GERMAN PRISON CAMPS
IBUENSTERIAGER AS A TEST CASE
ATROCIOUS ILL-TREATMENT
OF BELGIANS
Colonel Frey, n Swiss officer, _ has published recently in the "National Zeitung" of Bale (Switzerland) a somewhat startling statement on tho conditions prevailing in some of <he Ger man camps in which the Belgian deportees are interned. According to him, their regime is excellent, better than that prevailing in similar English camps, and the Swiss soldiers would envy the fate of the Belgian deportees. The German.Press of course (says the "Morning Post") naturally makes the most of these "neutral" declarations, and denounces the conflicting statements which have appeared in the Allied Press. Several escaped prisoners and deportees have already described the elaborate preparations made in the event of any foreign visitor even of a high German official inspecting the camp, so that the Swiss officer's good faith need not be suspected if he has only seen comfort and cleanliness in these places of 51th, illness, and untold miseries. One has only to refer to the declarations made by fTie men who escaped from Germany and who are perhaps in a better position to speak the truth than an occasional visitor acting under careful supervision. The Belgian authorities have lately received the following statement about the conditions prevailing in Muensterlager during last sprint;. Muensterlager is a dependency of Soltau camp, situated in Hanover, on tho Bremen-Berlin railway. There are at the present moment 1100 prisoners Merited in the camp. 300 Belgians, 16 Frenchmen, and 784 Russians. Similar information has reached the Belgian authorities on 50 German camps and Kommandos where tho regime is very much the same_ as that of Muensterlager, The following declaration from an eye-witness may therefore bo considered as an example of what is going on all over Germany.
Starved Deportees. At the end of December, 1914, the Germans brought a number of Belgiau civilians from Soltau to work on the construction of a branch railway connecting some asphyxiating gas works with the main line. These works are built in the centre of a camp covering nearly 20 square miles and lying north if tiie railway. "Belgian civilians will not be employed on work of military value" was said in the Reichstag! These people were so terribly hungry that on their arrival they broke out of their ranks and flung themselves on the rubbish heaps of the military camp, where they seized and devoured potato parities and scraps of swedes. They were the very picture of hunger and brought tears to the eyes of the spectators. The military prisoners, after much difficulty, obtained.permission to send them food, clothes, and tobacco. They worked for a fortnight and were then replaced by prisoners of war of ,all nationalities. Of these prisoners, only 100 Russians remained by February 26, and on that date 490 new deportees arrived. The latter had been at Soltau since November, where they had had no'firing and nothing to do, and where tho food is notorious both for insufficient quantity and had quality. For blankets they had two table-cloths each mado of a sort of striped cotton stuff. They suffered from hunger as much as their predecessors. Most of them never received any parcejs from home. (The Belgians were forbidden to send them food, but this was afterwards changed.) They were housed in hutments near the soldiers' camp, hut separated by a double wire fence. The soldiers managed to let them have some food in spite of stringent rules to tho contrary, with or without the connivance of tho sentries, several of whom were really sorry for them. The deportees wero so famished that they used to fight for a handful of scraps. They wero employed on the same work as tho first batch, but they'had to walk over three miles to it, making seven miles a, day. The beginning, of March was the coldest part of the year. The huts wero icy and let in the. wet, tho heating was reduced, and the wood was damp; it «-as scarcely any better in the infirmary. Every morning these poor men were kept waiting in the yard from 6.30 to seven for the roll-call. A Gefreiter (corporal) undertook to cure anyone who asknd to see the doctor by"beating him if ho thought that the nian was shamming. This proceeding continued all through March in spite of the repeated protestations of tho military prisoners, and these nrotosts caused them to be accused of antiGorman propaganda. Three Belgian stretcher-bearers wore employed on sanitary work iu tho civilian camp, and on March 3 a man called Maucq, from Ecaußsines-Enghein, who was in the infirmary suffering from enteric, was found dead in his bed, though tho evening before he Tiacl been walking and talking as usual. The post-mor-tem examination revealed, as m all the after cases, an imaginary heart disease. The icy raid at night inu«t have had a great deal to do with'this death. Ten Dead In One Month.
On March 4 the deportees started for work at 7 a.m., 'in spite of tho bitter cold. After the half-hour's wait in tho yard, near the entrance to the camp, one mnn fell down, struck with congestion, and in a few minutes twelve were attacked and were all within an inch of their lives. The Belgian stretcher-bearers saved eleven of tliem, But the twelfth succumbed. Another, De Dobbeleere, from Ecaussmes, was found dead in his hut. That was the worst day of all. There was neither room nor remedies for so many. On the 7th, at reveille, a man called Bruyninckx was very ill. Injections of camphorated oil and artificial respiration could not save him.' It had been decided to send all these men back to Soltau and thence to Belgium, because they were not strong enough to work, but in the meantime they had to go on working. None of them received the comforts of religion, as the chaplain lived far away, and always arrived too late. During the whole of the cold spell there were two to six cases of congestion every morning, and as well as that men were brought hack from work every day in an appalling state of weakness. The constant deaths and the great number of deportees that tho German doctors declared incapable of work obliged tho Germans to make some ameliorations, namely, suspension of work during the cold weather, and better heating. But alas, tho food could not be improved, as they already received almost the same ration as the Schwerarbeiter (navAt tho end of March 'the Gefreitor, who had no medical knowledge and always thought everyone was malingering, hit a man, as usual, and the,civilian fell to the ground in tho snow, Tho corporal wciit on kicking him about, while the acting-commandant of tho camp, "Feldwebel-Leutnant" Thormann, of tho 39th Battalion of the Landsttirm of the Xth Army Corps, looked calmly on. Thero were no more deaths in the camp, but seven more died in hospital in March. The forty beds in tlie infirmary were almost always full during the whole of March, and there were about seventy serious cases of illness in the hospital. Half nf these worn suffering from general; weakness, ten from serious tuberculosis, j
many from pneumonia or typhoid, and one from dysentery. 160 Unfit out of 600. The 400 deportees who came first were reinforced in the middle of March by 100 more. On April 0 there were .still only 390; the 200 others were accounted for iw follow; 50 reclaimed I)}' the Government General in Belgium, 60 in hospital, 00 sent back to Soltau as unfit for work. Among the 100 vho came from Soltau to replace- those unfit for work, twelve were men who had already been sent back as unfit. Every day from 40 to 00 men came ".p for inspection by the doctor, and very few of them did not deserve exemption from work. Nearly all were miserably thin, 'haggard, scarcely able to drag themselves to work. In fact, during March 240 were under treatment either at the infirmary or the hospital. These figures are sufficient proof of the condition to which the men wore reduced. On April 1 the Kommandantur lilayed a sinister practical joke on them. Orders were given to transfer them to hutments near their work. They were all dragged along, carrying their possessions—these poor folk, who v/ere deprived of everything, collected the most unlikely things—the whole 31 miles. When they got there they found the camp was not ready! Forced to return, we saw them come' back to the camp in groups of 20 or 30, then in smaller groups, and then singly, further and further apart, all bending beneath their burdens. Their entry lasted half an hour from the first to get in till the'last straggler had arrived. When at work they were often beaten with the butt of a rifle to make them work faster. They were punished with military punishments, the minimum being three days' dark cell on bread and water. At last on April 9 they were transferred for good. The work to the north of the railway turned out to be the erection of a" military engineers' instruction camp "for asphyxiating cas. The works connected with the main J-ne by a railway five miles long were for the production of this gas. A camp of 50 huts for 120 men had to be erected at the junction. The whole of this is called "Gasubungsplatz und Hand-granatenschule-Breton," Breloh being the name of a neighbouring village.
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Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 70, 15 December 1917, Page 10
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1,580GERMAN PRISON CAMPS Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 70, 15 December 1917, Page 10
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