Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914

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Rehearsals by Jeff Lipkes

This is a fascinating book; the author describes his project as a kind of revision of revisionism. The revision in this book comes hard and fast.

The focus of this book is on German war crimes in Belgium. Lipkes details the scope of the actual war crimes. While the truly lurid accusations of chopping of children's hands never happened, the more mundane atrocities of rapes and shooting of civilians are described in detail. Lipkes leaves no question about the horror and reality of these crimes. One detail he describes that I had never heard of involved the use of Belgian civilians as human shields for German assaults on Belgium positions.

I was frankly amazed by the description of German indiscipline. The description of Germans in Belgium sounds a lot like the Russian invasion of Germany in World War II with the rapes, looting and indiscriminate shooting of the civilian population. I assume that we have to keep in mind the fact that these descriptions are filtered through the testimony of Belgian civilians, but it seems clear that the massacre of civilians, rapes, and looting are well attested.

We might discount these German atrocities as insignificant in light of World War II, but as Lipkes points out the 6,000 killed in August of 1914 would be proportionately equal to the murder of 230,000 Americans today.

Lipkes effectively destroys the German argument that Germans were provoked by Belgian Franc Tireur (sharp shooters). The documentary evidence did not show that there were any franc tireurs captured or documented by Germans prior to retaliatory shootings of civilians. Rather it seems that German soldiers were more likely to shoot off their own guns in order to provide an excuse for looting. This is a fascinating revelation. I had been taught in high school that the German army had been provoked by Franc Tireurs. Lipkes discusses the revisionism during the 1920s that tended to exonerate Germans.

Another surprising bit of information from Lipkes is that German brutality was substantially motivated by anti-Catholicism. Protestant Germany had a long history of anti-Catholicism. There is substantial evidence of German troops specifically targeting Catholic priests for torture and execution. German soldiers were told that Belgians were the puppets of the priests and therefore that any anti-German activities were caused by Catholic priests. Lipkes offers the following graphic example of the treatment of Father Dergent:

“En route, the priest was repeatedly struck on the head by soldiers. But instead of being shoved inside, like the driver, Father Dergent was placed against an outer wall. There were more blows to the head. The pastor asked if he might turn and face the wall, and attempted to do so. The Germans stopped him, then changed their minds, pushed his face into the wall and ordered him to hold his hands up. He was then compelled to stand on tiptoe. When he attempted to lower his arms or rock back onto his heels, he was struck by the Germans. They alternately punched him on the head and banged their rifle-butts on his toes, yelling “higher, higher.”99 At various times over the next two hours, imprisoned civilians who were permitted to go outside to relieve themselves caught glimpses of the priest. They returned horrified. Not content with the rather simple torture they'd devised, the soldiers decided to strip him, and then urinate and defecate on him. He was soon standing, dripping, in a pile of excrement. One woman, permitted to bring a child outside, saw two soldiers urinating on him at the same time, the urine running onto the crumpled soutane at his feet. A third soldier spotted the woman and ordered her back into the church.100 Eventually the Germans tired of this game. Four soldiers marched him toward the Demer. He was placed in front of the Van Thielen house and shot, and then thrown into the river. His body floated back to Gelrode, where, badly decomposed, it was spotted and pulled out. Father Dergent was given a church burial.101”

It appears that German soldiers viewed the war as having the aspect of a religious war:

“The priests among the group of twenty were singled out for abuse. Amid the cries of “dirty pig” and other insults, the Dean heard soldiers shout out “Religionskrieg”– religious war – at least thirty times.”

There is the following interesting insight that deserves some investigation:

“His first day in Leuven, the Dutch professor dined with a well-known priest, Father van Ussel. Joining them was a German Catholic, a sergeant-major who'd been wanting for some time to confide in a priest. He was the only Catholic in his company, he told the men. As a rule, Protestant units were intentionally sent to Catholic Belgium, while Catholic troops, he claimed, were dispatched to Poland to fight the Eastern Orthodox Russians.”

I began this book thinking that it would provide some insight into the Nazi tactic of hostage-taking, making innocent members of a community suffer in order to deter the actions of other members of the community. This book offers a lot of insights into that issue, but it seems that it also offers an insight into the continuity of German anti-Catholicism that continued well into the Third Reich. (Jorn Leonhard's Pandora's Box also notes the anti-Catholicism of German war crimes in Belgium.)

Another element of revisionism is Lipkes observation that modernity and materialism had undermined traditional Christian ethics that might otherwise have restrained German soldiers. The period prior to World War One saw Germans embracing paganism and Social Darwinism. Lipkes writes:

“The religion the Saxons practiced before being forcibly converted by Charlemagne was a benign pantheism that bore much resemblance to liberal Protestantism, except for the occasional sacrifice of an unlucky girl or boy.”

And:

“The complaints of European intellectuals about German materialism and paganism no doubt strike the twenty-first century reader as incredibly quaint. But perhaps they should not be dismissed out of hand. Christianity, after its revival in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, constrained nations as it did individuals. It taught charity and empathy. That the contempt of German officers and soldiers for religion was a proximate cause of the August massacres is not an entirely farfetched proposition. The deaths of Belgian civilians and the desecration of their churches may have been linked.91”

This book is richly detailed. The details get tedious but the constant repetition of crimes on the individual level is more effective in communicating the reality of the horror experienced by Belgians in 1914 than abstract generalities. Lipkes' writing is insightful and at times lyrical.