So everyone uses the rape of Belgium as a way to treat Germany as villains but I know that crimes toward civilians are...

So everyone uses the rape of Belgium as a way to treat Germany as villains but I know that crimes toward civilians are common in a war.

Was there any event of such magnitude commited by the opposite side?

Anglos and the French raping Africa

>Was there any event of such magnitude commited by the opposite side?

Not in WW1
Germany and the Ottoman Empire were the only two belligerents who massacred civilians en mass
The Ottoman Empire was disolved after the war and thus rightfully punished, but Germany was spared and only inflicted the overly kind Versailles Treaty because of autistic Anglos

Britian killed fuckloads of civilians in East Africa in an attempt to starve out Lettow-Vorbeck's resistance.

The starvation of Germany's population thanks to the naval blockade killed a lot of people.

That said, the Reich's eagerness to enter and escalate the war is what made them the villains you fucking autist. The rape of Belgium is just further demonstration, alongside things like bombing the cathedral of Rheims or blowing up Coucy's Keep out of spite.

Guerilla campaigns do not operate by the same rules as campaigns between conventional armies.The only way to stamp out guerillas is to fuck over the civilians that feed them. Malaya is a perfect example of that. It was what Vietnam should have been like, but the American public didn't have the stomach for it.

>it's okay when we do it
We're not here to make excuses, we're here to state facts. Britain killed several thousand Tanganyikans at the minimum (estimates range in the hundreds of thousands from the ensuing famine as well). Far worse than what happened in Belgium.

Germans were ISIS tier in WW1. Bombing Reims cathedral on purpose, destroying medieval castles during their retreat from France. They were pure shit.

No, because the Germans were characteristically systematic about it. See, German strategic doctrine before the war had extrapolated Clausewitz's ideas on total war and the concept of war as "an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds" to mean that it would be far better for everyone involved to subdue their foes through sheer brutality. They thought that by taking a heavy hand with the Belgians, they would quickly break their will and force them to capitulate: "We are big. We are scary. Surrender now!"

It makes a certain military sense, but it fails to account for the political cost of such actions and, well, basic human psychology. Faced with what appeared to them to be an enemy bent on exterminating their people, the Belgians naturally dug in their heels and resisted the Germans all the harder. The Germans then figured, "Well, obviously we need to be more brutal. THEN they'll surrender!" and so began a vicious cycle of partisanship and reprisal. All the while, Germany was being vilified in the foreign press, costing them potential allies and sowing the seeds for all the bad blood that filled the Versailles conference.

France's use of colonial troops in the Rhineland in order to BLACK the local population post-war comes to mind.

Also why are they wearing backpacks for an execution?

Huh. I've heard the East Africa campaign referred to as "the Gentleman's War" before and was under the impression that there was a great deal of respect and chivalry between Smuts and Lettow-Vorbeck. Although I suppose being gentlemanly towards the enemy army doesn't prevent you from fucking over some random natives.

>We're not here to make excuses, we're here to state facts

But you're excusing one side of the other. Don't present yourself as being the voice of reason when it isn't true.

>But you're excusing one side of the other
>Was there any event of such magnitude commited by the opposite side?
I gave OP exactly what he asked for, an event of such a magnitude (and much greater, actually) than the Rape of Belgium. Don't go full AngloIDF when the OP got what he wanted, faggot.

snacks

The Austrians massacred shitloads of people in Serbia.

What about the Russians in East Prussia in 1914?

Sounds... Familiar

it was bombed because the French used it for artillery observation

>killing Balkanniggers

I see no problem there.

explain the destruction of the Leuven library where they purposely set fire to one of the largest and most ancient libaries in western europe with the librarians still locked inside

You got it wrong, first came Belgian partisan war then the reprisals followed

there was never any significant amount of belgian partisans
the damage to the belgian infrastructure was done by the army as a (successful) pre-emtive delay tactic and did not nearly warrant the amount of reprisal against the civilian population the germans enacted

furthermore the systematic dismantling of the belgian industry was done for no reason other than german profit. had versailles been fair the entire ruhr industrial area would have been dismantled and shipped to belgium and france

This is very often forgoten but the french governement conducted some kind of ethnic cleansing after the victory in the liberated regions of Alsace and Moselle. People were sorted between 4 classes of citizen according to the number of german or austrian family members they had. If you were too germanic you were simply deported. But it's not as good as raping civilian.
The naval blockade is the only example that comes to my mind concerning crimes perpreted by the triple entente against civilians during the war.But Just after the victory, the french army occupied the western part of current germany, there must have been some incidents between french troops and locals but it's not well documented because we wuz french and victorious (rape maybe ?).

A "Gentleman's War" in the sense that Germans/Brits treated each other extremely well if they were wounded/captured (see battle of Tanga), but they gave little shit about the natives under their command and millions in the region died as a result.

>there was never any significant amount of Belgian partisans

That's not what I remember from Dan Carlin's Blueprint for Armageddon.

There were acts of sabotage at a time when the German army depended on moving troops quickly through Belgium and they retaliated pretty hard iirc.

>That's not what I remember from Dan Carlin's Blueprint for Armageddon.
Not a credible source

>there was never any significant amount of belgian partisans

There are tons of accounts of German soldiers, they're just largely ignored because it's convenient

That's not surprising, the German military was steeped in a culture of paranoia about guerrillas ever since the Franco-Prussian War, leading them to see things that weren't there. They also mistook the Belgian Garde Civique, which was a lawfully constituted militia which operated as part of the regular Belgian armed forces, for guerrillas

>leading them to see things that weren't there

perhaps it wasn't just a collective autosuggestion afflicting more than one million men (allegedly stemming from a war that had happened more than 40 years ago in which almost none of the soldiers had participated themselves), but really happened? But I give it to you, the theory of a collective psychosis is an elegant way to brush aside any testimony from the German side, only to take everything from the Allied side at face value

>an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds

Clausewitz also was very poignant on the amount of time such war should take.
The general idea from his fragmented book was, if you have to fight a war, fight it quick and use every tool at your disposal.

The idea makes sense in paper but generally fucked over german strategic planning in the long run because if you wipe out villages for dumb shit then you gotta expect some reprisal.

>there was never any significant amount of belgian partisans

Depends who you ask. The germans were never thenless way too harsh and cruel with belgium and helped entente propaganda a great deal to perpetuate 'the rape of belgium' story.

Really? More than a million men said they saw Belgian partisans? Gonna need a source on that one user. Especially given that the Germans were never able to substantiate their claims about there being a widespread partisan movement, you would think if there was all this evidence as you claim they would have produced it at some point. But I guess literally every historian of the war is wrong, because you read some German soldiers who had a clear interest in doing so making unsupported claims about partisans once.

Bumping for interest.

The Austrians started mass hanging Serbian civilians in august 1914

belgians aren't human

No, you are thinking of both sides, and even then the Germans even moreso, when it comes to atrocities against natives during the African campaign.

Of course you don't Marx

Those WWI 'war crimes' have been debunked for almost 90 years now.

It's like accusing Canada of war crimes. It doesn't get any more ridiculous.

Not really.

Maybe its just the german nature

>It's like accusing Canada of war crimes.
didn't they often kill prisoners?

>and even then the Germans even moreso, when it comes to atrocities against natives during the African campaign
Except no, the number of porters killed by Germany was very small because they depended upon them and was almost always because of disease. The Entente actively killed natives for the purpose of starving out the German forces.

>The starvation of Germany's population thanks to the naval blockade killed a lot of people.
And where exactly did Germany import food from?

>villain in a war because muh war crimes
fuck you, we are the villains because we lost

Most German regimental histories contain remarks about the participation of Belgian civilians in combat (Spraul: Der Franktiereurkrieg 1914). Kramer/Horne, whose work is seemingly considered by many contemporary historians to be the final truth on the topic, don't acknowledge this and regard any German testimony as a part of the "collective delusion", that was allegedly causing them to see things that weren't really there. Apart from the aforementioned German-language book, Ulrich Keller of UCSB is apparently going to publish a study that will also critically deal with Horne/Kramer's theory of the "imagined partisan war".

Nowhere, since it was blockaded :^)

Imperial Germany was a clusterfuck of autism. Their diplomacy was inept and short-sighted as fuck. Like deliberately antagonizing the US over the Philippines and Latin America. Or pissing off Britain with its fleet and sabotaging a potential Anglo-German alliance.

This passage from Tuchman's The Guns of August really sums up how empty-headed Germans were:

>General von Hausen, commanding the Third Army, found, like von Kluck, that the “perfidious” conduct of the Belgians in “multiplying obstacles” in his path called for reprisals “of the utmost rigor without an instant’s hesitation.” These were to include “the arrest as hostages of notables such as estate-owners, mayors, and priests, the burning of houses and farms and the execution of persons caught in acts of hostility.” Hausen’s army were Saxons whose name in Belgium became synonymous with “savage.” Hausen himself could not get over the “hostility of the Belgian people.” To discover “how we are hated” was a constant amazement to him. He complained bitterly of the attitude of the D’Eggremont family in whose luxurious château of forty rooms, with greenhouses, gardens, and stable for fifty horses, he was billeted for one night. The elderly Count went around “with his fists clenched in his pockets”; the two sons absented themselves from the dinner table; the father came late to dinner and refused to talk or even respond to questions, and continued in this unpleasant attitude in spite of Hausen’s gracious forbearance in ordering his military police not to confiscate the Chinese and Japanese weapons collected by Count D’Eggrernont during his diplomatic service in the Orient. It was a most distressing experience.

Gee, you've invaded a neutral country that wanted no part in this war and you're outraged that they dare to stop you? I mean this isn't the Napoleonic era where populations are just sit there and take it.

>Most German regimental histories contain remarks about the participation of Belgian civilians in combat
Just because they remark on it ,doesn't mean it's true. They had a clear interest in lying to justify their actions. They could have just been repeating rumours that they hadn't seen with their own eyes. Or they could have been talking about the Garde Civique. There is no reason to accept their testimony at face value.

if partisans were as widespread as the germans claimed, post-war there should have been mass-acknowledgement of this in belgium

this never happened, at least not even nearly on the scale the germans suggested

And even if they was large-scale partisan attacks, the Germans have nothing to complain about. Their own kingdom was under attack by Napoleon and they conceptualized the idea of the Nation at War. Every Prussian subject was a born defender of the state according to the post-1806 reforms. So why should Belgium roll over and allow Germany to violate its territorial integrity? Whether in uniform or not, the Belgian people were taking a page from a German book.

WWI Germany was still stuck in early 19th century ideals. They had no idea that times changed and that they needed to adapt.

>They had a clear interest in lying to justify their actions.
>They could have just been repeating rumours that they hadn't seen with their own eyes.
>There is no reason to accept their testimony at face value.

Literally holocaust denial tier reasoning.

no they just seldom bothered to take any

No. There is overwhelming evidence for holocaust, meanwhile these are just mentions made by one side.

>Literally holocaust denial tier reasoning.
All your green test is applicable to holocaustist over holocaust skeptics.