WHAT A GERMAN PEACE MEANS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1868, 24 August 1918, Page 1

WHAT A GERMAN PEACE MEANS.

M. Chicherin, the Russian Commissary for Foreign Affairs, addressed the following note to the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Berlin : Many trustworthy eye-witnesses inform us of the terrible position of the peaceful population of the occupied regions of White Russia along the line of demarcation —of violence, pogroms, tortures, executions. and savage methods of dealing with the working-classes, as well as the plundering and burning of Russian villages by German detachments. Special mention in this respect is necessary with respect to the Polish Legions. In the village of Buda-koshelev-skaia a Uhlan patrol extorted a contribution of several thousand roubles, which sum had to be paid partly in gold. It requisitioned all corn. When the peasants had paid part of the contribution and stilted that they were unable to pay anything more, the Uhlans surrounded the village, fired into it with mach-ine-guns, and then set (ire to it. Several hundreds of peasants have been killed, and the village is now in ruins. In Zhaliki, and other villages, similar occurrences have taken place. Peasants, women and children who endeavoured (o escape from Ihe fires were pursued by Uhlans, (-ill into pieces with swords, and flogged with whips. In one village an old Jew was first (logged and then Imaged in the presence of all the villagers. In Bobruisk the fortress, the prisons, police stations, and all disciplinary establishments are full of arrested persons, who are detained under the most terrible conditions. They are flogged) and many of them have been shot for attempts to escape. Among (he comrades in prison, awaiting the death penalty, is Shvaiko, a sixteen-year-old school boy of the Slutzk Commercial School. Bobruisk is full of Uhlan punitive detachments. They are raiding villages, plundering, killing, and are. returning, singing songs of victory, with blood-stained whips and clothes. The town is cut off from (ho outside world, and is wholly given over to the plundering bands of the Polish Legion. Arrested men are being sent in fhoir thousands to the west from Minsk. The town is full of the cries and lamentations occasioned by these atrocities. Old men have been bound to horse saddles and dragged along for miles. The People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs suggests the formation of mixed commissions for the purpose of visiting the occupied regions of While Russia. Only in such a manner can all these facts be investigated without doing violence to the truth. A further group of facts which iq creating bitter feeling among large sections of the populations of the Russian Council’s Republic is violence done by the White Guards, allies of the German authorities, to Russian inhabitants in Finland, especially at Yiborg. Even twelve-year-old children have been shot. After the capture of Yiborg, a. group of about 200 arrested Russian subjects, ' among them women and children, were brought to the railway station, placed against a wall, and shot by machine-guns. The wounded were killed with rifles, and bayonets. A real exterminal ion of the Russian population took place. One witness saw about 500 corpses of Russians which had been mutilated in such a manner as to be unrecognisable.