Q. But weren’t those stories about atrocities exaggerated? You know we were fed so much propaganda in the last war that later turned out untrue, like the Belgian baby’s hands being cut off—how much can we believe of the atrocity stories we hear now?
A. No, the atrocity stories of today and of yesterday and of the last war were not exaggerated. The truth is that we shall never learn of more than the tiniest fraction of the atrocities committed by the Germans, and I am sure we never learned about more than a fraction of their atrocities in the last war.
Now by all means let some earnest young man arise and declare that the British and the French and the Americans also commit atrocities. Do they? Perhaps, because among our troops as among the troops of every nation are some exceptionally brutal men, who when they are possessed of the fury and license of battle become criminals. But only among the Germans was and is atrocious behavior, torture, and murder, an official policy, calculatedly carried out upon the authority of the government to terrorize or exterminate the vanquished. When I came to Germany I was intensely sympathetic with the Germans and refused to believe any of the atrocity stories of the last war. It took many years of residence in Germany and the experience of living through the bloodiest period of the Nazi revolution to realize that there was almost no atrocity charged against the Germans which could not have happened.
What a beautiful example of German propaganda the Belgian baby atrocity story was. Dr. Goebbels must often have jealously admired the person, whoever he was, who thought up the Belgian baby. Do we wish to cast in doubt reports about the atrocities our people are committing? Very well, let us plant a monstrous charge against ourselves, which we can prove untrue, then we can claim (and many of our softheaded opponents will believe us) that all other charges are untrue. This was the effect of the charge that German troops had cut off the hands of Belgian babies. Strangely enough, it was Northcliffe’s Daily Mail which obliged the Germans by first picking up the story of the Belgian baby, and then offering a reward for proof, and finally printing as a journalistic scoop the fact that no proof could be found that the Germans had ever cut off a Belgian baby’s hands. Thus in the minds of millions of simple British and Americans the Germans were exculpated of any atrocities. The bombarded British are not likely to make such a mistake again.
Was there anything in the first World War to equal the deliberate machine-gunning by German warplanes of the fleeing populations on the roads of Poland, France, and the Lowlands? I do not believe it has a counterpart in modern history, and only Genghis Khan and Tamerlane could have matched it in earlier days. There were thousands of children including babes in arms among the dead along the roads scarified by the Luftwaffe. An American diplomat in Paris estimated that in France and the Lowlands 100,000 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, were killed thus by the Germans, or approximately the same as the number of French soldiers who died in battle. The slaughter of civilians in Poland surpassed this figure many times.
I do not know why I should boggle at the lopped-off Belgian baby’s hands, except that nobody could ever find an authentic example, and I cannot imagine what good it would do the Germans, nor believe that even Nazi Germans like to torture babies. The machine-gunning of the roads in Europe had a military object, to cause panic and to clog the movements of the Allied troops. But I have seen enough purposeless acts of brutality committed by the Nazis to know what they are capable of doing.
I wish Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose sensitivity as a poet I sincerely admire, could have been with me one day in the women’s ward of a Berlin hospital as I listened to a woman explain to me why she lay there bandaged from head to foot, with the blood still oozing through. It was in the spring of 1933, and the Brown Terror was getting into its stride, but the Nazis had not yet learned to bar correspondents from hospitals. After this story they were all barred.
The woman was Frau Marie Jankowsky, forty-eight years old, mother of five sons. She was a Social Democratic welfare worker. “Night before last,” she related to me, pausing only when pain made her gasp, “a group of Storm Troopers came to our flat. One of them backed my husband and sons into the kitchen and held them at the point of his revolver. The others took me away to a Storm Troop barracks on the second floor of a building not far from my house. There they stripped me naked. In the middle of the room was a table, and covering the table a flag. They asked me what the flag was.
“I answered it was the Black Red Gold flag of the Republic. They said ‘No,’ and commanded me to repeat that it was Black Red Ordure. I refused and four Storm Troopers pulled me face down over the table, the fifth pushed my face into a bundle of rags to stop me screaming, and a sixth began beating me across the back with a light steel rod.
“It cut the skin and made blood come with every blow. The Storm Troop Captain said, ‘Give her twenty blows, the Jewish sow.’ I am not Jewish but that did not make any difference. Then they jerked me off the table and said, ‘You stole shoes from your welfare section, didn’t you?’ I said, ‘No,’ and the Captain said, ‘Give her another twenty.’ I was bleeding badly when they pulled me off the table again and yelled at me, ‘What’s this?’ and showed me our flag of the Iron Front with three arrows. I told them, but they demanded that I say it was a manure fork. I refused and the Captain ordered another twenty blows.