B. Among the crimes against persons of which the civilian populations of the occupied countries of the West were victims, those committed by the Nazi police organizations are the most revolting. The intervention of the German police who, in spite of certain appearances, did not belong to the armies of occupation, is in itself contrary to international law. Their crimes, particularly hateful in the complete disregard for human dignity that they imply, were multiplied during 4 years throughout all the territories of the West occupied by the German forces.
True, no definite order, no detailed directive emanating directly from one of the defendants or from one of their immediate subordinates and valid for all the German police or for the police of the occupied territories of the West, has been found. But these crimes were committed by a police that was a direct expression of the National Socialist ideology and the undeniable instrument of National Socialist policy for which all the defendants carry the full and entire responsibility.
Before the considerable mass of acts, their similarity, their simultaneousness, their generalization in time and place, no one would be able to deny that these acts are not only the individual responsibility of those who committed them here or there, but constitute as well the execution of orders from above.
The arrests took place without any of the elementary guarantees recognized in all civilized countries. On a simple, unverified denunciation, without previous investigation, and often on charges brought by persons not qualified to bring them, masses of arbitrary arrests took place in every occupied country.
During the first period of the occupation, the Germans nevertheless simulated a scrupulous respect for “legality” in the matter of arrests. This legality was that introduced by Nazism in the interior of Germany and did not respect any of the traditional guarantees to which the individuals in civilized countries are entitled. But, rapidly, even this pseudo-legality itself was abandoned and the arrests became absolutely arbitrary.
The worst treatments were applied to arrested persons even before the guilt of the accused had been examined. The use of torture in the interrogations was almost a general rule. The tortures usually applied were beating, whipping, chaining for several days without a moment of rest for nourishment or hygienic care, immersion in ice water, drowning in a bathtub, charging the bathwater with electricity, electrification of the most sensitive parts of the body, burns at certain places on the body, and the pulling out of fingernails. But, in addition, those who carried out these measures had every latitude for unleashing their instinct of cruelty and of sadism towards their victims. All those facts, which were of public knowledge in the occupied countries, never led to any punishment whatsoever of their authors on the part of the responsible authorities. It even seems that the torture was more severe when an officer was present.
It is undeniable that the actions of the German police towards the prisoners were part and parcel of a long premeditated system of criminality, ordered by the chiefs of the regime and executed by the most faithful members of the National Socialist organizations.
Aside from the general use of torture on prisoners, the German police perpetrated a considerable number of murders. It is impossible to know the conditions under which many of these murders were carried out. Nevertheless, we have enough information to permit us to discover in them a new expression of the general policy of the National Socialists in the occupied countries. Often the deaths were only the result of the tortures inflicted on the prisoners, but often the murder was deliberately desired and carried out.
C. The crime which will undoubtedly be remembered as the most horrible among those committed by the Germans against the civilian populations of the occupied countries was that of deportation and internment in the concentration camps of Germany.
These deportations had a double aim: To secure additional labor for the benefit of the German war machine; to eliminate from the occupied countries and progressively exterminate the elements most opposed to Germanism. They served likewise to empty prisons overcrowded with patriots and to remove the latter for all time.