There were many petty persecutions. In Aachen the presence of a Jewish woman prisoner in a cell caused the other prisoners to lose half of their ration. At Amrasch they had to go to toilets only when ordered. At Magdeburg recalcitrants had to make one hundred genuflexions before the guards. Interrogations were carried out in the same manner as in France, that is, the victims were brutally treated and were given practically no food.
At Asperg the doctor had heart injections given to the prisoners so that they died. At Cologne those condemned to death were perpetually kept in chains. At Sonnenburg those who were dying were given a greenish liquor to drink which hastened their death. In Hamburg sick Jews were forced to dig their own graves until, exhausted, they fell into them. We are still speaking of French, Belgians, Dutch, Luxembourgers, Danes, or Norwegians interned in German prisons. These descriptions apply only to citizens of those countries. In the Börse prison in Berlin, Jewish babies were massacred before the eyes of their mothers. The sterilization of men is confirmed by German documents in the file of the Prosecutor of Cologne, which contains a ruling to the effect that the victims cannot be reinstated in their military rights. These files also contain documents which show the role played by children who were in prison. They had to work inside the prison. A German functionary belonging to the prison service inquired as to the decision to be taken with regard to a 4-month-old baby, which was brought to the prison at the same time as its father and mother.
What kind of people were the prison staff? They were “recruited amongst the NSKK (National Socialist Motor Corps) and the SA because of their political views and because they were above suspicion and accustomed to harsh discipline.” This is also to be found in the file of the Public Prosecutor at Cologne, Page 39, last paragraph.
At Rheinbach those condemned to death and to be executed in Cologne were beaten to death for breaches of discipline. We can easily imagine the brutality of the men who were in charge of the prisoners. The German official text will furnish us with details regarding the executions. The condemned were guillotined. Nearly all the condemned showed surprise, so say the German documents of which we are giving you a summary, and expressed their dissatisfaction at being guillotined instead of being shot for the patriotic deeds of which they were declared guilty. They thought they deserved to be treated as soldiers.
Among those executed in Cologne were some young people of eighteen and nineteen years of age and one woman. Some French women, who were political prisoners, were taken from the Lübeck prison in order to be executed in Hamburg. They were nearly always charged with the same thing, “helping the enemy.” The flies are incomplete, but we have those of the chief Prosecutor of Cologne. In every case the offenses committed were of the same nature. Keitel systematically rejected all appeals for mercy which were submitted to him.
Although the lot of those who were held in the prisons was very hard and sometimes terrible, it was infinitely less cruel than the fate of those Frenchmen who had the misfortune to be interned in the concentration camps. The Tribunal is well informed about these camps; my colleagues of the United Nations have presented a long statement on this matter. The Tribunal will remember that it has already been shown a map indicating the exact location of every camp which existed in Germany and in the occupied countries. We shall not, therefore, revert to the geographical distribution of the camps.
With the permission of the Tribunal I should now like to deal with the conditions under which Frenchmen and nationals of the western occupied countries were taken to these camps. Before their departure the victims of arbitrary arrests, such as I described to you this morning, were brought together in prisons or in assembly camps in France.
The main assembly camp in France was at Compiègne. It is from there that most of the deportees left who were to be sent to Germany. There were two other assembly camps, Beaune-La-Rolande and Pithiviers, reserved especially for Jews, and Drancy. The conditions under which people were interned in those camps were somewhat similar to those under which internees in the German prisons lived. With your permission, I shall not dwell any longer on this. The Tribunal will have taken judicial notice of the declarations made by M. Blechmann and Mme. Jacob in Document Number F-457, which I am now lodging as Exhibit Number RF-328. To avoid making these discussions too long and too ponderous with long quotations and testimonies which, after all, are very similar, we shall confine ourselves to reading to the Tribunal a passage from the testimony of Mme. Jacob concerning the conduct of the German Red Cross. This passage is to be found at the bottom of Page 4 of the French document:
“We received a visit from several German personalities, such as Stülpnagel, Du Paty de Clam, Commissioner for Jewish Questions, and Colonel Baron Von Berg, Vice President of the German Red Cross. This Von Berg was very formal and very pompous. He always wore the small insignia of the Red Cross, which did not prevent his being inhuman and a thief.”
And on Page 6, the penultimate paragraph, Colonel Von Berg was, as we have already said earlier, very pompous. I skip two lines.