A Leading German Churchman Defends Poison Gas
The International Committee of the Red Cross at Geneva early in 1918 issued an appeal against the use of poisonous gases. The Rev. Dr. Balan, President of the Consistory for the Prussian Province of Posen and head of the Protestant Church in that province, refused, "after conscientiously examining it before God," to indorse or circulate the appeal, and wrote as follows to the President of the International Committee:
The first question that occurred to me on reading your appeal was, Is it really a more inhumane method of waging war when Germany, in defending herself against an immensely superior force of enemies in a fight for existence forced upon her, makes use also of poisonous gas, than when her enemies pour over our armies, so much weaker in numbers, devastating and disintegrating showers of iron, lasting days and weeks, and to which we cannot reply in such volume because we have not so many human hands at our disposal for the manufacture of munitions as our enemies have? I say, No. I ask further, Is it more humane to set the whole world in motion in order by starving it to prevent a great nation that, with its noble, chivalrous Kaiser at its head, has manifested clearly enough its unbounded love of peace, from taking the place to which it is entitled by the side of other nations than when this nation uses every means of defense that its enlightened scientists have discovered? I say again, No.
Dr. Balan maintains in the further course of his letter that the enemies of Germany cannot expect to be treated humanely in any special manner, for all war is inhumane, because they have from the outset persistently and constantly utterly disregarded the laws of nations and the "sacred sign of the Red Cross." In conclusion this Prussian church dignitary informs the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross that if he and his friends really wish to render the whole suffering population of Europe a truly great service, they should do their utmost to bring home to the French people, who are so deeply to be pitied, the fact that the phantom which, deluded by the lies of their and England's rulers, they still pursue is dragging them every day to deeper and more hopeless misery. At the very moment that France realizes this, Dr. Balan asserts, there will be peace. He explains that the phantom pursued by the French is "the recovery of two provinces that have been German from time immemorial, and of which we were once robbed against all right and justice."