“In the villages liberated by the Red Army in the Rostov and Voroshilovgrad regions in the Ukraine, the peasants were plundered again and again by the invaders. As successive German army units passed through these areas each of them renewed their searches, lootings, arsons, and executions for failure to deliver up provisions. The same thing took place in the Moscow, Kalinin, Tula, Orel, Leningrad, and other regions, from which the remnants of the German troops are now being driven by the Red Army.”
In order to save time I shall not read the next paragraphs of this note, but shall give an account of them to the Tribunal in my own words. They contain a whole series of concrete facts of the looting of the peaceful population in different regions of the Soviet Union and the names of the victims as well as the list of such things and belongings as were taken from these peaceful citizens. Further, this note reads as follows:
“The marauding orgies of the German officers and soldiers have spread to all the Soviet areas they have seized. The German authorities have legitimatized marauding in their armies and encouraged looting and violence. The German Government sees in this practice the realization of their bandit principle that every German combatant must have ‘a personal interest in the war.’ Thus, in a confidential order of 17 July 1941, addressed to all commanders of propaganda squads in the German Army and discovered by Red Army units when the 68th German Infantry Division was routed, explicit instructions are given to foster in every officer and soldier of the German Army the feeling that he has a material interest in the war. Similar orders inciting the army to mass looting and murder of the civil population are also issued by the armies of the countries fighting on the German side.
“On the German-Soviet front, and especially in the vicinity of Moscow, more and more fascist officers and soldiers can be met dressed in pilfered clothes, their pockets crammed with stolen goods and their tanks stuffed with women’s and children’s wearing apparel torn from their victims’ bodies. The German Army is becoming more and more an army of ravenous thieves and marauders, who are looting and sacking flourishing towns and villages of the Soviet Union, ravaging and destroying the property and belongings of the laboring population of our villages and towns, the fruit of its honest toil. These are facts testifying to the extreme moral depravity and degeneracy of the Hitlerite Army, whose looting, thievery, and marauding have earned it the contempt and the curses of the entire Soviet nation.”