These activities took place in the prison at Minsk, a prison which, Your Honors will recall from Document 1056-PS, was directly under the supervision of the Ministry for the occupied East.
For my next illustration I wish to offer Document 018-PS. This document has already been introduced as Exhibit Number USA-186. I would like to read to the Tribunal the first paragraph of Document 018-PS, which has not yet been read into the Record. The document reveals that Rosenberg wrote Sauckel on 21 November 1942, in the following terms:
“I thank you very much for your report on the execution of the great task given to you; and I am glad to hear that in carrying out your mission you have always found the necessary support, even on the part of the civilian authorities in the Occupied Eastern Territories. For myself and the officials under my command, this collaboration was and is self-evident, especially since both you and I have, with regard to the solution of the labor problem in the East, represented the same points of view from the beginning.”
As late as 11 July 1944 the Rosenberg Ministry was actively concerned with the continuation of the forced labor program, in spite of the retreat from the East.
THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle): After making this generality, Rosenberg goes on to object, at the last here, to the methods used. You haven’t mentioned that.
MR. BRUDNO: Quite right, Your Honor. Those objections are already in the record, Sir, and I was merely referring to this document to show that Rosenberg favored recruitment from the East, that his civilian administrators co-operated with the recruitment in spite of the methods used, the methods which were known to Rosenberg as he reports in the letter himself.
DR. ALFRED THOMA (Counsel for Defendant Rosenberg): High Tribunal, in this connection I must protest that the Prosecutor did not finish reading this Paragraph 1 he has just quoted. For then comes the sentence in which he states that an agreement existed between Sauckel and Rosenberg regarding. . .
THE PRESIDENT: I don’t think you can have heard that the United States Member of the Tribunal has just made this very point, which you are now making to Counsel for the United States, and has pointed out to him that he ought to have read there, or drawn attention at any rate, to the other paragraphs in this document which showed that Rosenberg was objecting to the methods used.
DR. THOMA: High Tribunal, I would like to point out that the prosecutor quoted just the first two sentences of a specific paragraph. The same paragraph ends, however, where it is stated that “there was an agreement between Sauckel and me according to which workers were to be treated well in Germany, and for this purpose welfare organizations were to be created”. The presentation of the prosecutor creates the impression that the Defendants Sauckel and Rosenberg had agreed only on the use of forced labor without restraint and on the deportation of the workers from the East.
THE PRESIDENT: As Counsel for the United States pointed out, the other passages in the document have already been read. And, naturally, the whole document will be treated as being in evidence.