Fifty-Ninth Day:
Thursday, 14th February 1946
[Page 21]
Thus, for example, in August, 1942, the prisoners
were ordered by the German staff of the camp to
have all their hair removed from their armpits and
around their genitals, as otherwise they would be
shot. Not one prisoner received any razors from
the Germans, though the Germans knew well that
they had none. The prisoners spent the whole of
the night plucking out their hair with their hands
and assisting one another. However, in the morning
the guards killed four prisoners and wounded three
by rifle fire.
On 26th November, 1943, German soldiers, in the
middle of the night, broke into the hospital and
dragged out into the courtyard eighty sick
prisoners; after they had been forced to strip in
the bitter cold, they were all shot. On 26th
January, 1943, fifty more prisoners died in
torment from the beatings received. Throughout the
winter many prisoners were killed in the following
manner: they would be buried up to their waist in
the snow, and water poured over them, so that they
formed statues of ice. It was established that 880
Yugoslav prisoners of war were killed in the above-
mentioned camp in various ways." [Page 22]
Men were constantly dying of hunger. Forty-five
were placed in a hut which normally accommodated
six men only.... There was no medicine.... They
worked under most difficult conditions on road
building, in the bitter cold, without clothing or
caps, in the wind and rain, twelve hours a day.
The prisoners in the camp at Osen used to sleep in
their shirts without any underpants, without any
cover whatsoever, on the bare boards. Dolps
personally visited the huts and carried out
inspections. The prisoners who were caught
sleeping in their underpants were killed on the
spot by Dolps with his submachine gun. In the same
manner he killed all those who appeared on parade,
which he reviewed personally, in soiled
underwear.... By the end of 1942, only ninety
still remained alive of the first group of 400 in
Korgen. Out of about 500 prisoners who were taken
to the camp of Osen by the end of June, 1942 there
were, in March, 1943, only thirty men left alive."
On 14th July, 1943, in the officers' S.S. camp at
Osnabrueck, 740 captured Yugoslav officers were
separated from the remainder and placed in a
special
[Page 23]
The Germans gambled with the lives of the
prisoners and frequently shot them from sheer
caprice. Thus, for instance, at the aforesaid camp
at Osnabrueck, on 11th January, 1942, a German
guard fired at a group of prisoners, severely
wounding Captain Peter Nozinic. On 22nd July,
1942, a guard fired on a group of officers. On 2nd
September, 1942, a guard fired on the Yugoslav
Lieutenant, Vladislav Vajs, who was incapacitated
by the wound he received for a very long time. On
22nd September, 1942, a guard from the prison
tower again fired on a group of officers. On 18th
December, 1942, the guard fired on a group of
officers because, from their huts, they were
watching some English prisoners passing by. On
20th February, 1943, a guard fired on an officer
merely because this officer was smoking. On 11th
March, 1943, a guard opened fire on the doors of a
hut and killed General Dimitri Pavlovic. On 21st
June, 1943, a guard fired at the Yugoslav
Lieutenant-Colonel, Branko Popandic. On 26th
April, 1944, a German non-commissioned officer,
Richards, fired on Lieutenant Vladislav Gaider,
who subsequently died of his wounds. On 26th June,
1944, the German captain, Kunze, fired on two
Yugoslav officers, severely wounding Lieutenant
Djorjevic. All these shootings were carried out
without any serious reason or pretext, and only as
a result of brutal orders issued by the German
camp commandants, who threatened that firearms
would be used even in the case of the most
insignificant offenses. All these incidents
occurred in one single camp. But this was the
treatment applied in all the remaining camps for
Yugoslav officers and soldiers - captives in the
hands of the Germans."
There was an airfield at Gavlichkov Brod at which various
military installations were located, while the former
lunatic asylum was used as an S.S. hospital. When the
question arose regarding the formalities for the surrender
of the German military units at the airfield (in 1945),
Staff Captain Sula with one of his fellow officers of the
Czechoslovak Army betook himself to the airfield. Neither of
them ever came back. Later the airfield and the hospital
were occupied by the Czech National Units and an
investigation was carried out. It showed that the
negotiators, together with six other persons who had
previously disappeared at Gavlichkov Brod, were taken by the
Germans to the S.S. hospital where they were subjected to
cruel tortures. In the case of Captain Sula the Germans cut
out his tongue, gouged out his eyes and cut his chest open.
The others suffered similar treatment. Most of them had been
castrated.
I am in possession of photographic evidence in support of
this fact which I am submitting to the Tribunal. My
presentation has lasted several hours. But surely, neither
time nor any word of living human speech will ever suffice
to describe even a thousandth part of the sufferings borne
by the soldiers of my Motherland and of the other democratic
countries who had the misfortune of falling into the hands
of the fascist executioners.
[Page 24]
We will here attempt, if only quite briefly, to fill in the
gaps. In tens of thousands the witnesses will pass before
your eyes. They have been called before the Tribunal to
testify in this case. I cannot summon them by name, no oath
will you ever administer to them and yet their evidence will
never be denied - for the dead do not lie. Most of the
films pertaining to German atrocities, which will be
presented by the Soviet prosecution, pertain to crimes
against prisoners of war. The silent testimony of the
helpless prisoners burned alive in hospitals, of prisoners
mutilated beyond all recognition, of prisoners tortured and
starved to death will, I am certain, be far more eloquent
than any word of mine.
Blood drips from the hands of the accused - the blood of
the victims of Rostov and Kharkov, the martyrs of Auschwitz
and all the extermination camps created by the Hitlerites.
Treacherously the enemy attacked our country. The people
rose in arms to defend their Motherland, her freedom and her
independence, the honour and lives of their families. They
joined the ranks of the fighting men. They fell into the
hands of the enemy. Now see how the enemy dishonoured them
when they stood helpless and unarmed.
So may these major criminals - who bear the main
responsibility for the evil deeds of the fascists - be
forced to answer to the martyrs to the full extent of the
law of international justice for the indescribable
atrocities which you will see with your own eyes, and for
the many other crimes which will forever remain unknown.
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(Part 9 of 15)
[COLONEL POKROVSKY continues] "One such camp was established in 1942 at Boten,
near Rognan. Nearly 1,000 Yugoslav prisoners of
war were brought into this camp and in the course
of a few months all of them, to the last man, died
of illness, hunger, physical torture, or execution
by shooting. They were forced every day to do the
very hardest work on a road and some dams. Their
working hours lasted from dawn until 1800 hours,
under the worst possible climatic conditions in
this far northern part of Norway. During their
work, the prisoners were beaten incessantly and in
the camp itself, were exposed to terrible ill-
treatment.
Further, on Page 38, Exhibit USSR 36, information is
contained of the shooting of Yugoslav prisoners of war in
the camp at Bajsfjord (Norway). After 10th July,
"When an epidemic of typhus broke out in the new
camp, an average of 12 men a day were shot in the
course of the following five to six weeks. By the
end of August, 1942, 350 only of these prisoners
were returned to Bajsfjord, where German S.S.
troops continued to exterminate them. In the end
only 200 men remained alive and were transferred
to camp Osen."
I will now omit two paragraphs and pass to the last
paragraph of the same report:-
"On 22nd June, 1943, a transport containing 900
Yugoslav prisoners arrived in Norway. Most of them
were intellectuals, workers and peasants,
prisoners from the ranks of the former Yugoslav
Army or else captured Partisans or men seized as
so-called 'politically suspicious elements.' Some
of them - about 400 - were placed in the still
unfinished camp at Korgen, while the other group
of about 500 was sent ten to twenty kilometers
further on to Osen. The commandant of both camps,
from June, 1942, until the end of March, 1943, was
the S.S. Sturmbannfuehrer Dolps....
I will read into the record an excerpt from Page 39, Exhibit
USSR 36, beginning with the third paragraph from the bottom,
Page 342 of your document book:-
"Besides this terrible treatment of the captured
soldiers of the Yugoslav National Army of
Liberation and the Partisan Detachments, the
Germans also treated prisoners of war from the
ranks of the old Yugoslav Army in complete
contravention of International Law and contrary to
the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of
Prisoners of War, of 1929. In April 1941,
immediately after the occupation of the Yugoslav
territory, the Germans drove into captivity in
Germany about 300,000 noncommissioned officers and
men. The Yugoslav State Commission has at its
disposal much evidence of the unlawful ill-
treatment of these prisoners. We will give here a
few examples only.
A certain incident is described in the Czechoslovak
Government report which I should like to mention here. Its
importance lies not in the fact that it throws a new light
on the methods employed in fascist crimes, but that it took
place at the time when the Hitlerites clearly realised that
their days were numbered. This incident is described in
Appendix 4 to the Czechoslovak Government's report, and I
will describe it briefly and in my own words.