WAR CRIME RECALLED.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20898, 13 June 1931, Page 2 (Supplement)

WAR CRIME RECALLED.

HOSPITAL SHIP ATROCITY. GERMAN U BOAT'S BARBARITY. One of tho most callous episodes of the German submarine campaign during tho Great War is recalled by a report which recorded tho suicide at Cali, in Colombia, South America, of Herr Jg. C. Boldt, manager of the German Colombian Construction Company. Herr Boldt was second-in-comniand of the U 86 when, in tho last year of tho war, she sank the hospital ship Llandovery Castle, 11,423 tons, in circumstances of unparalleled atrocity. At 9.30 p.m. on June 27, 1918, Captain Patzig, of U. 86, sighted the Llando-

very Castle about ICO miles west of the Fastnet homeward bound from Halifax. The liner carried a staff of 80 officers and men of the R.A.M.C., 14 nurses, and a crew of 164, but had no patients on board. She was fully lighted, and bore all the marks of a hospital ship. Patzig, however, torpedoed the vessel amidships, inflicting such damage that she sank in ten minutes. All on board had time to take to the boats, but Patzig fired on them. Only tho master's boat escaped, to be picked up witji its 24 survivors by a British destroyer. Iho remaining 234 persons on board had been, without a doubt, wantonly murdered. Boldt, in 1921, was sentenced to four years' imprisonment by tho Leipzig Supreme Court, but was allowed to escapo soon after his conviction.