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Waikato Times, Volume 90, Issue 14029, 4 April 1919, Page 6

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THE INDICTMENT OF HUN WAR CRIMINALS. (By Francis Gribble, a Former Prisoner at Ruhleben, in the "Daily Mail.) About General von Hanisch and the brothers Niemey'er enough has now been published to make their ultimate fate tolerably certain. Is it not time to turn the limelight on to Major Bach, of Sennelagcr? Sennelager was a! military prison camp with a civilian wing, and it was there that the Germans interned the civilians whom they arrested, at the beginning of the war. The brutality with which Major Bach ruled it was notorious even in Germany—and that in spite of the fact that when men were released from his charge he tried to intimidate them with the threat that anyone who complained of the treatment he had received would be returned to him for a second dose of the same mixture. Prisoners were starved at Sennelagcr at a time when there was no scarcity of food in the country. Sennelagcr was the first prison camp at which forced labour was exacted from civilians, and the civilians there were also, at one time, compelled to spend the night in an open held in 3 torrential downpour of rain. For all these things Major Bach can and shoufd lie held directly and personally responsible. The worst feature of his rule, however, was the ingenious and implacable cruelty of his punishments for trivial or imaginary breaches of discipline. It was he who not only had men tied to posts in their camps, but also invited women to come over from Pardeborn and enjoy the spectacle. . It was he, finally, who indicted in* tolerable and unpardonable outrages on captured fishermen, denouncing them without a particle of evidence as " minelayers," telling them that he would " feed them from the pigtub," and making them objects of derision to the world by causing them to be shaved on one side of the head and face.

These are abominations which call aloud for condign punishment. The sifting of all the evidence of all the outrages in all the prison camps may take months or even years, but there is no need to wait for the completion of that process. Where we have a clear case, as we have at Sennelager, the offender can perfectly well be put in the dock at once. It is Major Bach's turn next.