Prof. Stange.
To the great work of Prof. Stange, of Göttingen, I have once or twice alluded. He directs all the instruction given in the Göttingen camp, attends daily, gives lectures and superintends the library. He experienced the usual difficulties of any civilian who tries to practice Christianity in war-time. “One great German newspaper wrote with indignation that the prisoners in the Göttingen Camp had as good a time as if they were at a health resort.” Doubtless this paper, like some others, contrasted the (rumoured) abominable treatment of German prisoners by their enemies with the too great indulgence shown to prisoners in Germany. But Prof. Stange is not abashed. “No internment camp,” he writes, “can be compared with a ‘holiday resort.’ In spite of everything that may be done for the prisoners, internment is and remains always a very hard lot. In the Göttingen camp, too, many a prisoner needs not only the exertion of his whole strength, but help as well to make the endurance of his lot physically and spiritually possible.” Stange is one of those who have learned to envisage the anxieties, the loneliness, the uncertainty, the ennui of the prisoner, and the terrible enervation of long months, and, alas, years of confinement. In this, as in so many circumstances of the war, it is the more sensitive and developed minds that suffer most, and are most easily destroyed, those minds that are indispensable in the building of any worthy future.
Prof. Stange quite frankly acknowledges to a war prejudice against the English. But when he found their great need of help, his prejudices melted away, and he soon engaged in helping them too with books classes, and other means of activity.
Prof. Stange recognises that such work for enemy prisoners helps towards better treatment of their own prisoners abroad, but, he adds, “It must certainly be emphatically stated that we in Göttingen never took up our work for the prisoners with this object. What compelled us to work was simply and entirely the great distress and need of the prisoners themselves.” (P. 36. The extracts are from Prof. Stange’s pamphlet on Göttingen Camp.)