The Bryce Report

On 12 May 1915 the British government published the “Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages”, known after its chairman as the Bryce Report. The committee, led by Viscount James Bryce, a historian, lawyer and until 1913 ambassador in Washington, found that during the invasion of Belgium in August 1914 German troops had carried out planned and systematic massacres of the civilian population. The report appeared five days after the sinking of the Lusitania, when public opinion in Britain and the United States was more aroused than ever before, and it went round the world at once.

The committee

The first accounts of killings and burnings in Belgium, including the destruction of Louvain, reached London as early as August 1914. Within a few weeks the Belgian government issued three reports on the subject. On 15 September Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith instructed the Home Secretary and the Attorney General to investigate violations of the laws of war by the German army. Lawyers began taking statements from Belgian refugees, of whom there were then tens of thousands in Britain, and from wounded British soldiers. In December a committee was appointed to assess the material collected. Alongside Bryce it included well-known lawyers, among them Frederick Pollock and Edward Clarke, the historian H.A.L. Fisher and the journalist Harold Cox. The chairman’s name mattered: Bryce was respected in America as few Britons were.

The committee itself did not examine a single witness. It relied on more than 1,200 statements taken down by lawyers, who had been told not to put answers into witnesses’ mouths. The statements were not given on oath, and at the Belgian government’s request the witnesses’ names were left out, to protect their families in the occupied country from reprisals. The committee also used extracts from diaries found on dead German soldiers.

Conclusions

The report ran to several dozen pages, followed by a lengthy appendix of some five hundred statements. The committee named the places where inhabitants had been shot and houses burned: the area around Liège, Aarschot, Andenne, Tamines, Dinant and Louvain. It found that in many parts of Belgium there had been deliberate and systematically organised massacres of the civilian population, that men, women and children had been murdered and women raped, that officers had ordered or tolerated looting and burning, and that the laws of war had been broken, among other ways by using civilians as shields. According to the committee, the crimes did not arise from provocation by the inhabitants but from a policy “carried out scientifically and deliberately”. On Dinant the committee wrote that there was no reason to believe that the population had given any pretext.

It was the appendix, however, that had the strongest effect. Alongside sober accounts it contained descriptions of mutilations, rapes and the killing of children, often known only from hearsay and confirmed by no other source. These were what reached the front pages of newspapers and the pamphlets.

Propaganda

The report became one of the most effective tools of British propaganda. It was distributed by the secret propaganda bureau at Wellington House, headed by Charles Masterman, and its main audience was the Americans. By the end of 1915 the report had been translated into every major European language. In the United States the big dailies reprinted it, with The New York Times in the lead, and Bryce’s name convinced even sceptics. Together with the sinking of the Lusitania, it fixed in American opinion the image of the Germans as barbarians, which became part of the propaganda known as the Rape of Belgium.

There were few critical voices in 1915. Among those who challenged the report was the Irish activist Roger Casement, but his view was dismissed as biased. The Germans rejected the charges and claimed that their soldiers had been defending themselves against partisans, francs-tireurs who supposedly fired on them from hiding.

Dispute over its reliability

After the war the report became a byword for propaganda lies. Many of the sensational stories in the appendix could not be confirmed, and the original statements were not found, which critics took as proof of bad faith. Between the wars the prevailing belief was that the whole thing had been a fabrication. Today’s historians take a more nuanced view. In 2001 John Horne and Alan Kramer showed, on the basis of archives in several countries, that from August to October 1914 German troops did indeed kill some 6,500 civilians in Belgium and northern France, and that the belief in francs-tireurs was largely a collective delusion among the soldiers. The core of the report, the mass executions and the burning of towns, thus proved true, even if many of its most shocking details did not. Some German authors still argue that Belgian civilian resistance was greater than Horne and Kramer accept.