The hospital attached to the camp was likewise dedicated to the extermination of prisoners of war. Schoolteacher V. A. Efimova, who worked at the hospital, told the Commission:
“It was rarely that any one left this hospital alive. Five shifts of grave-diggers, selected from among the prisoners, carried the dead to the cemetery in handcarts. It frequently happened that a man who was still alive would be thrown into the cart and six to seven corpses or bodies of executed people piled on top of him. The living were buried with the dead. At the hospital sick people, tossing in delirium, were bludgeoned to death.”
When an epidemic broke out in the camp, the Hitlerites drove to the airfield all the prisoners from any barrack where typhus patients had been discovered and shot them. About 45,000 Soviet prisoners of war were thus exterminated.
Appalling facts are quoted in the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission, which investigated the crimes of the German fascist invaders in the neighborhood of Sevastopol, Kerch, and at the health resort of Teberda. I shall read into the Record some data from our Exhibit Number USSR-63(5) (Document Number USSR-63(5)). At the Sevastopol prison, the German fascist command organized a hospital for sick and wounded prisoners of war. Here the Soviet warriors perished in masses. I shall quote a few sentences, which you will find in your document book on Page 99:
“At the time the hospital was organized, the sick and wounded were not given any water or bread for 5 or 6 days by the Germans, who cynically said: ‘This is the punishment for the specially stubborn defense of Sevastopol by the Russians.’
“The wounded brought in from the battlefield were given no medical aid. Soldiers and officers were thrown on the cement floor, where they lay bleeding for 7 and 8 days on end.
“During the defense of Sevastopol, a military hospital and a medico-sanitary battalion, Number 47, were installed in the vaults of the champagne factory at Inkermann. After the retreat of the Red Army, a large number of wounded soldiers and officers were left behind in Vault Numbers 10, 11, 12, and 13, since there had been no time to evacuate them. When the German savages captured the factory, they all became drunk and set fire to the vaults.”
I omit a whole number of facts, the majority of which, strictly speaking, should have been specially reported to the Tribunal. I pass on to the description of the last crime mentioned in the statement of the commission. I pay special attention to it because it describes the brutal extermination of a very large number of wounded Red Army soldiers. You will also find this excerpt on Page 99 of your document book:
“On 4 December 1943 there arrived at the station of Sevastopol, from the city of Kerch, three transports of wounded prisoners of war belonging to the Kerch landing forces. Having loaded them on a 2,500-ton barge moored in the southern bay near the landing stage, the Germans set fire to it. The heart-rending screams of the prisoners filled the air. Women who were not far from the barge could render no assistance to the wounded, since they were driven from the site of the fire by gendarmes. Not more than 15 men were saved. Thousands perished in the fire.
“On the following day the same barge was loaded with 2,000 men from among the wounded brought from Kerch. The barge sailed from Sevastopol in an unknown direction, and all the wounded in it were drowned at sea.”