The Meaning of "Langemarck"

Norman Davies

LANGEMARCK is a small village five miles to the north of Ypres in Belgium. Like all the villages in that district, it possesses a war cemetery filled with the dead from successive Anglo-German battles over the Ypres salient in 1914–17. In outward appearance, it is indistinguishable from scores of others. Indeed, the long-overgrown grave of 25,000 unidentified German soldiers bears no comparison to the imposing monument at the nearby Menin Gate, where the names of 40,000 unidentified British casualties are inscribed. Yet, in the opinion of a leading military historian, "It is, in a real sense, the birthplace of the Second World War." For, unbeknown to many modern visitors, Langemarck shelters the last resting-place of the comrades of a young Austrian volunteer whom Providence spared for still greater deeds. 

Hitler, an unsuccessful art student and draft-dodger from the Austrian army, had listened with rapture in a Munich crowd to the declaration of war on 1 August 1914, and had immediately signed up for service in the German Army. He was assigned to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry (List) Regiment, and arrived on the Western Front in October, just in time for the first Battle of Ypres. In this way, he became a witness to the terrible Kindermord, the "Massacre of Innocents," where tens of thousands of half-trained German recruits, mainly eager university students, were cut to pieces by the steady firepower of professional British soldiers. It was the first great slaughter of Germans, amply revenged, no doubt, at Passchendaele and on the Somme. Hitler never forgot it.

Hitler’s "supreme experience" in the trenches, where for four years he lived the charmed life of a courageous Meldegänger or "regimental runner," undoubtedly fired the pathological drive of his subsequent career. Tormented by the fate of his dead and mutilated comrades, and by a huge German sacrifice that led only to defeat, he set out to avenge their deaths; to humiliate Germany’s conquerors in their turn; and to make Germans feel once again proud, superior, hateful, ruthless. His vow of vengeance struck a common chord in millions of wounded German hearts.

Langemarck, therefore, symbolizes the essential psychological link between the First World War and the Second, between the slaughter  of Ypres and Verdun, and that of the London Blitz, Warsaw, and Stalingrad.

From Europe: A History