Germans occupy Bruges

On 14 October 1914 German troops entered Bruges, the capital of West Flanders. The medieval city of canals and merchants’ houses was undefended. Only a week earlier soldiers of the British 7th Division, who had landed at nearby Zeebrugge, had been billeted there, but after the fall of Antwerp and the occupation of Ghent the Allies withdrew further west, to the river Yser and to Ypres.

According to Belgian accounts, these were reserve units of the German Fourth Army, which entered the city through the Ghent Gate. That same day, in suburban Assebroek, the almost eighty-year-old burgomaster Amédée Visart de Bocarmé, who had governed Bruges for 38 years, signed the city’s capitulation in the presence of the German general von Werder. Members of the city council offered themselves as hostages to guarantee order. The takeover of Bruges passed off without bloodshed, and the city escaped the destruction that befell Leuven and Dendermonde. Some local accounts give the date as 15 October, but most sources point to the 14th.

Capital of the Marinegebiet

For the Germans Bruges was of special importance. It lay about 12 kilometres from the sea, but for some years it had had a new inland port, linked by a wide canal to Zeebrugge and by an older canal to Ostend. Warships could be based here safely, away from the coast, and put to sea through either port.

From 20 October units of the German Naval Division poured into the city, and a week later its commander, Admiral Ludwig von Schröder, took up residence in the former provincial government building on the Market Square. Bruges became the capital of the so-called Marinegebiet, the stretch of coast placed under the navy. In the spring of 1915 the Germans brought here the first small UB-type submarines, carried in sections by rail to Antwerp, assembled and taken on by water. On 29 March 1915 the Flanders U-boat flotilla was formed at Bruges, and soon a torpedo-boat flotilla as well. For four years ships sailed from the base at Bruges to attack shipping in the English Channel and the North Sea.

The occupation was hard for the inhabitants. When the city authorities refused to supply workers for the construction of the submarine base, the Germans removed the burgomaster from office. Visart de Bocarmé returned to his post only after the war. Bruges was liberated on 19 October 1918.