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ber the place from which they came. What is the measure of this crime? No man in that dock can dispute his knowledge or his complicity. The minutes of the Central Planning Board must have been read in every department of the State. You have seen the mass of evidence connecting the military leaders and every other branch of the Government with this colossal programme of slavery. None of these men can be acquitted of this crime. None of them can have been ignorant of the scale and brutality with which it was perpetrated (D-524, GB 532).

I pass now to a connected matter, but one even more terrible. The general manner in which the Defendants conducted the belligerent occupation of the territories which they had overrun.

(B) EXTERMINATION

The evidence that these territories were the scene of murder, slavery, terrorism and spoliation on a scale without precedent in history, in breach of the elementary rules as to belligerent occupation has not really been seriously challenged. These crimes were in no sense sporadic or isolated depending on the sadism of a Koch here or cruelty by a Frank there. They were part and parcel of a deliberate and systematic plan of which their action in regard to slave labour was a lust symptom. In order to establish the "1,000year Reich", they set out to accomplish the extermination or permanent weakening of the racial and national groups of Europe or of those sections, such as the intelligentsia, on which the survival of those groups must largely depend.

The origin of this terrible attempt upon the existence of free and ancient nations goes back to the whole Nazi doctrine of total war which rejected war as being merely against States and their armies, as international law provides. Nazi total war was also a war against civilian populations, against whole peoples. Hitler told Keitel at the end of the Polish campaign (864-PS, USA 609):

"Shrewdness and severity must be the maxims in this racial struggle in order to spare us from going to battle on account of Poland again."

The aims of genocide were formulated by Hitler in the following words in his conversation with Hermann Rauschning (USSR 378):

"The French complained after the war that there were twenty million Germans too many. We accept the criticism. We favor the planned control of population movements. But our friends will have to excuse us if we subtract the twenty millions elsewhere. After all these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and lowly, it is about time we decided

to protect the strong against the inferior. It will be one of the chief tasks of German statesmanship for all time to prevent, by every means in our power, the increase of the Slav races. Natural instincts bid all living beings not merely to conquer their enemies, but also destroy them. In former days, it was the victor's prerogative to destroy entire tribes, entire peoples. By doing this gradually and without bloodshed, we demonstrate our humanity."

Himmler's vision was similar (L-70, USA 308):

"For us the end of this war will mean an open road to the East, the creation of the Germanic Reich in this way or that * * *the fetching home of 30 million human beings of our blood, so that still during our lifetime we shall be a people of 120 million Germanic souls. That means that we shall be the sole decisive power in Europe. That means that we shall then be able to tackle the peace, during which we shall be willing for the first twenty years to rebuild and spread out our villages and towns, and that we shall push the borders of our German race 500 kilometers farther out to the East."

Their aims went beyond mere Germanization, the imposing of the German cultural pattern upon other peoples. Hitler was resolved to expel non-Germans from the soil he required, but that they owned, and colonize it by Germans. This is plainly stated in "Mein Kampf" (D-660, GB 128).

66* * * The Polish policy in the sense of a Germanization of the East, demanded by so many, was rooted unfortunately almost always in the same wrong conclusion. Here too it was believed that one could bring about a Germanization of the Polish element by a purely linguistic integration into the German nationality. Here too the result would have been an unfortunate one; people of an alien race, expressing its alien. thought in the German language, compromising the height and dignity of our own nationality by its own inferiority." Himmler put it even more clearly (2915-PS, USA 306):

"It is not our task to Germanize the East in the old sense, that is to teach the people there the German language and the German law, but to see to it that only people of purely Germanic blood live in the East."

The defendants were careful to conceal their true aims from their victims. In January 1940 a captured report reads (661-PS, USA 300):

"In order to relieve the living space of Poles in the Government General as well as in the liberated East, one should remove cheap labor temporarily by hundreds of thousands, em

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ploy them for a few years in the old Reich, and thereby hamper their native biological propagation."

and it concludes:

"Strictest care is to be taken that secret circulars, memoranda and official correspondence which contain instructions detrimental to the Poles are kept rigidly under lock and key so that they will not some day fill the White Books printed in Paris or the U.S.A."

Again, the day before the appointment of Rosenberg as Minister for the East, Hitler told him in the presence of Keitel, Goering and Bormann (L-221, USA 317):

"We ought to act here in exactly the same way as we did in the case of Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium. In these cases too we did not publish our aims and it is only sensible to continue in the same way. Therefore we shall emphasize again that we were forced to occupy, administer or secure a certain area. It was in the interests of the inhabitants that we provided order, food, communications, etc. Hence our measures. Nobody shall be able to recognize that it initiates a final settlement. This need not prevent our taking all necessary measures -shooting at sight, etc., and we shall take them."

Having given these words of caution to his confederates, you will remember how Hitler went on to elaborate his plans for the destruction of the Soviet peoples. The Crimea, he said, must be evacuated of all foreigners and settled by Germans only.

"We now have to face the task of cutting up the giant cake according to our needs in order to be able

Firstly, to dominate it,

secondly, to administer it,

thirdly, to exploit it."

The pattern was exemplified in the infamous plan of Neurath and Frank for Bohemia and Moravia-the same Neurath whose Counsel the day before yesterday asked you to respect the holiness of the individual. The pattern, I say, was exemplified in their plan for Bohemia and Moravia. No more terrible document has been put in evidence in this trial nor one which more completely exposes the falsity of the slogan "Lebensraum", which constituted the excuse for the rape of Czechoslovakia (3859-PS, GB 520). That plan required the elimination of the intelligentsia, the bearers of Czechoslovakia history and tradition, and since the long term solution of evacuating all Czechs completely from the country and replacing them by Germans could not be affected immediately because of shortage of Germans, a short term solution of Germanising the remainder of the population. This was to be done

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by rendering their language a dialect, by abolition of higher education, by instituting a stringent marriage policy after previous racial examination. You will remember Frank's summary:

"Apart from the continuance of the propaganda for Germanization and the granting of advantages as an inducement, severest police methods with exile and special treatment for all saboteurs. Principle:

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You will remember too the plan for Poland discussed in Hitler's train on 12th September 1939 by Rippentrop, Keitel and Jodl as described in the evidence of the witness Lahousen and the discussion between Hitler, Schirach and Frank three weeks later after dinner in the Fuehrer's apartment (864-PS, USSR 172).

"There should be one master only for the Poles- the German; two masters side by side cannot and must not exist and therefore all representatives of Polish intelligentsia are to be exterminated. This sounds cruel but such is the law of life."

Such were the plans for the Soviet Union, for Poland and for Czechoslovakia. Genocide was not restricted to extermination of the Jewish people or of the gypsies. It was applied in different forms to Yugoslavia, to the non-German inhabitants of AlsaceLorraine, to the people of the Low Countries and of Norway. The technique varied from nation to nation, from people to people. The long term aim was the same in all cases.

The methods followed a similar pattern: first a deliberate programme of murder, of outright annihilation. This was the method applied to the Polish intelligentsia, to gypsies and to Jews. The killing of millions, even by the gas chambers and mass shootings, employed was no easy matter. The defendants and their confederates also used methods of protracted annihilation, the favourite being to work their victims to death, hence Himmler's bond with the Minister of Justice in September 1942 under which antisocial elements were handed over to the SS "to be worked to death". On the 14th of the same month Goebbels was recommending this method in terms (682-PS):

"With regard to the destruction of social life Dr. Goebbels has the opinion that the following groups should be exterminated: Jews and gypsies unconditionally, Poles who have to serve 3-4 years of penal servitude, and Czechs and Germans who are sentenced to death or penal servitude for life or to security custody for life. The idea of exterminating them by labour is the best." Another favourite technique of extermination was by starvation. Rosenberg, the great architect of this policy of national murder, told his collaborators in June 1941 (1058-PS, USA 147):

"The object of feeding the German people stands this year without a doubt at the top of the list of German's claims on the East, and there the southern territories and the Norther Caucasus will have to serve as a balance for the feeding of the German people. We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity bare of any feelings. A very extensive evacuation will be necessary without any doubt and it is sure that the future will hold very hard years in store for the Russians."

The method applied in Alsace was deportation. A captured report reads (R-114, USA 314):

"The first expulsion action was carried out in Alsace in the period from July to December, 1940: in the course of it, 105,000 persons were either expelled or prevented from returning. They were in the main Jews, gypsies and other foreign racial elements, criminals, anti-social and incurably insane persons, and in addition Frenchmen, and Francophiles. The Patois-speaking population was combed out by these series of deportations in the same way as the other Alsatians."

The report goes on to state that new deportations are being prepared and after reciting the categories affected, sums up the measures being taken:

"The problem of race will be given first consideration and this in such a manner that persons of racial value will be deported to Germany proper and racially inferior persons to France.".

The Nazis also used various biological devices, as they have been called, to achieve genocide. They deliberately decreased the birthrate in the occupied countries by sterilization, castration and abortion, by separating husband from wife and men from women and obstructing marriage.

"We are obliged to depopulate", said Hitler to Rauschning, "as part of our mission of preserving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out— that, roughly, is my task. Nature is cruel; therefore, we, too, must be cruel. If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the spilling of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.".

You have seen Neurath's use of this biological device in his plan for Czechoslovakia. Listen to Boermann's directives for the East

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