Gunnison news-champion., 1918-08-02
German Soldiers Incited to Acts
Of Cruelty by General Won
Kissing.
'EMANATI0N OF HIGH KULTUR'
Governor General Of Belgium on Rec
ord as Declaring the Innocent Must
Suffer With the Guilty-Irvin
Cobb's Tale Of Horrors

tematiediiy inflicted upon the people
Of Belgium by the German soldiers.
undes the orders of their command
ing officers. are Shopn in all their
hideousness by Official documents
and the testimony Of eye-witnesses.
as ueH as by letters urittsn by Ger
man soldiers tn the field. The bra-
zen effort Of Emperor William to
cast the odium Of the fearful deeds
on the BelgidHs IS also shoTn. Quo
'Gtions giren are from documents
already male public or in the pos
,ee'ioH Of the government at Wash
IHgton.
This interview was reproduced In
the Berliner Tugeblatt Of November
20. 1911
Mr. F. G. Walcott Of the Belgian re-
lief commission tells In the Geograph-
Ical Magazine for May. 1917. of meet
ing Gen Won Bernhard:
AS walked out. Gen. Won Bern
hardl came into the room, an expert
aTtillcryman. professor In one of
thcIr war colleges. l met him the
next morning. and he asked me II !
had read his book, Germany in the
Next War
81 sSd l had. He said: DO you
know. my friends nearly ran me out
Of the country for thatT They said.
You have let the cat out of the bag
will believe it What did you think
OF itr
~ said. General. I did not believe a
word of II when l read II. but now
feel that you did not tell the whole
truth and the old general looked
actually pleased"
Speaking on August 20, 1914. at
Munster. OF the extreme measures
which the Germans felt obliged to take
against the civil population Of Bel
GUM, Gen. Won Bissing said:
"The Innocent mus, suffer with the
guilty. In the repression Of
lnfamy. human lives cannot be spared.
and II Isolated houses, fiourishing VIII
lages, and even entire towns are ami
hllated. that Is assuredly regrettable.
but 1t must not excite ill-timed sent1-
All this must not In our
eyes weigh as much as the life Of a
single one OF our brave soldiers-the
rigorous accomplishment Of duty Is the
nmanation OF n high kultur, and in
that, the population Of the enemy
countries can learn a lesson from our
army"
Officers Encouraged Atrocities.
Gen. Won Bissing. after his appoint
ment as governor general Of Belgium.
repeated In substance the above opin-
Ion to Dutch journalist. The inter
view is published in the Dusseldorfer
Anzeiger Of December 8, 1914.
Irwin s. Cobb states his conclusions
on the responsibility Of the higher Ger
man command for the atrocities:
"But 1 was an eyewitness to crimes
which. measured by the standards Of
and civilization. impressed
me as worse than any individual ex-
cess. any individual outrage could
ever have been or can ever be; be-
cause these crimes indubltably were
instigated on a wholesale basis by Or
der Of officers of rank, and must have
been carried out under their personal
supervision. direction. and approval.
Taking the physical evidence offer
ed before our own eyes. and buttress-
ing 1t with the statements made to us,
diers and German officers. we could
reach but one conclusion, which was
that here. in such and such a place,
those In command had said to the
troops: Spare this town and these
people, And there they had said:
Waste this town and shoot these peo-
ple.' And here the troops had dlscrim-
inately spared, and there they had in
discriminatory wasted. In exact ac-
cordance with the word Of their supe-
Cobb. Speaking Of Prus-
SLAMS, New York, 1917, PIP. 1924.
tlcodwinked German People.
These ideas. then, were systemat-
icu,ly impressed upon the military and
Of cial classes. 1t was necessary,
h.Scver, to work upon the minds of
tie German people, so that they might
iei.c themselves to the inhuman poll
cies advocated by the military leaders.
To do this was difficult, for. as has
been shown often, many Of the civil
ian leaders Of public opinion, time and
again, expressed their horror Of the
new spirit which was animating the
military authorities. The reichstag
debates give ample evidence Of this,
and the task Of the military leaders
would have been still more difficult II
the reichstag had any real power.
(See War Information Series No. 8.
The Government Of Germany" see
also Gerard's my -Four Years in Ger
many" chapter p
The military authorities and those
in sympathy with them have done al