Text: English     International Military Tribunal "Blue Series," Vol. 3, p. 574
		14 Dec. 45 CAPTAIN SAMUEL HARRIS (Assistant Trial Counsel for the United States): May the Tribunal please, documents relating to the Nazi program of Germanization and spoliation have been assembled in a document book bearing the letter "U." These document books are now being distributed for the use of the members of the Tribunal. I ask Your Honors to note that the tabs on the side of the document book are numbered 1 to 30. The index sheet at the front of the book keys these numbers to the EC, PS, and R numbers of our exhibits. For Your Honors' convenience we have also numbered the pages of each exhibit in pencil at the upper right-hand corner of each exhibit. The documents which we shall introduce were collected by Lieutenant Kenyon, who sits at my right, and by Doctors Derenberg and Jacoby. Without their untiring efforts, this presentation would not have been possible. Evidence has already been introduced by Mr. Alderman to prove that the defendants conspired to wage aggressive war. It has also been proved that the desire for Lebensraum. was one of the chief forces motivating the conspirators to plan, launch, and wage their wars of aggression. We propose at this time to present evidence disclosing what the conspirators intended to do with conquered territories, called by them Lebensraum, after they had succeeded in overpowering the victims of their aggressions. We have broadly divided this subject into two categories: Germanization and spoliation. When we speak of plans to germanize, we mean plans to assimilate conquered territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich. Germanization, we shall demonstrate, meant the obliteration of the former national character of the conquered territories and the extermination of all elements which could not be reconciled with the Nazi ideology. By spoliation, we mean the plunder of public and private property and, in general, the exploitation of the people and the natural resources of occupied countries. We propose, with the permission of Your Honors, to introduce at this time .30 documents in all. These documents lay bare some of the secret plans of the conspirators to germanize, to plunder, to despoil, and to destroy. They do not, of course, tell the whole story of all the conspirators' plans in this field. In some instances proof of the plan is derived from the acts committed by the conspirators. But these few documents are particularly illuminating with respect to the conspirators' plans for Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia; and they indicate the outlines of carefully conceived plans for the rest of Europe. Others who follow will fill in this outline by showing a series of outrages committed on so vast a scale that no doubts will exist that they were committed according to plan. 574
		Text: English     International Military Tribunal "Blue Series," Vol. 3, p. 574     Last modified: October 10, 1998 Copyright © 1998 The Mazal Library and The Holocaust History Project. All rights reserved. Technical/administrative contact: webmaster@holocaust-history.org Find a typo? Let us know.