Victims of the People’s Court, Special Courts, and civil courts martial were judicially murdered by certain of the defendants using a variety of legalistic artifices, all of which had the obvious common denominator of a zealous desire to exterminate even trifling activity not even deemed misdemeanors by the community of civilized nations. One such artifice frequently employed was a subjective, conclusive assumption by the judges and prosecutors of proof of the very issues tried. For example, after the Nazi importation of forced labor from the occupied East had collected large numbers of foreign workers within the Reich at various war jobs against their will, escape efforts by such workers across Reich frontiers to their homeland or elsewhere became frequent. These escapees, when apprehended by border officials, were normally handed over to the People’s Court for trial for preparation of high treason, which bore a mandatory sentence of death. The applicable section of the German criminal code defined high treason in this context “as an attempt to incorporate by violence or by threat of violence the German territory in its entirety or in part into a foreign State or to detach from the Reich territory belonging to the Reich.” The escapees were indicted, inconceivable as it may be, for the violation of this provision. In grasping for some legal straw upon which to base a conviction on these grounds, the courts created a whole-cloth assumption that such escapees were heading through Switzerland, or wherever they might have been picked up, in an effort to join some military legion hostile to the Reich. The Reich prosecutors were drawn into this scheme. Walter Brem, a former assistant to the chief Reich prosecutor at the People’s Court, described the situation thus (_NG-316, Pros. Ex. 79_): “The majority of these cases concerned foreign laborers who wanted to look for a job in Switzerland because of inadequate salaries and insufficient food rations in the Reich. The prosecution, however, claimed that foreign legions were being established in Switzerland and that every foreigner wanting to cross the border illegally did so in order to join up with such legions. I was ordered by the prosecutor of the People’s Court to connect the defendants somehow with the foreign legions. I have never received a positive answer about those alleged organizations, and the whole concept was known to the foreigners only as a rumor. Individual proof of any acts of high treason could not be established; however, the prosecution based its claims on the assumption that such foreign laborers would behave in a hostile manner against Germany once given the opportunity.”