FULL PENALTY

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 July 1946, Page 7

FULL PENALTY

RUSSIAN DEMAND AT NUREMBERG NAZI POLICY CONDEMNED (Rec. 11.20 a.m.) NUREMBERG, July 29. The Russian prosecutor, Mr. Rudenko, began a 30,000-word speech before the War Crimes Tribunal this afternoon. He said that nations were for the first time trying those who had inundated vast expanses of the earth with blood, annihilated’millions of innocent persons, including aged people and also women and children, with a system of tortures, destroyed cultural treasures and, with a wild claim to the mastery of the wprlcl, had hurled it into an abyss of un-heard-of calamities. “Mankind calls these criminals to account. Not a single deed of which the defendants have been accused has been left without verification, he said. ' , 4 Mr. Rudenko referred scornfully to “the band of wild’ criminals” who, over many years, had committed monstrous crimes. All that - the defendants could say in their defence was that they themselves did not commit the crimes with their own hands. , “Their henchmen did the dirty work while the defendants had only to give orders which were incontestably obeyed. If the subordinates of Kaltenbrunner exterminated people in murder vans, these vans were built at the Daimler-Benz works; if Hoess, commandant of the Auschwitz camp, pulled out gold teeth from the dead, they might say Funk opened special safes in the Reichsbank in which to keep them. Between the defendants and the direct perpetrators of murder and torture there is only a difference of rank and scope of action,”- he concluded.