“Dr. Becker, Untersturmführer.”
The names have already been mentioned here of the camps of Maidanek and Auschwitz with their gas chambers, in which over 5,500,000 completely innocent people, citizens of Poland, Czechoslovakia, U.S.S.R., U.S.A., Great Britain, France, and other democratic countries were killed. I must name the concentration camps of Smolensk, Stavropol, Kharkov, Kiev, Lvov, Poltava, Novgorod, Orel, Rovno, Dniepropetrovsk, Odessa, Kamenetz-Podolsk, Gomel, Kerch, of the Stalingrad region, of Kaunas, Riga, Mariampol (Lithuanian) of Kloga (Estonian) and many others, in which hundreds of thousands of Soviet nationals belonging to the civilian population, as well as soldiers and officers of the Red Army, were tortured to death by the Hitlerites.
The Germans also carried out mass shootings of Soviet citizens in the Lisenitz forest, which is on the outskirts of Lvov in the direction of Tarnopol. It was to this forest that the Germans daily drove, or brought in motor vehicles, large parties of Soviet prisoners of war from the Citadel camp, internees from the Yanov camp and from the Lvov prison, as well as peaceful Soviet citizens who had been seized on the squares and streets of Lvov in the course of numerous roundups. Investigations made by the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union established the fact that the Germans shot over 200,000 people in the Lisenitz forest.
These mass murders, this regime of tyranny and terror, were fully approved by the Defendant Rosenberg who declared in his speech at the meeting of the German Labor Front in November 1942:
“Apparently, if we are to subjugate all these peoples”—that is, peoples inhabiting the territory of the U.S.S.R.—“then arbitrary rule and tyranny will be an extremely suitable form of government.”
Later, when the Red Army began to clear out the Germano-fascist hordes from the Soviet Union territory they had temporarily occupied and when the Soviet authorities began to discover the abominable crimes perpetrated by the fascist monsters and to find numerous graves of Soviet citizens, soldiers, and officers tortured to death by the fascists, the German Command took urgent measures to conceal and destroy all traces of their crimes. For this purpose, the German Command organized everywhere exhumations of corpses from their graves and their cremation. A special order of an Obersturmführer, dated “Rovno, 3 August 1943-IUAI No. 35/43c,” addressed to the Regional Commander of Gendarmerie in Kamen-Kashirsk, ordered him immediately to supply information concerning location and number of common graves of persons to whom special repressive measures had been applied in the district.
Among the documents discovered in the Gestapo building of the Rovno district has been found a report concerning the execution of the above-mentioned order, with the enumeration of about 200 localities, where such graves were registered. One can see from this list that the Germano-fascist henchmen primarily chose inaccessible and isolated spots for the interment of their victims. At the end of the list we read, “The list includes all the graves, including those of the commandos who worked here previously.”
I will now quote an extract of the appeal to the public opinion of the world from the representatives of several thousand former internees at Auschwitz:
“The gassing of unbelievable numbers of people took place upon the arrival of transports from various countries: France, Belgium, Holland, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, the U.S.S.R., Norway, and others. The new arrivals had to pass before an SS doctor or else before the SS commandant of the camp. The latter pointed his finger to the right or left. The left meant death by gas. Out of a transport of 1,500, an average of 1,200 to 1,300 were immediately to be gassed. Rarely the quota of people sent into the camp was a little higher. It often occurred that the SS doctors Mengele and Thilo performed this selection while whistling a lively tune. The people destined to be gassed were obliged to strip in front of the gas chambers, after which they were driven with whips into the gas chambers. Then the door of the underground gas-chamber was closed, and the people were gassed. Death occurred approximately 4 minutes later. After 8 minutes the gas chamber was opened, and workmen belonging to a special commando, the so-called Sonderkommando, transported the bodies to the cremation ovens which burned day and night.
“There was a shortage of ovens at the time of the arrival of transports from Hungary; consequently enormous ditches were dug for the purpose of cremating the bodies. Fires made of wood soaked in gasoline were laid in these ditches and the bodies were thrown into them. However, the SS men frequently hurled live children and adults into those ditches, where these unhappy victims died a terrible death. To save gasoline, the fats and oils necessary for cremations were partly derived from the bodies of gassed people. Fats and oils for technical purposes and for the manufacture of soap were also obtained from the corpses.”