Baron de Broqueville, the Belgian Prime Minister, said to a correspondent of The London Times:
The Belgian people, after three and a half years of the most grinding oppression, have shown by the courageous defiance of enemy bayonets which brought about the collapse of the "activist" plot, that they have lost none of their sturdy resolve to be free; that the spirit which moved them to reject the German ultimatum of Aug. 2, 1914, is as strong as ever. * * *
Only one thing is worrying and humiliating in a quite special degree all Belgians in occupied territory. It is the fear lest abroad it may be imagined that there really is an "activist" movement in Belgium. All the reports we have received on this point amount to this: "No one in Belgium talks of this alleged movement, for it is nonexistent. There are a few miserable individuals in German pay—always the same—who intrigue and plot. All they have achieved is to arouse against them such feelings of repulsion and hate that they have been thrust forever forth from the nation, and nothing can cleanse them of their crime. For mercy's sake, beg people not to insult us by treating the agitation of these individuals seriously, and to stop seeing any agitation where there is nothing but the work of a few paid traitors.
It is in this sense that our compatriots write to us from behind the German barrier. There, as elsewhere, the most ardent advocates of Flemish claims reject foreign interference in internal policy, and they treat as traitors to the cause all those who accept bribes from the torturers of their country.
Stripping Belgian Industries
Germany's Use of the "Rathenau Plan" for the Exploitation of Belgium and Northern France
The German Government from the beginning of the war has systematically stripped the factories of Belgium and other conquered territory with the purpose, it is charged, of crippling industries in those countries, not only as a war measure, but as an economic means of preventing future competition. This phase of German war policy is treated in a brochure edited by Professors Dana C. Munro of Princeton, George C. Sellery of the University of Wisconsin, and August C. Krey of the University of Minnesota. It is issued by the United States Committee on Public Information under the title, "German Treatment of Conquered Territory." The editors find their text in this statement by Deputy Beumer, made before the Prussian Diet in February, 1917:
Anybody who knows the present state of things in Belgian industry will agree with me that it will take at least some years—assuming that Belgium is independent at all—before Belgium can even think of competing with us in the world market. And anybody who has traveled, as I have done, through the occupied districts of France, will agree with me that so much damage has been done to industrial property that no one need be a prophet in order to say that it will take more than ten years before we need think of France as a competitor or of the re-establishment of French industry.
This exploitation for the benefit of German industry is an outgrowth of the plan suggested early in August, 1914, by Dr. Walter Rathenau, President of the General Electric Company of Germany, to establish a Bureau of Raw Materials for the War. The bureau (Kriegsrohstoffabtheilung) was made a part of the Ministry of War. Its operation in the occupied territories was explained in a lecture by Dr. Rathenau in April, 1916, as follows: