The section of the report of the Greek Government entitled “Recruitment of Manpower” contains two paragraphs which I intend to read into the record:
“One of the problems confronting the German administration was that of recruiting labor. All males between 16 and 50 years of age were liable to labor conscription. Strikes were declared illegal, and severe penalties enforced for resort thereto. Persons who organized and directed a strike were liable to the death penalty. Strikers were tried by military courts.
“At first the Germans, by propaganda and various forms of indirect pressure, tried to recruit Greek labor to work within Germany. They promised high wages and better conditions of life. As this kind of ‘voluntary’ recruitment failed to produce the expected results they abandoned it and confronted the workers with the dilemma either of being taken as hostages or else of being sent to Germany to work.”
Similar measures of deportation of manpower to Germany were applied by the fascists also in Czechoslovakia.
But the deportation by the fascist criminals of the peaceful populations into slave labor reached its climax in the temporarily occupied territories of the Soviet Union. I would like now to dwell briefly on the preparatory measures taken by the Hitlerite criminals for the utilization of forced labor in the temporarily occupied territories of the Soviet Union.
Even before their attack on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in a document which is known to the Tribunal as the “Green File” of the Defendant Göring, Exhibit Number USSR-10 (Document Number EC-472), a whole chapter was dedicated to the problem of organizing compulsory labor in the Soviet territories which the war criminals intended to occupy; the chapter was called “Allocation of Labor and Recruitment of Indigenous Population.”
This chapter—Pages 17 and 18 of the Russian text of the Green File, which is on Page 83 of the document book—lays down the Principle of compulsory labor for the peaceful Soviet population.
Paragraphs 3 and 2 of Subsection A in the second part of that chapter entitled, “Recruitment of the Local Population,” point out that:
“The workers in public utilities—gas, water, electricity, oil drilling, oil distilling, and oil storage, as well as emergency work in important industries . . . will be ordered to continue their work under threat of punishment, if necessary.”
And several lines above that: