GERMANY'S SHAME.

Taranaki Daily News, 29 December 1916, Page 3

GERMANY'S SHAME.

A NEW INDICTMENT. HORRORS OF GASTROW CAM?. A Danish writer, Madame Karen Bra in son, publishes in the Paris Matin probably the worst indictment "of the Germans for their treatment of prisoners of war which ha? yet been recorded, and she bases it, not up hoar-say evidence, but upon the signed statement of a French army surgeon who was an eye-witness of the atrocities he records. When his statement is read everyone will agree with the Danish lady's comment that "a shame v.'liieh the German Government will never efface is that of it;- deliberate treatment of prisoners of war, again.-t whom a policy of coldly calculated extermination lias been carried out." Tlie French doctor whom the Danish writer quotes was himself a prisoner in Gastrow Camp froan the end of September, 1914, to the middle of February, 1915. In January, at Mecklenburg, under snow and wind and icy rainstorms, men were still under canvas, lying in mud and filth, and covered with vermin. Every night one of them died. Every day, when food was distributed, there was a indescribable stampede to get a plate of soup or a morsel of bread. Old men, civilian prisoners, were thrown down and trampled on. Some, too weak to walk, crawled in the mud to .lap up what soup had dropped out of plates. German warders belabored them with sticks, and sometimes stabbed them with bayonets.

"I can give the names of some of these German brutes Male Nurse Sehultze, N.C'.O.'s Schwager, Decmann and Appel. Probably the greatest blackguard off all was Camp Inspector Abraham, who actually took prisoners' boots and shoes away from them. Schmidt, a cook, invented a new method of torture. He left a basin full of food outside the kitchens, and when unfortunate hungry prisoners came up, Schmidt and his acolytes fell upon them with sticks. The so-called chief surgeon of the camp was a medical student, called Dekkcr, who had next to no medical knowledge, but was in cliargc sometimes of 20,000 prisoners, whom he was incapable of attending. The deaths of many of them lie at his doou'. As always in Germany, the worst-treated prisoners were the English. They were always served last, and, when ill, were always worst looked after. These poor starving men actually had to sell, hit by bit, every scrap of clothing to obtain food. When literally naked they were taken to hospital. The spectacle of the hospitals itself, or the shed called by that name, was enough to make one's heart bleed. "Dying men lay on rotten straw .in rags, and eaten up with vermin. There was scarcely any medicine obtainable. Six or eight litres of milk were allowed for 150 patients. All dressings of wounds had long since run out. On February 3 I had this note in my diary: 'No more straw left for beds. Three English prisoners discovered completely naked in a pile of rotten straw. They had not had strength enough to drag themselves out. When wanned and fed as well as possible they actually revived, and are still alive, but the mortality of Gastrow Camp steadily increases, especially among the English and Russians. Thus a premeditated policy of slow murder is being nrried out."