13 Dec.
45
Afternoon Session
MR. DODD: May it please the Tribunal, the deterrent
effect of the concentration camps was based on the promise of brutal
treatment. Once in the custody of the SS guards, the victim was beaten,
tortured, starved, and often murdered through the so-called "extermination
through work" program which I described the other day or through
the mass execution gas chambers and furnaces of the camps, which were
shown several days ago on the moving picture screen in this courtroom.
The reports of official government investigations furnish additional
evidence of the conditions within the concentration camps.
Document 2309-PS, which has already been referred to and of which the
Tribunal has taken judicial notice, I now refer to again, particularly
to the second page of the English text, beginning with the second
sentence of the second paragraph:
"The work at these camps mainly
consisted of underground labor, the purpose being the construction of
large underground factories, storage rooms, et cetera. This
labor was performed completely underground and as a result of the
brutal treatment, working and living conditions, a daily average of
100 prisoners died. To the one camp Oberstaubling 700 prisoners were
transported in February 1945, and on the 15th of April 1945 only 405
of these men were living. During the 12 months preceding the
liberation, Flossenbürg and the branch camps under its control
accounted for the death of 14,739 male inmates and 1,300 women. These
figures represent the deaths as obtained from the available records in
the camp. However, they are in no way complete, as many secret mass
executions and deaths took place. In 1941 an additional stockade was
added at the Flossenbürg camp to hold 2,000 Russian prisoners.
From these 2,000 prisoners only 102 survived.
"Flossenbürg Concentration Camp can best be described as a
factory dealing in death. Although this camp had in view the primary
object of putting to work the mass slave labor, another of its primary
objectives was the elimination of human lives by the methods employed
in handling the prisoners.
"Hunger and starvation rations, sadism, housing facilities,
inadequate clothing, medical neglect, disease, beatings, hangings,
freezing, forced hand hanging, forced suicides, shooting, all played a
major role in obtaining their objective. Prisoners were murdered at
random; spite killings against Jews were common. Injections of poison
and shooting in