Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  The Hindenburg Program could be sustained only on the defiant neglect of basic economic realities. Even Ludendorff appeared to suspect as much in the spring of 1917, when he ordered the further consolidation of German defenses on the western front and a limited strategic withdrawal. Meanwhile, the German economy was thrown into ever greater dislocation in the desperate effort to produce more machines of war than resources would permit. By the end of the war more than 90 percent of the German firms still in business were struggling to manufacture materials of war. “The new Supreme Command represented the triumph not of imagination, but of fantasy,” Gerald Feldman has written. “In his pursuit of an ill-conceived total mobilization for the attainment of irrational goals, Ludendorff undermined the strength of the army, promoted economic instability, created administrative chaos, and set loose an orgy of interest politics.”17 Harsh words, these; but they hardly exaggerate the toll taken by the militarization of the German economy. The toll was borne by other parts of Europe as well, which had fallen under German control and were now themselves geared to the fantasies of the Hindenburg Program.

  Occupied Europe

  As German armies raced through Belgium and into northern France in the summer of 1914, terrifying stories began to circulate about outrages committed by soldiers against civilian populations. The Germans were reported to have engaged in the unprovoked shooting of thousands of men, women, and children, as well as in rape, the systematic pillage and burning of property, and the taking of hostages. The Germans responded that these reports were monstrous fabrications and that any hostile acts against Belgian or French civilians represented legitimate reprisals against so-called francs-tireurs, armed irregular fighters. These “German atrocities” immediately became the theme of a propaganda war that lasted well beyond the end of the fighting in 1918. Recent research has concluded that the bulk of the reports were true, but that the Germans’ behavior was due not to their innate barbarity – as the Allies proclaimed at the time – but, rather, to collective panic, which was driven by the immense pressures that the Schlieffen Plan and its timetables imposed on German soldiers, as well as by the dread of irregular warfare that had been endemic in the German army since the war with France in 1870–1.18 The pertinent point, however, was that the Germans lost the propaganda war during the first campaigns of 1914. The sheer volume of the atrocity reports, the arrogance of the German denials, and episodes that the Germans could not deny – such as the wanton destruction of the university library in Louvain – all turned the barbaric “Hun” into a controlling trope of the war, and it dogged the German effort until the end.

  Had they been inclined to do so, contemporary commentators could have noted that the German armies exercised no monopoly over atrocities against civilians. Comparable reports, subsequently confirmed, circulated of Russian outrages during the brief invasion of East Prussia in 1914, and of atrocities committed by Austrian soldiers against Serb and Ukrainian civilians, by Bulgarians against Serbs, by Russian soldiers against German, Jewish, and assorted other groups during the great retreat eastward in 1915, and, for that matter, by French soldiers against German civilians during the brief French occupation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1914. “Violence against civilians,” writes Alexander Watson, “was a European way of war in August 1914” (and later).19 The dynamics of atrocity tended in any event to confirm a basic truth of this war, that combat was most destructive during its mobile phases and that the stabilization of the front was a benefit to civilians and soldiers alike.

  Occupation thus represented the analog of trench warfare. It reduced the violence of soldiers against civilians, although, like trench warfare, it was an unforeseen dimension of the war, so it required improvisation and adjustment on the part of both soldiers and civilians. International law, as formulated primarily at the second Hague conference in 1907, prescribed a catalog of obligations and limitations, primarily on the occupier, but it provided no means for their enforcement. The most proximate models were to be found in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but these attached to a much shorter and less complex conflict.

  To German forces fell the main role in working out the modalities of occupation that were appropriate to industrial war. Germans occupied extensive parts of western and eastern Europe for much of the war; and the effort required nearly a third of the army’s manpower. Most of Belgium and northern France came under German control in the first weeks of the conflict, while the eastern offensives of 1915 brought Russian Poland and large segments of the Russian Baltic provinces into the German realm. The rapid conquest of Romania in the fall of 1916 added still more territory. The opportunities offered by these acquisitions were vast, as were the political dilemmas they raised – and the burdens they imposed on the native inhabitants of these territories.

  It is difficult to remove this story from the shadow cast by German actions in occupied Europe during the Second World War (which constituted one of the reasons why the controversy over the German atrocities of the First World War was so protracted). Aspects of German rule during the First World War did anticipate the Nazi “population policy” of the next war, the attempt to reengineer society in the occupied lands according to racial principles. During the Great War, however, this motif remained peripheral in the broader scheme of German policy, which was usually more humane, circumspect, and devoted, in the main, to principles other than race.20 Everywhere in Europe the occupation was a military phenomenon, insofar as soldiers were ultimately in charge of all its aspects. These institutional arrangements corresponded to the supreme goal of the whole undertaking, which was to harness the resources of occupied territories to the German war effort. The effort raised perplexing questions about means, however. Both within the German government and without, loud voices called for the annexation and pitiless exploitation of the occupied areas for the immediate purposes of war. Other leaders reasoned that German interests would be better served by more indirect, informal, and lenient forms of rule and by policies that at least gestured to the interests of the indigenous peoples. In this respect, too, the coming of the third Supreme Command to power in 1916 marked a turn in the war. As in Germany itself, the extraction of resources from occupied Europe became more intense, ruthless, and burdensome.

  When the smoke cleared after the initial campaigns in the west, German forces controlled all or parts of ten departments in northern France, and these numbered among the country’s richest in agricultural and industrial resources.21 Owing to its proximity to the front lines, this area was designated a rear staging area (Etappengebiet) and placed under direct military administration, which immediately abolished all French offices above the level of municipal government.22 Then it became pervasive, tenacious, and ravenous – a model for the advocates of pitiless exploitation. The view reigned that, like German soldiers, French civilians were to obey orders, which were designed not only to support the German armies in this sector of the front but also to relieve the material pressures on the German home front. To this end, the occupiers systematically sequestered crops, foodstuffs, lumber, livestock, industrial raw materials, and industrial machinery, much of which found its way back to Germany. Because the administration made little effort to look after the local supply of money, sequestration increasingly meant confiscation without even token compensation. The most painful and controversial side of this policy was the sequestration of human beings, their impressment into forced labor gangs or their involuntary evacuation to Switzerland, unoccupied France, Germany, or rural parts of the occupied territory, where the Germans calculated they would be less politically volatile and easier to feed amid the worsening shortages in the cities. Some 20,000 people – most of them workers – were evacuated in this way in the spring of 1916 from the now dormant industrial centers of Lille, Tourcoing, and Roubaix. German policies disdained French cooperation, let alone collaboration outside the bordellos. While draconian punishments, including deportation to Germany, discouraged organized resistance, northern France was arguably the most is
olated and forlorn place in Europe during this war.23

  The situation was marginally better in Belgium. Here the opportunities for exploitation were lavish.24 Rich reserves of industrial raw materials awaited the conquerors, as did a modern capital plant for extracting them. The principal asset in Belgium was coal, although this land also contained large amounts of iron ore as well as industrial chemicals. The pressures for putting these areas into the service of the German war effort were immediate; and they came from German industrialists who had invested here before the war and now hoped to relieve the pressures on German producers at home.

  Unlike the occupied zone in northern France, most of Belgium escaped direct military rule. In fact, the institutions of occupation here looked much like the institutions of mobilization in Germany, and the explosion of competing jurisdictions fostered the same kind of confusion. Outside the areas adjacent to the fighting front, Belgium was the realm of a governor-general, a soldier who was immediately responsible to the emperor. He ruled, like a super deputy commanding general, over a series of provincial governors, who were also soldiers. A parallel civilian administration, responsible to the federal Office of the Interior in Berlin, also arrived, however, as did civilian representatives of the Raw Materials Section and the war corporations. These were responsible to the War Ministry. The institutional arrangements provided ample room for the powerful German businessmen, such as Hugo Stinnes, who were its direct beneficiaries.25 Industrial barons populated not only the war corporations but also the committees that were set up to advise military and civilian officialdom throughout the occupied areas.

  In part because the civilian component was greater, in part because Belgium figured in visions of postwar Germany, German policy in Belgium was animated by a kind of arrogant benevolence, an attitude that recalled the thinking of colonial officials in some parts of the world. It emphasized a convergence of interests between occupier and occupied, the principle that both would benefit from the efficient, well-ordered arrangements that the Germans sought to impose, such as identity cards for all citizens, an amalgamated police force in Brussels, and German standard time.26 The German plan was to operate as far as possible through indigenous agencies. In hopes of encouraging cooperation, the occupiers left significant offices of the Belgian government in place, particularly at the provincial level and below, while they demanded regular monetary contributions for the support of the occupying forces – a policy that was made possible by the establishment of a Belgian occupation currency at the end of 1914.27 The same approach recommended leaving Belgian businesses in local hands, while they were redeployed in the German war effort. In all events, appearances forbade the outright German seizure of these firms, as did the prospect of reprisals against German assets held in Britain and other enemy lands. Belgian firms thus remained the property of their owners, who were paid – at low, administered prices – for what they were compelled by German managers to produce. The management of some 500 firms thus passed in practice into the hands of German businessmen, who contracted, much as they did in Germany, via the war corporations with the army’s procurement agencies.

  Whatever the institutional formalities or initial hopes for cooperation, German exploitation soon turned merciless, and it resulted in the paralyzing dislocation of economic life in Belgium. The concentration of Belgian resources in the war industries came at the expense of “non-essential” sectors, notably agriculture and food processing. Local industry suffered, too. The capital plant fell victim to disrepair, as growing quantities of raw materials – particularly coal – were sent directly to Germany for use. The arrival of Ludendorff in power then removed every appearance of moderation. The subjugation of economic life in the occupied areas now became ruthless in the service of policies fairly described as plunder. German businesses bought up Belgian utilities, port facilities, and industrial property on extortionate terms. Raw materials departed for Germany with no heed to the local consequences. Factories were worked to exhaustion, until they were dismantled and their metal skeletons transported to Germany for processing as scrap. Few businesses could survive these depredations. Of the 260,000 Belgian firms in operation on the eve of the war, 3,013 survived until the end. The collapse of employment attended this ordeal, as did the prospect of famine. As it did in occupied France, large-scale food relief from the United States helped avert the one catastrophe, while the Germans sought to capitalize on the other, figuring that Belgium had now become a “pool of manpower.”28 During the first two years of the war efforts to entice or prod Belgian workers to factories in Germany had produced little success. Ludendorff, who was indifferent to appearances as well as international protest, moved in the fall of 1916 to a program of forced deportations to Germany. Before the war’s end more than 60,000 Belgians had in this way joined the cast of the Hindenburg Program.

  These policies won the German occupiers few friends. The occupation placed Belgians of all descriptions (particularly public officials) in an excruciating situation. They had to weigh the price of defying the Germans, which entailed heavy fines, imprisonment, or deportation to Germany, against the collective benefits of limited compliance. Cardinal Mercier, the Belgian primate, captured the tensions in his pastoral letter of 1915, entitled “Patriotism and endurance.” The Germans, he announced, enjoyed “no lawful authority” and they commanded “neither respect nor attachment nor obedience.” Their presence was a fact of life to be endured, however. “Let us observe the rules they have laid upon us so long as those rules do not violate our personal liberty, nor our consciences as Christians, nor our duty to our country.”29 The occupation authorities understood these remarks as a sign of Belgian ingratitude. Thanks largely to their heavy-handed efforts to suppress this pastoral letter, Mercier himself became the symbol of national resistance, as the burdens of occupation became increasingly difficult to square with personal liberty, Christian conscience, or patriotic duty. In the face of massive efforts to silence it, a clandestine network of newspapers championed passive resistance, which found its most dramatic expression early in 1918 when the Belgian Supreme Court initiated a strike that shut down the entire court system for the remainder of the war.30 The only indigenous constituency in which the Germans enjoyed any sympathy was a group of activists among the Flemish minority. Ethnic affinities between Flemish speakers and Germans provided the ideological pretext for a German campaign that included administrative division of the country along linguistic lines in 1917, the patronage of several groups that favored the independence or autonomy of Flanders, imposing the use of the Flemish language in schools and local administration in this part of the country, and an attempt to establish a university with a Flemish-speaking faculty in the city of Ghent. While the policy prefigured the völkisch principles of the next war, it disappointed the expectations of its German authors, for by now most Flemish speakers so loathed the occupiers that these blandishments provided little temptation to collaboration beyond a small circle of so-called “activists.”31

  Ethnic factors figured larger in the German empire of occupation in eastern Europe. Here the focus and burdens of rule were different. The area was larger, the military situation more fluid, flows of refugees a more perplexing problem, populations more ethnically diverse, and economies less industrialized. In these circumstances, the occupiers were challenged to establish a degree of institutional order, without which effective economic exploitation would not have been feasible. In these circumstances, too, the colonial analogies seemed more apt, for the occupiers sought to promote economic development as a foundation for more thoroughgoing exploitation.

  The most striking case in point was the land commonly known as Ober-Ost, a large, ethnically complex area that comprised most of the Russian Baltic provinces and was ruled from 1915 to 1918 directly by the command of the German eastern armies.32 Here the object was to bring culture to parts of Europe that the Germans regarded as primitive. To this end, the occupiers set out to encapsulate the territory, mapping its terrain,
surveying its resources, categorizing and registering its inhabitants and their property. The occupiers sought as well to promote communication and transportation with new roads, railways, canals, telegraph lines, a postal service, and a new currency. By promoting the ethnic cultures of the region the Germans hoped to undermine the bases of Russian rule. At the same time, systematically exposing these peoples to German culture was to convey a measure of civilization, principally in the form of German bureaucratic institutions and practices, and German discipline. For each ethnic group the Germans planned a school system, based on its own language, although German would be a compulsory subject – the better to introduce German cultural achievements, folk ways, and habits of mind. In the eyes of many in the army’s leadership (as well as rabbis among the army’s chaplains), linguistic affinities between German and Yiddish suggested, though, that the Germans might find allies among the region’s Jews in pursuing the project.

  The fact that Ludendorff was the inspiring force in this extravagant undertaking suggested the limits of its benevolence. It was designed in the first instance to facilitate the brutal contributions, requisitions of livestock and foodstuffs, and forced labor that were the hallmarks of the German occupation here.33 The general’s ultimate vision was to create a military state, whose native populations could be evacuated to make room for German settlers, principally veterans of the war. Nor was Ludendorff alone in his vision of large-scale population movements in the service of what would today be called “ethnic cleansing.”34 With the support of leading civilian officials, including the chancellor, the army also explored plans to establish a long border strip in northwest Poland, which was to be purged of its indigenous inhabitants and resettled with Germans.35 The function of this Grenzstreifen was to provide a sanitized ethnic barrier between Germany and the Slavic peoples to the east. In this respect at least, German thinking did anticipate ideas that guided the occupation of eastern Europe during the next war.36