German Atrocities: Their Nature and PhilosophyHillis, Newell Dwight
History
German Atrocities: Their Nature and Philosophy
Hillis, Newell Dwight
Pangermanism; World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities
Another form of proof is found in the journals and diaries of the
German soldiers. The German has climbed into the witness stand,
and given conclusive testimony against himself. Had his statements
been made by Belgians, French or English, we would have denied or
questioned the words, but when diaries have been taken from the dead
bodies of German soldiers, and when these different journals contain
substantially the same statements as to the atrocities committed at
a given day in a given town, it becomes impossible for an American
student to deny the daily records of German soldiers, with the
confession of deeds committed sometimes by their fellows, sometimes
by themselves. There is also the testimony of mutilated bodies that
have been preserved in certain morgues against the day of judgment
when arbitrators will behold the proof, hear the witnesses, and weigh
the guilt of the Germans. The Day of Judgment is coming when these
witnesses will rise literally from the grave and indict the German
Kaiser and his War Staff for atrocities that are the logical and
inevitable result of the ceaseless drill of their officers and privates
in the science of murder, as a method of breaking down the nervous
resources of the armed soldiers of Belgium and France.
OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE
No horrors in history are so overwhelmingly evidenced as the German
atrocities. The nature, the number, and the extent of their crimes have
been documented more thoroughly than the scalpings of settlers by Sioux
Indians, the horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, or the cruelties
of the Spanish Inquisition. No American to-day can cross the threshold
of Belgium or Northern France, Poland or Serbia, without recalling the
words that Dante saw above the gate of Hell: "Abandon hope, all ye who
enter here." Not since Judas and his fellow conspirators crucified
Jesus has there been a ruler, a War Staff or an army, that has
deliberately revived the cross, as an instrument of torture, to further
the ends of military efficiency. The Germans have literally fulfilled
the Kaiser's charge in 1899, and reproduced in 1914, upon various
cards for the Kaiser's soldiers: "You will take no prisoners; you will
show no mercy; you will give no quarter; you will make yourselves as
terrible as the Huns under Attila." All scholars know that the Kaiser
was referring to Attila's well-known motto, "Where my feet fall, let
grass not grow for a hundred years."
A CATALOGUE OF CRIMES
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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