Oberleutnant und Kompagnie-Chef Stoy; Oberst und Regiments-Kommandeur Neubauer; General-Major und Brigade-Kommandeur Stenger.
Translation. After to-day no more prisoners will be taken. All prisoners are to be killed. Wounded, with or without arms, are to be killed. Even prisoners already grouped in convoys are to be killed. Let not a single living enemy remain behind us.
Some thirty soldiers of Stenger’s Brigade (112 and 142nd Regt of the Baden Infantry), were examined in our prisoners camps. I have read their evidence, which they gave upon oath and signed. All confirm the statement that this order of the day was given them on the 26th August, in one unit by Major Mosebach, in another by Lt Curtius, etc.; the majority did not know whether the order was carried out; but three of them say they saw it done in the forest of Thiaville, where ten or twelve wounded French soldiers who had already been spared by a battalion were despatched; two others saw the order carried out on the Thiaville road, where some wounded found in a ditch by a company were finished off.
No doubt, I cannot produce the autograph of General Stenger, and it is not for me to communicate the names of the German prisoners who gave this evidence. But I have no difficulty in producing here German autographs in proof of crimes precisely similar.
For example (Plate 13), here is an extract from Pte Albert Delfosse’s diary (III Inf. Reserve, XIV Reserve Corps):
“In the forest of St Rémy, 4th or 5th September, saw a fine cow and calf destroyed and once more corpses of Frenchmen, frightfully mutilated.”[27]
Plate 13.
Are we to understand from this that these dead bodies had been mutilated in fair fight torn to pieces for example by shells? It may be; but this would be a kindly interpretation which the documents (Plates 14 and 15) disprove:
Here is a fac simile on a reduced scale from a newspaper picked up in the German trenches, the Jauersches Tageblatt of the 18th October 1914. Jauer is a town in Silesia, about 50 kilometres west of Breslau; two battalions of the 154th regiment of the Saxon Infantry are stationed there. One Sunday (Sonntag, den 18 Oktober) no doubt at the hour when the inhabitants with their women and children were going to church, this local newspaper was distributed in the peaceful little town and in the hamlets and villages of the district, bearing these headlines.
EIN TAG DER EHRE FÜR UNSER REGIMENT.
24 SEPTEMBER 1914.
(A day of honour for our Regiment.
24th September 1914.)