The Rape of Belgium By Noah Brummer The first months of World War One were devastating for many reason, but the events that took place in Belgium between August 1914 and September 1914 may have been some of the most horrific. It all began with the Germans disregarding the Treaty of London (1839), at one point calling it a “scrap of paper”. The Germans would go on to test the limits of the neutral Belgium and in the beginning the Germans would encounter literal roadblocks built by the Belgian people. The most harshly impacted towns in Belgium were Liège, Andenne, Leuven, and Dinant, with the first town under siege being Dinant. The German army claimed that they feared the Belgian inhabitants were as “dangerous as the French army”, and that the fear of Belgian guerrilla fighters forced them to go to drastic measures to protect themselves. Those drastic measures included killing 674 civilians, men, women, and children alike in Dinant and burning the town. Throughout the next month the German Army carried out premeditated assaults on many Belgian towns in central and eastern Belgium. In each town they encountered the German Army murdered, raped, and mutilated the Belgian citizens in their homes. In-between August 1914 and September 1914, 6,000 Belgians were murdered, and another 17,700 while being chased from the country or sentenced to death by German courts. In 1914 20% of the Belgian population left the country, a massive 1.5million people. The aftermath of the Rape of Belgium left the country in absolute disarray. What had once been the world’s 6th largest economy had been destroyed and what remained was sent to Germany. A large portion of the Belgian population was forced to work in Germany during the war to help the German economy survive. During the 1920’s many of the stories of the horrific actions in Belgium were dismissed due to the large amount of wartime propaganda produced by opposing countries. English writers were able to tell stories of horror, full of murder, mutilations, and rapes, some being true stories retold from survivors, and some being heavily embellished. Because of the fact that so many false and embellished stories were being released, the credibility of the true stories fell, and were assumed to be all false. In more recent times the records of the Germans assault on Belgium have been studied and determined that many of the stories were in fact true. |
Milne, Nick. “The ‘Rape of Belgium’ Revisited.” World War I Centenary, ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/memoryofwar/the-rape-of-belgium-revisited/.
“The 'German Atrocities' of 1914.” The British Library, The British Library, 20 Jan. 2014, www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/civilian-atrocities-german-1914.