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Volume V · Page 984
| intimate and detailed knowledge
of happenings in any way connected with the concentration camps. He made it his
special business to know these facts. It is futile for him to say that he was
not aware of the crematories when the plans were drawn and the construction
supervised in his own organization and he visited the camps where they were
installed. Nearly every Amt chief testified that he reported frequently to
Pohl, in person, concerning events and problems arising in his immediate
sphere. According to his own testimony and correspondence, he kept a running
inventory, classified as to nationalities, of the labor supply of inmates in
every camp. He knew how many prisoners died; he knew how many were unfit for
work; and he knew what mass transfers were made from camp to camp. There was
doubtless no other one person in Germany who knew as much about all the details
of the concentration camps as Pohl. At least this much can be said and cannot
be denied, that Pohl knew that hundreds of thousands of men and women had been
cast into concentration camps and compelled to work, without remuneration and
under the most rigid confinement, for the country which had devastated their
homelands and abducted them into bondage. When these slaves died from
exhaustion, starvation, or from the abuse of the SS overseers, Pohl cannot
escape the fact that he was the administrative head of the agency which brought
about these tragedies. His was more than a mere consenting part. It was active
participation. Leaving all other considerations aside, Pohl stands before this
Tribunal as an admitted slave driver on a scale never before known. On this
count if no other he is guilty of direct participation in a war crime and a
crime against humanity. The mistreatment of prisoners of war, especially Russian and Polish prisoners, in the concentration camps, must also be laid at the door of Pohl. On 30 September 1944, Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellory, sent out an order from Hitler, which said in part: |
"The mobilization of labor of the prisoners of war will be organized with the present labor mobilization office in joint action between SS Obergruppenfuehrer Berger and SS Obergruppenfuehrer Pohl." |
| On 28 September 1944, Himmler ordered that the question of the labor allocation of prisoners of war was to be submitted to Pohl. Not since the Roman Caesars brought back their prisoners of war, chained to their chariot wheels, has such inhuman treatment been accorded captives in battle as is shown by the record in this case. They, too, were simply grist for Germany's mill. By her treatment of these prisoners, Germany made the honorable profession of a soldier a by-word and a slur. |
