“The increasing lack of punctuality and absenteeism have caused the competent authorities to issue stricter regulations to ensure labor discipline whereby the competence of the employers to impose penalties has been extended. Violations of labor discipline, such as repeated tardiness, being absent without cause or excuse, leaving a job without authorization, will in the future be punished by fines up to the average daily wage. In more serious cases, for example, for repeated absences without cause or excuse, or insubordination, fines up to the average weekly salary will be imposed. In such cases, moreover, the additional ration cards may be taken away for a period up to 4 weeks. . . .”
The precariousness of wages which, after these various cuts, were actually received by the foreign workers did not allow them to raise their standard of living in the places to which they had been deported. I maintain that this standard was insufficient and that the attitude of the Arbeitseinsatz in this matter constitutes a characteristic violation of the elementary principles of the rights of man. I will confirm this by submitting to the Tribunal proof of the inadequacy of food, lodging, and medical care to which the foreign workers were entitled.
The German propaganda services issued, in France, illustrated pamphlets in which the accommodations for foreign workers were represented as being comfortable. It was quite different in reality.
I will not dwell on this point. Mr. Dodd, my American colleague, has already submitted and commented upon Document D-288, an affidavit by Dr. Jäger, chief medical officer in charge of the work camps in the Krupp factories. I will not reread this document to the Tribunal, but I would like to repeat that in this document Dr. Jäger stated that French workers—prisoners of war working in the Krupp factories—had been billeted for more than half a year in kennels, urinals, unused ovens. The kennels were 3 feet high, 9 feet long, and 6 feet wide, and the men had to sleep there five in a kennel. I submit this document, which is to support my argument, as Exhibit Number RF-89.
To this unsanitary accommodation often inadequate food was added. In this respect I wish to explain the following to the Tribunal:
I do not claim that the foreign workers deported to Germany were systematically exposed to starvation, but I do maintain that the leading principle of National Socialism finds its expression in the food regulations for foreign workers. They were decently fed only insofar as the Allocation of Labor wished to maintain or to increase their capacity for work. They were put on a starvation diet the moment when, for any reason whatsoever, their industrial output diminished. They then entered that category of unproductive forces, which National Socialism sought to destroy.
On 10 September 1942 the Defendant Sauckel declared to the First Congress of the Labor Administration of Greater Germany:
“Food and remuneration of foreign workers should be in proportion to their output and their good will.”
He developed this point of view in documents which I am offering in evidence to the Tribunal.
I refer, in the first place, to the letter from Sauckel to Rosenberg, which is Document 016-PS and which I shall not read since it has already been read to the Tribunal by my American colleagues. I wish, however, to draw the Tribunal’s attention to the second paragraph, Page 20, of this document, which concerns the food supply of prisoners of war and foreign workers: