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country in the beginning of 1943. The technique was always the same. The day after some at of sabotage or any other action committed by the partisans near a village, the German troops would appear in the village. The inhabitants would be rounded up in the central square or some other place suitable for the occasion, to listen to a public announcement, but in reality to be killed on the spot by machine gun fire. After this the Germans either burned the villages or else, in some cases, they would first plunder a village and then open fire on it. The inhabitants were killed openly in the streets, houses, and fields, regardless of age or sex. There were few cases when only the male population from the from the age of 16 years and over were executed. In other cases, when the men succeeded in hiding in the mountains, the Germans would execute the old men, women, and children who had remained in the villages, hoping that their age and their sex would protect them. The villages of Arachovo, Kalovryta, Gestamon, Klessoura, Kommeno, and Lissovouni may be considered as typical examples. Some villages were destroyed for the sole reason that they were located in some regions where partisans had been active.:

I omit the next sentence since it has a direct bearing on another text of the report. I continue my quotation:

I am now going over to the presentation of evidence of mass extermination of the peaceful population in the territory of the U.S.S.R. by the Germans.

As to the circumstances of the mass executions, we may now judge them not only by the testimony of eyewitnesses or of the perpetrators of the atrocities; we may, in part, judge them on the basis of the material collected by the legal and medical commission. I say “in part” because, as from 1943, fearing retribution for the crimes committed, the Hitlerites began to destroy the traces of their crimes. They exhumed and burned corpses, ground bones, and strewed the ashes on the fields; they also used the slag formed by the corpses cremated, as well as the bone flour, for repairing the roads and fertilizing the fields. But notwithstanding the efforts of the criminals to conceal the traces of their crimes, it was impossible to destroy all the corpses of the people murdered.

The first mass “action” of the Germans, when tens of thousands of innocent and peaceful people were murdered at a time, was the “Kiev action”. In order to realize the extent of these atrocities I refer Your Honors to a communication of the Extraordinary State Commission already submitted to the Tribunal as Document Number USSR-9. I quote from Page 238, on the reverse side of the

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... MIX HUMAN ASHES WITH MANURE AND SELL IT

.19 Feb. 46

this quotation on Page 66, reverse side, of the document book, second column of the text, Paragraph 6. I begin the quotation:

" The Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission has ascertained that during the 4 years' existence of the extermination camp at Maidanek the Hitlerite hangmen, following the direct order of their criminal government, exterminated by mass shooting and mass killing in gas chambers approximately 1.5 million persons: Soviet prisoners of war, prisoners of war of the former Polish Army, and nationals of various countries Poles, Frenchmen, Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, Croats, and a great number of Jews."

With this document I conclude that section of my statement which concerns the concentration camps and pass on to the last section entitled, "Concealment of Traces of Crimes."

During the period of their temporary military successes, the German fascist criminals did not bother themselves very much with concealing the trace of their crimes. They did not even consider it necessary to camouflage the burial grounds in which they hurled the bodies of the murdered persons after the shootings.

But after the defeat suffered by the Hitlerite war machine at Stalingrad, the situation changed. Fearing retaliation, the criminals began to take urgent measures to conceal the traces of their crimes. Where possible, they burned the corpses. Where this could not be done, the burial rounds were carefull camouflaged with moss or green foliage. The earth which covered the graves of those shot was smoothed out with special machines and with caterpillar tractors.

However, the main method adopted by the German fascist criminals for camouflaging their crimes was the burning of the corpses. The ashes from the burned bodies were strewn over the fields. The bones which had not been calcinated were crushed in special machines and mixed with manure for the preparation of fertilizers. In large camps the crushed bones of the victims were sold to the German firms to be transformed into superphosphates.

As proof of the enormous scale of the Hitlerites' criminal activity directed toward concealing the traces of their crimes, I shall submit to the Tribunal a series of documents. I will refer, first of all, to the communiqué of the Polish-Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on Maidanek. This document was submitted to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-29 (Document Number USSR-29). The part of the communique to which I refer will be found by the Tribunal on Page 65 of the document book, on the other side. Column 2 of the text, last paragraph. In order to save time, I will allow myself to summarize the contents of this document:

In the beginning of 1942 two ovens for the burning of corpses were built:

IMT VII

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