, but that the text of this
regulation had not been published and was therefore not
available."
I assume that a very important circumstance is that these
regulations were distributed through two channels: The High
Command and the Nazi Party. In such a way, the extermination
by starvation of the Soviet prisoners of war captured by the
Germans had been planned and carried out both by the German
High Command and by the Nazi Party.
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(Part 4 of 19)
[COLONEL POKROVSKY continues] "The Soviet Government is in possession of numerous
facts testifying to the systematic outrages and
atrocities committed by the German authorities against
Red Army soldiers and against commanders of the Red
Army. Lately these facts have become particularly
numerous and have positively cried to high heaven,
thereby revealing once again the German war machine and
the German Government as a gang of bandits who utterly
ignored all codes of International Law and all laws of
human ethics.
whom the Germans had captured the previous day. His
feet were burnt and his ears were cut off. When our
units captured the village of Kholmy on the North-
western front, the mutilated bodies of Red Army men
were found. One of these had been thrown into a
bonfire. This was Private Adrei Ossipov of the Kazak
S.S.R.
There are many similar facts in the same note. Then it
continues:
"Marauding is rife among the men and officers of the
Hitler Army. When the cold winter weather set in,
marauding assumed a mass character, the Hitlerite
robbers stopping at nothing in their quest of war
clothing. They not only strip warm clothes and boots
from the dead bodies of Soviet soldiers; but divest
wounded men of literally all their warm clothing --
felt boots, boots, socks, jerseys, quilted jackets, and
warm caps -- leaving them stark naked. They put on
everything, even women's warm clothing taken from
killed or wounded hospital nurses.
Red Army prisoners are starved to death; they were left
without food for weeks or issued infinitesimal rations
of mouldy bread or rotten potatoes. Depriving the
Soviet prisoners of war of food, the Hitlerites compel
them to rake the garbage cans for remnants of food
which the German soldiers had thrown out or, as
happened in a number of camps, including the camp at
the hamlet of Malaya Korma (Byelorussian S.S.R.), they
fling the carcasses of horses over the barbed-wire
fence to the Soviet prisoners of war. In the Vitebsk
Camp, in Byelorussia, the Red Army prisoners received
almost no food at all for four months. When a group of
Red Army prisoners sent to the German Command a written
request for food to keep them alive, a German officer
inquired as to who wrote the statement. Five Red Army
men who affirmed that they had written it were shot on
the spot.
The regulation which had not been available for the Swedish
Government in the autumn of 1941 has now become available
for the International Military Tribunal.