Outrages committed by the Germans on Neutral Subjects Resident in Germany
M. Bernardino del Campo, ex-Minister of Finance of Brazil, ex-President of Sao-Paolo and leader of the Republican Party of that country, happened to be on the 3rd August at Bad-Nauheim with his wife, who was taking a course of treatment there, and his four children. The Germans showed no consideration either for his nationality, his rank or his age. M. Bernardino del Campo, although he had reached the age of sixty-two years, was struck with the butt-end of the rifle by Bavarian soldiers, robbed of his jewels and left dying at the Swiss frontier.
The news of this incident caused great indignation in Brazil.
Baroness Karen-Groothe, daughter of the King of Denmark’s Master of the Hunt, and wife of a Turkish officer, happened to be at Mecklenberg when war was declared, and was arrested as a spy and treated so brutally that she had to keep to her bed at Copenhagen, to which she was brought back.
Several Danish subjects resident in Schleswig were treated with the same kind of brutality. Count de Schack was imprisoned; when, on his release, he tried to escape across the Danish frontier, he was arrested again and sent to a fortress in the interior of Germany. The editors of the Danish papers in Schleswig, and a large number of distinguished people in the annexed provinces, were also imprisoned.
Americans were no better treated than Danes. The New York Sun (11th August, 1914) discussed the treatment of Americans in Germany in an article dealing with the arrest of Mr. Archer Huntington and his wife on a baseless charge of espionage, and the brutality with which several young Americans had been treated.
“It would seem that the German authorities” (said the Sun) “think that in war there is no obstacle to their will and no atonement for their acts. The American Government will speedily have to disabuse them of this idea. Germany must be made to understand clearly that ample compensation is due to her victims, and that those who have abused their authority must be punished.”
In Austria
The Austrian authorities were as discourteous as the German to foreigners, subjects of neutral countries. At Carlsbad the famous singer, Adelina Patti, and her husband, Baron Cederstrom, a Danish subject, were kept prisoners for several days in their hotel, where the police searched everything and rummaged through all their trunks and portmanteaus, while the crowd, who threatened to carry the hotel by assault, raised a hideous din by way of demonstration against the singer, who is a friend of Russia and France.