Dachau concentration camp

“ The further possibility of perhaps using German civilians for the experiments was completely out of question because at this time it was not possible to find young men in the age groups necessary in this case among the German civilian population, because all of them had either been conscripted for military service or for labor service. Professor Schroeder, therefore, had no choice but to follow the suggestion of considering Dachau concentration camp for his experimental station. ”

“ For these experiments inmates of the concentration camp at Dachau were selected. These inmates presented a motley group of prisoners of war, dissenters from the philosophy of the National Socialist Party, Jews, both from Germany and the eastern countries, rebellious or indifferent factory workers, displaced civilians from eastern occupied countries, and an undefined group known as “asocial or undesirable persons.” ”

“ Taken altogether, the evidence on this item discloses that during the period between March and August 1942, certain medical experiments were conducted at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany for the benefit of the German Air Force, to determine the limits of human endurance and existence at extremely high altitudes. Various human beings, unwillingly, and entirely without their consent, were required and compelled to, and did participate in the aforesaid experiments as subjects thereof. ”

“ Did you participate in the evacuation of the Jews from Germany?
ROSENBERG: I should perhaps add one thing: I visited no real concentration camp, neither Dachau nor any other one. Once—it was in 1938—I questioned Himmler on how things really were in the concentration camps and told him that one heard from the foreign press all sorts of derogatory atrocity reports. Himmler said to me, “Why don’t you come to Dachau and take a look at things for yourself? We have a swimming pool there, we have sanitary installations—irreproachable; no objections can be raised.” ”

“ On April 20, 1945, approximately 15,000 prisoners were assembled to make a forced march in the direction of Concentration Camp Dachau. The evacuation of these prisoners was caused by the impending capture of the camp by the Allies. These 15,000 prisoners were lined up in three groups and started on this march. Only those prisoners who could walk were taken and before leaving Flossenburg, many were executed, as also were those who collapsed in rank awaiting the movement to start the trek. No provision was made for the feeding of these prisoners or sleeping on this trip. ”

“ Munich II, has handed me his report of 29 May 1933 with two copies of the "special regulations" concerning inmates of the concentration-camp Dachau (Camp Organization) and stated orally that several deaths have been reported from the concentration camp Dachau during the last few days showing that the report of the camp commandant and the camp physician as to the causes of death is hardly in conformity with the findings of the coroner's inquest and autopsy, so that the evidence obtained by the inquiry so far would justify the suspicion of crimes committed. ”

“ Accordingly, the concentration camps will be classified into the following categories:
“Category I—for all prisoners charged with minor offenses only and definitely qualified for correction; also for special cases and solitary confinement—Camps Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz I. The latter also applies in part to Category II.
“Category Ia—for all old prisoners conditionally qualified for work who could still be used in the medicinal herb gardens—Camp Dachau. ”

“ These four murders, committed within the short space of two weeks in the Spring of 1933, each by different SS guards, are but a few examples of SS activities in the camps even as early as 1933. Many similar examples from that period and later periods could be produced.
Indeed, that sort of thing was officially encouraged. Disciplinary Regulations for the Dachau Concentration Camp were issued on 1 October 1933 by SS Fuehrer Eicke, who later became commander of all the Death Head Units (778-PS) . The fourth paragraph of the introduction of those rules provides:
“Tolerance means weakness. ”

“ In the course of our conversation that evening Gauleiter Giesler disclosed the fact to me that Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner had given him instructions, in accordance with an order from the Führer, that there should be made an immediate plan regarding the liquidation of the concentration camp at Dachau and the two Jewish work camps at Mühldorf and Landsberg. The instructions stated that these two Jewish work camps at Landsberg and Mühldorf were to be destroyed by the German Air Force, since the sites of those two camps had lately and repeatedly been affected by hostile bombing attacks. ”

“ Alfred Strauss from Munich who was in the concentration camp Dachau as a prisoner under protective custody was killed by 2 pistol shots by SS man Johann Kantschuster who escorted him on a walk prescribed to him by the camp doctor, outside of the fenced part of the camp. ”

“ Actually we have a certified copy of the shorthand notes of Blaha’s evidence here, and I also say in fairness to the witness that it does show he did say that at Dachau Frick visited the concentration camp, and I will show it to Dr. Pannenbecker whenever he likes. ”

“ At Rowno, Graebe watched the liquidization of the ghetto: "I saw dozens of corpses of all ages and sexes in the streets," he said. "At the corner of a house lay a baby less than a year old with its skull crushed. Blood and brains were spattered over the house wall.
"I noticed a farm cart with two horses. Dead people with stiff limbs lay on the cart; their legs and arms projecting over the sideboard." [39]
Nevada State Journal, May 14, 1946. "We saw the notorious concentration camp at Dachau and we saw many of the others. ”

“ Dachau and the other death camps, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Treblinka and the others, were the machinery used by the Nazi regime to perpetrate the Holocaust-the systematic, state-sponsored extermination of six million Jews and the murders of millions of other people. The Holocaust was a crime virtually without equal in history. It has left deep moral scars on all humankind. No one who participated in the liberation of those camps or who knows their history can ever forget them-least of all the 250,000 survivors who found a home and built a new life in this country after the war. ”

“ Through the police formations that are before you accused as criminal organizations, the Nazi Party leaders, aided at some point in their basic and notorious purpose by each of the individual defendants, instituted a reign of terror. These espionage and police organizations were utilized to hunt down every form of opposition and to penalize every nonconformity. These organizations early founded and administered concentration camps—Buchenwald in 1933, Dachau in 1934. But these notorious names were not alone. Concentration camps came to dot the German map and to number scores. ”

“ This in turn is necessary because we stand or die with this leading blood of Germany; and if the good blood is not reproduced, we will not be able to rule the world.”
One final aspect of SS control over concentration camps remains to be mentioned. That is its direction of the program of biological experiments on human beings, which was carried on in the camps. Just a few days ago another military tribunal passed judgment on some of those who participated in the experiments at Dachau. ”

“ The treatment in the labor training camps will have to be in accordance with, the severity of the offense. It is suitable, e.g., to make obstinate shirkers work in the stone-quarries of the Mauthausen camp. By a special decree, to the heads of SS-Deathshead Units and concentration camps, I have ordered that the treatment of these persons under protective custody be undertaken in a concentration camp. ”

“ It is common knowledge that the anguish of the concentration camp was spread, not only over the Continent of Europe, but over all the world. Even today all over the world people are still seeking word of their friends and relatives who vanished into the Nazi concentration camps and left no trace behind. ”

“ The concentration camps to which people were sent included Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrueck, Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Flossenburg, and Theresienstadt. Nationalities included Czech, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Corsican, Lithuanian, Greek, and Jew. Grounds included “refusal to work;” “religious propaganda;” “sex relations with PWs;” “communist statements;” “loafing on job;” “working against the Reich;” “spreading of rumors detrimental to morale;” ”

“ In the case of Poles employed on farms in Germany, the employers were given authority to inflict corporal punishment and were ordered, if possible, to house them in stables, not in their own homes. They were subject to constant supervision by the Gestapo and the SS, and if they attempted to leave their jobs they were sent to correction camps or concentration camps. The concentration camps were also used to increase the supply of labor. Concentration camp commanders were ordered to work their prisoners to the limits of their physical power. ”

“ For these experiments Auschwitz is in every respect better adapted than Dachau, for the climate is colder there and, as the camp area is larger, less attention will be attracted. The victims yell when they are being frozen. ”

“ Knowledge of, participation in, and responsibility for these atrocious crimes on the part of the defendants here charged will be clearly shown by the evidence.
B. Freezing Experiments The deep interest of the German Air Force in capitalizing on the availability of inmates of concentration camps for experimental purposes is even more apparent in the case of the freezing experiments. These, too, were conducted at Dachau. ”

“ At the Auschwitz concentration camp, evil found willing servants and innocent victims. For almost 5 years, Auschwitz was a factory for murder where more than a million lives were taken. It is a sobering reminder of the power of evil and the need for people to oppose evil wherever it exists. It is a reminder that when we find anti-Semitism, we must come together to fight it. ”

“ Besides, it is unworthy to put the German worker and the German moral conception of work in the same category as this pack of traitors. To an inmate of a concentration camp and to a Jew, work is not a mark of nobility. Things cannot be permitted to reach the point where inmates of concentration camps and Jews become articles in demand. It is absolutely essential that all concentration camp inmates and Jews working on building sites be kept apart from the remainder of the workers, including foreigners. ”

“ The overall question which I have to decide is whether the available evidence, considered in its totality, would convince any objective and reasonable historian that Auschwitz was not merely one of the many concentration or labour camps established by the Nazi regime but that it also served as a death or extermination camp, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were systematically put to death in gas chambers over the period from late 1941 until 1944. ”

“ We feel that no argument, no particular argument, is necessary to support our statement that the Nazi conspirators used these concentration camps and the related instruments of terror in them to commit Crimes against Humanity and to commit War Crimes. ”

“ The Prosecution hold you responsible for the commitment of politically and racially undesirable persons into concentration camps. How many concentration camps became known to you after your appointment as Chief of the RSHA?
KALTENBRUNNER: At the time of my appointment I knew three concentration camps. At the end of my official activity there were 12 in the entire Reich.
DR. KAUFFMANN: How many were there in all?
KALTENBRUNNER: There was a thirteenth. That was the SS prison camp near Danzig. There were altogether thirteen concentration camps in the Reich. ”

“ They fabricated the border incidents which Hitler used as an excuse for attacking Poland.
They murdered hundreds of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children by the infamous Einsatz groups.
They removed Jews, political leaders, and scientists from prisoner-of-war camps and murdered them.
They took recaptured prisoners of war to concentration camps and murdered them.
They established and classified the concentration camps and sent thousands of people into them for extermination and slave labor. ”

“ All Jews and Gypsies, Poles having to serve 3-4 years of penal servitude, and Czechs and Germans sentenced to death, to penal servitude for life, or to security custody (Sicherungsverwahrung) . The idea of exterminating them by work is the best. . . .”
We stress this last phrase which shows, even in the heart of the German Government itself, the will to “exterminate by work.”
The last document that we shall submit with regard to the concentration camps is Document F-662, which becomes Exhibit Number RF-390, Pages 77 and 78, second document book. ”