> France and England both underlined the brutality and inhumanity of the German nature. According to the allied propaganda, war prisoners were ill-treated, tortured and under-fed. German soldiers were purported by the allied forces to rape women and cut their breasts off. The hands of small boys were cut off to satisfy the Germans’ sadism and to prevent their service in the enemy’s forces. Furthermore, German soldiers were said to have burned civilians and babies alive.[17] Germany was also accused by France and England of taking hostages as human shields to prevent allied attacks.
- complete with picture proof, which of course was disputed:
> “They think that our Press is to blame in working up feelings against them by publishing false “atrocity reports.” I told them of various sweet little cases which I have seen myself, and they told me of English prisoners whom put they have seen with soft-nosed bullets, and lead bullets with notches cut in the nose; we had a heated, and at the same time good-natured argument, and ended by hinting to each other that the other was lying.”
and the occasional externalisation of internal divisions (the part about Saxons and Prussians) in the face of preexisting grievances and overwhelming external narrative pressure. It is an interesting small bit of historical irony that the Saxons, who appealed to their would-be kinship with the British a hundred years ago to distance themselves from the general image of the German, now after 45 years of Soviet occupation find themselves occupying a place within intra-German stereotypes that is a little adjacent to the opening article's depiction of the Russians.