A German Way of War?

Abstract

DISCUSSION A German Way of War? German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial. By John Horne and Alan Kramer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2001. xv + 608 pp. US $40.00 (hardback). Is it too soon to retire the Sonderweg? We may have forgotten how much that dark narrative of German history is owed, not just to Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914, but to the crimes of its troops, beginning on August 5, there and in France. Villages were looted and razed, hostages used as human shields, civilians shot, bayoneted, and confined to buildings which were then set alight. Children, including seven babies in Les Rivages, were among the 6,500 victims. Especially during the first three weeks, such violence was ‘endemic throughout the German army’ (p. 76), involving about half of its 300 regiments on the Western Front. The ‘proximate cause’ of these outrages was anxiety during the great gamble of the Western invasion (p. 42). Pillaging was ‘the natural consequence of armies outstripping their supply trains’ (p. 119); rage, fuelled by alcohol, the not unnatural consequence of meeting unexpectedly stiff Belgian resistance. But underlying these obvious explanations lay the German army’s belief that its progress was being sabotaged by civilian snipers (francs-tireurs); that their wounded were being mutilated by innocent-looking maidens and children; that they were confronted, in short, with the same kind of Volkskrieg that had beset them in France in 1870–71. The belief was false, sparked in most cases by panic at friendly fire. But along a front of more than 500 kilometres hysteria spread from foot soldiers to command: ‘a massive case of collective self-suggestion, probably unparalleled in a modern army. A million men were swept by a delusion %’ (p. 77). Within two weeks it encom- passed the home front as well. It was this astonishing ‘myth complex’ that stimulated a young Marc Bloch to embark upon his investigations into the history of rumour, irrationality, and mentalite´s. It stimulated German officers to issue orders which underwrote the initially spontaneous ‘reprisals’ with an official policy of exemplary massacre. The documentation of these atrocities is only the beginning of what, in lesser hands, could easily have become three books. The authors’ hearts are less in German History Vol. 22 No. 1 GH: german history 10.1191/0266355404gh302xx  2004 The German History Society GH$$$$302P