As I recently discussed, the Germans were breaking international law by committing the morally questionable acts involved with unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I. Their sinking of the Lusitania is famous to this day, and at the time, Britain and their allies labeled the Germans as “baby killers” and other monstrous adjectives to persuade others to side with them in the conflict. However, the British were performing their own questionable acts in the war, perhaps the greatest of these being the naval blockade into Germany.
With this blockade, the formidable British Navy was effectively starving the German civilian population at home. This was a war winning strategy, and eventually the German civilian population would grow weary of the war, but it is morally questionable as men, women, and children alike could be starved to death. These tactics did not have the awe factor of blowing up a massive liner like the Lusitania, with dramatic “movie scene” deaths, but it was no less cruel. In fact, the people who died on the Lusitania (1,198 total dead) were the lion’s share of civilian casualties caused by German unrestricted submarine warfare. This, combined with the famous sack of the city of Louvain in Belgium where a famous library with invaluable ancient texts was burned to the ground, 200 civilians killed, and 42,000 civilians more deported to Germany, cost the Germans mightily in the court of public opinion. Meanwhile, the British National Archives acknowledge that 763,000 Germans died from the blockade, via starvation or other maladies caused by malnutrition.* The civilian loss is not even comparable, and the British continued their blockade after the war ended, until the Germans had signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
(Courtesy of the National Archives)
The point of this post is not to vilify the British, for as I said, it was a war winning strategy, and war commonly erases any peacetime treaties or regulations. The question I have is why much of the neutral world including Holland, Switzerland, and Scandanavia, but America in particular, seemed far more aghast at German atrocities in the First World War, while ultimately turning a blind eye to examples of British malfeasance? I think the answer is probably a combination of things, with a root cause being money. Surely, the loss of American life on the Lusitania and other merchant ships due to the unrestricted submarine warfare angered America, but I think this is only in part due to empathy for those who died. Perhaps this is a highly cynical opinion, but I think the unrestricted submarine warfare had the potential to inhibit American merchant shipping, in turn costing their economy significantly, as the British and French relied heavily on American exports during the war.*
This is not to say that America agreed with the British blockade; they did not, and asked the British to follow maritime warfare law enacted in the prewar Declaration of London. However, they were still willing to trade with them, whereas trade, and civil conversation, with the Germans dwindled drastically as the war progressed. Adolf Hitler, among others, would later bemoan the lack of German propaganda in the First World War, and made sure to have a formidable propaganda machine for the Nazi takeover as a result. He certainly had a point. Every German misstep was seized upon by Allied press to further discuss German “frightfulness.” Between propaganda and the fact that the German atrocities were far more dramatic and apparently “culture-killing,” as in the Lusitania and Louvain attacks, the Germans did not stand a chance at winning the neutral world’s opinion. Much like us today, what looks dramatic in photos, or makes for a more compelling story, is often what will determine public opinion, and I would guess that the death of hundreds of thousands of German civilians was hard to dramatically capture as it occurred slowly over the course of the war. It can be argued forever which country actually committed the greatest atrocities, but the perception at the time was all the truly mattered.
*NOTE: This statistic does not include the additional 150,000 Germans the died from the influenza pandemic, though some undoubtedly coped worse with the disease due to malnutrition.
*NOTE 2: Unlike most countries, American would be a tremendous economic winner from World War 1.
Sources
A Higher Form of Killing by Diana Preston
The blockade of Germany. The National Archives. 2020. Retrieved from http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/spotlights/blockade.htm
Seven Hills History 