II. Violation of a Girl.
At the beginning of the war, when the Germans entered the town of Kalish, a girl named X—— was arrested and led out to the public place, or square, for execution. Here the Germans tied her to a tree and told her that she would be shot. Others of the inhabitants, also condemned to be shot, were drawn up on the same open space. Among these victims was an acquaintance of the girl X——, a student named N. Davuidov. The German soldiers proceeded to stab this Davuidov with their bayonets before the very eyes of the girl X——, and then they tore out hair from his head and finally shot him dead. This scene of murder gave the girl such a shock that she fainted. On coming to her senses she found herself in an apartment occupied by German officers. No sooner did she revive, than one of these officers committed a rape upon her and destroyed her virginity. During the following days she remained a captive in the same apartment, where she was forced to yield to the brutal lust of the officer who first violated her, and to the solicitations of two of his comrades, who threatened to cut her to pieces with their swords if she offered any resistance. These officers then told her “that the Germans had invented a new method of making war on the Russians, which would exterminate them by means of poisonous gas without the waste of any more bullets.”
The girl was subsequently rescued by the Russian troops.
A combined judicial and medical examination of the girl X—— on June 4th, established the fact that she had been deprived of her maidenhood and an inflammatory condition of the sexual organs was still plainly visible.
III. Murder of Wounded Soldiers.
On April 25th, 1915, when an infantry regiment retreated from the station of Krosno in Galicia, the unarmed wounded soldiers, who were unable to follow, and many of whom were crawling away on their hands and knees, were overtaken and stabbed to death, or despatched by blows with the butt end of rifles by the Austro-Hungarian troops.
The foregoing facts have been confirmed by the evidence of junior subaltern B—— of the regiment, Serge Yakovlev Sudarikov, aged thirty, who was interrogated as a witness by the Examining Magistrate of the 1st ward of Kharkov.
IV. Murder of Wounded Soldiers.
On May 12th, 1915, near the village of Bobrovka, forty versts from Yaroslav in Galicia, after the withdrawal of the “platoon sotnias” of dismounted cossacks from their trenches, the latter were occupied by German guardsmen, who drove out the Russian wounded at the point of the bayonet.
Private Nikita Davidenko, who was one hundred paces from the trenches taken by the Germans, saw how they used their bayonets to thrust out four or five of his wounded comrades, whose groans were distinctly audible.