“Lieutenants Helton and Ludka were also shot on the same day while attempting to escape.”
Regarding the second Liberator, at Page 91 we read:
“Subject: Crash of a Liberator on 21 June 1944, at 11:30 a.m. . . . six members of the crew shot while attempting to escape; one, seriously wounded, brought to the garrison hospital at Schwerin.”
We now submit as Exhibit Number RF-379, Document F-553, which the Tribunal will find on Page 101 of the document book. This document concerns the internment in concentration camps and extermination camps of prisoners of war. Among the escaped prisoners a discrimination was made. If they were privates and noncommissioned officers who had agreed to work, they were generally sent back to the camp and punished in conformity with Articles 47, and following, of the Geneva Convention. If it was a question of officers or noncommissioned officers—this is a comment I am making on the document which I shall read to the Tribunal—if it was a question of officers or noncommissioned officers who had refused to work, they were handed over to the police and generally murdered without trial.
One can understand the aim of this discrimination. Those French noncommissioned officers who, in spite of the pressure of the German authorities, refused to work in the German war industry had a very high conception of their patriotic duty. Their attempt to escape, therefore, created against them a kind of presumption of inadaptability to the Nazi order, and they had to be eliminated. Extermination of these elite assumed a systematic character from the beginning of 1944; and the responsibility of Keitel is unquestionably involved in this extermination, which he approved if he did not specifically order.
The document which the Tribunal has before it is a letter of protest by General Bérard, head of the French Delegation to the German Armistice Commission, addressed to the German General Vogl, the president of the said commission. It deals specifically with information reaching France concerning the extermination of escaped prisoners.
First paragraph, fourth line:
“This note reveals the existence of a German organization, independent of the Army, under whose authority escaped prisoners would come.”
This note was addressed on 29 April 1944 by the commandant of Oflag X-C. I read from Page 102:
“Captain Lussus”—declares General Bérard to the German Armistice Commission—“of Oflag X-C, and Lieutenant Girot, of the same Oflag, who had made an attempt to escape on 27 April 1944, were recaptured in the immediate vicinity by the camp guard.