The prisoner-of-war camp was set up in the city jail of Orel. After the Hitlerite invaders had been driven from Orel, the Extraordinary Commission was able to secure the testimony of doctors who had been in this camp and who had fortuitously escaped with their lives. Included in this report are the personal observations of a member of the Extraordinary State Committee, Academician Burdenko, who personally examined people liberated by the Red Army from the camp, from the camp premises, and from the so-called camp hospital. The general conclusion is that in the camp of Orel and in others the Hitlerites bodily exterminated the Soviet people with characteristic German thoroughness.
The prisoners received 200 grams of bread and a liter of soup made from rotten soy beans and moldy flour. The bread was baked with an admixture of sawdust. The camp administration, doctors included, treated the prisoners atrociously. I should like to quote a few excerpts from the report of the commission, and I shall start from Paragraph 5, Page 2 of the document, which you will find on Page 72 of the document book:
“The camp commander, Major Hoffmann, flogged the prisoners and forced persons exhausted by hunger to carry out heavy manual work in the local quarries and in the unloading of ammunition.
“Boots and shoes were taken from the prisoners and replaced by wooden clogs.
“In the winter these clogs became slippery and the prisoners, when walking, and especially when going up to the 2d and 3rd floor, would slip on the stairs and be lamed.”
Dr. H. I. Zvetkov, a former inmate of the prisoner-of-war camp, testified as follows. I quote, and you will find the excerpt quoted on Page 72 and at the beginning of Page 73:
“I can only describe the attitude of the German Command towards the prisoners of war, during my stay in the camp at Orel, as one of deliberate extermination of manpower in the person of the prisoners. The food ration, which at best contained a maximum of only 700 calories, led, when work was hard and beyond their strength, to complete exhaustion of the organism (cachexia) and to death. . . .
“Despite our categorical protests and our struggle against this mass murder of the people of the Soviet, the German camp doctors, Kuper and Beckel, maintained that the diet was perfectly satisfactory. Moreover, they denied that the oedemata from which so many of the prisoners suffered were due to starvation and quite calmly ascribed the condition entirely to heart or kidney troubles. The very mention of the term ‘hunger oedema’ was forbidden in the diagnosis. Mortality in the camp assumed mass proportions. Of the total number of persons murdered, 3,000 died of starvation and of complications arising from malnutrition.
“The prisoners lived in indescribably appalling conditions. The overcrowding was incredible. Fuel and water were completely lacking. Everything was infested by vermin. From 50 to 80 people were crammed into a ward 15 to 20 square meters in size. Prisoners would die at the rate of five or six per ward, and the living would have to sleep on the dead.”
It is further said that a particularly terrible regime existed for those included in the category of recalcitrants. They were put into a special building, named the death block. The inmates of this block were shot on schedule, five to six persons being taken to execution every Tuesday and Friday. The German physician Kuper was one of those present at the shootings. Academician Burdenko established that in the so-called hospital people were exterminated in the same manner as in the rest of the camp.