Russia and 'Unheard of Brutality' in East Prussia

On August 11, 1914, a week and a half after war had broken out between Germany
and Russia, a terrified crowd from the East Prussian border village of Radszen
appeared at the office of the local district administrator. That morning, the people
told him, there had been a clash between a German cavalry patrol and a larger
Russian force in their village. When the Germans withdrew, the Russians had
burned down almost every building and had “begun to beat us and to shoot at
us.” Four villagers had been killed, five wounded; the rest had fled in panic.1
Similar accounts of violence against civilians multiplied once border skirmishes
gave way to full-scale invasion in the middle of August. As tsarist troops poured
across East Prussia's eastern and southern borders, penetrating deep into its
interior, frightening reports of civilians tortured and murdered, officials arrested,
and farms and villages set ablaze attracted the attention of state authorities.2 On
the eve of the Battle of Tannenberg, as East Prussia's fate hung in the balance, the
Reich's alarmed deputy chancellor, Clemens Delbrück, telegraphed the Prussian
government from Army General Headquarters: “Russians annihilating property
and lives of population in the occupied areas with unheard-of brutality.”3