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Volume V · Page 974
| TREATMENT OF THE JEWS |
| This disgraceful chapter in the history of
Germany has been vividly portrayed in the judgment of the International
Military Tribunal (pp. 2/47-253 and 303, Official Edition). Nothing can
be added to that comprehensive finding of facts, in which this Tribunal
completely concurs. From it we see the unholy spectacle of six million human
beings deliberately exterminated by a civilized state whose only indictment was
that its victims had been born in the wrong part of the world of forbears whom
the murderers detested. Never before in history has man's inhumanity to man
reached such depths. Had Germany rested content with the exclusion of Jews from
her own territory, with denying them German citizenship, with excluding them
from public office, or any like domestic regulation, no other nation could have
been heard to complain. But such prejudice and hatred, once fanned into flame,
is difficult to control. And so, when the Nuernberg decrees against the Jews
were pronounced, the fuse was lighted and soon the program of world-wide
extermination of Jews was launched. Had Germany not been checked, one wonders
what race, or creed, or nation would next have been branded as subhuman and
marked for extermination. In his own affidavit of 1 April 1947 (NO-2616, Pros. Ex. 523), Pohl states: |
"The liquidation of Jews in the Auschwitz concentration camp in the years 1942 and 1943, when Rudolf Hoess was commander, was known to me through Himmler's speech, and I myself also saw the gas chambers and the crematorium in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944." |
| The most lurid descriptions of the Jewish extermination program are found in the reports of German officers themselves, in which, it can be assumed, the cruelties and atrocities are not exaggerated. Major General of Police Katzmann, reporting with evident pride in June 1943 on progress in murder in Galicia, writes: |
"I report that the District of Galicia with the exception of those Jews in the camps under the control of the SS and Police is free from Jews. Jews still caught in small numbers are given special treatment by the competent detachments of police. |
