The Mazal Library

©MAZAL LIBRARY

NMT05-T0973

NUERNBERG MILITARY TRIBUNAL
Volume V · Page 973

kept them hard at work. Tasks were found even for the bedridden, while they awaited their turn at the gas chambers. The ghastly story of Germany's mistreatment of the millions of slaves who filled her concentration camps to bursting — the endless hours of exhausting labor, the beatings and killings, the starvation, the degradation — this has become stale from retelling. That's the pity of it. It can be so soon forgotten. But let it be recorded here once more, for generations unborn to read and ponder, that millions of human beings between 1939 and 1945 were cast into slavery and treated with inhuman cruelty by a nation whose only excuse was economic need-the Nazi creed of "the state above humanity."

The story has come to the Tribunal from the lips of witnesses who personally experienced the horrors of the concentration camps —

Victor Abend — Polish inmate of three camps.
Bernhard Lauber — Polish inmate of two camps.
Jerzy Bielski — Polish inmate of two camps.
Albert Kruse — German inmate at Neuengamme.
Chaim Balizki — Polish inmate of two camps.
Herbert Engler — German inmate of Sachsenhausen.
Eugen Kogon — Austrian inmate of Buchenwald.
Josef Ackerman — German inmate of two camps.
Wolfgang Sanner — German inmate of Mauthausen.
Franz Mis — Yugoslav inmate of Dachau.
Helmut Bickel — German inmate of two camps.

We have had proof from camp commanders and physicians —

Karl Kahr — doctor at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Nordhausen.
Otto Barnewald — administrative chief at Mauthausen, Neuengamme, and Buchenwald.
Hermann Pister — commandant at Buchenwald.
Gerhard Schiedlausky — doctor at Mauthausen, Natzweiler, and Buchenwald.
Max Pauly — commandant at Neuengamme.
Rudolf Hoess — commandant at Auschwitz.
Philipp Grimm — commandant at Buchenwald.

We have seen the motion pictures of the frightful conditions in some of the camps when they were captured by the Allies — conditions so ghastly that they defy description. The proof is overwhelming that in the administration of the concentration camps the German war machine, and first and foremost the SS, resorted to practices which would shame the most primitive race of savage barbarians. All the instincts of human decency which distinguished men from beasts were forgotten, and the law of the jungle took command. If there is such a thing as a crime against humanity, here we have it repeated a million times over.

973