Blood drips from the hands of the accused—the blood of the victims of Rostov and Kharkov, the martyrs of Auschwitz and all the extermination camps created by the Hitlerites. Treacherously the enemy attacked our country. The people rose in arms to defend their mother country, her freedom, and her independence, the honor and lives of their families. They joined the ranks of the fighting men. They fell into the hands of the enemy. Now see how the enemy dishonored them when they stood helpless and unarmed.
So may these major criminals, who bear the main responsibility for the evil deeds of the fascists, be forced to answer to the martyrs to the full extent of the law of international justice for the indescribable atrocities which you will see with your own eyes, and for the many other crimes which will forever remain unknown.
Allow me to present to the Tribunal Chief Counsellor L. N. Smirnov, Assistant Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R., who will submit to the Tribunal the documentation pertaining to the crimes committed against the civilian population of the U.S.S.R., Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
CHIEF COUNSELLOR OF JUSTICE L. N. SMIRNOV (Assistant Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.): Your Honors, my problem today consists of presenting to you the written documents and other judicial evidence testifying to the very grievous crimes committed by the Hitlerian conspirators against the peaceful population in the territories of the U.S.S.R., Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia when under temporary occupation.
The number of such depositions at the disposal of the Soviet Prosecution is unusually great. Suffice it to say that in the reports of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union for the determination and investigation of the atrocities of the German fascist invaders and the accomplices, there are 54,784 reports of the crimes by the Hitlerian criminals, directed against the peaceful citizens of the Soviet Union.
But even these documents do not, by a long way, cover all the crimes perpetrated by these war criminals against the peaceful population. The Soviet Prosecution asserts and I submit to the Tribunal evidence to this effect, that along the entire length of the far-flung front, from the Barents to the Black Sea, and throughout the entire depths of the infiltration of the German hordes into my mother country, wherever the German soldier or the men of the SS set foot, crimes of unspeakable cruelty were committed and the victims of these crimes were the women, the children, and the old.
The crimes of the German fascist criminals became apparent as and when the Red Army units moved west. The reports on these Hitlerite crimes against the peaceful population were made by officers of the advance units of the Red Army, by local authorities, and public organizations.
The Soviet people did not, in the first moment, learn of the crimes of the German fascist invaders from circulars of the German Command, from the notices posted up by the Reich leaders, or from the directives issued by the SS Obergruppenführers both in incoming and outgoing bulletins of the competent German chancelleries, although such documents were captured in very large quantities by the advance units of the Red Army and are currently in the possession of the Soviet Prosecution. Far different were the sources of their information. Returning to their native haunts the soldiers of the Army of Liberation saw the many villages, towns, and cities which had been reduced to so much wasteland.
At the foot of the communal graves where rest the bodies of the Soviet people murdered by “typical German methods”—I shall, later on, present to the Tribunal evidence of these methods and of the regularity of their application—at the foot of the gallows where the feet of the adolescents danced on the air, at the ovens of the gigantic crematories where the murdered internees from the extermination camps were burned, at the sight of the dead women and girls, victims of some sadistic whim of the fascist bandits, at the sight of children, who had been torn in half—by all this evidence did the Soviet people recognize the mighty chain of crime extending, as the Chief Prosecutor of the U.S.S.R. so aptly said, “from the ministerial armchair to the hands of the executioner.”
All these monstrous crimes had a definite system of their own. There was uniformity in the murder methods: One and the same system prevailed in the construction of the gas chambers, in the mass production of the round tins containing the poisonous substances “Cyclone A” or “Cyclone B,” the ovens of the crematories are all built on the same typical lines, and one was the plan extending over all the camps of destruction. There was uniformity in the construction of the evil-smelling death machines, which the Germans referred to as “gaswagen” but which our people called the “soul destroyers”; and there was the same technical elaboration in the construction of mobile mills for grinding human bones. All this indicates one sole and evil will uniting all the individual assassins and executioners.