“To replace the ranks of the dead, fresh batches of sick and wounded prisoners of war were continually brought in. On the journey the captives were tortured, starved, and murdered. The Hitlerites threw out hundreds of corpses from each car of the incoming transports as they reached the ‘Lazarett.’ ”
According to data received from the investigating commission, 800 to 900 dead bodies would be thrown out of each train as it unloaded at a branch line. A further report of the Commission states:
“Thousands of Soviet prisoners on the march perished from hunger, thirst, lack of care, and the savage club-law of the German guards . . . as a routine practice the Hitlerites would greet a group of prisoners at the ‘Lazarett’ gates with blows from rifle butts and rubber truncheons, after which the new arrivals would be stripped of their leather footwear, warm clothing, and personal belongings.”
In the next section, on the same page, the State Commission reports that infectious diseases were deliberately spread among the prisoners of war by German medical officers in the “Lazarett”:
“In the ‘Grosslazarett’ the German medical officers artificially created an incredible state of overcrowding. The prisoners were forced to stand close to each other; they succumbed to exhaustion, dropped down, and died.”
The fascists resorted to various methods for reducing the living room in the “Lazarett”. A former prisoner of war, I.Y. Chuazhev, reported that:
“The Germans reduced the floor space in the ‘Lazarett’ by firing off submachine guns, since the prisoners, perforce, pressed more closely to each other; then the Hitlerites pushed in more sick and wounded and the door was closed.”
The premeditated spreading of infectious diseases in this death camp, derisively named a “Lazarett,” was achieved by extremely primitive means:
“Patients suffering from spotted fever, tuberculosis, or dysentery, severely and lightly wounded cases, were one and all put in the same block and the same ward.”
In a ward intended, under normal conditions, to hold not more than 400 patients, the number of spotted fever and tuberculosis cases alone amounted to 1800.