Brutality in the name of the Kaiser

British propaganda in the First World War painted a lurid picture of the Kaiser's armies, and of the ghastly sufferings they inflicted on innocent people, above all, the civilians of Belgium. In the deep disillusionment which took hold in Allied countries later in the war and after it ended, sophisticated people turned away from all this in disgust. All the nations were guilty, were they not? Were we seriously expected to believe that German officers shot innocent people wholesale? Postwar German governments conducted several formal inquiries into this issue, and reported that allegations of atrocities were utterly unfounded. Surprisingly enough, many of the Allies seemed happy to accept the Berlin verdict.

Then came Hitler's legions, so much more evil that the Kaiser's soldiers seemed gentlemen by comparison. When the Nazis invaded France and Belgium in 1940, they tore down the monuments erected in towns and villages to the victims of Prussian chivalry in 1914. Thereafter, the world's historians were too busy struggling to come to terms with the enormities of the Holocaust to have time to spare for the lesser horrors of the First World War.

Now, however, two historians at Trinity College, Dublin, have conducted an exhaustive inquiry, first, into what the German army did to Belgian and French civilians when it marched into their towns and villages in 1914; and second, into the successful campaign afterwards to deny the reality of what was done. Many people remember that the Germans burned the medieval library at Louvain. Far fewer know that in the Kaiser's name, some 6,500 civilians, including women and children, were murdered, mostly in cold blood, to establish the rectitude of Germany's dominance over their communities.

It is a wretched story, meticulously documented. At Louvain, Dinant, Huy, Andenne and a string of other towns and villages, as the German army advanced in late August 1914, its units carried out a succession of purges, in which townspeople and villagers were killed wholesale. The alleged justification was almost always the same: the Kaiser's soldiers believed they had been fired on by franc-tireurs, guerrillas of the kind they had encountered in France in 1870. In virtually every case, this claim was fantasy - for the most part, any shots were fired by drunken or careless Germans. But the ruthlessness with which the invaders treated civilians provided a foretaste of Nazi behaviour in 1940.

Soldiers afterwards wove fantastic webs of deceit to explain their conduct. A German NCO gave his version of a massacre of civilians in the town of Leffe: "We pushed on from house to house, under fire from almost every building, and we arrested the male inhabitants, who almost all carried weapons. They were summarily executed in the street. Only children under 15, old people and women were spared ... I did not see anyone from my battalion killed or injured in this streetfighting. But I saw the corpses of at least 150 franc-tireurs lying in the streets."

In a rare moment of frankness, a German officer issued an order to troops in Huy, which was later discovered, to Berlin's embarrassment: "Last night shots were fired. It has not been proved that the citizens of the town still have weapons in their possession. On the contrary, the impression is unavoidable that German soldiers, under the influence of alcohol, in quite incomprehensible fear of enemy attack, opened fire ... It is most regrettable when officers or NCOs set fire to houses and incite the men to burn and pillage without permission ... The wretched attitude of the men has resulted in one NCO and one soldier being injured by German bullets."

The authors' verdict is unequivocal. Allied propagandists were right. The German army behaved with persistent savagery, above all in Belgium. British cynics, and even many historians, have since been wrong in mocking the tales of German atrocities. Just as the Kaiser's Germany must bear the lion's share of blame for starting the First World War, so also it did more than any other combatant to brutalise it.