My Four Years in Germany

by James W. Gerard

In the beginning of the war the Germans were surprised by the great number of prisoners taken and had made no adequate preparations for their reception. Clothing and blankets were woefully wanting, so I immediately bought what I could in the way of underclothes and blankets at the large department stores of Berlin and the wholesalers and sent these to the camps where the British prisoners were confined. I also sent to the Doeberitz camp articles such as sticks for wounded men who were recovering, and crutches, and even eggs and other nourishing delicacies for the sick.

At first the prisoners were not compelled to work to any extent, but at the time I left Germany the two million prisoners of war were materially assisting the carrying on of the agriculture and industries of the Empire.

The League of Mercy of New York having telegraphed me in 1914, asking in what way funds could best be used in the war, I suggested in answer that funds for the prisoners of war were urgently needed. Many newspapers poked fun at me for this suggestion, and one bright editor said that if the Germans did not treat their prisoners properly they should be made to! Of course, unless this particular editor had sailed up the Spree in a canoe and bombarded the royal palace, I know of no other way of "making" the Germans do anything. The idea, however, of doing some work for the prisoners of war was taken up by the Young Men's Christian Association. Dr. John R. Mott was at the head of this work and was most ably and devotedly assisted by the Rev. Archibald C. Harte. I shall give an account of their splendid work in a chapter devoted to the charitable work of the war.

At only one town in Germany was any interest in the fate of the prisoners of war evinced. This was, I am glad to say, in the quaint university town of Göttingen. I visited this camp with Mr. Harte, in April, 1915, to attend the opening of the first Y. M. C. A. camp building in Germany. The camp was commanded by Colonel Bogen, an officer strict in his discipline, but, as all the prisoners admitted, just in his dealings with them. There were, as I recall, about seven thousand prisoners in this camp, Russian, French, Belgian and British. It is a pity that the methods of Colonel Bogen and his arrangements for camp buildings, etc., were not copied in other camps in Germany. Here, as I have said, the civil population took some interest in the fate of the unfortunate prisoners within their gates, led in this by several professors in the University. The most active of these professors was Professor Stange who, working with a French lawyer who had been captured near Arras while in the Red Cross, provided a library for the prisoners and otherwise helped them. Of course, these charitable acts of Professor Stange did not find favor with many of his fellow townsmen of Göttingen, and he was not surprised when he awoke one morning to find that during the night his house had been painted red, white and blue, the colours of France, England and America.

I heard of so many instances of the annoyance of prisoners by the civil population that I was quite pleased one day to read a paragraph in the official newspaper, the North German Gazette, which ran somewhat as follows: "The following inhabitants of (naming a small town near the borders of Denmark), having been guilty of improper conduct towards prisoners of war, have been sentenced to the following terms of imprisonment and the following fines and their names are printed here in order that they may be held up to the contempt of all future generations of Germans." And then followed a list of names and terms of imprisonment and fines. I thought that this was splendid, that the German government had at last been aroused to the necessity of protecting their prisoners of war from the annoyances of the civil population, and I wrote to our consul in Kiel and asked him to investigate the case. From him I learned that some unfortunate prisoners passing through the town (in a part of Germany inhabited by Scandinavians) had made signs that they were suffering from hunger and thirst, that some of the kind-hearted people among the Scandinavian population had given them something to eat and drink and for this they were condemned to fines, to prison and to have their names held up to the contempt of Germans for all time.

I do not know of anyone thing that can give a better idea of the official hate for the nations with which Germany was at war than this.

The day after visiting the camp at Göttingen, I visited the officers' camp situated at the town of Hanover Münden. Here about eight hundred officers, of whom only thirteen were British, were confined in an old factory building situated on the bank of the river below the town. The Russian officers handed me some arrows tipped with nails which had been shot at them by the kind-hearted little town boys, and the British pointed out to me the filthy conditions of the camp. In this, as in unfortunately many other officer camps, the inclination seemed to be to treat the officers not as captured officers and gentlemen, but as convicts. I had quite a sharp talk with the commander of this camp before leaving and he afterwards took violent exception to the report which I made upon his camp. However, I am pleased to say that he reformed, as it were, and I was informed by my inspectors that he had finally made his camp one of the best in Germany.

Much as I should have liked to, I could not spend much time myself in visiting the prison camps; many duties and frequent crises kept me in Berlin, but members of the Embassy were always travelling in this work of camp inspection.

For some time my reports were published in parliamentary "White Papers," but in the end our government found that the publication of these reports irritated the Germans to such a degree that the British Government was requested not to publish them any more. Copies of the reports were always sent by me both to Washington and to London, and handed to the Berlin Foreign Office.

A COVER OF THE MONTHLY ISSUED BY THE RUHLEBEN PRISONERS.