door. Kunze's men refused to go inside the fortification as they feared an ambush. Armed only with a rifle, the Pioneer-Sergeant entered alone. He wandered around the empty tunnels until he found the artillery team, captured them and locked them up. By now, another group from the Brandenburg regiment, led by reserve-officer Lieutenant Radtke, was also entering the fort through its unoccupied defences. Radtke then made contact with Kunze's troops and organised them before they spread out, capturing a few more French defenders and securing the fort. Later, more columns of German troops under Hauptman Haupt and Oberleutnant von Brandis arrived. No shots were ever fired in the capture of Fort Douaumont. The only casualty was one of Kunze's men who scraped a knee. Despite being the last officer to enter the fort, von Brandis was the one who dispatched the report on the capture of Douaumont to the German High Command. A few days later, the Prussian officer was telling Crown Prince Wilhelm about its heroic seizure. No mention was made of the efforts of Lieutenant Radtke or Sergeant Kunze. Instead von Brandis became the "Hero of Douaumont" and was awarded the Pour le Mérite, (Hauptman Haupt received it later, too). Kunze, who broke in and locked up the garrison and Radtke, who took command during the fort's capture, received no award. It was not until the 1930s, after historians from the German Great War committee had time to review the capture of Fort Douaumont that credit was belatedly given. Kunze, now a member of the Ordnungspolizei, received a promotion and Lieutenant Radtke got an autographed portrait of Wilhelm, the former Crown Prince and Kunze received the order of Pour le Mérite. Douaumont, the keystone of the system of forts that was to protect Verdun against a German invasion, had been given up without a fight. In the words of one French divisional commander, its loss would cost the French army 100,000 lives. Douaumont's easy fall was a disaster for the French and a glaring example of the lack of judgment prevailing in the General Staff at the time, under General Joffre. The French General Staff had decided in August 1915 to partially disarm all the Verdun forts, acting under the erroneous assumption that the forts could not resist the effects of modern heavy artillery. After its capture, Douaumont became an invulnerable shelter and operational base for German forces