Dr. Rubner writes in the “German Medical Weekly” on the effects of the blockade. He gives the figures of deaths of army and civil population since 1914 as:
Civil population, through blockade, 763,000, of which 260,000 is for 1917 and 294,000 to the end of 1918. He comes to the conclusion that even now any improvement in the condition, as regards nourishment of the German people, will be possible only in a very partial degree; above all, capacity for work will not increase to the needed extent.--“Vorwaerts,” April 11, 1919.
In a report made by five doctors of neutral lands, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch, dated April 11, 1919, after they had collected information in Berlin, Halle and Dresden, they say: “The food concessions under the Brussels agreement are altogether inadequate. The most they do is to maintain the present necessitous food conditions.... Immediate help is necessary. Every day of delay risks immeasurable injury not only to the whole of Europe, but to the whole world.”
Evidence of the same import is furnished by Jane Adams and charitable English persons, and the liberal periodicals, as distinct from the daily newspapers, have printed columns showing the terrible ravages of an illegal and indefensible blockade which inflicted the horrors of war upon the feeble and helpless, those recognized by the laws of nations and humanity as entitled to protection when not within the sphere of military operations and in no way responsible for or contributing to them.
The armistice was signed November 11, 1918, but so relentless was the English policy of crushing the German people that Winston Churchill, on March 3, 1919, declared in the House of Commons: “We are enforcing the blockade with rigor.... This weapon of starvation falls mainly upon the women and children, upon the old, the weak, and the poor, after all the fighting has stopped.” (“The Nation,” June 21, 1919; p. 980.)
The appalling heartlessness which, not content with inflicting starvation on a whole nation--for we will not mention Austria in this connection--designed to add to its horrors still added injuries, is exposed in the terms of the treaty, by which the German people were required to give up 140,000 milch cows and other livestock. Witness the following Associated Press dispatch: