ROBERT FISK: WHEN PROPAGANDA TURNS OUT TO BE FACT

Independent.co.uk Web
19 July 2008

What happens when myths turn out to be true? I’m talking about the
"myth" of the German army’s atrocities in little Belgium in 1914, the
raped nuns and the babies spitted on Prussian bayonets. "Hun barbarism"
was the powerful propaganda tool to send the British Tommies and the
French poilus – literally, "the hairy ones" – off to the killing
fields of the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele and Verdun. But now,
thanks to the analytical, brilliant, horrifying work of Alan Kramer,
a history professor at my own alma mater of Trinity College, Dublin,
it all turns out to be – well, let’s speak frankly – true.

He’s not the first to catalogue Germany’s war crimes in the 1914-18
conflict – Germany’s own academics got their hands on the military and
political archives proving that the massacre of civilians in Belgium
really happened at the start of the war – but Kramer has gone a stage
further; he has traced an undeniable pattern of atrocities not only
in Belgium but in First World War Italy and Russia too. The Nazis, it
seems, were marching in the footsteps of earlier German war criminals.

Maybe it’s hypocritical to dwell on these long-ago war crimes when our
own illegal invasion of Iraq may have culled a million Iraqi lives,
not to mention Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki – re aders can fill in the
extra names – and it’s true that New Zealand troops murdered German
prisoners in the First World War (on 15 September 1916, to be precise).

So did Canadian troops. And Brits. But slaughtering prisoners on the
battlefield is one thing. Shooting down rows of innocent civilians
is quite another. Kramer’s new book has a suitably academic title –
Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World
War – but its contents freeze the blood.

Here, for example, is what happened to unarmed civilian prisoners in
the Les Rivages suburb of Dinant after German troops were attacked
by snipers: "German witnesses to one mass execution … stated that
the order was given by a major whose face was ‘contorted with rage’
… More than half of the 77 killed were women and children: 38
women and girls, and 15 children under 14, of whom seven were babies;
seven of the men were over 70 years old."

A Captain von Loeben describes another nearby massacre. "The people
were arranged in several ranks by the garden wall. Women, children
and older men were excluded … I had some difficulty separating the
women and children.

One woman clung to her husband and wanted to be shot together with
him. I therefore decided to let her go free, together with her
husband. One man had a child of about five in his arms … the child
was taken away from him and sent to the women.

The man was shot with the rest."

In all, 674 citizens of Dinant, including many women and children –
one in 10 of the population of the town – were executed. Another 262
civilians were murdered by the Kaiser’s soldiers in Ardenne where
the burgomaster – a man called Camus – was hacked to death with an axe.

German troops had already torched the historic Belgian city of Louvain,
bayoneting civilians in their homes and burning the great university
library with its wealth of Latin and medieval manuscripts. "Holocaust
of Louvain," the Daily Mail trumpeted on 31 August 1914. For once,
the paper was right.

There’s a chilling photograph of a German shell exploding on the
roof of Reims cathedral, one of the finest medieval treasures
of France. Of course, the Germans said that the Allies were using
it as an observation tower – but they effectively blew the place
to bits. And come to think of it, I recall my Dad, 2nd Lieutenant
Bill Fisk of the King’s Liverpool Regiment – yes, of course, he has
featured in this column before – telling me how, after being bitten
by a rat in the trenches, doctors removed an entire layer of his skin;
and how he lay each night in agony in a makeshift hospital at Reims.

"I was made to sleep on the floor of Reims Cathedral," he told me,
"and every night, I’d look up at the stars and see all these gargoyles
glaring do wn at me." So the Germans had blown the entire roof off
the cathedral.

After the massive Italian defeat at Caporetto – the Italians were
on "our" side in the First World War, so it was perhaps only fair
that the Germans should have them on their side in the Second –
mass deportation of Italian civilians began, along with executions
and deliberate starvation.

The number of Italian deportee and PoW deaths – largely from
maltreatment, but also massacre – reached 24,597. Some were dispatched
to camps whose names – draw in your collective breath, O reader –
were Mauthausen and Theresienstadt.

Indeed, there were Jews in the German army in the First World War –
12,000 of them were killed in action for the Fatherland – but hands
up those readers who know that, even as the Germans were fighting for
their lives in 1916, the authorities undertook a "Jew census" in the
army after provocations from small anti-Semitic parties in Berlin.

On the eastern front, 92,451 Russian prisoners died in German
captivity.

"They are not to be given water at first," a 1914 German 8th Army
order read. "While they are in the vicinity of the battlefield it is
good for them to be in a broken physical condition." The Untermenschen
idea was already there, it seems. At least 9 per cent of Germany’s
158,000 soldiers in Russian camps, it should be added, also died.

Amid such=2 0a charnel house, the Ottoman genocide of one and a half
million Armenians – still outrageously denied by Turkey, although
it taught Hitler how to destroy the Jews of Europe less than three
decades later – provides a terrible historical continuity.

Did those German-Jewish soldiers of the First World War have the
slightest inkling of what was to come? They must have known of the
German army’s cruelty towards civilians, even if they could not then
read the words of the angry, gas-blinded corporal from the Somme who
asked after the armistice: "Did all this happen only so that a gang
of wretched criminals could lay their hands on the Fatherland?"

This young German soldier had been fighting less than a mile from where
my father stood in the trenches of the Somme. Alas, 2nd Lieutenant
Bill Fisk didn’t manage to shoot Corporal Adolf Hitler.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress