Guest AmericanDoughboy Posted 28 July , 2004 Share Posted 28 July , 2004 As many have read, and I'm sure almost all of you have, when reading a book on the Western Front or the Great War in general, you will fall under the narration of the German Atrocities which various soldiers took part in killing innocent men, women and even children. To many Belgians, they agree and are still haunted by the destruction of their cities and their people, but to the Germans, at times they disagree of how awful these atrocities really were. Was it really like this? TOURIST SAW GERMAN SOLDIER CARRYING BAG OF EARS ...was a headline for a Newspaper Article in the United States of America in 1914. Was it really true? If so, why did it happen, how did it happen? I believe if such things were as awful as propaganda stated it was it was mostly because when German Infantry marched into various Belgian towns they were met by civillians and refugees carrying rifles and personal sidearms which soon evolved into a small skirmish of Urban Warfare. Such things might have occured when victims of these Belgian attacks were full of anger and oppression that they unleashed it on those 600 innocent Belgians. What do you believe...? This subject, in my opinion, is very difficult to describe and understand, but that is why I have brought it to this forum. As I ask again, what do you believe really happend? And why did it? -Doughboy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Landsturm Posted 28 July , 2004 Share Posted 28 July , 2004 Tourist!?! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marina Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 There was a documentary last year (Timewatch?) about atrocities in Belgium. It really was quite horrific. Marina Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John_Hartley Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Havn't most of these "organised atrocity stories" of the early part of the war now been more or less discredited by serious historians. That's not to say that individual acts of extreme unpleasantness did not take place. After all, history is littered with references up to and including the present day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
healdav Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 There were atrocities and thet were horrific, but they all seem to have been of the ''line up and shoot 'em' variety. The bags of ears, the nuns being mutilated, etc. etc simply did not happen. What did happen was for people to be shot for the most bizarre reasons (or not as the case may be). One abbot of a monstery was about to be shot for having sabotaged the water supply to the trough that the horses were drinking from, when someone pointed out that there was no water supply. The water was rain and the horses had drunk it! The Germans denied it, but there does seem to have been something official about it all. It was just too frequent and repetitive to have been the odd isolated incident. Probably it was part of a German attempt to frighten the general population into not resisting. Another incident comes to mind, when the Germans refused to believe that the French army could possibly be shooting at them and starting shooting the civilians for doing the shooting. The list goes on and on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyHollinger Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Documentation of any of this will be hard to find. The British did take everything they could get and "sexed it up" (is that the current phrase) for American eyes ... propaganda played and plays an important part in waging wars. Contrary to military logic, things like heavy handed anti-partisan retaliation and mass bombing do not work in "cowing" civilian populations. For proof, simply look at British methods in the present unpleasentness and the American ... which works better ... but Belgium was raped ... occupied ... and the Germans wanted little interference from this group of people ... stuff happens. I put it down to the same command concepts of "search and destroy" in Viet Nam ... one commander telling a subordinate to get the job done, don't let anyone stand in your way and shoot a couple of people to put eveyone's attitude straight ... wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HarryBettsMCDCM Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Documentation of any of this will be hard to find.  I have the below publication of 1915 Published by the "Committee On Alleged German Outrages" For the British government from sworn Witness statements ;Containing Details Of Outrages On Civil Population In Belgium & France ~The Use Of Civilians As Screens~Offences Against Combattants~Firing On Hospitals~Extracts From Diaries & Papers Of German Soldiers~Proclamations By German Army Authorities~Facsimilies Of Papers Found On German Soldiers~Extracts From The Hague Convention,The Book Published By HMSO has nearly 300 Pages of Eye~Witness Etc Statements From British Soldiers,Officers,Belgian & French Civilians Of Many Walks Of Life,With Place Names Dates & Numbers Of Casualties of Alleged{In 1915} Atrocities Including the Wanton Murder Of Children & Women By Retreating German Forces,How Reliable this Evidence Was I Know Not But It Does Make For Appalling Reading{ a sort of 1915 "Butler Report"} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyHollinger Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Harry ... the above is probably an example of the "sexed up" propaganda I mentioned ... published in 1915, it could hardly be researched and validated by impartial investigators ... that committee was probably an Allied front group ... most probably for UK and American audiences ... Cool Book, though .... I have an English Primer from Soviet schools, circa 1955 where the Reading lessons talk about social conditions for blacks in the American South ... same thing ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John_Hartley Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Harry Any raped nuns or crucified Canadians in it? John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HarryBettsMCDCM Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Harry Any raped nuns or crucified Canadians in it? John John,Not quite sure how to take that request? I have only dug out the book for the 1st time in about 12 years on seeing the thread posted,I have had a quick browse through & no apparent Violations of Nuns,though Hospitals & Red Cross Get a Chapter,& I can't recall any crucified Canucks,I'll have a better read later this evening & post if I do find anything,There are however mentions of Rape & subsequent murders of Belgian civilians,Attacks on Priests, & Wholesale Bayonetting of Wounded Belgian Troops,as well as cases of Bayonetting of Children,The Hacking off of Hands Etc,and numerous reports of the use of Village inhabitants as Human shields by advancing German Troops Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul guthrie Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 The biggest of the Great War myths is that German atrocities in Belgium & France are myth. Yes the bags of ears, the crucified Canadian & such are myth. But, there were executions of civilians, deportations, humans shields, some nast anti priest and Catholic actions and lots of these things. See the village memorials, so many list those assissanitated by the Germans. Add the torching of the great medieval library at Louvain/Leuven. For a recent shcolarly study see German Atrocities 1914 1918 A History of Denial, a fine study by two Trinity College profs which won US Branch WFA prize for best work in English a couple of years ago. Also Helen McPhail's The Long Silence about the occupation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sgt York Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Extracted from the NA: Alleged German 'war crimes' Germany's invasion of Belgium on 4 August 1914 quickly prompted allegations of 'war crimes'. Some of them were confined to excesses committed in the military conflict - witness, for example, a captured German soldier's diary describing how British POWs were beaten to death. The Times - owned by the staunch Germanophobe Viscount Northcliffe - ran an almost certainly apocryphal story in May 1915, detailing how Allied troops in the 2nd Battle of Ypres had discovered the body of a Canadian soldier crucified on a barn door with German bayonets. But the accusations of atrocities committed against civilians in occupied Belgium were far more damaging to the German cause. During the autumn of 1914, the British Foreign Office received a number of disturbing 'eyewitness' accounts from fleeing British subjects and Belgian refugees. German soldiers, it was alleged, had been seen 'pillaging and looting'. As reprisals for civilian attacks on the German army, they were committing 'wholesale massacres of innocent women and men' (source: FO 371/1913). Charged by a genuine sense of moral outrage, and with one eye on the propaganda war, the Asquith government appointed a special committee to investigate these rumours in December 1914. Under the leadership of the widely respected Lord Bryce, the Committee of Alleged German Outrages published its findings five months later. The 'Bryce report' concluded that German troops had committed excesses against Belgian civilians as part of a conscious strategy of terror. It accused German soldiers of (among other things): raping women and girls; using civilians as 'human shields' during combat; and cutting off children's hands and ears in front of their horrified parents. The Bryce Report The Bryce report's sensational findings were published with powerful effect in neutral countries such as the USA. German attempts to counter this, by disseminating details of atrocities committed by Belgian civilians against their own soldiers, had little impact. Taken alongside the Zeppelin raids, the use of poison gas, the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 and the execution in Brussels in October 1915 of the British nurse Edith Cavell, the Bryce report seemed to confirm the brutal nature of German war strategy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sgt York Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Rest of Image: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sgt York Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Edith Cavell Poster: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrB Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 I would point out that Nurse Cavell did "ask" for it, in a roundabout way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest AmericanDoughboy Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Edith Cavell simply helped many allied prisoners of war escape from the German hostilities. I suppose that he death was quite "over the top" when the Germans found out about such a thing, but it is difficult to understand without knowing the Imperial German Codes of War. -Doughboy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AOK4 Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Well, the Allies also committed crimes like that: I encountered quite a few stories about Belgian civilians being mistreated by British soldiers. And about Edith Cavell: the French executed Mata Hari... IMHO both sides did things that were not acceptable... Jan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HarryBettsMCDCM Posted 29 July , 2004 Share Posted 29 July , 2004 Harry Any crucified Canadians in it? John On Reading through the Tome this Evening There is but one example of Crucifixion,Recorded in the Affidavits Sworn by the Witnesses, Case h67:........At Haecht in September I saw the dead body of a young girl nailed to the outside of a Cottage Door by her hands.I am sure there were no nails in her feet.She was about 14 or 16 Years Old...." Sworn statement by Belgian soldier.[NB No names are recorded in this Government produced document but all avidavits were from recorded witnesses{The names being omitted to avoid reprisal}]perhaps this event or a similar one gave rise to the lore of the Canadian? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duncan Posted 30 July , 2004 Share Posted 30 July , 2004 Saw a recent (ish) documentary that claimed the Crucified Canadian was true (Channel 4 I think). There was an enquiry after the war by the UK and Canadian governments. They gathered various Red Cross reports, testimony from soldiers who found the body, even a nurse who tended the body after it was brought in. I think he was brought in alive but died later? The programme even traced the man in question, a Canadian Sergeant, and traced his family in Canada. Amazingly the family even had surviving letters from the authorities about it, and letters from various nurses etc, and it was a well known family story that he had been crucified. The postwar German government (the Wermar Republic not the Nazis) were furious at the accusation though, and the inquest seems to have been quietly dropped. The programme went on to say that at the time some famous Canadian artist did a sculpture based on the crucified Canadian. The Germans were furious and it was boxed up and left in some Canadian museum basement, where it remains to this day. Not proof it took place, but an interesting TV programme. Those living in the occupied areas of France and Belgium suffered considerably at the hands of the German authorities. It wasn’t just a case of one off atrocities, but they were slowly starved as their food, livestock, crops etc etc as it was sucked in to feed the German war machine. There were a considerable number of ridiculous atrocity stories during the war, but afterwards a myth seems to have grown up (I believe this is a process that happened particularly in the 1960’s) that all were ridiculous and untrue. What do you all think? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyHollinger Posted 30 July , 2004 Share Posted 30 July , 2004 IF someone told me an American officer would herd 100 women and children in a ditch and then kill them all, I'd say it was untrue. If I knew Bill Calley and heard he did it - I'd say it could be true. After seeing Life Magazine I'd know it was true ... BUT, do I think every or most or many or a lot of American Officers did that ... nope ... Do I believe the Russians raped everything German female on the way West ... more or less ... do I believe most of this was second line troops, hell yes ... Do I believe the Germans cared one bit about Belgian sensibilities and possible Allied Propaganda - no. Do I believe that the anti-partisan reprisals got out of hand - yes. Do I believe some crazy could crucify a Canadian (notice the alliteration in English - does it work in German as well?) sure ... did German soldiers attach Belgian babies to their pickelhaube and parade around ... no ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
egbert Posted 30 July , 2004 Share Posted 30 July , 2004 Do I believe the Germans had lots of problems with attacks by non-combattants - the Franctireurs=yes Do I believe the Germans were nervous and impatient =yes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul guthrie Posted 30 July , 2004 Share Posted 30 July , 2004 German atrocities 1914 A History of Denial says there was little partisan activity but that nervous troops sometimes assumed military fire including their own was franctireurs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
egbert Posted 30 July , 2004 Share Posted 30 July , 2004 Paul, I thought you reject the myths of the Great War? So you should cleanup your glasses and expand your point of view what scientific research is available on the subject as of today and what was described in German literature by veterans. I just read another (2nd) book this week were the actions of Franctireurs are vividly described. I also have some 10 books from the early 20s were Franctireur crimes (they were non-combatants and according to Geneva Convention TODAY are not allowed to act as they did) are explicitly described. Also a quick search in the internet shows you a vast array of documentation/literature/research (sorry I checked the German-language websites; if you can read German I will send you the links). there is no doubt today that Franctireurs were indeed bothering the German Army in Belgium Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max Posted 30 July , 2004 Share Posted 30 July , 2004 I would have thought that a little Belgian "partisan" activity could be expected given that the German army had invaded their country WITHOUT provocation. Thats the real war crime. Andy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul guthrie Posted 30 July , 2004 Share Posted 30 July , 2004 I recommend this book to you also before you make up your mind, it may well be it was more fear of franctireurs based on what had happened in 1870. THis book is not a smear, quite serious history. Sorry to say I don't read German, was there a year but like most GIs did not take the opportunity. You quote veterans accounts; yes as I said they thought they were taking partisan fire when they were not. The book also demonstrates modern German historians have conceded the point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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