12 Dec.
45
Incredible as it may seem, mothers in the throes of
childbirth shared cars with those infected with tuberculosis or venereal
diseases. Babies, when born, were hurled out of these car windows; and
dying persons lay on the bare floors of freight cars without even the
small comfort of straw.
I refer to Document Number 084-PS, which is Exhibit USA-199. This
document is an interdepartmental report, prepared by Dr. Gutkelch, in
the Defendant Rosenberg's Ministry, and it is dated the 30th of
September 1942. 1 wish to quote from Page 10 of the English text,
starting with the fourth line from the top of the page. In the German
text it appears at Page 22, Paragraph 1. Quoting directly from that
paragraph:
"How necessary this interference was
is shown by the fact that this train with returning laborers had
stopped at the same place where a train with newly recruited Eastern
Workers had stopped. Because of the corpses in the trainload of
returning laborers, a catastrophe might have been precipitated had it
not been for the mediation of Mrs. Miller. In this train women gave
birth to babies who were thrown out of the windows during the journey,
people having tuberculosis and venereal diseases rode in the same
car, dying people lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the
dead was thrown on the railway embankment. The same must have occurred
in other returning transports."
Some aspects of the Nazi transport were described by the Defendant
Sauckel himself in a decree which he issued on the 20th of July 1942;
and I refer specifically to Document Number 2241(2)-PS, which is Exhibit
USA-200. I ask that the Tribunal take judicial notice of the original
decree, which is published in Section BIa, at Page 48e of a book
entitled Die Beschäftigung von ausländischen Arbeitskräften
in Deutschland. I quote from Page 1, Paragraph 2, of the English
text; and I am quoting directly:
"According to reports of
transportation commanders" — Transportleiter — "presented
to me, the special trains provided by the German railway have
frequently been in a really broken-down condition. Numerous window
panes have been missing in the coaches. Old French coaches without
lavatories have been partly employed so that the workers had to fit up
an emptied compartment as a lavatory. In other cases, the coaches were
not heated in winter so that the lavatories quickly became unusable
because the water system was frozen and the flushing apparatus was
therefore without water."
The Tribunal will unquestionably have noticed or observed that a number
of the documents which we have referred to — and which