“In view of the total area of burial grounds and the area of 2 square kilometers in which the ashes and bones were scattered as well the expert commission concluded that in the Yanov Camp there were exterminated over 200,000 Soviet citizens.”
I omit the next part of my presentation, which deals with the regime of starvation in concentration camps. This was already very well presented by the representative of the British Prosecution, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe. This must be already quite clear to the Tribunal and I don’t think it will be necessary to give any additional proofs. But I ask the Tribunal’s permission for a presentation of evidence on a camp which was created by the German fascists only during the last stage of the war. I refer to Page 265 of my presentation.
Maidanek and Auschwitz camps served as a means of extermination only for those who really were sent to these camps. These two camps were not a direct menace for those people who were outside the walls of the camp; but, in the course of the war, having already suffered grave defeats, German fascism began to practice new bestialities for exterminating peaceful citizens—thus, in Bielorussia camps of death, not only to exterminate the inmates of the camp itself but, first and foremost, to spread infectious diseases among the peaceful population and the ranks of the Red Army. There were no crematoria and gas chambers in these camps but these camps should in all justice be considered as among the most brutal concentration camps which were created by fascism for extermination of people.
I present to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-4 (Document Number USSR-4) the report of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union for the investigation of the murder of people by means of spreading typhus epidemics. Such evidence was not presented before, and I shall therefore quote several excerpts from this report. I begin the quotation on Page 454 of the document book, first column of the text, first paragraph; last paragraph on Page 266 of the Russian text. I begin the quotation:
“On 19 March 1944 advancing Red Army units discovered, near the settlement of Osaritchi in the region of Polesskoy in the Bielorussian S.S.R., within the limits of German defense lines, three concentration camps in which there were over 33,000 children, women, and old men incapable of work.”
I interrupt my quotation, and I omit one paragraph.
“The camps were really open squares surrounded by barbed wire. The approaches to them were mined. There were no buildings whatever even of the most insignificant type in the camp grounds.”
I call the Tribunal’s attention to the fact that all this happened in March, in Bielorussia, when it is really very cold there.
“The inmates were sitting on the ground. Many of them had lost their ability to move and were lying unconscious in the mud. It was forbidden to the inmates to build fires, to gather brush or branches for bedding. The Hitlerites shot Soviet people for the slightest attempt to violate this order.
“For concentration camps close to the nearest line of defense, the Germans, in the first place, selected sites in such places where they did not hope to retain their position. Secondly, they concentrated large masses of Soviet people in the camps, placing there primarily women, children, and old men unable to work. Thirdly, they placed in these camps thousands of typhus patients who were brought from various temporarily occupied regions of the Bielorussian S.S.R., especially for this purpose. They were kept together with the starved, weak inmates who no longer could serve as labor and who were living there under the most unhygienic conditions.