13 Dec.
45
"The Organization," by the way, is the
Organization Todt.
Going on with the quotation:
"The main difference was that, since
the principal activities of the Organization lay outside the frontiers
of Germany, foreigners were not transported to Germany but had either
to work in their own country or in some other occupied country.
"In the In the recruitment drives for foreign workers for the
Organization, methods of compulsion as well as methods of persuasion
were used, the latter usually with very little result."
Moreover, conscripted allied nationals were compelled by this same
Organization Todt actually to engage in operations of war against their
country.
Document 407(VIII)-PS discloses that the foreign workers who were
impressed into the Organization Todt through the efforts of the
Defendant Sauckel did participate in the building of the Atlantic Wall
fortifications.
As chief of German war production, this Defendant Speer sponsored and
approved the use of these prisoners of war in the production of
armaments and munitions. This has been made plain by the evidence
already discussed.
To sum it up briefly finally we say that it shows first that after
Speer assumed the responsibility for the armament production, his
concern, in his discussions with his co-conspirators, was to secure a
larger allocation of prisoners of war for his armament factories. That
has been shown by the quotations from the excerpts of Document R-124,
the minutes of the meeting of the Central Planning Board; and in this
same meeting the Tribunal will recall that Speer complained because only
30 percent of the Russian prisoners of war were engaged in the armaments
industry.
We referred to a speech of Speer, Document 1435-PS — we quoted
from it — in which he said that 10,000 prisoners of war were put at
the disposal of the armaments industry upon his orders.
And finally, Speer advocated the returning of escaped prisoners of war
to factories as convicts. That is shown again by Document R-124, Page
13, Paragraph 5, of the English text, where the Defendant Speer says
that he has come to an arrangement . . .
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Dodd, don't you think that we have really got this
sufficiently now?
MR. DODD: Yes, Sir; I just . . .
THE PRESIDENT: We have Speer's own admission and any number of
documents which prove the way in which these prisoners of war and other
laborers were brought into Germany.
MR. DODD: Well I just wanted to refer briefly to that passage in that
document, R-124, as showing that this defendant advocated having escaped
prisoners of war returned to the munitions factories.