“In Berlin, in a clean hospital, well lighted and ventilated, where the chief doctor, a German, makes the rounds only once in 3 weeks, and a female Russian doctor every morning distributes uniformly the same calming drops to every patient, I have seen a dozen consumptives, three of them released prisoners. All of them except one have gone beyond the extreme limit at which treatment might still have had some chance of proving effective.”
No statistics have been made of foreign workers who died during their deportation. Professor Henri Dessaille, Medical Inspector General of the Labor Ministry, estimates that 25,000 French workers died in Germany during their deportation. But not all of them died of diseases. To slow extermination was added swift extermination in concentration camps.
The disciplinary regime over the foreign workers was, in fact, of a severity contrary to the rights of man. I have already given some example of penalties to which the deported workers were exposed. There were still more. The workers who were deemed recalcitrant by their supervisors were sent to special reprisal camps, the ‘Straflager’; some disappeared in political concentration camps.
I remind the Tribunal that I have already, indirectly, proved this fact. In the course of my presentation I submitted under Exhibit Number RF-44, the ordinance of Sauckel of 29 March 1943 which extends the term of the labor contracts by the length of time which the workers spent in prison or in internment camps.
I will not dwell on this point. Mr. Dodd, my American colleague, has submitted to the Tribunal the documents which prove the shipment of labor deportees to concentration camps. For the rest, I take the liberty of referring the Tribunal to the presentation which M. Dubost will deliver to the Tribunal within a few days.
I emphasize, however, the significance of this persecution of foreign workers. It constitutes the completion of the crime of their deportation and the proof of the coherence of the German policy of extermination.
I have already reported to the Tribunal the events which marked the civilian mobilization of foreign workers for the service of National Socialist Germany. I have shown how the device of compulsory labor was inserted into the general framework of the policy of German domination. I have denounced the methods employed by the defendants to enforce the recruitment of foreign labor. I have emphasized the importance of the deportations undertaken by the Arbeitseinsatz, and I have recalled how the deported workers were treated and ill-treated.
The policy of compulsory labor includes all the infractions under the jurisdiction of the Tribunal: Violation of international conventions, violation of the rights of man, and crimes against common law.
All the defendants bear functional responsibility for these infractions. It was the Reich Cabinet which set up the principles of the policy of enforced recruitment; the High Command of the German Armed Forces carried them out in the workshops of the Wehrmacht, the Navy, and the Air Force; the civilian administrations made use of it to support the German war economy.