Is it necessary to recall the consequences of these transports, carried out in the conditions described to you, when witnesses have come to tell you that each time the cars were opened numerous corpses had first to be taken out before a few survivors could be found?
The French Document Number F-115 (Exhibit Number RF-336), is the report of Professor Richet. In it Professor Richet repeats what our witnesses have said, that there were 75 to 120 deportees in each car. In every transport men died. The fact is known that on arriving in Buchenwald from Compiègne, after an average journey of 60 hours, at least 25 percent of the men had succumbed. This testimony corroborates those of Blaha, Madame Vaillant-Couturier and Professor Dupont.
Blaha’s testimony appears in your document book under the Number 3249-PS. It is the second statement of Blaha. We have heard Blaha. I do not think it necessary to read what he has already stated to us.
Especially infamous is the transport to Dachau, during the months of August and September 1944, when numerous trains which had left France, generally from the camps in Brittany, arrived at this camp with four to five hundred dead out of about two thousand men in a train. The first page of Document Number F-140 states—and I quote so as not to have to return to it again—in the fourth paragraph which deals with Auschwitz: “About seven million persons died in this camp.” It repeats the conditions under which the transports were made and which Madame Vaillant-Couturier has described to you. On the train of 2 July 1944, which left from Compiègne, men went mad and fought with each other and more than six hundred of them died between Compiègne and Dachau. It is with this convoy that Document Number F-83 deals, which we submit as Exhibit Number RF-337, and which indicates in the minutes of Dr. Bouvier, Rheims, 20 February 1945—that these prisoners by the time they reached Rheims were already half-dead of thirst: “Eight dying men were taken out already at Rheims; one of them was a priest.” This convoy was to go to Dachau. A few kilometers past Compiègne there were already numerous dead in every car.
Document F-32, Exhibit Number RF-331, Page 21, contains many other examples of the atrocious conditions under which our compatriots were transported from France to Germany:
“At the station at Bremen water was refused us by the German Red Cross.
“We were dying of thirst. At Breslau the prisoners again begged German Red Cross nurses to give us a little water. They took no notice of our appeals. . . .”
To prevent escape, in disregard of the most natural and elementary feelings of modesty, the deportees were forced in many convoys to strip themselves of all their clothes, and they travelled like that for many hours, entirely naked, from France to Germany. A testimony to this effect is given by our official document already submitted under Document Number RF-301:
“One of the means used to prevent escapes, or as reprisal for them, was to unclothe the prisoners completely.”—And the author of the report adds—“This reprisal was also aimed at the moral degradation of the individual.”