Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 September 1917 — GERMAN ATROCITIES PROVEN [ARTICLE]

GERMAN ATROCITIES PROVEN

Evidence Discloses Deeds Worse I Than Any Indian Fiction. New York, September 20. —The Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, pastor of Plymouth church, Brooklyn, quoting from official records and , affidavits he had collected -on his recent tour of regions in France evacuated by the Germans, asserted in the first of a series of six sermons on the war in his church, that there could no longer be any doubt of the fact that the German armies had been guilty of the blackest crimes charged against them. ?■- Dr. Hillis spent July and August visiting the areas in France ruined by the German armies in their retreat. He brought back with him much evidence of German brutalities. and he placed affidavits and copies of official records on the pulpit from which he preached. “For three years German-Amer-icans have protested that the stories of German atrocities were to be disbelieved as English inventions, Belgian lies, ami French hypocrisies, but that day has gone forever,” he said. < “When the -representatives of the nations assemble for the final settlement there will be laid before the representatives of Germany affidavits, photographs, and other legal- proofs that make German atrocities far better established than the scalpings of the Sioux Indians on the Western frontiers, the murders of the Black iHole of Calcutta, or .«• the crimes of the Spanish Inquisition. On a battle line miles long, in every village the retreating Germans passedthe following morning accredited men hurried to the scene' to make the record against the day of judgment.

“The photographs of dead and mutilated girls, children, and old men tell no lies. Two forms of testimony are esteemed by jurists —the testimony of mature men, who have seen and heard and the' testiimony of children too innocent to invent their sfatements, but old enough to tell what they saw. For the first time in history the German has reduced savagery to a science, therefore this great war for peace must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the body." Dr. Hillis asserted that more than 10,000 separate atrocities committed by the German armies had been documented and were .on file in the chancellories of the allied jiations for use when the terms of peace are to be discussed. . “When the German army in Lorraine was defeated by one-half Its number,” he went on, “it fell northward, passing through French towns ahd villages where there were no Frenchmen. no guns, and where no shots were fired... D’.wing July and -August we went slowly from one ruined town to another, talking with the wonfcn and the children, comparing the photographs and the full official records imade at the time, with the statements of the poor, wretched survivors, who lived in cellars, where once there had been beautiful houses, orchards, and vineyards. “In Gerbevillier, standing beside their graves, I studied the photograph of the bodies of fifteen old men whom the Germans had lined up and shot because there were no young soldiers to kill; heard the detailed story of a woman whose boy of 14, being nearest the age of a soldier, was first hanged to a pear tree in the garden, and when the officer and soldiers had left him and were busy setting fire to the next house, she cut the rope, revived the strangled boy, only to find the soldiers had returned, and while the officer held her hands behind her back, his assistant ■poured petrol on the boy’s head and clothes,, set fire to him, ahd while he staggered about a flaming torch, they shrieked with laughter. “When they burned all the houses a.nd retreated the next imorning, the prefect of Lorraine photographed the bodies of thirty aged men lying as they fell, the bodies of women stripped and at last slain, while in the next village stood the ruined square belfry into which the ! Germans had v lifted machine guns, then forced every woman and child—27s in number—into the little church, and notified the French soldiers that if they fired upon the machine guns they would kill their own women and children. “After several days’ hunger and thirst, at midnight these brave woun<en slipped a little boy through the church window and hade their husbands fire upon the Germans in the belfry, saying they preferred death to the indignities they were suffering. And so these Frenchmen turned their guns, and in blowing those machine guns out of the belfry killed twjenfy of their own wives and chUAn^r. ’ ’ Dr. that further

indisputable proof of the heartless-! ness of the Germans was found in the letters and diaries taken from! the bodies of dead German soldiers. He continued: : ■■out of the large number note these: Hundreds of photographs of the dead bodies of aged priests, some of whom had been staked down. Here is the German efficiency for you. Here is the diary on August 22 of private Max Thomas* ‘Our soldiers are so excited we are like wild beasts. Destroyed eight houses with their inmates. Bayoneted two men witn their wives and a girl of 18. The little one almost unnerved me, so innocent was her expression.’ ’’ Dr. Hillis read what had been copied from the diary of Eitel Anders, another German soldier. It read: “In Vendre all the inhabitants without exception were brought out and shot. This shooting was heartbreaking, as they all knelt down and prayed. It was real sport, yet it was terrible to watch. At Hecht I saw the dead body oS> a young girl nailed to the outside door of a cottage by her hands. She was about 14 or 16 years old.” Dr. Hillis quoted from one of the affidavits, “Affidavit D--89.” It read: “After passing Weerde we met a woman covered with blood,’ with her breasts' cut off. She was delirious. “Standing in the village of Heri■menil,” continued Dr. (Hillis, “a boy of 16 and his mother showed me twelve bullet marks against the stone wall where a mother, aged .23, with a babe on her breast, with her young sister and sister-in-law of 16’and 17, were shot by twelve German soldiers. On a little board in one ruined village, I read these words: ‘Marie, aged 16, dead August 24, 1915. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.’ The hundreds of atrocities personally investigated only serve to interpret Aimibassador Morgenthau’s statement as to Armenia, that the Turkish soldiers and German, officers massacred in Armenia 500,000 people, that they might move into their farm houses and little shops and stores.” Germany’s philosophy, the pastor concluded, had dehumanized her officers and men. He. said the kaiser, and not the rest of th° world, had coined the word “Hun,” and had applied it to his own people.