Dirty hands
Atrocities of World War I
Dr Alan McDougall
Unlike
the Second World War, the First World War is not commonly associated with
atrocities carried out by military forces against either enemy soldiers
or civilians. The Great War began at a time when warfare was still widely
regarded as an 'honourable' pursuit, in which certain moral principles
were inviolable.
Chivalric values of duty and sacrifice were still being piously invoked years after the conflict was over. As General Hindenburg emphasised at the unveiling of a German war memorial in 1927, 'With clean hearts we marched ... with clean hands we fought.'
However, the First World War was not always fought with 'clean hands'. Advances in military technology before 1914 – including the submarine torpedo, the aeroplane and poison gas – widened the possible range of wartime casualties. On both sides, civilian victims were privately accepted as a regrettable by-product of the conflict. At the same time, each side greeted its own civilian deaths at the hands of the enemy with a sense of moral outrage fuelled by the exigencies of the propaganda war. The First World War lent itself readily to accusations of atrocities – both real and imagined.
Rumours
The earliest allegations of wartime atrocities focused on the conduct
of German troops in Belgium. Germany invaded Belgium on 4 August 1914,
thereby violating Belgian neutrality and bringing Britain into the war.
For the next 10 weeks, the country was subjected to mobile warfare, before
military lines on the Western Front were fortified in the autumn and 'trench
warfare' began.
Throughout this period, rumours circulated in Allied military and government circles about the German army's brutal treatment of Belgian civilians. The first reports on this subject were published by the Belgian government in late August 1914. The French government published its initial findings about German atrocities in January 1915. A month earlier, the British government had appointed a special committee, headed by the widely respected Lord Bryce, to investigate alleged German 'outrages' in Belgium.
The Bryce report
Published in May 1915, the Bryce report concluded that the German
army had committed atrocities against Belgian civilians as part of a deliberate
strategy of terror. German soldiers were variously accused of raping women
and girls; using civilians as 'human shields' during combat; and cutting
off children's hands and women's breasts. The report had a powerful international
impact, particularly in neutral countries such as the United States, where
'atrocity propaganda' heightened existing anti-German sentiment.
As a credible legal enquiry, the Bryce report was deeply flawed. Many of the 1,200 depositions heard by the committee (from Belgian refugees and Allied soldiers) were not taken under oath. Little attempt was made to verify the more fantastic testimonies. The enquiry's other main source – captured German war diaries – contained little evidence of the horrific sexual and sadistic crimes outlined in the report in May 1915.
In the Bryce report, the difficult and time-consuming task of separating fact from fiction was sacrificed to the immediate needs of the propaganda war. It was precisely the report's most dubious stories about violence against defenceless women and children that sold the most newspapers and did most to promote the Allied cause.
After the war, there was a strong reaction against the distortions of the Allied investigations into German atrocities in Belgium in 1914. The British pacifist Arthur Ponsonby even claimed in 1928 that all such allegations had been fabricated.
Brutal measures
However, while Allied propaganda undoubtedly sensationalised German
atrocities, many of the allegations were not unfounded. German strategy
in Belgium in 1914 was unquestionably brutal.
Civilians were executed in large numbers; towns and buildings were looted and destroyed; captured Allied soldiers were shot; and some civilians were used as 'human shields' to provide cover against enemy fire. Approximately 5,500 Belgian civilians were killed by the invading German army in 1914. Military leaders such as the chief of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke, freely admitted to deploying these 'extraordinarily harsh' measures.
Various explanations have been offered for the brutality of German conduct in Belgium in 1914. Older accounts emphasised the cold inhumanity of the German army leadership and the ill-disciplined cruelty of the 'ordinary' German soldier. Recent explanations have focused more specifically on such issues as German anti-Catholicism and exaggerated German fears of armed civilian resistance by franc-tireurs (literally 'free shooters'), a legacy of the German army's experiences in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
Not beyond reproach
Back in 1915, the Bryce report seemed to confirm the brutal nature
of Germany's approach to the war. It was published just days after a German
submarine torpedo sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, with
the loss of almost 1,200 lives. Less than a month earlier, the German
army had used poison gas for the first time on the Western Front, during
the 2nd Battle of Ypres. In October 1915, the British nurse Edith Cavell
was executed by the Germans in occupied Belgium for helping Allied prisoners
to escape. These actions were all held up as examples of German atrocities.
The Allies, however, were not beyond reproach. Like the Germans, the British quickly sanctioned the use of poison gas on the Western Front in 1915. Shortly after the Germans executed Edith Cavell, the French army executed two German nurses in similar circumstances.
The Allies also imposed a ruthless trade blockade on Germany that lasted from the beginning of the war until mid-1919. Official German statistics attributed nearly 763,000 wartime deaths in Germany to starvation caused by the blockade.
The greatest atrocity
These examples illustrate the ambiguous moral boundaries of the First
World War. What was regarded by one side as an 'atrocity' was regarded
by the other as a just and necessary means of winning the war. This could
be seen even in the war's single most horrific act: the massacre of the
Armenian population by Turkish army troops in the Ottoman empire. At least
one million Armenians were killed in this attempted genocide.
While the Allies publicly condemned the 'Armenian atrocities' in 1915, the German government made only weak protests to its Turkish ally about the massacres. The Ottoman government contended that its actions were a justified response to the threat to national security posed by the Armenians, who had allegedly conspired with the Russian army to ensure Turkish defeats. Turkey has ever since denied that the greatest atrocity of the First World War even took place.
Dr Alan J McDougall is an assistant professor in modern European history and European studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He also wrote the content for the Public Record Office's excellent website on the First World War.
