Author: John Horne
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300107913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 632
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Book Description
Is it true that the German army, invading Belgium and France in August 1914, perpetrated brutal atrocities? Or are accounts of the deaths of thousands of unarmed civilians mere fabrications constructed by fanatically anti-German Allied propagandists? Based on research in the archives of Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, this pathbreaking book uncovers the truth of the events of autumn 1914 and explains how the politics of propaganda and memory have shaped radically different versions of that truth. John Horne and Alan Kramer mine military reports, official and private records, witness evidence, and war diaries to document the crimes that scholars have long denied: a campaign of brutality that led to the deaths of some 6500 Belgian and French civilians. Contemporary German accounts insisted that the civilians were guerrillas, executed for illegal resistance. In reality this claim originated in a vast collective delusion on the part of German soldiers. The authors establish how this myth originated and operated, and how opposed Allied and German views of events were used in the propaganda war. They trace the memory and forgetting of the atrocities on both sides up to and beyond World War II. Meticulously researched and convincingly argued, this book reopens a painful chapter in European history while contributing to broader debates about myth, propaganda, memory, war crimes, and the nature of the First World War.
Author: John N. Horne
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300089752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Author: Joseph Bédier
Publisher: Librairie A. Colin
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Author: Jeff Lipkes
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9058675963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 817
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Book Description
"People screamed, cried, and groaned. Above the tumult I could distinguish the voices of small children. All this time the soldiers were singing.... Sometime after the first salvo, there was another round of fire and, once again, I was not hit. After this I heard fewer cries, save from time to time a small child calling its mother."?Félix Bourdon, survivor of a mass execution in Dinant, BelgiumIn August 1914, without any legitimate pretext, German soldiers killed nearly 6,000 Belgian noncombatants, including women and children, and burned some 25,000 homes and other buildings. Rehearsals is the first book to provide a detailed narrative history of the German invasion of Belgium as it affected civilians. Based on extensive eyewitness testimony, the book chronicles events in and around the towns of Liége, Aarschot, Andenne, Tamines, Dinant, and Leuven, where the worst of the German depredations occurred. Accounts of the killing, looting, and arson have long been dismissed as "atrocity propaganda," particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. Rehearsals examines the campaign by revisionists that led to voluminous and compelling testimony about German war crimes being discredited.Recently, the case has been made that the violence that came to a peak between August 19 and August 26, 1914, was the result of a spontaneous outbreak of German paranoia about civilian sharpshooters. In Rehearsals, Jeff Lipkes offers compelling evidence that the executions were in fact part of a deliberate campaign of terrorism ordered by military authorities. In his shocking account of events that have been largely overlooked by historians of World War I, Lipkes commemorates the heroism as well as the suffering of the Belgian victims of German aggression.
Author: Larry Zuckerman
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814797044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476
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Book Description
The author presents a compelling and untold story of Germany's occupation of Belgium after WW1. It's a great, trade history book from a wonderful storyteller.
Author: James Morgan Read
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
This book is a heavily documented study of the psychology of rumor and propaganda during World War I, with coverage of the German, Belgian, French, British and American roles.
Author: William Le Queux
Publisher: Litres
ISBN: 5040583605
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Alan Kramer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780191580116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international community reacted in horror - 'Holocaust at Louvain' proclaimed the Daily Mail - and the behaviour of the Germans at Louvain came to be seen as the beginning of a different style of war, without the rules that had governed military conflict up to that point - a more total war, in which enemy civilians and their entire culture were now 'legitimate' targets. Yet the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a wider wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept Europe in the era of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and eye-witness accounts from across Europe at this time, award-winning historian Alan Kramer paints a picture of an entire continent plunging into a chilling new world of mass mobilization, total warfare, and the celebration of nationalist or ethnic violence - often directed expressly at the enemy's civilian population.
Author: Larry Zuckerman
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814797393
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
In August 1914, the German Army invaded the neutral nation of Belgium, violating a treaty that the German chancellor dismissed as a "scrap of paper." The invaders terrorized the Belgians, shooting thousands of civilians and looting and burning scores of towns, including Louvain, which housed the country's preeminent university. The Rape of Belgium recalls the bloodshed and destruction of the 1914 invasion, and the outrage it inspired abroad. Yet Larry Zuckerman does not stop there, and takes us on a harrowing journey over the next fifty months, vividly documenting Germany's occupation of Belgium. The occupiers plundered the country, looting its rich supply of natural resources; deporting Belgians en masse to Germany and northern France as forced laborers; and jailing thousands on contrived charges, including the failure to inform on family or neighbors. Despite the duration of the siege and the destruction left in its wake, in considering Belgium, neither the Allies nor the history books focused on the occupation, and instead cast their attention almost wholly on the invasion. Now, The Rape of Belgium draws on a little-known story to remind us of the horrors of war. Further, Zuckerman shows why the Allies refrained from punishing the Germans for the occupation and controversially suggests that had the victors followed through, Europe's reaction to the rise of Nazi Germany might have taken a very different course.
Author: Raffael Scheck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521857994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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