As a result of the economic plundering of Belgium between 1940 and 1944 the damage suffered amounted to 175 billions of Belgian francs.
During the occupation of the Eastern Countries the German Government and the German High Command carried out, as a systematic policy, a continuous course of plunder and destruction including:—
On the territory of the Soviet Union the Nazi conspirators destroyed or severely damaged 1,710 cities and more than 70,000 villages and hamlets, more than 6,000,000 buildings and made homeless about 25,000,000 persons.
Among the cities which suffered most destruction are Stalingrad, Sevastopol, Kiev, Minsk, Odessa, Smolensk, Novgorod, Pskov, Orel, Kharkov, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, Stalino and Leningrad.
As is evident from an official memorandum of the German command, the Nazi conspirators planned the complete annihilation of entire Soviet cities. In completely secret order of the Chief of the Naval Staff (Staff Ia No. 1601/41, dated 29, IX, 1941), addressed only to Staff officers, it was said:
“The Fuehrer has decided to erase from the face of the earth St. Petersburgh. The existence of this large city will have no further interest after Soviet Russia is destroyed. Finland has also said that the existence of this city on her new border is not desirable from her point of view. The original request of the Navy that docks, harbor, etc. necessary for the fleet be preserved—is known to the Supreme Commander of the Military Forces, but the basic principles of carrying out operations against St. Petersburgh do not make it possible to satisfy this request.
It is proposed to approach near to the city and to destroy it with the aid of an artillery barrage from weapons of different calibres and with long air attacks.
The problem of the life of the population and the provisioning of them is a problem which cannot and must not be decided by us.
In this war * * * we are not interested in preserving even a part of the population of this large city.”
The Germans destroyed 427 museums, among them the wealthy museums of Leningrad, Smolensk, Stalingrad, Novgorod, Poltava and others.
In Pyatigorsk the art objects brought there from the Rostov museum were seized.
The losses suffered by the coal mining industry alone in the Stalin Region amount to 2,000,000,000 rubles. There was colossal destruction of industrial establishments in Makerevka, Carlovka, Yenakievo, Konstantinovka, Mariupol, from which most of the machinery and factories were removed.