CALLS KILLING DELIBERATE
“In the present war, however—and this is the gravest charge against the German army—the evidence shows that the killing of non-combatants was carried out to an extent for which no previous war between nations claiming to be civilized (for such cases as the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks on the Bulgarian Christians in 1876, and on the Armenian Christians in 1895 and 1896, do not belong to that category) furnishes any precedent. That this killing was done as part of a deliberate plan is clear from the facts hereinbefore set forth regarding Louvain, Aerschot, Dinant and other towns. The killing was done under orders in each place. It began at a certain fixed date. Some of the officers who carried out the work did it reluctantly, and said they were obeying directions from their chiefs. The same remarks apply to the destruction of property. House burning was part of the program; and villages, even large parts of a city, were given to the flames as part of the terrorizing policy.
“Citizens of neutral states who visited Belgium in December and January report that the German authorities do not deny that non-combatants were systematically killed in large numbers during the first weeks of the invasion, and this, so far as we know, has never been officially denied.
“The German government has, however, sought to justify these severities on the grounds of military necessity and has excused them as retaliation for cases in which civilians fired on German troops. There may have been cases in which such firing occurred, but no proof has ever been given, or, to our knowledge, attempted to be given, of such cases, nor of the stories of shocking outrages perpetrated by Belgian men and women on German soldiers. . . .
“We gladly record the instances where the evidence shows that humanity has not wholly disappeared from some members of the German army and that they realized that the responsible heads of that organization were employing them not in war but in butchery: ‘I am merely executing orders, and I should be shot if I did not execute them,’ said an officer to a witness at Louvain. At Brussels another officer said, ‘I have not done one hundredth part of what we have been ordered to do by the high German military authorities.’
“That these acts should have been perpetrated on the peaceful population of an unoffending country which was not at war with its invaders, but merely defending its own neutrality, guaranteed by the invading power, may excite amazement and even incredulity. It was with amazement and almost with incredulity that the commission first read the depositions relating to such acts. But when the evidence regarding Liège was followed by that regarding Aerschot, Louvain, Andenne, Dinant, and the other towns and villages, the cumulative effect of such a mass of concurrent testimony became irresistible, and we were driven to the conclusion that the things described had really happened. The question then arose how they could have happened.
“The explanation seems to be that these excesses were committed—in some cases ordered, in others allowed—on a system and in pursuance of a set purpose. That purpose was to strike terror into the civil population and dishearten the Belgian troops, so as to crush down resistance and extinguish the very spirit of self-defense. The pretext that civilians had fired upon the invading troops was used to justify not merely the shooting of individual franc-tireurs, but the murder of large numbers of innocent civilians, an act absolutely forbidden by the rules of civilized warfare.