Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 January 1918 — GERMAN PRISON CAMP AS SEEN BY AN AMERICAN [ARTICLE]

GERMAN PRISON CAMP AS SEEN BY AN AMERICAN

Connecticut Man Arrives Home After Escape Into Sweden || ■ on Fertilizer Boat. HB. ______ ' WAS HELD IN THREE PRISONS ■ . t Lott 80 Pounds In Seven Months Before Aid Came —Guards Worse Off Than Prisoners and .Glad to Get Scraps from Food the • Y. M. C. A. Sent. « L m mm New York.—What is a German prison camp like, from the prisoner’s viewpoint? ;

S What sort of food, treatment, comforts (If any) do the men receive who are captured by the Germans? How do the captives stand German prison conditions? Americans are more than ever vitally interested in these questions, since some of General Pershing’s soldiers were made prisoners a few days ago in a trench raid in France. Through the narrative of an American adventurer who less than a month ago escaped fronj a German prism and who had had experience with two other confinement camps, the New York World is able to give answers to the questions. Captured by Moewe. The narrator is Willet C. Smith of South Norwalk, Conn., who reached this country on November <5 from Sweden, to which> land he escaped from Luebeck, Germany, by concealing himself in the hold of a vessel and existing six days without food or water. Smith had been a prisoner, first aboard the German raider Moewe, then in camp at Duelmen, then at Brandenburg and finally j at Luebeck, for seven months and one day. He fled on October 11. Summed up, his testimony is this: There is no particular brutality, no clubbing with guns or stabbing with bayonets as long as prisoners remain orderly. But the food is insufficient—he fell away from 210 to 130 pounds—and long continued subsistence upon German prison fare alone has most grievous effects upon the health. Only the Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. supplies are keeping the prisoners alive at some confinement places. Brandenburg, where about 70,000 prisoners of allied, nations were kept, was the worst camp Smith encountered. This is in Prussia, not far from Berlin. Duelmen, in Westphalia, was bad enough, although the treatment . was better. At Luebeck, which is not a camp but a port where prisoners are worked on the waterfront, conditions were not bad at all. * Guards Worse Off. The German soldiers guarding the. prisoners were far worse off there than the captives, Smith declares. Relielorganizations keep the prisoners supplied with enough food and clothes to get along with, and the middle-aged •guards, half starving and in patches, beg supplies from their captive enemies. “They’re sick and disgusted with the war, these fellows at Luebeck,’ • Smith says. “They would often say: ‘Look at us, without enough to eat or wear! The kaiser’s no earthly good! He’s crazy. Germany’s starving and licked and yet he keeps, on fighting!’ Smith, a railroad brakeman by trade and a “boomer” by inclination, sailed from Newport News on January 28 for Liverpool as foreman of 54 American horse-wranglers. When his ship, the British-owned steamer Esmeralda, was on, her return voyage in March she was captured, robbed and sunk by the raider Moewe, and her crew added to the prisoners of that adventurous craft, who numbered at the end of the Moewe’s raiding voyage abdv<* 600. How the prisoners were shut be-

low, with no chance for their lives, - whenever the Moewe sighted another vessel, has been told by others, and Smith’s narrative of that need not be repeated. {le arrived with the rpsfcv at Kiel, Germany, on March 21, and next day, with all the Moewe’s prisoners, was sent to Duelmen, Westphalia. a town, about ten miles from the Holland border. Captors “On Leave.” “We were sent down there In third class cars,’” Smith said, “with one guard to each ten men. The guards were all middle-aged Germans who had been at the front and who were home on furlough. They complained bitterly because r whcn they got a leave it wasn’t really a leave at all. They had to do guard duty or work in a factory or on a farm. This trip lasted all night, hut we didn’t get a scrap of food till we had breakfast at Duelmen in the morning. ' “The camp consisted of a lot,of low, wooden, unpainted shacks, with plain board floors. Around the walls ran bunks, one above another. Each bunk had a bag of straw for a mattress, and two medium weight blankets. There were four of these shacks in: each inclosure at Duelmen. Each inclosure held about 1,000 prisoners, and had a 12-foot barbed wire fence around it, with the wire at the top bent inward so you couldn’t get over. How many of these inclosures there were —each with its four shacks —I don’t know, but I was told there were 50,000 prisoners.

“Then there was another barbed wire fence,, higher and thicker, on the outside of a roadway which ran around the entire camp. Every 200 feet around this barrier was a sentry box and a sentry. Inside of each smaller inelosure there were two armed guards, marching back and forth. Nationalities Separated. “The nationalities were all separated. The French prisoners were kept by themselves. They seemed to get the worst treatment. The Russians were by themselves and we Americans were kept /with the English. Nobody got what you’d call good treatment. “For breakfast every morning we got a piece of bread an inch and a half thick and about four inches square and one tincup of what they called coffeehut I’d call good water spoiled. I don’t know what they made it out of, but it was rotten, bitter stuff and not even very -hot.

“For dinner and supper we had the same thing every day—turnip soup, with mighty few turnips in it. We never had anything No meat, no potatoes, no bread, even, except at breakfast. You could take the turnip soup or starve. It was just about enough to keep you alive. Some of the fellows got so weak they’d have to be carried to the hospital. There they’d get nourishing- food for a few days, but as soon as they were a little stronger they’d be chucked out of the hospital. There wasn’t much of what you’d call real suffering at Duelmau and the guards were decent enough:— but it wasn’t much of a life.” Sent to Brandenburg. On April 3 Smith and his fellow captives of the Moewe were sent from Duel man to the notorious camp at Brandenburg, which is on the Havel river, Berlin and Magdeburg. Again they had an all-night trip without food and crowded into narrow wooden benches in the worst sort of cars. “Here we, had Prussians for guards, and they were wicked devils,” Smith went on. “The camp was the same sort of a place as Duelman, with barbed wire inner inclosures, and then a roadway circling the whole camp and barred on the outside with wire. “At Duelman they would turn us out and count us only twice a day, but at Brandenburg they gave us the ‘raus’ a dozen times. They’d keep us standing barefoot in the snow for hours until some major would come up ancj verify the final count. By this time our shoes had worn out, and most of us actually were barefoot.

“The Prussians hauled and shoved us around like cattle, although I must say I didn’t see any one struck or stabbed who didn’t have it coming to him. “At Brandenburg we got the same old food —turnip soup, with never a change. They made the strongest of us work on farms outside the inclosure, clearing the ground for the spring planting; but we got no better food than the rest. r “We nearly froze to death at Brandenburg. There were small stoves in the huts, but they didn’t begin to warm (ihem. The blankets —you could see through them! We were all full of insects and had to have our clothes fumigated every two weeks, but in a couple of days we’d be as bad as ever. Gets Job on Docks. “I was about ready to take a desperate chance for escape when on May 1 they esked for 300 volunteers to go to work on the docks at Luebeck. They said they’d give us boots, better clothes and a mark a day for wages. I thought anything was better than Brandenburg, so I volunteered and was taken. v ... “The clothes tlre> gave us were black uniforms with a yellow stripe do%n the pants and a yellow band fitted into the sleeve, with our number and the word ‘Krfegsgefangenlager’ (war prison) on. them. ‘‘They did give us better footgear, but you were Just as likely as not to get one boot and One shoe, and different sizes. And when they half-soled a shoe they did it with the upper part of an old boot. They had scarcely any leather at all. While I was working on

the farms L managed, to get a pair of wooden shoes to keep my feet off the ground. ~ J *— I —— “There had been promises of Red Cross packages and Y. M. C. A. boxes at Brandenburg, but they hadn’t arrived when I left. “At Luebeck everything was- much better. They kept us in a big warehouse on the Hamburg-American quay, and made us load and unload ships. But here we had steamer bunks to sleep in and decent blankets, and it was luxury compared to the other places. We had the same old bum coffee and turnip soup—hut our guards got the same. Then in the summer we began. to receive some clothing from the International Y. M. C. A. and some food boxes from the American Red Cross through Copenhagen. What Y. M. C. A. Sent. “Every week we got a box that had in -it 50 biscuits, some corned beef, veal loaf, suet pudding, condensed milk, one-quarter pound of tea, a slice of bacon, a can of fruit, 50 cigarettes and some tobacco. That saw us through. It was so good we felt sorry for the poor guards and would give them scraps. They offered as high as 50 marks for a pound of tea. And the bacon they would have given anything for.”

In June, Smith made his first attempt at escape. He had been working in a shipyard 'distant from Luebeck and managed to elude his guard at nightfall. He struck out overland, but his prison uniform revealed him and two days later he was captured and returned. For the offense of trying to escape he was given 19 days in the “black hole,” with only a piece of bread a day to eat. Also a big German guard “took -a couple of cracks” at his face. “The Spanish ambassador came to see us Americans on June 1 and promised to send us books and clothing, but I never saw any of them. They did begin to put a few potatoes into the turnip soup, and occasionally they put about five pounds of meat into the soup supply for §OO men. Another Getaway Chance. “In October I made up my mind to take another chance on a getaway. The ships we were loading were plying between Luebeck and Swedish ports, and I thought I might hide on one of these. They carried mostly salt fertilizer to Sweden, though sometimes some coal and coke, and they brought back- pigiron and ore. I never saw them bring in any foodstuffs. Sometimes the German , ships would go out carrying barbed wire and iron rods for the trenches on the Russian front. They went to Riga, I believe. “There was one boat, the Undine, which traveled between Luebeck and a Swedish port named Norrkoping regularly. I got acquainted with a Swede on board her, and he told me one other fellow had mdde his getaway to Norrkoping by concealing himself in the hold.

“My scheme was this: Every morning the guard would get together an early working crew of 12 men at four o’clock. He would take them on board while it was dark, to get the hatches ready for the others. One morning when I wasn’t in this squad I hid myself in the hallway where they always lined up. The guard counted his 12, and then in the darkness I joined them. As we- climbed aboard the Undine he didn’t know he had 13, instead of 12. He was a boneheaded German anyhow. “I hid myself in the fertilizer—a combination of salt and sulphur. What it did to me was plenty. My feet are still full of holes and the nails are off my toes.” For six days then (an unusually long journey”) Smith remained in the hold.. When the vessel docked at Xorrkoping and the hatch was opened he dashed down the gangplank to safety. The Swedish police gave him water and food; American consulate attaches clothed him and sent him to Stockholm and then to Christiania, Norway, and there he boarded the liner Bergensjord for home.