CONVICTS FOB WAR

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3013, 26 February 1917, Page 6

CONVICTS FOB WAR

WHAT THE GERMANS THINK.. • Many articles are now appearing in the Gorman Press about the employ-* merit on military service of men whd have Berved, or are at present serving, sentences of penal servitude. A Kiel magistrate named Bovensiepen summarises the disoussion in tha "Deutsche Tageszeitung." He asks why, "while the flower of the people, the leading forces of intellectual and economic life, are shedding their precious noble blood on the battlefields, ■ the conviots are sitting safe behind lock and key, and those who have done penal servitude or otherwise lost their civil rights are going about their business earning large salaries in these favourable times, and even making large fortunes?" Herr Bovensiepen also considers that there are many patriotic convicts "filled with shame and suffering great mental torture because they cannot risk their lives for their Fatherland."

According to Professor von Liszt, of the University of Berlin, there are 100,000 German conviots available. Herr Bovensiepen considers that it would he impossible to treat the convicts as ordinary recruits, and also that it would be inadvisable that, as many people propose, they should be employed in labour battalions for particularly dangerous work. He comes to the conclusion that the best plan would be to form them into special labour columns, and to employ them; either behind the front or in munition factories, under strict control and without freedom to leave the places where they work. • The credit for this benevolent proposal is said to belong to a Hamburg pastor named Seyfarth.