“Due to the sweeping drives (Grossaktionen) of the SS and police in November 1942, about 115,000 hectar farmland is not used, as the population is not there and the villages have been razed. * * *” (3000-PS)
The conspirators’ policy, of permanently weakening the enemy through the enslavement of labor and breaking up of families, was applied in the Occupied Eastern Territories after Rosenberg’s approval of a plan for the apprehension and deportation of 40,000 to 50,000 youths of the ages from 10 to 14. The stated purpose of this plan, approved by Rosenberg, was to prevent a reinforcement of the enemy’s military strength and to reduce the enemy’s biological potentialities. (031-PS)
Further evidence of the Nazi conspirators’ plan to weaken their enemies in utter disregard of the rules of International Law is contained in a secret order issued by a rear-area Military Commandant, to the District Commissar at Kasatin on 25 December 1943. The order provided in part that:
“1. The able-bodied male population between 15 and 65 years of age and the cattle are to be shipped back from the district East of the line Belilowka-Berditschen-Shitomir (places excluded).” (1702-PS)
The program of enslavement and its accompanying measures of brutality were not limited to Poland and the Eastern Occupied Territories, but extended to Western Europe as well. Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Belgians, and Italians all came to know the Nazi slavemasters. In France these slavemasters intensified their program in the early part of 1943 pursuant to instructions which Speer telephoned to Sauckel from Hitler’s headquarters at eight in the evening of 4 January 1943. These instructions are found in a note for the files signed by Sauckel, dated 5 January 1943, which states:
“1. On 4 January 1943 at 8 p. m. Minister Speer telephones from the Fuehrer’s headquarters and communicates that on the basis of the Fuehrer’s decision, it is no longer necessary to give special consideration to Frenchmen in the further recruiting of specialists and helpers in France. The recruiting can proceed with emphasis and sharpened measures.” (556-13-PS)
To overcome the resistance to his enslavement program, Sauckel improvised new impressment measures which were applied in both France and Italy by his own agents and which he himself labelled as grotesque. At a meeting of the Central Planning Board on 1 March 1944 Sauckel stated:
“The most abominable point made by my adversaries is their claim that no executive had been provided within these areas in order to recruit in a sensible manner the Frenchmen, Belgians and Italians and to dispatch them to work. Thereupon I even proceeded to employ and train a whole batch of French male and female agents who for good pay just as was done in olden times for “shanghaiing” went hunting for men and made them drunk by using liquor as well as words, in order to dispatch them to Germany.
“Moreover, I charged some able men with founding a special labor supply executive of our own, and this they did by training and arming with the help of the Higher SS and Police Fuehrer, a number of natives, but I still have to ask the Munitions Ministry for arms for the use of these men. For during the last year alone several dozens of very able labor executive officers have been shot dead. All these means I have to apply, grotesque as it sounds, to refute the allegation there was no executive to bring labor to Germany from these countries.” (R-124)
As in France, the slave hunt in Holland was accompanied by terror and abduction. The “Statement of the Netherlands Government in view of the Prosecution and Punishment of the German Major War Criminals”, (1726-PS) contains the following account of the deportation of Netherlands workmen to Germany: