“Everybody is exposed to the danger of being seized anywhere and at any time by members of the police, suddenly and unexpectedly, and being brought into an assembly camp. None of his relatives knows what has happened to him; only weeks or months later, one or the other gives news of his fate by a postcard.” (T-83.)
In Ukrainia skilled workers whose names had been furnished to the police by corrupted village elders were “dragged from their beds at night to be locked up in cellars until shipped.” (T-67.) As neither the male nor the female workers were given time to gather up their belongings they often arrived at the collecting center without shoes or other adequate clothing for the long and torturing journey ahead. (T-67.)
A directive applying to recruitment in White Ruthenia declared—
“All permissible means shall be used to obtain manpower from White Ruthenia. Do not hesitate to apply extraordinary measures.” (T-91.)
In the same directive “the recruiters” are told, “Everything you do for Germany is right, everything else is wrong.” (T-93.) So wide-sweeping was this recruitment drive waged by the SS and police in one area of White Ruthenia that 115,000 hectares of farm land became useless because the whole population had been removed. (T-93.)
Goering bluntly declared in a speech at the Reich Ministry of Air on 7 November 1941, in connection with the Four Year Plan that Poles, Dutchmen, etc., were to be taken, “if necessary as prisoners of war and employ them as such, if work through free contract cannot be obtained. Strong action.” * * * “Foreigners not to be treated like German workers.” (T-53.)
One Leyser in making a report to Rosenberg on the situation in his district of Zhitomir gives the answer to the assertion of voluntary labor when he says—
“It is certain that a recruitment of labor, in the sense of the word, can hardly be spoken of. In most cases, it is nowadays a matter of actual conscription by force. The population has been stirred up to a large extent and views the transports to the Reich as a measure which does in no way differ from the former exile to Siberia during the Czarist and Bolshevist system.” (T-94.)
A report on recruitment measures taken in Holland reveals—
“All Jewish Netherlanders, whom the Germans could lay their hands on, with the exception of a small group of exempted persons, were brought together here; hospitals, old age homes, institutions for the blind and other disabled persons were emptied in order to concentrate the inmates in Westerbork for deportation. Even the inmates of lunatic asylums did not escape deportation.” (T-125.)