The Nuremberg Trials (Vol.2). International Military Tribunal
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 perpetration of crimes committed on the field of battle during encounters with enemy armies, 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, ill-treated civilians, imprisoned them without legal process, tortured, and murdered them.
The murders and ill-treatment were carried out by divers means, such as 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 population 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.
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”, that is to say 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 crimes and ill-treatment are 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.
1. In France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Italy, and the Channel Islands, (hereinafter called the “Western Countries”), and in that part of Germany which lies west of a line drawn due north and south through the center of Berlin (hereinafter called “Western Germany”).
Such murder and ill-treatment took place in concentration camps and similar establishments set up by the defendants, and particularly in the concentration camps set up at Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Breendonck, Grini, Natzweiler, Ravensbrück, Vught, and Amersfoort, and in numerous cities, towns, and villages, including Oradour sur Glane, Trondheim, and Oslo.
Crimes committed in France or against French citizens took the following forms:
Arbitrary arrests were carried out under political or racial pretexts; they were either individual or collective; notably in Paris (round-up of the 18th Arrondissement by the Field Gendarmerie, round-up of the Jewish population of the 11th Arrondissement in August 1941, round-up in July 1942); at Clermont-Ferrand (round-up of professors and students of the University of Strasbourg, which had been evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand, on 25 November 1943); at Lyons; at Marseilles (round-up of 40,000 persons in January 1943); at Grenoble (round-up of 24 December 1943); at Cluny (round-up on 24 December 1943); at Figeac (round-up in May 1944); at Saint Pol de Léon (round-up in July 1944); at Locminé (round-up on 3 July 1944); at Eysieux (round-up in May 1944); and at Meaux-Moussey (round-up in September 1944). These arrests were followed by brutal treatment and tortures carried out by the most diverse methods, such as immersion in icy water, asphyxiation, torture of the limbs, and the use of instruments of torture, such as the iron helmet and electric current, and practiced in all the prisons of France, notably in Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Rennes, Metz, Clermont-Ferrand, Toulouse, Nice, Grenoble, Annecy, Arras, Béthune, Lille, Loos, Valenciennes, Nancy, Troyes, and Caen, and in the torture chambers fitted up at the Gestapo centers.
In the concentration camps, the health regime and the labor regime were such that the rate of mortality (alleged to be from natural causes) attained enormous proportions, for instance:
1. Out of a convoy of 250 French women deported from Compiègne to Auschwitz in January 1943, 180 had died of exhaustion at the end of 4 months.
2. 143 Frenchmen died of exhaustion between 23 March and 6 May 1943 in Block 8 at Dachau.
3. 1,797 Frenchmen died of exhaustion between 21 November 1943 and 15 March 1945 in the block at Dora.
4. 465 Frenchmen died of general debility in November 1944 at Dora.
5. 22,761 deportees died of exhaustion at Buchenwald between 1 January 1943 and 15 April 1945.
6. 11,560 detainees died of exhaustion at Dachau Camp (most of them in Block 30 reserved for the sick and the infirm) between 1 January and 15 April 1945.
7. 780 priests died of exhaustion at Mauthausen.
8. Out of 2,200 Frenchmen registered at Flossenburg Camp, 1,600 died from supposedly natural causes.
Methods used for the work of extermination in concentration camps were:
Bad treatment, pseudo-scientific experiments (sterilization of women at Auschwitz and at Ravensbrück, study of the evolution of cancer of the womb at Auschwitz, of typhus at Buchenwald, anatomical research at Natzweiler, heart injections at Buchenwald, bone grafting and muscular excisions at Ravensbrück, et cetera), and by gas chambers, gas wagons, and crematory ovens. Of 228,000 French political and racial deportees in concentration camps, only 28,000 survived.
In France also systematic extermination was practised, notably at Asq on 1 April 1944, at Colpo on 22 July 1944, at Buzet sur Tarn on 6 July 1944 and on 17 August 1944, at Pluvignier on 8 July 1944, at Rennes on 8 June 1944, at Grenoble on 8 July 1944, at Saint Flour on 10 June 1944, at Ruisnes on 10 June 1944, at Nimes, at Tulle, and at Nice, where, in July 1944, the victims of torture were exposed to the population, and at Oradour sur Glane where the entire village population was shot or burned alive in the church.
The many charnel pits give proof of anonymous massacres. Most notable of these are the charnel pits of Paris (Cascade du Bois de Boulogne), Lyons, Saint Genis-Laval, Besançon, Petit Saint Bernard, Aulnat, Caen, Port Louis, Charleval, Fontainebleau, Bouconne, Gabaudet, L’hermitage Lorges, Morlaas, Bordelongue, Signe.
In the course of a premeditated campaign of terrorism, initiated in Denmark by the Germans in the latter part of 1943, 600 Danish subjects were murdered