GERMAN BRANDS YOUNG MOTHER WITH AN IRON. —— Victim of a Violation Officially Labeled by Army Authorities. —— PAINT BADGE FOR OTHERS —— Children of German Fathers Catalogued as the Government's Property. —— FORCED INTO MENIAL SERVICE —— An Officer Formerly in British Army Tells How Kultur Repopulates Itself.
Reading edition
A new and startling story of German atrocities is told by an American formerly in the service of the British Army, but now attending one of the A.E.F. schools in preparation for a commission in the American Army. It is in accordance with other stories of the prostitution of womanhood which the Kaiser is forcing in order to repopulate the German Empire.
The rapid British advance at Cambria, in November, when towns which the Germans had occupied for three years were captured before the latter could deport the civilian population into Germany as is their custom, disclosed the latest effort of the German army. French women and girls had been made the victims.
"Among the refugees who passed along the roads making their way southward farther into France after we made our first big advance were scores of women and girls, each marked on her breast by a cross in red paint," said the officer. "These were disclosed when the refugees passed in front of our medical officers who were inspecting them. All of them were about to become mothers, and the French interpreter who was assisting the medicos explained that the cross indicated that German soldiers were the fathers. The crosses had been painted on them, the women explained, to show that their children would belong to the German Government.
This Iron Cross Red Hot.
"One of these unfortunates, apparently not more than seventeen years of age, had not only been painted but branded with a hot iron so that she would be marked for life with the sign of the cross. She said that a German officer would be the father of her child. This officer, the girl said, had been quartered in her parents' home and she had been forced to accede to his desires.
"After her health became such that he had no further use for her, she said, he ordered her to act as his personal servant, doing the menial work in his chamber. It was not long until she was unable to continue this and then, angered at her weakness, he ordered soldiers to scour the paint from her breast and burn the cross into her flesh. When this was done, she was forced to leave her home and taken to a maternity hospital which the army had established for other girls and women of the town in the same condition.
An Eye-Witness on "Kultur."
"I myself saw the girl who had been branded and the others who had been painted like sheep and heard their stories, as I had been detailed to supervise the return of the refugees. Thank God, America, by coming into the war, will help to stamp out this beastly 'kultur' from the world and make it a safe, clean place to live in for your womenfolk and mine—our mothers, our sweethearts, our wives, and our daughters. I have a daughter just seventeen years old," concluded the American grimly.