Terror in the Balkans (6 page)

cies, it also conveyed the importance of good character, self-awareness,

and personal responsibility.59 The multiethnic character of the Austro-

Hungarian army, meanwhile, helped its offi cers retain an outlook char-

acterized by open-minded moderation as well as by more reactionary

traits. It would be wrong, therefore, to conclude that a combination of

social and political myopia, narrow technical specialization, and emer-

gent Social Darwinism with all it vicious offshoots was having a uni-

formly nefarious effect upon all offi cers.

Nevertheless, there are many signs that a base of disturbing tenden-

cies was already forming, and on a widespread basis. It would take a new

development, the Great War, to radically harden it.

c h a p t e r 2

Forging a Wartime Mentality

The Impact of World War I

When most of europe went to war in summer 1914, following a

monthlong diplomatic crisis sparked by the assassination of Franz

Ferdinand at the hands of a Bosnian Serb radical, the belief that it would

be a quick, glorious affair was not universal. Certainly, many generals

did not share it. They were cognizant of just how diffi cult the revolution

in defensive fi repower had rendered the business of attack. They were

also cognizant of nations’ capacity to mobilize, fi eld, and equip conscript

armies on a scale so great that it was now infi nitely harder to vanquish

them in one decisive campaign. Moltke was well aware of how protracted,

intense, and perilous to the German Empire’s future the war might well

prove to be.1 Similarly, of the approaching confl agration’s possible impact

upon the Habsburg Empire, Conrad wrote his mistress that “it will be a

hopeless struggle, but nevertheless it must be, because such an ancient

monarchy and such an ancient army cannot perish ingloriously.”2

The Great War and its tumultuous aftermath would provide favor-

able conditions for ruthlessness to fl ourish and for moderation to wither.

The effect should not be exaggerated; the brutalization German and

Austro-Hungarian offi cers underwent did not go unchecked, whether

by the more restrained side of their own mind-set or by the more level-

headed decrees issued by the commands under which they served. And

28

Forging a Wartime Mentality
29

the progression from the brutalizing ordeal they underwent during these

years to the mass violence they helped perpetrate during World War II

was not yet inescapable. But the Great War and its aftermath certainly

made that calamitous endpoint much more likely.

Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, devised a decade before war broke out,

envisioned committing the bulk of the German army to the front in the

west, in a lightning sweep through Belgium and northern France. The

Germans would advance on Paris, with the principal aim of encircling

and destroying the French armies in that swift “battle of annihilation”

of which the German General Staff deemed itself the unrivalled master.

Meanwhile, a small force would be stationed in eastern Prussia to hold

off the slower-to-mobilize Russians, until the German armies in the west

could be sent eastward to settle accounts there. With German armies

thus committed elsewhere, the Austro-Hungarian army was left to fi nish

off Serbia and her diminutive neighboring ally, Montenegro.

Franz Ferdinand had been slain by a Bosnian Serb fanatic with the

connivance of pan-Slavic elements in the Serbian army. Desire to avenge

his murder, and to expunge Slavic nationalism from the Balkans, drove

the Austrian urge for a fi nal reckoning with Serbia. Lieutenant General

von Appel, commander of X Austro-Hungarian Army Corps stationed

in Sarajevo, proclaimed on August 10, 1914:

We not only have to win here but also shatter and destroy the Serbo-

Montenegrin army—this is the carrier of Russian ideas and propa-

ganda. Above all we must thoroughly wean them of their megalomania

and arrogance . . . I have forbidden my offi cers under pain of punish-

ment with loss of honor to treat with Serbian offi cers on an equal foot-

ing . . . If they are captured . . . they are to be treated like common

soldiers . . . for an offi cer corps that takes into its midst foreign deserters

like comrades, tolerates regicide, conspires, and (includes) members of

secret societies deserves no other treatment than captured soldiers.3

It was not just the Serbian army the Austrians faced, however,

but also Serbian irregular fi ghters—men who, to Austrian eyes, were

30
terror in the balk ans

indistinguishable from the bandits who had inhabited the Balkans’

wild, mountainous regions for centuries. The previous chapter pointed

out that the Austro-Hungarians’ aversion to irregular warfare was only

slightly less intense than that of the Germans. And, though there were

limits to how far they were prepared to go in suppressing such resistance,

Austro-Hungarian troops were ready to employ ferocious brutality when

they encountered it.

It was during their fi rst invasion of Serbia, in August 1914, that the Aus-

trians encountered the highest levels of irregular resistance. Some came

from ethnic Serbian saboteurs (
Komitadjis
) within the empire’s own bor-

ders. Some
Komitadjis
, to the Austrians’ horror, were women—a fore-

runner of the armed women (
Flintenweiber
) whose irregular resistance

during World War II would particularly revolt the German army’s sensi-

bilities. Then, once in Serbia, proliferating stories of the enemy’s subter-

fuge and atrociousness, including reports that Austro-Hungarian soldiers

were being mutilated before they were killed, increased the troops’ fear

and revulsion.4 Austro-Hungarian countermeasures were fi erce in the

extreme. General von Appell ordered his offi cers to make their men aware

of “our
moral and numerical superiority
to the point of fanaticism.”5 He

also proclaimed that the war would be a “punishing hand” for the “fanati-

cal” leaders of Serbia, and that it would serve as “atonement for the coun-

try.”6 In a matter of weeks, around thirty-fi ve hundred Serbian civilians

perished in Austro-Hungarian reprisals.7 Many reprisals, usually in the

form of mass public hangings, were directed against the “treasonous”

border peoples within the empire itself.8

Brutal and excessive though it was, there was a context to this blood-

letting. The Serbs themselves, and other Balkan peoples, had been

guilty of considerably worse during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. More-

over, Serbian and Montenegrin troops attacking Sarajevo in August 1914

committed atrocities against Habsburg civilian subjects.9 And the Aus-

trians did not comport themselves as viciously as they might have done.

Though they sometimes threatened to retaliate against Serbian barba-

rism by devastating the country and decimating its population, they

always pulled back from the brink. This was partly out of practicality,

partly because they did not wish to transform the Serbian people into an

avenging horde, and partly because they wanted to retain the moral high

Forging a Wartime Mentality
31

ground in the eyes of domestic and international opinion. This, then,

was never a war of racial extermination, even if ethnic contempt contrib-

uted to it. Rather, it was an old-school imperial-style campaign—albeit

an extremely harsh one—to preserve order.10

Worse was the treatment the Imperial German Army dealt out in its

march through Belgium and northern France during the war’s opening

weeks. Here, German troops overreacted massively to the slightest civil-

ian resistance in the regions of Belgium and northern France through

which they were advancing. Indeed, so edgy were the German troops

that they even blamed cases of friendly fi re on francs-tireurs, and exacted

dreadful retaliation accordingly. Over six thousand French and Belgian

civilians were shot, bayoneted, or burned indiscriminately. This butch-

ery was synthesized with the mass destruction of buildings and prop-

erty. The most infamous instance was the destruction of large parts of

the Belgian university town of Louvain.11

That the Germans lashed out so frequently and ferociously during

the war’s opening weeks was due not just to their embedded hatred of

irregular warfare. It was due also to the fact that the Schlieffen Plan was

deeply fl awed, indeed—it has been widely argued—beyond the German

army’s capabilities.12 Any delay to its completion was bound to frustrate

and alarm both generals and troops. And no delay was bound to incense

them more than delay caused, supposedly or in fact, by civilian resistance.

The German General Staff did not try to clamp down on the troops’

brutality; unsurprisingly, given their traditional view of irregular warfare,

they encouraged it. They also believed it would help forge the obduracy

of spirit they were seeking to instill in their troops in anticipation of an

increasingly likely long war. And just as important to German counterin-

surgency warfare’s future development was the army’s prickly, defensive

reaction to worldwide criticism of the atrocities it had committed. Such

criticism only hardened the army’s already pronounced siege mentality

on the issue and fortifi ed its belief that its actions had been justifi ed.13

The violence also contained a perhaps even more ominous element.

For senior German commanders believed that the French and Belgian

francs-tireurs possessed important attributes in common with some of

the German Empire’s “enemies within.” They were Catholic, working

class, and, like the population of Alsace-Lorraine—provinces France

32
terror in the balk ans

had been forced to cede to Germany in 1871—pro-French.14 How far the

troops themselves were similarly motivated, given that many were them-

selves working class or Catholic, is an entirely different question.15 The

point, however, is that the senior offi cer corps was already advocating a

reprisal policy that fused “security” needs with ideological ones. Target-

ing such groups during the Great War therefore set a sinister precedent.

As with them, so with Communists, Jews, and Sinti and Roma—albeit to

a far more frightful extent—during World War II.

This does not mean that the German army’s brutality in the face of

irregular resistance during World War II was inevitably preprogrammed.

German ferocity towards Belgian and French civilians in 1914 may have

been part of an older tradition. But even with its ideological overtones, it

was still only one precedent for the conduct of later wars. Less uniformly

ferocious, as will be seen, were the Germans’ counterinsurgency oper-

ations in the Ukraine in 1918.16 But developments in later years would

ensure that the Franco-Belgian precedent, with its own roots in the Ger-

man military’s long-standing aversion to irregular warfare, would infl u-

ence the German military considerably during World War II.

It was not only Austrian and German troops who retaliated viciously

against subversion real or imagined. Russian forces horribly maltreated

civilians, particularly Jews, in those border regions of their empire they

deemed of suspect loyalty. They also subjected the population of such

regions to scorched earth actions and mass deportations.17 But the irregu-

lar warfare of 1914 to 1918 would have a signifi cant long-term effect upon the

Austrian and German militaries. For it would harden the equation between

combating insurgents and combating ideological enemies in both militar-

ies’ institutional mind-sets. The line that carried this equation through the

interwar years into the Third Reich would not be continuous, or ineluc-

table.18 But in German counterinsurgency campaigns during World War

II, the equation between armed civilians and ideological enemies would be

resurrected in many offi cers’ minds and shape their methods accordingly.

By autumn 1914 the war was deadlocked, as the combination of defensive

fi repower and mass mobilization checked all attempts to achieve rapid,

Forging a Wartime Mentality
33

decisive victory. Following this came four years of stalemate and slaugh-

ter on all major European battlefronts. The experience marked men in

fundamental ways for decades to come.

Of all the battlefronts on which men fought and died during the Great

War, it is of course the western front in Belgium and northern France

that fi gures most prominently in the Western imagination. Battles like

Verdun, the Somme, and the succession of clashes at Ypres have become

bywords for industrial-scale carnage. It was on the western front that

the greatest number of men perished, in ways refl ecting the new indus-

trialized warfare at its most destructive. Then there were the miserable,

sometimes fatal living conditions soldiers endured day to day.19

But different men responded to the horrors of the western front in dif-

ferent ways. Some, exemplifi ed by Erich Maria Remarque, author of the