New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2: Who Began the War, and Why?Various
History
New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2: Who Began the War, and Why?
Various
World War, 1914-1918
At Rotselaer, for instance, they set fire to about fifteen houses. A
German officer, addressing an inhabitant whose house was afire, wanted
to make him declare, at the point of a pistol, that the fire had been
started by the Belgians. When this inhabitant protested, claiming that
the Belgians had left the town the previous evening, this officer
declared that if the Germans had set fire to the town it was due
probably to the fact that the civilians had fired at them, a fact which
is also denied by all the witnesses.
There, too, the German troops pillaged everything they could lay their
hands on during their passage.
Up to this writing the Commission of Inquiry has been unable to obtain
the testimony of inhabitants of Diest and Tirlemont, which towns were
occupied by the Germans on the 18th and 19th of August, 1914, and which
are cut off from communication.
However, the inhabitants of Schaffen, a town near Diest, have stated
that the same abominations were committed in their locality and in the
adjoining communities, Lummen and Molenstede. The whole region has been
laid waste. German troops, at an hour's distance from Diest, had begun
their work of destruction all along the highway from Diest to Beeringen.
Turning upon Diest they set fire to everything they could lay hands
on--farms, houses, furniture. Arriving at the village of Schaffen, the
Germans set fire to the town, massacring the few inhabitants who
remained behind, and whom they found in their houses or in the streets.
The witness gives the names and addresses of eighteen persons whom he
knows to have been massacred.
Among them are:
The wife of Francois Luyck, 45 years old, and her 12-year-old daughter,
who were discovered in a sewer and shot.
The daughter of Jean Ouyen, 9 years old, who was shot.
Andre Willem, 23 years old, sexton, who was tied to a tree and burned
alive.
Joseph Reynders, forty years old, who was killed together with his
nephew, a lad of ten years.
Gustave Lodt, forty years old, and Jean Marken, also aged forty,
probably buried alive.
The witness testifies that he personally proceeded to exhume these two
bodies, and that he afterward buried them in the town cemetery.
The village of Rethy, near Turnhout, was the object of devastation and
shooting during the day of Aug. 22 by seventeen cavalrymen who had
penetrated into the village. A young woman of fifteen years was killed
by a bullet.
Still more horrible crimes, if that were possible, have been committed
by the German troops on account of their defeat at the hands of the
Belgian Army before Malines. The City of Louvain, with its artistic and
scientific riches, has not been spared.
New reports will be submitted very shortly.
GOOREMAN, President,
ERNST DE BUNSWYCK,
Secretary of the Commission.
* * * * *
III.
Destruction of Louvain.
Antwerp, Aug. 31, 1914
To the Minister of Justice:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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