Capitulation of Antwerp

On 10 October 1914 Antwerp, Belgium’s largest port and its national redoubt, formally capitulated. At noon the agreement that the city’s representatives had signed at Kontich the previous day came into force. The governor of the fortress, General Victor Deguise, surrendered to the Germans in one of the forts on the left bank of the Scheldt. The fortress, regarded as one of the strongest in Europe, had held out for less than two weeks.

A capitulation concluded by civilians

The act signed on the evening of 9 October at Kontich by Burgomaster Jan De Vos and his companions covered the surrender of the fortress, including the forts that were still holding out. The Germans, however, wanted a capitulation signed by the military command. On the morning of 10 October an officer sent by Deguise, according to Belgian sources General Werbrouck, came to the Germans to discuss terms. It turned out that the agreement concluded by the civil authorities was already in force and only remained to be confirmed.

During the day further forts surrendered, among them Liezele, Bornem and Haasdonk. Some garrisons had managed to destroy their guns and ammunition beforehand so that they would not fall into German hands. Other soldiers, as ordered, dispersed, trying to rejoin the field army or to get across the nearby Dutch border.

The general at Fort Sainte-Marie

Deguise had already left the city and moved his headquarters to the small Fort Sainte-Marie on the Scheldt, on the left bank of the river. He hoped to be able to put up further resistance there. When the Germans reached the fort on 10 October, they found the governor with a handful of men. According to Belgian sources he was accompanied by only four soldiers, two of them officers. Deguise was taken prisoner and spent the rest of the war in German camps for officers, first in Heidelberg and then in Gütersloh.

That same day the conquerors celebrated their victory. General Hans von Beseler and the new governor of Antwerp, Admiral Ludwig von Schröder, took the salute at a parade of the besieging troops. There were hardly any onlookers in the streets. Most of the inhabitants had fled the city in the preceding days.

Prisoners and internees

The numbers of soldiers who failed to get away are given differently. According to some sources, about 30,000 Belgians, mainly from the fortress garrison, were taken prisoner by the Germans. Some 30,000–40,000 soldiers crossed the border into the Netherlands. The neutral state, in accordance with the Hague Convention, disarmed them and interned them until the end of the war. The Belgians were placed in camps inland, away from the border, among them Zeist, Amersfoort and Oldebroek.

The British Naval Division suffered heavily. About 1,500 sailors of the 1st Brigade, whom the order to withdraw did not reach in time, crossed into the Netherlands. They were interned in a camp at Groningen, where many of them spent the rest of the war. Nearly a thousand others, mostly marines, whose train the Germans stopped on its way west, were taken prisoner.

A city of refugees

The fall of Antwerp set off a huge wave of refugees. Already during the days of bombardment hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of the city and its surroundings fled on foot, in carts, by train and by boat to the Netherlands, to the west of the country and across the Channel to Britain. Within a few days the neutral Netherlands took in hundreds of thousands of people, by some estimates nearly a million. Many of Antwerp’s inhabitants returned home in the following weeks, once the fighting had stopped. In May 1915 there were still about 105,000 Belgian refugees in the Netherlands, and the last of them returned home only at the beginning of 1919.

Significance

For Belgium the loss of Antwerp meant the end of the strategy on which the defence of the country had been based. The kingdom’s largest port and last fortress passed into German hands, and almost the whole of Belgium came under occupation. The Germans eliminated the threat to the rear of their armies, and Beseler’s corps could move west, towards the coast.

They did not, however, achieve their main aim. The field army of King Albert I, whose destruction was to have crowned the siege, slipped out of the fortress and retreated along the coast, covered by French naval fusiliers and the British 7th Division. A few days later it took up position on the river Yser, where, together with the French, it halted the German march towards the Channel ports. Antwerp remained under German occupation until November 1918.