THE PRESIDENT: Well, in our statement of the document itself it is translated as 16 December 1942. Evidently it is wrong in one place or the other.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: In the testimony itself, in Paragraph 1, Korbonski mentions that in the beginning of December 1943 the Germans posted these lists on the walls of the houses. If the Tribunal will refer to the original of the document it will find “at the beginning of December 1943.”
THE PRESIDENT: I see, it is 1943. It was wrongly translated in the first place.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Yes, 1943. May I continue?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Thank you, Sir. I shall speak of the change in the procedure of the executions. It was on the Polish territory that the criminal code introducing special rights for the “master race” and Draconic laws for the other nations whom the fascist “masters” considered completely vanquished, was put into practice for the first time.
The report of the Polish Government which had already been submitted to the International Military Tribunal by my colleagues as irrefutable evidence in accordance with Article 21 of the Charter gives a brief description of the regime of lawlessness and despotism which reigned in occupied Poland under the guise of special legislation.
To characterize this legislation I shall take the liberty, if Your Honors please, to refer to two excerpts from the report of the Government of the Polish Republic, which has already been presented to the Tribunal by my colleagues as Exhibit Number USSR-93 (Document Number USSR-93). I shall first read into the record a paragraph which will be found on Page 110 in the document file in possession of the Tribunal, the section dealing with “Germanization of the Polish Law.” It is the fourth paragraph after the heading, and I shall quote only two paragraphs of this section:
“In the Government General the machinery of justice was changed particularly by a decree of 26 October 1939. It bears the signature of Frank. (Encl. 2)
“Polish courts became subjected to supervision of German courts established in the Government General. Their jurisdiction, heavily curtailed, was confined to those cases only for which the German courts had no competence. New ideas of law were introduced. Punishment could be inflicted by intuition; the accused deprived of the right to choose a counsel and to appeal.