“After all these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and the lowly, it is about time we decided to protect the strong against the inferior. It will be one of the chief tasks of German statesmanship for all times to prevent, by every means in our power, the further increase of the Slav races. Natural instincts bid all living beings not merely to conquer their enemies but to destroy them. In former days it was the victor’s prerogative to destroy entire tribes, entire peoples.” (Rauschning, H., The Voice of Destruction, New York, 1940, Page 138.)
If Your Honors please, you have already heard the testimony of the witness, Eric Von dem Bach-Zelewski, about Himmler’s aims, as given by him in his speech at the beginning of 1941.
In answer to a question by a representative of the Soviet Prosecution, the witness declared, “Himmler mentioned in his speech that it was necessary to cut down the number of Slavs by 30 million.” The Tribunal will see by this what monstrous proportions the criminal ideas of the Hitlerite fanatics attained.
The Hitlerites vented their ferocity particularly on the Soviet intelligentsia. Even before the attack on the U.S.S.R., directives were prepared regarding the merciless annihilation of Soviet people for political and racial reasons. In Appendix 2 to Operational Order Number 8 of the Chief of the Security Police and SD, dated 17 June 1941, it was stated:
“It is above all essential to ascertain the identity of all prominent Government and party officials, particularly professional revolutionaries, persons working for the Comintern, all influential members of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. and the affiliated organizations in the Central Committee and the district and regional committees, all people’s commissars and their deputies, all former political commissars in the Red Army, leading personalities of the state institutions of the central and middle administrative levels, leading personalities in economic life, the Soviet Russian intelligentsia, and all Jews.”
In a directive of 17 June 1941 for Security Police and SD detachments it is pointed out that it is necessary to take such measures, not only against the Russian people, but also against the Ukrainians, Bielorussians, Azerbaidzhanians, Armenians, Georgians, Turks, and other nationalities.
The Soviet Prosecution will present to the Tribunal actual documents and facts in this connection. The fascist conspirators planned the extermination to the last man of the Jewish population of the world and carried out this extermination throughout the whole of their conspiratorial activity from 1933 onwards.
My American colleague has already quoted Hitler’s statement of 24 February 1942, that “the Jews will be annihilated.” In a speech by the Defendant Frank, published in the Kraków Gazette on 18 August 1942, it is stated:
“Anyone who passes through Kraków, Lvov, Warsaw, Radom, or Lublin today must in all fairness admit that the efforts of the German administration have been crowned with real success, as one now sees hardly any Jews.”
The bestial annihilation of the Jewish population took place in the Ukraine, in Bielorussia, and in the Baltic States. In the town of Riga some 80,000 Jews lived before the German occupation. At the moment of the liberation of Riga by the Red Army there were 140 Jews left there.