Prison camp

“ Nevertheless, if a man had his choice of his prison, this particular convict camp would be likely to be the one chosen, if he knew about it. It had a glorious situation, the air was pure and clear, so much so, that the locality was one of the noted health resorts of America. A visitor was generally astonished when he examined the camp to find what little difficulty a convict would have in escaping from it. Here and there were tall board erections, on which a man was stationed with a rifle or shot-gun. ”

“ Firing at prison camps containing helpless prisoners would certainly appeal to the humour of the German mind. Of course complaints were made to the commandant, but, as usual, nothing came of them.
Continual small drafts of prisoners were always arriving at the camp, accompanied by a German officer and guard. One of these officers, seeing a group of British seated in the eating-hall, came up very politely and expressed his sorrow at seeing them there, but told them to cheer up, as the war would soon be over. ”

“ No doubt you will find in the German prison-camps one or two faint-hearted individuals with a pronounced yellow streak who voluntarily gave up the struggle and gave up their liberty rather than risk their lives or limbs. These sad cases, however, are, I am sure, extremely few. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of the men fighting in the Allied lines would rather be in the front-line trenches, fighting every day, with all the horrors and all the risks, than be a prisoner [Pg 264] of war in Germany, for the men in France have a very keen realization of what that means. ”

“ COL. POKROVSKY: This document has not yet been read into the record. Permit me, Your Honor, to read a few excerpts. I quote Page 183:
“The prison camp in Minsk, covering a space about the size of the Wilhelmsplatz, accommodates about one hundred thousand prisoners of war and forty thousand civilian prisoners. The prisoners, crowded together in this small space, can hardly move, and are therefore forced to relieve nature at the very place where they happen to be. The camp is guarded by a detail of soldiers on active duty, of company strength. ”

“ Colonel Moore of the Veteran Reserve Corps, the ranking officer, was in command of all the troops of the prison guard.
The prison camp near Elmira was established in July, 1864, and, at the time of our arrival, contained upwards of ten thousand prisoners. They had been in tents all summer but were then in barracks, within a stockade enclosing about forty acres. The main front with the principal gate and guard-house was close to and faced the road leading into Elmira, the back was near the Chemung river. ”

“ We have only two bunks in our quarters. While we take turns with these the rest of the party have to sleep on the floor or sit up around the fire. The building is open to the wind, and so cold that it is impossible to sleep comfortably.
At Parole Camp I see a great many prisoners who have been incarcerated in Northern prisons, principally Camp Chase, Camp Douglas, and Johnson’s Island. They all corroborate the statements made to me by the Western prisoners with whom I conversed while in the Old Capitol regarding the treatment of prisoners. ”

“ One day I offered a button off my uniform to one of these Belgian ladies as a souvenir, but a German guard saw me and I was never allowed to go near the visitors afterward.
The sanitary conditions in this prison-camp were excellent as a general proposition. One night, however, I discovered that I had been captured by "cooties." ”

“ Cribbage, back gammon, euchre, seven up, and sometimes we would play poker for the beans we drew for our rations. When the bean ration was given out, each man would have perhaps a good tablespoonful, then five or six would sit down and play until one would have the whole, which would make him quite a respectable dinner, and the rest would have to go without. Thus it will be seen that our prison camp was a village, where all kinds of business was carried on, and all sorts of characters were to be found. ”

“ It was about one o’clock then, and the kid took us in our steel-wheeled “lizzy” to the prison camp, which was to be our new home. I must say that ostensibly they treated us lovely in every way, and outside of the fact that our home was not in the same class with Riverside Drive or Orange Grove Avenue, it wasn’t so bad. We were incarcerated without ceremony and the kid left us after many assurances of his kind offices. ”

“ Executive Department, Governor's Office, Jackson, Miss.
Mr. J. J. Evans, Jr., Penitentiary.
Dear Sir: Mrs. Elizabeth Wheaton, who is interested in reform work, desires to talk to the convicts. Any courtesy shown her will be highly appreciated.
Very truly yours,
J. J. Coman, Governor's Sec.
A STOCKADE.
Many inquire of me what a stockade or prison camp is. I will here explain. A man, or party of men, lease or hire from the state the labor of a certain number of prisoners for a certain length of time. They are "doing time," as the prisoners say, for the state. ”

“ All such subjects, his host reminded him, “enjoy full, or nearly full liberty, whereas in Great Britain and France Austro-German subjects have either been clapped into prison, or at any rate confined in a camp or barracks.”
Civilian and Military Prisoners Compared.
“Confinement in a camp or barracks” sounds a small thing. It is really, wherever it occurs, a rather terrible thing. The universal experience is that civilians suffer under this restraint more than soldiers, and consequently are more “difficult” to deal with. ”

“ The prisoners are turned absolutely loose one hour each day in the prison yard.
General Efficiency the same as the previous year, but on account of the farm work we estimate the grade at 70 per cent.
WESTMORELAND COUNTY.
Here is a county prison reporting for the year 1916 an average [Pg 24] daily number of inmates of 58. And yet they could send 12 men to work at road-making in a prison camp, and 10 men to work on the county farm. The employment record is a vast improvement over the report of the previous year when a few at domestic employments about the jail were the only inmates at work. ”

“ The reformative influence of Camp Hill and the Parole Line System deserve commendation, and the fact that none of the 175 prisoners who have been located in the Parole Line Cabins made any attempt to break parole, and that it has only been necessary to remove three for misconduct, testifies to the success of the plan which provides a stepping-stone from imprisonment to liberty. ”

“ Victims of the “Wolf” Carlsruhe Kriegsgefangenenlager being what was known as a Distribution Camp, there was a continual coming and going of officers. Here we had no continuing city. An occasional prisoner might linger on—as if entirely overlooked and forgotten—for a year or even [81] two; in the majority of cases, however, the stay only extended for a few weeks, sometimes merely a few days. ”

“ The German commandant of this camp full well realised what an extremely unpleasant place it was and how unsuited for the accommodation of officers or for private soldiers for that matter. Evidently ordered to make the best of a bad job, and told to try and smooth over the bad particulars of the camp by the skillful giving of small privileges, he attempted to get the prisoners interested in the building of a theatre and the making of playing-fields outside the camp. ”

“ Prison-labour is used for the purpose; and though a camp of convicts, with movable prison-vans like the cages of a travelling menagerie, seems a strange foil to the wonders of Nature, the toil is healthy for the men as well as useful to the country. ”

“ Small parties of prisoners were constantly leaving and arriving at the camp. This was done, so it was generally thought, to let the people see prisoners being taken about and make them imagine that the German armies were always taking new batches. ”

“ In prison life one question looms up every day before many of the prisoners. It is that of possible escape. During the three years I spent in the Stadtvogtei several escapes took place. It would take too long to relate here a story in detail of all the escapes which occurred. I would like, however, to mention the case of two prisoners who evaded the guards on three occasions; twice getting through the lines of the camp of Ruhleben, and once escaping from the prison where I was confined. The two men were: Wallace Ellison and Eric Keith. ”

“ At 6 o'clock the offices were cleared of prisoners by the numerous Germans employed there and cut off from the prisoners' part of the camp by closing the iron gate in the main wire wall of the camp.
It occurred to me that if I could hide in the parcel office or tin room before 6 o'clock, and be locked in when the work of the day ceased, I should naturally find myself [99] outside the wire enclosure, which was the first and principal difficulty to be overcome by a would-be escaper. ”

“ The conditions of this prison were bad enough when a man was in normally good health, but it was barbarous to subject a wounded soldier to the hardships and discomforts [Pg 67] of the place. However, this was the fate of a poor private we discovered there one day in terrific pain, suffering from shrapnel in his stomach and back. All of us officers asked to have him sent to a hospital, but the doctors curtly refused, saying it was against orders. So the poor creature went on suffering from day to day and was still there when I left, another victim of German cruelty. ”

“ We passed four cheery days in the old familiar prison, and then came the excitement of our departure for Ruhleben camp, via Cologne, where we and a hundred and fifty other civilian prisoners, collected from the Rhine provinces, spent a night in a large penal prison.
Under a strong escort we were marched to the station at seven the following morning. Before [Pg 12] starting we had been told that there was only one punishment for misbehavior on transport—death! Misbehavior included leaving the ranks in the streets or leaning out of the windows when in the railway carriages. ”

“ The Kommandantur of Berlin, and particularly Capt. Wolff, who appeared to be the “big gun” on the aforesaid Kommandantur, decided to place their own interpretation on this clause of the agreement. It was at about this time that we saw carpenters at work in the yard making more [100] window shutters of the kind I have already mentioned, and afterwards whenever one or more British prisoners were overtaken after an attempt to escape from the camp they were each thrown into a dungeon where for four days they were kept in absolute darkness, and on a diet of bread and water. ”

“ Some prisoners, who had taken the trouble to try to make their rooms comfortable when the camp became all English, were particularly savage over the move, and took care that nothing which they were unable to take away should be left to be sold again to another batch of prisoners at a later date. There was a considerable quantity of live stock of various kinds in the camp, and measures for the transportation of these furred and feathered belongings had to be undertaken. ”

“ Each camp has its officers, guards, etc., among whom is the whipping boss. And God pity the man or woman who falls into his cruel hands. There is a board of prison inspectors, the president of which travels from place to place looking after the interests of all. ”

“ The Judge Advocate here exhibited to the witness a plan of the camp found on the person of one of the conspirators.
Colonel Sweet.—The map is very roughly drawn and is a little out of proportion in detail, but is a correct drawing of the camp as it was in August and September of last year. The outlines are precisely the same. As shown on the map there were then 40 barracks in the prison square. This number is now increased. The Guard-house and small tents on the west side of the camp are also moved now. ”

“ They have 150 large prison camps and five hundred small prison camps in Germany, and there are hundreds of places where the working prisoners live. The largest camps are at Guben and Czersh, where the prisoners are mostly Russians. ”

“ For the man would come back to visit him with the silent, undemonstrative violence that had done for the two men in the woods, but Garth would be waiting for him, behind the door, with his knife. Therefore, when the door was locked, he commenced hopefully to examine his prison.
The night, he found after a moment, was not complete in here. It possessed a quality, milky but lustreless, reminiscent of the shroud through which the shadowy figures had paraded. It retained, however, the obscurity of thorough darkness. He had a feeling, indeed, of standing in a darkness that was white. ”

“ The measure of success is both in work accomplished and benefit to the prisoners, physically and mentally.
What first impresses the visitor to the camp is the total absence of anything suggestive of confinement and of a corrective institution. The inmates are free to wander within certain limits from the cluster of buildings and while they are garbed in the customary gray suits worn by other county prisoners, there is little to suggest the prisoner to the passerby in their actions and general demeanor. ”

“ So far, twenty-two miles of road have been constructed through the forest, at a small expense to the county, by the prisoners. A stone crusher and a compression drill are parts of the equipment of the road building gang, which is under the charge of the master of the camp.
Flanked on three sides by mountain slopes and by a large meadow on the other, the camp is situated in an ideal spot. Thankful are the prisoners for the change from indoor confinement, and in token of appreciation they work as hard if not harder than men on the outside who enjoy their full liberty. ”