Terror in the Balkans (70 page)

Also widespread across society, and likewise insinuating itself into both

offi cer corps, was anti-Slavism. The pre–Great War anti-Slavism of the

imperial German offi cer corps was particularly directed against “the

East.” This is not surprising; it was founded both in centuries-old Rus-

sophobia, common to the West generally, and in notions of Germany’s

“moral mission” to civilize its backward, inferior eastern neighbors.28

Such notions had grown stronger since the demise of the independent

Kingdom of Poland and the infl ux of millions of Poles into the eastern

provinces of Prussia itself.29 Anti-Slavism grew stronger still in reaction

to the expansionist pan-Slavic ideology that increasingly animated the

foreign policy of Tsarist Russia, particularly over the Balkans, in the

years up to 1914.30

In the German offi cer corps, anti-Slavic views went to the top. In

February 1913 Hellmuth von Moltke, chief of the German General Staff,

opined to his Austro-Hungarian opposite number, Conrad, that any

future war would be “a struggle between Slavs and Teutons” for the

preservation of “Germanic culture.”31 Conrad dismissed talk of a race

war, reminding Moltke that Slavs comprised 47 percent of the Habsburg

Empire’s population.32 But six months on Moltke remained stuck in the

same groove, asserting to Conrad that the European war would come

“sooner or later,” and that it would be “primarily a struggle between

Germans and Slavs.”33

Yet though the Pan-Germans were strongly anti-Slavic, there were

other educated bourgeois German circles, circles from which ever more

offi cers were now being drawn, that harbored a different attitude. This

attitude, condescending though it was, did acknowledge Russia’s contri-

bution to the cultural and intellectual life of Europe. At any rate, it was

an attitude certainly more favorable than Moltke’s stance.34 True, new

offi cers harboring such sentiments may well have found them stifl ed fol-

lowing their admission into the offi cer corps. But this did not mean they

were going to automatically convert to Moltke’s strident anti-Slavism.

The extent of such anti-Slavism within the German offi cer corps as a

whole, then, should not be overstated.

General Conrad, for his part, was not best-placed to rebuke his Ger-

man counterpart for anti-Slavism. When he recalled his tour of duty fi ght-

ing Slavic irregulars in Habsburg-occupied Bosnia between 1878 and

Before the Great War
21

1882, he railed against their “cruelty,” “bestiality,” and “bloodlust.”35 By

the early twentieth century, growing numbers of ethnic Germans within

the Habsburg Empire would have sympathized. This was down partly

to the advent of biologically based racism during the 1870s and 1880s. It

was also down partly, especially after universal suffrage was introduced

in 1907, to Pan-Germanism’s swelling political mobilization in the face

of what many Austrians perceived as “Slav encroachment and Jewish

emancipation.”36 But probably the most powerful source of burgeoning

anti-Slavism within the empire, and ultimately the most cataclysmic, was

the empire’s confrontation with Serbia.

During the decade before the Great War, Serbia became a signifi cant

Balkan power and an increasingly anti-Habsburg one. In particular, the

Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 enabled it to expand its territory considerably.

Consequently, pan-Slavists in both Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian

Empire regarded one another with growing interest. Eventually, the

idea of unifying Serbia with the southern Slavic peoples of the empire—

something that would, of course, be fatal to the empire’s future—began

taking root.37 Unsurprisingly, those years saw Austrian journalists

take an increasingly bellicose line against Serbia; Leopold Mandl, for

instance, wrote of the “Austro-phobic putrefaction in the nation” that

was the foundation of Serbian foreign policy, and warned that Serbia’s

goal was “the liberation and reunifi cation of all lands that are inhabited

by Serbs”—including those within the Habsburg Empire itself.38 In

1908, Austria-Hungary almost went to war with Serbia, and Serbia’s ally

Russia, over the surprise Habsburg annexation of Bosnia. And just as

some offi cers saw the apparently imminent confl agration as a conven-

tional battle between states, others viewed it as a battle between superior

Germans and inferior Slavs.39

Yet while fear of Serbia and Russia as hostile states was strong, racial

contempt for Slavs in the “modern” biological sense did not affect the

army’s outlook or policy, or its offi cers’ behavior. Indeed, as Conrad

indicated in his exchanges with Moltke, generic anti-Slavism was hardly

a viable policy for an empire that encompassed such a voluminous num-

ber of Slavs itself—not least among the rank and fi le of its own army.

So numerous were the army’s Slavic troops that the need for a tolerant,

understanding attitude on the part of the army’s predominantly German

22
terror in the balk ans

offi cer corps was clearly a given. Army doctrine encouraged it, Franz

Josef himself demanded it, and the vast majority of Habsburg offi cers

practiced it.

Conrad himself was an avowed Social Darwinist—a worldview that sig-

nifi cant numbers of offi cers seem, at least at fi rst sight, to have shared.40

But Conrad’s brand of Social Darwinism thought in terms of strong

and weak states rather than strong and weak races. He believed that the

Habsburg Empire, were it to survive, must reinvigorate itself with a pro-

active, aggressive foreign policy against its principal foreign enemies.

These enemies, in Conrad’s view, were Italy—despite the fact that Italy

and Austria-Hungary were offi cially in alliance—and of course Serbia.

Such a policy, Conrad argued, would strengthen the monarchy not just

against external enemies, but also against the corrosive effects of ethnic

nationalism within the empire. He accordingly promoted it with tireless

energy. The historian Holger Herwig writes:

A glance at Conrad’s outpourings during the seven years before 1914

provides insight into his fertile mind. In 1907 Conrad demanded

war against “Austria’s congenital foes” Italy and Serbia; the next

year versus Russia, Serbia, and Italy. In 1909 he counselled military

action against Serbia and Montenegro; in 1910 against Italy; and in

1911 versus Italy, Serbia, and Montenegro. The year 1912 saw con-

centration on the struggle against Russia and Serbia. The next year

was especially productive, with military studies readied for con-

fl icts with Albania, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, and even Russian

Poland. The fi nal six months of peace in 1914 saw renewed plans ver-

sus Montenegro, Romania, Russia, and Serbia. Each of these years

also brought contingency plans against numerous combinations of

the above-named powers.41

Even though Conrad’s Social Darwinism was national rather than

biological in character, then, the resulting policy was profoundly belli-

cose. Such a policy could only be credible, of course, with an army capa-

ble of executing it. Conrad tried to get round the lack of resources the

Before the Great War
23

army’s fi nancial straitjacket imposed, by making the bulk of the army’s

combat manpower—the infantry—as tough and offensive-minded as

possible. Extreme infantry training ensured that Conrad’s Social Dar-

winism impacted directly upon the army’s soldiers, as well as upon the

foreign and military policy for they were intended to promote. The war

games of Conrad’s revamped infantry maneuvers awarded the greatest

number of points to those units that advanced farthest and seized the

greatest number of objectives. This ignored the fact that the revolution-

ary development of defensive fi repower would, come actual war, render

such rapid advances impossible. The maneuvers also took the cultiva-

tion of strength and the purging of weakness to drastic lengths; so enor-

mous were the distances soldiers were now expected to march that some

died from heat exhaustion.42 The hardening psychological effect upon

the offi cers who underwent and survived this ordeal was likely to make

itself felt in future years.

But even the Social Darwinism of Conrad’s harsh training regime and

the transformation in military spirit it was designed to generate were not

omnipotent within the Habsburg offi ce corps. They came up against

the entrenched “aristocratic conservatism” that still characterized army

culture. Many senior offi cers, at least, shared the mutaphobic stance of

the emperor and the inspector general of the army, and this hindered

Conrad’s “fresh, radical” approach.43 The impact of Conrad’s Social

Darwinism may also have been limited because even many of the offi cers

who were infl uenced by it may have viewed it not so much as a radical

departure, than as a rebranded justifi cation of imperial expansion and

the old hierarchical system.44

Social Darwinism within the German offi cer corps enjoyed a much

more lethal outlet—Germany’s colonial wars against “inferior” peoples

in Africa and Asia. The worst example was the Germans’ particularly

savage suppression of the Herero Rebellion in German Southwest Africa

in 1904–1905.45 The extent to which German soldiers’ experience of colo-

nial campaigns further brutalized the imperial German military mind-

set should not be overstated. The number of troops serving in these

campaigns was self-selecting and very small;46 among other things, it

24
terror in the balk ans

included none of the German-born offi cers featured in this study. But the

army’s conduct of colonial campaigns was not a fringe issue; it fi gured

prominently, for example, in the 1907 elections for the German parlia-

ment. Defenders of the army’s conduct depicted it as a national security

issue, and so embedded was military culture in middle-class German

circles that politicians from many points of the political spectrum sup-

ported the troops unreservedly.47

Such clamorous approval could only strengthen the German mili-

tary’s hard-line stance on colonial suppression. But such a stance had a

strong base within the German military already. For the ferocity of Ger-

man colonial warfare was not just a product of Social Darwinist racism.

These were wars in which the Germans were fi ghting not conventional

troops, but armed irregulars. The revulsion with which the Imperial

German Army regarded such opponents surpassed that exhibited by

any other regular army during the decades before 1914. Identifying how

durably the army’s abhorrence affected the German military mind-set

is important to understanding what shaped its conduct of counterinsur-

gency during World War II. This is an ideal point at which to consider

how such abhorrence came about.48

The waging of ruthless counterinsurgency colonial warfare, suffused

by racist thinking, was far from unique to the German military during

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Armies of all the major

European colonial powers, and of the United States, waged successive

counterinsurgency campaigns during the decades before 1914, usually

against indigenous peoples resisting imperial rule. Such campaigns usu-

ally demanded the type of fi ghting, amid the kinds of conditions, for

which conventional troops were not traditionally prepared. The conven-

tional troops ordered to contend with all this were liable to lash out ruth-

lessly against civilians. This might be out of hatred and distrust, desire to

somehow compensate for their own shortcomings, pressure from above

for results, or brutalizing fear and frustration. The troops’ brutality was

also fueled—barring exceptions such as the British campaign against the

white Boers in southern Africa between 1899 and 1902—by the racism of

the period. Put simply, white soldiers who had imbibed racist attitudes

Before the Great War
25

found it easier to kill noncombatants of a darker skin color, and their

commanders usually stood ready to encourage them.

Yet the early decades of the twentieth century brought signs that some

armies, at least, were beginning to appreciate the benefi ts of hearts-and-

minds measures to counterinsurgency. Behind this was a dawning real-

ization that active support, or at least passive cooperation, could make

mounting a successful counterinsurgency campaign considerably easier.

It might even be crucial to that campaign’s success. Measured treatment

of insurgent deserters and prisoners, widespread use of propaganda,

and, perhaps most importantly, social and economic measures of practi-

cal benefi t to the population all rendered valuable service in this cause.49

But the German military—some saner heads aside—largely failed to

properly appreciate this approach. The corrosive infl uence of its own

particularly harsh counterinsurgency history proved too strong. In

Clausewitz, the doyen of Prussian military thinkers, the German mili-