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Updated: May 22, 2025
All these luckless civilians four thousand of them had been herded together in the stables, paddock, and stands of the Ruhleben track. The place was not as suited for a prison as the high land of Zossen, the stalls with their four bunks were dismal enough, and the lofts overhead, with little light and ventilation, still worse.
But wander among the thousands of captured Cossacks building their own prisons at the camp at Zossen, hear them muttering "Nichevo" "this is fate" "I do not care," and, listening to the stories of their captors, you felt the atmosphere of centuries gone by. One such was called to my attention in the form of a Prussian captain's letter, which was, I believe, published in Berlin.
Men tell you "they've put up a mighty good fight, say!" or speaking of the young French sculptor allowed to go on with his work in the prison camp at Zossen, or the flower-beds in front of the French barracks there "but, of course, the French are an artistic people. You can allow them liberties like that."
It is a strange experience and leaves one hoping that somebody some German shut away in the south of France, one of those quick-eyed Frenchmen in the human zoo at Zossen is keeping a diary. For while there have always been prison camps, have there ever been at least, since Rome such menageries as these!
Behind the barbed-wire fence at Zossen Zossen is one of the prisons near Berlin there are some fifteen thousand men. The greater number are Frenchmen, droves of those long blue turned-back overcoats and red trousers, flowing sluggishly between the rows of low barracks, Frenchmen of every sort of training and temperament, swept here like dust by the war into common anonymity.
Whether or not Zossen could be called a "show" camp, it seemed, at any rate, about as well managed as such a place could be. The prisoners were housed in new, clean, one-story barracks; well fed, so far as one could tell from their appearance and that of the kitchens and storerooms; they could write and be written to, and they were compelled to take exercise.
As a rule they have attempted to cram their arguments down my throat. These Teutons think they can force you to believe. "Dr. Drechsler and the proprietor of the Kaiserhof, and, of course, the Foreign Office warned me that it was forbidden to go to the prisoners' camps, either at Zossen or Doeberitz.
I do not remember any picture of the war more curious, and, as it were, uncanny than the first sight of Zossen as our motor came lurching down the muddy road from Berlin that huge, forgotten eddy, that slough of idle, aimless human beings against the gray March sky, milling slowly round and round in the mud. But the French are only part of Zossen.
The next fastest mile ever traveled by human beings who lived to tell about it was made in an electric-car on the experimental track between Berlin and Zossen, in 1902. As the engineers who achieved this record for the advancement of scientific knowledge of the railroad considered such speed dangerous, it is not at all likely to become standard practise.
Some correspondents had been taken on 'personally conducted' tours; but because of misinformation sent out the tours were no longer in vogue. So I thought that I would risk it, without permit, and, wishing to take a swing through rural Germany, I decided to visit the camp at Zossen, twenty-five kilometers south of the capital.
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