M. DUBOST: Yes, Your Honor, F-274, on Page 35. The Document was submitted under Exhibit Number RF-301. The Tribunal will see that the prison at Cologne, where many Frenchmen were interned, was situated between the freight station and the main station so that the Chief Prosecutor in Cologne wrote, in a report which was used by the Ministry of Deportees and Prisoners of War when compiling the book which is before you, that the situation of that prison was so dangerous that no enterprise engaged in war work would undertake to furnish its precious materials to a factory in this area. The prisoners could not take shelter during the air attacks. They remained locked in their cells, even in case of fire.
The victims of air attacks in the prisons were numerous. The May 1944 raid claimed 200 victims in the prison at Alexander Platz in Berlin. At Aachen the buildings were always dirty, damp, and very small; and the prisoners numbered three or four times as many as the facilities permitted. In the Münster prison the women who were there in November 1943 lived underground without any air. In Frankfurt the prisoners had as cells a sort of iron cage, 2 by 1.5 meters. Hygiene was impossible. At Aachen, as in many other prisons, the prisoners had only one bucket in the middle of the room, and it was forbidden to empty it during the day.
The food ration was extremely small. As a rule, ersatz coffee in the morning with a thin slice of bread; soup at noon; a thin slice of bread at night with a little margarine or sausage or jam.
The prisoners were forced to do extremely heavy work in war industries, in food factories, in spinning mills. No matter what kind of work it was, at least twelve hours of labor were required—at Cologne, in particular, from 7 o’clock in the morning to 9 or 10 o’clock in the evening, that is to say, 14 or 15 consecutive hours. I am still quoting from the file of the Public Prosecutor of Cologne, a document, Number 87, sent to us by the Ministry of Prisoners. A shoe factory gave work to the inmates of 18 German prisons . . . I quote from the same document:
“Most of the French flatly refused to work in war industries, for example, the manufacture of gas masks, filing of cast iron plates, slides for shells, radio or telephone apparatus intended for the Army. In such cases Berlin gave orders for the recalcitrants to be sent to punishment camps. An example of this was the sending of women from Kottbus to Ravensbrück on 13 November 1944. The Geneva Convention was, of course, not applied.
“The political prisoners frequently had to remove unexploded bombs.”
This is the official German text of the Public Prosecutor of Cologne.
There was no medical supervision. There were no prophylactic measures taken in these prisons in case of epidemics, or else the SS doctor intentionally gave the wrong instructions.
At the prison of Dietz-an-der-Lahn, under the eyes of the director, Gammradt, a former medical officer in the German Army, the SS or SA guards struck the prisoners. Dysentery, diphtheria, pulmonary diseases, and pleurisy were not reasons for stopping work; and those who were dangerously ill were forced to work to the very limit of their strength and were only admitted to the hospital in exceptional cases.