authorities in question. They
have done so, and their defense is substantiated by striking proofs. He
who wants to know the truth can learn it, and we trust that truth will
prevail. But if we are to look on, when our enemies, guided by envy and
malice, are shameless enough to charge our army and with it our whole
nation with barbarous atrocities and senseless vandalism, and when their
statements appear to be believed, to a certain extent, among neutrals
and in places which, at other times, were well disposed toward us; if we
are quietly to look on when all this happens, we, the appointed trustees
of culture and education in our Fatherland, feel in duty bound to break
the reserve which our calling and position impose on us with a strong
expression of protest. Hence we now appeal to the learned bodies with
whom we hitherto worked in common in the interests of the highest ideals
of the human race and with whom, even at this time, when hatred and
passion rule the world and confuse the minds of men, we hope to remain
of the same mind, in the same service of truth. We appeal to them in the
confident belief that our voice will find hearing, and that the
expression of our honest indignation will meet with credence. Moreover,
we appeal to the love of truth and to the sense of justice of the many
thousands all over the world who, being welcome guests in our
educational institutions, have taken part in the inheritance of German
culture, and who thus have had an opportunity of watching and
appreciating the German people in peaceful labor, their industry and
uprightness, their sense of order and discipline, their reverence for
intellectual work of every kind, and their profound love for sciences
and arts. All of you who know that our army is no mercenary host but
embraces the entire nation from first to last, that it is led by the
country's best sons, and that, at this very hour, thousands from our
midst, teachers as well as students, are shedding their life's blood as
officers and soldiers on the battlefields of Russia and France; you who
have seen and heard for yourselves in what spirit and with what success
our youths are treated and taught, and that nothing is stamped upon
their minds more deeply than reverence and admiration for artistic,
scientific and technical creations of the human mind, no matter what
country and nation brought them forth; we call upon you who know all
this as witnesses, whether it can be true what our enem
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