12 Dec.
45
be starved, given less than sufficient to eat, often
beaten and maltreated, and permitted to die wholesale for want of food,
for want of even the fundamental requirements of decent clothing, for
the want of adequate shelter or indeed sometimes just because they
produced too little.
Now these conditions of deportation are vividly described in Document
Number 054-PS, which is a report made to the Defendant Rosenberg
concerning the treatment of Ukrainian labor. I wish to refer to Document
Number 054-PS, which bears the Exhibit Number USA-198. Before quoting
from it directly — according to this report the plight of these
hapless victims was aggravated because many were dragged off without
opportunity to collect their possessions. Indeed, men and women were
snatched from bed and lodged in cellars pending deportation. Some
arrived in night clothing. Brutal guards beat them. They were locked in
railroad cars for long periods without any toilet facilities at all,
without food, without water, without heat. The women were subjected to
physical and moral indignities and indecencies during medical
examinations.
I refer now specifically to this Document Number 054-PS, which consists
of a covering letter to the Defendant Rosenberg, first of all, and is
signed by one Theurer, a 1st lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, to which is
attached a copy of a report by the commandant of the collecting center
for Ukrainian specialists at Kharkov; and it also consists of a letter
written by one of the specialists in the Rosenberg office — no, by
one of the workers, not in the Rosenberg office, but one of the
specialists they were recruiting, by the name of Grigori. I wish to
quote from the report at Page 2, starting at Paragraph 4 of the English
text-and in the German text it appears at Page 3, Paragraph 4. Quoting
directly from that page of the English text:
"The starosts, that is
village elders, are frequently corruptible; they continue to have the
skilled workers, whom they drafted, dragged from their beds at night
to be locked up in cellars until they are shipped. Since the male and
female workers often are not given any time to pick up their luggage
and so forth, many skilled workers arrive at the collecting center for
skilled workers with equipment entirely insufficient (without shoes or
change of clothing, no eating and drinking utensils, no blankets, et
cetera). In particularly extreme cases, therefore, new arrivals
have to be sent back again immediately to get the things most
necessary for them. If people do not come along at once, threatening
and beating of skilled workers by the above-mentioned local militia
become a daily occurrence and are reported from most of the
communities. In some cases women were beaten until they could no
longer