“On 23 June 1944 the French senior officer of Oflag X-C received two funeral urns containing the ashes of these two officers. . . .”
No particulars could be given to this French officer as to the cause of the deaths of Captain Lussus and Lieutenant Girot. General Bérard pointed out at the same time to the German Armistice Commission that the note—which the Tribunal will find on Page 104—had been communicated by the commandant of Oflag X-C to the French senior officer at that Oflag:
“You will bring to the attention of your comrades the fact that there exists, for the control of people moving about unlawfully, a German organization whose field of action extends over regions in a state of war from Poland to the Spanish frontier. Each escaped prisoner who is recaptured and found in possession of civilian clothes, false papers and identification cards, and false photographs, falls under the authority of this organization. What becomes of him then, I cannot tell you. Warn your comrades that this matter is particularly serious.”
The last two lines of this note assumed their full significance when the urns containing the ashes of the two escaped French officers were handed to the senior officer of the camp.
Our Soviet colleagues of the Prosecution will present the conditions under which the escapes of the officers from the Sagan Camp were repressed.
THE PRESIDENT: Was there any answer to this complaint? What you have just been reading, as I understand it, is a complaint made by the French general, Bérard, to the German head of the Armistice Commission, is that right?
M. DUBOST: Mr. President, I do not know if there was an answer. I know only that the archives in Vichy at the time of the liberation were partly pillaged and partly destroyed through military action. If there was an answer we would have had it in the Vichy archives, for the documents we present now are the documents from the German archives of the German Armistice Commission. As to the French archives, I do not know what has become of them. In any case it is possible they may have disappeared as a result of military action.
I was about to inform the Tribunal that my Soviet colleagues would set forth the conditions under which repressive measures were carried out at the camp of Sagan for attempts to escape.
We submit as Exhibit Number RF-380, Document Number F-672, which the Tribunal will find on Page 115 of its document book. This is a report from the Service for War Prisoners and Deportees, dated 9 January 1946, which relates to the deportation to Buchenwald of 20 French prisoners of war. This report must be considered as an authentic document, as well as the reports of war prisoners which are annexed thereto. On Page 116 is the report of Claude Petit, former prisoners’ representative in Stalag VI-G.