CIVILIANS KIDNAPPED
"At the beginning they had a cruel way of arresting people. They would march them off as they stood, not letting them communicate with wives or friends or relatives. I know of one lady who for about two months did not know where her husband was, while he knew just as little about her. Two Serbian ladies, mother and daughter, who had also been at Salzerbad, had been staying at a little watering place in Dalmatia, where they had gone for many years. One evening, when they were only dressed in cotton dressing gowns, they were asked by an official to come down to a steamer lying at the wharf. Only for a few minutes, he said; there were just a few questions to be asked. So they went just as they were, and went on the boat with several others; some one began to ask them questions, when, to their horror, they noticed the ship was moving. They were taken right away, as they were. At every port they stopped and brought in others in the same way.
"In Fiume they landed, were handcuffed two and two, and marched through the streets to the prison. There the daughter and her 65-year-old mother, who had been also handcuffed, spent the night in a cell, with only two upright chairs in it. Next day they and all the other prisoners collected up to then were packed into third-class carriages, packed as close as they would go, and in each compartment two soldiers, fully accoutred, with fixed bayonets, and smoking like chimneys. Although it was hot Summer, all the windows were kept shut. In this way they were brought to Marburg—a journey of some four or five hours in ordinary time—but they took two days for it. All this time they had nothing to eat. People came to the train selling things; but, as all their money had been taken away from them on the boat, they could get nothing. In Marburg they were put in the prison, and kept there for eight months."
Abuses in German Prison Camps
Examples of Heartless Treatment
Quartermaster Sergeant T. Duggan of the First Coldstream Guards, who was at the prison camp at Schneidemühl (Posen) from 1914 to March, 1918, described the horrors at that camp as follows:
Prisoners of all nationalities, Russians, French, British, and Belgians, were kept there, the majority being Russians. At the beginning they lived in holes in the ground without any covering whatever. Quartermaster Sergeant Duggan showed me a photograph illustrating this condition of things, which lasted for some time, it being a month before the prisoners had any covering over their heads. The food was so bad that the British could never eat it.
About December, 1914, a typhus epidemic began. It continued for four or five months. Schneidemühl has one camp divided into three inclosures, the whole camp containing about 40,000 prisoners. The daily average of deaths was certainly not under thirty. Another photograph was shown to me depicting a long procession of coffins during the epidemic. A gigantic German carrying a rifle headed the procession, which was mainly composed of unfortunate Russian prisoners. Anything more pathetic cannot be imagined. Photographs were also shown me of the actual funeral service and place of interment. These photographs showed many being buried at one time in one long trench. After the interment, where the bodies were deposited four deep, one above another, the Germans made mounds surmounted by crosses, intimating that only two persons were buried beneath each mound.
It is impossible to estimate now how many were buried altogether, but many thousands died from this typhus epidemic. When the epidemic broke out a terrible condition of affairs quickly ensued, and it was not until it had been raging for a fortnight that Russian doctors arrived on the scene. Some of the patients were then first sent to hospital. The camp's condition, even after the doctors' arrival, was perfectly awful.
A British merchant Captain, who was released in May from internment in a German camp, asserted under oath that after his ship was torpedoed he was locked up for twenty-four hours in the U-boat for refusing to answer questions. On the following day he was searched, and for still refusing to answer was sentenced to be shot on reaching port, or before if he should cause any annoyance. One of the principal officers called him a liar and an English swine.