Clausewitz and Terror
Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz opened a real can of worms when he made "terror" a part of German, and much other military doctrine.
His general idea was that war should be as short as possible. That's humane insofar as longer wars typically do more harm.
But to make wars shorter, he believed that civilian populations cannot be spared. That the civilians must be terrorized to the point of demanding that their government surrender, accept a negotiated peace or otherwise stop the conflict.
This idea was always implicit in war, but the most history-making introduction of the formalized "terror" concept (Schrecklichkeit, German for "terror" or "frightfulness"
to Europeans was when Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, a nation whose neutrality Germany guaranteed by treaty and who posed no threat to Germany whatsoever... but was inconveniently between Germany and Paris.
(All nations do terrible things in war, of course, but the German terror campaign in Belgium was so top-down and formalized that it couldn't be blamed on passion and circumstance. And, as an aside here, what was shocking in Europe was often SOP in European colonies. Belgium was a tragic victim of WWI, but the Congo was a very tragic victim of Belgium under King Leopold before WWI)
The Germans had a formal (secret) war plan of terror and collective punishment which, like almost everything else they did, was barred by the 1899 Hague Conventions that Germany was signatory to. The Belgian government instructed all civilians to not do anything to antagonize the invaders.
If any Belgian citizen did anything offensive toward the Germans (sniping, dismantling a bridge they wanted to cross, sheltering a Belgian soldier, having an un-surrendered weapon, and generally helping the Belgian military in any way whatsoever) the Germans would line up everyone in the village, men and woman, and shoot every tenth person of both sexes. They found that for some reason this made the Belgians even less affectionate toward their invaders. So they started shooting half the people in the town. And for some reason Belgian resistance increased.
Soon the Germans had schedules of hostages. Every time the entered a town they would take all the political officials plus ten hostages from every street, and the priests, and shoot them all in the square if any one individual Belgian did anything against the German war effort. If an incident occurred on a road between two towns then both towns got the treatment.
Then it was one hostage from every single house. And after a few weeks they were killing every single person in villages. Massacres of hundreds and hundreds of civilians lined up and shot... men, women, children, everyone. (Though occasionally able-bodied male civilians taken off to Germany as slave agricultural labor.) Essentially, events equivalent to the My Lai massacre... as formal written policy and happening every few days for a month. (The estimates for My Lai range from 350 to 500 unarmed civilians. That would be in the mid-range of the series of mass-reprisals in Belgium. Some smaller, some larger.)
The last straw and headline grabber was Leuven, where the German Army decided to completely eliminate a significant city. As a German officer there later wrote, "We shall wipe it out...Not one stone will stand upon another. We will teach them to respect Germany. For generations people will come here and see what we have done."
It was indeed memorable, but rather than earn respect, Leuven convinced a lot of the watching world that Germany was too dangerous to exist. The world reaction was so bad that the razing of the city was abruptly called off after 8 days. But the damage of the month was done. Britain went from uncertainty to full emotional commitment. For France the war became a fight to the national death (Having seen the preview, nobody wanted to be occupied by Germany.) Woodrow Wilson was, as of August 4th, 1914, devoted to neutrality in both deed and mind. By August 30, after the destruction of Leuven, Wilson was confiding to those close to him that a German victory would be a calamity for the USA.
It is hard to say that the terror method worked. A point missed, I think, is that a government can easily terrorize its own subjects into abject submission over time. But it is very difficult to do so as an invader of a land with a sense of nationalism. It just firms resolve. It makes the resistance impulse a vendetta. And for a certain type of mind, the failure of the method will always be attributed to it being employed too lightly.
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