12 Dec.
45
the Russian prisoners of war were engaged in the
armament industry. This the Defendant Speer found unsatisfactory. And
referring again to Document R-124, the minutes of the Central Planning
Board, and particularly to Page 17 of that document, Paragraph 10 of the
English text, and Page 14, Paragraph 7 of the German text, we find this
statement by the Defendant Speer, quoting directly:
"There is a detailed statement
showing in what sectors the Russian prisoners of war have been
distributed. This statement is quite interesting. It shows that the
armaments industry received only 30 percent. I constantly complained
about this."
And at Page 20
of the same document, R-124 — Paragraph 1 on Page 20 of the English
text and Page 14, the last paragraph of the German text — the
Defendant Speer stated, and I quote from the paragraph directly:
"The 90,000 Russian prisoners of war
employed in the whole of the armament industry are for the greatest
part skilled men."
The
Defendant Sauckel, who was appointed Plenipotentiary General for the
utilization of labor for the express purpose, among others, of
integrating prisoners of war into the German war industry, made it plain
that prisoners of war were to be compelled to serve the German armament
industry. His labor mobilization program, which is Document 016-PS,
already marked Exhibit USA-168, contains this statement on Page 6,
Paragraph 10 of the English text and Page 9, Paragraph 1, of the German
text:
"All prisoners of war now in Germany,
from the territories of the West as well as of the East, must be
completely incorporated into the German armament and food industries.
Their production must be brought to the highest possible level."
I wish to turn now from the exploitation of foreign labor in general to
a rather special point of the Nazi program which appears to us to have
combined the brutality and the purposes of the slave labor program with
those of the concentration camp. The Nazis placed all Allied nationals
in concentration camps and forced them along with the other inmates of
the concentration camps, to work under conditions which were set
actually to exterminate them. This was what we call the Nazi program of
extermination through work.
In the spring of 1942 these conspirators turned to the concentration
camps as a further source of slave labor for the armament industry. I
refer to a new Document Number R-129, bearing Exhibit Number USA-217.
This document is a letter to Himmler, the Reichsführer SS —
and it is dated the 30th day of April 1942 — from one