Abuses in German Prison Camps

Examples of Heartless Treatment

Quartermaster Sergeant T. Duggan of the First Coldstream Guards, who was at the prison camp at Schneidemühl (Posen) from 1914 to March, 1918, described the horrors at that camp as follows:

Prisoners of all nationalities, Russians, French, British, and Belgians, were kept there, the majority being Russians. At the beginning they lived in holes in the ground without any covering whatever. Quartermaster Sergeant Duggan showed me a photograph illustrating this condition of things, which lasted for some time, it being a month before the prisoners had any covering over their heads. The food was so bad that the British could never eat it.

About December, 1914, a typhus epidemic began. It continued for four or five months. Schneidemühl has one camp divided into three inclosures, the whole camp containing about 40,000 prisoners. The daily average of deaths was certainly not under thirty. Another photograph was shown to me depicting a long procession of coffins during the epidemic. A gigantic German carrying a rifle headed the procession, which was mainly composed of unfortunate Russian prisoners. Anything more pathetic cannot be imagined. Photographs were also shown me of the actual funeral service and place of interment. These photographs showed many being buried at one time in one long trench. After the interment, where the bodies were deposited four deep, one above another, the Germans made mounds surmounted by crosses, intimating that only two persons were buried beneath each mound.

It is impossible to estimate now how many were buried altogether, but many thousands died from this typhus epidemic. When the epidemic broke out a terrible condition of affairs quickly ensued, and it was not until it had been raging for a fortnight that Russian doctors arrived on the scene. Some of the patients were then first sent to hospital. The camp's condition, even after the doctors' arrival, was perfectly awful.

A British merchant Captain, who was released in May from internment in a German camp, asserted under oath that after his ship was torpedoed he was locked up for twenty-four hours in the U-boat for refusing to answer questions. On the following day he was searched, and for still refusing to answer was sentenced to be shot on reaching port, or before if he should cause any annoyance. One of the principal officers called him a liar and an English swine.

Some days later the submarine put into Heligoland, and the Captain was transferred to an underground cell ashore. Later, after scanty and bad food had made him ill, he was marched with other prisoners from merchant ships to a camp. Kept naked in intense cold for three hours while his clothes were being searched, German officers stood about laughing. His garments were returned to him wet, and he was put in barracks, where his only covering was verminous blankets.

In another compound the conditions were better, but the food uneatable. The prisoners were skeletons in rags. If they fell down from weakness they were kicked and clubbed, beaten with the flat of swords, and kept standing at attention in freezing weather. They had to fight like wild beasts for food that a dog would refuse. Funerals were a daily occurrence.

Transferred to Brandenburg, where he lived five and a half months, the fare was such that, by the time his own parcels of food arrived, he had lost twenty-eight pounds in weight. Twenty degrees of frost have been registered on the inside wall of the barrack in the mornings, and in Summer the heat was intolerable and the flies and mosquitos very trying. Sanitation was almost nil; 850 Russians died at that camp earlier in the war, and several were burned to death there shortly before the Captain arrived.