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"1683-1920": The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How It Worked—"Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—GermaSchrader, Frederick Franklin

History

"1683-1920": The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How It Worked—"Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—Germa

Schrader, Frederick Franklin

Germans -- United States; World War, 1914-1918 -- Miscellanea

Dear Mr. Matthews: Replying to your letter of the 9th
    inst., enclosing a letter which you have received from the
    “Labor Leader,” although I have heard of a number of cases
    of Belgian girls being maltreated in one way or another,
    I have on investigation not found a particle of truth in
    one of them, and I know of no girl in Sheffield who has
    had her nose cut off and her stomach ripped open. I have
    also investigated cases in other towns, but have not yet
    succeeded in getting hold of any tangible information.
    Yours very truly,

                                                  A. BALFAY,
      Consulat du Royanne de Belgique.
    District War Refugee Committee for Belgians.
      March 11, 1915.

Horace Green, a war correspondent, who spent many weeks in Belgium
during the early stages of the war, in his book, “The Log of a
Noncombatant,” issued by the Houghton Mifflin Company, devotes the
last chapter to a discussion of atrocities. Concluding that the
stories of atrocities have been exaggerated a hundred fold, Mr. Green
says:

    The reports of unprovoked personal atrocities have been
    =hideously exaggerated=. Wherever one real atrocity has
    occurred, it has been multigraphed into a hundred cases.
    Each, with clever variation in detail, is reported as
    occurring to a relative or close friend of the teller. For
    campaign purposes, and particularly in England for the sake
    of stimulating recruiting, a partisan press has helped
    along the concoction of lies.

    In every war of invasion there is bound to occur a certain
    amount of plunder and rapine. The German system of reprisal
    is relentless; but the German =private as an individual
    is no more barbaric= than his brother in the French, the
    British, or the Belgian trenches.

In the “Atlantic Monthly” for October, 1917, Prof. Kellogg, of
the American Belgian Relief Commission, while severely arraigning
Germany’s treatment of Belgium, expressly states that he came across
no instance of Belgian children with their hands cut off or women
with breasts mutilated.

Ernest P. Bicknell, Director of Civilian Relief, American Red Cross,
in an article in “The Survey” in 1917, writes as follows:

    The world is familiar with stories of the atrocities
    charged against the German army in Belgium. In our travels
    in Belgium many of these stories came to our ears. In time
    we came to feel that a fair consideration of these reports
    required a careful discrimination between the conduct of
    individual German soldiers, and those operations carried on
    under the direction of army officers in accordance with a
    deliberately adopted military policy.

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