Germans destroy Leuven

On the night of 25–26 August 1914 German soldiers began burning and looting Leuven (French: Louvain), a Belgian university city lying some fifteen kilometres east of Brussels. Over the following days they killed inhabitants, plundered houses and drove out the population. The library of the Catholic University of Leuven, one of the most valuable collections of books in Europe, was burned. The British chronology of the war places the destruction of the city under 26 August, although the fires and killings had begun the previous evening and went on for several more days.

A city under occupation

The Belgian army left Leuven on 18 August, during the retreat to Antwerp. The next day German troops entered the city. The inhabitants offered no resistance. For several days Leuven housed the headquarters of the German 1st Army, and an estimated 15,000 soldiers were stationed in the city. The Germans took hostages from among the city authorities, judges and university professors. They also ordered the inhabitants to leave their doors open and their windows lit at night.

By then an atmosphere of fear already reigned behind the front. German soldiers, many of them freshly mobilised reservists, believed that in Belgium they were being shot at from hiding by civilian guerrillas, the so-called francs-tireurs. In the preceding days this obsession had led to mass executions of civilians at Andenne, Aarschot, Tamines and Dinant.

The night of 25–26 August

On 25 August the Belgian army made a sortie from Antwerp towards Mechelen, which set off the fighting at Mechelen and confusion in the German rear. In the evening German units began to stream into Leuven, and shots rang out in the darkness. Historians now believe that German soldiers, frightened by a false alarm of an enemy attack, simply fired on their own troops. The Germans, however, concluded that they had been attacked by the inhabitants of the city.

That night discipline in the German units collapsed. Soldiers shot and bayoneted civilians, set fire to houses and dragged inhabitants into the streets. At about 11.30 p.m. they burst into the former 14th-century Cloth Hall, which housed the university library, and set it alight. Within a few hours the building and its collections had been reduced to ashes, and the fire smouldered on for many days. The flames also consumed the roof of the Gothic collegiate church of St Peter.

The killings and burnings went on for another twenty-four hours. Then the Germans drove most of Leuven’s roughly 42,000 inhabitants out of the city, which was systematically plundered for several days. Soldiers carried money, silver and wine out of the houses, and those who resisted or did not understand orders were killed. Some 1,500 people, including women and children, were taken in cattle wagons to Germany, to a camp at Munster, where some of them were held until January 1915.

The toll

According to the findings of historians, 248 civilians were killed in Leuven. About 1,100 buildings were burned, which by various calculations was between one sixth and more than one fifth of the city’s buildings. The Gothic town hall survived because it housed a German headquarters.

The greatest cultural loss was the burning of the library. Figures for its collections vary from source to source. The most commonly cited figure is about 230,000 volumes, although some estimates reach 300,000. Several hundred medieval manuscripts and several hundred incunabula, the earliest books printed before 1501, were also destroyed. The collections had been built up since the 17th century and could not be replaced.

German explanations

The German authorities presented the destruction of the city as punishment for a treacherous attack by the inhabitants on the soldiers. The Prussian War Ministry collected statements from officers and soldiers who claimed they had been fired on from windows and roofs. However, no evidence was found of organised resistance by the population, and the inhabitants had been obliged to hand in their private weapons at the beginning of August. Modern historians, including John Horne and Alan Kramer, believe that the tragedy stemmed from the panic of inexperienced soldiers, friendly fire between their own units and a widespread belief in civilian guerrillas.

The destruction of the library also violated the Hague Convention of 1907. Germany had signed it, and the convention required buildings dedicated to religion, art and science to be spared.

World outrage

The news of the burning of Leuven shocked public opinion in the Allied and neutral countries. The British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, wrote that it was the worst thing the Germans had done so far and compared it to the atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War. The British and French press portrayed the Germans as the new Huns, barbarians destroying European culture. The nickname, which Kaiser Wilhelm II himself had used earlier when in 1900 he urged the soldiers being sent to China to be ruthless, became a permanent part of Allied propaganda. The events at Leuven became one of the symbols of what was called the Rape of Belgium, and did Germany serious harm in the eyes of the neutral countries, especially the United States.

In October 1914, 93 German scholars, writers and artists signed an appeal “to the civilised world”, in which they denied the accusations and defended the conduct of the army. The rector of the University of Leuven, Paulin Ladeuze, later said that at Leuven the Germans had disqualified themselves as a nation of thinkers.

For Polish readers the destruction of Leuven may recall the fate of Kalisz, which the Germans burned and shelled at the beginning of August 1914. Both cities fell victim to the same obsession with civilian snipers. We write more about Kalisz in the article First fighting on the border of the Kingdom of Poland.

Rebuilding the library

The university resumed its work in 1919. The Treaty of Versailles obliged Germany to hand over to Leuven manuscripts, incunabula, books and maps equal in number and value to those that had been burned. The collection was also rebuilt thanks to gifts from all over the world.

The new library building was made possible by the Americans. The fund-raising was run by a special committee, and a huge role was played by Herbert Hoover, who during the war organised food relief for occupied Belgium and later became President of the United States. American universities and schools sent donations. The building, in the Flemish Renaissance style, was designed by the American architect Whitney Warren. Construction lasted from 1921 to 1928, and the formal opening took place on 4 July 1928, on United States Independence Day. History came full circle, however: in May 1940, during another German invasion, the library at Leuven burned again.