The negotiations concerning the military preparations for aggression against the Soviet Union, in each of these countries, were mainly concluded during the period September-December 1940. The negotiations were conducted by the general staffs of the German and the satellite armies. The subject of the negotiations in each case was of a purely military character, such as the retraining of the troops, the transportation of military units, the coordination of strategic plans, the deciding on the number of divisions needed to attack the Soviet Union, et cetera.
Such character of negotiations testifies to the fact that there existed between the fascist Government of Germany and the Governments of Romania, Finland, and Hungary, a preliminary agreement with regard to aggression against the Soviet Union even before the negotiations began.
And, finally, the documents submitted reveal that to each of these countries, one way or the other, the fascist conspirators had promised some territory belonging to the Soviet Union.
I should like to point out one more circumstance.
In order fully to grasp the consequences of the predatory fascist attack on the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, it is not enough to confine ourselves to Plan Barbarossa. This is a strategic plan, a plan for military attack, a plan for the beginning of aggression.
And close on the heels of the attack followed, as it is well known, the so-called “assimilation” and “organization” of the occupied territories. The plans for the “assimilation” and “organization,” which were plans for the extermination of the peaceful civilian population and the plundering of the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, were also prepared in advance, in the same way as Plan Barbarossa.
The Soviet Prosecution declares that the documents at the disposal of the Tribunal, and especially such documents as the directive of 13 March 1941 (Document Number 447-PS), signed by the Defendant Keitel; the order for the application of military jurisdiction, dated 15 May 1941 (Document Number C-50), also signed by Keitel; the propaganda directive for Plan Barbarossa (Document Number C-26); and others, testify to the destruction not only of legal but of all moral standards of behavior by the hordes of the fascist usurpers on the temporarily occupied Soviet territories, this destruction having been premeditated and planned long before the attack on the Soviet Union.
Even before the attack on the Soviet Union, the Hitlerites had decided and outlined in appropriate paragraphs of these instructions, directions, and orders, the terroristic methods for dealing with the civilian population and the measures and means for plundering the land of the Soviet Union and reducing it to a colony of the Third Reich. And when war did break out and the whole secret was laid bare, the fascists did not hesitate to publish all these plans in their press.
I submit to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-59 (Document Number USSR-59), an article, published on 20 August 1942, in Das Schwarze Korps, an SS paper and organ of the Reich Führer of the SS. This article, entitled, “Should We Germanize?”—Page 180 of the document book—states openly:
“The Reich Führer of the SS chose the following slogan for one of the editions of the newspaper Deutsche Arbeit, devoted to the problems of resettlement in the East: