Page:The Destruction of Poland - Toynbee - 1916.djvu/13

 company, the "Commodity-Import, Ltd.," albeit a German company, with its headquarters in Prussian territory at Posen. At the same time public and private benevolence were coordinated, and a Polish relief committee was instituted under official auspices at Berlin. The Berliners owed something to the Poles, after all, for they were subsisting all the time on the food supplies which German organisation had diverted so competently from Poland to them. But they were not permitted to exercise their charity very long, for the Russian Army was tactless enough in the spring to do considerable damage in Memel, and the wrath of the German military authorities could not be appeased. Field-Marshal von Hindenburg counter-organised very comprehensive reprisals against the civilian population in the occupied Russian territories; and though most of these were not carried out, they did not fail altogether to bear fruit.

On the walls of Lodz and in the newspapers the following announcement appeared for several days: —