The Germans had not only requisitioned food; they also requisitioned the very means of industrial life. According to a scheme conceived and worked out by the president of the “Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft,” Walther Rathenau, Belgium was to be stripped of all natural and manufactured products which could help the German army in continuing and winning the war. Coal, metals, chemical products, wood, wool, linen, cotton, copper, rubber, machines, machine tools, oil, transport material, horses, etc., were put under “saisie” by successive decrees of von Bissing and sent to Germany, with the help of German business men, who visited the Belgian factories and marked the things to be requisitioned. A consequence of this was the closing of many factories and the creation of an enormous number of forced strikers. These men, then, were considered as idlers and, by order of the military, taken out of their houses and sent by whole trains, in cattle-trucks, to Germany. There they had to work for the German army, even making munitions to kill their brethren. This was the origin of the awful deportations, which stirred the conscience of the civilized world. About 150,000 Belgians, mostly workmen, but intellectuals, bourgeois, and even schoolboys not excepted, were either sent to Germany or to the firing-line in France and Belgium, where they were compelled to dig trenches, construct roads, etc. A large number of them refused flatly to work for the enemy. They were submitted in the camps to real tortures, beaten, martyrized, and scores of them died. Others were sent back, exhausted by their martyrdom, and died on arriving in their native home. The financial wealth of Belgium was also crippled by the heavy war levies imposed on provinces, towns, and villages. In December, 1914, von Bissing imposed on the Belgian provinces a collective war levy of 40,000,000 francs monthly; in November, 1916, this levy had reached 50,000,000 francs monthly. Von Falkenhausen, who succeeded von Bissing, raised it to 60,000,000 francs. It would be impossible to estimate exactly the total of the levies and fines imposed on Belgian towns and villages during four years of war.