PRISONERS IN GERMANY.
Every thirtieth person in Germany is a war prisoner. Every fifth man is a Russian.
In Germany there are now nearly 2,000,000 prisoners of war. In the summer of 1916 the Central Powers held 2,658,283 prisoners, and of this number 1,647,225 were held in Germany. This was before Roumania fell, and then the number was greatly increased.
They have 150 large prison camps and five hundred small prison camps in Germany, and there are hundreds of places where the working prisoners live. The largest camps are at Guben and Czersh, where the prisoners are mostly Russians. The camps at Zossen, Wunsdorf, Nuremberg and Ratisbon are also very large.
The camps are divided into military divisions, and they are run like real military camps. The common prisoners sleep in dormitories, and they are furnished with a straw mattress, a pillow and colored bed covers. The men must keep their own beds clean, and they are compelled to take a bath every day. Many of the prisoners are employed around the camp, some of them helping in the cooking and the baking. In a camp of 10,000 prisoners it is no easy task to get the meals ready.
The prisoners, especially on the east front, are compelled to be vaccinated against cholera, typhoid and small-pox, and every prisoner must be disinfected for lice and fleas, even his clothes. Every Russian prisoner must have his head shaved. Prisoners are employed as barbers.
A Street in Ruhleben, the English Prison Camp.
Every prisoner is allowed to write four postcards and two letters each month, and these letters are censored. All prisoners except the Russians receive many packages from their homes. In the Stuttgart camp, where the soldiers are mostly English and French, the twenty-four hundred prisoners receive on an average seventeen thousand packages each month. Every package is censored. No alcoholic drinks are allowed to be sent, and also no cartoons that would be offensive to the Germans.
Russian Prisoners Receiving Bread.
The English and French prisoners receive spending money from their families, and most of them are never without spending money for tobacco and beer. It goes much harder with the Russians whose families are too poor to send anything. That is one reason why the Russian prisoners are anxious to work.
Most of the Russian prisoners are employed in carrying the ashes out of the apartment houses, and the big burly fellows lift the great iron cans as though they were made of paper. These men are quite free, and they run their wagons without a guard. They are very well behaved, attending strictly to their own business and speaking to no one. It is verboten for the German people to speak to them, so of course they do not do it. The working Russian prisoners wear their soldier uniform, a brown coat, brown corduroy trousers and a brown cap with a green band. They have a black stripe sewed around their sleeve. This shows they are prisoners.
A Canteen in the Zossen Camp.
Last fall many of the prisoners were employed in cutting down trees in the Grunewald. A guard was always stationed near them. I was walking one day with a German who spoke Polish, when we came upon a group of prisoners. The German asked the Russians in Polish how they liked Berlin. "Sehr gut, aber—" (very good, but—) one of the fellows answered. Just then a German guard came from the top of the hill, and he told us to move on. In Germany, every time anything became truly interesting I was told to move on.
French Prisoners Gathering Wood.
A great many Russians work on the railroad tracks, and still others are employed in factories, gardening and working in the fields. Those that work in the factories are not employed in the explosive departments but are engaged in lifting heavy bars of metal and shells. In these factories the men are closely guarded, but the average Russian is very docile and easy to manage.
Very few English prisoners do any work, but many French prisoners are employed in factories and in the fields. They still wear their bright red trousers. In Dresden I saw a lot of these red-trousered fellows running around the streets loose. One prisoner had a little German child with him. She was a little girl of about four years of age, and she clung to his hand and seemed very fond of him.
Russian Prisoners Before Entering the Louse Disinfecting Place.
Russian Prisoners Coming Out of the Louse Disinfecting Place.
At Circus Busch last winter a great spectacular play was produced and as five hundred supers were needed for the show, men were taken from the prison camps to take part. There were English, French, Arabs and Turcos, all dressed in their own uniforms, but some of the prisoners had to take the part of German soldiers. They were dressed in the regular German uniform and they looked rather sheepish. Of course in the play the Germans won all of the battles, but there was a waiting list of prisoners who wanted jobs in the show. They were paid one mark a night. The theater management was responsible for the safety of the prisoners, and the theater was well guarded.
Two of the most interesting camps in Germany are the two near Berlin, the one at Zossen and that for the English at Ruhleben. The camp at Zossen is about an hour's ride from Berlin and can be seen from the train window on the way to Dresden. It is built in the open country and is a town of small houses. They have all kinds of prisoners here.
The "Gentlemen's Camp" at Ruhleben is where the English civil prisoners are interned, and some very rich and influential men are here. Ruhleben is built on a race track, and though at first it had only a few buildings, it is now a small town. It has its main streets, its shops, its restaurants, its reading rooms, its select circle and its four hundred. It had a theater, the director of which was the director of one of the Berlin theaters before the war.
French Prisoners Going into the City to Make Purchases.
They have a newspaper printed in Ruhleben. The German authorities do not allow these papers to be sent out of the camp, but I was lucky enough to have seen one of them. An English girl I knew in Berlin got one of them from the German wife of a Ruhleben prisoner. I had to swear that while I was in Germany I would never tell I had seen it. It was a very neat little sheet with stories, poems and advertisements—no news. The advertisements were for the different shops and stores in Ruhleben. Some of the men interned there carry on trades, and I saw advertisements for printing, clothes-pressing and tailoring.
At Ruhleben they have what they call their "university," and here they have classes in languages, art and science, and for the colored prisoners they have the common school branches. All these benefits were not gotten up by the Germans, but by the prisoners themselves. The men are allowed to spend only a certain amount of money each month, which keeps down the gambling, but they are allowed to buy what furniture they wish.
Englishmen on Their Way to Ruhleben, November, 1915.
A great cry has been raised against the small amount of food given the prisoners at Ruhleben. I heard from all sides that this was true, and that in winter they have very little coal. But Germany can't give her prisoners much—she can't give even her own people much. What they have to give the Russian prisoners is a mystery—perhaps just enough to exist on.
A Popular French Prisoner in Germany.
When I was in Germany, an English preacher was invited to come over from England and inspect the Ruhleben camp. He was met at the German frontier by a German officer and escorted direct to Ruhleben. He spent one week in the camp, living the same life the English prisoners live. He was allowed to bring messages to the men and to take messages from the men back to England—censored of course. There were rumors around Berlin about him, but there was nothing in the German papers. I read his report in the London Times after he got back to England. He said that the men were comfortable and that they had an intellectual life, but he added that the men surely needed the food packages sent from England and that they received the packages sent.
One day the first summer I was in Berlin, I was in Wertheim's department store. I saw a great many people gathered around the sporting-goods counter. When I asked what was the matter I was told that the two men in civilian clothes were Englishmen from Ruhleben, and that they had come to Berlin to buy a tennis racket. They were accompanied by a German sergeant. The Englishmen seemed to be enjoying themselves and they took a long time to select the rackets.
French Prisoners at Work.
This spring they left a number of men out of Ruhleben. These men wanted to work. One day I was standing in my boarding-house hall talking to the landlady, when a fine-looking young man came up and asked for a room. He spoke very good German, but I could see that he was a foreigner. Before she showed him the room he asked what kind of boarders she had, and she said, mostly German officers. "Then there is no use for me to look at the room," he answered, "I am an enemy foreigner, and maybe it would not be pleasant." "Oh, it would be all right," said the eager landlady, "all you would have to do would be to report to the police." "Oh, yes, I know," answered the man, "I am sehr bekannt (well known) to the police. I am an Englishman."
Every prison camp has religious services according to the religion of the prisoners. Prince Max of Saxony likes to preach, and he goes around preaching to the Russian prisoners in Russian. At Wunsdorf and Zossen they have mosques where the Mohammedan prisoners can hold their services.
Some of the officers' camps are at Klausthal and Wildemann in the Harz, at Cologne, and at Mainz. They have much better quarters than the common soldiers. In some cases they have separate rooms, and the meals are better and are served in better style. They are even said to have napkins. The officers never work for the Germans, but I have seen pictures of them knitting and doing fancy work.
The youngest prisoners are some little Russian boys from twelve to fourteen years of age. These children were used as messenger boys to the Russian officers and employed around the camp kitchens. In the camps they are given a lesson in German every day.