After the lost war and the ‘war guilt’ provocation of the Versailles treaty, it was not only German politicians, especially of the Right, who made sustained efforts to justify the war: the majority of the German people sought some expression of legitimization. One and a half million dead German soldiers and – according to the officials statistics of the German Army medical bulletin – more than 4.8 million wounded, called out for the war to be placed in an historical context with some reasonable basis for it. The central place in this search for rationality and the creation of a tradition was divided by memories of the enormously costly battle at Verdun in 1916 on the one hand, and on the other the retreat to the Siegfried Line in February and March 1917 and finally – though less prominent – the Great Battle of France in the spring and summer of 1918, during which the German armies returned to sections of the original Somme battle front.
Even during the war most Germans had already begun to draw a clear distinction between the military events on the Somme and at Verdun. The principal difference between the two was that at Verdun the Germans were obviously the attackers, while on the Somme they defended. Today we may find this differentiation academic, for both the Somme and Verdun were French territory and the Germans were present there as invaders. Understanding this line of reasoning is important, however. At the Somme the Germans held the ‘Watch on the Somme’ as it were, a kind of ‘Watch on the Rhine’ extended westwards, and it was no coincidence that the 1.Army soldiers’ newspaper from the autumn of 1914 should have the title ‘Die Somme-Wacht.’1
Here the fortified positions were like ‘a wall of iron and fire.’2 Even the troops – and here the propaganda functioned only as an echo – were totally convinced that it was precisely this wall ‘in the midst of enemy land’ which had saved the German people from the horrors of war, from death and destruction. What the soldiers had achieved as defenders of the Homeland appeared to be unarguable fact when seen against the cruelty of the war suffered daily elsewhere. Moreover the Germans were not only determined defenders of the Home Front in France, they were also witnesses to events on the Somme – eyewitnesses above all to the destruction which the British and even the French in their own land had wrought by their ruthless military planning. In thousands of photographs, in letters and newspaper articles ‘from the field’ this accusation was repeated endlessly: not we Germans are responsible for the enormous destruction in the Somme region, but the French themselves, and the British, and finally also the Americans. From 1917 onwards there appeared pictorial documentation in book form which served this kind of propaganda. Best known was Zwischen Arras und Péronne which appeared in numerous reprints.3
The contention that the Germans had only defended at the Somme made irrelevant to them the destruction which German forces had inflicted during their retreat to the Siegfried Line in 1917. Neither the war damage resulting as a consequence of the advance during the Michael offensive of 1918, nor the dreadful destruction during the last German retreat in the autumn of 1918 brought into question the image already forming in 1916. The entire Somme-discourse in the Weimar Republic post-war was dominated by the twin themes of how they defended at the Somme and tried to preserve the French cultural heritage. To the degree that after the war the victors (especially the French) accused the Germans of war crimes against property, this solidified the conscious and raucous German defensive strategy, and culminated in the assertion that selfless and untiring German soldiers had had their hands full coping with the task of saving French cultural treasures from being wrecked by British and French shelling.
The basis for the argument and its justification were formed during the war and made systematic after it. As is well known, the ‘war guilt clause’ in the Treaty of Versailles was received with great indignation by most Germans and led to an immense outpouring of literature in repudiation of the clause during the 1920s. Less well known is that Article 231 of the Treaty laying the war guilt at Germany’s door, with the resulting reparations and costs, was directly related to the damage done especially on the Somme and in Northern France. As ‘the perpetrator’, Germany had to pay for all the damage ‘which the Allied and associated Governments and their citizens had suffered in the war forced upon them as the result of the attack by Germany and its allies.’4 This meant all and any damage whatsoever and howsoever caused was a consequence of the war for which Germany was responsible. The Germans were, or remained, overwhelmingly of the opinion – narrow-mindedly but perhaps understandably – that this demand was totally unjust, being adamant that they themselves had not inflicted most of the damage. It was pointed out again and again that the Allies had destroyed towns, villages and cultural treasures.
To the forefront in the polemic literature was the rebuttal published in August and December 1922 in the leading revisionist journal Süddeutsche Monatsheften by former officer Joachim von Stülpnagel. His argument and exhaustive documentation was aimed principally at exposing the lie of ‘wilful destruction’, a term which, though it did not occur in the Treaty itself, was often heard in statements by foreign politicians and statesmen in their attempts to morally justify the Allied claim for reparations. In the Treaty draft, French Prime Minister Clemenceau accused Germany of responsibility not only for starting the war, but also for its subsequent brutalization. During the negotiations in London in the spring of 1921 to set the level of reparations, British Prime Minister Lloyd George also mentioned the ‘wilful destruction’ of Belgian and French localities by the Germans. French President Poincaré, who at the opening of the Versailles Congress had accused the Germans of ‘the worst crimes in human history’, strung this together with a host of other accusations the following year respecting the wilful and barbaric destruction of Northern France and Belgium.
Relying on a large number of German military documents, Stülpnagel set out to prove that ‘the German share in this destruction of French and Belgian regions was much smaller than that of the Allies.’5 Above all, the Germans had been forced to stand by and watch massive destruction by the Allies while all destruction by the Germans, especially during the retreat to the Siegfried Line in 1917 and the final retreat in the late autumn of 1918, had been a ‘military necessity and was therefore a completely lawful measure in international law.’6 Similar arguments were heard by the Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry (the so-called Third Sub-Committee) in 1919 set up by the National Assembly which was investigating alleged breaches of international law in the Great War. Besides other questions – the deportations of Belgian forced labourers to Germany, the Allied naval blockade, gas warfare etc. – ‘the destruction in Northern France occasioned during the retreats of the German Army in 1917 and 1918’ were also on the Commission’s agenda.7 The committee took evidence from a series of witnesses including General von Kuhl, former Chief of Staff of Army Group Kronprinz Rupprecht von Bayern. General Kuhl explained the efforts made by those responsible to ensure the most humane possible ‘removal’ of the inhabitants from the ‘area of destruction. ’ With direct reference to the documents presented by Stülpnagel amongst others, Kuhl argued that ‘the destruction undertaken was limited to what was necessary militarily. It must be established that not merely in the retreat to the Siegfried Line, but in the war as a whole, very much destruction had been committed not only by the Germans but also by the enemy side.’8
The sub-committee accepted this line of reasoning without further debate. Kuhl’s assertion appears almost verbatim in the Conclusions of the Third Sub-Committee of 29 September 1923: the German measures were fully within the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare. Moreover it ‘had to be pointed out that towns such as Cambrai, Douai, Denain and Valenciennes, despite the efforts of the German Army leadership to spare them a bombardment, were destroyed by Allied artillery.’9 Obviously this would be hard to swallow for those Frenchmen who, returning home, gazed nonplussed on the rubble of their villages, the hacked-down orchards, the flooded mine workings and the poisoned springs. Nevertheless much destruction wrought by the Allies in Northern French towns was (and to some extent still is) wrongly attributed to the brutality of the German occupying force.
An example here is the case of Saint Quentin, a town which plays a leading role in Stülpnagel’s documentation, since he could show by reference to the 18.Armeekommando war records show how between April and October 1917 the Germans had watched ‘the enemy artillery’ batter down, in successive stages, the famous cathedral which dated from the Middle Ages. In the French wartime and post-war propaganda, this destruction is blamed universally on German barbarism. The same goes for other onslaughts against Northern French towns when facts and propaganda, both during and after the war, became hopelessly interwoven. While the Germans attempted to prove that it had been British artillery alone which reduced Cambrai to ash and rubble, the British military and Press emphasized that whatever the facts of the matter, the destruction had been exclusively a consequence of German war policy.10 Such polemic and mutual recriminations were to be expected in the wake of the war experience but ultimately served little useful purpose.
The fact that remembrance of the war dead after 1919 frequently assumed strong political overtones and remained a constant area of controversy was prejudicial to any rapprochement on the Somme. At first German war graves there were tended almost solely by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. which at the time never – contrary to the present case – worked together with the British and French across the national divide. The French hatred of the Germans was so firmly entrenched that there could be no place for a common remembrance, and at international talks the vengeful attitude and intentions of the French were striking. No effort was spared to keep the Germans out of French military cemeteries. The Germans remained bitter for a long period at having to paint their wooden grave markers black while the French ones were white. There is still no explanation for this today, but many Germans considered it a deliberate insult to their dead. During the recultivation of the region after 1919 there occurred a general upheaval of German memorials and cemeteries in which local inhabitants would uproot gravestones and toss them on rubbish heaps. The French Government would not allow the Germans to put up new memorials honouring their dead as they permitted their Allies to do across the Somme in the period up to the Second World War, and as may be found today everywhere in eastern Picardy, but at least they did guarantee that new German military cemeteries could by formed by amalgamations and be properly maintained.
What remains a mystery to the present day is why, despite the granting of passage across the frontier to German cemetery visitors from 1924, and the ‘social excursions’ to France organized by the Volksbund from 1927, the total of German visitors to the Somme fell far short of the stream of British visitors.11 Given that the journey was made extremely tiresome by passport formalities and having to declare in advance the exact time and place of border crossings there and back, nevertheless according to the Volksbund, in the years 1920 – 1930 only three per cent of the relatives of the German Fallen on the Somme went to the graveside. This absenteeism was perhaps based on a rejection of the mass-cemetery innovation which tended to emphasize the dehumanization of the individual soldier and made the paying of respects to that person ‘in that place’ difficult or impossible.
An analysis based on the files of the Somme Département showed that for the period to 1933 only a few large group excursions of battlefield visitors to the thirteen German military cemeteries were registered.12 Of note here was the excursion of fifty persons from Aachen travelling in September 1933 to the Rancourt cemetery near Péronne for the consecration of the new memorial. In order to avoid any possibility of giving offence, the local prefecture was consulted on whether anybody would mind if the group sang the Dead German Soldier’s song Ich hatt’einen Kameraden at the ceremony.
Die Somme-Wacht, newspaper of 1.Armee, Nr 1 – 5 (1917).
War Correspondent at the Front Georg Wegener: Der Wall von Eisen und Feuer, 3 Vols., Leipzig 1915 – 1920.
Zwischen Arras und Péronne: Reserve-Korps-Verlagsbuch-handlung, Bapaume, 1916: a pictorial record with 311 photographs recalling the period of trench warfare and the struggle to repel the British offensive.
The Treaty of Versailles together with concluding Protocol and the Rhineland Statute, Berlin 1925. The words ‘German aggression’ in the original are translated as ‘German attack’ in the German translation.
Otto von Stülpnagel: Die Zerstörung Nordfrankreichs und Belgiens (361 photographs) in: Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 20th year (1922/1923) December 1922, p.117 – 157. Also: Die Wahrheit über die deutsche Kriegsverbrechen, Berlin 1920.
Raymond Poincaré: Messages, discourse, allocutions, lettres et télégrammes, 3 Vols, Paris 1919 – 1922.
Stülpnagel: die Zerstörung, p.124.
Ibid, p.127.
Völkerrecht im Weltkrieg, 4 Vols, Berlin 1927, here Vol I, p.55 – 154.
Ibid, p.76f.
See Susanne Brandt: Vom Kriegsschauplatz zum Gedächtnisraum – die Westfront 1914 – 1940. Baden-Baden 2000, p.160ff.
Claudia Figge: Das visualisierte Gedenken an den Massentod des ersten Weltkrieges, Magister-arbeit, Univ. Freiburg, 1994.