The Nuremberg Trials (Vol.2). International Military Tribunal
March 1944, 50 R.A.F. officers who escaped from Stalag Luft III at Sagan were murdered when captured.
In September 1941, 11,000 Polish officers who were prisoners of war were killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.
In Yugoslavia the German Command and the occupying authorities in the person of the chief officials of the police, the SS troops (Police Lieutenant General Rosener) and the Divisional Group Command (General Kubler and others) in the period 1941-43 ordered the shooting of prisoners of war.
THE PRESIDENT: Now, Paragraph 2 of (D).
CAPTAIN V. V. KUCHIN (Assistant Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.) [Continuing the reading of the Indictment]: 2. In the Eastern Countries:
At Kragnevatz in Yugoslavia 2,300 hostages were shot in October 1941. At Kraljero in Yugoslavia 5,000 hostages were shot.
THE PRESIDENT: Will you turn now to (E), Paragraph 2, page 21?
CAPT. KUCHIN: 2. Eastern Countries:
During the occupation of the Eastern Countries the German Government and the German High Command carried out, as a systematic policy, a continuous course of plunder and destruction including:
On the territory of the Soviet Union the Nazi conspirators destroyed or severely damaged 1,710 cities and more than 70,000 villages and hamlets, more than 6 million buildings and rendered homeless about 25 million persons.
Among the cities which suffered most destruction are Stalingrad, Sevastopol, Kiev, Minsk, Odessa, Smolensk, Novgorod, Pskov, Orel, Kharkov, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, Stalino, and Leningrad.
As is evident from an official memorandum of the German Command, the Nazi conspirators planned the complete annihilation of entire Soviet cities. In a completely secret order of the Chief of the Naval Staff (SKL Ia No. 1601/41, dated 29 September 1941) addressed only to Staff officers, it was said:
“The Führer has decided to erase Petersburg from the face of the earth. The existence of this large city will have no further interest after Soviet Russia is destroyed. Finland has also said that the existence of this city on her new border is not desirable from her point of view. The original request of the Navy that docks, harbor, et cetera, necessary for the fleet be preserved is known to the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces, but the basic principles of carrying out operations against Petersburg do not make it possible to satisfy this request.
“It is proposed to approach near to the city and to destroy it with the aid of an artillery barrage from weapons of different calibers and with long air attacks. . . .
“The problem of the lives of the population and of their provisioning is a problem which cannot and must not be decided by us.
“In this war . . . we are not interested in preserving even a part of the population of this large city.”
The Germans destroyed 427 museums, among them the wealthy museums of Leningrad, Smolensk, Stalingrad, Novgorod, Poltava, and others.
In Pyatigorsk the art objects brought there from the Rostov museum were seized.
The losses suffered by the coal mining industry alone in the Stalin region amount to 2 billion rubles. There was colossal destruction of industrial establishments in Makerevka, Carlovka, Yenakievo, Konstantinovka, Mariupol, from which most of the machinery and factories were removed.
Stealing of huge dimensions and the destruction of industrial, cultural, and other property was typified in Kiev. More than 4 million books, magazines, and manuscripts (many of which were very valuable and even unique) and a large number of artistic productions and divers valuables were stolen and carried away.
Many valuable art productions were taken away from Riga.
The extent of the plunder of cultural valuables is evidenced by the fact that 100,000 valuable volumes and 70 cases of ancient periodicals and precious monographs were carried away by Rosenberg’s staff alone.
Among further examples of these crimes are:
Wanton devastation of the city of Novgorod and of many historical and artistic monuments there; wanton devastation and plunder of the city of Rovno and of its province; the destruction of the industrial, cultural, and other property in Odessa; the destruction of cities and villages in Soviet Karelia; the destruction in Estonia of cultural, industrial, and other buildings; the destruction of medical and prophylactic institutes; the destruction of agriculture and industry in Lithuania; the destruction of cities in Latvia.
The Germans approached monuments of culture, dear to the Soviet people, with special hatred. They broke up the estate of the poet Pushkin in Mikhailovskoye, desecrated his grave, and destroyed the neighboring villages and the Svyatogor monastery.
They destroyed the estate and museum of Leo Tolstoy, “Yasnaya Polyana” and desecrated the grave of the great writer. They destroyed, in Klin, the museum of Tchaikovsky and, in Penaty, the museum of the painter Repin and many others.
The Nazi conspirators destroyed 1,670 Greek Orthodox churches, 237 Roman Catholic churches, 67 chapels, 532 synagogues, et cetera.
They also broke up, desecrated and senselessly destroyed the most valuable monuments of the Christian Church, such as the Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra, Novy Jerusalem in the Istrin region, and the most ancient monasteries and churches.
Destruction in Estonia of cultural, industrial, and other premises; burning down of many thousands of residential buildings; removal of 10,000 works of art; destruction of medical and prophylactic institutions; plunder and removal to Germany of immense quantities of agricultural stock including horses, cows, pigs, poultry, beehives, and agricultural machines of all kinds.
Destruction of agriculture, enslavement of peasants, and looting of stock and produce in Lithuania.
In the Latvian Republic destruction of the agriculture by the looting of all stock, machinery, and produce.
Carrying away by Rosenberg’s headquarters of 100,000 valuable volumes and 70 cases of ancient periodicals and precious monographs; wanton destruction of libraries and other cultural buildings.
The result of this policy of plunder and destruction was to lay waste the land and cause utter desolation.
The over-all value of the material loss which the U.S.S.R. has borne, is computed to be 679 billion rubles, in State prices of 1941.
Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 the defendants seized and stole large stocks of raw materials, copper, tin, iron, cotton, and food; caused to be taken to Germany large amounts of railway rolling stock, and many engines, carriages, steam vessels and trolley buses; robbed libraries, laboratories, and art museums of books, pictures, objects of art, scientific apparatus, and furniture; stole all gold reserves and foreign exchange of Czechoslovakia, including 23,000 kilograms of gold, of a nominal value of 5,265,000 Pounds; fraudulently acquired control and thereafter looted the Czech banks and many Czech industrial enterprises; and otherwise stole, looted, and misappropriated Czechoslovak public and private property. The total sum of defendants’ economic spoliation of Czechoslovakia from 1938 to 1945 is estimated at 200 billion Czechoslovak crowns.
(G) Wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages, and devastation not justified by military necessity.
The defendants wantonly destroyed cities. . . .
THE PRESIDENT: Will you go to Paragraph 2 of (G)? The French read the first paragraph. Do you want to go to Paragraph 2 of (G)?
CAPT. KUCHIN: I have begun. . . .
THE PRESIDENT: I thought we had read Paragraph 1. We might take up at Paragraph 2, beginning “In the Eastern Countries the defendants pursued. . . .”
CAPT. KUCHIN: 2. Eastern Countries:
In the Eastern Countries the defendants pursued a policy of wanton destruction and devastation; some particulars of this, without prejudice to the production of evidence of other cases, are set out above under the heading “Plunder of Public and Private Property”.
In