Military History | Fort de Douaumont — Taken on 25 February 1916 Without a Shot Fired

The most important fort at Verdun was very nearly empty when the Germans walked into it. Begun in 1885 and rebuilt until 1913, Douaumont carried a concrete roof laid on a cushion of sand and retractable turrets. Then in August 1915 Joffre approved stripping the Verdun forts of guns and garrisons. The French staff had watched German heavy howitzers open the Belgian forts in 1914 and concluded that fortification was finished.

By February 1916 the fort held a caretaker detachment: 56 men and a few gunners by one account, 57 reserve artillerymen by another, the senior man an NCO named Chenot.

On the afternoon of 25 February a small pioneer party of the 24th Brandenburg Regiment found the ditch unguarded and climbed in through a gun embrasure. Sergeant Kunze went along the corridors alone and locked up the men he found. Lieutenant Radtke's platoon followed and collected the rest. Hauptmann Haupt and Oberleutnant von Brandis arrived after that. Nobody fired.

Von Brandis carried the report back, and Berlin made him the hero of Douaumont with the Pour le Mérite; one account gives Haupt the same decoration. Historians at the Reichsarchiv reconstructed the actual sequence in the 1930s, by which time Kunze was a policeman. He was promoted. Radtke received a signed photograph of the Crown Prince.

The Germans held the fort for eight months. On 8 May 1916 a fire inside set off stored flamethrower fuel and then ammunition; German accounts put their own dead at roughly 650 to 679, and the bodies were sealed into a casemate that is a German war grave to this day, marked with a cross and a plaque in German. Some French accounts date the sealed gallery instead to 23 October 1916, when French 400 mm shells reached the magazines, and put the number nearer 800. French colonial infantry retook the fort on 24 October 1916.

The galleries are open. The sealed casemate is one of the stops.

📸 Cover: the outer works of Fort de Douaumont as they stand today, by historicair, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.