GERMAN ASSASSINS
VAST UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT HOW “UNDESIRABLES” ARE GOT RID OF "Secret societies are springing into being throughout the who.e of Germany.’’ Tho authority for this statement is none other than Herr Stinnes’s own newspaper, tho "Hallo Zeitung,” and reports from various Allied Commissions are strongly corroborative, says a writer in the "Glasgow Herald." An officer attached to an important Commission, now m England, states that an alarming number of secret assassinations have taken place lately, about which it has been impossible to obtain evidence. Tho sufferers are German subjects who have had relations of a more or less friendly character with Allied officers and French officials. "Investigation shows,” says this officer, "that there is a vast underground movement employing secret and mysterious methods against all foreigners.” Secret societies of this description have always had sway on tho Continent, and all wars have been followed by demonstrations on their part. The wars of Napoleon were followed 'by a veritable crop of secret societies, of which the most troublesome were the “Chouans, who indulged in robbery and murder disguised under the best of intentions. In the Middle Ages Germany was honeycombed with a powerful secret organisation. known as the "Vehme. This society was started with high ideals, its object being the righting of wrongs and the punishment of criminals too lightly dealt with by the law. So pow-erful did they become that they were far more dreaded than the established authority; they captured criminals, tried them with a rough sort of justice, and punished them with severity. It is apparent that there is now in Germany, struggling in the aftermath of the war, a. revival of the "Vehme.” The secret brotherhood now at work is punishing all those who, according to the idea of the Vehme, are enemies of their country and are thereby giving considerable trouble to their own authorities and the British and French Commissions. Many French “idiersXave fallen victims to the secret assassins, the method pf dealing death—whatever it is—being always the uime. The bodies of the victims are almost invariably .found in every case full of knifo wotnds and' floating in tho Rhine and other rivers. This finding of floating bodies full of wounds is a most significant fact and its importance has hitherto escaped' notice in the examination of the victims of ffio "Vehme." In earlier days it was tho "Vehme” of Germany that invented the diabolical instrument of death known a, tho "Iron Virgin.” This waS a lifesize’ statue constructed in a most cunning manner for the execution of offenders, and it stood in a secret dungeon in a castle on the Rhine. The condemned would be led' mto the dread chamber, and there ordered to kiss the Virgin." On his approaching the statue it opened, and, grasping him firmly, drew him ’within. But the interior of the statue was filled with knives, so arranged that they entered tho limbs and the eyes of the victim thus embraced. After a few minutes, the “Virgin” released the victim, a.-trap-door opened in tho floor, and his body was dropped into the Rhine, and carried swiftly away. . It is a significant fact that the victims of the new “Vehme” are being discovered dead under circumstances that point to a similar punishment, and there are much greater improbabilities than that the reign, of the “Iron Virgin” lias teen resuscitated. Many of to-day’s victims show unmistakable signs of her terribly rendins embrace. , , . • . Herr was by shootin,., but the anti-militarists of Germany are convinced that it' was the work of a "national murder centre, which has systematically prepared a long series of murders of inconvenient adversaries and the fact that bloodhounds failed to c et on the track of the assassins, while a ,£5OOO reward for their arrest still awaits a claimant, goes far to confirm the suspicion, Whoever were tho assassins, robbery was clearly not the object, for nothin"- was taken from the body, and even a diamond ring which fell from the dead statesman’s finger was found lying in the grass beside the body.
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Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 26, 25 October 1921, Page 7
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675GERMAN ASSASSINS Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 26, 25 October 1921, Page 7
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