Nobody expected little Belgium to put up any resistance, least of all the Germans. The ‘rage of dreaming sheep’ was how a Prussian statesman had described the Belgians’ willingness to defend their neutrality. ‘I will go through Belgium like that!’ the Kaiser, with a chop of his hand, had indiscreetly confided in a British officer before the war.1
At 8.02 on the morning of 4 August, the first grey lines of German infantry crossed the Belgian border at Gemmenich. Belgian sentries promptly opened fire, not realizing they had shot the spearhead of three German armies – nearly 800,000 troops – the vanguard of whom were now bristling to invade French territory. The reconnaissance patrol briefly dispersed, but the Germans soon returned, in force. They didn’t expect any delays. The occupation of Belgium was meant to be just the rapid first stage in the Schlieffen Plan.
Within an hour, the brunt of the German invasion – the cavalry – had made short work of the border resistance and entered Belgian territory proper, hoisting the black eagle standard in every village and issuing proclamations that the destruction of roads and bridges by the locals would be considered hostile acts. As they barged into each community, the Germans were, at first, almost apologetic: they had violated Belgian territory ‘with regret’ and meant no harm, so long as the Belgians stood aside.
Advancing across Belgium that morning were General Alexander von Kluck’s First Army on the right wing; General Karl von Bülow’s Second Army in the centre; and General Max von Hausen’s Third Army on the left wing. Line after line of grey-uniformed soldiers crammed every road and lane, in columns 30–40 miles (50–60 km) long, accompanied by reconnaissance motorcyclists, officers in automobiles, field kitchens, medical units, engineers, horses with carts of supplies, ammunition trucks and piece after piece of horse-drawn artillery. Not yet visible were the huge Krupp and Skoda guns – including the 16.5-inch Big Bertha super-heavyweight howitzers, the largest of their kind, specially designed to demolish modern fortresses with their concrete-smashing shells. They would soon destroy the city of Liège in an agony of pounding.
One after one, the Belgian villages stirred, murmuring ‘Uhlan’ and ‘Hun’ at the German approach. The people stood silently aside as thousands of grey-uniformed troops passed through bearing a forest of flags. The great crump of boots on the cobblestones and the rising chorus of the German anthem and patriotic songs were all that could be heard. A verse from a favourite ran:
So a whole world is threatening us – so what?
We are of good cheer
And if someone should try to get in our way
Give us our rifles! We are good shots.
Brothers, move on! To the Vistula, to the Rhine!
Dear Fatherland, no need to fear!
Just and good, that is our war!
Now lead us, Emperor, into battle and to victory!2
Private Hitler sang the same song as his regiment approached the front, though the Listers would not pass through Belgian territory until October, when Hitler would witness the aftermath of one of the lesser-known atrocities of the First World War. How Germany dealt with Belgium would have a profound impact on the mind of the future dictator. To understand why, we must enter the maelstrom of those first few weeks of conflict.
The ‘Martyrdom of Belgium’3 began in the villages and farms, up against church walls and in the flames of people’s homes. For General von Kluck, the ‘shooting of individuals and the burning of houses’ were ‘punishments under martial law’, which, he later wrote, were ‘slow in remedying the evil’.4 Other generals shared his view that whole villages of innocent people should be massacred as punishment for the actions of a few francs-tireurs, the civilian resistance.
German retribution was merciless and bloody. It expressed a policy that blamed Belgium for any disruption to the German Army, part of a ‘general system of terror’ directed at innocent communities. Revelations of the slaughter of Belgian civilians – old men, women and children – and the mass rape of women would soon astonish the world. Whole towns were selected for destruction without any evidence that the inhabitants had resisted the occupying force. A stray explosion, a broken bridge, a destroyed road, the shout ‘Vive la France!’ – as some Belgian French, aware of the ultimate goal of the invasion, would call out – was enough to bring down the wrath of the Uhlan, the feared Prussian cavalrymen.
The people of Namur in southern Belgium dared not resist the German lines, yet they would be severely punished, pour encourager les autres. The murder of residents and the burning of their homes began at 9 p.m. on 24 August. ‘Six dwellers in the Rue Rogier, who were [fleeing] their burning houses, were shot on their own doorsteps,’ noted the Official Belgian Commission of Inquiry, based on the evidence of hundreds of witnesses (and the source for the testimonials that follow, unless otherwise stated).5 The town panicked. People streamed from their homes, many in their nightgowns. Seventy-five were shot or burned to death.
At Andenne, on 20 August, a single shot and an explosion were heard as the German troops marched through town on their way to Charleroi near the French border. Nobody was hit. The Germans halted and fired back in disorder. They brought up a machine gun. The people fled, hiding in their cellars, bolting their doors and shutters. The destruction of the bridge and a nearby tunnel also provoked German fury. The pillaging began: windows and shutters were smashed, houses burned. The next day, the citizens were herded through the streets at gunpoint, their hands in the air. A man who tried to help his eighty-year-old father, who couldn’t put up his arms, was struck in the neck with an axe. Anyone who resisted was shot; between forty and fifty people were selected at random and shot. Some were axed to death. More than 300 civilians were murdered at Andenne: ‘no other Belgian town was the theatre of so many scenes of ferocity and cruelty’. The survivors later said that ‘Andenne was sacrificed merely to establish a reign of terror’.6
The horror continued at Tamines, on the River Sambre. On 22 August, the Germans herded 400–450 men in front of the local church and opened fire – punishment for defying the occupation and shouting ‘Vive la France!’ The Official Inquiry stated, ‘as the shooting was a slow business the officers ordered up a machine gun, which swept off all the unhappy peasants still standing’.7 The wounded hobbled to their feet and were shot down again. The next day, a Sunday, the people were ordered to bury a pile of corpses in the town square: ‘fathers buried the bodies of their sons and sons the bodies of their fathers’, while the German officers watched, ‘drinking champagne’.8 A gravedigger testified to burying 350–400 corpses. On leaving Tamines, the Germans burned 264 houses. The Official Inquiry estimates 650 dead; later research put the figure at 385.
The same atrocities were inflicted on many Belgian communities – at terrible cost, for example, to Dinant, in the district of Philippeville, and the villages of Hastière and Surice, according to the Official Inquiry. In these and other places, the populations were terrorized or killed, and the towns utterly destroyed. At Dinant, hundreds of bodies, including that of a three-week-old baby, were identified as the victims of two firing squads. The Inquiry listed 700 dead. Later research found evidence of duplication and placed the figure at 410.
In these communities, parish priests were routinely shot, and massacres of the menfolk usually followed. Women were hunted down and raped, by crazed, drunken soldiers whose officers were un willing to restrain them. Nothing was sacred: in one village, a German infantry regiment broke up a church service, drove the parishioners on to the street and shot fifty of the men. During another massacre, women and children were forced to watch the execution of their husbands and fathers. At the village of Surice, a crowd of tearful women shouted, ‘Shoot me too; shoot me with my husband!’ German soldiers obliged, then plundered the corpses, taking ‘watches, rings, purses and pocketbooks’.9
An act of barbarity that would for ever redound to German disgrace was visited upon the Belgian town of Louvain between 25 and 31 August. Over six days, the German Army burned Louvain’s cathedral and university to the ground, murdered many of its residents and destroyed one of the world’s finest cultural centrepieces: Louvain’s peerless library, the cherished depository of 230,000 ancient volumes, including 750 medieval manuscripts. All were reduced to ashes. The sack of Louvain, reported in the world’s press, provoked universal disgust. ‘Are you descendants of Goethe or Attila the Hun?’ wondered the writer Romain Rolland in a letter of protest.10
By the end of August, Belgium had been subjected to the horror of ‘a medieval war’. The crucial point was this: the massacres, the rapes and the sacking of whole towns were not arbitrary acts of vengeance. They were organized. They were part of a strategy of civilian coercion laid down in the 1902 German Military Code, the Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege, or ‘custom of war’. This explicitly stated that ‘an energetically conducted war’ should extend to ‘the destruction of material and moral resources’ (i.e. property, civilian lives, including women and children). ‘Humanitarian’ acts were in conflict with Kriegsbrauch.11 In other words, German atrocities in Belgium were planned and prescribed, the corollary being the dismissal of the rules of law under the Hague Convention and the wilful suspension of conscience and compassion in the troops.
The man responsible for enforcing Kriegsbrauch was Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, appointed military governor of Belgium at the start of the occupation (he would later die of typhus or, some believe, poisoning by Turkish assassins). A dour, pitiless individual, von der Goltz grimly adhered to his rule book. ‘It is the stern necessity of war,’ he ordered in early September, ‘that the punishment for hostile acts falls not only on the guilty, but on the innocent as well.’ He clarified this on 5 October, shortly before Hitler’s regiment passed through, in an order bearing his name:
In the future, villages in the vicinity of places where railway and telegraph lines are destroyed will be punished without pity (whether they are guilty or not of the acts in question). With this in view hostages have been taken in all villages near the railway lines, which are threatened by such attacks. Upon the first attempt to destroy lines of railway, telegraph or telephone, they will immediately be shot.12
The result was utter lawlessness, as German officers lost control of their men. By the end of August 1914, the Belgian civilian dead outnumbered their military casualties. In these acts, Germany revealed to the world ‘a monstrous and disconcerting moral phenomenon’, concluded the report on the Martyrdom of Belgium.13
In the early hours of 21 October, Hitler’s regiment entrained for the front line – they knew not where, only that they were heading for the Western Front. ‘I’m immensely looking forward to it,’ Hitler wrote to Joseph Popp, his landlord, as the train shunted towards Belgium, via Cologne and Aachen.14 The soldiers hoped they would be fighting the English.
At every German station crowds of supporters greeted Hitler’s regiment with gifts of food and tobacco. The Rhinelanders left a deep impression on him: ‘… they received and feted us in a most touching manner’15 – with stirring choruses of ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’. ‘I will never forget the feelings that welled up in me when I first caught sight of this historic river,’ he later said.16
Amid German jubilation at the fall of Brussels in late August, Hitler’s chief fear had been that he would arrive too late for the fighting at the front. Scenes of the German path through Belgium soon relieved his impatience. He and his comrades witnessed a trail of destruction and heard stories of the rape and slaughter of Belgian civilians such as would horrify any morally sentient witness. Yet German propaganda muted their reaction: the Bavarian press retaliated with accounts of the francs-tireurs mutilating and blinding German officers. Hitler had surely read, as did most soldiers entering Belgium, the story of a Württemberger dragoon who had had his ‘eyes plucked out, his hands hacked off and his tongue ripped out’.17
In a letter dated 5 February 1915, he wrote to Ernst Hepp, the lawyer who had helped him in Munich:
After a really lovely journey down the Rhine, we reached Lille on 23rd October. We could already see the effects of the war as we travelled through Belgium. We saw the conflagrations of war and heard its ferocious winds. As far as Douai our journey was reasonably safe and quiet. Then came shock after shock … We were now frequently coming upon blown up bridges and wrecked locomotives. Although the train kept going at a snail’s pace, we encountered more and more horrors: graves. Then in the distance we heard our heavy guns.18
During the journey Hitler witnessed, unmoved, the ruins of Liège, pounded under shellfire. In a letter to Joseph Popp, dated 3rd December 1914, he dismissed the burned-out city of Louvain and its beautiful library as a ‘heap of rubble’.19 The slaughter of 248 of Louvain’s citizens and the loss of 230,000 books, including many priceless, irreplaceable works, elicited no further comment in his letters or memoir.
Hitler took a lesson from the rape of Belgium that he would later apply as Führer: terrifying civilians was a tactic of war, vital to the effective occupation of an enemy country. As the German military governor of occupied Belgium, von der Goltz personally authorized the atrocities and terrorized Belgium for the duration of the war. His ‘methods’ impressed young Hitler, who would later deploy them on a far larger scale during the invasions of Poland, France, Russia, Ukraine and many other countries in the Second World War. The Nazis would think nothing of wiping out whole villages and towns and murdering their people as punishments for resistance elsewhere. In the First World War, this policy was applied to speed the flow of the German Army into France; in the Second, to destroy civilian resistance and unearth the racial enemies of the Third Reich (and infamously applied at the Czech village of Lidice, which was completely destroyed and 184 men massacred on Hitler’s orders as punishment for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the spring of 1942).
On the evening of 23 October, the List Regiment detrained at Lille station, a bombed-out shambles. The war had severely marked the city’s civilian population: bombs had destroyed 1,200 homes and ‘crying and begging women and children’ crept among the rubble.20 The German forces received three days’ leave during which most of the men drank and caroused with French girls. Hitler spent his time reading.
Three days later the Sixth Army Reserve paraded before the Bavarian King Ludwig III and Crown Prince Rupprecht, before hastily preparing to attack the British lines east of Ypres. The alarm sounded in the German camp in Lille at 1 a.m. on 27 October. Hitler’s regiment assembled in the Place de Concert, where the Crown Prince issued a rousing call to arms against ‘the Englishman [who] has been at work for so many years in order to surround us with a ring of enemies and strangle us’.21 They then departed on the 25-mile march towards the sound and flash of the heavy guns on the western horizon, in Flanders fields.
They marched through the night and all the next day, camping on the evening of the 28th. ‘Four steps from my bundle of straw,’ Hitler wrote, in the same letter to Hepp, ‘lay a dead horse. The beast was already half decayed.’ They got little sleep, as German guns fired round after round all night: ‘They howled and hissed through the air, and then far in the distance you heard two dull thuds. Every man of us listened. We had never heard that sound before …’22
Late that night the regiment received their marching orders. ‘Tomorrow we’re attacking the English!’ an officer announced. ‘At last!’ Hitler wrote. ‘Every man of us was overjoyed.’23 They rose at dawn on 29 October and, in dense fog, prepared to charge the British lines near the villages of Becelaere and Gheluvelt. ‘Out there the first shrapnel was flying over us,’ Hitler recorded, ‘bursting at the edge of the woods, and tearing apart the trees like so much brushwood. We looked on curiously. We had no real idea of the danger. None of us was afraid. Each man was waiting impatiently for the command: “Forward!”’24