Terror in the Balkans (11 page)

ily, before the new government called in the army and, most notoriously,

the Free Corps—right-wing vigilante groups composed largely of former

soldiers and idealistic university students—to bloodily crush them. The

period also saw army and free corps units take on Polish separatists in

Silesia and Posen.131

Many free corps units themselves were invited by nascent repub-

lican governments in the new Baltic states to provide defense against

Forging a Wartime Mentality
55

Bolshevik Russia. The free corps promptly embarked on a barbaric

rampage through the region. They launched their self-styled crusade

partly to salvage “ancestral” German territory from Bolshevism, partly

for land and booty, and partly out of lust for violence and adventure. It is

worth mentioning that the British government, keen to use the free corps

against the Bolsheviks, gave their campaign its tacit approval.132

The conviction that Germany’s very existence was imperiled by infer-

nal forces from within and without, and the savagery of the struggle

against them, constituted a further seminal moment in the formative

development of many of the men who would hold divisional and other

middle-level fi eld commands within the army twenty years later.133 If

anything, the experience may have been even more signifi cant for offi cers

who would go on to command counterinsurgency units during World

War II. For, even more so than the real or imagined franc-tireur threat

that had confronted German troops in Belgium and northern France

during 1914, the left-wing forces whom army and free corps contingents

faced on the streets of Germany between 1918 and 1920 were not just

an irregular opponent, but an ideological one also. A similar process,

albeit less pronounced, may have taken place among offi cers and soldiers

returning to the less severe but still considerable upheaval within Austria

during these years.134

The years between 1914 and 1920, then, did not just harden and radical-

ize the military and political systems within which German and Austrian

offi cers operated. They also infused offi cers themselves with a harsher,

more obdurate mentality. The forces that forged this mentality came on

many fronts. There were the harsh environments, brutal fi ghting, and

often squalid living conditions on the battlefronts themselves, be it the

industrialized war of the western front, the wild war of the eastern front,

the seesawing carnage of the Italian front, or the serial humiliations the

Austro-Hungarians endured against Serbia. War also saw civilians ruth-

lessly instrumentalized across all battlefronts, whether through reprisal

killings, forced labor, scorched earth, or other means.

And on all battlefronts, albeit to varying degrees, brutality against

enemy soldiers or civilians was colored by culture and ideology. This

56
terror in the balk ans

was particularly apparent on the eastern front. It was here that German

and Austrian troops came into contact with groups who, if they were

not already the subject of opprobrium in the run-up to the Great War,

certainly became the subject of it during the war itself—eastern Slavs,

eastern Jews, and Bolsheviks. Finally, the combined effect of all these

forces would coagulate and fl ow into offi cers’ embittered reaction to the

twin traumas of defeat and postwar chaos.

The legacy that resulted was still not enough to ensure that they would

become active and willing agents of National Socialist warfare a quar-

ter of a century later. Quite apart from anything else, the experiences

offi cers underwent during this time were still too varied to make such

a ferocious endpoint inevitable. But this six-year period had certainly

made that outcome more likely. The process was to be completed during

the interwar years and the opening phase of the even more destructive

confl ict that commenced in 1939.

c h a p t e r 3

Bridging Two Hells

The 1920s and 1930s

During the 1920s and early 1930s, neither the German Reichswehr

nor the Austrian
Bundesheer
—the diminished successors to,

respectively, the Imperial German Army and the Austro-Hungarian

Royal-Imperial Army—were ineluctably set on the path that would even-

tually see them commit to the National Socialist cause. But nothing sig-

nifi cant happened during those years to steer them in an ultimately less

disastrous direction. Then, from the mid-1930s onward, the Reichswehr,

then the Bundesheer after it, became ever more entangled with National

Socialism, for the greater part willingly so.1

In Germany the new Weimar Republic, though defended by the army

in its fi rst moment of danger, held little to endear it to the Reichswehr.

Offi cers’ disdain for it was increased by the contempt they themselves

had drawn, as members of the “ruling class,” during the November Rev-

olution that had ushered the republic in. The best most offi cers had to

say about Weimar was that even an unloved democratic republic was

more palatable than a Bolshevik dictatorship.2 And when the republic

had seen fi t to fall back on the soldiers in order to suppress the violent

left-wing threat to its existence, it had been forced to buy the generals’

57

58
terror in the balk ans

support. The price was a promise not to intervene “excessively” in the

Reichswehr’s internal affairs in future.

Thanks to this, the Reichswehr leadership was able to cultivate an

identity separate to, and aloof from, both the German government and

German society. In this cause it turned its truncated size to its advan-

tage; the successor to the old General Staff, the Troops Offi ce, had far

more excuse than its predecessor to be selective in its choice of person-

nel.3 Further, the fact that the government’s hands were tied also enabled

the Troops Offi ce to become experts, albeit only theoretical experts for

the time being, in the business of mass destruction.

More emphasis was placed on intellect than before, but with one pur-

pose in mind. The Troops Offi ce ignored the fundamental strategic rea-

sons why Germany had lost the Great War. Instead, it fi xated itself even

more fi rmly than its predecessor on achieving victory at the operational

and tactical levels.4 The main means of doing so, the Troops Offi ce

believed, was to learn how to harness the new military technologies and

techniques, particularly those relating to air and armored forces, to their

utmost. The fact that both air and armored power were denied to the

Reichswehr by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles was something the

Reichswehr found imaginative ways of circumventing—be it practicing

armored warfare tactics with wooden bicycle-mounted contraptions, or

even furtively visiting the Soviet Union to collaborate clandestinely with

the new Red Army.5 After four years of war followed by crushing defeat,

moreover, the offi cer corps’ mind-set was not just more technocratic than

before. It was also harder, and its threshold for ruthlessness correspond-

ingly lower.6

Offi cers, bar a few fanatics such as those who backed the farcical Kapp

Putsch in 1920,7 did not try to actively undermine the Weimar Repub-

lic during this period. They recognized that, for the moment at least,

it must be tolerated as the only governmental system that could stave

off nationwide chaos. Instead, they immersed themselves collectively in

the business of honing their destructive expertise, and individually in

the business of furthering their careers. Both ambitions, of course, went

hand in hand. The route to success, now more than ever, was to undergo

specialist technical training—and in time, preferably, to impart such

training oneself. Better still would be to attain the kind of appointment

Bridging Two Hells
59

that provided proper expertise in the entire panoply of military plan-

ning and organization. In the days of the old Imperial Army, it was the

General Staff that had best afforded such an opportunity. Now, it was

the new Reichswehr Ministry.8 This agenda would, of course, eventually

dovetail perfectly with National Socialism’s aims for the armed forces.

The Reichswehr’s senior offi cers also hoped they would eventually

be able to assure Germany’s national strength and greatness by wedding

their mastery of technological warfare to the mobilized hearts and minds

of German society, both civilian and military. This was a mobilization

whose absence, they believed, had caused too many Germans to fall vic-

tim to the infl uence of defeatists, pacifi sts, and Bolsheviks during the

Great War. Weimar, they believed—perhaps not unreasonably, given the

republic’s fractious party system and its at best uneven popular appeal—

was incapable either of providing this popular rallying point or of safe-

guarding Germany’s national interests more generally.9

Not all military fi gures were so averse; indeed in 1928 the Defense

Minister, General Groener, sought to reconcile the Reichswehr with the

republic.10 But just one year later, the global economic crisis that followed

the collapse of the New York stock exchange fatally entrenched most

offi cers’ contempt for Weimar. Barely any country was hit harder by the

crisis than Germany. This was a consequence of its massive reliance on

US loans to pay off the war reparations that the Treaty of Versailles, a

treaty with the Weimar Republic’s signature on it, had imposed upon the

country. Now more than ever before, the majority of Reichswehr offi cers

believed that the best route to achieving their goals lay not in the republic

but in an authoritarian, national conservative government.

But in 1933, following the failure of two short-lived national conserva-

tive administrations to govern the country stably in the face of mounting

political chaos, the Reichswehr leadership hit upon a more radical solu-

tion: alliance with the Nazis.11 The Reichswehr gave its tacit approval as

a cabal of arch-conservative politicians prevailed upon the increasingly

doddery State President Hindenburg to award Hitler the chancellorship

in January of that year. Behind the conservatives’ maneuvering was the

tragically misconceived notion of “taming” Hitler once he was in offi ce.

This was the culmination of the economic and political corrosion of the

Weimar Republic that had been set in train when the global economic

60
terror in the balk ans

crisis had broken over Germany. Already the corrosion had resulted in

six million unemployed, the lurch of German politics to extremes of left

and right, and frightening levels of social and political unrest. What fol-

lowed its culmination was, of course, incomparably worse.

The Austrian Bundesheer’s goals during the 1920s and early 1930s were

much more prosaic than the Reichswehr’s. Partly this was because the

old Royal-Imperial Army had not bequeathed a similarly formidable

technocratic tradition to live up to. The more pressing reason was that

the Bundesheer had no practical choice. Any grand ambitions it might

have harbored were scotched by the sobering economic and political

realities of postwar Austria—realities even more sobering than they were

north of the border. Many offi cers, facing a squeeze on their pay and

pensions, also resented the new dwarf republic for material reasons.12

Then, during the 1920s, War Minister Vaugoin of the governing center-

right Christian Social Party weeded out the—not inconsiderable—left-

wing elements within the army. By 1927 at the latest, the Bundesheer was

solidly loyal to the Christian Socials and their coalition partners, but

deeply ambivalent towards the democratic republic as an institution.13

This would of course impact enormously on how it would conduct itself

amid the violent political turmoil that ripped Austria apart during the

early 1930s.

For Austrians, the most catastrophic phase of the global economic cri-

sis, and with it the unfolding political crisis, followed the collapse of the

Vienna Credit Institute in 1931.14 The elections that followed in April 1932

saw a surge in support for the Austrian Nazis similar to that which their

comrades in Germany were then enjoying.15 The Christian Social chan-

cellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was profoundly alarmed at this development.

He saw it as a threat both to Austria’s internal stability and, following the

Nazis’ ascent to power in Germany, to Austria’s national independence.

Dollfuss might have countered the threat by forming an alliance with

the trade unions and the Social Democrats. But the distrust between

socialist left and conservative right, which had been poisoning Austrian

politics since the republic’s founding, prompted Dollfuss to dismiss that

option. Instead, he declared the formation of an Austro-fascist Catholic

Bridging Two Hells
61

“corporate state,” backed by Mussolini’s Italy and led by a new, post-

democratic political organization, the Patriotic Front.