21 Nov. 45
rights were denied, that prisoners of war were given brutal
treatment and often murdered. This was particularly true in the case
of captured airmen, often my countrymen.
It was ordered that captured English and American airmen should
no longer be granted the status of prisoners of war. They were to be
treated as criminals and the Army was ordered to refrain from
protecting them against lynching by the populace. (R-118) The Nazi
Government, through its police and propaganda agencies, took pains to
incite the civilian population to attack and kill airmen who
crash-landed. The order, given by the Reichsführer SS Himmler on
10 August 1943, directed that: "It is not the task of the police
to interfere in clashes between German and English and American
flyers who have bailed out". This order was transmitted on the
same day by SS Obersturmbannführer Brand of Himmler's personal
staff to all senior executive SS and Police officers, with these
directions:
"I am sending you the inclosed
order with the request that the Chief of the Regular Police and of
the Security Police be informed. They are to make this instruction
known to their subordinate officers verbally." (R-110)
Similarly, we will show Hitler's top secret
order, dated 18 October 1942, that Commandos, regardless of
condition, were "to be slaughtered to the last man" after
capture (498-PS). We will show the circulation of secret orders, one
of which was signed by Hess, to be passed orally to civilians, that
enemy fliers or parachutists w were to be arrested or liquidated
(062-PS). By such means were murders incited and directed.
This Nazi campaign of ruthless treatment of enemy forces assumed
its greatest proportions in the fight against Russia. Eventually all
prisoners of war were taken out of control of the Army and put in the
hands of Himmler and the SS (058-PS). In the East, the German fury
spent itself. Russian prisoners were ordered to be branded. They were
starved. I shall quote passages from a letter written February 28,
1942 by Defendant Rosenberg to Defendant Keitel:
"The fate of the Soviet
prisoners of war in Germany is on the contrary a tragedy of the
greatest extent. Of 3,600,000 prisoners of war, only several hundred
thousand are still able to work fully. A large part of them has
starved, or died, because of the hazards of the weather. Thousands
also died from spotted fever....
"The camp commanders have forbidden the civilian population
to put food at the disposal of the prisoners, and they have rather
let them starve to death....