something to his comrade. The latter
counted off about 20 persons, and instructed them to walk behind the
earth mound . . . . I walked around the mound and stood in front of a
tremendous grave; closely pressed together, the people were lying on
top of each other so that only their heads were visible. The
excavation was already two-thirds full; I estimated that it contained
about a thousand people . . . Now already the next group approached,
descended into the excavation, lined themselves up against the
previous victims and were shot."
The foregoing crimes against the civilian population
are sufficiently appalling, and yet the evidence shows that at any
rate in the East, the mass murders and cruelties were not committed
solely for the purpose of stamping out opposition or resistance to
the German occupying forces. In Poland and the Soviet Union these
crimes were part of a plan to get rid of whole native populations by
expulsion and annihilation, in order that their territory could be
used for colonization by Germans. Hitler had written in Mein Kampf on
these lines, and the plan was clearly stated by Himmler in July 1942,
when he wrote: "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."
In August 1942 the policy for the Eastern
Territories as laid down by Bormann was summarized by a subordinate
of Rosenberg as follows:
"The Slavs are to work for us.
In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory
vaccination and Germanic health services are superfluous. The
fertility of the Slavs is undesirable."
It was Himmler again who stated in October 1943:
"What happens to a Russian, a
Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can
offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take. If
necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with
us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests
me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur, otherwise
it is of no interest to me."
In Poland the intelligentsia had been marked down for
extermination as early as September 1939, and in May 1940 the
Defendant Frank wrote in his diary of "taking advantage of the
focussing of world interest on the Western Front, by wholesale
liquidation of thousands of Poles, first leading representatives of
the Polish intelligentsia." Earlier, Frank had been directed to
reduce the 'entire Polish economy to an absolute minimum necessary
for bare