German Atrocities: An Official Investigation

by J. H. Morgan

The German authorities seem to suffer from a malady which can only be described as moral perversion. It is a kind of moral insanity. In defending the sinking of the Lusitania with its freight of innocent women and children the German Government wrote:

“The case of the Lusitania shows with horrible clearness to what jeopardising of human lives the manner of war conducted by our adversaries leads.”[49]

This affectation of horror at the consequences of its own crimes and the imputation of the guilt of them to others is surely one of the most remarkable revelations of the moral obliquity of the German mind. Yet it by no means stands alone. The Proclamations, issued in Belgium, threaten the inhabitants with fire and sword, the scaffold and the firing-party, for the least infraction of the most trivial regulations, and then conclude with the aspersion that by such infraction they will commit “the horrible crime” of compromising the existence of a whole community and placing it “outside the pale of international law.”[50] The man who omits to put his hands up with acrobatic promptitude will “make himself guilty” of the penalty of death. All through the German utterances there runs an infatuated obsession that the Germans enjoy a kind of moral prerogative in virtue of which they are entitled to violate all the laws which they rigidly prescribe for others.[51] We have lately had an example of this which is of supreme horror. The Power which has broken all laws, human and divine, sought to dignify its condemnation of Edith Cavell with all the pomp and circumstance of a tribunal of justice. While thousands of ravishers and spoilers go free, one woman, who had spent her life in ministries to such as were sick and afflicted, was handed over to the executioner. Truly, there has been no such trial in history since Barabbas was released and Christ led forth to the hill of Calvary.

The Guilt of the German People.

It is the fondest of delusions to imagine that all this blood-guiltiness is confined to the German Government and the General Staff. The whole people is stained with it. The innumerable diaries of common soldiers in the ranks which I have read betray a common sentiment of hate, rapine, and ferocious credulity.[52] Again and again English soldiers have told me how their German captors delighted to offer them food in their famished state and then to snatch it away again. The progress of French, British, and Russian prisoners, civil as well as military, through Germany has been a veritable Calvary.[53] The helplessness which in others would excite forbearance if not pity has in the German populace provoked only derision and insult.[54] The “old gentleman with a grey beard and gold spectacles” who broke his umbrella over the back of a Russian lady (the wife of a diplomatist), the loafers who boarded a train and under the eyes of the indulgent sentries poked their fingers in the blind eye of a wounded Irishman who had had half his face shot away, the men and women who spat upon helpless prisoners and threatened them with death, the guards who prodded them with bayonets, worried them with dogs, and dispatched those who could not keep up—these were not a Prussian caste, but the German people. What is to be thought of a people, one of whose leading journals publishes[55] with approval the letter of a German officer describing “the brilliant idea” (ein guter Gedanke) which inspired him to place civilians on chairs in the middle of the street of a town attacked by the French and use them as a screen for his men, in spite of their “prayers of anguish.”

New Russian Evidence.

This question of the culpability of the German people, civilians and soldiers in the ranks, as distinct from the German Government, is one of supreme importance, and I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the mass of unpublished evidence (from which some selections are given in Part VI. of the Documentary Chapter of this book) placed at my disposal by the Russian Embassy. In addition to the documents I have printed in that chapter—I refer the reader to No. 7 in particular—I will here quote the following unpublished deposition as to the conduct of the German guards in a prison camp. These barbarities, it should be remembered, were not done in the heat of action, but represent the leisurely amusement of guards whose only provocation was the helplessness of the famished men in their charge.

“In their leisure moments the German soldiers amused themselves with practical joking at the expense of the prisoners. They announced that an extra portion of food would be given out, and when the Russians hurried to the kitchen, a whole pack of dogs were let loose on them. The animals flew at the prisoners and dispersed them in all directions, while the Germans looked on and roared with laughter. Sometimes the prisoners were offered an extra ladle of soup, or piece of bread if they would expose their backs to a certain number of blows with a whip. Our hungry and tormented soldiers often bought an extra piece of bread at this price, and it was thrown to them as if they had been dogs.”

The Germans appear in the case of the Russian, as in that of the British, Belgian, and French prisoners, to have taken a malignant and bestial delight in outraging their feelings of self-respect, and men were herded together day and night in cattle-trucks deep in manure, and forced to perform their natural functions where they stood, packed together so close that they could not sit and dared not lie down. At each station they were exhibited like a travelling menagerie to the curiosity and insult of the populace. The quality of mercy was not shown even where one might most expect to find it, namely, at the hands of the German surgeons and nurses who wore the Red Cross. Here is the deposition of Vasili Tretiakov:

“Having received no food for two days, the Russian prisoners, who fully expected to get some bread at this station, were gazing with hungry and longing looks into the distance, when they saw women dressed as Sisters of Mercy distributing bread and sausages to the German soldiers. One of these Sisters went up to the truck in which I was standing, and a Russian soldier at the door stretched out his hand for something to eat, but the woman simply struck it and smeared the soldier’s face with a piece of sausage. She then called all the prisoners ‘Russian swine’ and went away from the side of the train.”