Finally the note quotes a number of letters from home to the German soldiers on the Eastern Front, which describe the humiliation to which the Soviet workers were subjected. I will quote a passage from one of such letters. A letter from his mother in Chemnitz was found on the body of Wilhelm Bock, killed German private, of the 221st German Infantry Division. This letter reads:
“Many Russian women and girls are working at the Astra Works. They are compelled to work 14 and more hours a day. Of course, they receive no pay whatever. They go to and from the factory under escort. The Russians literally drop from exhaustion. The guards often whip them. They have no right to complain about the bad food or ill-treatment. The other day my neighbor obtained a servant. She paid some money at an office and was given the opportunity to choose any woman she pleased from a number here from Russia.”
Letters also mention mass suicides of Russian women and men.
The note ends with a declaration of the Soviet Government, which states that it places responsibility for atrocities in this domain on the leading Hitlerite clique and the High Command of the German fascist Army:
“The Soviet Government also places full responsibility for the above enumerated crimes upon the Hitlerite officials who are engaged in recruiting, abducting, transporting in camps, selling into slavery, and inhumanly exploiting peaceful Soviet civilians who have been forcibly transported from their native land to Germany. . . . The Soviet Government holds that stern responsibility should be borne by such already exposed criminals as . . . Fritz Sauckel and . . . Alfred Rosenberg.”
“The Soviet Government expresses the conviction that all the Governments concerned are unanimous on the point that the Hitler Government and its agents must bear full responsibility and receive stern punishment for the monstrous crimes they have committed, for the privation and suffering they have inflicted upon millions of peaceful citizens who have been forcibly deported into German fascist slavery.”
This is the end of People’s Commissar Molotov’s note. Kindly allow me to close my statement also with these words.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will now adjourn.