Page 361 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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German War Crimes 1914/1941: Continuity or Break?

ALAN KRAMER

For professional historians it is no longer a matter of debate that the German army com-
mitted war crimes both in the First and the Second World War. Interest now focuses, in a
revival of the old controversy about the Sonderweg (special path) of German history, on the
question of possible continuities. Did Nazi warfare represent a continuation of the warfare
of imperial Germany, enriched, so to speak, by racist ideology? Or had a radically new type
of warfare emerged?
At first it is the differences in the magnitude and motivation of the crimes that are most
striking. The total number of civilians killed during the three months of the invasion of
France and Belgium in 1914 was about 6,500. In the best-known case, that of Louvain in
Belgium, 248 citizens were killed. By contrast, just in the first five weeks of ‘Operation
Barbarossa’, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, down to the end of July 1941, 63,000
civilians were killed. Almost all the victims were Jews; self-evidently this reflected a policy
of racial extermination, although a plan for genocide had not yet been decided.
Racial motivation was not absent in 1914, but the main factor was the troops’ widespread
fear of ‘francs-tireurs’, or civilian irregular fighters. In addition, violent anti-Catholic preju-
dice analogous to racism caused German troops to accuse Catholic clergy of fomenting the
fanatical armed resistance of the Belgian people. The destruction of Louvain and its famous
medieval university library was partly motivated by anti-Catholicism because the university
was regarded as the intellectual centre of Belgian Catholicism, and hence of Belgian national
identity. Numerous Belgian priests were arrested and beaten; at least 47 were killed.
The violence against civilians in 1914 was not the result of a breakdown in discipline or
the brutality of individual officers. It occurred throughout the invasion zone. Of the 300 regi-
ments in the invasion in August 1914, 150 were responsible for incidents in which 10 or more
civilians were killed; many more were involved in other killings. The troops thought they
saw francs-tireurs in combat everywhere, calling forth drastic reprisals. Yet the francs-tireurs
existed only as a chimera in the imagination of the German troops. Apart from some isolated
cases of individual resistance the real source of unidentified shooting was the firing by the
regular Belgian and French armies; rifles had a range of 1.8 kilometres, and in the hands of
experienced soldiers they were accurate at 600 metres: a distance that made it impossible to
identify the assailant. Sometimes there were ‘friendly fire’ incidents between inexperienced,
nervous, and exhausted German soldiers. The soldiers selected their victims arbitrarily: they
usually did not even try to identify armed men who might have been responsible for the
firing, but simply executed all male inhabitants of a house or street from which shots had
ostensibly been fired. Sometimes women, children, and old people were also killed.
This draconian procedure rested on a concept of international law that deviated consider-
ably from the international consensus. Germany had signed the Hague Law of Land Warfare
of 1899 and 1907, which afforded protection to non-combatants, and even reproduced it in
the Field Service Regulations carried by every officer. However, the army leadership and the