As indicating that the defendant was not indifferent to the problem, at the same meeting, in referring to procuring labor from Italy, he offered the following suggestion:
“We could take under German administration the entire food supply for the Italians and tell them: only he gets any food who either works in a protected factory (that is, a factory in Italy manufacturing German war material) or goes to Germany.”
Later in the same conference, the defendant made another contribution to the solution of the problem of foreign labor, saying:
“Now during the transfer it is necessary to see that the people really do arrive and do not run away before or during the transfer. If a transport has left a town and has not arrived, 500 to 600 persons from this place must be arrested and sent to Germany as prisoners of war. Such a thing is then talked about everywhere. If actions like this and other similar ones are carried out often, they would exert a certain pressure. The whole thing would be made easier, if we had control of food.”
At the 53d meeting of the Central Planning Board (16 February 1944), the defendant stated:
“Our best new engine is made 88 percent by Russian prisoners of war and the other 12 percent by German men and women.”
Instances could be multiplied in which the defendant not only listened to stories of enforced labor from eastern civilians and other prisoners of war and thereby became aware of the methods used in procuring such labor, but in which he himself urged more stringent and coercive means to supplement the dwindling supply of labor in the Luftwaffe. As Germany’s plight became more desperate, her loss of military personnel presented an alarming dilemma, resulting in the defection of thousands of workmen to the armed forces. This resulted in a shifting of the dilemma to industry, and spurs were put to the labor procurement officers to fill the widening gap in the industrial labor ranks. Every branch of war industry constantly clamored for replacements and each vied with the others for a greater quota from the labor pool. Confronted by the desperate situation, the labor procurement officers, headed by the implacable Sauckel, cast aside all restraint and set out systematically to herd into the Reich any human being who could contribute to Germany’s war effort. Under Sauckel’s whip, no means however harsh were overlooked, and no person however exempt was spared.
The defense on this count is ingenious but unconvincing. As to the use of prisoners of war, the defendant testified that he had been advised by some unidentified person high in the National Socialist Councils that it was not unlawful to employ prisoners of war in war industries. The defendant was an old and experienced soldier, and his testimony revealed that he was well acquainted with the provisions of the Geneva and Hague Treaties on this subject, which are plain and unequivocal. In the face of this knowledge, the advice which he claims to have received should have raised grave suspicions in his mind. Presenting an entirely different aspect to his defense, he testifies that many of the Russian prisoners of war volunteered to serve in the war industries and apparently enjoyed the opportunity of manufacturing munitions to be used against their fellow countrymen and their allies. Other Russian prisoners of war, he states, were discharged as such and immediately enrolled as civilian workers. The photographs introduced in evidence, however, show that they still retained their Russian army uniforms, which makes their status as civilians suspect. Be that as it may, it does not adequately answer the charge that hundreds of thousands of Polish prisoners of war were cast into concentration camps and parceled out to the various war factories, nor the further fact that thousands of French prisoners of war were compelled to labor under the most harrowing conditions for the Luftwaffe.
As to the French civilian workers who were employed at war work in Germany after the conquest of France, it is the contention of the defendant that these workers were supplied by the French Government under a solemn agreement with the Reich. It is claimed with a straight face that the Vichy Government, headed by Laval, entered into an international compact with the German Government to supply French laborers for work in Germany. This contention entirely overlooks the fact that the Vichy Government was a mere puppet set up under German domination, which, in full collaboration with Germany, took its orders from Berlin. The position of the defendant seems to be that, if any force or coercion was used on French citizens, it was exerted by their own government, but this position entirely overlooks the fact that the transports which brought Frenchmen to Germany were manned by German armed guards and that upon their arrival they were kept under military guard provided by the Wehrmacht or the SS.
It was sought to disguise the harsh realities of the German foreign labor policy by the use of specious legal and economic terms, and to make such policy appear as the exercise of conventional labor relations and labor law. The fiction of a “labor contract” was frequently resorted to, especially in the operations of the Todt Organization, which implied that foreign workers were given a free choice to work or not to work for Germany military industry. This, of course, was purely fictitious, as is shown by the fact that thousands of these “contract workers” jumped from the trains transporting them to Germany and fled into the woods. Does anyone believe that the vast hordes of Slavic Jews who labored in Germany’s war industries were accorded the rights of contracting parties? They were slaves, nothing less—kidnapped, regimented, herded under armed guards, and worked until they died from disease, hunger, and exhaustion. The idea of any Jew being a party to a contract with Germans was unthinkable to the National Socialists. Jews were considered as outcasts and were completely at the mercy of their oppressors. Exploitation was merely a convenient and profitable means of extermination, to the end that, “when this war ends, there will be no more Jews in Europe”. As to non-Jewish foreign labor, with few exceptions they were deprived of the basic civil rights of free men; they were deprived of the right to move freely or to choose their place of residence; to live in a household with their families; to rear and educate their children; to marry; to visit public places of their own choosing; to negotiate, either individually or through representatives of their own choice, the conditions of their own employment; to organize in trade unions; to exercise free speech or other free expression of opinion; to gather in peaceful assembly; and they were frequently deprived of the right to worship according to their own conscience. All these are the sign-marks of slavery, not free employment under contract.