It became obvious that German thermotechnicians and chemists, architects, toxicologists, mechanics, and physicians were engaged in this rationalization of mass murder on instructions received from Hitler’s government and from the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces. It was also evident that the “death factories” brought into existence an entire series of auxiliary industries.
But the unity of this will-to-evil was not only apparent there, where a special technique had been evolved to serve the purpose of very evil murder. The unity of this will-to-evil was also apparent from the similarity of the methods employed by the murderers, from the uniformity of type in the murder technique evolved as well as from the fact that, in cases where no special technique was employed, use was made of ordinary weapons of the German Armed Forces.
From the evidence which I shall submit later on you will see that the sites where the Germans buried their victims were opened up by Soviet legal doctors in the north and south of the country. These sites were separated from each other by thousands of kilometers, and it is quite evident that the crimes were perpetrated by perfectly different people; but the methods employed were absolutely identical. The wounds were invariably inflicted on the same parts of the body. And identical, too, were the preparations for camouflaging the gigantic graves as antitank ditches and trenches. Everywhere the unarmed and defenseless people, on their arrival at the execution ground, were ordered, in practically the same terms, to undress and lie face downwards in previously prepared pits. As soon as the first batch was shot, whether in the swamps of Bielorussia or the foothills of the Caucasus, the row was covered with quicklime and the second batch of unarmed and defenseless people, of people about to die, were again ordered by the murderers to undress and lie down on that corrosive, blood-soaked mass which covered the first batch of victims.
This is testified to not only by the uniformity of instructions and orders received from high commands. So similar were the methods employed that it became clear that execution squads were being trained in special schools which had systematized beforehand and provided for every eventuality, from the order to undress prior to the shooting right down to the shooting proper. These assumptions, based on an analysis of assembled facts, were later confirmed by documents captured by the Red Army and by the testimony of prisoners of war.
From the very first months of the war it became clear to the Soviet Government that the innumerable crimes of the German fascist aggressors against the peaceful citizens of my mother country represented, not the excesses of undisciplined military units or the isolated crimes of individual officers and soldiers, but that they represented a system prepared in advance, not merely sanctioned by the criminal Hitler Government, but consciously planned and encouraged by this government.
I submit to the Tribunal in evidence according to Article 21 of the Charter, one of the official notes of V. M. Molotov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the U.S.S.R., dated as early as 6 January 1942. This document is registered as Exhibit Number USSR-51 (Document Number USSR-51). It is on the first page of your document book, beginning at the third paragraph after the heading:
“As and when the Red Army, in the course of its continued and victorious counter-offensive, liberated numerous cities and rural committees which had, for a certain time, been in the hands of the German invader, an incredible picture emerged more clearly with every passing day—a picture of the looting which took place in every community, of general devastation, of revolting acts of rape, ill-treatment, and mass murder—all committed against peaceful citizens by the fascist German occupational forces during their advance, during the occupation, and during their withdrawal. The great amount of documentary material which the Soviet Government has at its disposal witnesses to the plundering and despoiling of the population, accompanied by bestial acts of violence and mass murders, carried out in all territories which came under the heels of the German invaders. Unquestionable facts prove that the regimes of robbery and of bloody terror inflicted on the peaceful population of the occupied villages and cities did not consist of certain excesses of individual undisciplined military units or individual German officers and soldiers. Rather does it point to a definite system, planned far in advance and encouraged by the German Government and the German Army Command, a system which intentionally unleashed within their army the lowest animal instincts among the officers and men.
“Every step of the German fascist army and its allies in the invaded Soviet territories of the Ukraine and Moldavia, of Bielorussia and Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, in the Karelian-Finnish lands, in the Russian zones and regions, led to annihilation and to the destruction of priceless material and cultural treasures—the property of the nation; for the civilian population it led to the loss of hard-won property, slave labor, famine, and bloody massacre before whose horror the most savage crimes in history have paled.
“The Soviet Government and its organizations record all these infamous crimes of the Hitler army for which the indignant Soviet people justifiably demand and will obtain retribution.
“The Soviet Government considers it a duty to bring to the notice of all civilized humanity, of honest men all the world over, its declaration concerning the monstrous crimes perpetrated against the peaceful people of all occupied territories of the Soviet Union by the Hitlerite armies.”