THE PRESIDENT: Could you tell me what evidence you have for your figures of calories?
M. GERTHOFFER: I am going to show you this at the end of my presentation. It is a report of a professor at the Medical School of Paris who has been specially commissioned by the Dean of the University to make a report on the results of undernourishment. I will quote it at the end of my statement. I am almost there.
The results of this economic spoliation will be felt for an indefinite length of time. The exhaustion is such that, despite the generous aid brought by the United Nations, the situation of the occupied countries, taken as a whole, is still alarming. In fact, the complete absence of stocks, the insufficiency of the means of production and of transport, the reduction of livestock and the economic disorganization, do not permit the allotting of sufficient rations at this time. This poverty, which strikes all occupied countries, can disappear only gradually over a long period of time, the length of which no one can yet determine.
If in certain rich agricultural regions the producers were able during the occupation to have and still do have a privileged situation from the point of view of food supply, the same is not true in the poorer regions nor in urban districts. If we consider that in France the urban population is somewhat more numerous than the rural population, we can state clearly that the great majority of the French population was subject to and still remains subject to a food regime definitely insufficient.
Professor Guy Laroche, delegated by the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris to study the consequences of undernourishment in France as a result of German requisitions, has just sent a report on this question.
I do not wish to prolong my explanation by reading the entire report. I shall ask the Tribunal’s permission to quote the conclusion, which I submit as Document Number RF-264(bis). I received the whole report only a few days ago. It is submitted in its entirety, but I have not been able to have 50 copies made of it. Two copies have been made and are being submitted. Here are Dr. Laroche’s conclusions:
“We see how great the crime of rationing was, which was imposed by the Germans upon the French during the occupation period from 1940 to 1944. It is difficult to give exact figures for the number of human lives lost due to excessive rationing. We would need general statistics and these we have been unable to establish.
“Nevertheless, without overestimating, we may well believe that, including patients in institutions, the loss of human life from 1940 to 1944 reached at least 150,000 persons. We must add a great number of cases which were not fatal, of physical and mental decline often incurable, of retarded development in children, and so forth.
“We think that three conclusions can be drawn from this report, which of course is incomplete:
“1.) The German occupation authorities deliberately sacrificed the lives of patients in institutions and hospitals.
“2.) From the way everything happened it seemed as if they had wished to organize, in a rational and scientific fashion, the decline of the health of adolescents and adults.
“3.) Suckling babies and young children received a normal ration; it is probable that this privileged position is explained by the fact that the Nazi leaders hoped to spread their doctrine more easily among beings who would not have known any other conditions of life and who would, because of a planned education, have accepted their doctrine, for they knew they could not expect to convince adolescents and adults except through force.”
The report is signed by Professor Guy Laroche.
This report, gentlemen, has attached to it a photograph, which you will find at the end of the document book. I beg to hand it to you. The unfortunate beings that you see in that picture are not the victims of a concentration or reprisal camp. They are simply the patients of an asylum in the outskirts of Paris who fell into this state of physical weakness as a result of undernourishment. If these men had had the diet of the asylum prior to rationing, they would have been as strong as normal people. Unfortunately for them they were reduced to the official rationing and were unable to obtain the slightest supplement.
Do not let adversaries say: “But the German people are just as badly off!”
I should reply that, in the first place, this is not true. The German did not suffer cold for four years; he was not undernourished. On the contrary, he was well-fed, warmly clothed, warmly housed, with products stolen from the occupied countries, leaving only the minimum necessary for existence for the peoples of these countries.
Remember, gentlemen, the words of Göring when he said: “If famine is to reign, it will not reign in Germany.”
Secondly I should say to my adversaries if they made such an objection: The Germans and their Nazi leaders wanted the war which they launched, but they had no right to starve other peoples in order to carry out their attempt at world domination. If today they are in a difficult situation, it is the result of their own behavior; and they seem to me to have no right to take recourse to the famous sentence: “I did not want that.”
I am coming to the end of my statement. If you will permit me, gentlemen, I will conclude in two minutes the whole of this presentation by reminding the Tribunal in a few words what the premeditated crime was, of which the German leaders have been accused, from the economic point of view.
The application of racial and living space theories was bound to engender an economic situation which could not be solved and force the Nazi leaders to war.
In a modern society because of the division of labor, of its concentration, and of its scientific organization, the concept of national capital takes on more and more a primary importance, whatever may be the social principles of its distribution between nationals, or its possession in all or in part by states.
Now, a national capital, public or private, is constituted by the joint effort of the labor and the savings of successive generations.
Saving, or the putting into reserve of the products of labor as a result of deprivations freely consented to, must exist in proportion to the needs of the concentration of the industrial enterprises of the country.
In Germany, a country highly-industrialized, this equilibrium did not exist. In fact, the expenditures, private or public, of that country surpassed its means; saving was insufficient. The establishment of a system of obligatory savings was formulated only through the creation of new taxes and has never replaced true savings.
As a result of the war of 1914-1918, after having freed herself of the burden of reparations (and I must point out that two-thirds of the sum remained charged to France as far as this country is concerned), Germany, who had established her gold reserve in 1926, began a policy of foreign loans and spent without counting the cost. Finding it impossible to keep her agreements, she found no more creditors.
After Hitler’s accession to power her policy became more definite. She isolated herself in a closed economic system, utilizing all her resources for the preparation of a war which would permit her, or at least that is what she hoped, to take through force the property of her western neighbors and then to turn against the Soviet Union in the hope of exploiting, for her profit, the immense wealth of that great country. It is the application of the theories formulated in Mein Kampf, which had as a corollary the enslavement and then the extermination of the populations of conquered countries.
In the course of the occupation the invaded nations were systematically pillaged and brutally enslaved; and this would have permitted Germany to obtain her war aims, that is to say, to take the patrimony of the invaded countries and to exterminate their populations gradually, if the valor of the United Nations had not delivered them. Instead of becoming enriched from the looted property, Germany had to sink it into a war which she had provoked, right up to the very moment of her collapse.
Such actions, knowingly perpetrated and executed by the German leaders contrary to international law and particularly contrary to the Hague Convention, as well as the general principles of penal law in force in all civilized nations, constitute War Crimes for which they must answer before your high jurisdiction.
Mr.