BRITISH PRISONERS IN GERMANY.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 August 1918, Page 8

BRITISH PRISONERS IN GERMANY.

TYPICAL OUTRAGES. London, May 21. The Times' correspondent at Amsterdam has supplied us during the past few days with several accounts of German brutabty ,to British prisoners. Wo are now able to supplement these, accounts by other instances of extreme brutality. For their authenticity we can. vouch absolutely, though it is obviously necessary in most cases to supply a bare outline of the shocking incidents, and to suppress the names of the men concerned.

In a camp called Merseburg, during 1914 and 1915, there were a number of prisoners, men of the Old Army. Many of them had been very seriously wounded and were unfit to work. The Germans continually attempted to iuaKe these men work, but they were successfully resisted so long as the men had an officer looking after them. But this did not last for ever, and when the intfn were left without an officer the Germans lost no time in sending them to work on a neighboring farm. The work was hard, beginning at <5 a.m. Even that did not satisfy the Germans, who tried to insist that the men should begin at 4 o'clock in the morning instead of G. The men refused, and the sentries tried to compel them to turn out. DELIBERATE MURDER.

One of the men received a brutal blow in the face, and all but two then decided to give in. Of the two, one had been badly wounded, having had the fingers of one hand shot away. The wound had not healed, and he was quite unfit for work. The sentries drove these two men with kicks and blows of the clubbed rifle out to work. At last the man with the wounded, hand stopped and held it up to show the sentries that he was unfit for work. One of them, in a passion, pr.t his rifle up and shot the man through the chest. He fell without speaking, and was thrown down the stairs by the two sentries. The other soldier was then threatened by one of the sentries with a loaded Title, and was at last kicked out of the buildings. The body of the murdered man lay where it had been thrown. Later it was carried to a dirty wash-house, placed on a bare stdne floor, and left there. A German- officer, coming to see it, was shown by the sentry a small cut on his hand. The inference was that the murder was .punishment for an attack. The officer shook hands with the sentry, and went away, after telling the other men that they must work from 4 in the morning till 1 in the evening. The next day some of them were made to dig a grave in a corner of the cemetery, which had been used as a rubbish'heap. That night the body, still in clothing saturated with blood, was' placed in a rough coffin, and the next day it was buried in the presence of a crowd of jeering Germans, who talked, pointed, and every now and then burst into loud roars of laughter. The. funerol was conducted by a Roman Catholic priest, who showed plainly by his manner that he shared the. unseemly 'sentiments of the crowd,,