21 Nov. 45
cohesion of the German people in war purposes. Moreover, these
cruelties in Germany served as atrocity practice to discipline the
membership of the criminal organization to follow the pattern later
in occupied countries.
Through the police formations that are before you accused as
criminal organizations, the Nazi Party leaders, aided at some point
in their basic and notorious purpose by each of the individual
defendants, instituted a reign of terror. These espionage and police
organizations were utilized to hunt down every form of opposition and
to penalize every nonconformity These organizations early founded and
administered concentration camps-Buchenwald in 1933, Dachau in 1934.
But these notorious names were not alone. Concentration camps came to
dot the German map and to number scores. At first they met with
resistance from some Germans. We have a captured letter from Minister
of Justice Gürtner to Hitler which is revealing. A Gestapo
official had been prosecuted for crimes committed in the camp at
Hohnstein, and the Nazi Governor of Saxony had promptly asked that
the proceeding be quashed. The Minister of Justice in June of 1935
protested because, as he said:
"In this camp unusually grave
mistreatments of prisoners have occurred at least since summer 1933.
The prisoners not only were beaten with whips without cause,
similarly as in the Concentration Camp Bredow near Stettin till they
lost consciousness, but they were also tortured in other manners,
e.g. with the help of a dripping apparatus constructed exclusively
for this purpose, under which prisoners had to stand until they were
suffering from serious purulent wounds of the scalp ...."
(787-PS)
I shall not take time to detail the ghastly proceedings in these
concentration camps. Beatings, starvings, tortures, and killings were
routine - so routine that the tormenters became blasé and
careless. We have a report of discovery that in Plötzensee one
night, 186 persons were executed while there were orders for only
180. Another report describes how the family of one victim received
two urns of ashes by mistake.
Inmates were compelled to execute each other. In 1942 they were
paid five Reichsmarks per execution, but on June 27, 1942 SS General
Glücks ordered commandants of all concentration camps to reduce
this honorarium to three cigarettes. In 1943 the Reich leader of the
SS and Chief of German Police ordered the corporal punishments on
Russian women to be applied by Polish women and vice versa, but the
price was not frozen. He said that as reward, a few cigarettes was
authorized. Under the Nazis, human life had been progressively
devalued, until it finally became