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Show FRIGHTFULNESS IN PRISONS 13 El H 13 13 S3 H REPRISALS ADD TO HORRORS Arrows tipped with nails were shot at the prisoners hy little town boys. lip c British Officers Placed in Jails in Retaliation for Treatment of Submarine Prisoners in England. . By JAMES W. GERARD, American Ambassador to the German Imperial Court, July 23, 1913, to Feb ruary 4, 1917. Copyright, 1917, by the Public Ledger Company. IT was the policy of the Germans to ; put some prisoners of each nation ! in each camp. This was probably so that no claim could be made that the prisoners from one nation among the allies Were treated better or worse than the prisoners from another an-other nation. Iu the beginning of the war the Germans Ger-mans were surprised by the great number num-ber of prisoners taken, and had made no adequate preparations for their reception. re-ception. Clothing and blankets were woefully wanting; so that I immediately immediate-ly bought what I could in the way of underclothes and blankets at the large department stores of Berlin and the wholesalers, and sent these to the ! camps where the British prisoners were j confined. T also sent to the Doeberitz camp articles such as sticks for wound-j wound-j ed men who were recovering and crutches and even eggs and other nourishing nour-ishing delicacies for the sick. At first the prisoners were not com- pelled to work to any great exteut, but at the time I left Germany tho two million prisoners of war were materially material-ly assisting the carrying on of the agriculture ag-riculture and industries of the empire. The League of Mercy of New York having telegraphed me in' 1014 asking in what way funds could" best be used in the war, I suggested io answer that fuud3 for the prisoners of war were urgently needed. Many newspapers poked fun at me for this suggestion, and one bright editor said, if the Germans Ger-mans did not treat' their prisoners properly prop-erly that they should be mado tol John R. Mott's Work. Of course, unless this particular editor edi-tor had sailed up the Spree in a canoe and bombarded the royal palace, I know of no other way of "making" the Germans Ger-mans do anything. The idea,' however, of doing some work for the prisoners of war was taken up by the Young (Continued on Page Thirteen.) . j "My Four Years in Germany" (Continued frcm r?.e On? ren '5 christian association. Dr. John R. Molt was at the biad of this work ami was most ably and devotedly assisted as-sisted liy the Rev. Archibald C. llarte. t shall give an account of their splendid splen-did work in a chapter devoted to the charitable work of the war. At only one town in Germany was any interest in the fate of the prisoners prison-ers of war evinced. This was, t am glad to say, in the quaint university town of Gottingen. 1 visited this camp with Mr. Hnrte in April of lfll") to attend the opening of the first Young Men's Christian association camp building in Germany. The camp was commanded by Colonel Bogen, an mmmmmmgmm ' The prisoners made signs that they were suffering from hunger and thirst. officer strict in his discipline, but, as all the prisoners admitted, just in his dealings with , them. There were, as I recall, about 7000 prisoners in this camp, Russian, French, Belgian and English. En-glish. ' ' A Model Prison Camp. It is a pity that the methods of Colonel Colo-nel Bogen and his arrangements for camp buildings, etc., were Dot copied in other camps in Germany. Here, as I bave said, the civil population took some interest in the fate of the unfortunate unfor-tunate prisoners within their gates, led in this by several professors in the uni- versity. The most active of these professors pro-fessors was Professor Stange, who, working with a French lawyer who had been captured near Arras while id the Red Cross, provided a library for the prisoners and otherwise helped them. Of course, these charitable acts of Professor Pro-fessor Stange did not find favor with many of his fellow townsmen of Gottingen Gottin-gen and he was not surprised when he awoke one morning to find that during the night his house had been painted red, white and blue, the colors of France, England and America. I heard of 'so many instauces of the annoyance of prisoners by the civil population that I was quite pleased one day to read a paragraph in the official offi-cial newspaper, the North German Gazette, Ga-zette, which ran somewhat as follows: The following inhabitants of (naming n, small town near the borders bor-ders of Denmark), having becu guilty of improper conduct toward prisoners of war, have been sentenced sen-tenced to" the following terms of " imprisonment and to the following fines and their names are printed here in order that they may be held up to the contempt ,of all future generations of Germans. And then followed a list of names and terms of imprisonment and fines. T thought that this was splendid, that the German government had at last been aroused to the necessity of protecting pro-tecting their prisoners of war from the annoyances of the civil population, and I wrote to our consul at Kiel and asked him to investigate the case. Official Hate. From him I learned that some unfortunate un-fortunate prisoners passing through the town (in a part of Germany inhabited by Scandinavians), had made signs that they were suffering from hunger and thirst; that some of the kind-hearted people among the Scandinavian population popu-lation had given them something to eat 1 and drink, and for this they were condemned con-demned to fiues, to prison and to have their names held up to the contempt of Germans for all time. I do not know of any one thing that can give a better idea of the official hate for the nations with which Ger- ; many was at war than this. The day after visiting the camp at Gottingen T visited the officers' ramp, situated in the town of Hanover Mun- : den. Hern about S'O officers, of whom onlv thirteen were British, were con- ; fined in an old factory building situated situ-ated on the bank of the river below the town. The Russian officers handed mc I some arrows tipped with nails which j had been shot at them by the kind hearted little town boys, and the British Brit-ish pointed out to me the filthv conditions condi-tions of the camp. j In this. as. unfori unat civ. in many j other camps, the inclination sernird to he to treat the otfircrs not as captured .officers and gentlemen, but :is run- Ivi.'ts-. I nri!e a Vi-; t:iik r.:'- I the commander of this camp before i leaving and he afterward took violent exception to the report which I made upon his camp. However, I am pleased to say that he reformed, as it were, and I was informed by my inspectors that he had finally made his camp one of the best in Germany. Much as I should have liked to, I could not spend much Time myself in visiting-the prison camps, many duties and frequent crises kept me in Berlin, but members of the embassy were always al-ways traveling in this work of camp inspection. For some time my reports were published pub-lished in parliamentary "White Fa- pers, " but in the enl our government found that the publication of these reports re-ports irritated the Germans to such a degree that tho British government was requested not to publish them any more. Copies of the reports were always sent by me both to Washington and to London, Lon-don, and handed to the Berlin foreign office. Reprisals Over Prisoners. While Wi,nston Churchill was at the head of the British admiralty, it was stated that the German submarine prisoners pris-oners would not be treated as ordinary prisoners of war, but would be put in a place by themselves on the ground that they were pirates and murderers and not entitled to the treatment accorded ac-corded in general to prisoners of war. Great indignation was excited by this in Germany; the German government immediately seized thirty-seven officers, picking those whom they supposed were related to the most prominent families in England, and placed them in solitary confinement. A few were confined in this way in Cologne, but the majority-were majority-were put in the ordinary jails of Magdeburg Mag-deburg and Burg. As soon as I heard of this, accompanied accom-panied by Mr. Charles H. Russell, Jr., of my staff, I went to Magdeburg, using us-ing my ordinary pass for the visiting of prisoners. The German authorities told me afterward that if they had known I was going to make this visit they would not have, permitted it, but on this occasion the corps commander system worked for nie. Accompanied by an adjutaut in peace times a local lawyer law-yer from the corps commander's office of-fice in Magdeburg, and other officers, I visited these British officers in their cells in the common jail at Magdeburg. They were in absolutely solitary confinement, con-finement, each in a small cell about seven sev-en feet long and four feet wide. Some cells were a little larger, and the prisoners pris-oners ''were allowed only one hour's exercise ex-ercise a day in the courtyard of the prison. The food given them was not bad, but the close confinement was very tryiug, especially to Lieutenant. Gos-chen, Gos-chen, son of the former ambassador to Germany, who had been wounded and in the hospital at Douai. Among them t found an old acquaintance, Captain Robin Grey, who had been often in New York. The German authorities agreed to correct cor-rect several minor matters of which the officers complained and then we went to the neighboring town of Burg, where other officers were confined in the same manner and under similar conditions in the ordinary jail. After visiting these prisoners and obtaining for them from the authorities some modifications of the rules which had been established, we visited tho regular officers' camp at Burg. Officers' Prison at Burg. This was at that time what I should call a bad camp, crowded and with no space for recreation. Later conditions were improved and more ground allowed al-lowed to the prisoners for games and recreation. At the time of my first visit I found that the commander, a polite but peppery officer, was in civil life a jude of the supreme court at Leipzig, the highest court in the empire. As I had been a judge in the state of New York we foregathered and adjourned for lunch with his staff to the hotel in Bur-. ' Alter t hur.-hill left the British admiralty ad-miralty his successor re eiod his rul-i rul-i ng. rd the srd-iua'-ire prisoners were ila. -cd in the o:dinniv confinement ot were assured of this the thirty-sevcu officers who had been in repri:-a! placed in solitary confinement were sent back to ordinary camps. In fact, in most cases T managed to get the Germans to send them to what were called "good1' camps. Release of Goschen. Lieutenant Goschen, however, became quite ill and was taken to the hospital in Magdeburg. At the time of his capture cap-ture the Germans had told me in answer an-swer to my inquiries that he was suffering suf-fering from a blow- on the head with the butt end of a rifle, but an X-ray examination exam-ination at Magdeburg showed that fragments frag-ments of a bullet had penetrated his brain and that he was, therefore, hardly hard-ly a fit subject to be chosen as one of the reprisal prisoners. I told Yon Ja-gow Ja-gow that I thought it, in the first place, a violation of all diplomatic courtesy to pick out the son or the former ambassador ambas-sador to Germany as a subject for reprisals, re-prisals, and, secondly, in picking him that they had taken a wounded man; that Ihe fact that they did not -know-that he had fragments of a bullet in his brain made the situation even worse, because that ignorance was the result of the want of a proper examination examina-tion in the German hospitals, and I insisted, in-sisted, because of this manifestly unfair treatment which had undoubtedly caused the very serious condition of Lieutenant Goschen, that he should be returned to England in the exchange of those who were badly wounded. 1 am pleased to say that Voi Jagow 6aw my point of view and finally secured permission for Lieutenant Goschen to leave for England. Dr. Ohnesorg, one of our assistant naval attaches, went with him to England En-gland on account of the seriousness of his condition, and I am very glad to hear from his father that he arrived ar-rived safely iii London. |