I would like to point out here that the Defendant Sauckel developed the same theme at the Congress of Gauleiter and Reichsleiter held 5 and 6 February 1943 at Posen. He expressed himself in plain terms: He justified compulsory recruitment on the basis of National Socialist philosophy and on the basis of the necessity of drawing all the European peoples into the struggle carried on by Germany. His speech constitutes Document 1739-PS. I submit it under Exhibit Number RF-10, and I request the Court to take judicial notice of it and to accept the following passages in evidence against the Defendant Sauckel. First, Page 5 of the German text, fourth paragraph—this is found on the first page of the French translation:
“The remarkable violence of the war forces me to mobilize, in the name of the Führer, many millions of foreigners for labor for the entire German war economy and to urge them to effect the maximum production. The purpose of this utilization is to assure in the field of labor the war material necessary in the struggle for the preservation of the life and liberty, in the first place, of our own people, and also for the preservation of our Western culture for those peoples who, in contrast to the parasitical Jews and plutocrats, possess the honest will and strength to shape their life by their own work and effort.
“This is the vast difference between the work which was exacted through the Treaty of Versailles and the Dawes and Young Plans at one time—which took the form of slavery and tribute to the might and supremacy of Jewry—and the use of labor which I, as a National Socialist, have the honor to prepare and to carry out as a contribution by Germany in the fight for her liberty and for that of her allies.”
The compulsory recruitment of foreign workers did not have as its only object the maintenance of the level of German industrial production. There was also the conscious desire to weaken the human potential of the occupied countries.
The idea of extermination by work was familiar to the theorists of National Socialism and to the leaders of Germany. It constituted one of the bases of the policy of domination of the invaded territories. I lay before the Court the proof that the National Socialist conspirators envisaged the destruction by work of whole ethnical groups. A discussion which took place on 14 September 1942 between Goebbels and Thierack is significant. It constitutes Document 682-PS, which I submit to the Tribunal under Exhibit Number RF-11, from which I take the following passage:
“Concerning the extermination of asocial elements, Doctor Goebbels is of the opinion that the following groups must be exterminated: All Jews and gypsies; Poles who have to serve 3 or 4 years penal servitude; Czechoslovakians and Germans who have been condemned to death or hard labor for life or placed in protective custody. The idea of extermination by work is best.”
The idea of extermination by work was not applied to ethnical groups alone, the disappearance of which was desired by the defendants; it also led to the employment of foreign labor in the German war industry up to the extreme limit of each man’s strength. I will revert to this aspect of the policy of forced labor when I lay before the Tribunal the treatment of foreign workers in Germany: The cruelty to which they were submitted sprang from this main conception of National Socialism, that the human forces of the occupied countries must be employed with no other limitation than that of their extermination, which is the final goal.
The defendants have not only admitted the principle of compulsory recruitment of foreign workers; they have followed a consistent policy of putting their principle into practice, applying it in the same concrete manner in the various occupied territories. To do this they resorted to identical methods of recruitment; they set up everywhere the same recruitment organizations to which they gave the same orders.
In the first place, it was a question of inducing foreign workers to work in their own countries for the army of occupation and the services connected with it. The German military and civil authorities organized yards and workshops in order to carry out on the spot work useful to their war policy. The yards and workshops of the Todt Organization, which were under the direction of the Defendant Speer after the death of their founder, and those of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, and the NSKK organization, employed numerous foreign workers in all areas of Western Europe.