Quartermaster Sergeant T. Duggan of the First Coldstream Guards, who
was at the prison camp at Schneidemühl (Posen) from 1914 to March,
1918, described the horrors at that camp as follows:
Prisoners of all nationalities, Russians, French, British, and
Belgians, were kept there, the majority being Russians. At the
beginning they lived in holes in the ground without any covering
whatever. Quartermaster Sergeant Duggan showed me a photograph
illustrating this condition of things, which lasted for some time,
it being a month before the prisoners had any covering over their
heads. The food was so bad that the British could never eat it.
About December, 1914, a typhus epidemic began. It continued for
four or five months. Schneidemühl has one camp divided into three
inclosures, the whole camp containing about 40,000 prisoners. The
daily average of deaths was certainly not under thirty. Another
photograph was shown to me depicting a long procession of coffins
during the epidemic. A gigantic German carrying a rifle headed
the procession, which was mainly composed of unfortunate Russian
prisoners. Anything more pathetic cannot be imagined. Photographs
were also shown me of the actual funeral service and place of
interment. These photographs showed many being buried at one time
in one long trench. After the interment, where the bodies were
deposited four deep, one above another, the Germans made mounds
surmounted by crosses, intimating that only two persons were
buried beneath each mound.
It is impossible to estimate now how many were buried altogether,
but many thousands died from this typhus epidemic. When the
epidemic broke out a terrible condition of affairs quickly ensued,
and it was not until it had been raging for a fortnight that
Russian doctors arrived on the scene. Some of the patients were
then first sent to hospital. The camp's condition, even after the
doctors' arrival, was perfectly awful.
A British merchant Captain, who was released in May from internment in
a German camp, asserted under oath that after his ship was torpedoed
he was locked up for twenty-four hours in the U-boat for refusing to
answer questions. On the following day he was searched, and for still
refusing to answer was sentenced to be shot on reaching port, or before
if he should cause any annoyance. One of the principal officers called
him a liar and an English swine.
Some days later the submarine put into Heligoland, and the Captain was
transferred to an underground cell ashore. Later, after scanty and
bad food had made him ill, he was marched with other prisoners from
merchant ships to a camp. Kept naked in intense cold for three hours
while his clothes were being searched, German officers stood about
laughing. His garments were returned to him wet, and he was put in
barracks, where his only covering was verminous blankets.
In another compound the conditions were better, but the food uneatable.
The prisoners were skeletons in rags. If they fell down from weakness
they were kicked and clubbed, beaten with the flat of swords, and kept
standing at attention in freezing weather. They had to fight like
wild beasts for food that a dog would refuse. Funerals were a daily
occurrence.
Transferred to Brandenburg, where he lived five and a half months, the
fare was such that, by the time his own parcels of food arrived, he
had lost twenty-eight pounds in weight. Twenty degrees of frost have
been registered on the inside wall of the barrack in the mornings,
and in Summer the heat was intolerable and the flies and mosquitos
very trying. Sanitation was almost nil; 850 Russians died at that camp
earlier in the war, and several were burned to death there shortly
before the Captain arrived.