“Accepting the story as it stands, without demanding the names of the Jews found guilty, or any other details, let us simply examine the map. Shavli is not in Kurland at all. It is in the province of Kovno, and is 50 versts from the nearest point in Kurland, and more than 50 versts from the nearest point inhabitated by Jews. The Germans, we know, moved to Shavli, not through Kurland, but from the opposite direction. =The charge, if true, would therefore mean that the Jews of Kurland went 100 versts out of their way in an entirely strange territory in order to commit treason by communicating with Germans. This is obvious nonsense. Nor is it less obvious that this fiction has been manufactured out of whole cloth.= And this is how it was manufactured: Reports reached the newspapers that the Jews of Kurland were being expelled. The anti-Semitic papers at once argued that if the Jews were being expelled they must have committed some treason, and since the line of the German advance was known to be in the general direction of Shavli, =and since these people were too lazy to consult the map, they promptly decided that the expulsion must have been due to the fact that the Jews of Kurland had guided the Germans to Shavli.”= And so this preposterous story was started on its way. Other Spy Stories No story was too absurd to be given credibility and systematic circulation. It was reported, and seriously believed, that at a place unnamed and a time unknown some Jew had enclosed a million and half roubles in a coffin and shipped the coffin to Germany. The chief Rabbi and the Jewish community of Warsaw telegraphed to the “Novoe Vremya” and several other leading papers, protesting against this monstrous slander against the Jews at a time when their sons were shedding their blood freely on the battlefields. The “Novoe Vremya” declined to publish the telegram.[29] The Jewish community of Petrograd appealed to the Grand Duke Nicholas, then Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies, in these words: