“The German barbarians, in their atrocious ill-treatment of the Soviet people, did not even spare the children. A school teacher, M. N. Kolessnikova, stated that the Germans killed a 13-year-old boy for taking an old car tire and trying to swim in it while bathing in the sea.
“The following incident happened, according to the testimony of E. N. Sapelnikova:
“Maria Bondarenko, who lived in the village of Adjimushkaya, in an attempt to save her three children from starvation, appealed to some Germans working in the kitchen, for a little food. They poured some thin gruel into a small bowl. The Bondarenko family ate it greedily. A few hours later the mother and all three children were dead. The fascist henchmen had poisoned them.
“It has been ascertained from the testimony of N. H. Shoumilova that in July a German officer shot a 6-year-old boy merely because he was singing a Soviet song in the streets of the town.
“Practically all summer long the dead body of a 9-year-old boy dangled in the ‘Sacco and Vanzetti’ garden; the child had been hanged for plucking some apricots from a tree.”
Here I end my quotation from the report on the town of Kerch.
In my statement I have dwelt on the example of Kerch not because the atrocities committed by the Hitlerites in this town were on a particularly large scale or because they stood out, by reason of their cruelty, among the other crimes perpetrated by the Germans—the documents relevant to these latter crimes are at our disposal. Certainly not. On the contrary, I have quoted the report of the Extraordinary State Commission only because it gives a detailed and objective record of Hitlerite military crimes committed against peaceful citizens of one of the many towns which, as a result of a monstrous war unleashed by the German fascist criminals, were doomed to become the victims of a terrorist regime. Such atrocities were perpetrated by the Hitlerites in all the temporarily occupied cities of the Soviet Union.
In confirmation of this statement I now turn to a document of a general nature, which has already been submitted to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-51 (Document Number USSR-51) but parts of which have not yet been read into the record. I am referring to the note of the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, V. M. Molotov, of 27 April 1942. In their introduction to this note, the Soviet Government made the following statement—I start my quotation from Paragraph 2 of the reverse side of the Russian text, Paragraph 3 after the heading of the document book. There you will find the following remarks:
“Fresh information and documents are being submitted to the Soviet Government to the effect that the Hitlerite invaders are carrying on a wholesale looting of the Soviet population and do not shrink from any crimes and acts of cruelty or violence on the territories which they temporarily occupied or which they still continue to occupy. The Soviet Government have already declared that these atrocities do not represent accidental excesses perpetrated by single undisciplined military units or by individual German officers or men. The Soviet Government are now in possession of documents recently seized in the staffs of routed German formations, which prove that the carnage and atrocities committed by the fascist German Army were perpetrated in accordance with carefully elaborated plans issued by the German Government, in pursuance of orders from the German High Command.”
I omit the subsequent parts and continue with Section V of the note. The Tribunal will find the passage which I am about to quote on Page 8 of the document book, Column 1 of the text, Paragraph 5.