The Germans occupy Brussels

On 20 August 1914 German troops entered Brussels. The capital of Belgium surrendered without a fight: three days earlier the government had moved to Antwerp, and after the fighting on the Gete the field army was falling back to the same fortress. General Alexander von Kluck’s German First Army began to pass through the city, marching west and south towards France.

An undefended city

Only a few days earlier the military authorities had intended to defend Brussels on the line of the inner boulevards. The American diplomat Hugh Gibson, secretary of the United States legation, wrote that such resistance would have changed nothing but would have cost the lives of many innocent people. On the evening of 19 August refugees and weary soldiers streamed into the city, and word spread through Brussels that Belgian troops had been routed near Leuven. On the morning of 20 August Gibson learned that the civic guard had been disbanded and the plans for the defence abandoned.

The burgomaster of Brussels, Adolphe Max, had posters put up urging the inhabitants to refrain from any hostile act. The shops were closed, the shutters were down, and the carts of peasants fleeing the surrounding villages filled the boulevards. Telegraph and telephone had stopped working and no trains were running. Max had agreed the course of the entry with the Germans: the commander of the troops, General von Jarotzky, was to enter the city in the afternoon by the Louvain road and march along the boulevards to the other side of the city, while small detachments were to occupy the railway stations and the Grand-Place, where the staff intended to establish itself in the town hall.

An endless procession

Gibson described the entry as a show of strength. An unbroken column flowed through the city: infantry, artillery, hussars, lancers and cyclists, field kitchens with their chimneys smoking, even lorries carrying cobblers who mended the soldiers’ boots on the march. Two battalions with their guns rested on the Grand-Place, and the goose step was put on display for the onlookers. The soldiers sang songs of triumph. Gibson watched the procession until seven in the evening, and according to his notes the columns were still coming. The inhabitants received the Germans in sullen silence, but there were no incidents.

In the evening the ministers of the United States and Spain called on Jarotzky at the town hall. The general declared that he had no intention of occupying the city permanently or of quartering soldiers there; he was only to keep the road open for the troops who would be marching through for several days towards the French frontier. Max, who had earlier gone out to meet him, had declined to shake his hand, explaining that in the circumstances he could not bring himself to make even that gesture. He spent the night on the couch in his office at the town hall so as not to leave the building in the hands of the occupier. The same day General Friedrich Sixt von Armin, commander of the IV Corps, announced that the city was to provide the troops with quarters, food and supplies, and that any attack on the soldiers would be met with the severest measures.

The first days of occupation

Brussels had not seen a foreign army since Napoleonic times. The very next day the Germans demanded a war contribution of 50 million francs from the city within three days, and 450 million from the province of Brabant. Meanwhile the main forces did not halt in the capital. According to a Belgian headquarters report of 21 August, the corps that had occupied Brussels had left it by the Ninove road and turned south towards Hal. Kluck’s army was heading for the French frontier, where a few days later it ran into the British at Mons.

Adolphe Max spent the following weeks standing up for the inhabitants. At the end of September 1914, after he told the banks to stop paying the contribution and publicly contradicted a German proclamation, he was arrested and taken to Germany. The occupation of Brussels lasted more than four years. The city was liberated only in November 1918, and on 22 November King Albert I made a ceremonial entry into the capital at the head of the Belgian army.