. NMT05-T1053
Volume V · Page 1053
| [con…] centration camp routine such as
labor assignment, rations, clothing, quarters, treatment of prisoners,
punishment, etc., were discussed. The evidence in this case reveals that there was perhaps no industry which permitted such constant maltreatment of prisoners as the DEST enterprises. Prosecution witness Engler, testifying to conditions in the DEST plants at the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp, declared that the inmates worked 12 hours a day, that the food was insufficient, the clothing inadequate, and beatings constant; and that because of the heavy work and inadequate food there was an average of from 800 to 900 deaths per month. As a result of a report made by Engler on deplorable conditions at the camp hospital he was sentenced to a punitive company, 6½ days a week. In one month's time 19 out of 65 men in this company died. Engler stated that the average life duration of a punitive company worker was four weeks. Mummenthey could not help knowing about concentration camp labor in the DEST enterprises. In Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg the inmate workers daily passed by the very building in which Mummenthey had his office. Their poor physical condition was obvious. The prosecution witness, Kruse, a German citizen, testifying to conditions at the Neuengamme concentration camp, declared that the monthly death rate in that camp was from 8,000 to 12,000. During the construction period of the Clinker Works of DEST, the death rate went up to about 20,000. Mummenthey called in his behalf the witness Helmut Bickel, a German citizen who served from 1939 to 1940 in the Clinker Works at Sachsenhausen, and from 1940 to 1945 in the Neuengamme Works of DEST. No witness gave a more harrowing account of concentration camp conditions than did Bickel, this defense witness. He testified that the food was not adequate for the work required of the inmates. "Proof of that is the extremely large number of inmates who died directly or indirectly of starvation." He further stated that reports were submitted by the works managers to Mummenthey's office every month and that these reports showed indirectly the intolerable conditions under which the inmates worked and lived. Mummenthey could not have failed to know the plight of the inmate workers. Bickel described Mummenthey as a, "white crow," but it is obvious that he used this characterization because Mummenthey had done him a favor of some proportions. If Bickel is to be believed at all, it cannot be accepted that Mummenthey, amid all these excesses, atrocities and maltreatment, could remain so |
