Terror in the Balkans (10 page)

Bolshevism also came to be associated, due to the ethnic background

of many leading Bolsheviks, with Jews.103 Major Bothmer, a German offi -

cer stationed in Russia in 1918, vilifi ed the Jews as the source of all Bol-

shevik infection there. His diary ghoulishly detailed how he would “just

love to see a few hundred of these Jew-boys strung up from the walls of

the Kremlin, dying as slowly as possible so as to enhance the effect.”104

But the Great War was nourishing anti-Semitism well before the Revo-

lution. One reason for this was the troops’ encounters with eastern Jews.

This was a people whose alien appearance and customs could affront

even an assimilated German Jew such as Victor Klemperer. Klemperer

described how a visit to a Talmud school in 1918 had “repelled me as if

with fi sts,” for the “swirl of people” in these rooms at prayer or recitation

of holy texts represented for Klemperer “repellent fanaticism . . . No,

I did not belong to these people, even if one proved my blood relation

to them a hundred times over . . . I belonged to Europe, to Germany,

and I thanked my creator that I was a German.”105 Such views were far

from universal; other commentators, such as the Bavarian writer Ludwig

Ganghofer, regarded the eastern Jews much more positively. “In amongst

the farmers you see groups of Jews in their long black dress,” he wrote. “If

50
terror in the balk ans

you need to ask the way or enquire as to some other matter, you are best

off approaching one of these lock wearers; they are pleasant and friendly,

answer knowledgably, (and) almost always speak good German.”106 It is

nevertheless clear that there was widespread contempt towards eastern

Jews within the German army.107

In Germany itself, anti-Semitism within the popular press reared

its head following the fi rst setbacks at the front. Newspapers depicted

Jews as cowards, shirkers, and profi teers, and many on the political right

hoped to exploit such prejudices for political gain.108 Lieutenant Colonel

Max Bauer, a fanatically anti-Semitic offi cer, wrote:

There is a huge sense of outrage at the Jews, and rightly so. If you

are in Berlin and go to the Ministry of Commerce or walk down the

Tauentzienstraße, you could well believe you were in Jerusalem.

Up at the front, by contrast, you hardly ever see any Jews. Virtually

every thinking person is outraged that so few are called up, but noth-

ing is done, because going after the Jews, meaning the capital that

controls the press and the parliament, is impossible.109

In 1916, delusions over the extent of Jewish “shirking” led the Ger-

man army to implement a demeaning “head count” of its Jewish soldiers.

This operation eventually concluded that Jews were after all fulfi lling

their national duty every bit as much as Gentiles. But not before it had

devastated the morale of many loyal, patriotic Jewish soldiers.110

The war strengthened anti-Semitism in Austria-Hungary also. Here

too, the anti-Semitic press fanned long-standing resentments towards

Jews, likewise depicting them as shirkers and black marketeers. One of

the “foundations” for these rumors, as in Germany, was the underrepre-

sentation of Jews among the army’s rank and fi le. The simple explanation

for this, which the rabble-rousers chose to ignore, was that most rank-

and-fi le soldiers were peasants and most peasants were not Jewish.111 In

Vienna, anti-Semitic contempt was exacerbated by an infl ux of Galician

Jewish refugees fl eeing persecution from the Tsar. Their appearance was

very different to that of the empire’s assimilated Jewish population, and

their arrival put immense strain on the capital’s already acute housing

Forging a Wartime Mentality
51

shortage. There was similar resentment towards eastern Jews arriving in

Berlin between 1917 and 1920.112

But there was still no simple straight line between this anti-Semitism,

however abhorrent, and the deadly anti-Semitism that infl uenced the

conduct of German army units in the service of the Nazis a quarter-

century later. Apart from the German army’s shameful anti-Semitic head

count of 1916, the belligerent anti-Semitism that increasingly contami-

nated German society during the Great War did not inform German mil-

itary policy.113 Jewish soldiers serving in the still relatively enlightened

Austro-Hungarian army, meanwhile, were not compelled to suffer any

kind of head count; Conrad, his own anti-Semitism notwithstanding,

opined that “it does not seem appropriate to draw up statistics on the

basis of religious distribution.”114

In any case, the core reason why the Central powers were losing the

war by 1918 was neither the Bolsheviks nor the Jews, but their own mili-

tary and economic weakness. The weakness had been exacerbated by

the increasingly megalomaniac way in which the military dictatorship

running the German government since August 1916 was conducting the

war.115 By 1918, against an Allied coalition vastly strengthened by the

entry of the United States into the war, the Central powers’ defi cien-

cies were mercilessly apparent. The extent of their material privations

became especially clear to soldiers participating in Germany’s desper-

ate fi nal offensives on the western front in the spring and early summer

of that year, when advancing German soldiers stumbled upon veritable

treasure troves of supply in captured Allied trenches.116

By September the German army was fi rmly on the defensive, fi ghting

a doomed struggle against an Allied coalition now enjoying the prospect

of millions of fresh American troops. There is much to be said for the

view that, following the failure of its fi nal offensives, the German army

became stricken with levels of disobedience that amounted to a “covert

military strike.”117 But in reality, considerable though indiscipline was,

its effect was not terminal. For the army’s resistance stiffened, albeit ulti-

mately in vain, as the fi ghting approached German soil.118 In October

52
terror in the balk ans

1918 Major General von Endres, commander of I Bavarian Army Corps,

sought to rally his troops for the fi nal effort:

(The enemy’s) purpose is clear; he wants to bring the war with all

its terror into our beloved Fatherland and bring us to our knees . . .

But he will not succeed . . . No Frenchman, Englishman, American

or Italian will cross our border. If every man does his duty to the

utmost, we will succeed in halting their onslaught and achieve an

honorable peace. The Fatherland is in danger; you can save it!119

Vain though such rallying calls would ultimately prove, the great

majority of German soldiers responded to them as the borders of their

Fatherland were threatened during the weeks before the Armistice. That

they did so would be taken as further proof in interwar military circles

that the Imperial German Army had not been vanquished in the fi eld

at the end of the Great War. Instead, many would claim, the army had

been “stabbed in the back” by defeatist elements at home. This take on

events was at odds with the reality of autumn 1918. For the army, if not

yet actually defeated militarily, could no longer avoid that inevitable

fate—regardless of any temporary stiffening in its resistance or of what

happened at home. But the “stab-in-the-back” myth would endure in

post-1918 Germany nonetheless.

Meanwhile, following peace with Russia, the only remaining battle-

front on which Austro-Hungarian troops remained committed was in

Italy. But by now the Royal-Imperial Army’s fi ghting power was so far

gone that its last ever offensive, on the River Piave in June 1918, came to

naught almost immediately.120 Over the next few months, what remained

of the troops’ discipline, and with it the army itself, disintegrated com-

pletely.121 Attempts to stem the fl ood were in vain. The fact that the new

emperor, Karl I, had relaxed army discipline in a misconceived attempt

to get his subjects to like him more could only hamper such attempts

further.122 By October the 14th Austro-Hungarian Infantry Regiment

was declaring that “the rising instances of desertion . . . give rise to the

suspicion that one of the motives to desert (is the belief) that the general

spirit of conciliation after the war will prevent such offences from being

punished with the full force of the law.”123

Forging a Wartime Mentality
53

When the Armistice fi nally came, such was the German army’s con-

dition that it was at least able to march home in good order. Not so the

miasmic exodus of the Austro-Hungarian army from Italy: “trains over-

crowded, some looking from a distance like swarms of bees . . . Every

train was fully occupied including the roofs, platforms, bumpers, run-

ning-boards, and locomotives. Hundreds of men paid the ultimate price

of their haste to return home in tunnels, on sharp turns, and across low

railway-bridges.”124 The likely traumatizing effect of this spectacular

disintegration upon the offi cers who witnessed it—among whom, by

this time, were nearly all the Austrian-born offi cers examined in this

study125—is easy to imagine. All told, bearing witness either to the com-

plete collapse in morale within the Royal-Imperial Army, or to its severe

albeit less debilitating erosion within the Imperial German Army, is

likely to have increased many former offi cers’ later receptivity to National

Socialism. For National Socialist ideology, they would come to believe,

had a uniquely strengthening effect upon military morale.

Karl abdicated, and a new democratic republic, christened the

Republic of Austria in 1919, was set up. The peace treaties imposed

upon Austria and Hungary after the Great War did not merely reduce

their territory and armed forces to a fraction of their former size. They

also dismembered the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its territory

was distributed to neighboring countries already in existence, such as

Italy and Rumania, or to countries newly formed—Poland; Czechoslo-

vakia; and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Austria

itself was reduced to a dwarf state a tenth the size of its former empire.

The army’s remnants were organized into a People’s Army, or
Volks-

wehr
. The Volkswehr joined forces with militias to confront not just

unrest within Austria, but also—with a newly formed Frontier Guard—

attempts by some of Austria’s neighbors to nip at its borders and seize

its territory.126

In the popular press and right-wing circles, Jews were scapegoated

for the collapse of Austrian power, as well as for the infl ation that sub-

sequently crippled the postwar Austrian economy. Anti-Semitism was

further buttressed when the loss of Galicia to Poland and the Bukovina

to Rumania sparked a fresh wave of Jews into Vienna. Many staunch

Austrian Catholics, meanwhile, associated Jews with Marxism.127

54
terror in the balk ans

In Germany, the military dictatorship that since 1916 had run the coun-

try to ultimately ruinous effect pinned the blame for defeat upon oth-

ers—Bolsheviks and pacifi sts128 and “cowardly” socialist and liberal

politicians. It was these same politicians for whom the military dictator-

ship made way in autumn 1918, so as to saddle them with the blame for

the humiliating peace treaty that was imminent. The wartime military

leaders believed such action was justifi ed. For they deluded themselves

that it was these groups who had sealed Germany’s doom by sowing the

seeds of defeatism on the German home front while the army in the fi eld

had stood fi rm. The “stab-in-the-back” myth, which denied the military

realities of autumn 1918, would become an article of faith for the political

right in Germany, as it would for many army offi cers, during the years of

republican government that succeeded the imperial regime.129

Many German offi cers, front-liners in particular, found defeat in 1918

and the humiliation heaped upon army and nation in its wake almost

impossible to endure. Consequently, such men regarded the “guilty”

parties—democrats, Bolsheviks, and the Jews whom they synonymized

with both—with an especially noxious loathing. Captain von Selchow,

visiting Berlin days after the Armistice, wrote that “we passed all sorts

of people, the dregs of the city. Jews and deserters—gutter scum, in the

vilest sense of the word—now rule Germany. But as far as the Jews are

concerned, their day will come, and then woe to them!”130

Hatred towards the “enemies of the nation” was transformed into

violence during the so-called “Time of Struggle” that engulfed Ger-

many between 1918 and 1920. During this period numerous far left-wing

groups, most prominently the Bolshevik-inspired Spartakists, sprang up

in cities across Germany in an effort to foment Bolshevik-style revolu-

tion. Berlin, Munich, and the Ruhr were just three of the areas in which

these forces either tried to seize power, or managed to seize it temporar-