August 28th 1914. Throughout August, 1914, as the war progressed in Belgium, France,
and Serbia, the Austrian and German high command either sanctioned or ignored the widespread
execution and rape of civilians and the sacking and burning of occupied towns. A shocked and
revolted world looked on.
My name is Indy Neidell. Welcome to the Great War.
Here’s where we stood on the battlefields of Europe at the beginning of the week:
In the west, there were three German armies- 750,000 men. The left flank was in Lorraine,
and the rest were marching through Belgium at 30 km per day, an amazing speed, and pretty
much slaughtering the French armies they encountered, and the British Expeditionary Force under
John French was approaching from the west. Okay? In the East, the Germans were on the
retreat out of East Prussia and the Russians were advancing.
Now, in the west, after all the victories of the past few weeks, things were looking
good for the Germans but their reputation was doing anything but that, and the atrocities
the German troops committed against civilians in the west grew and grew.
In Dinant, German soldiers repairing a bridge were fired on by a few Belgian civilians,
and as a reprisal over 600 Belgian men, women, and children were shot. On August 20th, it
happened in Andenne. There was even a printed announcement from German General von Bulow,
posted in Liege that read the following “The population on Andenne, after manifesting peaceful
intentions towards our troops, attacked them in the most treacherous manner. With my authorization
the general who commanded these troops has reduced the town to ashes and shot 110 persons.”
In Tamines, 384 men were rounded up near the church and shot.
In Rossignol 122 people were executed for supposedly supporting the French army, who
had just themselves been crushed there in battle.
There were dozens more such incidents, known collectively as “the Rape of Belgium”,
but in Leuven, though, it was completely out of control. The Germans had occupied Leuven
on August 19th, right? On the 25th, the Belgian army, coming from Antwerp, harassed the Germans,
but once this was over, the German command decided the people of Leuven were to blame,
so for the next five days the German troops executed hundreds of citizens of both sexes,
including many clergy, and burned the city and many of its famous medieval buildings.
In the international press there were horrible eyewitness accounts and even a headline in
the New York Tribune “Germans sack Louvain, women and clergy shot.”10,000 civilians
were driven from the city. In total over 6,000 civilians are known to have been killed in
cold blood in Belgium and France by Germans in the first weeks of the war.
Now, I have to point out that some people today believe that the charges of war crimes
against Germany in occupied Belgium and France are greatly exaggerated or even fabricated,
but this is completely at odds with contemporary evidence. And it’s important to note that
these crimes were not only tolerated by military command, but in many cases even sanctioned
by them.
Even some of the German newspapers, instead of denying or downplaying what happened, tried
to explain and justify civilian executions and town burnings. The results of this were
as you’d expect- French and Belgian hearts hardened against the Germans and anti-German
sentiment grew all over the world.
The stories of German atrocities were particularly abundant in the British papers, where propagandists
wanted to move away from the killing of an aristocrat in a far away country to atrocities
closer at hand in Belgium as a moral impera tive for fighting the war. This would motivate
the British troops enormously when, on August 23, the Germans ran into the British for the
first time in the war at the Battle of Mons.
Now, the German high command had been mocking the British army for weeks and joking that
they should just send the police to arrest them, but the British regulars, the only fully
professional army in Europe before the war, held off the numerically superior Germans
for many hours, inflicting three times the losses they took themselves.
German howitzers arrived in the afternoon, though, with which the British artillery could
not compete, and the British began to retreat, parallel to the French retreat as the Germans
quickly pushed through Belgium and slaughtered the unprepared French army.
There was heavy fighting for the British along the retreat over the next few days, especially
when they turned and held their ground on August 26th at Le Cateau, long enough for
thousands of men to withdraw in good order, A British General, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien,
had decided to stop and fight as the Germans were so close and the rearguard divisions
were becoming so scattered that a catastrophic battle was otherwise inevitable. Smith-Dorrien
was a general who had seen a lot of action, for over 30 years all over the world with
the British Colonial Army, and he knew what he was doing. Although the action that day
would prove deadlier for the British army than the D-Day invasion 30 years later, Smith-Dorrien
would give his army a 12 hour start on the Germans, but the troops were exhausted, and
there was now even talk in the air that the war would indeed be over by Christmas, but
with Germany the victor.
Although on the Eastern front, things to that point hadn’t been going well at all for
the Germans, especially after their recent defeat at Gumbinnen, which caused the German
retreat. After this, German army chief of staff von Moltke dismissed his paranoid General
von Prittwitz and brought General von Hindenburg out of retirement to replace him. Hindenburg
had retired in 1911, but unlike many of the European generals so far this war, Hindenburg
had seen action going as far back as the 1860s.
Now, on the surface, things looked good for the Russians, but they had colossal logistical
and communications problems. They didn’t even encode their telegrams so all wire communications
could be monitored by anyone, and one tiny event occurred that had huge later repercussions:
After the battle of Gumbinnen, a note was found on a dead Russian officer that outlined
most of the Russian plans for their offensive. Armed with this knowledge, Hindenburg and
his second in command Ludendorff broke off the German retreat and decided to go on the
attack.
It’s the little things, you know?
On August 24th, the Russians collided with the Germans and the Russian center made great
progress, but it was a complete illusion. On the 26th, the German western flank cut
through the Russian left and cut off communications, and on the 27th the German Eastern flank did
the same to the Russian right flank. The Russian army was trapped in the middle, running out
of basically everything, and on August 28th they began surrendering in droves, nearly
100,000 men with 50,000 more killed or wounded over the course of several days. This was
the most spectacular defeat of the war and made Hindenburg a German national hero, even
if much of the credit rightly belonged to the ironically named German General Francois.
There was a village nearby named Tannenberg, where in a medieval battle the Slavs had defeated
the Teutonic Knights[ad], and this village gave its name to the battle, which would become
a big symbol of German pride.
This was a big moment, because it put East Prussia now totally under German control.
But further south, Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary was having huge difficulties with control,
which the Austrian army used as an excuse for wartime atrocities of their own.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire had launched this war in the first place to teach Serbia a lesson
or even end her existence, and there was no love lost between the two, so when Austria-Hungary
invaded it provoked widespread Serbian civilian resistance to the invading army- guerilla
warfare- and this really upset the Austrians, particularly their stuck-in-the-past aristocratic
military leaders, who wanted the war conducted on their terms, and they decreed that they
would deal with civilian resistance ruthlessly.
And they did, shooting, hanging, and bayonetting Serbian civilians, most of whom were innocent-
men, women, and even children. But the Serbian guerillas were good at creating chaos in the
Austrian lines, often waiting for them to pass before sniping them with rifles from
behind. This was effective but it had its cost- an estimated 3,500 Serbian civilians
were executed during just the first two weeks of the August campaign.
And we have a lot of evidence of this because executing Serbian civilians was not something
the Austrians tried to hide. In fact, Austrian army chief of staff Conrad von Hotzendorf
wanted people to see these punishments, so many of the executions of civilians were photographed
and the photos were published. Mass executions and mass graves.
And here we are at the end of the week, with Germany ascendant in both the east and the
west, and a terrified citizenry- including over a million Belgians- fleeing from the
invaders.
Many formerly anti-war people decided this week that the war was, after all, justified,
and that Germany must be stopped at all costs to preserve civilization in Europe, and we
see years later that the massacres of civilians by the Germans in August 1914 were a direct
factor in the harsh conditions imposed on Germany after the war which indirectly, or
maybe even directly led to Nazism and the Second World War.
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