I retain more particularly the guilt of certain of the defendants: Göring, Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan, co-ordinated the planning and the execution of the plans for the recruitment of foreign workers. Keitel, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, counter-signatory of Hitler’s decrees, integrated compulsory labor with his manpower policy. Funk, Reich Minister of Economics, and Speer, Minister for Armament and War Production, based their program of war production on compulsory labor. Sauckel, finally, Plenipotentiary General for Allocation of Labor, proved to be the resolute and fanatical agent—to use his own words—of the policy of compulsory enrollment which, in Holland, was promoted and carried out by Seyss-Inquart.
The Tribunal will appreciate their respective responsibility. I request the Tribunal to condemn the crime of mobilization of foreign workers. I ask the Tribunal to restore the dignity of human labor which the defendants have attempted to degrade.
M. CHARLES GERTHOFFER (Assistant Prosecutor for the French Republic): Mr. President, Your Honors, the French Prosecution is in charge of the part of the Indictment concerning the deeds charged to the defendants which were perpetrated in the countries of Western Europe, as provided for by Article VI of the Charter of 8 August 1945. This text provides for violations of the laws and customs of war which concern persons on the one hand and private and public property on the other hand.
The part of the Indictment concerning persons, that is, ill-treatment inflicted on prisoners of war and on civilians, torture, murder, deportation, as well as devastations not justified by military exigencies, were presented to you and will be presented to you by my colleagues. M. Delpech and I will have the honor to present to you the pillage of private and public property.
The Tribunal will have to be informed of the most arid part of the presentation of the French prosecution. We shall strive to present it as briefly as possible, to shorten the quotation of the numerous documents submitted to the Tribunal, and to avoid, whenever possible, statistical material in order to bring only the principal facts to light. Nevertheless, sometimes we will go into detail in order that the Tribunal may appreciate certain characteristic facts now charged to the defendants, facts which are customarily designated as “economic looting.”
Before approaching this subject, I should like to ask the Tribunal’s permission to express the gratitude of the Prosecutors of the Economic Section of the French Delegation to their colleagues of the other Allied delegations, and particularly to those of the American section of the economic case who have been kind enough to put at our disposal a great number of German documents discovered by the United States Army, and important material means for their reproduction in a sufficient number of copies.
I shall have the honor of presenting in succession to the Tribunal: 1) General remarks on the economic looting of the occupied countries of Western Europe, 2) the special case of Denmark, 3) that of Norway, 4) that of Holland. My colleague, M. Delpech, will present 5), the part covering Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. I shall have the honor of presenting to you 6), the part relating to France, and also the conclusion. Finally, a special statement, 7), will be devoted to the works of art.
In the course of the presentation, we shall submit a certain number of documents. We shall quote only the passages which seem to us the most important, when the same document relates to several different questions; we shall quote those excerpts concerning each question when it is presented, indicating each time the reference in the document book, since it is impossible to make known to you all the excerpts at the same time because of the complexity of facts.
In his speeches and in his writings, Hitler never concealed the economic aims of the aggression of which Germany was to become guilty. The theories of race and living space increased the envy of the Germans at the same time as they stimulated their bellicose instincts.
After having conquered Austria and Czechoslovakia without bloodshed, they turned against Poland and prepared to attack the countries of Western Europe, where they hoped to find what was lacking to assure their domination.