According to an order, dated 26 August 1942 Polish as well as German workers were obliged to take out insurance against illness, accidents, and disability. The deductions from the wages for this purpose were larger for the Poles than for the German. However, the German workers profited by this insurance, whereas, in actuality, the Poles were deprived of it.
As proof of this I shall present to the Tribunal two short excerpts from the same investigation report which Your Honors will find on Page 111 in the document book, Paragraph 4. It corresponds to Page 134 of the original text of the investigation report quoted above:
“Insurance against accidents, which is incumbent on the trade unions, involved particularly stringent measures for the Poles. The recognition of disability caused by an accident is much more limited than in the case of Germans. Disability for the loss of an eye is 30 percent for a German and 25 percent for a Pole. The payment of a subvention depends on 33⅓ percent disability.”
I continue my quotation on Page 135 of the original document, that is to say, on Page 111, last paragraph of the document book:
“The most stringent measures are provided for the dependents of fatally injured persons. The maximum a widow can receive is half of that granted by the insurance to Germans—and this only in case she has to support four children under 15 years of age, or is herself an invalid.
“The restriction on the rights of Poles is illustrated by an example: A German widow with three children receives 80 percent of the yearly salary of her fatally injured husband; from an annual income of 2,000 marks she receives 1,600 marks per year, but a Pole in a similar situation would receive nothing.”
The major German fascist war criminals not only sent into the temporarily occupied Eastern territories soldiers and the SS, but specially appointed fascist “scientists,” “consultants in economic problems,” and all sorts of “investigators” followed after. Some of them were detached from Ribbentrop’s office; some others were sent by Rosenberg.
I beg the Tribunal to enter into the record as evidence one of these documents. I submit it under Document Number USSR-218. I mean the report of the representative attached by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the command of the 17th Army, Captain Pfleiderer, and addressed to his colleague Von Rantzau from the information service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These documents were discovered by units of the Red Army on the Dirksen estate in Upper Silesia.
On the basis of a reading of these documents, it can be concluded that in 1941-42 Pfleiderer made a trip covering the following route through the occupied territories on the route Yaroslavl in the Ukraine, Lvov, Tarnopol, Proskurov, Vinnitza, Uman, Kirovograd, Alexandria, and Krementshoug on the Dnieper.
The purpose of this trip was to study economic and political conditions in the occupied territories of the Ukraine. That the author of this document was also completely free of so-called humanitarian tendencies, can be seen from the short excerpt from his report dated 28 October 1941, where Pfleiderer writes—the Tribunal will find this quotation on Page 113, second paragraph of the document book. I quote only one line: