Ww1 Propaganda Analysis

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Recommended: Impact of propaganda in the First World War

In John Horne’s article, he examines the allegations of brutality on both sides of the Great War. These rumors started, when German troops invaded Belgium, on August 4th, 1914. Within days, rumors of atrocities against civilian populations started. It is said that German atrocities either happened, were imagined to have happened , or invented to manipulate public opinion. In this paper, we will look at these possibilities, in order to understand atrocities as propaganda. The first atrocities ever reported in WWI happened against German soldiers by French and Belgian guerillas know as franestireurs,or free-shooters, who were accused of assaulting ,poisoning, blinding and even castrating germans. On the Allies side, histories of Germany’s pillagign, rapes and burning of towns spread quite fast. After the war ended, those tales about the German horrors were dismissed as nothing more than allied propaganda. The public began to look for anything to blame for the horrors unleashed in WWI, since they were unable to understand how a common man was incapable of such barbarity. Propaganda then became the principal scapegoat, blaming the Allies for spreading false tales that turned ordinary individuals to turn butcherers. This idea was also very popular in Germany after the war and used as a tool by the nationalists to increase …show more content…

They tried to prove the existence of franestireurs, and they deliberately rejected Allied accusations dismissing them as just propaganda - a view that continued to be upheld by the German army and government after the war. However this dismissal of was meet with shock and anger in Allied countries, especially France and Belgium. Only in the towns that had suffered the German fury against imaginary franestireurs a different memory of German atrocities was remembered, as show in local monuments and the determination to never

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