The Soviet Prosecution will present to the Tribunal actual documents and facts in this connection. The fascist conspirators planned the extermination to the last man of the Jewish population of the world and carried out this extermination throughout the whole of their conspiratorial activity from 1933 onwards.
My American colleague has already quoted Hitler’s statement of 24 February 1942, that “the Jews will be annihilated.” In a speech by the Defendant Frank, published in the _Kraków Gazette_ on 18 August 1942, it is stated:
“Anyone who passes through Kraków, Lvov, Warsaw, Radom, or Lublin today must in all fairness admit that the efforts of the German administration have been crowned with real success, as one now sees hardly any Jews.”
The bestial annihilation of the Jewish population took place in the Ukraine, in Bielorussia, and in the Baltic States. In the town of Riga some 80,000 Jews lived before the German occupation. At the moment of the liberation of Riga by the Red Army there were 140 Jews left there.
It is impossible to enumerate in an opening statement the crimes committed by the defendants against humanity. The Soviet Prosecution has at its disposal considerable documentary material which will be presented to the Tribunal.
If Your Honors please, I here appear as the representative of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, which bore the main brunt of the blows of the fascist invaders and which vastly contributed to the smashing of Hitlerite Germany and its satellites. On behalf of the Soviet Union, I charge the defendants on all the counts enumerated in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal.
Together with the Chief Prosecutors of the United States of America, Great Britain, and France, I charge the defendants with having prepared and carried out a perfidious attack on the peoples of my country and on all freedom-loving nations.
I accuse them of the fact that, having initiated a world war, they, in violation of the fundamental rules of international law and of the treaties to which they were signatories, turned war into an instrument of extermination of peaceful citizens—an instrument of plunder, violence, and pillage.
I accuse the defendants of the fact that, having proclaimed themselves to be the representatives of the “master race,” a thing which they have invented, they set up, wherever their domination spread, an arbitrary regime of tyranny; a regime founded on the disregard for the elementary principles of humanity.