As to the total number of those deported from France, the official figure is as follows: Of 250,000 deported only 35,000 returned.
The deportees served as guinea pigs for numerous medical, surgical, or other experiments which generally led to their death. At Auschwitz, at Struthof, in the prison at Cologne, at Ravensbrück, at Neuengamme, numerous men, women, and children were sterilized. At Auschwitz the most beautiful women were set apart, artificially fertilized, and then gassed. At Struthof a special barrack, isolated from the others by barbed wire, was used to inoculate men in groups of 40 with fatal illnesses. In the same camp women were gassed while German doctors observed their reactions through a peephole arranged for this purpose. Extermination was often directly effected by means of individual or collective executions. These were carried out by shooting, by hanging, by injections, by gas vans, or gas chamber.
I should not wish to stress further the facts, already so numerous, submitted to Your High Tribunal during the preceding days by the American Prosecution, but the representative of France, so many of his people having died in these camps after horrible sufferings, could not pass in silence over this tragic example of complete inhumanity. This would have been inconceivable in the 20th century, if a doctrine of return to barbarism had not been established in the very heart of Europe.
D. Crimes committed against prisoners of war, although less known, bear ample testimony to the degree of inhumanity which Nazi Germany had attained.
To begin with, the violations of international conventions committed against prisoners of war are numerous. Many were forced to travel on foot, almost without food, for very long distances. Many camps had no respect for even the most elementary rules of hygiene. Food was very often insufficient; thus a report from the WFSt of the OKW dated 11 April 1945 and annotated by the Defendant Keitel, shows that 82,000 prisoners of war interned in Norway received the food strictly indispensable to the maintenance of life on the assumption that they were not working, whereas 30,000 of them were really employed on heavy work.
In agreement with the Defendant Keitel, acting at the request of the Defendant Göring, camps for prisoners belonging to the British and American Air Forces were established in towns which were exposed to air raids.
In violation of the text of the Geneva Convention, it was decided, at a conference held at the Führer’s headquarters on 27 January 1945, in the presence of the Defendant Göring, to punish by death all attempts to escape made by prisoners of war when in convoy.
Besides all these violations of the Geneva Convention, numerous crimes were committed by the German authorities against prisoners of war: Execution of captured allied airmen, murder of commando troops, collective extermination of certain prisoners of war for no reason whatsoever—for example the matter of 120 American soldiers at Malmédy on 27 January 1945. Parallel with “Nacht und Nebel,” an expression for the inhumane treatment inflicted on civilians, can be put down the “Sonderbehandlung,” a “special treatment” of prisoners of war, in which these disappeared in great numbers.
E. The same barbarism is found in the terroristic activity carried out by the German Army and Police against the Resistance.
The order of the Defendant Keitel of 16 September 1941, which may be considered as a basic document, certainly has as a purpose the fight against the Communist movements; but it anticipates that resistance to the army of occupation can come from other than Communist sources and decides that every case of resistance is to be interpreted as having a Communist origin.