The Imperial German Army, which was dominated by recent volunteers and conscripts who had received minimal military training before being sent into combat, had already committed multiple war crimes since invading Belgium on 4 August 1914, including mass killings of hundreds of civilians as hostages or under suspicion of guerrilla warfare, in Liege, Aarschot, and Andenne.

[3] The Germans took hostages from the municipal administration, magistrates, and the Catholic University of Leuven, and forced inhabitants to keep their front doors open, and windows lit throughout the night.

[10] At around 11:30 pm, German soldiers broke unto the university's library (located in the 14th-century cloth hall), which held significant special collections, including medieval manuscripts and books, and set it on fire.

Furthermore, Georg Berghausen, the 1st Army's chief medical officer, testified that the German soldiers wounded at Louvain had mostly been injured by bullets from hunting guns, rather than being the victims of friendly fire.

[35] If Berghausen's testimony was not perjury, in an effort to shield the officers and enlisted men of his Division from facing court martial proceedings under German military law, it is intriguing, as the city government of Louvain had ordered the confiscation of all privately owned firearms in early August, believing that civilian resistance was futile and would provoke violent reprisals.

[38] Even though the German people are traditionally stereotyped as orderly, well-disciplined, and invariably super-efficient,[39] according to Weber, the real, "situational factors at play", during the August 1914 Rape of Belgium were, "the nervousness and anxiety of hastily mobilized, largely untrained civilians, panic, [and] the slippery slope from requisitioning to looting and pillaging.

"[40] According to Weber, vast numbers of minimally trained, poorly disciplined, and extremely paranoid teenaged German soldiers in August 1914 Belgium saw, "franc-tireurs everywhere, with lethal consequences.

To make matters worse, the Belgian Garde Civique - the home guard - that had been deployed during the first few days of the war (and thus immediately prior to the eleven-day period in which most atrocities took place) did indeed not wear regular uniforms.

"[41] The destruction of the university library, whether it was an act of poorly trained conscripts whose discipline had imploded, a deliberate act of cultural vandalism, or because, similarly to the bombing of Monte Cassino in 1944, the library buildings were believed to be in secret use for military purposes, still violated Imperial Germany's obligation, as a signatory to the Hague Convention of 1907, that "in sieges and bombardment all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes".

[43] The monument features panels by Marcel Wolfers depicting the atrocities that soldiers from the German 1st Army perpetrated against the civilian population of Louvain following the collapse of their military discipline.