The Rape of Belgium by Zuckerman Larry

Author:Zuckerman, Larry [Zuckerman, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: NYU Press academic
Published: 2004-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

The chancellor had said more than he perhaps knew. To invoke the Somme while waving away Belgium’s “difficulties” was to endorse the policy of thrusting German costs, with interest, onto a captive population because what small nations suffered did not matter. However genuine Bethmann’s sorrow, he had followed the same reasoning by which he had called a treaty a scrap of paper and expressed the same undertone of contempt.

This attitude imbued the two most important occupation policies of 1916, the deportations and Flamenpolitik. To steal workers’ livelihoods at gunpoint and force them to betray their country showed disdain for law, the Belgians, and Belgium. To claim that they, a people renowned for thrift and hard work, had brought the measure on themselves was to demean them further. Likewise, Flamenpolitik told the Belgians that they did not deserve to be called a nation, that Walloons had no right to their ethnicity, language, or customs, and that the law would henceforth discriminate against them. As Whitlock had said in January 1915 when he tried to summarize the occupation’s character, the contempt and “the multitude of humiliations that are inflicted” were the worst aspects of German rule.2

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