21 Nov. 45
the reports of the "doctor" in charge show that victims
were immersed in cold water until their body temperature was reduced
to 28 degrees centigrade (82.4 degrees Farenheit), when they all died
immediately (1618-PS). This was in August 1942. But the
'doctor's" technique improved. By February 1943 he was able to
report that 30 persons were chilled to 27 to 29 degrees, their hands
and feet frozen white, and their bodies "rewarmed" by a hot
bath. But the Nazi scientific triumph was "rewarming with animal
heat."' The victim, all but frozen to death, was surrounded with
bodies of living women until he revived and responded to his
environment by having sexual intercourse. (1616-PS) Here Nazi
degeneracy reached its nadir.
I dislike to encumber the record with such morbid tales, but we
are in the grim business of trying men as criminals, and these are
the things that their own agents say happened. We will show you these
concentration camps in motion pictures, just as the Allied armies
found them when they arrived, and the measures General Eisenhower had
to take to clean them up. Our proof will be disgusting and you will
say I have robbed you of your sleep. But these are the things which
have turned the stomach of the world and set every civilized hand
against Nazi Germany.
Germany became one vast torture chamber. Cries of its victims
were heard round the world and brought shudders to civilized people
everywhere. I am one who received during this war most atrocity tales
with suspicion and scepticism. But the proof here will be so
overwhelming that I venture to predict not one word I have spoken
will be denied. These defendants will only deny personal
responsibility or knowledge.
Under the clutch of the most intricate web of
espionage and intrigue that any modern state has endured, and
persecution and torture of a kind that has not been visited upon the
world in many centuries, the elements of the German population which
were both decent and courageous were annihilated. Those which were
decent but weak were intimidated. Open resistance, which had never
been more than feeble and irresolute, disappeared. But resistance, I
am happy to say, always remained, although it was manifest in only
such events as the abortive effort to assassinate Hitler on July 20,
1944. With resistance driven underground, the Nazi had the German
State in his own hands.
But the Nazis not only silenced discordant voices. They created
positive controls as effective as their negative ones. Propaganda
organs, on a scale never before known, stimulated the Party and Party
formations with a permanent enthusiasm and abandon such as we,
democratic people, can work up only for a few days before