ABSTRACT
Within a few days of the German invasion of Belgium and France in 1914, rumors of atrocities abounded and rapidly found their way into print. Growing in intensity, they accompanied the entire two-and-a-half-month period of mobile warfare before the Western Front solidified. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it tries to escape the preoccupation with propaganda and the accusational attitudes that have marked the historiography of the subject by establishing the relativity of the concept of “ atrocity.” Second, the article seeks to establish the evidence for what happened and to explain why the two sides interpreted it so differently in 1914-15. The subject is potentially a large one, since the atrocity accusations were numerous and varied. We do not consider atrocity propaganda exhaustively, nor for its own sake, but only as evidence of the cultural values raised by the issue, and we have chosen to concentrate on a neglected but crucial source of evidence-the diaries of German soldiers. These lay at the center of one of the most acrimonious propaganda battles-an argument between intellectuals on the two sides as to the meaning of the term “ atrocity” —and they allow detailed probing of the nature and causes of the conduct of the German army in the period AugustOctober 1914. The diaries thus illuminate the relationship between event, perception, and contemporary interpretation that lies at the heart of our interest in this subject. 1
Ironically, the complexity of this relationship has been buried by the interwar pacifist reaction to wartime propaganda and by the history of genocide in the Second World War.2 The “ German atrocities” have been regarded, at least in the English-speaking countries and Germany, as a prime example of untruthful war propaganda. The British pacifist Arthur Ponsonby, a Liberal and later Labour member of Parliament, published a book in 1928 that condemned the reports on German atrocities as pure inventions of propaganda.3 The American historian Ralph H. Lutz considered the accusations made against the German army during the war to be falsifications designed to malign the German nation in the interest of propaganda.4 In Germany, the defeat of 1918 was followed by rejections of the “ war guilt” accusation and the associated allegations of war crimes. A book on American propaganda against Germany during the First World War, published in 1943 by a researcher at the Stuttgart Weltkriegsbiicherei with the intention of showing that the American people had been ‘ ‘prepared for this war’ ’ with the same propaganda methods as for the First World War and had succumbed to “ the same empty phrases and atrocity stories” as twenty-five years previously, found that the “ atrocity legends” associated with the German invasion of Belgium were the main feature of American propaganda in the years 1917-19.5
This generally accepted consensus among historians still survives today. Thus Trevor Wilson, writing in 1979, saw the most significant aspect of the question to be the use made by the British official report of 1915 on the “ German outrages” of unverified evidence from unreliable witnesses and
untenable accusations about cruel and sadistic behavior.6 Since the Second World War there have been two serious, but little-known, attempts to deal with the question of German “ atrocities” in 1914 and their legacy: a case study on the destruction of Louvain published in 1958 and Lothar Wieland’s book on German military conduct in Belgium in 1914 and German-Belgian relations until 1936.7 While both come to the conclusion that the allegations made by the Belgian authorities against the German army were in essence true, neither seeks to explain the divergent perceptions of the issue by contemporaries, including French and German intellectuals, nor do they use German military sources or the private diaries of soldiers.
