My colleagues have already proved that the attack on the U.S.S.R., as well as on other European countries, was planned and prepared beforehand by the criminal Hitlerite Government.
I shall submit to the Tribunal a number of the conspirators’ original documents, statements, and speeches, which in the aggregate will prove that the despoliation and plunder of private, public, and national property in the occupied territories was also premeditated, planned, and prepared on a large scale, and that thus, simultaneously with the development of their purely military and strategic plans of attack, the Hitlerites with the cold-blooded deliberateness of professional robbers and murderers also developed and prepared beforehand the plan of organized plunder and marauding, after having minutely and accurately calculated their future profits, their criminal gains, their robbers’ spoils.
The official report of the Czechoslovak Government on the crimes committed by the Hitlerites on the territory of Czechoslovakia, the first victim of German aggression, has already been submitted to the Tribunal as Exhibit Number USSR-60 (Document Number USSR-60).
In the third section of this report there is a short extract from an article by Ley, published on 30 January 1940 in the _Angriff_. I quote:
“It is our destiny to belong to a superior race. A lower race needs less room, less clothing, less food, and less culture, than a superior race.”
This promise, this program of action, found its concrete expression in the fact that the Hitlerite conspirators subjected all territories occupied by them to unrestrained plunder, highly varied in form and method and entirely shameless in its devastating results. The report of the Czechoslovak Government contains a large number of examples corroborating the corresponding counts of the Indictment.
I shall read this section into the record starting with the first paragraph on Page 72 of the Russian translation. I read:
“The German plan of campaign against Czechoslovakia was aimed not only against the republic as a political and military unit, but also against the very existence of the Czechoslovak people, who were to be robbed not only of all political rights and cultural life, but of their wealth and their financial and industrial resources.