Then the witness can retire.
[The witness left the stand.]
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: I should like to submit to the Tribunal a very short excerpt from a document which is submitted as an appendix to the Polish Government report. I mean an affidavit. . .
THE PRESIDENT: Colonel Smirnov, have you got any more witnesses?
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Yes, I still have a request to call one more witness on the last count of my statement. In connection with the presentation of evidence on this last count I would request the Tribunal’s permission to summon as witness the Archdeacon of Leningrad Churches and Rector of the Leningrad Seminary, the Permanent Dean of Nikolai Bogoiavlensky Cathedral in Leningrad, Nikolai Lomakin.
THE PRESIDENT: Very well, and you will be able to include his evidence today and conclude your statement; is that right?
MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV: Yes, Mr. President. I should like to read another short excerpt from this report of the Polish examining magistrate, which I have submitted to the Tribunal (Document Number USSR-340). I shall read only that excerpt which demonstrates the scale of the crimes. The number of victims murdered at the Treblinka Camp, according to the Polish magistrate’s estimate, is about 781,000 persons. At the same time he mentions that the witnesses interrogated by him testified to the fact that when the clothes of the internees were sorted out, they even found British passports and diplomas of Cambridge University. This means that the victims of Treblinka came from every European country.
I should like further to quote, as proof of the existence of another secret extermination center, the depositions of Wladislav Bengash, the district examining magistrate in the city of Lodz, made before the Chief Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. This testimony is also an official appendix to the Polish Government report. I should like to read two excerpts from this statement which would give us an idea of the methods of extermination practiced in the village of Helmno. The two paragraphs are on the back of Page 223 of the document book:
“In the village of Helmno there was an abandoned mansion surrounded by an old park—the property of the state. Nearby . . . there was a pine forest with a nursery and dense undergrowth. At this point the Germans built an extermination camp. The park was closed in by a high wooden fence, and one could not see what was going on in the park nor in the house itself. The inhabitants of the village of Helmno were all evacuated.”
I interrupt the quotation and pass on to Page 226 of the document book, first paragraph. I quote: