“If on the other hand the doctors state that the food conditions of the babies are not so unfavorable, it is only an imaginary contradiction. As long as a mother nurses her child, the child gets everything from that source. The consequences of the underfeeding are felt in this period not by the child but by the mother. Her health and working capacity are impaired considerably from the undernourishment.”
I continue on Page 178 of the original which corresponds to Page 103, Paragraph 2 in the second document book:
“In all categories the Polish youth in comparison with the German is more wretched. The difference in rations of the Poles and Germans reaches 60 percent.”
Extracts from the report of the German Labor Front cited in this investigation also offer some interest. Particularly on Page 76 are quoted excerpts from the report of the German Labor Front, dated 10 October 1941, after a visit to one of the coal mines in Poland:
“It was established that daily in various villages Polish miners fall from exhaustion. . . . As the workers constantly complained of stomach pains, doctors were consulted, who answered that this was a symptom of undernourishment.”
I would conclude the description of the Polish workers’ physical condition drawn by the German criminals themselves, and, what is more, by the “learned” criminals, by a short quotation from the same report which the Tribunal will find on Page 106, Paragraph 6 of the document book:
“The management of the factories constantly stresses that it is no longer possible by threats of deportation to concentration camps to incite to work underfed people incapable of physical effort. Sooner or later there comes a day when the weakened body can no longer work.”
There is also in this document a descriptive sketch of the legal status of the Polish worker during the German occupation which bears no possibility of double interpretation. This descriptive sketch is all the more valuable because, as was already stressed above, the authors of the investigation report expressly emphasized that “all humanitarian tendencies whatsoever were alien to them.”
I begin the quotation of the produced document on Page 127 which corresponds to Page 110, second paragraph of the document book:
“The law does not recognize any legal claim of any member of the Polish nation in any sphere of life. Whatever is granted a Pole is done voluntarily by the German masters. This legal situation is perhaps most clearly mirrored in ‘the Pole’s lack of possession in the eyes of the law.’ In the administration of justice Poles are not permitted to conduct their cases before a court. In criminal procedure the viewpoint of obedience dominates. The execution of legal regulations is in the first place the task of the police, who can decide at their discretion or refer individual cases to the courts.”