GERMANY

Taranaki Daily News, 9 December 1915, Page 5

GERMANY

PRISONERS IN GERMANY, COMPLAINTS OF ILL-TREATMENT. A PITIABLE STORY. ■Received Dec. 8, 10.40 p.m. London. Dec. 8. The Dally Chronicle says lu'D civilians who have been released from Ruheleben have arrived at Flushing. They told pitiable stories of ill treatment and said they were exhausted in body and mind. They said the Germans were revenging themselves ami 4500 British with means which were only possible in the German character. There ivas no heating in the camps before two in the afternoon, and then it was only meagre.

The soldiers in the early part of the war attempted to persuade the prisoners to work, belaboring them with rides'and by other means of cruelty. They forced even invalids of sixty years of age to walk for an hour at a fast pace around the racecourse in which they were interned. They were tied to posts for the smallest infractions of rules. The clothes of all the prisoners were painted with broad yellow stripes. The food was bad and there was a high rate of sickness and mortality.

A SORRY SIGHT. DISEASE AND RIOTS IN CAMP. Received Dee. 9, 1.40 a.m. London, Dee. 8. The returned men include a number of maimed - soldiers. The majority wear pinched faces and sunken eyes, and have the shabbiest clothes, contrasting with the warm suits and overcoats in which the well-fed Germans returned to Ger-' many the same night. The returned men detail shocking happenings at Witten'ourg Whcte. Fifteen thousand interned prisoners were treated in the most brutal fashion. Typhus broke out, killing sixteen hundred prisoners. The German guards immediately fled, and six 'British army medical officers at the camps volunteered to go to Wittenburg. Five immediately caught typhus and three died.

THE TALK OF PEACE. GERMANY'S STORY OF ITS ORIGIN. Times and Sydney Sun Services. Received Sept 8, ">.o p.m. London, Sept. 7. A German wireless states that a French wireless related that Germany prohibited the exportation of newspapers because they were afraid the world would know the truth of what happened at the session of the Reichstag. France knows this t„ be untrue,, though it is what France would like to he true. The reason for these excesses of the imagination lies in the fact that the French enthusiasm for their hopeless war is ebbing, and this is the best proof of the fantastic nature of these reports becoming dignified dehates in the ReicLHag. When Fiance suffers a reverse on the battlefield she invents German proposals so as to revive her spirits. This is why the news that Germany is seeking peace was spread throughout the world, The reports of Count von Buelow's mission were invented and were as untrue as the talk of the Kaiser's visit to Constantinople.

THE PIRATE ADMIRAL. HIS LATEST GLORIFICATION. Copenhagen, Dec. 7. A giant statue of Admiral von Tirpitz has boon erected at Wilhelmshaven similar to that of Genera] Hindenburg. it ha* a capacity for a quarter of a million nails. The Wilhelmshaven Zeitung .describes the statue as a wonderful likeness, dressed in oilskins, sea-boots and sou'wester, with a telescope in the left hand and the right outstretched. His eye;, ga/.c: into space, far over the distant seas, where the heroes of Germany's sea-power carry out his orders.