My German prisons; the story of my two and a half years of captivity in Germany and my final escape, November 14, 1914-April 8, 1917

Front matter

D firtTitt

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

Preface

The writer was appealed to, so constantly and so earnestly, to write his experiences, and was so weary recounting them, that at last he decided to put into print a short account of the happenings within his own personal knowledge during his two and a half years' imprisonment in Germany. He was also encouraged to do so from other and more important reasons.

There are countless people throughout the world who have been so unfortunate as to have intimate friends and relatives in captivity in Germany. In the opinion of the writer, these people ought to know, from one who has had a bitter experience, to which these pages will testify, the true conditions under which the wretched prisoners existed. These pages are entirely uncensored and aim at a true record of events, in which there is no word of hearsay, or stories borrowed from others. As such they must stand. To those who may be inclined to be skeptical towards the newspaper reports of German brutality, it is hoped that this narrative will come as a revelation.

The first edition of this book was published in the summer of 1918, by Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton, of London, receiving a tremendous ovation from the vi PREFACE

critics of the London press. The present volume is the original book, rewritten and enlarged by the addition of facts which could not possibly have been published before the cessation of hostilities, for fear of giving valuable information to the enemy, and of calling down the wrath of the Germans on the defenceless heads of the poor prisoners who stiU remained in bondage.

If the facts disclosed therein bring home to the reader a knowledge of the infamous, relentless, and savage character of the Hxm, deliberately dehumanized by the State for the purposes of the State, the writer will feel that his labors have not been in vain.

Contents

Introduction ix

I. Captured by the Boches i

II. By Cattle-Truck to Munden 19

Introduction

I VISITED the camp of Hanover-Munden, where Captain Gilliland was confined, in the spring of 1915. About nine hundred ofl&cers, mostly Russians and French, were collected in an old factory building on the banks of the river below the town. There was but little room for exercise, only a space where a few might stand together in a group. The sanitary arrangements were filthy beyond aU description and the whole place did not then resemble a decent penitentiary, still less a camp for the confinement of officers. When I spoke to the camp commander, I foimd him in a semi-intoxicated state. Captain Gilliland, as I remember, although ill, had attempted to escape, weighing, at this time, only one hundred and three pounds. I secured the transfer of the fourteen British officers who were in this camp to the camp or prison of Bischofswerda, in the Kingdom of Saxony, where, according to the accounts of my inspectors, the treatment, lodging, and food were much better than at Hanover-Munden.

Captain Gilliland, as a result of his numerous attempts to escape, was transferred to many officers' detention places in Germany and on one occasion was sent to the camp for enlisted men at Gottingen. This

X INTRODUCTION

was also one of the camps visited by me, and was perhaps the best camp for enlisted men which came under my observation in Germany — but that is saying very little. The camp commander, Colonel Bogen, showed more initiative and skill in the management than did the other camp commanders. Some of the professors ra the University at Gottingen took an iaterest in the camp and in the estabUshment of a library for the prisoners.

In one of the books which I wrote after returning from Germany, I referred to this interest of the college professors and particularly to the work of Professor Stange, praising him for his humanitarian interest in the prisoners. It is hard to be disillusioned concerning the only evidence of humane feeling observed by me in Germany with reference to the prisoners of war, but I have since learned that Professor Stange and the other poisonous snakes from the University of Gottingen had only taken an interest in the affairs of this prison camp for the purpose of doing propaganda work amongst the Belgian soldiers and endeavoring to set those Belgians who spoke Flemish against those speaking French.

I happened to visit another of the camps where Captain GiUiland was confined — Fort number 9, one of the ring forts surroimding the town of Ingolstadt, in Bavaria. My visit was on a bitterly cold winter's day in January, I think in 1916. Captain GiUiland was not

INTRODUCTION xi

at the time confined to this fort. The officers there suffered very much from the cold and damp. Their quarters, as I remember, were in the casemates or bombproofs of this old-fashioned fort, with little or no heat and a continuous ooze of damp from the stone walls. There was no exercise-ground, a few of the British officers at the time of my visit endeavoring to get a httle exercise by coasting down the ramparts. ■ I have never been able to understand why the Germans treated their prisoners of war so badly, unless it was that they hoped to make these poor prisoners fear for all time the very name of German. ' The officers were not, of course, in such evil position as the men, who were leased out like slaves to the owners of factories, farms, and mines and compelled to do slaves' work on rations hardly sufficient to keep a man alive, brutally punished if they failed, and shot like dogs, as were the Irish prisoners in Limburg, when the liquor given to them by their guards excited them to opposition. I have always beheved that the guards deliberately gave Uquor to the Irish in Limburg for the purpose of inducing them to show some fight and thereby furnish an excuse for murder.

The civiHzed world cannot permit that these crimes against civilization and humanity and the laws of war shall go unpunished.

The control of the prisoners of war was entirely in xii INTRODUCTION

the hands of the representing corps commanders, who in the absence of the fighting army corps, and on the first day of the declaration of war, were clothed with despotic power superseding the civil officers and reporting, not to the General Stafif or the Ministry of War, but to the Emperor direct.

The Ministry of War, in endeavoring to exercise a general supervision, was in continual conflict with the corps commander. Colonel Friederich, afterwards General, who, in the Ministry of War, had charge of the prisoners' department, was a particularly common, pig-headed, and disagreeable Prussian. I regret that by his deatii from heart disease within the last year he cheated the gallows.

I He is not the only one. There are others aUve of those responsible for the frightful conditions in the prison camps, and these brutal cowards must be made to pay for their cruelty with their own skins.

Captain Gilliland's book is most interesting and gives a true picture of life in German war prisons.

I recommend it to those who are inclined to forgive an unrepentant Germany.

James W. Gerard