German Atrocities: An Official Investigation

by J. H. Morgan

In this matter of holding the civil population responsible with their lives for anything that may prove “inconvenient” (gênant), to quote a German Proclamation, to the German troops, the German commanders seem to have no sense of cause and effect. At Coulommiers, so the Mayor informed me, they threatened to shoot him because the gas supply gave out. In a town which I visited close to the German lines (and the name of which I suppress by request of the civil authorities for fear of a vindictive bombardment), the Mayor, who was under arrest in the guardroom, was threatened with death because a signal-bell rang at the railway station, and was in imminent peril until it was proved that the act was due to the clumsiness of a German soldier; and an exchange of shots between two drunken soldiers, resulting in the death of one of them, was made the ground of an accusation that the inhabitants had fired on the troops, the Mayor’s life being again in peril. Where the life of the civilian is held so cheap, it is not surprising that the German soldier, himself the subject of a fearful discipline, is under a strong temptation to escape punishment for the consequences of his own careless or riotous or drunken behaviour by attributing those consequences to the civil population, for the latter is invariably suspected.

Outrages upon Women—The German Occupation of Bailleul.

When life is held so cheap, it is not surprising that honour and property are not held more dear. Outrages upon the honour of women by German soldiers have been so frequent that it is impossible to escape the conviction that they have been condoned and indeed encouraged by German officers. As regards this matter I have made a most minute study of the German occupation of Bailleul. This place was occupied by a regiment of German Hussars in October for a period of eight days. During the whole of that period the town was delivered over to the excesses of a licentious soldiery and was left in a state of indescribable filth. There were at least thirty cases of outrages on girls and young married women, authenticated by sworn statements of witnesses and generally by medical certificates of injury. It is extremely probable that, owing to the natural reluctance of women to give evidence in cases of this kind, the actual number of outrages largely exceeds this. Indeed, the leading physician of the town, Dr. Bels, puts the number as high as sixty. At least five officers were guilty of such offences, and where the officers set the example the men followed. The circumstances were often of a peculiarly revolting character; daughters were outraged in the presence of their mothers, and mothers in the presence or the hearing of their little children. In one case, the facts of which are proved by evidence which would satisfy any court of law, a young girl of nineteen was violated by one officer while the other held her mother by the throat and pointed a revolver, after which the two officers exchanged their respective rôles.[91] The officers and soldiers usually hunted in couples, either entering the houses under pretence of seeking billets, or forcing the doors by open violence. Frequently the victims were beaten and kicked, and invariably threatened with a loaded revolver if they resisted. The husband or father of the women and girls was usually absent on military service; if one was present he was first ordered away under some pretext; and disobedience of civilians to German orders, however improper, is always punished with instant death. In several cases little children heard the cries and struggles of their mother in the adjoining room to which she had been carried by a brutal exercise of force. No attempt was made to keep discipline, and the officers, when appealed to for protection, simply shrugged their shoulders. Horses were stabled in saloons; shops and private houses were looted (there are nine hundred authenticated cases of pillage). Some civilians were shot and many others carried off into captivity. Of the fate of the latter nothing is known, but the worst may be suspected.

The German troops were often drunk and always insolent. But significantly enough, the bonds of discipline thus relaxed were tightened at will and hardly a single straggler was left behind.

Inquiries in other places, in the villages of Meteren, Oultersteen, and Nieppe, for example, establish the occurrence of similar outrages upon defenceless women, accompanied by every circumstance of disgusting barbarity. No civilian dare attempt to protect his wife or daughter from outrage. To be in possession of weapons of defence is to be condemned to instant execution, and even a village constable found in possession of a revolver (which he was required to carry in virtue of his office) was instantly shot at Westoutre. Roving patrols burnt farm-houses and turned the women and children out into the wintry and sodden fields with capricious cruelty and in pursuance of no intelligible military purpose.

Private Property.

As regards private property, respect for it among the German troops simply does not exist. By the universal testimony of every British officer and soldier whom I have interrogated the progress of German troops is like a plague of locusts over the land. What they cannot carry off they destroy. Furniture is thrown into the street, pictures are riddled with bullets or pierced by sword cuts, municipal registers burnt, the contents of shops scattered over the floor, drawers rifled, live stock slaughtered and the carcases left to rot in the fields. This was the spectacle which frequently confronted our troops on the advance to the Aisne and on their clearance of the German troops out of Northern France. Cases of petty larceny by German soldiers appear to be innumerable; they take whatever seizes their fancy, and leave the towns they evacuate laden like pedlars. Empty ammunition waggons were drawn up in front of private houses and filled with their contents for despatch to Germany.

I have had the reports of the local commissaires of police placed before me, and they show that in smaller villages like those of Caestre and Merris, with a population of about 1,500 souls or less, pillaging to the extent of £4,000 and £6,000 was committed by the German troops. I speak here of robbery which does not affect to be anything else. But it is no uncommon thing to find extortion officially practised by the commanding officers under various more or less flimsy pretexts. One of these consists of holding a town or village up to ransom under pretence that shots have been fired at the German troops. Thus at the village of Merris a sum of £2,000 was exacted as a fine from the Mayor at the point of a revolver under this pretence, this village of 1,159 inhabitants having already been pillaged to the extent of some £6,000 worth of goods. At La Gorgue, another small village, £2,000 was extorted under a threat that if it were not forthcoming the village would be burnt. At Warneton, a small village, a fine of £400 was levied. These fines were, it must be remembered, quite independent of the requisitions of supplies. As regards the latter, one of our Intelligence officers, whose duty it has been to examine the forms of receipt given by German officers and men for such requisitions, informs me that, while the receipts for small sums of 100 francs or less bore a genuine signature, those for large sums were invariably signed “Herr Hauptmann von Koepenick,” the simple peasants upon whom this fraud was practised being quite unaware that the signature has a classical fictitiousness in Germany.

Observations on a Tour of the Marne and the Aisne.

My investigations, in the company of a French Staff Officer, in the towns and villages of our line of march in that part of France which lies north-east of Paris revealed a similar spirit of pillage and wantonness. Coulommiers, a small town, was so thoroughly pillaged that the damage, so I was informed by the Maire, has been assessed at 400,000 francs, a statement which bore out the evidence previously given me by our own men as to the spectacle of wholesale looting which they encountered when they entered that town. At Barcy, an insignificant village of no military importance, I was informed by the Maire that a German officer, accompanied by a soldier, entered the communal archives and deliberately burnt the municipal registers of births and deaths—obviously an exercise of pure spite. At Choisy-au-Bac, a little village pleasantly situated on the banks of the Aisne, which I visited in company with a French Staff Officer, I found that almost every house had been burnt out. This was one of the worst examples of deliberate incendiarism that I have come across. There had been no engagement, and there was not a trace of shell-fire or of bullet-marks upon the walls. Inquiries among the local gendarmerie, and such few of the homeless inhabitants as were left, pointed to the place having been set on fire by German soldiers in a spirit of pure wantonness. The German troops arrived one day in the late afternoon, and an officer, after inquiring of an inhabitant, who told me the story, the name of the village, noted it down, with the remark “Bien, nous le rôtirons ce soir.” At nine o’clock of the same evening they proceeded to “roast” it by breaking the windows of the houses and throwing into the interiors burning “pastilles,” apparently carried for the purpose, which immediately set everything alight. The local gendarme informed us that they also sprayed (arrosé) some of the houses with petrol to make them burn better. The humbler houses shared the fate of the more opulent, and cottage and mansion were involved in a common ruin. It seems quite clear that there was not the slightest pretext for this wanton behaviour, nor did the Germans allege one. They did not accuse the inhabitants of any hostile behaviour; the best proof of this is that they did not shoot any of them, except one who appears to have been shot by accident.