“Haupteinsatzführer Schueller, in his capacity as acting director of the main working group of the Einsatzstab RR, is commissioned with the carrying out of the removal and shipment.
“He is advised to maintain special contact with Army Group North in order to co-ordinate the execution of this mission of the Reichsleiter, with the transportation requirements of the field forces.
“Utikal, chief of Einsatzstab”
I should like to draw the attention of the Tribunal to another peculiar circumstance. In this case, too, the looting was carried out by Rosenberg together with the High Command, and as late as the fall of 1944, “future chiefs” of Staff Rosenberg were selected.
An analysis of all these circumstances permits us categorically to reassert that the destruction and looting of cultural valuables was inspired, directed, and executed by a central organization, and that this central organization was the criminal Hitler Government and the High Command, the representatives of which, in the persons of all the defendants in this Trial, should suffer punishment in accordance with Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal.
May it please Your Honors, when we deal with a system of wholesale destruction and plunder, it is impossible, and scarcely necessary, to enumerate all the facts, even if these facts are, per se, of great importance. In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union the Hitlerites carried out precisely such a system of wholesale and manifold destruction and plunder of cultural treasures of the peoples of the U.S.S.R. At this moment it is not yet possible to draw up an exhaustive balance of the defendants’ crimes.
But I shall, with the permission of the Tribunal, submit a document containing data which, although only of a preliminary nature, are absolutely accurate and bear witness to the tremendous damage inflicted by the Hitlerites.
I have in view the report of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union, submitted to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-35 (Document Number USSR-35). This document is on Pages 404 and 405 of your document book. From this I shall only quote individual excerpts concerning the subject which I am presenting and which have not yet been read into the record:
“Destruction of Cultural-Social Institutions, Public Organizations, and Co-operatives.
“The German plunderers destroyed various establishments, clubs, stadia, rest homes, and sanatoria belonging to consumer and industrial co-operatives, trade unions, and other public organizations . . . in the occupied territory of the U.S.S.R. They destroyed over 87,000 industrial buildings belonging to co-operatives, trade unions, and other social organizations; 10,000 residential buildings and 1,839 cultural and social institutions. They carried off to Germany about 8,000,000 books. . . .