Present:
Oberamtsgerichter Dr. Schilling, Judge.
Gerichtsobersecretär Hornig, Secretary.
There appears as witness Musketeer Paul Blankenburg, 7th Company, Infantry Regiment No. 165, at the present time in the Reserve Hospital of this place. The witness, after the importance of the oath had been pointed out to him, was examined as follows:
As to Person: My name is Paul Blankenburg. I was born in Magdeburg, September 4th, 1893; Protestant.
As to Case: The following statement, which he had made on October 31st of this year before 1st Lieutenant Reyner in this place, was read over to the witness:
"We were on the march in close column, and in the course of it passed through a Belgian village, lying west of Herve. In the village German wounded were lying, and indeed I recognised some Jäger troops from Jäger Battalion No. 4. The column in marching through suddenly came under fire from the houses, and the order was therefore given to remove all the civilians from the houses, and to get them together into one place. While this was going on I noticed that some girls of eight or ten years of age, armed with sharp instruments, were busying themselves with the German wounded. I subsequently ascertained that, from the most severely wounded, the lobes and the upper parts of their ears had been cut off. On continuing our march, an ambulance soldier, belonging, as far as I remember, to the 27th Regiment, was shot dead from a house by Belgian civilians while he was occupied in a school-yard in rendering assistance to a wounded man."
The witness therefore declared: "The statement just read over to me corresponds to the truth. I again emphasise the fact that I myself saw girls of some eight or ten years of age busying themselves with severely wounded men in the Belgian village. The girls had steel instruments in their hands—but they were not knives or scissors—and with these instruments, which were sharp on one side, they busied themselves among the wounded. We took the instruments from them. The wounded had fresh wounds on their ears, from which the lobes and upper portions had evidently been just cut off. One of the wounded told me in reply to a question that he had been mutilated by the girls in the way here described."
Read over, approved, signed.
Signed: Paul Blankenburg.
The witness was thereupon sworn.
Signed: Dr. Schilling. Signed: Hornig.