Arnold Joseph Toynbee

“ We have now ascertained one very definite object towards which German organisation in Poland has been directed. A nation of seventy millions, being strong in arms but short of food, strips a country of twelve millions, which has fallen under its military domination, and leaves those twelve million people to starve. The German argues in his heart: "We want this food and are strong enough to seize it. The owners cannot prevent us. They are not Germans. Let them take care of themselves." That is one aspect of German policy. ”

“ Is the extortionate profit, wrung out for this coal by the German police, the ultimate reason for stinting the Poles of it to this extreme degree 1 Obviously not, for it would pay Germany better still to furnish the factories of Lodz, at reasonable prices, with as much coal as they could consume. No, the reason is deeper than that, and the policy pursued is further-reaching. Germany is not aiming merely at feeding herself during the War, or at fleecing the Poles while she holds them in her power. Her grand object is the permanent extirpation of Polish industry. ”

“ The Press Censorship at Lodz does not allow any plans for public works to be alluded to, and it suppresses the advertisements for workmen inserted by the factories, when they see an occasional chance of resuming activity for a few days. Everything is done to make Poland a country without a future and to deepen the atmosphere of despair, in town and country alike. The irreplaceable forests are being systematically cut down. ”

“ The Polish labourer is not unfamiliar with Germany; he has gone to work in the years before the war at Beuthen and Elberfeld and Essen, and now there are German official and semi-official labour bureaux all over the country, promising him higher wages in Germany than he has ever had in his life. "The German authorities," writes a Polish correspondent, "are doing everything in their power to induce workmen to leave for Germany. They almost force them to go. The workmen, however, are not willing to leave the country, and the majority of them go to work on the land. ”

“ Yet the migration to the countryside must have accounted for most of this depopulation, for the migration from Warsaw to Germany has been extraordinarily small. At the end of November, 1915, no more than 2,639 Warsaw workmen had answered the German call [11] ; 8,000 more had been beaten up from Piotrkov, Pabianitse and Lask; 21,000 working men and 1,702 working women have gone to Germany from Lodz, and 2,427 persons of the educated class—less than 25,000 people in ail from a district where the cessation of industry has cut off the subsistence of 500,000 souls. ”

“ The scarcity of fuel in Lodz is equally the fault of the 'Import Company.' The town requires about 150 railway trucks of coal a day, and it has to import it by way of Germany instead of getting it straight from Polish coalfields. This city of half a million inhabitants has no stores of fuel, and if the railway communication is interrupted it may be left destitute of fuel altogether, especially as the forests round Lodz have been cut down during the war. ”

“ Organisation is far better—organisation is the German's talisman, whatever end he has in view.
They organised Poland with a will. Hundreds of thousands of Polish workers—factory hands of Lodz and miners of Dombrova—had been hemmed in between the hostile lines, and with roads blocked, railways cut and bridges blown up, were isolated for the, time being from their markets and their sources of supply. ”

“ The German administration is assisted in promoting emigration by the municipal authorities, though it is said that there are Poles, too, on the town council. The town committee for poor relief helps only those who bring certificates from the German. Labour Exchange to the effect that they are not fit for work in Germany.
"We raise a solemn protest, in the name of the Polish labouring classes, to all the more enlightened elements of the German nation and to German Socialists in particular. The present condition of things is reducing the Polish proletariat to mental and physical exhaustion." ”

“ These thriving centres of Polish industry had sprung up between industrial Germany and the boundless markets of the Russian Empire, and they were favoured in competition, not only by their closer geographical proximity, but by the shelter of the Russian tariff wall, which gave them an additional preference against imported German wares. ”

“ The German authorities have commandeered all provisions. Wheat may now be sold only by the Goods Importation Company, which buys it up cheap from the peasants and sells the resultant flour (war-flour) at exorbitant prices to the townspeople, who find their bread 'simply uneatable,' as well as 10 per cent, above the price to which they were accustomed. The same company has the monopoly of sugar and alcohol. 'Huge quantities' of pulse and oatmeal have been exported to Germany, and their price at Lodz has gone up fourfold. ”

“ Prices are higher than the highest known anywhere else. According to the "Nowy Kuryer Lodzki": "At a sitting of the Town Council of Lodz Mr. Winnicki, a town councillor of Polish nationality, raised the question why the German 'Import Company,' which has been invested by the German Government with the monopoly of buying grain for Russian Poland, pays 71⁄2 roubles for 1 cwt. of rye when it buys it in the districts of Russian Poland under German occupation, but charges at Lodz 23 roubles for a bag of 'war flour' which contains hardly 40 per cent, of the 1 cwt. ”

“ On December 1st, 1915, the Imperial German Administration in Russian Poland declared for its own benefit a monopoly of tobacco and cigarettes; and in the course of the same month it assigned a monopoly of the vodka trade to the " War-Potato-CompanyEast" (Kriegskartoffelgesellschaft Ost) , an association directed from Berlin. [8] This Berlin Potato Company took over the potatoes requisitioned in Poland, and distributed them for the extraction of alcohol to the refineries in Germany. ”

“ But their greatest dream was this exploitation of Polish man-power, this drafting of skilled and docile helots into German workshops and mines, so that every able-bodied German might be free to take his rifle and enter the fighting ranks, with a vast impetus to German military power. ”

“ Wishing to acquaint myself with the misery in the factory towns and to consider means of relief, I went to Lodz. What I found surpassed my most awful fears. The population is slowly dying, after exhausting its forces in a hopeless struggle. I went under the guidance of the relief caretaker of the district and I visited only one street, Ciemna, in the suburb of Bluty. ”

“ The experience of Belgium had taught them that open and indiscriminate atrocities are incapable in themselves of breaking the strength and spirit of a conquered nation, besides being ruinously costly in the good opinion of the rest of the world. ”

“ The present scheme for exporting to Germany 12-15 million quintals of potatoes will cause a similar rise in what is now ' almost the only resource left to the poor.' Almost all the cattle have already been exported, and the price of meat, which for some months has been quite beyond the reach of the artisans, has gone up 400-500 per cent. Even the handfuls of bread, meat, and flour, which the artisans who have taken work in the fields bring back with them, are confiscated at the city-gates, on the plea of contraband. ”

“ In Lodz, where great quantities of coal are required for fuel in the houses and in those factories which are working at least a small fraction of the time, the German authorities (the Police Office) have introduced a monopoly in coal and coke. No one is allowed to provide himself with coal by any other channel; certain stores bought by the manufacturers without the mediation of. ”

“ Here are a few sentences from a statement drawn up, in authoritative Polish quarters, as recently as January, 1916:—
"On May 22, 1915, all textile mills in Lodz were shut and all 'stocks of raw materials, as well as part of the machinery, were confiscated. The same thing happened a little later in Warsaw and Sosnovitse....
"The working people are starving. Hundreds of people are dying from a new illness caused by lack of food. The majority of infants have died, and the death-rate is now much higher than the birth-rate." ”

“ They have closed the factories at Lodz, and they are interfering with the charities at Warsaw. There is no flour nor sugar to be had, not even in the Committee Stores on the production of tickets. A pound of meat costs 1 rouble, [2] a pound of bacon 1 rouble 80 kopecks. [3] People are feeding on bread made of washed potato-peelings and acorns. Spotted gastric typhus is prevailing alarmingly. People are simply dropping down in the streets from starvation, while the Committees are helpless, and continually harassed by the Germans. ”

“ In a radius of a few miles round the town there is a regular procession of starving paupers fetching wood or potatoes. I have met a number of people who are devoting their services to the relief of this misery. They have instituted cheap kitchens, homes for children and orphans, free dinners for school children, tailoring establishments for poor girls; but all those institutions have to contend continually against lack of funds. ”

“ Amid the disorganisation caused by the war, the Committee at Warsaw was the one institution which successfully organised relief for the population and to a large extent alleviated the condition of the poor. ”

“ As for landed property, the German authorities have piled such heavy taxes upon it that even the German landlords, of whom there are a good many, have risen in revolt and are joining the Poles in deputations to Warsaw and Berlin. ”

“ There were at least 250,000 working people—^men, women and children—on the employers' hands, and they had the implacable hostility of the German administration against them-^a hostility which paralysed them at every turn. ”

“ There are about 60,000 of these families in the care of the Committee, for everyone is economising on account of the general high prices, and many artisans, tailors and servants have lost employment. Those who own any property do not receive any support from the Committee, and consequently the owners of the houses in the suburbs where nobody pays any rent, are sometimes worse off than the workmen. ”

“ At the frontier town of Kalish, for instance, the Prussian commander summoned the mayor and corporation from their duties to set them lying, face downwards and with revolvers at their heads, in the public street; and he disorganised their city still further by an artillery bombardment—three days' gunnery practice upon a civilian population of 50,000 souls. [5] This was at the beginning of August, 1914, and, during the German advance in November, there was another untovsrard incident at the Dombrova mines. ”

“ Every one of them is entitled to a coal card, and as only 150 of these are issued a day (which makes 4,500 a month) , the rest are likely to remain without fuel for the winter. The cold favours the development of tuberculosis. Last year we had 40 per cent, mortality from tuberculosis, although conditions then were much better than can be hoped for this winter.
"The manufacturers have been told to give support only to those workmen who have been employed by them for no less than 15 years; that practically means the old people who are not fit to go to work in Prussia. ”

“ The Polish workman sees all turning to ruin around him, and the starvation of his wife and children is ever present with him at home....
That is the pressure on the one hand, while on the other he is solicited and allured continually to choose the alternative course. ”

“ People who go to Prussia for work must have a certificate. A man. may only leave his (Prussian) employer when he has obtained another post. If he tries to return home, the Prussian authorities throw all sorts of difficulties in his way. ”

“ If the two Governments will give satisfactory guarantees that this spoliation shall cease, the British Government will gladly allow supplies for the relief of the Poles to be imported into Poland from the United States. ”