The Nuremberg Trials (Vol.2). International Military Tribunal
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 Article 6 (b) of the Charter.
IX. Individual, Group and Organization Responsibility for the Crimes Stated in Count Three.
Reference is hereby made to Appendix A of this Indictment for a statement of the responsibility of the individual defendants for the charge set forth in Count Three of the Indictment.
Reference is hereby made to Appendix B of this Indictment for a statement of the responsibility of the groups and organizations named herein as criminal groups and organizations for the crime set forth in this part three of the Indictment.
THE PRESIDENT: I will now call upon the Chief Prosecutor for the Soviet Union.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL J. A. OZOL (Assistant Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.): COUNT THREE—WAR CRIMES.
All the defendants committed War Crimes between 1 September 1939 and 8 May 1945 in Germany and in all those countries and territories occupied by the German Armed Forces since 1 September 1939, and in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and on the High Seas.
All the defendants, acting in concert 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 commission of crimes perpetrated on the field of battle during encounters with enemy armies, and 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, murdered and tortured civilians, and ill-treated them, and imprisoned them without legal process.
The murders and ill-treatment were carried out by divers means, including 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 populations 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 and others.
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” whereby 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 murders and ill-treatment were 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.
[2.] In the U.S.S.R., i.e. in the Bielorussian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Karelo-Finnish, and Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republics, in 19 regions of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, and in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Balkans (hereinafter called the “Eastern Countries”).
From the 1st September 1939, when the German Armed Forces invaded Poland, and from the 22nd June 1941, when they invaded the U.S.S.R., the German Government and the German High Command adopted a systematic policy of murder and ill-treatment of the civilian populations of and in the Eastern Countries as they were successively occupied by the German Armed Forces. These murders and ill-treatments were carried on continuously until the German Armed Forces were driven out of the said countries.
Such murders and ill-treatments included:
(a) Murders and ill-treatments at concentration camps and similar establishments set up by the Germans in the Eastern Countries and in Eastern Germany including those set up at Maidanek and Auschwitz.
The said murders and ill-treatments were carried out by divers means including all those set out above, as follows:
About 1½ million persons were, exterminated in Maidanek and about 4 million persons were exterminated in Auschwitz, among whom were citizens of Poland, the U.S.S.R., the United States of America, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, and other countries.
In the Lwow region and in the city of Lwow the Germans exterminated about 700,000 Soviet people, including 70 persons in the field of the arts, science, and technology, and also citizens of the U.S.A., Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Holland, brought to this region from other concentration camps.
In the Jewish ghetto from 7 September 1941 to 6 July 1943 over 133,000 persons were tortured and shot.
Mass shooting of the population occurred in the suburbs of the city and in the Livenitz forest.
In the Ganov camp 200,000 citizens were exterminated. The most refined methods of cruelty were employed in this extermination, such as disembowelling and the freezing of human beings in tubs of water. Mass shootings took place to the accompaniment of the music of an orchestra recruited from the persons interned.
Beginning with June 1943 the Germans carried out measures to hide the evidence of their crimes. They exhumed and burned corpses, and they crushed the bones with machines and used them for fertilizer.
At the beginning of 1944, in the Ozarichi region of the Bielorussian S.S.R., before liberation by the Red Army, the Germans established three concentration camps without shelters, to which they committed tens of thousands of persons from the neighbouring territories. They intentionally brought many people to these camps from typhus hospitals, for the purpose of infecting the other persons interned and for spreading the disease in territories from which the Germans were driven by the Red Army. In these camps there were many murders and crimes.
In the Estonian S.S.R. they shot tens of thousands of persons and in one day alone, 19 September 1944, in Camp Kloga, the Germans shot 2,000 peaceful citizens. They burned the bodies on bonfires.
In