Germans capture Fort Douaumont

On 25 February 1916, the fifth day of the battle of Verdun, soldiers of the Brandenburg 24th Infantry Regiment entered Fort Douaumont, the largest and highest-lying fort in the ring of fortifications around Verdun. The stronghold, which the Germans regarded as one of the strongest in the world, fell without a single shot, because it was defended by only about sixty French soldiers, sheltering from the bombardment in its underground galleries. In Germany the news was received as a great victory, in France as a shock. That same day, however, the French command decided to defend the right bank of the Meuse, and that night General Philippe Pétain took over the defence of Verdun.

A fort without guns

Fort Douaumont was built in the 1880s on a hill near the village of Douaumont, a few kilometres north-east of the town. Before the war it was strengthened several times: it received thick concrete roofs on a cushion of sand, retractable armoured turrets with a 155 mm gun and 75 mm guns, and casemates from which the approaches and the ditch could be swept with fire. But when in 1914 the German 420 mm mortars smashed the forts of Liège and Namur within a few days, the French high command concluded that forts no longer had any value. From August 1915 their guns and ammunition were removed for the field armies. At Douaumont only the guns in the armoured turrets remained. Explosives were stored in the fort in case it had to be blown up.

According to French sources, the garrison consisted of 56–57 older soldiers of the territorial artillery under the command of a non-commissioned officer, Adjudant Chenot, plus a few stray soldiers from other units. The fort came under a separate administration rather than under the commanders of the divisions fighting nearby. According to plan, in the event of an attack it was to be manned by infantry from the nearest units, but in the confusion following the collapse of the French defence on 24 February nobody saw to it. For several days the fort had been shelled by the heaviest German mortars. The garrison took refuge in the lower levels, did not man the observation posts or the casemates covering the ditch, and the only working gun, in the 155 mm turret, fired blindly at distant targets.

A few dozen men and an open ditch

On the afternoon of 25 February the German III Corps was advancing in a snowstorm on the heights north of the fort. The 24th Infantry Regiment of the 6th Division was to take up a position a few hundred metres in front of the fort and prepare the assault only the next day. The regiment quickly reached its objective but came under fire from its own artillery. Some of the men from the companies of Captain Hans Joachim Haupt and Lieutenant of the Reserve Eugen Radtke, looking for cover, went on towards the fort. French machine-gunners in the village of Douaumont, in the gathering dusk, took them for returning Zouaves and ceased fire.

The first into the fort was a pioneer sergeant, Kunze, with his section. The Germans cut through the wire, passed through a damaged grille at the edge of the ditch and climbed down into it, and Kunze squeezed through an embrasure into an empty casemate at the corner of the ditch and entered the fort’s corridors. Soon Radtke followed him with his men, and then Haupt. The Germans took prisoner the gunners at the gun and the surprised soldiers in the underground galleries, including Adjudant Chenot. Not a single shot was fired. The last of the officers to enter the fort was Lieutenant Cordt von Brandis, commander of the 8th Company. By the evening there were 19 German officers and 79 men from five companies in the fort.

A hero from a report

Before Brandis reached the fort, he sent a report that Douaumont was “firmly in our hands”. On its way through successive headquarters it turned into the message that the fort was “firmly in the hands of Lieutenant von Brandis”. On 26 February the German war communiqué announced the capture of the “armoured fort of Douaumont” by the Brandenburg 24th Infantry Regiment. Germany celebrated, and according to many accounts church bells were rung in some places and children were let off school. Brandis and Haupt received the highest Prussian military decoration, the Pour le Mérite, and Brandis became the “hero of Douaumont” written about in the press. Radtke and Kunze received nothing. Only after the war, when veterans of Radtke’s company protested loudly, did the German Reich Archives acknowledge that Radtke had been the first officer in the fort. Historians, among them Alistair Horne and German Werth, later showed that the capture of the fort was a stroke of luck rather than a heroic assault.

Castelnau and Pétain

For the French, the loss of Verdun’s strongest fort without a fight was a humiliation that exposed the consequences of disarming the fortress. One French divisional commander later reckoned that the loss of Douaumont cost the army a hundred thousand men. That same day, however, decisions were taken that shaped the further course of the battle. On the night of 24–25 February Joffre’s chief of staff, General Noël de Castelnau, went to the Meuse with the full powers of the commander-in-chief. On 25 February, overruling the commander of the Group of Armies of the Centre, General Fernand de Langle de Cary, who doubted whether the right bank could be held, he ordered it to be defended at all costs. General Frédéric-Georges Herr, commander of the Fortified Region of Verdun, was to hold the line from Bras through Douaumont to Vaux and Eix.

Pétain, commander of the Second Army, received the order to take over the defence of Verdun on the morning of 25 February at Joffre’s headquarters in Chantilly. In the evening he met Castelnau at Herr’s headquarters in Dugny and took command at about midnight. Immediately afterwards he learned of the loss of the fort. He ordered the remaining forts to be reoccupied and rearmed and prepared for defence if surrounded. During the night of 25–26 February he fell ill with pneumonia, but he directed the defence from his headquarters in Souilly. On 26 February a French counter-attack on Douaumont failed, and Pétain forbade further attempts to retake the fort. The French held the village of Douaumont until 4 March.

The fort remained in German hands for eight months. It served as a shelter, dressing station and depot just behind the German front line, and the Germans called it “old uncle Douaumont”. The French retook it only on 24 October 1916.