“In 1941 German soldiers and officers stole from the Staritzki Church all the vessels, altar crosses, crowns, miters, and tabernacles.
“In the town Dokshitza, in the Polotsk region, the Germans looted and took away all the property of the local mosque. The same fate was shared by nearly all the churches in the territories occupied by the Germans.
“Everywhere the Germans plundered Orthodox and Catholic churches, synagogues, mosques, and other buildings of religious worship.”
The Hitlerite conspirators not only actually plundered, tortured, and murdered, but they also strove to humiliate the believers morally and to rob them of their spiritual treasures.
Such, Your Honors, is the conclusive evidence concerning the crimes against culture, committed by Rosenberg, Frank, Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, and the other participants in the conspiracy. The crimes of the defendants against culture are terrible indeed in their consequences. Even though it be possible, by a tremendous effort, to rebuild the cities and villages destroyed by the Hitlerites, even though it be possible to restore the factories and plants blown up or burned down by them, mankind has lost for all time the irreplaceable art treasures which the Hitlerites so ruthlessly destroyed, as it has lost forever the millions of human beings sent to their death in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Babye-yar, or Kerch.
Having inherited the savage hatred of all mankind from the dim ages of the past, the modern Huns have far surpassed, in cruelty and vandalism, the darkest pages of history. While arrogantly challenging the future of mankind, they trampled under foot the finest heritage of mankind’s past. Themselves without faith or ideals, they sacrilegiously destroyed both the churches and the relics of the saints.
But in this unparalleled struggle between culture and obscurantism, between civilization and barbarism, culture and civilization prevailed. The Hitlerite conspirators who had aspired to world domination, who had dreamed of destroying the culture of the Slavs and of all other nations, now stand in the defendants’ dock. May a just punishment be theirs.
THE PRESIDENT: Will you continue until 5 o’clock?
MR. COUNSELLOR RAGINSKY: As you wish, Your Honor.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes; will you go on until 5 o’clock?