“The Commission notes that there were many whose wounds were not fatal; they had evidently been thrown into the pit and buried alive. This has also been confirmed by citizens who passed near the pit soon after the shooting; they saw the ground stirring and heard dull groans emanating from the grave.”
In confirmation of this fact, I would request the Tribunal to read into the record the original minutes, taken from the report of the Extraordinary State Commission, on the interrogation of the witness, Vassilievitch Joseph Ivanovitch, examined by the public prosecutor of the city of Stanislav at the request of the Extraordinary State Commission. We submit this document as Exhibit USSR-346 (Document Number USSR-346). I shall quote only two paragraphs from the minutes of this interrogation:
“In the beginning of 1943 we burned people there in the cemetery, to which firewood was brought for this purpose. There were cases where women and children were thrown alive into the pits and there buried.
“One woman—I do not know her name—begged an officer not to shoot her, and he gave her his word that she would not be shot. He even said, ‘I give you my word as an officer that you will not be shot.’ After the shooting of the group to which this woman belonged, this officer himself took her by the hand, threw her alive into the pit, and she was buried alive.”
Thus, in one whole series of cases, the victims were purposely buried alive in order to add extra cruelty to the misdeeds of the criminals. In other cases this was due to the fact that the Germans did not even consider it necessary to verify whether the people to be liquidated were dead or not.
An investigation of the data on the exhumation of these bodies, when the German fascists no longer had the time to destroy the traces of their crime by burning them, shows that towards the end of 1941 and in 1942 the criminals did not particularly attempt to camouflage the execution grounds—and this despite the instructions, already known to the Tribunal, issued by fascist headquarters on the camouflaging of execution grounds and keeping secret the so-called executions. I am of the opinion that this can be explained only by the fact that the Germans, in spite of some set-backs, were convinced of their final victory, and that, therefore, they hoped that their deeds would not be punished.
I refer to the document already presented with other documents to the Tribunal as Document Number USSR-2(a), a report of the Extraordinary Commission of the Soviet Union on atrocities committed by the German fascist invaders in the region of Stalinsk. There we find a report of the medical-legal expert commission on the atrocities committed by the German fascist invaders in the alabaster quarries near the city of Artemovsk, in the Stalinsk district. I shall quote only a brief excerpt from this document. I shall omit the greater part of the indictments.
In the document book, Page 366, fifth paragraph, of the first column of the text, Your Honors will find the following:
“Two kilometers to the east of the city of Artemovsk, in the tunnel of the quarry of the alabaster works, 400 meters from the entrance, there is a small opening walled up with bricks. When the bricks were removed a continuation of the tunnel was discovered. This was a narrow passage rising steeply, having at the end a broad, oval cavern, 20 meters in length, 30 meters in width, and 3 to 4 meters in height.
“The entire cavern was filled with dead bodies and only a small area at the entrance and a narrow strip in the center were free of corpses. The bodies were closely pressed one against the other, with their backs turned to the entrance to the cavern.