“A Belgium of Our Own”: The Sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914

The Geneva Convention of 1864 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 defined international standards for the just conduct of war and the proper treatment of civilians. From the first days of fighting in 1914, the belligerent powers accused one another of ignoring them.¹ Press campaigns against “enemy atrocities” were designed to stir patriotic emotion; governments employed commissions and experts to document the enemy’s misdeeds.² Their findings justified war crimes charges presented at Versailles in 1919. The political motivation behind such claims and the lurid terms in which they were often couched led skeptics at the time and in retrospect to question their foundation.³ Indeed, some of the stories assumed the fantastic proportions of myth, but many documented actual abuses.⁴

The pattern began with the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August 1914, followed by the destruction of monuments and cities in Belgium and France, inspiring outrage across Europe. The Germans in return justified their conduct as a response to civilian aggression.⁵ On the Eastern and Southeastern fronts, the Germans and Austrians faced an opponent with a reputation for what Europeans deemed uncivilized behavior, the anti-Jewish pogroms often cited as prime example. ⁶ By mid-August 1914, the Germans were already condemning as “Russian atrocities” (Russische Greueltaten) the murder and arson perpetrated by Cossack troops in East Prussia.⁷ In early October, a group of distinguished German scientists and scholars published an “Appeal to the Civilized World,” denying their nation had disregarded the laws of war, while protesting the “blood of women and children slaughtered by the Russian hordes” in the east.⁸

One incident at the very start of the war gave Russians the opportunity to position themselves as the moral equivalent of the suffering Belgians and offset their image as the eastern analogue to Germanic barbarity. This incident involved the modest textile town of Kalisz, located on the Prosna River, at the outermost limit of the Kingdom of Poland, not far from the Prussian border. Like all Polish towns and cities, Kalisz contained a mix of cultures. Half of the almost 25,000 residents were Roman Catholic, a third Jewish. These proportions had remained stable for 50 years, despite continuous expansion culminating in a spurt of prosperity after the opening in 1902 of a railway connecting Russia and Prussia through Kalisz and the industrial powerhouse of Łódź.⁹ In 1897, three-quarters of city residents considered Polish their native tongue (reflecting the degree of Jewish cultural adaptation). About 10 percent were either Russian-speaking Eastern Orthodox or German-speaking Protestants and Catholics. Manufacture was dominated by Poles, commerce by Jews. The wealthiest residents were mostly Polish, the military and bureaucracy mostly Russian.¹⁰

The German sack of Kalisz during the first two weeks of August 1914 became a cause célèbre in the Russian press. The attack was a textbook case of wartime atrocity in two senses. First, in terms of what occurred, German behavior anticipated the excesses soon to follow in Belgium. Second, in terms of how it was represented, the accounts of all interested parties—Russians, Germans, and Poles—used the evidence to convey a political message, shaping the Kalisz story with an eye to public opinion, both at home and abroad. Despite their different perspectives, the versions offered by the victims, both Russians and Poles, share two striking features: on the one hand, the inability of those who experienced the events to determine how exactly the violence began; on the other, the absence, under circumstances in which opportunities for mutual hatred abounded, of the ethnic stereotypes that otherwise pervaded wartime opinion. This omission is all the more noteworthy, as anti-Jewish feeling was hardly confined to the Slavic Eastern front; nor was it necessarily blunted by horror at German aggression. Take, for example, the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916). In a widely read tract, available also in Russian, he bemoaned the damage inflicted on his country by the once-noble German nation, reduced to the level of medieval barbarism, he explained, by the baleful...