10 Dec.
45
far beyond any legitimate exploitation under the Geneva
Convention principles for military purpose. Undoubtedly the demands of
the German war economy for food and raw material served to revive the
attractiveness on the economic side of this theory while the
difficulties Germany was experiencing in defeating England reaffirmed
for the Nazi conspirators the temporarily forgotten Nazi political
imperative of eliminating, as a political factor, their one formidable
opponent on the continent.
As early as 1923 Hitler outlined this theory in some detail in Mein
Kampf where he stated, and I quote from Page 641 of the Houghton
Mifflin English edition, as follows:
"There are two reasons which induce
me to submit to a special examination the relation of Germany to
Russia: (1) Here perhaps we are dealing with the most decisive concern
of all German foreign affairs; and (2) this question is also the
touchstone for the political capacity of the young National Socialist
movement to think clearly and to act correctly."
And again at Page 654 of the same edition:
"And so we National Socialists
consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our
pre-war period. We take up where we broke off 600 years ago. We stop
the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze
toward the land in the East. At long last we break off the colonial
and commercial policy of the pre-war period and shift to the soil
policy of the future.
"If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in
mind only Russia and her vassal border states."
The political portion of this economy or purpose is clearly reflected in
the stated purposes of the organization which the Defendant Rosenberg
set up to administer the Occupied Eastern Territories. I have already
discussed this material and need not repeat it now. In a speech,
however, which he delivered 2 days before the attack to the people most
interested in the problem of the East, Rosenberg re-stated in his usual
somewhat mystic fashion the political basis for the campaign and its
inter-relationship with the economic goal. I should like to read a short
extract from that speech, which is Document Number 1058-PS and which I
now offer in evidence as Exhibit USA-147. The part I read is from Page 9
of the German text:
"The job of feeding the German people
stands this year, without a doubt, at the top of the list of Germany's
claims in the East; and here the southern territories and the northern
Caucasus will have to serve as a balance for the feeding of the German
people. We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to
feed also the Russian people with the