Verdun – Primal Battle of the 20th Century

The name Verdun is a household name to the vast majority of people in France and Germany. On February 21, 1916, German troops began “Operation Gericht”, the attack on Verdun and thus one of the bloodiest, most gruesome, and longest battles of the First World War, which has influenced European history and above all Franco-German relations to this day like no other event.

On the morning of February 21, 1916, at around 07:15, more than 1,200 German guns of all calibers opened a nine-hour drumfire of unprecedented intensity along a front width of nearly 40 kilometers. Around noon, about 150 Minenwerfer (trench mortar) joined in. At the beginning of the battle, 2.5 million shells were available. It is estimated that during the drumfire on the first day alone, statistically about 160,000 shells fell on every square kilometer of the French front, a scarcely imaginable figure.

Three army corps of the Fifth Army under the command of German Crown Prince Wilhelm launched an attack with six divisions and about 100,000 men after the end of the bombardment at around 17:00. Two further army corps were to join the attack in the following days. The mass of the units was preceded by storm troops, who, taking advantage of the effect of the drumfire, were to break any remaining resistance in the forward French trenches in close combat. Instead of the leather spiked helmet still common at the time, these special units were already equipped with the modern Stahlhelm M1916. The “Sturm-Abteilung” formed in March 1915 at the Cologne-Wahn firing range, later Sturm-Bataillon Nr. 5 (Rohr) (5th Assault Battalion), became well known. It was the first of its kind. The unit was deployed in the front line during the attack on Verdun and suffered very substantial losses.

Despite initial successes, by mid-March 1916 it became foreseeable that a breakthrough at Verdun could no longer be achieved. An attrition battle developed, with which the Oberste (colonel) Heeresleitung under General Erich von Falkenhayn wanted to force the French to deploy all their forces and reserves and thereby break France’s resistance power. Terms like “blood pump”, “bone mill”, “bleeding dry”, and “bleeding white” subsequently shaped the characterization of the battles at Verdun. Although the French had been brought to the limit of their defensive capability at the end of February 1916, the Germans did not succeed in decisively overcoming their resistance. In July 1916, the British and French opened the Somme Battle, which involved even more massive preparatory artillery fire as well as the deployment of significantly larger troop contingents than at Verdun, and ultimately resulted in even higher losses. This forced the Germans to withdraw units from the Verdun front. By the end of 1916, the French had then reconquered virtually all the lost terrain and thrown German troops back to their starting positions at the beginning of the Battle of Verdun. The German attack plan had failed.

Relevant offensive efforts by the German army lasted into December 1916. The average life expectancy of a “Verdun combatant” during the battle was about 14 days. According to realistic estimates, about 300,000 soldiers of all participating nations fell. The figures assumed by individual historians fluctuate considerably, which is also related to the question of which period is taken into account in the investigations and which adjacent combat areas are included in the consideration. Regardless of all theoretical considerations, it will never be possible to determine exactly how many young men actually lost their lives. In the Ossuaire de Douaumont alone, the ossuary located centrally on the battlefield, the mortal remains of more than 130,000 soldiers from all participating countries rest. A tract of land of about 65 square kilometers was transformed by artillery into an inhospitable crater desert. A large proportion of the fallen could never be recovered. In large parts of the former battlefield, neither agriculture nor animal husbandry was possible on the churned-up and poisoned soil even decades later. Even today, more than 100 years after the end of the fighting, the arsenic contamination of the soil in places exceeds natural values a thousandfold.

From the horrors of the First World War, which found its peaks in battles such as at Verdun or on the Somme, international politics failed to draw the necessary conclusions. With the Treaty of Versailles, the German Reich was demanded the humiliating and factually unjustified admission of sole war guilt. An crushing reparations burden was established which, due to the resulting hardship among the population, represented the breeding ground for radical aspirations and ultimately National Socialism. Through the League of Nations, into which Germany was admitted only in 1926 with limited rights after repeated efforts by German diplomacy and against the explicit will of France, an organization had indeed been created that was supposed to preserve peace. However, the statutes contained neither a general ban on war nor any other superior power or sanctioning authority. The USA as a new world power had not even joined the body in the first place. Following the National Socialist seizure of power, the German Reich declared its withdrawal in October 1933 with great approval among the population. Only a good 20 years after the end of the First World War, German soldiers marched into France again in the spring of 1940. The Second World War that then developed was to exceed everything that the First World War had brought of the unimaginable many times over.

Excursion: Erich Kästner, a graffiti, and a poem:

His 1957 book When I Was a Little Boy. is concluded by author Erich Kästner, who became well-known in the 1920s, with the words “The world war had begun, and my childhood was over.” Born in Dresden on February 23, 1899, Erich Kästner escaped deployment at the front at the last moment only due to a heart condition that delayed his military service. At 17, he was drafted from high school into the Königlich-Sächsischen 2. Fußartillerie-Regiment Nr. 19 (2nd Foot Artillery Regiment No. 19) and completed his training there as an Einjährig-Freiwilliger (one-year volunteer). The brutality of military drill, the misanthropy of the instructors, and the death of many of his schoolmates left a lasting impression on Erich Kästner and turned him into a pacifist and antimilitarist.

Shortly before the seizure of power by the National Socialists, Erich Kästner wrote in 1931 with „Verdun, Many Years Later a little-noticed, yet remarkably vivid and precise poem for today’s times as well:

On the exterior wall of a gymnasium in the rather underprivileged southwestern area of Verdun, where few outside visitors stray, young members of Heidelberger Vereins KulturFenster e.V. as well as Centre Social Culturel d’Anthouard Pré-l’Evêque from Verdun created a graffiti mural in July 2016 in commemoration of the battles of the First World War, which they named “Graff’ in peace”. Lines from Erich Kästner’s poem were incorporated into it, along with an excerpt from the 1961 book “Verdun” by French author George Blond. The work is dominated by a portrayal of the German symbolic figure Germania and Marianne, the national figure of the French Republic, who embrace in friendship over the battlefields of Verdun and look challenging into the eyes of the viewer.

The portrait and its creation show how natural Franco-German togetherness, apart from all political and economic aspects, has meanwhile become, especially among the young generation of both countries. In the spirit of this normality, which is so important for the European idea, those responsible in state and society may repeatedly recall Erich Kästner’s final appeal:

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