I omit the rest of this page, and I pass on to Page 42:
“The poet’s tomb was found completely covered with refuse. Both stairways leading down to the grave were destroyed. The platform surrounding the grave was covered with refuse, rubble, wooden fragments of icons, and pieces of sheet metal.”
“The marble balustrade surrounding the platform was damaged by fragments of artillery shells and by bullets. The monument itself inclined at an angle of 10 to 12 degrees eastwards, as a result of a landslide following the shelling, and of the shocks caused by the explosions of German mines.
“The invaders knew perfectly well that, on entering the Pushkinskiye hills, the officers and soldiers of the Red Army would first of all visit the grave of the poet, and therefore converted it into a trap for the patriots. Approximately 3,000 mines were discovered and removed from the grounds of the monastery and its vicinity by the engineers of the Soviet Army. . . .”
The destruction of works of art and architecture in the towns of Pavlovsk, Tzarskoe-Selo, and Peterhof, figure among the worst anti-cultural crimes of the Hitlerites. The magnificent monuments of art and architecture in these towns, which had been turned into “museum towns,” are known throughout the civilized world. These art and architectural monuments were created in the course of 2 centuries. They commemorated a whole series of outstanding events in Russian history.
Celebrated Russian and foreign architects, sculptors, and artists created masterpieces which were kept in these “museum towns” and, together with valuable masterpieces of Russian and foreign art, they had been blown up, burned, robbed, or destroyed by the fascist vandals.
I read into the record Exhibit Number USSR-49 (Document Number USSR-49) which includes a statement of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union dated 3 September 1944. The excerpts which I shall quote, Your Honors, are on Pages 330-332 of the document book.
I omit the end of Page 43 and the whole of Page 44 of this statement, and begin my quotation in the middle of Page 45:
“At the time the German invaders broke into Petrodvoretz (in Peterhof) there still remained, after the evacuation, 34,214 museum exhibits (pictures, works of art, and sculptures), as well as 11,700 extremely valuable books from the palace libraries. The ground floor rooms of the Ekaterininsky and Alexandrovsky Palaces in the town of Pushkin contained assorted furniture suites of Russian and French workmanship of the middle of the 18th century, 600 items of artistic porcelain of the late 19th and 20th centuries, as well as a large number of marble busts, small sculptures, and about 35,000 volumes from the palace libraries.