Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914

15. Denials: U.K. and U.S.

CHAPTER 15 Denials: Britain and America QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES The section that follows describes how German war crimes in Belgium came to be regarded in the Englishspeaking world as the invention of British propagandists. From unpromising beginnings – the quixotic wartime pronouncements of Bertrand Russell and G. B. Shaw – the notion that massacres of innocent civilians had not taken place became the prevailing orthodoxy by the 1930s. Two books were largely responsible for this development, along with the revival in 1925 of a controversy over allegations about German corpse conversion factories that had been resolved eight years earlier. These were Arthur Ponsonby’s Falsehood in Wartime (1928) and Harold Lasswell’s Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927). They were hardly more accurate than Russell’s and Shaw’s polemics, but a backlash against the Great War made readers more receptive. The books themselves contributed, in turn, to the new perspective on the war. To characterize the attitude that emerged in the twenties as “disillusionment” is something of a misnomer. An alternative set of illusions was embraced, and these proved, in the end, to be more pernicious than the chivalric and patriotic ideals they superceded. However understandable the revulsion from the appalling losses during the war, “revisionism” helped precipitate a still greater catastrophe less than a generation later. Crossing the Iron Curtain in the years before the breakup of the Soviet Union, one entered a weird looking-glass world where “liberals” defended free markets and private property, as they had not done since the 19th century in the U.S., and “conservatives” were hard-line Stalinists . In Germany it was, unsurprisingly, Rightists during the interwar period who vigorously defended the behavior of the German Army in Belgium. Its critics were men and women of the Left. But across the Channel (and the Rhine as well, naturally), the situation was reversed. It was chiefly writers on the Left who sought to exonerate the German Army and indict their own former leaders for waging an insidious campaign of disinformation. Their opponents were largely, though not en- 604 CHAPTER 15 tirely, conservatives. On the other side of the Atlantic, the situation was similar, if somewhat more complex. The cause of non-intervention attracted individuals across a wider political spectrum. Nonetheless, most of the leading deniers in the U.S., with a couple of notable exceptions, were enthusiastic New Dealers. The admirable objective of socialists during the twenties and thirties was to prevent a second World War. Their strategy was less happy. But even after British pacifists and American non-interventionists had lost their battle to keep their countries neutral, atrocity denial persisted, unbowed and unbloodied. Particularly remarkable is the lack of curiosity, on the part of scholars as well as journalists both before and after World War II, about what actually happened in Belgium in August, 1914. The many volumes providing detailed and credible eyewitness accounts of the events were never consulted. The notebooks and boxes of additional testimony in archives in Brussels, Mechelen, Namur, and Liège were never disturbed. Schöller’s and Wieland’s monographs were not translated into English, and were ignored. Clearly, the notion that public opinion had been manipulated by unscrupulous governments was too appealing to be lightly abandoned. Precisely because of the remarkable success of the campaign to discredit the evidence of German war crimes, and its longevity, I have documented the revisionists’ efforts in some detail. If nothing else, it may be of interest as one more case study of the havoc wreaked on the historical record by well-intentioned ideologues during the twentieth century. BRITAIN In the opening months of the war, the Liberal Government’s two most visible and vocal critics were Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw, already Britain’s best-known philosopher and playwright .¹ Russell was loosely associated with the Union for Democratic Control, the most influential opposition group during the war; Shaw was not. A chief concern of each was to demonstrate British culpability and German innocence in the diplomatic maneuvering preceding the war, but both made numerous comments about events in Belgium. That the Belgians were suffering grievously was acknowledged by each, but it was the fault of “war,” Russell wrote, not Germans or Germany.² Denials: Britain and America 605 For Shaw, too, “Belgium has been destroyed, not by Germany alone, but by the two thunder clouds of the Alliance and the Entente. The fact that the...