“Twenty people, including four professors, lawyers, and physicians, were brought by the SS into the courtyard of House Number 8, on Artishevsky Street. One of them I know by name, Doctor of Juridical Science Krebs. Among them were five or six women. The SS forced them to wash the stairs leading from the seven entrances to the four-story house, with their tongues and lips. After those stairways were washed, the same people were forced to collect garbage in the courtyard with their lips. All garbage had to be transferred to one place in the courtyard. . . .”
I omit the end of this paragraph and continue from the next paragraph:
“The fascist invaders carefully concealed the extermination of the intelligentsia. To repeated requests of relatives and friends concerning the fate of these men of science, the Germans replied, ‘Nothing is known.’
“In the autumn of 1943, on the order of Reich Minister Himmler, the Gestapo men burned the bodies of the murdered professors. Mandel and Korn, former internees of the Yanovsky Camp, who dealt with the exhumation of the bodies, have told the Commission the following:
“ ‘During the night of 5 October 1943, acting on orders from the Gestapo, we opened a pit between Kadetskaya and Bouletskaya streets by the light of searchlights and took from it 35 bodies. We burned all these corpses.
“ ‘While lifting the corpses from the pit we found the documents of Professor Ostrovsky, of Otoshek, Doctor of Natural Science, and of Kasimir Bartel, Professor of the Polytechnical Institute.’
“The investigation established that during the first few months of the occupation the Germans arrested or killed more than 70 of the most prominent scientists, technologists, and artists in the city of Lvov.”
What I have just said does not in any way infer that the leaders of local organizations and representatives of the intelligentsia alone were victims of the fascist terror. I only wanted to make it clear that the fascist terror was directed in the first instance against these people.
But one of the characteristic features of Hitlerite terrorism was the fact that it was decreed by the German fascist leaders and materialized by the executioners as a general reign of terror.
To confirm this I refer to a document previously submitted to the Tribunal but not read into the record. It is Document Number USSR-63, which is a report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the investigation of German atrocities in the town of Kerch.