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[oppor…] tunity of revealing to the Court the true picture of
the employment and treatment of foreign workers in Germany during the war in
all its aspects. For not only by the wording of the indictment, but also by the
documents incorporated in its evidence, the prosecution demonstrates that it is
going to charge the defendants in this trial with having participated in the
forcible removal and deportation of the foreign workers, basing such charge on
the same arguments which were often refuted during the Flick trial. I reserve
to a later stage of the trial my juridical comments on the criminal actions as
defined by Control Council Law No. 10 on which the prosecution bases this
charge.
On scrutinizing
the argumentation of the prosecution we encounter also in this trial a
fundamental mistake which the prosecution, obviously deliberately, maintains
and fosters: the misleading premise — which drags on and on like an
eternal illness — that “at least 5 million workers were forcibly
removed to Germany.” The indictment in the Flick trial admitted at least
that 200,000 came of their own free will. In the Krupp trial this admission is
obviously being withdrawn. I shall furnish proof showing that these figures are
very, very far from correct. Not even the International Military Tribunal made
the statement maintained by the prosecution. It only referred to the notorious
statement of Sauckel in the Central Planning Office to the effect that out of 5
millions of workers hardly 200,000 had come voluntarily. But at no time did the
IMT make this figure the basis of any positive statement as to the number of
the workers employed in Germany against their will.
In this connection I shall submit evidence
to the Tribunal to show that the so called unwilling workers from some
countries came to Germany with the full consent of their respective
governments. This evidence will also show that the introduction of labor
service in the various countries outside of Germany must be appraised from a
different angle. Conditions in the western countries were different. They were
fundamentally different from those in the East. In this trial, too, the
prosecution failed to explain in detail what, in its opinion, makes the
indicted industrialists parties to the deportation of foreign workers. These
defendants, among them the defendant Max Ihn, were no government officials, no
political functionaries who were cooriginators of the Sauckel programs. These
defendants were private persons, employees of an industrial enterprise, like
many thousands of their colleagues. For this reason I shall also call the
attention of the Tribunal to the question of whether it is possible to try
private persons, business men, and industrialists, before this
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