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Volume V · Page 822
| VI.. CLOSING. STATEMENTS |
| A. Extracts from the
Closing Statement of the Prosecution* |
| MR. JACK W. ROBBINS: The United States
charges these defendants with responsibility for the atrocities committed in
the administration of the concentration camp system of the Third Reich.
The history of these vile institutions is the biography of these men. Himmler brought the defendant Pohl to his Verwaltungsamt SS [SS Administrative Department] in 1934, and from that date Pohl's jurisdiction over concentration camp affairs increased steadily until he became chief of the entire system. Pohl took over construction matters and the SS enterprises in the first concentration camp in Germany at Dachau, and so distinguished himself that by 1936 he was handling the clothing, finance, auditing, and construction for all concentration camps and for the Death Head units which were used for guarding them. In 1938 he added the stone quarries at Mauthausen and Flossenbuerg. In 1939 a labor allocation office was added, and in February 1942 he assumed complete jurisdiction for the administration of all concentration camps and continued as their supreme chief until the collapse. Every minute, every aspect of the inmates' lives was regulated by Pohl and his associates. Such food, clothing, medical care, and billets as the inmates had, these men furnished. As the power to tax is the power to destroy, so the power to furnish includes the power to withhold. They allotted inmate labor and were themselves the largest users of it. The concentration camp commandant, the guards, the camp doctors, the labor allocation officer, the administrative officer, were under their control. Responsibility for the administration of the system cannot be shoved up higher than this. In the dock sit Pohl and his office chiefs. They are highly skilled administrative officers — the brains of the concentration camp organization. They made it operate and operate successfully, from the Nazi viewpoint. They were high-ranking SS men, career men in the administration of the concentration camp system. Under the aegis of these defendants, every conceivable crime was committed — the systematic commission of atrocities in concentration camps, the utilization of slave labor under brutal and murderous conditions, the extermina- [...tion] |
* Complete closing statement is recorded in mimeographed transcript, 17 September 1947, tr. pp. 7565-7637.
