Toward a New Understanding of the Two World Wars

Social Sciences9 MIN READ

Raffael Scheck reframes the Spring 1940 Western Campaign using firsthand accounts from citizens and soldiers

A new book by Raffael Scheck, the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History, sheds new light on the Western Campaign of 1940, arguing that most contemporaries in 1940 experienced Germany’s defeat of France and its allies as the decision and conclusion of World War I and not a beginning phase of World War II.
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By Laura MeaderPhotography by Ashley L. Conti
October 17, 2024

Is history ever definitively written? Can fresh insight alter accepted historical “facts”?

Consider the Western Campaign of 1940, when Germany invaded Belgium and the Netherlands to exert pressure on France. The campaign and the previous eight months of fighting with Germany at war with Britain and France, called the Phoney War, have long been considered a crucial part of the starting phase of World War II. But historian Raffael Scheck reconsiders that notion.

In his new book, Frühling 1940 (Spring 1940), Scheck argues that most contemporaries in 1940 experienced Germany’s defeat of France and its allies as the decision and conclusion of World War I. 

book cover

While other historians have discussed the campaign as related to World War I, Scheck is the first to look at the experiences of soldiers and civilians who lived it.

His unprecedented research involved an examination of Belgian, French, and German letters and diary entries as well as records from British soldiers deployed in France and Belgium. These firsthand accounts from both sides of the front reveal the untold story of the tumultuous months of May and June 1940.

“It’s history from below,” said Scheck, the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History. “It’s a history of common people in this war. How did they experience it? How did they make sense of it? Ultimately, how did they deal with this sudden, new situation that emerged by the end of June 1940” when Germany emerged victorious?

Frühling 1940: Wie die Menschen in Europa den Westfeldzug erlebten (Spring 1940: How People in Europe Experienced the Western Campaign) is Scheck’s seventh book. It’s also his first written in German, his mother tongue. It’s been praised for including all of the campaign’s participants instead of just one side, an approach more typical in war histories, said Scheck.

The book is selling briskly in German bookstores and train stations nationwide. Last month German journalists and publishers voted Frühling 1940 onto the list of 10 best nonfiction books available in September, placing it at number four.

An exercise in historical empathy

Scheck has studied World War II extensively and has wanted to examine the Western Campaign “from below” for years. He was curious how common citizens and soldiers experienced the moment in 1940 and how they related it to past events and an uncertain future.

His research focused on three previously neglected aspects of that period.

  • The German perspective, which historically has focused only on the later war years. Letters and diaries from the spring of 1940 reveal important sentiments toward Nazi Germany.
  • Belgium, with an army more than twice as strong as the British army. Scheck also considers its civilian population, a quarter of which took refuge in France.
  • British soldiers and perceptions of some of the 300,000 who fought in Belgium. Scheck and research assistant John Farah ’21 listened to interviews with British veterans to identify what these soldiers felt and experienced in 1940.

Scheck calls this an exercise in historical empathy, which he practices with compassion toward all parties involved in this critical moment in time.

Diary entry from a Belgian woman, 1939
A page from the diary of a 22-year-old Belgian woman, Lucienne Vervotte, who flees Belgium on bicycle with her mother and father on a horse cart. Her diary is an example of the original sources Scheck used to tease out the common people’s story of the Western Campaign. (Courtesy State Archives of Belgium)

The connection to World War I

Scheck began his research in 2020, reading primary sources in the State Archives of Belgium, the German Diary Archive, and digital sources. He combed through material in four languages and transcribed hundreds of entries to identify passages relating to the Western Campaign.

He wasn’t surprised by what he found. He presumed people would relate the events of 1940 to the memory of World War I. The material he found confirmed his suspicion.

“The diaries, interviews, memoirs, and the letters showed me that connection to the First World War—the personal access to it and the personal meaning it had that they were fighting on the same ground.”

For the British, Germans,  French, and Belgians involved in the Western Campaign, those connections happened differently, yet similarly.

As British soldiers dug defensive positions, they encountered corpses, guns, and unexploded material from the First World War, Scheck said. “Then in the fighting, they might take refuge in a World War I cemetery, get bombed there, and the bones would be thrown up. It would be a horrifying, direct encounter with the past.”

The Germans marched through areas with a terrible familiarity, pausing at the graves of fathers, older brothers, and uncles. German soldiers who fought in World War I were stationed at the same farm or town. Painful memories were awakened, and soldiers compared their past losses with present success.

For the Germans, there is also unbridled enthusiasm, said Scheck. They can’t believe they are marching across fields of blood where hundreds of thousands of corpses are buried, moving through them with ease. German success in the war gave meaning to their two million dead soldiers of 1914-18. Soldiers and citizens alike expressed gratitude to Hitler for providing this apparent closure to World War I.

However, the situation was depressing for the French, whose sacrifices in World War I now felt meaningless. Instead of a determination to fight and repair their war-torn country, they slipped into fatalism. Belgian and French refugees overwhelmed southern France, almost all of northern France was homeless, and the military was thoroughly beaten. “It’s an untenable situation and there’s no way to continue the struggle,” said Scheck. The French resign themselves to defeat.

Similarly, the Belgians spun into resignation. The Belgian king, who stayed in the country, capitulated while millions of citizens were driven from their homes by fearful memories of German occupation in World War I. Whether sheltering in France or remaining in Belgium, they accepted that this campaign decided World War I and that they would live in a German-dominated Europe.

Historic photo of Belgians in horse carts in northern France, 1940
Belgian or French refugees in northern France in the spring of 1940. Many Belgians fled their homes during the Western Campaign, expecting a repeat of the prolonged battles and trench warfare of World War I. (Courtesy historicmedia.de)

Power of individual stories

Scheck’s research uncovered another previously unknown aspect of the Western Campaign—a triangle of tension between the British, Belgians, and French. Initially on the same side, they fell into sharp disagreements shortly after the war began. Everyone was pitted against everyone, which led to a fear of spies and saboteurs, or the so-called “fifth column.”

Scheck said that fantasies of a fifth column were ubiquitous in Belgium and France and widely shared by the British soldiers as well. “So much so that many Brits, Belgians, and Frenchmen attacked and killed completely innocent people simply because they believed they were making signs to the Germans.”

At the same time, German soldiers, jubilant at their success and good fortune, became friendly and helpful toward the French and Belgians. They weren’t bloody, murdering barbarians that the French and Belgian governments made them out to be, Scheck said, adding, “except when it came to Black African soldiers from the French army, who suffered massacres and random abuses.” Scheck chronicled the plight of these soldiers in his book Hitler’s African Victims.  

“At the end of the spring of 1940, this is so unimaginable. You don’t see Nazi Germany in the evil light that it deserves and quickly gets. Its reputation is very, very different,” the historian emphasized, noting that it explains people’s future actions.

The German victory in the Western Campaign in 1940 united the German people and the Nazi regime together, Scheck said. 

“Many scholars grapple with the loyalty [toward Hitler] of so many Germans, especially German soldiers. I think this provides some of the answers, that this success forges a very emotional, trusting relationship with the leadership.

“People write this again and again in their letters and diaries, both at home and at the front. ‘We can trust this leadership. They’re doing unbelievable things.’” 

Scheck’s history from below and historical empathy combine in Frühling 1940 to rewrite a bit of history. They prove that in the end, history is about individual stories.

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