COLONEL Y. V. POKROVSKY (Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.): I would like permission to ask this witness several questions.
[Turning to the witness]: Tell us, witness, do you know what was the particular purpose of the concentration camp at Dachau; was it really, so to speak, a concentration camp of extermination?
BLAHA: Until the year 1943 it was really an extermination camp. After 1943 a good many factories and munition plants were established, also inside the camp, particularly after the bombardments started, and then it became more of a work camp. But as far as the results are concerned there was no difference, because the prisoners had to work so hard while going hungry that they died from hunger and exhaustion instead of from beatings.
COL. POKROVSKY: Must I understand you this way, that, in fact, both before 1943 and after 1943 Dachau was a camp of extermination and that there were different ways of extermination?
BLAHA: That is so.
COL. POKROVSKY: How many, according to your own observations, went through this camp of extermination, Dachau; how many internees came originally from the U.S.S.R., how many passed through the camp?
BLAHA: I cannot state that exactly, only approximately. First, after November 1941, there were exclusively Russian prisoners of war in uniform. They had separate camps and were liquidated within a few months. In the summer of 1942, those who remained of these—I believe there were 12,000 prisoners of war—were transported to Mauthausen; and, as I learned from the people who came from Mauthausen to Dachau, they were liquidated in gas chambers.
Then, after the Russian prisoners of war, Russian children were brought to Dachau. There were, I believe, 2,000 boys, 6 to 17 years old. They were kept in one or two special blocks. They were assigned to particularly brutal people, the “greens,” who beat them at every step. These young boys also. . .
COL. POKROVSKY: What do you mean when you refer to the “greens”?
BLAHA: Those were the so-called professional criminals. They beat these young boys and gave them the hardest work. They worked particularly in the plantations where they had to pull ploughs, sowing machines, and street rollers instead of horses and motors being used. Also in all transport Kommandos Russian children were used exclusively. At least 70 percent of them died of tuberculosis, I believe, and those who remained were then sent to a special camp in the Tyrol in 1943 or the beginning of 1944.