THE PRESIDENT: Please do.
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Continuing the presentation of evidence on atrocities of German fascist criminals with regard to children, I refer to the testimony of the witness, Bespalov, included in the document previously presented to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-32 (Document Number USSR-32). The members of the Tribunal will find the place which I refer to on Page 33, fifth paragraph of the document, Column 1 in the document book. Bespalov testified:
“At the end of June last year I myself saw up to 300 girls and women brought on 10 to 12 trucks to the forest park. The unfortunate women were throwing themselves from side to side, weeping, tearing their hair, and rending their clothes. Many fainted, but the German fascists paid no attention to this. By kicks and beatings with rifle butts and sticks they forced them to get up; the executioners themselves stripped and threw into the pits, those who did not rise. Several girls—among them children—tried to run away, but were killed.
“I saw how, after a burst of machine gun fire, some of the women, swaying and helplessly flinging up their arms, staggered toward the standing Germans with heart-rending cries. At this time the Germans were shooting them with pistols. Maddened with terror and grief, mothers clutched their children to their breasts, running with terrible wails into the forest clearing, seeking help.
“The Gestapo members snatched the children from them, seized them by the arms or legs, and threw them alive into the pit; when the mothers ran after them to the pit, they were shot.”
I quote one paragraph out of Exhibit Number USSR-9 (Document USSR-9), already presented to the Tribunal. This is a report of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union of the crimes of the German fascist invaders in the city of Kiev. The members of the Tribunal will find this document on Page 238, second column of the text, sixth paragraph:
“On 29 September 1941 Hitler’s bandits drove thousands of the peaceful Soviet citizens to the corner of Melnik and Doktorovskaya Streets and from there to Baybe-yar, where they shot them, after taking all their valuables from them.
“Citizens N. F. Petrenko and N. T. Gorbacheva, who lived near Baybe-yar, stated that they had seen how the Germans threw babies at the breast into graves and buried them alive with their dead or wounded parents. One could see the surface of the ground moving over the buried people who were still alive.”
These were not individual occurrences, but a systematic plan. This inhuman terror was practiced on children, since the chiefs of German fascism understood that this form of terrorism would be particularly frightful for the survivors. Compassion for the weak and the defenseless is an inalienable human trait. By applying their particularly barbarous methods to children, the German fascist criminals showed the rest of the population that there was no crime, no cruelty at which they would stop for the purpose of pacifying the occupied territories. Children did not simply share the fate of their parents. The so-called “actions” were frequently directed against the children themselves. They were taken forcibly from their parents, concentrated in one place, then murdered.
I refer to a very brief report of the Extraordinary State Commission, already submitted to the Tribunal, entitled, “Concerning the Crimes of the German Conspirators in Latvia.” The members of the Tribunal will find the place I refer to on Page 286, on the reverse side, in the second column of the document book, Paragraph 5. Here it states, and I quote: