Squareheads, Blockheads and other epithets applied to German soldiers of World War I

Here are some of the commonly used epithets for German soldiers during World War I:

Bosche: The pejorative French word for German comes from the French “albosche” and “caboche” (cabbage head or block head). This was very commonly applied to German soldiers by the French. They hardly knew the German soldier of the First or Second World War by any other name.

William Casselman, author of Canadian Words and Sayings has this to say about the Bosche expression:

“Boche is a French slang word for ‘rogue’ first applied to German soldiers during World War I and borrowed during the early years of that conflict into British English.

A definition is given in Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914-1918, edited by John Brophy and Eric Partridge, published 1930. I have increased his note.

Boche is the preferred and most common English spelling. Bosche is a rare alternative spelling in English.

The word was first used in the phrase boche head. French philologist Albert Dauzat believed that boche was short for caboche, playful French slang for ‘human head’, much like comic English synonyms for head like ‘the old noodle’, noggin, nut, numbskull.

One of the ways of saying ‘to be stubborn, to be stubborn’ in French is avoir la caboche dure. The root for caboche in the former French province of Picardy is ultimately the Latin word caput ‘head’. Our English word cabbage has the same origin, the compact head of leaves making a perfect ‘caboche’.

Boche Head was used as early as 1862 by stubborn people. It is printed in a document published in Metz. In 1874, French typographers applied it to German typesetters. By 1883, says Alfred Delvau’s Dictionnaire de la langue Verte, the phrase had come to mean bad subject and was used especially by prostitutes.

The Germans, who had a reputation among the French for stubbornness and bad luck, came to be named with a joking version of the German, namely allboche or alboche. Around 1900 Alboche was shortened to Boche as a generic name for Germans. During the war, propaganda posters revived the term using the dirty phrase boche ‘dirty kraut’.

At the start of World War I, Boche had two meanings in mainland French: (a) German and (b) stubborn, headstrong, stubborn. Quickly during the course of the war, this French slang word was taken up by the English press and public.

By the time of World War II, while boche was still used in French, it had been replaced in mainland French by other disparaged terms, such as ‘maudit fritz’, ‘fridolin’ and ‘schleu’. These three milder pejoratives were common during the German occupation of France from 1941 to 1945.” 3

Fritz: a common German given name.

Terms of disparagement in English during World War II used by British troops were ‘Jerry’ and ‘Fritz’ in the British Army and Navy, and ‘Hun’ in the RAF. Canadian and US troops generally preferred ‘Heinie’, ‘Kraut’ or Fritz. 3

Heinie: probably a form of Heinz, another common German given name. Heinie or Hiney is dated by Lighter to Life in Sing Sing, a 1904 book and says it was in common use during World War I to denote Germans. 1 Heinie is also defined in the dictionary as slang for the buttocks. two

Hun: A throwback to the days of the barbaric German tribes known as the “Huns.”

The use of “Hun” in reference to German soldiers is a case of propaganda. To completely dehumanize the enemy, he must first be thought of as clearly different from you and yours. Initially, it was quite difficult to make the “decent whites” of Blighty laugh at the “decent whites” of central Europe. The solution, then, was to transform them philosophically into rampaging Mongol hordes from the east. A look at the simian characteristics applied to German soldiers portrayed on Allied propaganda posters makes the point clear. Who would you fear and hate more, a cute blond-haired, blue-eyed boy from Hamburg or a rapacious ape-like brute from some far, dark land?

“Huns” was the result of a comment made by Kaiser Wilhelm when he sent a German expeditionary force to China during the Boxer Rebellion. Basically, he told his troops to show no mercy, saying that 1000 years ago the Huns (an Asian nomadic people, not the least bit Germanic) led by Attila, had become so famous with their depredations that they were still regarded with wildness. destruction, and urging the 1900s German troops in China to make a similar name for themselves that would last 1,000 years. When the Germans were fighting the French and British just 14 years later, this piece of prefabricated propaganda was too good to pass up on the Allied side, especially in view of the reports coming in from Belgium since the early days of the war. war.

Hun is defined in the dictionary as a barbaric or destructive person and also as offensive slang, used as a derogatory term for a German, especially a German soldier in World War I. two

Dutch – Used by American soldiers, meaning anyone who spoke with a guttural accent in America was commonly referred to as “Dutch”.

Dutch is defined in the dictionary as a term of or relating to any of the Germanic peoples or languages. two

Kraut: an obviously shortened form of sauerkraut. Kraut, krout, crout as used in the United States in the 1840s to refer to the Dutch and by American soldiers during World War I and World War II to refer to the Germans with its origin found in sauerkraut. 1 Kraut is defined in the dictionary as offensive slang and is used as a derogatory term for a German. Among Americans, this is the main recognized use of the word. two

Squarehead or Blockhead: Most interesting of all was the appellation “Squarehead” or “Blockhead” as it is applied to German soldiers and mostly by American soldiers. I have often wondered if these two denominations had some anthropological origin. There are numerous references in the literature and by American soldiers to the effect that the shape of the skulls of German soldiers appeared to be “blocked” or “square”. One soldier claims that he made an amateur study of the shape of the skulls of German soldiers and that, in his judgment, they were definitely of a “blocked” or “square” configuration. I can understand the expression “knock the block down” or “I’ll knock the block down for you”, “block” being the head slang. There was apparently a causal relationship between these last two expressions and “block heads” or “square heads”. Did the German male skulls have anything to do with the physical positions they slept in as babies? Let’s look at some of the origins of “square head” and “block head”.

The idea has been ventured that “square head” and “block head” were due to the shape of the German World War I steel helmet. So far no evidence has been gathered to support this observation.

Blockhead dates back to the 1500s and defines a stupid person, a block of wood for a head. I think it was probably misapplied to Germans because of its similarity to fool, and eventually the words became identical. Squarehead has been used to describe Germans and Scandinavians and was used as a mild pejorative for Danes and Swedes in the American Midwest. Believed to be of Austrian origin from the late 1800s. Defines an ethnic physical characteristic of a square face exhibited by some Northern Europeans. It’s genetic, not how you slept. The similar boxhead appeared in the early 1900s before World War I.

Squarehead appears in Jonathan Lighter’s The Slang of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, 1917-1919: An Historical Glossary, American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, Vol. 47, Issues 1-2, Spring/Summer 1972 as used in the United States to describe Germans and Scandinavians before World War I. Lighter does not mention fool and does not offer any origin for that term.

The standard German military haircut seemed to produce the “boxy” or “blocky” look. This would also be in line with the term “jarhead” for a US Marine, again due to this hair style. “Squarehead,” at least, remained a buzz term in the postwar era for anyone of German origin. Of course, each race and/or nationality had its own terms by which it was described, most of which today would be considered derogatory or racist.

Of course, when one considers the origins of the words “Squarehead” and “Blockhead”, the logical question arises: ‘What about ‘Roundheads’, an expression that gained popularity during the English Civil War? Is this more in the way of physical anthropology or how the ’round’ skull formed in infancy?

In reality, the term “roundheads” for Parliamentarians was a derogatory (and, it seems, class-based) reference to the close-cropped hair worn by London apprentices, with which Royalists apparently lumped all their opponents. (The counter-slur, “Cavalier,” compared royalists to knights, that is, the servants of Catholic authoritarian Spain.) See Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland 1638-1651, Blackwell, 1997, pp. 104-5.

Roundheads” of the English Civil War refers to the haircuts of the more puritanical members of the Parliamentary forces: their basic bowl look, very short and very conservative. It distinguished them from “gentlemen” (royalists), often elegantly hairstyles. , gentlemen of noble birth and often of considerable wealth, on the other hand, with their long, showy locks.

“Round head” as a propaganda epithet for Parliamentarian troops seems to have originated from the fact that they wore their hair short rather than the archetypal flowing locks of royalist cavalrymen. While this was not always the case (indeed there is a famous van Dyke portrait of George, Lord Digby and William, Lord Russell, the former in elegant ‘Cavalier’ garb and loose headpiece, the other in sombre Puritan black – the former fought for Parliament, the latter for King) was enough of a stereotype for propagandists to use both ‘Roundhead’ and ‘Cavalier’ as terms of insult, although this did not stop both sets of soldiers from taking the terms to your heart’s content. hearts as a compliment. If one believes those two great historians Walter Carruthers Seller and Robert Julian Yeatman: The Roundheads, of course, were so called because Cromwell made all his heads perfectly round, so that they would present a uniform appearance when laid out in a line. . In addition to this, if any man were to lose his head in action, the artillery could use it as a cannonball (which was done at the siege of Worcester).

As for the denominations, we see that the German was less affectionately called Huns, Boche and Jerrys. The American soldiers were called Yanks and Doughboys, while the British were called Brits or Tommys, and the French Poilus.” 4

GRADES

1. “The Jargon of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, 1917-1919: A Historical Glossary,” by Jonathan Lighter, American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, Vol. 47, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Summer 1972.

2. Free Dictionary, http://www.thefreedictionary.com

3. http://www.billcasselman.com and specifically his website http://www.billcasselman.com/wording_room/boche.htm. Material used with permission from Mr. Casselman.

4. Chenoweth, H. Avery, and Brooke Nihart, Semper Fi: The Definitive Illustrated History of the US Marines. New York: Main Street, 2005, page 142.