[3] When Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, the German high command expected to sweep through the country with negligible opposition.
Echoes of this explanation can be found as late as the 1990s in such works as Deutsche Geschichte of Thomas Nipperdey and in the 1996 edition of the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie.
[5] More recently, however, 21st century historian Thomas Weber has carefully examined the root causes of the German war crimes committed during the Rape of Belgium, the vast majority of which took place between 18 and 28 August 1914 and which were curtailed by the disciplinary policies the Imperial German Army High Command immediately adopted in response to the global outcry.
Acting with the benefit of both hindsight and detachment from the emotions, atrocity propaganda, and political ideologies of the period, Weber alleges that German war crimes in Belgium were not motivated by anti-Catholicism, as even overwhelmingly Catholic units of the Imperial German Army willingly took part.
[6] Even though the German people are traditionally stereotyped as orderly, well-disciplined, and invariably super-efficient,[7] according to Thomas 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.
"[8] According to Thomas Weber, vast numbers of minimally trained, poorly disciplined, and extremely paranoid 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 particularly 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.