Belgian Congo crimes inspired anti-German propaganda

On May 12, 1915, the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, chaired by Viscount James

Bryce (1838-1922), published "Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages."

The report claimed that the evil Germans occupying Belgium, were

in the practice of cutting off people's, often children's, hands:

A third form of mutilation, the cutting of one or both hands, is frequently said to have taken place. In some cases where this form of mutilation is alleged to have occurred it may be the consequence of a cavalry charge up a village street, hacking and slashing at everything in the way; in others the victim may possibly have held a weapon, in others the motive may have been the theft of rings.

We find many well-established cases of the slaughter (often accompanied by mutilation) of whole families, including not infrequently that of quite small children.

Bryce Report into German Atrocities in Belgium, 12 May 1915

The cutting-off-of-hands did occur, but not by the Germans in Belgium,

but was a deliberately policy of the Belgian colonialists in the Congo.

American journalist Adam Hochschild's award-winning 1998 book King Leopold's Ghost, is about the efforts of Belgian King Leopold II (1835 - 1909) to make the Congo into a colonial empire. Hochschild describes how even high officials of the regime, later admitted the severing of hands was deliberate policy in the Congo, and thanks largely to the efforts of William Henry Shepphard (1865 - 1927), an African American Presbyterian missionary, it soon became common knowledge in both Europe and the United States.

William Henry Shepphard (in the white suit) was posted to a region of the Congo bordering the Kasai river, where the resistance of the indigenous people to the rule of King Leopold was some of the strongest. The region was also rich in rubber, the chief interest of the colonialists.

Shepphard described how in 1899, men armed with guns, belonging to a tribe whose chief had allied himself with the Belgian regime, rampage through his region, plundering and burning more than a dozen villages. Shepphard was ordered by his superiors to travel into the bush, putting him at a severe risk, and to investigate the cause of the fighting. He found bloodstained ground, many bodies and the stench of rotting flesh.

On the day he reached the camp of the perpetrators of the massacres, he saw many items being smoked over a fire. He was taken to the fire by the chief of the marauders, where Shepphard saw that the items were actually human hands, he counted 81 of them. The chief said to Shepphard:

See! here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the State how many we have killed.

The smoking of the hands helped preserve the evidence, as it was sometimes weeks before they were able to collect their credits for the hands from a official of the regime.

If a village refused to submit to the Belgian's rubber regime, the troops, or often their allies would shoot everyone in that village to send a message to the neighbouring villages. But in the case of the allies teaching the lesson, the Belgians were mistrustful and demanded that evidence of a human killed must be produced for each bullet given to their allies, and therefore bullets wouldn't be wasted on hunting, or worse; saved to be used in an uprising against the Belgians themselves.

A severed right hand, was the standard proof of a kill, but often, very often it appears, a right hand would be taken from a live person, as the bullets had been used for hunting.

William Henry Shepphard's writings, detailing the severed hands and many other atrocities appeared in the American Presbyterian Congo Mission newsletter. For this, in 1908 Shepphard was sued for libel by the Kasai Rubber Company. Shepphard was defended in a court in the Congo, by Belgian lawyer/politician Emile Vandevelde. Shepphard was acquitted.

Belgian socialist politician Emile Vandevelde (1866 - 1938), was not Jewish, but he was a Freemason, and an outspoken supporter of Zionism. He has been hailed as being highly influential in gathering European support for Zionism before and after WW1.

Only a few weeks before the Committee on Alleged German Outrages published the allegations that the Germans were cutting off people's hands, Vandevelde, by then a Belgium government minister, had again criticised Belgium crimes in the Congo. This resulted in a public spate with his fellow Belgian minister.

click image to enlarge

Los Angeles Times - April 17, 1915

It has been alleged, the Report of Committee on Alleged German Outrages, was rushed to be finished, being printed just days five days after the Lusitania was sunk, in a hope to further garner support for United State entry into the war. Not a single witness was interviewed by the committee, they merely examined some 1,300 affidavits from Belgian refugees. These affidavits were subsequently lost, later found, then presumed destroyed by a German rocket in WWII, ie they've never been examined by anyone other than the committee. So how many of the Belgians, if any, claimed the Germans cut off people's hands Belgian-Congo-style, will never be known.

Sources

Emile vandervelde on Zionism and the Jewish question

King Leopold's Ghost (1998) by Adam Hochschild