I offer at the same time to the Tribunal a certified photostatic copy of the page of the newspaper, which is from the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale. This article is signed by Dr. Michel, who was the Chief of the Economic Administration in France. Its title is “Two Years of Controlled Economy in France.” It is then an article written for the purpose of German propaganda since it appeared in a German newspaper which published one page in French in Paris. Naturally I wish to point out to the Tribunal that we in no way accept all the ideas which are presented in this article, but we should like to point out several sentences of Dr. Michel’s as revealing the same sort of procedure about which I was speaking just now, which consisted of utilizing labor, first on the spot, as long as there was raw material, and then deporting that labor to Germany:
“In order to utilize the productive forces of French industry, the Reich began by transferring to France its orders for industrial articles for the war effort.
“One single figure is sufficient to show the success of this transfer of German orders: The value of the transactions to date is expressed in a figure surpassing hundreds of thousands of millions of francs. New blood is circulating in the veins of French economy, which is working to the utmost of its capacity. . . .”
Some sentences in the original are omitted here, as they are of no interest, and I would like to read the following sentence:
“As the stocks of raw materials tended to diminish on account of the length of the war, the recruitment of available French labor began.”
Dr. Michel uses here elegant ways of expressing himself, which cover the reality, that is to say, the beginning of the transfer of workmen at the moment when raw materials, which the Germans had appropriated from the beginning, had begun to be exhausted.
The conclusion which I would now like to give to my statement is the following: That the Germans have always considered labor, human labor, as a factor for their use. This attitude existed even before the official institution of compulsory labor, of which we will speak to you presently.
For Germans the work of others has always been compulsory and for their profit, and it was meant to remain so even after the end of the war.
It is this last point that I should like to emphasize, for it shows the extent and the gravity of the German conception and of the German projects. I shall quote in relation to this a document which will bear the Number RF-5 in our document book. Here is the document, which I submit to the Tribunal. It is a work published in French in Berlin in 1943, by Dr. Friedrich Didier, entitled Workers for Europe. It was issued by the central publishing house of the National Socialist Party. It begins with a preface by the Defendant Sauckel, whose facsimile signature is printed.