Revier, that is to say the camp infirmary.

HERR BABEL: What were your duties there?

DUPONT: I was assigned to the ambulance service for internal diseases.

HERR BABEL: Were you able to act on your own initiative? What sort of
instructions did you receive regarding the treatment of patients?

DUPONT: We acted under the control of an SS doctor. We had a certain
number of beds for certain patients, in the proportion of one bed to 20
patients. We had practically no medical supplies. I worked in the
infirmary up to the liberation.

HERR BABEL: Did you receive instructions regarding the treatment of
patients? Were you told to look after them properly or were you given
instructions to administer treatment which would cause death?

DUPONT: As regards that, I was ordered to select the incurables for
extermination. I never carried out this order.

HERR BABEL: Were you told to select them for extermination? I did not
quite hear your reply. Will you please repeat it?

DUPONT: I was ordered to select those who were dangerously ill so that
they might be sent to Block 61 where they were to be exterminated. That
was the only order I received concerning the patients.

HERR BABEL: “Where were they to be exterminated?” I asked if you were
told that they were to be selected for extermination. Were you
told—“They will be sent to Block 61?” Were you also told what was to
happen to them in Block 61?

DUPONT: Block 61 was in charge of a noncommissioned officer called
Wilhelm, who personally supervised the executions; and it was he who
ordered what patients should be selected to be sent to that block. I
think the situation is sufficiently clear.

HERR BABEL: I beg your pardon. You were given no specific details?

DUPONT: The order to send the incurables . . .

HERR BABEL: Witness, it strikes me that you are not giving a
straightforward answer of “yes” or “no,” but that you persist in evading
the question.

DUPONT: It was said that these patients were to be sent to Block 61.
Nothing more was added but every patient sent to Block 61 was executed.

HERR BABEL: That is not first-hand observation. You found out or you
heard that those who were sent there did not come back.

DUPONT: That is not correct. I could see for myself, for I was the only
doctor who could enter Block 61, which was under the command of an
internee called Louis Cunish (or Remisch). I was able to get a few of
the patients out; the others died.

HERR BABEL: If such a thing was said to you, why did you not say that
you would not do it?

DUPONT: If I understand the question correctly, I am being asked why,
when I was told to send the most serious cases . . .

HERR BABEL: When you received instructions to select patients for Block
61 why did you not say, “I know what will happen to those people, and
therefore I will not do it.”

DUPONT: Because it would have meant death.

HERR BABEL: And what would it have meant if Germans had refused to carry
out such an order?

DUPONT: What Germans are you talking about? German internees?

HERR BABEL: A German doctor, if you like, or anyone else employed in the
hospital. What would have happened to him if he had received such an
order and refused to carry it out?

DUPONT: If an internee refused point-blank to execute such an order, it
meant death. In point of fact, we sometimes could evade such orders. I
emphasize the fact that I never sent anyone to Block 61.

HERR BABEL: I have one more general question to ask about conditions in
the camp. For those who have never seen a camp it is difficult to
imagine what conditions were actually like. Perhaps you could give the
Tribunal a short description of how the camp was arranged.

DUPONT: I think I have already spoken at sufficient length on the
organization of the camp. I should like to ask the President whether it
will serve any useful purpose to return to this subject.

THE PRESIDENT: I believe it is not necessary. [_To Herr Babel_] If you
want to put any particular cross-examination to him to show he is not
telling the truth, you can, but not to ask him for a general
description.

HERR BABEL: The camp consists of an inner site surrounded and secured by
barbed wire. The barracks in which the prisoners were housed were inside
this camp. How was this inner camp guarded?

THE PRESIDENT: Will you kindly put one question at a time? The question
you just put involves three or four different matters.

HERR BABEL: How was the part of the camp in which the living quarters
are situated, separated from the rest? What security measures were
taken?

DUPONT: The camp was a unified whole, cut off from the rest of the world
by an electrified barbed wire network.

HERR BABEL: Where were the guards?

DUPONT: The guards of the camp were in towers situated all around the
camp; they were stationed at the gate and they patrolled inside the camp
itself.

HERR BABEL: Inside the camp? Inside the barbed wire enclosure?

DUPONT: Obviously, inside the camp and inside the barracks, of course.
They had the right to go everywhere.

HERR BABEL: I have been informed that each separate barrack was under
the supervision of only one man, a German SS man or a member of some
other organization, that there were no other guards, that these guards
were not intended to act as guards but only to keep order, and that the
so-called Kapos, who were chosen from the ranks of the prisoners, had
the same authority as the guards and performed the duties of the guards.
It may have been different in Buchenwald. My information comes from
Dachau.

DUPONT: I have already answered all these questions in my statement by
saying that the camps were run by the SS in a manner which is common
knowledge and that in addition the SS employed the internees as
intermediaries in many instances. This was the case in Buchenwald and, I
suppose, in all the other concentration camps.

HERR BABEL: The answer to the question has again been highly evasive. I
shall not, however, pursue the matter any further, as in any case I
shall not receive a definite answer.

But I should like to put one further question: You stated in connection
with the facts you described that a professor, whose name I could not
understand through the earphones and who was, I believe, a professor of
your own, was housed in Block 58. You stated in connection with the
question of degradation that at first 300 people, I think, were housed
there and later on 1,200. Is that correct?

DUPONT: There were 1,200 men in Block 58 when I found Dr. Kindberg
there.

HERR BABEL: Yes. And if I understood you correctly, you said that in
this block there were not only Frenchmen, but also Russians, Poles,
Czechs, and Jews and that a state of degradation was caused not only
through the herding together of 1,200 people but also through the
intermingling of so many different nationalities.

DUPONT: I want to make it clear that the intermingling of elements
speaking a different language, men who are unable to understand each
other, is not a crime; but it was a pre-disposing factor which furthered
all the other measures employed to bring about a state of human
degradation among the prisoners.

HERR BABEL: So you consider that the intermingling of Frenchmen,
Russians, Poles, Czechs, and Jews is a degradation?

DUPONT: I do not see the point of this question. The fact of
intermingling . . .

HERR BABEL: There is no need for you to see the point; I know why I am
asking the question.

DUPONT: The fact of putting men who speak different languages together
is not degrading. I did not either think or say such a thing; but the
herding together of elements which differ from each other in every
respect and especially in that of language, in itself made living
conditions more difficult, and paved the way for the application of
other measures which I have already described at length and whose final
aim was the degradation of the human being.

HERR BABEL: I cannot understand why the necessity of associating with
people whose language one does not understand should be degrading.

THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Babel, he has given his answer, that he considers it
tended to degradation. It does not matter whether you understand it or
not.

HERR BABEL: Mr. President, the transmission through the earphones is
sometimes so imperfect that I, at least, often cannot hear exactly what
the witness says and for that reason I have unfortunately been compelled
to have an answer repeated from time to time.

M. DUBOST: I should not like the Tribunal to mistake this interpolation
for an interruption of the cross-examination; but I think I must say
that some confusion was undoubtedly created in the mind of the Defense
Counsel just now in consequence of an interpreter’s error which has been
brought to my notice.

He asked my witness an insidious question, namely, whether the French
deportees were criminals for the most part, and the question was
interpreted as follows: whether the French deportees were criminals. The
witness answered the question as translated into French and not as asked
in German. I therefore request that the question be put once more by the
Defense Counsel and correctly translated.

THE PRESIDENT: Do you understand what Mr. Dubost said, Dr. Babel?

HERR BABEL: I think I understand the substance. I think I understand
that there was a mistake in the translation. I am not in a position to
judge; I cannot follow both the French and German text.

THE PRESIDENT: I think the best course is to continue your
cross-examination, if you have any more questions to ask, and Mr. Dubost
can clear up the difficulty in re-examination.

HERR BABEL: Mr. President, the Defense Counsel for Kaltenbrunner has
already explained today that it is very difficult for the Defense to
cross-examine a witness without being informed at least one day before
as to the subjects on which the witness is to be heard. The testimony
given by today’s witnesses was so voluminous that it is impossible for
me to follow it without previous preparation and to prepare and conduct
from brief notes the extensive cross-examinations which are necessary.

To my knowledge, the President has already informed Defense Counsel for
the organizations that we shall have an opportunity of re-examining the
witnesses later or of calling them on our own behalf.

THE PRESIDENT: I have already said what I have to say on behalf of the
Tribunal on that point, but as Counsel for the Defense must have
anticipated that witnesses would be called as to the conditions in the
concentration camps, I should have thought they could have prepared
their cross-examination during the 40 or more days during which the
Trial has taken place.

HERR BABEL: Mr. President, I do not think that this is the proper time
for me to argue the matter with the Tribunal, but I may perhaps be given
the opportunity of doing so later in a closed session. I consider this
necessary in the interests of the rapid and unhampered progress of the
Trial.

I have no desire whatsoever to delay the proceedings. I have the
greatest interest in expediting them as far as possible, but I am
anxious not to do so at the cost of prejudicing the defense of the
organizations.

THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Babel, I have already pointed out to you that you
must have anticipated that the witnesses might be called to state the
conditions in concentration camps. You must therefore have had full
opportunity during the days the Trial has taken place for making up your
mind on what points you would cross-examine, and I see no reason to
discuss the matter with you.

HERR BABEL: Thank you for this information. But naturally I cannot know
in advance exactly what the witness is going to say, and I cannot
cross-examine him until I have heard him. I know, of course, that a
witness is going to make a statement about concentration camps but I
cannot know in advance which particular points he will discuss.

M. DUBOST: I would ask the Tribunal to note that in questioning the
French witness the Defense used certain words the literal translation of
which is “for the most part.” This applied to the character of the
French deportees. The question was, “Were they criminals for the most
part?” The witness understood it to be as I did: “Did you say that they
were criminals?” and not “that the convoys were for the most part
composed of criminals.” His reply was the natural one. The Tribunal will
allow me to ask the witness to give details. What was the proportion of
common-law criminals and patriots respectively among the deportees? Was
he himself a common-law criminal or a patriot? Were the generals and
other personalities whose names he has given us common-law criminals or
patriots, speaking generally?

DUPONT: The proportion of French common-law criminals was very small.
The common-law criminals came from Fort Barraut in a convoy. I cannot
give the exact figures, but there were only a few hundred out of all the
internees. In other incoming convoys the proportion of common-law
criminals included was only 2 or 3 per thousand.

M. DUBOST: Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: The witness can retire.

[_The witness left the stand._]

THE PRESIDENT: M. Dubost, are you proposing or asking to call other
witnesses upon concentration camps? Because, as I have already pointed
out to you, the evidence, with the exception of Dr. Babel’s recent
cross-examination, has practically not been cross-examined; and it is
supported by other film evidence. We are instructed by Article 18 of the
Charter to conduct the Trial in as expeditious a way as possible; and I
will point out to you, as ordered under 24e of the Charter, you have the
opportunity of calling rebutting evidence, if it were necessary and,
therefore, if the evidence which has been so fully gone into as to the
condition in concentration camps . . .

M. DUBOST: The witness whom I propose to ask the Tribunal to hear will
elucidate a point which has been pending for several weeks. The Tribunal
will remember that when my American colleagues were presenting their
evidence, the question of ascertaining whether Kaltenbrunner had been in
Mauthausen arose. In evidence of this, I am going to call M. Boix, who
will prove to the Tribunal that Kaltenbrunner had been in Mauthausen. He
has photographs of that visit and the Tribunal will see them, as the
witness brought them with him.

THE PRESIDENT: Very well.

[_The witness, Boix, took the stand._]

THE PRESIDENT: What is your name?

M. FRANÇOIS BOIX (Witness): François Boix.

THE PRESIDENT: Are you French?

BOIX: I am a Spanish refugee.

THE PRESIDENT: Will you repeat this oath after me. I swear to speak
without hate or fear, to say the truth, all the truth, only the truth.

[_The witness repeated the oath in French._]

THE PRESIDENT: Raise your right hand and say, “I swear.”

BOIX: I swear.

THE PRESIDENT: You may sit down.

M. Dubost, will you spell the name.

M. DUBOST: B-O-I-X. [_Turning to the witness._] You were born on 14
August 1920 in Barcelona?

BOIX: Yes.

M. DUBOST: You are a news photographer, and you were interned in the
camp of Mauthausen, since . . .

BOIX: Since 27 January 1941.

M. DUBOST: You handed over to the commission of inquiry a certain number
of photographs?

BOIX: Yes.

M. DUBOST: They are going to be projected on the screen and you will
state under oath under what circumstances and where these pictures were
taken?

BOIX: Yes.

M. DUBOST: How did you obtain these pictures?

BOIX: Owing to my professional knowledge, I was sent to Mauthausen to
work in the identification branch of the camp. There was a photographic
branch, and pictures of everything happening in the camp could be taken
and sent to the High Command in Berlin.

[_Pictures were then projected on the screen._]

M. DUBOST: This is the general view of the quarry. Is this where the
internees worked?

BOIX: Most of them.

M. DUBOST: Where is the stairway?

BOIX: In the rear.

M. DUBOST: How many steps were there?

BOIX: 160 steps at first; later on there were 186.

M. DUBOST: We can proceed to the next picture.

BOIX: This was taken in the quarry during a visit from Reichsführer
Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, the Governor of Linz, and some other leaders
whose names I do not know. What you see below is the dead body of a man
who had fallen from the top of the quarry (70 meters), as happened every
day.

M. DUBOST: We can proceed to the next picture.

BOIX: This was taken in April 1941. My Spanish comrades who had sought
refuge in France are pulling a wagon loaded with earth. That was the
work we had to do.

M. DUBOST: By whom was this picture taken?

BOIX: At that time by Paul Ricken, a professor from Essen.

M. DUBOST: We may proceed to the next one.

BOIX: This staged the scene of an Austrian who had escaped. He was a
carpenter in the garage and he managed to make a box, a box in which he
could hide and so get out of the camp. But after a while he was
recaptured. They put him on the wheelbarrow in which corpses were
carried to the crematorium. There were some placards saying in German,
“Alle Vögel sind schon da,” meaning “All the birds are back again.” He
was sentenced and then paraded in front of 10,000 deportees to the music
of a gypsy band playing a song “J’attendrai.” When he was hanged, his
body swung to and fro in the wind while they played the very well known
song, “Bill Black Polka.”

M. DUBOST: The next one.

BOIX: This is the scene; in this picture we see on the right and left
all the deportees in a row; on the left are the Spaniards, they are
smaller. The man in the front with the beret is a criminal from Berlin
by the name of Schultz, who was employed on these occasions. In the
background you can see the man who is about to be hanged.

M. DUBOST: Next one. Who took these pictures?

BOIX: By the SS Oberscharführer Fritz Kornatz. He was killed by American
troops in Holland in 1944. This man, a Russian prisoner of war, got a
bullet in the head. They hanged him to make us think he was a suicide
and had tried to hurl himself against the barbed wire.

The other picture shows some Dutch Jews. That was taken at Barracks C,
the so-called quarantine barracks. The Jews were driven to hurl
themselves against the barbed wire on the very day of their arrival
because they realized that there was no hope to escape for them.

M. DUBOST: By whom were these pictures taken?

BOIX: At this time by the SS Oberscharführer Paul Ricken, a professor
from Essen.

M. DUBOST: Next one.

BOIX: These are 2 Dutch Jews. You can see the red star they wore. That
was an alleged attempt to escape (Fluchtversuch).

M. DUBOST: What was it in reality?

BOIX: The SS sent them to pick up stones near the barbed wires, and the
SS guards at the second barbed wire fence fired on them, because they
received a reward for every man they shot down.

The other picture shows a Jew in 1941 during the construction of the
so-called Russian camp, which later became the sanitary camp, hanged
with the cord which he used to keep up his trousers.

M. DUBOST: Was it suicide?

BOIX: It was alleged to be. It was a man who no longer had any hope of
escape. He was driven to desperation by forced labor and torture.

M. DUBOST: What is this picture?

BOIX: A Jew whose nationality I do not know. He was put in a barrel of
water until he could not stand it any longer. He was beaten to the point
of death and then given 10 minutes in which to hang himself. He used his
own belt to do it, for he knew what would happen to him otherwise.

M. DUBOST: Who took that picture?

BOIX: The SS Oberscharführer Paul Ricken.

M. DUBOST: And what is this picture?

BOIX: Here you see the Viennese police visiting the quarry. This was in
June or July 1941. The two deportees whom you see here are two of my
Spanish comrades.

M. DUBOST: What are they doing?

BOIX: They are showing the police how they had to raise the stones,
because there were no other appliances for doing so.

M. DUBOST: Did you know any of the policemen who came?

BOIX: No, because they came only once. We had just time to have a look
at them.

The date of this picture is September 1943, on the birthday of
Obersturmbannführer Franz Ziereis. He is surrounded by the whole staff
of Mauthausen Camp. I can give you the names of all the people in the
picture.

M. DUBOST: Pass the next photo.

BOIX: This is a picture taken on the same day as Obersturmbannführer
Franz Ziereis’s birthday. The other man was his adjutant. I forgot his
name. It must be remembered that this adjutant was a member of the
Wehrmacht and put on an SS uniform as soon as he came to the camp.

M. DUBOST: Who is that?

BOIX: That is the same visit to Mauthausen by police officials in June
or July 1941. This is the kitchen door. The prisoners standing there had
been sent to the disciplinary company. They used that little appliance
on their backs for carrying stones up to a weight of 80 kilos, until
they were exhausted. Very few men ever came back from the disciplinary
company.

This picture shows Himmler’s visit to the Führerheim at Camp Mauthausen
in April 1941. It shows Himmler with the Governor of Linz in the
background and Obersturmbannführer Ziereis, the commanding officer of
Camp Mauthausen, on his left.

This picture was taken in the quarry. In the rear, to the left, you see
a group of deportees at work. In the foreground are Franz Ziereis,
Himmler, and Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner. He is wearing the gold
Party emblem.

M. DUBOST: This picture was taken in the quarry? By whom?

BOIX: By the SS Oberscharführer Paul Ricken. This was between April and
May 1941. This gentleman frequently visited the camp at that period to
see how similar camps could be organized throughout Germany and in the
occupied countries.

M. DUBOST: I have finished. You give us your assurance that it is really
Kaltenbrunner.

BOIX: I give you my assurance.

M. DUBOST: And that this picture was taken in the camp?

BOIX: I give you my assurance.

M. DUBOST: Were you taken to Mauthausen as a prisoner of war or as a
political prisoner?

BOIX: As a prisoner of war.

M. DUBOST: You had fought as a volunteer in the French Army?

BOIX: Either in infantry battalions or in the Foreign Legion, or in the
pioneer regiments attached to the Army to which I belonged. I was in the
Vosges with the 5th Army. We were taken prisoners. We retreated as far
as Belfort where I was taken prisoner in the night of 20-21 June 1940. I
was put with some fellow Spaniards and transferred to Mulhouse. Knowing
us to be former Spanish Republicans and anti-fascists, they put us in
among the Jews as members of a lower order of humanity (Untermensch). We
were prisoners of war for 6 months and then we learned that the Minister
for Foreign Affairs had had an interview with Hitler to discuss the
question of foreigners and other matters. We knew that our status had
been among the questions raised. We heard that the Germans had asked
what was to be done with Spanish prisoners of war who had served in the
French Army, those of them who were Republicans and ex-members of the
Republican Army. The answer . . .

M. DUBOST: Never mind that. So although you were a prisoner of war you
were sent to a camp not under Army control?

BOIX: Exactly. We were prisoners of war. We were told that we were being
transferred to a subordinate Kommando, like all the other Frenchmen.
Then we were transferred to Mauthausen where, for the first time, we saw
that there were no Wehrmacht soldiers and we realized that we were in an
extermination camp.

M. DUBOST: How many of you arrived there?

BOIX: At the end we were 1,500; altogether 8,000 Spaniards at the time
of our arrival.

M. DUBOST: How many of you were liberated?

BOIX: Approximately 1,600.

M. DUBOST: I have no more questions to ask.

THE PRESIDENT: Do you want to ask any questions?

GEN. RUDENKO: I shall have some questions. If the President will permit
me I shall present them in tomorrow’s session.

THE PRESIDENT: We will adjourn now.

    [_The Tribunal adjourned until 29 January 1946 at 1000 hours._]

                            FORTY-FIFTH DAY
                        Tuesday, 29 January 1946

                           _Morning Session_

MARSHAL: May it please the Court, I desire now to say that the Defendant
Kaltenbrunner will be absent from this morning’s session on account of
illness.

M. DUBOST: In my capacity as representative of the French Prosecution, I
wish to ask the Tribunal to consider this request. The witnesses that
were interrogated yesterday are to be cross-examined by the Defense. The
conditions under which they are here are rather precarious, for it takes
30 hours to return to Paris. We would like to know whether we are to
keep them here; and, if the Defense really intends to cross-examine
them, we should like to proceed with that as quickly as possible in
order to ensure their return to France.

THE PRESIDENT: In view of what you said yesterday, M. Dubost, I said on
behalf of the Tribunal that Herr Babel might have the opportunity of
cross-examining one of your witnesses within the next two days. Is Herr
Babel ready to cross-examine that witness now?

HERR BABEL: No, Mr. President, I have not yet received a copy of his
interrogation and consequently have not been able to prepare my
cross-examination. The time from yesterday to today is, naturally, also
too short. Therefore, I cannot yet make a definite statement whether or
not I shall want to cross-examine the witness. If I were given an
opportunity during the course of the day to get the Record. . . .

THE PRESIDENT: [_Interposing_] Well, that witness must stay until
tomorrow afternoon, M. Dubost, but the other witnesses can go. M.
Dubost, will you see, if you can, that a copy of the shorthand notes is
furnished to Herr Babel as soon as possible?

M. DUBOST: Yes, Mr. President.

[_The witness, Boix, took the stand._]

I shall have it done, My Lord. We continue. The Tribunal will remember
that yesterday afternoon we projected six photographs of Mauthausen
which were brought to us by the witness who is now before you and on
which he offered his comments. This witness specifically stated under
what conditions the photograph representing Kaltenbrunner in the quarry
of Mauthausen had been taken. We offer these photographs as a French
document, Exhibit Number RF-332.

Will you allow me to formulate one more question to the witness? Then I
shall be through with him, at least concerning the important part of
this testimony.

Witness, do you recognize among the defendants anyone who visited the
camp of Mauthausen during your internment there?

BOIX: Speer.

M. DUBOST: When did you see him?

BOIX: He came to the Gusen Camp in 1943 to arrange for some
constructions and also to the quarry at Mauthausen. I did not see him
myself as I was in the identification service of the camp and could not
leave, but during these visits Paul Ricken, head of the identification
department, took a roll of film with his Leica which I developed. On
this film I recognized Speer and some leaders of the SS as well, who
came with him. Speer wore a light-colored suit.

M. DUBOST: You saw that on the pictures that you developed?

BOIX: Yes. I recognized him on the photos and afterward we had to write
his name and the date because many SS always wanted to have collections
of all the photos of visits to the camp.

I recognized Speer on 36 photographs which were taken by SS
Oberscharführer Paul Ricken in 1943, during Speer’s visit to the Gusen
Camp and the quarry of Mauthausen. He always looked extremely pleased in
these pictures. There are even pictures which show him congratulating
Obersturmbannführer Franz Ziereis, then commander of the Mauthausen
Camp, with a cordial handshake.

M. DUBOST: One last question. Were there any officiating chaplains in
your camp? How did the internees who wanted religious consolation die?

BOIX: Yes, from what I could observe, there were several. There was an
order of German Catholics, known as “Bibelforscher,” but officially
. . .

M. DUBOST: But officially did the administration of the camp grant the
internees the right to practice their religion?

BOIX: No, they could do nothing, they were absolutely forbidden even to
live.

M. DUBOST: Even to live?

BOIX: Even to live.

M. DUBOST: Were there any Catholic chaplains or any Protestant pastors?

BOIX: That sort of Bibelforscher were almost all Protestants. I do not
know much about this matter.

M. DUBOST: How were monks, priests, and pastors treated?

BOIX: There was no difference between them and ourselves. They died in
the same way we did. Sometimes they were sent to the gas chamber, at
times they were shot, or plunged in freezing water; any way was good
enough. The SS had a particularly harsh method of handling these people,
because they knew that they were not able to work as normal laborers.
They treated all intellectuals of all countries in this manner.

M. DUBOST: They were not allowed to exercise their functions?

BOIX: No, not at all.

M. DUBOST: Did the men who died have a chaplain before being executed?

BOIX: No, not at all. On the contrary, at times, instead of being
consoled, as you say, by anyone of their faith, they received, just
before being shot, 25 or 75 lash with a leather thong even from an SS
Obersturmbannführer personally. I noticed especially the cases of a few
officers, political commissars, and Russian prisoners of war.

M. DUBOST: I have no further questions to ask of the witness.

THE PRESIDENT: General Rudenko?

GEN. RUDENKO: Witness, please tell us what you know about the
extermination of Soviet prisoners.

BOIX: I cannot possibly tell you all I know about it; I know so much
that one month would not suffice to tell you all about it.

GEN. RUDENKO: Then I would like to ask you, Witness, to tell us
concisely what you know about the extermination of Soviet prisoners in
the camp of Mauthausen.

BOIX: The arrival of the first prisoners of war took place in 1941. The
arrival of 2,000 Russian prisoners of war was announced. With regard to
Russian prisoners of war, they took the same precautions as in the case
of the Republican Spanish prisoners of war. They put machine guns
everywhere around the barracks and expected the worst. As soon as the
Russian prisoners of war entered the camp one could see that they were
in a very bad state, they could not even understand anything. They were
human scarecrows. They were then put in barracks, 1,600 to a barracks.
You must bear in mind these barracks were 7 meters wide by 50 long. They
were divested of their clothes, of the very little they had with them;
they could keep only one pair of drawers and one shirt. One has to
remember that this was in November and in Mauthausen it was more than 10
degrees (centigrade) below zero.

Upon their arrival there were already 20 deaths, from walking only the
distance of 4 kilometers between the station and camp of Mauthausen. At
first the same system was applied to them as to us Republican Spanish
prisoners. They left us with nothing to do, with no work.

They were left to themselves, but with scarcely anything to eat. At the
end of a few weeks they were already at the end of their endurance. Then
began the process of elimination. They were made to work under the most
horrible conditions, they were beaten, hit, kicked, insulted; and out of
the 7,000 Russian prisoners of war who came from almost everywhere, only
30 survivors were left at the end of three months. Of these 30 survivors
photographs were taken by Paul Ricken’s department as a document. I have
these pictures and I can show them if the Tribunal so wishes.

GEN. RUDENKO: You do have these pictures?

BOIX: M. Dubost knows about that, yes. M. Dubost has them.

GEN. RUDENKO: Thank you. Can you show these pictures?

BOIX: M. Dubost has them.

GEN. RUDENKO: Thank you. What do you know about the Yugoslavs and the
Poles?

BOIX: The first Poles came to the camp in 1939 at the moment of the
defeat of Poland. They received the same treatment as everybody else
did. At that time there were only ordinary German bandits there. Then
the work of extermination was begun. There were tens of thousands of
Poles who died under frightful conditions.

The position of the Yugoslavs should be emphasized. The Yugoslavs began
to arrive in convoys, wearing civilian clothes; and they were shot in a
legal way, so to speak. The SS wore even their steel helmets for these
executions. They shot them two at a time. The first transport brought
165, the second 180, and after that they came in small groups of 15, 50,
60, 30; and even women came then.

It should be noted that once, among four women who were shot—and that
was the only time in the camp of deportees—some of them spat in the
face of the camp Führer before dying. The Yugoslavs suffered as few
people have suffered. Their position is comparable only to that of the
Russians. Until the very end they were massacred by every means
imaginable. I would like to say more about the Russians, because they
have gone through so much . . .

GEN. RUDENKO: Do I understand correctly from your testimony that the
concentration camp was really an extermination camp?

BOIX: The camp was placed in the last category, category 3; that is, it
was a camp from which no one could come out.

GEN. RUDENKO: I have no further questions.

THE PRESIDENT: Does Counsel for Great Britain desire to cross-examine?

COLONEL H. J. PHILLIMORE (Junior Counsel for United Kingdom): No
questions.

THE PRESIDENT: Counsel for the United States?

MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): No
questions.

THE PRESIDENT: Do any counsel for the defendants wish to cross-examine?

HERR BABEL: Witness, how were you marked in the camp?

BOIX: The number? What kind of brand?

HERR BABEL: The prisoners were marked by variously colored stars, red,
green, yellow, and so forth. Was this so in Mauthausen also? What did
you wear?

BOIX: Everybody wore insignia. They were not stars; they were triangles
and letters to show the nationality. Yellow and red stars were for the
Jews, stars with six red and yellow points, two triangles, one over the
other.

HERR BABEL: What color did you wear?

BOIX: A blue triangle with an “S” in it, that is to say “Spanish
political refugee.”

HERR BABEL: Were you a Kapo?

BOIX: No, I was an interpreter at first.

HERR BABEL: What were your tasks and duties there?

BOIX: I had to translate into Spanish all the barbaric things the
Germans wished to tell the Spanish prisoners. Afterwards my work was
with photography, developing the films which were taken all over the
camp showing the full story of what happened in the camp.

HERR BABEL: What was the policy with regard to visitors? Did visitors go
only into the inner camp or to places where work was being done?

BOIX: They visited all the camps. It was impossible for them not to know
what was going on. Exception was made only when high officials or other
important persons from Poland, Austria, or Slovakia, from all these
countries, would come. Then they would show them only the best parts.
Franz Ziereis would say, “See for yourselves.” He searched out cooks,
interned bandits, fat and well-fed criminals. He would select these so
as to be able to say that all internees looked like these.

HERR BABEL: Were the prisoners forbidden to communicate with each other
concerning conditions in the camp? Communication with the outside was,
of course, scarcely possible.

BOIX: It was so completely forbidden that, if anyone was caught at it,
it meant not only his death but for all those of his nationality
terrible reprisals.

HERR BABEL: What observations can you make regarding the Kapos? How did
they behave toward your fellow internees?

BOIX: At times they were really worthy of being SS themselves. To be a
Kapo, one had to be Aryan, pure Aryan. That means that they had a
martial bearing and, like the SS, full rights over us; they had the
right to treat us like beasts. The SS gave them _carte blanche_ to do
with us what they wished. That is why, at the liberation, the prisoners
and deportees executed all the Kapos on whom they could lay their hands.

Shortly before the liberation the Kapos asked to enlist voluntarily in
the SS and they left with the SS because they knew what was awaiting
them. In spite of that we looked for them everywhere and executed them
on the spot.

HERR BABEL: You said “they had to treat you like wild beasts.” From what
facts do you draw the conclusion that they were obliged to?

BOIX: One would have to be blind in order not to see. One could see the
way they behaved. It was better to die like a man than to live like a
beast; but they preferred to live like beasts, like savages, like
criminals. They were known as such. I lived there four and a half years
and I know very well what they did. There were many among us who could
have become Kapos for their work, because they were specialists in some
field or another in the camp. But they preferred to be beaten and
massacred, if necessary, rather than become a Kapo.

HERR BABEL: Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Does any other member of the defendants’ counsel wish to
ask questions of the witness? M. Dubost, do you wish to ask any
questions?

M. DUBOST: I have no further questions, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: Very well.

GEN. RUDENKO: My Lord, the witness informed us that he had at his
disposal the photographic documents of 30 Soviet prisoners of war, the
sole survivors of several thousand internees in this camp. I would like
to ask your permission, Mr. President, to present this photographic
document to the witness so that he can confirm before the Tribunal that
it is really this group of Soviet prisoners of war.

THE PRESIDENT: Certainly you may show the photograph to the witness if
it is available.

GEN. RUDENKO: Yes. Witness, can you show this picture?

[_The witness presented the picture to the Tribunal._]

THE PRESIDENT: Is this the photograph?

BOIX: Yes, I can assure you that these 30 survivors were still living in
1942. Since then, in view of the conditions of the camp, it is very
difficult to know whether some of them are still alive.

THE PRESIDENT: Would you please give the date when this photograph was
taken?

BOIX: It was at the end of the winter of 1941-42. At that time, it was
still 10 degrees (centigrade) below zero. You can see from the picture
the appearance of the prisoners because of the cold.

THE PRESIDENT: Has this book been put in evidence yet?

M. DUBOST: This book has been submitted as evidence, Your Honor, as
official evidence.

THE PRESIDENT: Have the defendants got copies of it?

M. DUBOST: It was submitted as Exhibit Number RF-331 (Document F-321).
The Defense have also received a copy of this book in German, but the
pictures are not in the German version, Your Honor.

THE PRESIDENT: Well then, let this photograph be marked. It had better
be marked with a French exhibit number, I think. What will it be?

M. DUBOST: We shall give it Exhibit Number RF-333.

THE PRESIDENT: Let it be marked in that way, and then hand it to Herr
Babel.

GEN. RUDENKO: Thank you, Sir. I have no more questions.

THE PRESIDENT: Will you hand the photo to Dr. Babel.

[_The photo was handed to Herr Babel._]

I think it should be handed about to the other defendants’ counsel in
case they wish to ask any question about it. M. Dubost, I think that an
approved copy of this book, including the photographs, has been
deposited in the defendants’ Information Center.

M. DUBOST: The whole book, except for the pictures.

THE PRESIDENT: Why not the pictures?

M. DUBOST: At that moment we did not have them to submit. In our exposé
we have not mentioned the photographs.

THE PRESIDENT: The German counsel ought to have the same documents as
are submitted to the Tribunal. The photographs have been submitted to
the Tribunal; therefore they should have been deposited in the
Information Center.

M. DUBOST: Mr. President, the French text, including the pictures, was
deposited in the Defense Information Center; and, in addition, a certain
number of texts in German, to which the pictures were not added because
we had that translation prepared for the use of the Defense. But there
are French copies of the book that you have before you which include the
pictures.

THE PRESIDENT: Very well.

M. DUBOST: We have here four copies of the picture which was shown
yesterday afternoon, which we shall place before you. It shows
Kaltenbrunner and Himmler in the quarry of Mauthausen, in accordance
with the testimony given by Boix. One of these pictures will also be
delivered to the Defense, that is, to the lawyer of the Defendant
Kaltenbrunner.

THE PRESIDENT: Now the photograph has been handed around to the
defendants’ counsel. Do any members of the defendants’ counsel wish to
ask any questions of the witness about this photograph? No question? The
witness can retire.

BOIX: I would like to say something more. I would like to note that
there were cases when Soviet officers were massacred. It is worth noting
because it concerns prisoners of war. I would like the Tribunal to
listen to me carefully.

THE PRESIDENT: What is it you wish to say about the massacre of the
Soviet prisoners of war?

BOIX: In 1943 there was a transport of officers. On the very day of
their arrival in the camp they began to be massacred by every means. But
it seems that from the higher quarters orders had come concerning these
officers saying that something extraordinary had to be done. So they put
them in the best block in the camp. They gave them new prisoner’s
clothing. They gave them even cigarettes; they gave them beds with
sheets; they were given everything they wanted to eat. A medical
officer, Sturmbannführer Bresbach, examined them with a stethoscope.

They went down into the quarry, but they carried only small stones, and
in fours. At that time Oberscharführer Paul Ricken, chief of the
service, was there with his Leica taking pictures without stopping. He
took about 48 pictures. These I developed and five copies of each, 13 by
18, with the negatives, were sent to Berlin. It is too bad I did not
steal the negatives, as I did the others.

When that was done, the Russians were made to give up their clothing and
everything else and were sent to the gas chamber. The comedy was ended.
Everybody could see on the pictures that the Russian prisoners of war,
the officers, and especially the political commissars, were treated
well, worked hardly at all, and were in good condition. That is one
thing that should be noted because I think it is necessary.

And another thing, there was a barrack called Barrack Number 20. That
barrack was inside the camp; and in spite of the electrified barbed wire
around the camp, there was an additional wall with electrified barbed
wire around it. In that barrack there were prisoners of war, Russian
officers and commissars, some Slavs, a few Frenchmen, and, they said,
even a few Englishmen. No one could enter that barrack except the two
Führer who were in the camp prison, the commanding officers of the inner
and outer camps. These internees were dressed just as we were, like
convicts, but without number or identification of their nationality. One
could not tell their nationality.

The service “Erkennungsdienst” must have taken their pictures. A tag
with a number was placed on their chest. This number began with 3,000
and something. There were numbers looking like Number 11 (two blue
darts), and the numbers started at 3,000 and went up to 7,000. SS
Unterscharführer Hermann Schinlauer was the photographer then in charge.
He was from the Berlin region, somewhere outside of Berlin, I do not
remember the name. He had orders to develop the films and to do all work
personally; but like all the SS of the interior services of the camp,
they were men who knew nothing. They always needed prisoners to get
their work done. That is why he needed me to develop these films. I made
the enlargements, 5 by 7. These were sent to Obersturmführer Karl
Schulz, of Cologne, the Chief of the Politische Abteilung. He told me
not to tell anything to anybody about these pictures and about the fact
that we developed these films; if we did we would be liquidated at once.
Without any fear of the consequences I told all my comrades about it, so
that, if one of us should succeed in getting out, he could tell the
world about it.

THE PRESIDENT: I think we have heard enough of this detail that you are
giving us. But come back for a moment to the case you were speaking of.
I wish you would repeat the case of the Russian prisoners of war in
1943. You said that the officers were taken to the quarry to carry the
heaviest stones.

BOIX: No, just very small stones, weighing not even 20 kilos, and they
carried them in fours to show on the pictures that the Russian officers
did not do heavy work but on the contrary, light work. That was only for
the pictures, whereas in reality it was entirely different.

THE PRESIDENT: I thought you said they carried big, heavy stones.

BOIX: No.

THE PRESIDENT: Were the photographs taken while they were in their
uniforms carrying these light stones?

BOIX: Yes, Sir; they had to put on clean uniforms, neatly arranged, to
show that the Russian prisoners were well and properly treated.

THE PRESIDENT: Very well. Is there any other particular incident you
want to refer to?

BOIX: Yes, about Block 20. Thanks to my knowledge of photography I was
able to see it; I had to be there to handle the lights while my chief
took photographs. In this way I could follow, detail by detail,
everything that took place in this barrack. It was an inner camp. This
barrack, like all the others, was 7 meters wide and 50 meters long.
There were 1,800 internees there, with a food ration less than
one-quarter of what we would get for food. They had neither spoons nor
plates. Large kettles of spoiled food were emptied on the snow and left
there until it began to freeze; then the Russians were ordered to get at
it. The Russians were so hungry, they would fight for this food. The SS
used these fights as a pretext to beat some of them with bludgeons.

THE PRESIDENT: Do you mean that the Russians were put directly into
Block 20?

BOIX: The Russians did not come to the camp directly. Those who were not
sent to the gas chamber right away were placed in Block 20. Nobody of
the inner camp, not even the Blockführer, was allowed to enter this
barrack. Small convoys of 50 or 60 came several times a week and always
one heard the noise of a fight going on inside.

In January 1945, when the Russians learned that the Soviet Armies were
approaching Yugoslavia, they took one last chance. They seized fire
extinguishers and killed soldiers posted under the watch tower. They
seized machine guns and everything possible as weapons. They took
blankets with them and everything they could find. They were 700, but
only 62 succeeded in passing into Yugoslavia with the partisans.

That day, Franz Ziereis, camp commander, issued an order by radio to all
civilians to co-operate, to “liquidate” the Russian criminals who had
escaped from the concentration camp. He stated that everyone who could
produce evidence that he had killed one of these men would receive an
extraordinary sum of marks. This was why all the Nazi followers in
Mauthausen went to work and succeeded in killing more than 600 escaped
prisoners. It was not hard because some of the Russians could not drag
themselves for more than 10 meters.

After the liberation one of the surviving Russians came to Mauthausen to
see how everything was then. He told us all the details of his painful
march.

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t think the Tribunal wants to hear more details
which you did not see yourself. Does any member of the Defense Counsel
wish to ask any question of the witness upon the points which he has
dealt with himself.

HERR BABEL: One question only. In the course of your testimony you gave
certain figures, namely 165, then 180, and just now 700. Were you in a
position to count them yourself?

BOIX: Nearly always the convoys came into the camp in columns of five.
It was easy to count them. These transports were always sent from the
Wehrmacht, from the Wehrmacht prisons somewhere in Germany. They were
sent from all prisons in Germany, from the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the
SD, or the SS.

THE PRESIDENT: Just answer the question and do not make a speech. You
have said they were brought in in columns of five and it was easy to
count them.

BOIX: Very easy to count them, particularly for those who wanted to be
able to tell the story some day.

HERR BABEL: Did you have so much time that you were able to observe all
these things?

BOIX: The transports always came in the evening after the deportees had
returned to the camp. At this time we always had two or three hours when
we could wander about in the camp waiting for the bell that was the
signal for us to go to bed.

THE PRESIDENT: The witness may now retire.

[_The witness left the stand._]

M. DUBOST: If the Tribunal permits, we shall now hear Mr. Cappelen, who
is a Norwegian witness. The testimony of Mr. Cappelen will be limited to
the conditions that were imposed on Norwegian internees in Norwegian
camps and prisons.

THE PRESIDENT: Very well.

[_The witness, Hans Cappelen, took the stand._]

THE PRESIDENT: I understand that you speak English.

M. HANS CAPPELEN (Witness): Yes, I speak English.

THE PRESIDENT: Will you take the English form of oath?

CAPPELEN: Yes, I prefer to speak in English.

THE PRESIDENT: What is your name?

CAPPELEN: My name is Hans Cappelen.

THE PRESIDENT: Will you repeat this oath after me:

I swear that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

[_The witness repeated the oath in English._]

THE PRESIDENT: [_To the witness._] Raise your right hand and say “I
swear.”

CAPPELEN: I swear.

M. DUBOST: M. Cappelen, you were born 18 December 1903?

CAPPELEN: Yes.

M. DUBOST: In what town?

CAPPELEN: I was born in Kvitseid, province of Telemark, Norway.

M. DUBOST: What is your profession?

CAPPELEN: I was a lawyer, but now I am a business man.

M. DUBOST: Will you tell what you know of the atrocities of the Gestapo
in Norway?

CAPPELEN: My Lord, I was arrested on 29 November 1941 and taken to the
Gestapo prison in Oslo, Moellergata 19. After 10 days I was interrogated
by two Norwegian NS, or Nazi police agents. They started in at once to
beat me with bludgeons. How long this interrogation lasted I cannot
remember, but it led to nothing. So after some days I was brought to 32
Victoria Terrace. That was the headquarters of the Gestapo in Norway. It
was about 8 o’clock at night. I was brought into a fairly big room and
they asked me to undress. I had to undress until I was absolutely naked.
I was a little bit swollen after the first treatment I had by the
Norwegian police agents, but it was not too bad.

There were present about six or eight Gestapo agents and their leader
was Femer; Kriminalrat was his title. He was very angry and they started
to bombard me with questions which I could not answer. So Femer ran at
me and tore all the hair off my head, hair and blood were all over the
floor around me. And so, all of a sudden, they all started to run at me
and beat me with rubber bludgeons and iron cable-ends. That hurt me very
badly and I fainted. But I was brought back to life again by their
pouring ice water over me. I vomited, naturally, because I was feeling
very sick. But that only made them angry; and they said, “Clean up, you
dirty dog!” And I had to make an attempt to clean up with my bare hands.

In this way they carried on for a long, long time, but the interrogation
led to nothing because they bombarded me with questions and asked me of
persons whom I did not know or scarcely knew.

I suppose it must have been in the morning I was brought back again to
the prison. I was placed in my cell and felt very sick and weak. All
during the day I asked the guard if I could not have a doctor; that was
the 19th. After some days—I suppose it must have been the day before
Christmas Eve 1941—I was again, in the night, brought to the Victoria
Terrace. The same happened as last time, only this time it was very easy
for me to undress because I had only a coat on me. I was swollen up from
the last beating. Just like the last time, six, seven, or eight Gestapo
agents were present.

THE PRESIDENT: German Gestapo, do you mean?

CAPPELEN: Yes, German Gestapo, all of them. And then there was Femer
present at that time, too. He had a rank in the SS and was criminal
commissar. Then they started to beat me again, but it was useless to
beat a man like me who was so swollen up and looking so bad. Then they
started in another way, they started to screw and break my arms and
legs. And my right arm was dislocated. I felt that awful pain, and
fainted again. Then the same happened as last time; they poured water on
me and I came back again to life.

Now all the Germans there were absolutely mad. They roared like animals
and bombarded me with questions again, but I was so tired I could not
answer.

Then they placed a sort of home-made—it looked to me like a sort of
home-made—wooden thing, with a screw arrangement, on my left leg; and
they started to screw so that all the flesh loosened from the bones. I
felt an awful pain and fainted away again. But I came back to
consciousness again; and I have still big marks here on my leg from the
screw arrangement, now, four years afterwards.

So that led to nothing and then they placed something on my neck—I
still have marks here [_indicating_]—and loosened the flesh here. But
then I had a collapse and all of a sudden I felt that I was sort of
paralyzed in the right side. It has otherwise been proved that I had a
cerebral hemorrhage. And I got that double vision; I saw two of each
Gestapo agent, and all was going round and round for me. That double
vision I have had 4 years, and when I am tired it comes back again. But
I am better now, so I can move again on the right side; but the right
side is a little bit affected from that.

Well, I cannot remember much more from that night, but the other
prisoners who had to clean up the corridors in the prison had seen them
bringing me back again in the morning. That must have been about 6
o’clock in the morning. They thought I was dead because I had no irons
on my hands. If it had been for 1 day or 2 days, I can’t tell, but one
day I moved again and was a little bit clear; and then the guard at once
was in my cell where I was lying on a cot in my own vomiting and blood,
and afterwards there came a doctor.

He had, I suppose, quite a high rank; which rank I can’t exactly say. He
told me that I most probably would die, especially if I wasn’t—I asked
him, “Couldn’t you bring me to a hospital, because . . .” He said, “No.
Fools are not to be brought to any hospital, before you do just what we
say you shall do. Like all Norwegians, you are a fool.”

Well, they put my arm into joint again. That was very bad, but two
soldiers held me and they drew it in, and I fainted away again. So the
time passed and I rested a bit. I couldn’t walk, because it all seemed
to be going around for me. So I was lying on the cot. And so one day—it
must have been in the end of February or in the middle of February
1942—they came again. It must have been about ten o’clock in the night,
because the light in my cell had been out for quite a long time. They
asked me to stand up, and I made an attempt, and fell down again because
of the paralysis. Then they kicked me; but I said, “Is not it better to
put me to death, because I can’t move?”

Well, they dragged me out of the cell, and I was again brought up to
Victoria Terrace; that is the headquarters where they made their
interrogations. This time the interrogation was led by one SS man called
Stehr. I could not stand so, naked as I was, I was lying on the floor.
This Stehr had some assistants, four or five Gestapo agents; and they
started to tramp on me and to kick me. So all of a sudden they brought
me to my feet again and brought me to a table where Stehr was sitting.
He took my left hand like this [_indicating_] and put some pins under my
nails and started to break them up. Well, it hurt me badly; and all
things began going around and around for me—the double vision—but the
pain was so intense that I drew my hand back. I should not have done
that, because that made them absolutely furious. I fainted away,
collapsed, and I do not know for how long a time; but I came back to
life again by the smelling of burned flesh or burned meat. And then one
of the Gestapo agents was standing with a little sort of lamp burning me
under my feet. It did not hurt me too much, because I was so feeble that
I did not care; and I was so paralyzed my tongue could not work, so I
could not speak, only groaned a bit, crying, naturally, always.

Well, I don’t remember much more of that time, but this was to me one of
the worst things I went through with respect to interrogations. I was
brought back again to the prison and time passed and I attempted to eat
a little bit. I spewed most of it up again, I threw it up again, most of
it. But little by little I recovered. I was still paralyzed in the side,
so I couldn’t stand up.

But I was also taken into interrogations again, and then I was
confronted with other Norwegians, people I knew and people I did not
know; and the most of them were badly treated. They were swollen up, and
I remember especially two of my friends, two very good persons. I had
been confronted with them, and they were looking very bad from torture,
and when I came back again after my imprisonment I learned that they
both were dead; they had died from the treatment.

Another incident which I aim to tell—I hope My Lord will permit me to
do it—concerned a person called Sverre Emil Halvorsen. He was one
day—that must have been in the autumn or in August or October 1943—a
little bit swollen up and very unhappy; and he said they had treated him
so bad, but he and some of his friends had been in some sort of a court
where they had been told that they were to be shot the next day. They
placed a sort of sentence upon them, just to set an example.

Well, Halvorsen had, naturally, a headache and felt very ill, and I
asked the guard to bring—the head guard, that was a person named Herr
Götz. He came and asked what the devil I wanted. I said, “My comrade is
very ill, could not he have some aspirins?” “Oh no,” he said, “it is a
waste to give him aspirin, because he is to be shot in the morning.”

Next morning he was brought out of the cell, and after the war they
found him up at Trondheim together with other Norwegians in a grave
there with a bullet through his neck.

Well, the Moellergate 19, in Oslo, the prison where I was for about 25
months, was a house of horror. I heard every night—nearly every
night—people screaming and groaning. One day, it must have been in
December 1943, about the 8th of December, they came into my cell and
told me to dress. It was in the night. I put on my ragged clothes, what
I had. Now I had recovered, practically. I was naturally lame on the one
side, could not walk so well, but I could walk; and I went down in the
corridor and there they placed me as usual against the wall, and I
waited that they would bring me away and shoot me. But they did not
shoot me; they brought me to Germany together with lots of other
Norwegians. I learned afterwards about some few of my friends—and by
friends, I mean Norwegians. We were so-called “Nacht und Nebel”
prisoners, “Night and Mist” prisoners. We were brought to a camp called
Natzweiler, in Alsace. It was a very bad camp, I must say.

We had to work to take stones out of the mountains. But I shall not bore
you about my tales from Natzweiler, My Lord, I will only say that people
of all other nations—French, Russians, Dutch, and Belgians—were there
and we are about five hundred Norwegians who have been there. Between 60
and 70 percent died there or in other camps of concentration. Also, two
Danes were there.

Well, we saw many cruel things there, so cruel that they need—they are
well known. The camp had to be evacuated in September 1944. We were then
brought to Dachau near Munich, but we did not stay long there; at least,
I didn’t stay long there. I was sent to a Kommando called Aurich in East
Friesland, where we were about—that was an under-Kommando of
Neuengamme, near Hamburg. We were about fifteen hundred prisoners. We
had to dig tank traps. Well, we had to walk every day about 3 or 4
hours, and go by train for 1 hour to the Panzer Gräben where we worked.
The work was so strong and so hard and the way they treated us so bad,
that most of them died there. I suppose about half of the prisoners died
of dysentery or of ill-treatment in the five or six weeks we were there.
It was too much even for the SS, who had to take care of the camp, so
they gave it up, I suppose; and I was sent from Neuengamme, near
Hamburg, to a camp called Gross-Rosen, in Silesia; it is near Breslau.
That was a very bad camp, too. We were about 40 Norwegians there; and of
those 40 Norwegians we were about 10 left after 4 to 5 weeks.

THE PRESIDENT: You will be some little time longer, so I think we better
adjourn now for 10 minutes.

                        [_A recess was taken._]

M. DUBOST: M. Cappelen, will you continue to speak to us of your passage
through those camps, particularly of what you know of the camp of
Natzweiler and the role at Natzweiler of Dr. Hirt, Hirch, or Hirtz of
the German medical faculty of Strasbourg?

CAPPELEN: Well, in Natzweiler, yes, there were also carried on
experiments. Just beside the camp there was a farm they called Struthof.
That was practically a part of the camp; and some of the prisoners had
to work there to clean up the rooms; and—well not so often, but
sometimes—they were taken out. For instance, one day, I remember, all
the Gypsies were taken out, and then they were brought down to Struthof.
They were very afraid of being brought down there.

Well, one friend of mine, a Norwegian called Hvidding, who had a job in
the hospital—so-called hospital—in the camp, told me the day after the
Gypsies were taken and brought to Struthof, “I tell you something. They
have, so far as I understand, tried some sort of gas on them.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Well, come along with me.”

And then, through the window of the hospital, I could see four of the
Gypsies lying in beds. They did not look well, and it was not easy to
look through the glass, but they had some mucus, I suppose, around their
mouths. And he told me that they had—Hvidding told me—that the Gypsies
could not tell much because they were so ill, but so far as he
understood, it was gas which they had used upon them. There had been 12
of them, and 4 were living; the other 8, so far as he understood, died
down there at Struthof. Then he told further on, “You see that man who
sometimes walks through the camp together with some others?”

“Well, I have seen him,” I said.

“That is Professor Hirtz from the German University in Strasbourg.”

I am quite sure Hvidding said that this man is Hirt or Hirtz. He is
coming here now nearly daily with a so-called commission to see those
who are coming back again from Struthof, to see the result. That is all
I know about that so far.

M. DUBOST: How many Norwegians died at Gross-Rosen?

CAPPELEN: In Gross-Rosen, it is not possible for me to say here exactly;
but I know about 40 persons who had been there, and I also know about
ten who came back again. Well, Gross-Rosen was a bad camp. But nearly
the worst of it all was the evacuation of Gross-Rosen. I suppose it must
have been in the middle of February of that year. The Russians came
nearer and nearer to Breslau.

THE PRESIDENT: You mean 1945?

CAPPELEN: Yes, 1945 I mean. One day we were placed upon a so-called
“Appellplatz” (roll call ground). We were very feeble, all of us. We had
hard work, little food, and all sorts of ill-treatment. Well, we started
to walk in parties of about 2,000 to 3,000. In the party I was with, we
were about 2,500 to 2,800. We heard so and so many when they took up the
numbers.

Well, we started to walk, and we had SS guards on each side. They were
very nervous and almost like mad persons. Several were drunk. We
couldn’t walk fast enough, and they smashed in the heads of five who
could not keep up. They said in German, “That is what happens to those
who cannot walk.” The others would have been treated in the same way if
they had not been able to follow. We walked the best we could. We
attempted to help one another, but we were all too exhausted. After
walking for 6 to 8 hours we came to a station, a railway station. It was
very cold and we had only striped prison clothes on, and bad boots; but
we said, “Oh, we are glad that we have come to a railway station. It is
better to stand in a cow truck than to walk, in the middle of winter.”
It was very cold, 10 to 12 degrees below zero (centigrade). It was a
long train with open cars. In Norway we call them sand cars, and we were
kicked on to those cars, about 80 on each car. We had to sit together
and on this car we sat for about 5 days without food, cold, and without
water. When it was snowing we made like this [_indicating_] just to get
some water into the mouth and, after a long, long time—it seemed to me
years—we came to a place which I afterwards learned was Dora. That is
in the neighborhood of Buchenwald.

Well, we arrived there. They kicked us down from the cars, but many were
dead. The man who sat next to me was dead, but I had no right to get
away. I had to sit with a dead man for the last day. I didn’t see the
figures myself, naturally, but about one-third of us or half of us were
dead, getting stiff. And they told us that one-third—I heard the figure
afterwards in Dora—that the dead on our train numbered 1,447.

Well, from Dora I don’t remember so much, because I was more or less
dead. I have always been a man of good humor and high spirited, to help
myself first and my friends; but I had nearly given up.

I do not remember so much before, so I had a good chance, because
Bernadotte’s action came and we were rescued and brought to Neuengamme,
near Hamburg; and when we arrived, there were some of my old friends,
the student from Norway who had been deported to Germany, other
prisoners who came from Sachsenhausen and other camps, and the few,
comparatively few, Norwegian “NN” prisoners who were living, all in very
bad condition. Many of my friends are still in the hospital in Norway.
Some died after coming home.

That’s what happened to me and my comrades in the three and
three-quarter years I was in prison. I am fully aware that it is
impossible for me to give details more than I have done; but I have
taken, so to say, the parts of it which show, I hope, the way they
behaved against Norwegians, and in Norway, the German SS.

M. DUBOST: For what reason were you arrested?

CAPPELEN: I was arrested the 29th of November 1941, in a place called
then Hoistly. That is a sort of sanitarium where one goes skiing.

M. DUBOST: What had you done? What was held against you?

CAPPELEN: Well, what I had done. Like most of us Norwegians, we regarded
ourselves to be at war with Germany in one way or another; and naturally
we, most of us, were against them by feelings; and also, as the Gestapo
asked me, I remember, “What do you think of Mr. Quisling?” I only
answered, “What would you have done if a German officer—even a
major—when your country was at war and your government had given an
order of mobilization, he came and said, ‘Better forget the Mobilization
Order?’” A man can’t do that with respect.

M. DUBOST: On the whole, did the German population know of, or were they
unaware of, what went on in the camps?

CAPPELEN: That is, naturally, very difficult for me to answer. But in
Norway, at least, even at the time when I was arrested, we knew quite a
lot about how the Germans treated their prisoners.

And there is one thing I remember in Munich where I was working. I was
not working; I was in Dachau for that short period. With some others, I
was once brought to the town of Munich to go into the ruins to seek for
persons and find bombs and things like that. I suppose that was the
idea. They never told us anything, but we knew what was on. We were
about one hundred persons, prisoners. We were looking like dead persons,
all of us looking very bad. We went through the streets and people could
see us; and they also could see what we were going to do, the sort of
work which one should think was very dangerous and which should in some
way help them; but it was no fun for them to see us. Some of them were
hollering to us, “It is your fault that we are bombed.”

M. DUBOST: Were there any chaplains in your camp? Were you allowed to
pray?

CAPPELEN: Well, we had among the “NN” prisoners in Natzweiler a priest
from Norway. He was, I suppose, what you call in English a Dean. He was
of quite high rank. In Norwegian we call it “Prost.” From the west coast
of Norway. He was also brought to Natzweiler as an “NN” prisoner, and
some of my comrades asked him if they could not meet sometimes so he
could preach to them. But he said, “No, I don’t dare to do it. I had a
Bible. They have taken it from me and they joked about it and said, ‘You
dirty churchman, if you show the Bible and things like that . . .’” You
know, therefore, we did not do anything in that way.

M. DUBOST: Those who were dying among you, did they have the consolation
of their religion at the time of their death?

CAPPELEN: No.

M. DUBOST: Were the dead treated with decency?

CAPPELEN: No.

M. DUBOST: Was there any religious service conducted?

CAPPELEN: No.

M. DUBOST: I have no further questions to ask.

THE PRESIDENT: Does counsel for the U.S.S.R. desire to cross-examine?

GEN. RUDENKO: I have no question, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: Has the United States?

[_No response._]

Then does any member of the defendants’ counsel wish to ask the witness
any questions?

DR. MERKEL: Witness, at your first interrogations which as a rule took
place about ten days after arrest, were you interrogated by German or by
Norwegian Gestapo men?

CAPPELEN: It was made by two Norwegians who belonged to, as I learned
afterward, the so-called State Police. That was not the police in
Norway. They were working together with the Gestapo; in fact, it was the
same. But it was by them I was interrogated after the 10 days. But they,
as I heard afterwards, usually did it in that way, because it was easy
to do it in Norwegian; and some of the Germans could not speak
Norwegian. Most of them could not. I think it was, therefore, that they
took the Norwegian; and you can call them Gestapo, practically. They let
them handle the persons first.

DR. MERKEL: Then at the Victoria Terrace, which name I believe you used
to designate the Gestapo headquarters in Oslo, were there Norwegian or
German officials present during your interrogation?

CAPPELEN: I dare say there may have been one Norwegian as a sort of
interpreter; but as I spoke the German language, I cannot, with 100
percent surety, say if there were one or two Norwegian policemen there.
It is difficult. But as Victoria Terrace was the headquarters of the
Gestapo, naturally they had some Norwegian Nazis to help them there. But
most of them were German.

DR. MERKEL: Were the persons who interrogated you in uniform or in
civilian clothes?

CAPPELEN: During my interrogation I have sometimes seen them in uniform,
too. But when they tortured me they were mostly in civilian clothes. So
far as I remember, there was only one person in uniform during one of
the torture interrogations.

DR. MERKEL: You stated that you were then treated by a physician. Did
this physician come of his own free will or was he asked to come?

CAPPELEN: The first time I asked for a doctor, but then I did not get
any. But at the time when I came back to consciousness, when I was
supposed perhaps to be dead, the guard possibly had been looking at me
because he was then running away; and afterwards they came with a
doctor.

DR. MERKEL: Did you know that in the German concentration camps there
was an absolute prohibition against talking about the conditions in the
camp—among the prisoners as well as to outsiders, of course—and that
any violation of the order not to talk was subject to most severe
penalties?

CAPPELEN: Well, in the camps it was like this: It was naturally more or
less understood that it was more or less forbidden to talk about the
tortures we had gone through; but naturally in the camps, the Nacht und
Nebel Camps where I was, the situation was so bad that even torture
sometimes seemed to be better than dying slowly away like that, so
almost the only thing we spoke about was: “When shall the war end; how
to help our comrades; and are we to get some food tonight or not?”

DR. MERKEL: Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Does any other defendant’s counsel wish to ask any
questions? Mr. Dubost, have you anything you wish to ask?

M. DUBOST: I have nothing further to ask, Mr. President. I thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Then the witness can retire.

[_The witness left the stand._]

M. DUBOST: If the Tribunal will permit, we will now hear a witness,
Roser, who will give a few details on the conditions under which they
kept French prisoners of war in reprisal camps.

[_The witness, Paul Roser, took the stand._]

THE PRESIDENT: What is your name?

M. PAUL ROSER (Witness): Roser, Paul.

THE PRESIDENT: You swear to speak without hate or fear, to state the
truth, all the truth, only the truth? Raise the right hand and say “I
swear.”

[_The witness raised his right hand and repeated the oath in French._]

THE PRESIDENT: You may sit down.

M. DUBOST: Your name is Paul Roser, R-o-s-e-r?

ROSER: R-o-s-e-r.

M. DUBOST: You were born on the 8th of May 1903? You are of French
nationality?

ROSER: I am French.

M. DUBOST: You were born of French parents?

ROSER: I was born of French parents.

M. DUBOST: You were a prisoner of war?

ROSER: Yes.

M. DUBOST: You were taken prisoner in battle?

ROSER: Yes, I was.

M. DUBOST: In what year?

ROSER: 14 June 1940.

M. DUBOST: You sought to escape?

ROSER: Yes, several times.

M. DUBOST: How many times?

ROSER: Five times.

M. DUBOST: Five times. You were transferred finally to a disciplinary
camp?

ROSER: Yes.

M. DUBOST: Will you indicate the regime of such a camp? Will you
indicate your rank, and the treatment which French people of your rank
in those disciplinary camps had to submit to, and for what reasons?

ROSER: Very well, I was an “aspirant,” a rank which, in France, is
between a first sergeant and a second lieutenant. I was in several
disciplinary camps. The first was a small camp which the Germans called
Strafkommando, in Linzburg in Hanover. It was in 1941. There were about
thirty of us.

While I was in that camp during the summer of 1941, we attempted to
escape. We were recaptured by our guards at the very moment when we were
leaving the camp. We were naturally unarmed. The Germans, our guards,
having recaptured one of us, attempted to make him reveal the others who
also had sought to escape. The man remained silent. The guards hurled
themselves upon him, beating him with the butts of their pistols in the
face, with bayonets, with the butts of their rifles. At that moment, not
wishing to let our comrade be killed, several of us stepped forward and
revealed that we sought to escape. I then received a beating with
bayonets applied to my head and fell into a swoon. When I recovered
consciousness one of the Germans was kneeling on my leg and was
continuing to strike me. Another one, raising his gun, was seeking to
strike my head. I was saved on that occasion through the intervention of
my comrades, who threw themselves between the Germans and myself. That
night we were beaten for exactly 3 hours with rifle butts, with bayonet
blows, and with pistol butts in the face. I lost consciousness three
times.

The following day we were taken to work, nevertheless. We dug trenches
for the draining of the marshes. It was a very hard sort of work, which
started at 6:30 in the morning, to be completed at 6 o’clock at night.
We had two stops, each of a half-hour. We had nothing to eat during the
day. Soup was given to us, when we came back at night, with a piece of
bread, a small sausage or 2 cubic centimeters of margarine, and that was
all.

Following our attempted escape, our guards held back from us all the
parcels which our families sent to us for a month. We could not write
nor could we receive mail.

At the end of three and a half months, in September 1941, we were
shipped to the regular Kommandos. I, personally, was quite ill at that
time and I came back to Stalag X B at Sandbostel.

M. DUBOST: Why were you subjected to such a special regime, although you
were an “aspirant”?

ROSER: Certainly because of my attempted escape.

M. DUBOST: Had you agreed to work?

ROSER: No, not at all. Like all my comrades of the same rank and like
most of the noncommissioned officers and like all “aspirants,” I had
refused to work, invoking the provision of the Geneva Convention, which
Germany had signed and which prescribed that noncommissioned officers
who were prisoners cannot be forced to perform any labor without their
consent. The German Army, into whose hands we had fallen, practically
speaking, never respected that agreement undertaken by Germany.

M. DUBOST: Are you familiar with executions that took place in Oflag XI
B?

ROSER: I was made familiar with the death of several French or Allied
prisoners, specifically at Oflag XI at Grossborn in Pomerania. A French
prisoner, Lieutenant Robin, who with some of his comrades had prepared
an escape and for that purpose had dug a tunnel, was killed in the
following manner: The Germans having had information that the tunnel had
been prepared, Hauptmann Buchmann, who was a member of the officer staff
of the camp, watched with a few German guards for the exit of the
would-be escapees. Lieutenant Robin, who was first to emerge, was killed
with one shot while obviously he could in no manner attack anyone or
defend himself.

Other cases of this type occurred. One of my friends, a French
Lieutenant Ledoux, who was sent to Graudenz Fortress where he was
subjected to a hard detention regime, saw his best friend, British
Lieutenant Anthony Thomson, killed by Hauptfeldwebel Ostreich with one
pistol shot in the neck, in their own cell. Lieutenant Thomson had just
sought to escape and had been recaptured by the Germans on the airfield.
Lieutenant Thomson belonged to the RAF.

I should like to state also that in the camp of Rawa-Ruska in Galicia,
where I spent 5 months, several of our comrades . . .

M. DUBOST: Would you tell us why you were at Rawa-Ruska?

ROSER: In the course of the winter, 1941-42, the Germans wanted to
intimidate, first, the noncommissioned officers who were refractory in
labor; second, those who had sought to escape; and third, the men who
were being employed in Kommandos (labor gangs) and who were caught in
the act of performing sabotage. The Germans warned us that from 1 April
1942 onward all these escapees who were recaptured would be sent to a
camp, a special camp called a Straflager, at Rawa-Ruska in Poland.

It was following another attempt to escape that I was taken to Poland
with about two thousand other Frenchmen. I was at Limburg-an-der-Lahn,
Stalag XII A, where we were regrouped and placed in railway cars. We
were stripped of our clothes, of our shoes, of all the food which some
of us had been able to keep. We were placed in cars, in each of which
the number varied from 53 to 56. The trip lasted 6 days. The cars were
open generally for a few minutes in the course of a stop in the
countryside. In 6 days we were given soup on 2 occasions only, once at
Oppel, and another time at Jaroslan, and the soup was not edible. We
remained for 36 hours without anything to drink in the course of that
trip, as we had no receptacle with us and it was impossible to get a
supply of water.

When we reached Rawa-Ruska on 1 June 1942, we found other
prisoners—most of them French, who had been there for several
weeks—extremely discouraged, with a ration scale much inferior to
anything that we had experienced until then, and no International Red
Cross or family parcel for anyone.

At that time there were about twelve to thirteen thousand in that camp.
There was for that number one single faucet which supplied, for several
hours a day, undrinkable water. This situation lasted until the visit of
two Swiss doctors, who came to the camp in September, I think. The
billets consisted of 4 barracks, where rooms contained as many as 600
men. We were stacked in tiers along the walls, 3 rows of them, 30 to 40
centimeters for each of us.

During our stay in Rawa-Ruska there were many attempts at escape, more
than five hundred in 6 months. Several of our comrades were killed. Some
were killed at the time when a guard noticed them. In spite of the
sadness of such occurrences, no one of us contested the rights of our
guards in such cases, but several were murdered. In particular, on 12
August 1942, in the Tarnopol Kommando, a soldier, Lavesque, was found
bearing evidence of several shots and several large wounds caused by
bayonets.

On the 14th of August, in the Verciniec Kommando, 93 Frenchmen, having
succeeded in digging a tunnel, escaped. The following morning three of
them, Conan, Van den Boosch, and Poutrelle, were caught by German
soldiers, who were searching for them. Two of them were sleeping; the
third, Poutrelle, was not asleep. The Germans, a corporal and two
enlisted men, verified the identity of the three Frenchmen. Very calmly
they told them: “Now we are obliged to kill you.” The three wretched men
spoke of their families, begged for mercy. The German corporal gave the
following reply, which we heard only too often: “Befehl ist Befehl” (“An
order is an order”); and they shot down immediately two of the French
prisoners, Van den Boosch and Conan. Poutrelle was left like a madman
and by sheer luck was not caught again. But he was captured a few days
later in the region of Kraków. He was then brought back to Rawa-Ruska
proper, where we saw him in a condition close to madness.

On the 14th of August, once again in the Stryj Kommando, a team of about
twenty prisoners accompanied by several guards, were on their way to
work . . . .

M. DUBOST: Excuse me, you are talking about French prisoners of war?

ROSER: Yes, French prisoners of war, so far.

Going along a wood, the German noncommissioned officer, who for some
time had been annoying two of them, Pierrel and Ondiviella, directed
them into the woods. A few moments later the others heard shots. Pierrel
and Ondiviella had just been killed.

On 20 September 1942, at Stryj once again, a Kommando was at work under
the supervision of German soldiers and German civilian foremen. One of
the Frenchmen succeeded in escaping. Without waiting, the German
noncommissioned officers selected two men, if my memory is correct,
Saladin and Duboeuf, and shot them on the spot. Incidents of this type
occurred in other circumstances. The list of them would be long indeed.

M. DUBOST: Can you speak of the conditions under which the refractory
noncommissioned officers who were with you at camp at Rawa-Ruska lived?

ROSER: The noncommissioned officers who refused to work were grouped
together in one section of the camp, in two of the large stables which
served as billets. They were subjected to a regime of most severe
repression; frequent roll calls for assembly; lying-down and standing-up
exercise which after a while leaves one quite exhausted.

One day, Sergeant Corbihan, having refused Captain Fournier—a German
captain with a French name—to take a tool to work with, the German
captain made a motion and one of the German soldiers with him ran
Corbihan through with his bayonet; Corbihan by miracle escaped death.

M. DUBOST: How many of you disappeared?

ROSER: At Rawa-Ruska, in the 5 months that I spent there, we buried 60
of our comrades who had died from disease or had been killed in
attempted escapes. But so far, 100 of those who were with us and sought
to escape have not been found.

M. DUBOST: Is this all that you have witnessed?

ROSER: No, I should say that our stay at the punishment camp,
Rawa-Ruska, involved one thing more awful than anything else we
prisoners saw and suffered. We were horrified by what we knew was taking
place all about us. The Germans had transformed the area of
Lvov-Rawa-Ruska into a kind of immense ghetto. Into that area, where the
Jews were already quite numerous, had been brought the Jews from all the
countries of Europe. Every day for 5 months, except for an interruption
of about six weeks in August and September 1942, we saw passing about
150 meters from our camp, one, two, and sometimes three convoys, made up
of freight cars in which there were crowded men, women and children. One
day a voice coming from one of these cars shouted: “I am from Paris. We
are on our way to the slaughter.” Quite frequently, comrades who went
outside the camp to go to work found corpses along the railway track. We
knew in a vague sort of way at that time that these trains stopped at
Belcec, which was located about 17 kilometers from our camp; and at that
point they executed these wretched people, by what means I do not know.

One night in July 1942 we heard shots of submachine guns throughout the
entire night and the moans of women and children. The following morning
bands of German soldiers were going through the fields of rye on the
very edge of our camp, their bayonets pointed downward, seeking people
hiding in the fields. Those of our comrades who went out that day to go
to their work told us that they saw corpses everywhere in the town, in
the gutters, in the barns, in the houses. Later some of our guards, who
had participated in this operation, quite good-humoredly explained to us
that 2,000 Jews had been killed that night under the pretext that two SS
men had been murdered in the region.

Later on, in 1943, during the first week of June, there occurred a
pogrom which in Lvov caused the death of 30,000 Jews. I was not
personally in Lvov, but several French military doctors, Major Guiguet
and Lieutenant Levin of the French Medical Corps, described this scene
to me.

THE PRESIDENT: The witness appears to be not finishing and therefore I
think we had better adjourn now until 2 o’clock.

              [_The Tribunal recessed until 1400 hours._]

                          _Afternoon Session_

MARSHAL: I desire to announce that the Defendant Kaltenbrunner will be
absent from this afternoon’s session on account of illness.

M. DUBOST: With the permission of the Tribunal, we shall continue
examining the witness, M. Roser.

M. Roser, this morning you finished the description of the conditions
under which you witnessed the pogrom of Rawa-Ruska and you wanted to
give us some details on another pogrom. You told us that a German
soldier, who had taken a part in it, made a statement to you which you
wanted to relate to us. Is that right?

ROSER: Yes.

M. DUBOST: We are listening to you.

ROSER: At the end of 1942 I was taken to Germany, and I, together with a
French doctor, had the opportunity of meeting the chauffeur of the
German physician who was head of the infirmary where I was at that time.
This soldier, whose name I have forgotten, said to me as follows:

    “In Poland, in a town the name of which I have forgotten, a
    sergeant from our regiment went with a Jewess. A few hours later
    he was found dead. Then”—said the German soldier—“my battalion
    was called out. Half of it cordoned off the ghetto, and the
    other half, two companies, to one of which I belonged, forced
    its way into the houses and threw out of the windows, pell-mell,
    the furniture and the inhabitants.”—The German soldier finished
    his story by saying—“Poor fellow! It was terrible,
    horrible!”—We asked him then—“How could you do such a
    thing?”—He gave us the fatalistic reply—“Orders are orders.”

This is the example which I previously mentioned.

M. DUBOST: If I remember rightly, when speaking of Rawa-Ruska you
started describing the treatment of Russian prisoners who were in this
camp before you.

ROSER: Yes. That is correct. The first French batch, which arrived in
Rawa-Ruska the 14th or 15th of April 1942, followed a group of 400
Russian prisoners of war, who were the survivors of a detachment of
6,000 men decimated by typhus. The few medicines found by the French
doctors upon arrival at Rawa-Ruska came from the infirmary of the
Russian prisoners. There were a few aspirin tablets and other drugs;
absolutely nothing against typhus. The camp had not been disinfected
after the sick Russians had left.

I cannot speak here of these wretched Russian survivors of Rawa-Ruska,
without asking the Tribunal for permission to describe the terrible
picture we all—I mean all the French prisoners who were in the stalags
of Germany in the autumn or winter of 1941—saw when the first batches
of Russian prisoners arrived. It was on a Sunday afternoon that I
watched this spectacle, which was like a nightmare. The Russians arrived
in rows, five by five, holding each other by the arms, as none of them
could walk by themselves—“walking skeletons” was really the only
fitting expression. Since then we have seen photographs of those camps
of deportation and death. Our unfortunate Russian comrades had been in
that condition since 1941. The color of their faces was not even yellow,
it was green. Almost all squinted, as they had not strength enough to
focus their sight. They fell by rows, five men at a time. The Germans
rushed on them and beat them with rifle butts and whips. As it was
Sunday afternoon the prisoners were at liberty, inside the camp, of
course. Seeing that, all the French started shouting and the Germans
made us return to the barracks. Typhus spread immediately in the Russian
camp, where, out of the 10,000 who had arrived in November, only 2,500
survived by the beginning of February.

These figures are accurate. I have them from two sources. First, from a
semi-official source, which was the kitchen of the camp. In front of the
kitchen a big chart was posted where the Germans recorded the
ridiculously small rations and the number of men in the camp. This
number decreased daily by 80 to 100, in the Russian camp. On the other
hand, French comrades employed in the camp’s reception office, called
“Aufnahme,” also knew the figures, and from them I got the figure of
2,500 survivors in February. Later, particularly at Rawa-Ruska, I had
the opportunity of seeing French prisoners from all parts of Germany.
All those who were in stalags, that is, in the central camps, at the
time mentioned, saw the same thing. Many of the Russian prisoners were
thrown in a common grave, even before they were dead. The dead and the
dying were piled up between the barracks and thrown into carts. The
first few days we could see the corpses in the carts, but as the German
camp commandant did not like to see French soldiers salute their fallen
Russian comrades, he had them covered with canvas after that.

M. DUBOST: Were your camps guarded by the German Army or by the SS?

ROSER: By the Wehrmacht.

M. DUBOST: Only by the German Army?

ROSER: I was never guarded by anybody but the German Army and once by
the Schutzpolizei, after I had tried to escape.

M. DUBOST: And were you recaptured?

ROSER: Yes.

M. DUBOST: One last question. You were kept in a number of
prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, were you not?

ROSER: Yes.

M. DUBOST: In all those camps did you have the opportunity to practice
your religion?

ROSER: In the camps . . .

M. DUBOST: What is your religion?

ROSER: I am a Protestant. In the camps where I was kept, Protestants and
Catholics were generally allowed to practice their religion. But I was
detailed to working squads, particularly to an agricultural group in the
Bremen district, called “Maiburg,” I think, where there was a Catholic
priest. There were about sixty of us in this group. This Catholic priest
could not say Mass—they would not let him.

M. DUBOST: Who?

ROSER: The sentries—the “Posten.”

M. DUBOST: Who were soldiers of the German Army?

ROSER: Yes, always.

M. DUBOST: I have no further questions.

THE PRESIDENT: Does the British Prosecutor wish to ask any questions?

BRITISH PROSECUTOR: No.

THE PRESIDENT: Or the United States?

AMERICAN PROSECUTOR: No.

THE PRESIDENT: Do any of the Defense Counsel wish to ask any questions?

DR. NELTE: Witness, when were you taken prisoner?

ROSER: I was taken prisoner on 14 June 1940.

DR. NELTE: In which camp for prisoners of war were you put?

ROSER: I was immediately sent to the Oflag, XI D, at
Grossborn-Westfalenhof in Pomerania.

DR. NELTE: Oflag?

ROSER: Yes.

DR. NELTE: What regulations were made known to you in the
prisoner-of-war camp regarding a possible attempt at escape?

ROSER: We were warned that we would be shot at and that we should not
try to escape.

DR. NELTE: Do you think that this warning was in agreement with the
Geneva Convention?

ROSER: This one certainly.

DR. NELTE: You mentioned, if I heard correctly, the case of Robin from
Oflag XI D. You said that there was an officer who dug a tunnel in order
to escape from the camp, and that as he was the first to emerge from the
tunnel, he was shot. Is that right?

ROSER: Yes; I said so.

DR. NELTE: Were you with those officers who tried to escape?

ROSER: I said before that this was related to me by Lieutenant Ledoux
who was still in Oflag XI D when that happened.

DR. NELTE: I only wanted to ascertain that this officer, Robin, met his
death while trying to escape.

ROSER: Yes, but here I should like to mention one thing, namely, all the
prisoners of war who escaped knew they risked their lives. Everyone
attempting to escape, knew that he risked a bullet. But it is one thing
to be killed trying to climb the barbed wire, for instance, and it is
another thing to be ambushed and murdered at a moment when one cannot do
anything, when one is unarmed and at the mercy of somebody, as was the
case with Lieutenant Robin. He was in a low tunnel, flat on his stomach,
crawling along, and was killed. That was not in accordance with
international rules.

DR. NELTE: I see what you mean, and you may rest assured that I respect
every prisoner of war who tried to do his duty as a patriot. In this
case, however, which you did not witness, I wanted to make the point
that this courageous officer who left the tunnel might not have answered
when challenged by the guards and was therefore shot.

ROSER: No.

DR. NELTE: Though you have just given a vivid description of the
incident, I think it was a product of your imagination because,
according to your own testimony, you did not see it yourself; is that
correct?

ROSER: There are not 36 different ways of getting out of an escape
tunnel: You lie flat on your stomach, you crawl, and if you are killed
before you get out of the tunnel, I call that murder.

DR. NELTE: And then you saw the officer . . .

THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Nelte, we do not want argument in cross-examination.
The witness has already stated that he was not there and did not see it,
and he has explained the facts.

DR. NELTE: Thank you. The incident in respect to Lieutenant Thomson is
not quite clear to me. In this case too, I believe you said you had no
direct knowledge, but were informed by a friend. Is that correct?

ROSER: I cannot but repeat what I said before. I related the story of
the French lieutenant, Ledoux, who told me that he was in the fortress
of Graudenz together with an R.A.F. lieutenant called Anthony Thomson.
This English officer escaped from the fortress. He was recaptured on the
airfield, taken back to the fortress, put into the same cell as
Lieutenant Ledoux, and Ledoux saw him killed by a revolver shot in the
back of the neck. Ledoux gave me the name of the murderer. I think I
mentioned him just now, Hauptfeldwebel Ostereich. This is the story told
me by an eyewitness.

DR. NELTE: Was that Hauptfeldwebel Ostereich a guard at the camp, or to
what formation did he belong?

ROSER: I don’t know.

DR. NELTE: Do you know that you, as prisoner of war, had a right to
complain?

ROSER: Certainly; I personally knew the Geneva Convention which was
signed by Germany in 1934.

DR. NELTE: Knowing those regulations you also knew, did you not, that
you could complain to the camp commander? Did you avail yourself of
that?

ROSER: I tried to do so, but without success.

DR. NELTE: May I ask you for the name of the camp commander who refused
to hear you?

ROSER: I do not know the name, but I will tell you when I tried to
complain. It was when I was in the infamous Linzburg Strafkommando
(punishment squad) in the province of Hanover. This squad belonged to
Stalag XC. In the morning following the night I have just described,
when, after an unsuccessful attempt at escape, we were beaten for 3
hours running, some of us were kept in the barracks. We then saw the
immediate superior of the commander of the squad. It was an
Oberleutnant, whose name I do not know, who saw that we were injured,
particularly about the head, and he considered it quite all right. In
the afternoon we went to work. When we returned at 7 o’clock we had the
visit of a major, a very distinguished-looking man, who also thought
that, as we had tried to escape, it was quite in order that we should be
punished. As to our complaint, it went no further.

DR. NELTE: Did you know that the German Government had made an agreement
with the Vichy Government regarding prisoners of war?

ROSER: Yes, I have heard of that, but they did not inspect squads of
this kind.

DR. NELTE: You mean to say that only the camps were inspected, but not
the labor squads?

ROSER: There were inspections of the labor squads, but not of the
punishment squads where I was. That is the difference.

DR. NELTE: You were not always in a disciplinary squad, were you?

ROSER: No.

DR. NELTE: When were you put in a disciplinary squad?

ROSER: In April 1941, for the first time. It was a squad to which only
officer cadets and priests were sent without any obvious reasons. This
was the Linzburg Strafkommando squad which did not receive any visits.
At Rawa-Ruska we received the visit of two Swiss doctors; I think it was
in September 1942.

DR. NELTE: In September 1942?

ROSER: Yes, in September 1942.

DR. NELTE: Did you complain to the Swiss doctors?

ROSER: Not I personally, but our spokesman was able to talk to them.

DR. NELTE: And were there any results?

ROSER: Yes, certainly.

DR. NELTE: Do you not think that a complaint made through the camp
commander would likewise have been successful, if you had wished to
resort to it?

ROSER: We were not on very friendly terms with the German staff at
Rawa-Ruska.

DR. NELTE: I do not quite understand you.

ROSER: I said we were not on friendly terms with the German commander of
the Rawa-Ruska Camp.

DR. NELTE: It is not a question of good terms, but of a complaint which
could be made in an official manner. Do you not think so?

[_The witness shrugged his shoulders._]

DR. NELTE: When did you leave Rawa-Ruska?

ROSER: At the end of October 1942.

DR. NELTE: If I remember rightly, you mentioned the number of victims
counted or observed by you, did you not?

ROSER: Yes.

DR. NELTE: How many victims were there?

ROSER: It was a figure given to me by Dr. Lievin, a French doctor at
Rawa-Ruska. There were, as I said, about sixty deaths in the camp
itself, to which approximately one hundred must be added who
disappeared.

DR. NELTE: Are you speaking of French victims or victims in general?

ROSER: When I was at Rawa-Ruska there were only Frenchmen there, with a
few Poles and a few Belgians.

DR. NELTE: I am putting this question because an official French report
I have before me, dated 14 June 1945, states that the victims up to the
end of July were 14 Frenchmen, and therefore for the period from August
to September the number seems to me very high. Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Does any other German counsel want to put any questions
to this witness? [_There was no response._] M. Dubost?

M. DUBOST: I have finished with this witness, Mr. President. If the
Tribunal will permit me, I shall now call another witness, the last one.

THE PRESIDENT: One moment, M. Dubost, the witness can retire.

[_The witness left the stand._]

M. Dubost, could you tell the Tribunal whether the witness you are about
to call is going to give us any evidence of a different nature from the
evidence which has already been given? Because you will remember that we
have in the French document, of which we shall take judicial notice—a
very large French document; I forget the number, 321 I believe it is,
Document Number RF-321; we have a very large volume of evidence on the
conditions in concentration camps. Is the witness you are going to call
going to prove anything fresh?

M. DUBOST: Your Honors, the witness whom we are going to call is to
testify to a certain number of experiments which he witnessed. He has
even submitted certain documents.

THE PRESIDENT: Are these experiments about which the witness is going to
speak all recorded, in the Document Number RF-321?

M. DUBOST: They are referred to, but not reported in detail. Moreover,
in view of the importance attached to statements of witnesses in the
French presentation concerning the camps, I shall considerably curtail
my work and will dispense with reading the documentary evidence, a large
amount of which I shall merely submit after these witnesses have been
heard.

THE PRESIDENT: You may call the witness, but try not to let him be too
long.

M. DUBOST: I shall do my best, Mr. President.

[_The witness, Dr. Alfred Balachowsky, took the stand._]

THE PRESIDENT: What is your name?

DR. ALFRED BALACHOWSKY (Witness): Alfred Balachowsky.

THE PRESIDENT: Are you French?

BALACHOWSKY: French.

THE PRESIDENT: Will you take this oath? Do you swear to speak without
hate or fear, to say the truth, all the truth, only the truth?

[_The witness repeated the oath in French._]

Raise your right hand and swear.

BALACHOWSKY: I swear.

THE PRESIDENT: You may sit if you wish.

M. DUBOST: Your name is Balachowsky, Alfred B-a-l-a-c-h-o-w-s-k-y?

BALACHOWSKY: That is correct.

M. DUBOST: You are head of a laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in
Paris?

BALACHOWSKY: That is correct.

M. DUBOST: Your residence is at Viroflay? You were born 15 August 1909
at Korotcha in Russia?

BALACHOWSKY: That is correct.

M. DUBOST: You are French?

BALACHOWSKY: Yes.

M. DUBOST: By birth?

BALACHOWSKY: Russian by birth, French by naturalization.

M. DUBOST: When were you naturalized?

BALACHOWSKY: 1932.

M. DUBOST: Were you deported on 16 January 1944 after being arrested on
2 July 1943, and were you 6 months in prison first at Fresnes, then at
Compiègne? Were you then transferred to the Dora Camp?

BALACHOWSKY: That is correct.

M. DUBOST: Can you tell us rapidly what you know about the Dora Camp?

BALACHOWSKY: The Dora Camp is situated 5 kilometers north of the town of
Nordhausen, in southern Germany. This camp was considered by the Germans
as a secret detachment, a Geheimkommando, which prisoners who were kept
there could never leave.

This secret detachment had as its task the manufacture of V-1’s and
V-2’s—the “Vergeltungswaffen” (reprisal weapons)—the aerial torpedoes
which the Germans launched on England. That is why Dora was a secret
detachment. The camp was divided into two parts: one outer part
contained one-third of the total number of persons in the camp, and the
remaining two-thirds were concentrated in the underground factory. Dora,
consequently, was an underground factory for the manufacture of V-1’s
and V-2’s. I arrived at Dora on 10 February 1944, coming from
Buchenwald.

M. DUBOST: Please speak more slowly. You arrived at Dora from Buchenwald
on . . .?

BALACHOWSKY: On 10 February 1944, that is at a time when life in the
Dora Camp was particularly hard.

On 10 February we were loaded, 76 men, onto a large German lorry. We
were forced to crouch down, four SS guards occupying the seats at the
front of the lorry. As we could not all crouch down, being too many,
whenever a man raised his head he got a blow with a rifle butt, so that
in the course of our 4-hour journey several of us were injured.

After our arrival at Dora, we spent a whole day and night without food,
in the cold, in the snow, waiting for all the formalities of
registration in the camp—completing forms, with names and surnames, and
so on.

In comparison with Buchenwald, we found a considerable change at Dora,
as the general management of the Dora Camp was entrusted to a special
category of prisoners who were criminals. These criminals were our block
leaders, served our soup, and looked after us. In contrast to the
political prisoners who wore a red triangular badge, these criminals
were distinguished by a green triangular badge on which was a black S.
We called them the “S” men (Sicherheitsverband). They were people
convicted of crimes by German courts long before the war, but who,
instead of being sent home after having served their terms, were kept
for life in concentration camps to supervise the other prisoners.
Needless to say prisoners of that kind, these criminals with the green
triangles, were asocial elements. Sometimes they had been 5, 10, even 20
years in prison, and afterwards, 5 or 10 years in concentration camps.
These asocial outcasts no longer had any hope of ever getting out of the
concentration camps. These criminals, however, thanks to the support and
co-operation they were offered by the SS management of the camp, now had
the chance of a career. This career consisted in stealing from and
robbing the other prisoners, and obtaining from them the maximum output
demanded by the SS. They beat us from morning till night. We got up at 4
o’clock in the morning and had to be ready within 5 minutes in the
underground dormitories where we were crammed, without ventilation in
foul air, in blocks about as large as this room, into which 3,000 to
3,500 internees were crowded. There were five tiers of bunks with
rotting straw mattresses. Fresh ones were never issued. We were given 5
minutes in which to get up, for we went to bed completely dressed. We
were hardly able to get any sleep, for there was a continuous coming and
going, and all sorts of thefts took place among the prisoners.
Furthermore, it was impossible to sleep because we were covered with
lice; the whole Dora Camp swarmed with vermin. It was virtually
impossible to get rid of the lice. In 5 minutes we had to be in line in
the tunnel and march to a given place.

THE PRESIDENT: [_To the witness_] Just a minute, please. M. Dubost, you
said you were going to call this witness upon experiments. He is now
giving us all the details of camp life which we have already heard on
several occasions.

M. DUBOST: So far nobody has spoken about the Dora Camp, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, but every camp we have heard of has got the same
sort of brutalities, hasn’t it, according to the witnesses who have been
called?

You were going to call this witness because he was going to deal with
experiments.

M. DUBOST: If the Tribunal is convinced that all the camps had the same
regime, then my point has been proved and the witness will now testify
to the experiments at the Buchenwald Camp. However, I wanted to show
that all German camps were the same. I think this has now been proved.

THE PRESIDENT: If you were going to prove that, you would have to call a
witness from every camp, and there are hundreds of them.

M. DUBOST: This question has to be proved because it is the uniformity
of the system which establishes the culpability of these defendants. In
every camp there was one responsible person who was the camp commander.
But we are not trying the camp commander, but the defendants here in the
dock and we are trying them for having conceived . . .

THE PRESIDENT: I have already pointed out to you that there has been
practically no cross-examination, and I have asked you to confine this
witness, as far as possible, to the question of experiments.

M. DUBOST: The witness will then confine himself to experiments at
Buchenwald as this is the Tribunal’s wish. The Tribunal will consider
the uniformity of treatment in all German internment camps as proved.

[_Turning to the witness_] Will you now testify to the criminal
practices of the SS Medical Corps in the camps, criminal practices in
the form of scientific experiments?

BALACHOWSKY: I was recalled to Buchenwald the 1st of May 1944, and
assigned to Block 50, which was actually a factory for the manufacture
of vaccines against exanthematous typhus. I was recalled from Dora to
Buchenwald, because, in the meantime, the management of the camp had
learned that I was a specialist in this sort of research, and
consequently they wished to utilize my services in Block 50 for the
manufacture of vaccines. However, I was unaware of it until the very
last moment.

I came to Block 50 on the 1st of May 1944, and I stayed there until the
liberation of the camp on the 11th of April 1945.

Block 50, which was the block where vaccines were manufactured, was
under Sturmbannführer Schuler, who was a doctor with the rank of a
Sturmbannführer, equal to SS major. He was in charge of the block and
was responsible for the manufacture of the vaccines. This same
Sturmbannführer Schuler was also in charge of another block in the
Buchenwald Camp. This other block was Block 46, the infamous block for
experiments, where the internees were utilized as guinea pigs.

Blocks 46 and 50 were both run by one office; it was the
“Geschäftszimmer.” All archives, index cards pertaining to the
experiments—as well as Block 50, were sent to the Geschäftszimmer, that
is, to the office of Block 50.

The secretary of Block 50 was an Austrian political prisoner, my friend,
Eugene Kogon. He and a few other comrades had, consequently,
opportunities of looking through all the archives of which they had
charge. Therefore they were able to know, day by day, exactly what went
on either in Block 50, our block, or in Block 46. I myself was able to
get hold of most of the archives of Block 46, and even the book in which
the experiments were recorded has been saved. It is in our possession,
and has been forwarded to the Psychological Service of the American
Forces.

In this book all experiments are entered which were made in Block 46.
Block 46 was established in October 1941 by a high commission
subordinate to the medical service of the Waffen SS; and we see as
members of its administrative council, a certain number of names, for
this Block 46 came under the Research Section Number 5
(Versuchsabteilung Number 5 of Leipzig) of the Supreme Command of the
Waffen SS. Inspector Mrugowski, Obergruppenführer of the Waffen SS, was
in charge of this section. The administrative council which set up Block
46 was composed of the following members:

Dr. Genzken, Obergruppenführer (the highest rank in the Waffen SS); Dr.
Poppendiek, Gruppenführer of the Waffen SS; and finally we see among
these names also that of Dr. Handloser of the Wehrmacht and of the
Military Academy of Berlin, who was also associated with the initiation
of experiments on human beings.

Thus, in this administrative council there were members of the SS, and
also Dr. Handloser. The experiments proper were carried out by
Sturmbannführer Schuler, but all the orders and directives concerning
the different types of experiments, which I shall speak about to you,
were issued by Leipzig, that is, by the Research Section
(Versuchsabteilung) of the Waffen SS. So there was no personal
initiative on the part of Schuler or the management of the camp.

As to the experiments, all orders came directly from the Supreme Command
in Berlin. Among these experiments, which we could follow step by step
(at least some of them) through the cards, the results, the registration
number of people admitted to and discharged from Block 46, were, first
of all, numerous exanthematous typhus experiments; second, experiments
on phosphorus burns; third, experiments on sexual hormones; fourth,
experiments on starvation edema or avitaminosis; finally, fifth, I can
tell you of experiments in the field of forensic medicine. So we have
five different types of experiments.

M. DUBOST: Were the men who were subjected to these experiments
volunteers or not?

BALACHOWSKY: The human beings subjected to experiments were recruited,
not only in the Buchenwald Camp, but also outside the camp. They were
not volunteers; in most cases they did not know that they would be used
for experiments until they entered Block 46. The recruitment took place
among criminals, perhaps in order to reduce their large numbers in that
way. But the recruitment was also carried out among political prisoners
and I have to point out that recruits for Block 46 came also from
Russian prisoners of war. Among the political prisoners and prisoners of
war who were used for experimental purposes at Block 46, the Russians
were always in the majority, for the following reasons:

Of all the prisoners who could exist in concentration camps it was the
Russians who had the greatest physical resistance, which was obviously
superior to that of the French or other people of western Europe. They
could withstand hunger and ill-treatment, and, generally speaking,
showed physical resistance in every respect. For this particular reason,
Russian political prisoners were recruited for experiments in greater
numbers than others. However, there were people of other nationalities
among them, particularly French. I should now like to deal with details
of the experiments themselves.

M. DUBOST: Do not go too much into details, because we are not
specialists. It will suffice us to know that these experiments were
carried out without any regard to humanity and on nonvoluntary subjects.
Will you please describe to us the atrocious character of these
experiments and their results.

BALACHOWSKY: The experiments carried out in Block 46 did without doubt
serve a medical purpose, but for the greater part they were of no
service to science. Therefore, they can hardly be called experiments.
The men were used for observing the effects of drugs, poisons, bacterial
cultures, _et cetera_. I take, as an example, the use of vaccine against
exanthematous typhus. To manufacture this vaccine it is necessary to
have bacterial cultures of typhus. For experiments such as are carried
out at the Pasteur Institute and the other similar institutes of the
world, cultures are not necessary as typhus patients can always be found
for samples of infected blood. Here it was quite different. From the
records and the chart you have in hand, we could ascertain in Block 46
12 different cultures of typhus germs, designated by the letter BU,
(meaning Buchenwald) and numbered Buchenwald 1 to Buchenwald 12. A
constant supply of these cultures was kept in Block 46 by means of the
contamination of healthy individuals through sick ones; this was
achieved by artificial inoculation of typhus germs by means of
intravenous injections of 0.5 to 1 cubic centimeter of infected blood
drawn from a patient at the height of the crisis. Now, it is well-known
that artificial inoculation of typhus by intravenous injection is
invariably fatal. Therefore all these men who were used for bacterial
culture during the whole time such cultures were required (from October
1942 to the liberation of the camp) died, and we counted 600 victims
sacrificed for the sole purpose of supplying typhus germs.

M. DUBOST: They were literally murdered to keep typhus germs alive?

BALACHOWSKY: They were literally murdered to keep typhus germs alive.
Apart from these, other experiments were made as to the efficacy of
vaccines.

M. DUBOST: What is this document?

BALACHOWSKY: This document contains a record of the typhus cultures.

M. DUBOST: This document was taken by you from the camp?

BALACHOWSKY: Yes, I took this document from the camp, and its contents
were summarized by me in the experiment book of Block 46.

M. DUBOST: Is this the document you handed to us?

BALACHOWSKY: We have actually made a more complete document—which is in
the possession of the American Psychological Service—as we have the
entire record, and this represents only one page of it.

M. DUBOST: I ask the Tribunal to take note that the French Prosecution
submits this document, Document Number RF-334, as appendix to the
testimony of Dr. Balachowsky.

BALACHOWSKY: [_Continuing_] In 1944, experiments were also made on the
effects of vaccines. One hundred and fifty men lost their lives in these
experiments. The vaccines used by the German Army were not only those
manufactured in our Block 46, but also ones which came from Italy,
Denmark, Poland, and the Germans wanted to ascertain the value of these
different vaccines. Consequently, in August 1944 they began experiments
on 150 men who were locked up in Block 46.

Here, I should like to tell you how this Block 46 was run. It was
entirely isolated and surrounded by barbed wire. The internees had no
roll call and no permission to go out. All the windows were kept closed,
the panes were of frosted glass. No unauthorized person could enter the
block. A German political prisoner was in charge of the Block. This
German political prisoner was Kapo Dietzsch, an asocial individual who
had been in prisons and in camps for 20 years and who worked for the SS.
It was he who gave the injections and the inoculations and who executed
people upon order. Strangely enough, there were weapons in the block,
automatic pistols, and hand grenades, to quell any possible revolt,
either outside or inside the block.

I can also tell you that an order slip for Block 46, sent to the office
(Geschäftszimmer) at Block 50 in January 1945, mentioned three strait
jackets to be used for those who refused to be inoculated.

Now I come back to the typhus and vaccine experiments. You will see how
they were carried out.

The 150 prisoners were divided into 2 groups: those who were to be used
as tests and those who were to be the subjects. The latter only received
(ordinary) injections of the different types of vaccines to be tested.
Those used for testing were not given any injections. Then, after the
vaccination of the subjects, inoculations were given (always by means of
intravenous injections) to everybody selected for this experiment, those
for testing as well as the subjects. Those used for tests died about two
weeks after the inoculation—as such is approximately the period
required before the disease develops to its fatal issue. As for the
others, who received different kinds of vaccines, their deaths were in
proportion to the efficacy of the vaccines administered to them. Some
vaccines had excellent results, with a very low death rate—such was the
case with the Polish vaccines. Others, on the contrary, had a much
higher death rate. After the conclusion of the experiments, no survivors
were allowed to live, according to the custom prevailing in Block 46.
All the survivors of the experiments were “liquidated” and murdered in
Block 46, by the customary methods which some of my comrades have
already described to you, that is by means of intracardiac injections of
phenol. Intracardiac injections of 10 cubic centimeters of pure phenol
was the usual method of extermination in Buchenwald.

THE PRESIDENT: We are not really concerned here with the proportion of
the particular injections.

BALACHOWSKY: Will you repeat that please?

THE PRESIDENT: As I have said, we are not really concerned here with the
proportions in which these injections were given, and will you kindly
not deal with these details?

M. DUBOST: You might try and confine the witness.

BALACHOWSKY: [_Continuing_] Then I will speak of other details which may
interest you. They are experiments of a psychotherapeutic nature,
utilization of chemical products to cure typhus, in Block 46, under the
same conditions as before. German industries co-operated in these
experiments, notably the I. G. Farben Industrie which supplied a certain
number of drugs to be used for experiments in Block 46. Among the
professors who supplied the drugs, knowing that they would be used in
Block 46 for experimental purposes, was Professor Lautenschläger of
Frankfurt. So much for the question of typhus.

I now come to experiments with phosphorus, particularly made on
prisoners of Russian origin. Phosphorus burns were inflicted in Block 46
on Russian prisoners for the following reason. Certain bombs dropped in
Germany by the Allied aviators caused burns on the civilians and
soldiers which were difficult to heal. Consequently, the Germans tried
to find a whole series of drugs which would hasten the healing of the
wounds caused by these burns. Thus, experiments were carried out in
Block 46 on Russian prisoners who were artificially burned with
phosphorus products and then treated with different drugs supplied by
the German chemical industry.

Now as to experiments on sexual hormones . . .

M. DUBOST: What were the results of these experiments?

BALACHOWSKY: All these experiments resulted in death.

M. DUBOST: Always in death? So each experiment is equivalent to a murder
for which the SS are collectively responsible?

BALACHOWSKY: For which those who established this institution are
responsible.

M. DUBOST: That is the SS as a whole, and the German medical corps in
particular?

BALACHOWSKY: Definitely so, as the orders came from the
Versuchsabteilung 5 (Research Section 5). The SS were responsible as the
orders were issued by that section at Leipzig and, therefore, came from
the Supreme Command of the Waffen SS.

M. DUBOST: Thank you. What were the results of the experiments made on
sexual hormones?

BALACHOWSKY: They were less serious. Besides, these were ridiculous
experiments from the scientific point of view. There were, at
Buchenwald, a number of homosexuals, that is to say, men who had been
convicted by German tribunals for this vice. These homosexuals were sent
to concentration camps, especially to Buchenwald, and were mixed with
the other prisoners.

M. DUBOST: Especially with the so-called political prisoners, who in
reality were patriots?

BALACHOWSKY: With all kinds of prisoners.

M. DUBOST: All were in the company of these German inverts?

BALACHOWSKY: Yes. They wore a pink triangle to distinguish them.

M. DUBOST: Was the wearing of this triangle a well-established custom,
or on the contrary, was there much confusion in classification?

BALACHOWSKY: At the very first, before my arrival, from what I heard,
order was kept with respect to triangular badges; but when I arrived at
Buchenwald, in January of 1944, there was the greatest confusion in the
badges, and many prisoners wore no badge at all.

M. DUBOST: Or did they wear badges of a category different from their
own?

BALACHOWSKY: Yes, this was the case with many Frenchmen, who were sent
to Buchenwald because they were ordinary criminals and who finally wore
the red triangle of political prisoners.

M. DUBOST: What was the color of the triangle worn by the ordinary
German criminals?

BALACHOWSKY: They had a green triangle.

M. DUBOST: Did they not wear eventually a red triangle?

BALACHOWSKY: No, because they had more privileges than the others and
they wore the green triangle distinctly.

M. DUBOST: And in the working groups?

THE PRESIDENT: We have heard that they were all mixed up.

M. DUBOST: The fact will not have escaped the Tribunal that these
questions are put to counter other questions which were asked this
morning by the Counsel for the Defense with the intent to confuse not
the Tribunal, but the witnesses.

BALACHOWSKY: I repeat that we had a complete conglomeration of
nationalities and categories of prisoners.

THE PRESIDENT: That is exactly what he said, that these triangles were
completely mixed up.

M. DUBOST: I think, that the statement by this second witness will
definitively enlighten the Tribunal on this point, whatever the efforts
of the Defense might be to mislead us.

[_Turning to the witness_] Do you know anything about the fate of
tattooed men?

BALACHOWSKY: Yes, indeed.

M. DUBOST: Will you please tell us what you know about them?

BALACHOWSKY: Tattooed human skins were stored in Block 2, which was
called at Buchenwald the Pathological Block.

M. DUBOST: Were there many tattooed human skins in Block 2?

BALACHOWSKY: There were always tattooed human skins in Block 2. I cannot
say whether there were many, as they were continuously being received
and passed on, but there were not only tattooed human skins, but also
tanned human skins—simply tanned, not tattooed.

M. DUBOST: Did they skin people?

BALACHOWSKY: They removed the skin and then tanned it.

M. DUBOST: Will you continue your testimony on that point?

BALACHOWSKY: I saw SS men come out of Block 2, the Pathological Block,
carrying tanned skins under their arms. I know, from my comrades who
worked in Pathological Block 2, that there were orders for skins; and
these tanned skins were given as gifts to certain guards and to certain
visitors, who used them to bind books.

M. DUBOST: We were told that Koch, who was the head at that time, was
sentenced for this practice.

BALACHOWSKY: I was not a witness of the Koch affair, which happened
before I came to the camp.

M. DUBOST: So that even after he left there were still tanned and
tattooed skins?

BALACHOWSKY: Yes, there were constantly tanned and tattooed skins, and
when the camp was liberated by the Americans, they found in the camp, in
Block 2, tattooed and tanned skins on 11 April 1945.

M. DUBOST: Where were these skins tanned?

BALACHOWSKY: These skins were tanned in Block 2, and perhaps also in the
crematorium buildings, which were not far from Block 2.

M. DUBOST: Then, according to your testimony, it was a customary
practice which continued even after Koch’s execution?

BALACHOWSKY: Yes, this practice continued, but I do not know to what
extent.

M. DUBOST: Did you witness any inspections made at the camp by German
officials, and if so, who were these officials?

BALACHOWSKY: I can tell you something about Dora, concerning such
visits.

M. DUBOST: Excuse me, I have one more thing to ask you about the skins.
Do you know anything about Koch’s conviction?

BALACHOWSKY: I heard rumors and remarks about Koch’s conviction from my
old comrades, who were in the camp at that time. But I personally was
not a witness of the affair.

M. DUBOST: Never mind. It is enough for me to know that after his
conviction skins were still tanned and tattooed.

BALACHOWSKY: Exactly.

M. DUBOST: You expressly state it?

BALACHOWSKY: Absolutely. Even after his conviction, tanned and tattooed
skins were still seen.

M. DUBOST: Will you tell us now what visits were made to the camp by
German officials, and who these officials were?

BALACHOWSKY: Contacts between the outside—that is German civilians and
even German soldiers—and the interior of the camp were made possible by
departures and furloughs that some political prisoners were able to
obtain from the SS in order to spend some time with their families; and,
vice versa, there were visits to the camp by members of the Wehrmacht.
In Block 50 we had a visit of Luftwaffe cadets. These Luftwaffe cadets,
members of the regular German armed forces, passed through the camp and
were able to see practically everything that went on there.

M. DUBOST: What did they do in Block 50?

BALACHOWSKY: They just came to see the equipment at the invitation of
Sturmbannführer Schuler. We received several visits.

M. DUBOST: What was the equipment?