were therefore "expected to endanger the
interest of the German Reich if allowed to go free."
The practice of keeping hostages to prevent and to punish any
form of civil disorder was resorted to by the Germans; an order
issued by the Defendant Keitel on 16 September 1941 spoke in terms of
fifty or a hundred lives from the occupied areas of the Soviet Union
for one German life taken. The order stated that "it should be
remembered that a human life in unsettled countries frequently counts
for nothing, and a deterrent effect can be obtained only by unusual
severity." The exact number of persons killed as a result of
this policy is not known, but large numbers were killed in France and
the other occupied territories in the West, while in the East the
slaughter was on an even more extensive scale. In addition to the
killing of hostages, entire towns were destroyed in some cases; such
massacres as those of Oradour-sur-Glane in France and Lidice in
Czechoslovakia, both of which were described to the Tribunal in
detail, are examples of the organized use of terror by the occupying
forces to beat down and destroy all opposition to their rule.
One of the most notorious means of terrorizing the people in
occupied territories was the use of concentration camps. They were
first established in Germany at the moment of the seizure of power by
the Nazi Government. Their original purpose was to imprison without
trial all those persons who were opposed to the Government, or who
were in any way obnoxious to German authority. With the aid of a
secret police force, this practice was widely extended, and in course
of time concentration camps became places of organized and systematic
murder, where millions of people were destroyed.
In the administration of the occupied territories the
concentration camps were used to destroy all opposition groups. The
persons arrested by the Gestapo were as a rule sent to concentration
camps. They were conveyed to the camps in many cases without any care
whatever being taken for them, and great numbers died on the way.
Those who arrived at the camp were subject to systematic cruelty.
They were given hard physical labor, inadequate food, clothes and
shelter, and were subject at all times to the rigors of a soulless
regime, and the private whims of individual guards. In the report of
the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate's Section of the Third
U.S. Army, under date 21 June 1945, the conditions at the Flossenburg
concentration camp were investigated, and one passage may be quoted:
"Flossenburg concentration camp can
best be described as a factory dealing in death. Although this camp
had in view the primary object of putting to work the mass slave
labor,