“In the ‘Grosslazarett’ we periodically observed outbreaks of a mysterious disease of an unknown nature, referred to as ‘para-cholera’ by the German doctors. The appearance of ‘para-cholera’ was the result of barbarous experiments by the German doctors. These outbreaks would vanish as suddenly as they appeared. The mortality rate in ‘para-cholera’ rose to 60-80 percent. German physicians performed autopsies on the bodies of some of the victims, and no captured Russian medical officers were admitted to these autopsies.”
In conclusion, it is stated in Subparagraph 8 of the medico-legal expert report—Page 7 of Exhibit Number USSR-5(a), Page 159 of the document book—that:
“No objective circumstances can justify the conditions under which the prisoners of war were housed in the camp. All the more, since it has been revealed by thoroughgoing investigations that there were enormous food supplies in the German military depots at Slavuta and that both medical supplies and surgical bandages abounded in the military dispensaries.”
The “Grosslazarett” staff included a considerable number of medical personnel. Nevertheless, according to the statement of the government commission, sick and wounded officers and men of the Red Army did not receive even the most elementary medical attention. And how could there be any talk of medical attention when the entire object of the “Grosslazarett” was directly opposed to such assistance? The administration of the “Grosslazarett” not only strove to destroy the prisoners of war physically, but they also endeavored to fill the last days of the sick and wounded with suffering and anguish.
One part of the commission’s statement is entitled “Torture and shooting of Soviet prisoners of war.” I shall read into the Record a passage taken from this part. It is on Page 4, Exhibit Number USSR-5, Page 153 of the document book:
“Soviet prisoners of war in the ‘Grosslazarett’ were subjected to torture and torment, beaten up when food was distributed and again when setting out to work. Even the dying were not spared by the fascist murderers. The medico-legal examination of the exhumed corpses revealed, among a number of other bodies of prisoners of war, the body of a prisoner who, in his death agony, had been wounded in the groin with a knife. He had been thrown into his grave while still alive, with the knife sticking in the wound, and was then covered over with earth.
“One method of mass torture in the ‘Lazarett’ consisted in locking the sick and wounded in a detention cell—a room without heat and with a concrete floor. The prisoners in this cell were left without food for days on end, and many died there. In order to exhaust the ill and weak prisoners still further, the Hitlerites forced the sick and enfeebled patients to run round the ‘Lazarett’ building; those who could not run were flogged almost to death. There were many cases where the German guards murdered the prisoners just for fun.
“A former prisoner of war, Buchtichyuk, reported how the Germans threw the intestines of dead horses on the barbed wire surrounding the interior of the camp. When the prisoners, maddened with hunger, ran up to the barbed wire, the guards opened fire on them with submachine guns. The witness, Kirsanov, saw one prisoner of war bayonetted for picking up a potato tuber. A former prisoner of war, Shatalov, was an eyewitness to the shooting of a prisoner by his escort merely for trying to obtain a second helping of ‘Balanda soup.’
“In February 1942 Shatalov saw a sentry wound a prisoner who was searching the garbage heap for remnants of food left over from the kitchen of the German personnel; the wounded man was immediately brought to the pit, stripped, and executed.”
THE PRESIDENT: We will adjourn now.