rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

854 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHThe clothing of the Eastern workers was likewise completely inadequate.They worked and slept in the same clothing in which theyhad arrived from the East. Virtually all of them had no overcoatsand were compelled to use their blankets as coats in cold and rainyweather. In view of the shortage of shoes many workers were forcedto go to work in their bare feet, even in winter . . .Sanitary conditions were atrocious. At Kramerplatz only ten children’stoilets were available for 1,200 inhabitants . . . Excretion contaminatedthe entire floors of these lavatories . . . The Tartars andKirghiz suffered most; they collapsed like flies [from] bad housing,the poor quality and insufficient quantity of food, overwork and insufficientrest.These workers were likewise afflicted with spotted fever. Lice, thecarrier of the disease, together with countless fleas, bugs and othervermin tortured the inhabitants of these camps . . . At times thewater supply at the camps was shut off for periods of from eight tofourteen days . . .On the whole, Western slave workers fared better than those from the East– the latter being considered by the Germans as mere scum. But the differencewas only relative, as Dr. Jaeger found at one of Krupp’s work camps occupiedby French prisoners of war in Nogerratstrasse at Essen.Its inhabitants were kept for nearly half a year in dog kennels, urinalsand in old baking houses. The dog kennels were three feet high,nine feet long, six feet wide. Five men slept in each of them. Theprisoners had to crawl into these kennels on all fours . . . There wasno water in the camp. ∗1174Some two and a half million slave laborers – mostly Slavs and Italians – wereassigned to farm work in Germany and though their life from the very force ofcircumstances was better than that of those in the city factories it was far fromideal – or even humane. A captured directive on the ”Treatment of Foreign∗ Besides obtaining thousands of slave laborers, both civilians and prisoners of war for itsfactories in Germany, the Krupp firm also built a large fuse factory at the extermination campat Auschwitz, where Jews were worked to exhaustion and then gassed to death.Baron Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the chairman of the board, was indicted asa major war criminal at Nuremberg (along with Goering, et al.) but because of his ”physicaland mental condition” (he had had a stroke and had faded into senility), he was not tried. Hedied on January 16, 1950. An effort was made by the prosecution to try in his stead his son,Alfried, who had acquired sole ownership of the company in 1943, but the tribunal deniedthis.Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was subsequently tried before a Nuremberg militarytribunal (a purely American court) along with nine directors of the firm in the United States v.Alfried Krupp et al. case. On July 31, 1948, he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonmentand confiscation of all his property. He was released from Landsberg prison (where Hitlerhad served his sentence in 1924) on February 4, 1951, in a general amnesty issued by JohnJ. McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner. Not only was the confiscation of his corporateproperty annulled but his personal fortune of some $10,000,000 was returned to him. TheAllied governments had ordered the breakup of the vast Krupp empire but Alfried Krupp,who took over the active management of the firm after his release from prison, evaded theorder and at the time of writing (1959) announced, with the approval of the Bonn government,that not only would the company not be broken up but that it was acquiring new industries.