Germany's Dishonoured Army: Additional records of German atrocities in France

by J. H. Morgan

A less conclusive passage, but a none the less suspicious one, is to be found in a diary now in my possession. It is the diary of an Unteroffizier, named Ragge, of the 158th Regiment, and contains (under date October 21) the following:—

We pursued the enemy as far as we saw him. We "knocked out" many English. The English lay on the ground as if sown there. Those of the Englishmen who were still alive in the trenches were stuck or shot. Our company made 61 prisoners.

Damning Brigade Order.—So far I have only dealt with the acts of small German units—i.e., companies of infantry. I now come to the most damning proofs of a policy of cold-blooded murder of wounded and prisoners, initiated and carried out by a whole brigade under the orders of a Brigadier-General. This particular investigation took me a long time, but the results are, I think, conclusive. It may be remembered that some months ago the French military authorities published in the French newspapers what purported to be the text of an order issued by a German Brigadier-General, named Stenger, commanding the 58th Brigade, in which he ordered his troops to take no prisoners and to put to death without mercy every one who fell into their hands, whether wounded and defenceless or not. The German Government immediately denounced the alleged order as a forgery. I determined to see whether I could establish its authenticity, and in February last I obtained a copy of the original from M. Mollard, of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who is a member of the Commission appointed by the French Government to inquire into the alleged German atrocities. The text of that order was as follows:—

Army Order of 26 Aug., 1914, about 4 p.m., such as was given to his troops as a Brigade or Army Order by the leader of the 7th Company of the 112th Regiment of Infantry at Thionville, at the entrance of the wood of Saint Barbe.

To date from this day no prisoners will be made any longer. All the prisoners will be executed. The wounded, whether armed or defenceless, will be executed. Prisoners, even in large and compact formations, will be executed. Not a man will be left alive behind us.

Taking this alleged order as my starting-point, I began to make inquiries at British Headquarters as to the existence of any information about the doings of the 112th Regiment. I soon found that there was good reason to suspect it. Our Intelligence Department placed in my hands the records of the examination of two men of this regiment who had been captured by us. One of them volunteered a statement to one of our Intelligence Officers on the 23rd of November to the effect that his regiment had orders to treat Indians well, but were allowed to treat British prisoners as they pleased. This man's testimony appeared to be reliable, as statements he made on other points, i.e., as to the German formations, were subsequently found to be true, and his information as to discrimination in the treatment of Indians entirely bore out the conclusions I had already arrived at on that particular point. The German witness in question further stated that 65 out of 150 British prisoners were killed in cold blood by their escort on or about the 23rd of October on the road to Lille, and that the escort were praised for their conduct. Other German prisoners have, I may add, also made statements that they had orders to kill all the English who fell into their hands....

At the end of April—too late, unfortunately, for use by Lord Bryce's Committee—one of our Intelligence Officers placed before me the following entry in the field note-book of a German prisoner, Reinhart Brenneisen[1], reservist, belonging to the 4th Company, 112th Regiment, and dated in August (the same month as appears on the face of the order in question):

Then came a brigade order that all French, whether wounded or not, who fell into our hands were to be shot. No prisoners were to be made.

This, I think, may be said to put the reality of the brigade order in question beyond doubt.

The cumulative effect of this evidence, coupled with the statements of so many of our men who claim to have been eye-witnesses of wholesale bayoneting of the wounded, certainly confirms suspicions of the gravest kind as to such acts having been done by authority. Neither the temperament of the German soldier nor the character of German discipline (furchtbar streng—"frightfully strict"—as a German prisoner put it to me) makes it probable that the German soldiers acted on their own initiative. It would, in any case, be incredible that so many cases of outrage could be sufficiently explained by any law of averages, or by the idiosyncrasies of the "bad characters" present in every large congregation of men....