Our Journal: First World War Studies

This article examines the occupied war culture of the Nord in 1914–18, focusing on various forms of behaviour met with opprobrium and disdain by many among the occupied population, which flood archival documents. An argument is put forward for a new conceptual category to understand such actions and the wider culture – what is termed ‘mauvaise conduite’ or misconduct, in some senses a forerunner to the notion of collaboration. This concept covers actions which comprised both illegal and legal misconduct – behaviours that were forbidden by French law, and those which were permitted but frowned upon by fellow inhabitants. This conflation of different forms of misconduct – illegal and legal, sexual and non-sexual, friendly and political – was central to the culture of the occupied population, who occasionally expressed outrage at certain actions via physical and verbal attacks on suspect individuals. In doing so, they upheld a moral-patriotic framework based on the notion of respectability. Breaches of this framework were also punished by the French authorities after the war, but only on a small scale, and mauvaise conduite was eventually replaced in the memory of the occupation by the other aspect of the occupied war culture: resistance.

Key Words: occupation, occupied, France, Nord, north, northern, collaboration, culture, war, respectability, complicity, mauvaise conduite , misconduct, moral, patriotic, behaviour

Sursum Corda studies the underground press in occupied Belgium during the First World War. No other European occupied territory, in 1914–1918, produced such an intensive underground discourse. The article links this exceptional proliferation to the circumstances of Belgium’s entry into the war, viz. the violation of neutrality and the civilian massacres of 1914. These issues, which galvanized a sense of national identity, were stressed by the underground press to deny legitimacy to the German occupation regime. This underground press was sustained by ad hoc networks of people from the urban middle classes, most of them Catholic. The German occupation regime, in its quest for legitimacy, spent considerable effort dismantling these networks. Underground press activity, at its most intense in 1915, sank to a very low pitch in 1917–1918. This was not only due to hardened repression and material difficulties but also due to a sense, among the occupied population, of the diminished (though never completely expired) relevance of the message of the underground press.

Key Words: First World War, Belgium, Germany, occupation, press, censorship, resistance

The deportation and forced labour of Belgian and northern French civilians in the fall and winter of 1916/1917 is one of the darkest chapters of the history of the German occupation regime behind the Western Front. The forced conscription of civilian labourers was part and parcel of the radicalization of labour policies in the occupied Eastern and Western territories – albeit a radicalization which was subsequently rescinded. Only the exceptional circumstances of war explain this shift from a labour policy centred on voluntary enrolment to ever-more coercive practices. The forced mobilization of civilian labour in the occupied territories, but also its failure, can be interpreted in the context of the First World War’s ‘totalizing’ tendencies.

Key Words: First World War, forced labour, deportation, occupation, total war, Belgium, northern France

Forced labour was not a phenomenon limited to the Second World War. Already in the First World War, German labour policy in occupied Poland and Lithuania was increasingly marked by coercion. It is little known in scholarship that the militarily administered territory of the Baltic (Ober Ost), especially, had developed into a laboratory for forced labour and total war. This article examines the conditions, forms and consequences of forced labour and recruitment in occupied Poland and Lithuania between 1914 and 1918. It will contribute towards explaining the extent to which the German labour policy of 1914–1918 served as a blueprint for the Nazi forced labour system during the Second World War.

Key Words: First World War, forced labour, occupation, total war, Poland, Lithuania, Eastern Europe

The German occupation of Russia’s Polish territories from 1915 to 1918 remains one of the least-explored chapters in the history of the Great War. This article examines the policies pursued by the occupation authorities in wartime Poland with a particular focus on the Polish university opened by the Germans in 1915. An analysis of the Germans’ ambitions for the university, as well as how the occupiers and the university’s students and faculty interacted during the occupation, reveals a great deal about the sources and nature of the ambitious state-building plan that developed under the German Governor-General, Hans Hartwig von Beseler, during the war. In turn, this provides new perspectives on the relationship between occupier and occupied in the Great War, German-Polish relations, the history of sovereignty and nationalism, and the continuities of German history in the era of total war. This article draws on both Polish and German published and archival sources.

Key Words: Germany, Poland, occupations, education, sovereignty, Beseler

This article explores the multiple fashions in which food and the pursuit of food structured the policy and experience of occupation in Romania during the First World War. It compares the occupation regime to systems of grain acquisition before the war and during the period of Romanian neutrality to emphasize the depth of state intervention in the economy during occupation. It also emphasizes the impact of this regime on the behaviour of German and Habsburg soldiers and the costs for Romanian civilians.

Key Words: World War I, Romania, occupation, food, grain, rationing

This essay first explores European assumptions regarding occupation and war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These assumptions found their way into international law, but are best understood as a series of international norms. The article then goes on to examine how these norms changed over the course of the war, paying attention to the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia from 1916 to 1918. The European approach to war within Europe attempted to contain the expansion of conflict and created a strict divide between civilian and military realms. Occupiers were to maintain the sovereignty of the departed government until the conclusion of a peace treaty, while the occupied population owed obedience to the occupier. Austria-Hungary’s war against Serbia and subsequent occupation two years later placed heavy pressure on these pre-war norms. In some cases, such as the use of military law in occupied Serbia, Austria-Hungary departed entirely from these norms. As the war progressed, however, a growing realization that such norms of contained conflict also buttressed Austria-Hungary’s place in the international system led Austria-Hungary to restrain its occupation of Serbia. While Austria-Hungary attempted to resituate itself and its occupation of Serbia back within these norms from mid-1917 forward, this attempt went largely unrecognized. Broadly seen, such international norms fell under severe pressure in Eastern Europe with the implosion of imperial sovereignties in this region, most notably that of Tsarist Russia.

Key Words: Austria-Hungary, Serbia, occupation, norms, law

The Brest-Litovsk Peace Agreement was supposed to be a grand solution. Germany and Austria-Hungary, under increasing domestic pressure, wanted to create facts on at least one front and demonstrate to the world at large their willingness to accept peace. In reality, the German Supreme Army Command’s main goal was to bring large parts of Eastern Europe under German control and permanently weaken revolution-torn Russia. Since late 1917, Ukraine appeared to be the key to controlling the entire region: it was considered the ‘breadbasket’ of the former Russian Empire, it possessed heavy industry in the East and it offered access to the Black Sea. But the Brest Treaty proved to be brittle and the contracting states showed themselves to be either politically unstable (Ukraine) or unreliable (Bolshevik Russia). Additionally, Ukraine was not even remotely capable of fulfilling its economic pledges. Furthermore, the ‘dictated peace’ proved to the entente that there could be no negotiated peace with Germany and that fighting would have to continue until the capitulation of the Central Powers.

Key Words: Eastern Europe, Austria-Hungary, Germany, First World War, Central Powers, military history, German way of war