Documentary evidence proves the fact the Hitlerite Government and the German Supreme Command carried out the deportation of Soviet citizens into German slavery by deceit, threats, and force. Soviet citizens were sold into slavery by the fascist invaders to concerns and private individuals in Germany. These slaves were doomed to hunger, brutal treatment, and, in the end, to an agonizing death.
I shall dwell later on the inhuman and barbarous directives, edicts, and orders of the Hitlerite Government and the Supreme Command, which were issued for the purpose of effecting the deportation of Soviet persons to German slavery and for which the defendants now being prosecuted are responsible, particularly Göring, Keitel, Rosenberg, Sauckel, and others. Documents at the disposal of the Soviet Prosecution, captured by the Red Army from the staffs of the smashed Germano-fascist armies, demonstrate the defendants to have perpetrated these crimes.
In a report read at a meeting of the German Labor Front in November 1942, Rosenberg presented facts and figures confirming the vast scale of the deportation of Soviet citizens to slave and serf labor in Germany which were organized by Sauckel.
On 7 November 1941 a secret conference took place in Berlin, at which Göring gave directives to his officials concerning the utilization of Soviet citizens for forced labor. These directives came to our knowledge from a document which is Secret Circular Number 42006/41 of the Economic Staff of the German Command in the East, dated 4 December 1941. This is how these directives run:
“1. Russians must be used chiefly for road and railway construction, cleaning-up operations, demining and airfield construction. German construction battalions must be disbanded (for instance those of the air force). Skilled German workers must work in war production; they must not dig and break stones—the Russian is there for that purpose.
“2. It is essential to utilize the Russian primarily for the following types of work: Mining, road construction, war production (tanks, guns, aircraft equipment), agriculture, building, in large workshops (shoemaking) and in special detachments for urgent unforeseen jobs.
“3. In taking measures to keep order, the decisive considerations are speed and severity. Only the following types of punishment, without any intermediate punitive sanctions, will be imposed: deprivation of food or death by sentence of court-martial.”
The Defendant Fritz Sauckel was appointed Plenipotentiary General for the Allocation of Labor by Hitler’s order of 21 March 1942. On 20 April 1942 Sauckel sent to several government and military organs his top-secret “Program of the Plenipotentiary General for the Allocation of Labor,” which is no less foul than the circular referred to above. This is what is said in the “Program”:
“It is extremely necessary fully to utilize the human reserves available in occupied Soviet territories. If attempts to attract the necessary labor voluntarily do not succeed, it will be necessary to resort immediately to recruitment or to the compulsory signing of individual contracts.
“Besides the prisoners of war we already have, and who are still located in the occupied territories, there is need mainly for the recruitment of skilled male and female civilian workers over 15 years of age from the Soviet provinces for utilization in Germany.