Terror in the Balkans (74 page)

doubt that the region’s social and economic backwardness, and its mind-

numbing size, often made a profoundly negative impression upon Ger-

man and Austrian troops.

This impression grew stronger the further the two armies advanced

into the territory of the Russian Empire. Crossing into the East, a Ger-

man military offi cial noted, “I have never seen a border like this, which

divided not just two states, but two worlds. As far as the eye could see,

nothing but a scene of poverty and
Unkultur
, impossible roads, poor vil-

lages and neglected huts and a dirty, ragged population with primitive

fi eld agriculture, a total opposite of the blooming German landscape in

neighboring Upper Silesia.”59

The East’s scarcely conceivable distances and rudimentary road net-

work also made it considerably harder to supply the troops.60 The men

of the Austro-Hungarian 57th Infantry Division, in an army whose supply

capabilities were found severely wanting in any case,61 were complain-

ing about supply as early as August 4, 1914.62 Under these conditions,

disease was an ever present danger. Among the German army, there were

2.8 sick cases for every one wounded man in the West as against 3.7 sick

cases for each wounded man in the East.63 Indeed, lack of hygiene and the

consequent fear of contamination were recurrent themes in accounts of

life on the eastern front by all levels of German and Austrian personnel.64

The III Austro-Hungarian Army Corps was alarmed at the possibility of

a cholera outbreak among its men as early as October 1914.65 In January

1915 Adalbert Lontschar’s 43d Austro-Hungarian Rifl e Division urged its

troops to drink boiled water so as to avoid not just cholera, but typhus

and dysentery also.66 Austro-Hungarian XVII Army Corps, which among

its formations counted the 11th Field Artillery Brigade—with which Wal-

ter Hinghofer, a future divisional commander in Yugoslavia, was serv-

ing as a staff offi cer—was blighted by something approaching the Seven

Plagues. Among other things, it faced a cholera alarm in August 1915,67

Forging a Wartime Mentality
43

put an entire settlement off-limits when it was hit by typhus in February

1916,68 and was harried by a visitation of fl ies in April 1917.69

German soldiers in particular often extended their disdain at the

region’s backwardness to its Slavic population also.70 At the Great War’s

start, the German government had some trouble stoking up anti-Russian

sentiment among the troops; it had after all been a quarrel involving Rus-

sia and Austria-Hungary, not Germany, that had precipitated the entire

confl agration in the fi rst place. But Russia’s brief, unsuccessful invasion

of eastern Prussia in August 1914 presented German propagandists with

a great opportunity.71

The Russians did not comport themselves like a barbarian horde dur-

ing this short-lived onslaught. They did, however, plunder and destroy

property, and sometimes kill civilians.72 This was nothing the Germans

themselves were not doing in the West, and on a larger and more system-

atic scale. And there are balanced contemporary German accounts of

the invasion acknowledging that many Russian troops behaved correctly

during its course.73 But for many German soldiers already weaned on a

measure of anti-Slavism, such brutality as the Russians did deal out in

eastern Prussia, together with German propaganda’s exploitation of it,

seemed to confi rm age-old prejudices about the barbaric East. Thus, for

instance, did Gottard Heinrici, who would go on to serve as a senior fi eld

commander during World War II, accuse the Russians of perpetrating

acts of “blind destruction and mindless annihilation of a kind we never

would have thought possible.”74

Perceptions of the “Wild East” became further embedded for German

and Austrian troops as the war continued. On November 27, 1914, troops

of the Austro-Hungarian III Army Corps, to which Karl Eglseer’s 87th

Infantry Regiment was subordinate, stumbled upon the bodies of muti-

lated Austro-Hungarian soldiers in a recently reoccupied village. The

Russian troops they had been facing had been Kalmuks from Siberia.75

In January 1915 the 43d Rifl e Division uncovered cases of captured or

wounded Austro-Hungarian soldiers being “mutilated and murdered in

a bestial manner by Russian soldiers.” This time the perpetrators com-

prised Circassian and Siberian irregulars in part, but also regular Rus-

sian troops. It was also alleged, on the basis of statements by Russian

44
terror in the balk ans

prisoners of war, that Habsburg offi cers in Russian captivity had been

brutally mistreated.76

Incidents like these, and the sentiments they engendered or strength-

ened, were hardly going to improve relations between advancing Ger-

man and Austro-Hungarian troops and the eastern Slavic peoples they

were encountering. Nor was the fact that the troops detected “danger-

ous” levels of Russophile sympathy amongst those peoples. Indeed, they

detected it among peoples living within those easternmost reaches of the

Habsburg Empire through which they marched, as well as those living

within enemy territory.77

Nevertheless, higher-level Habsburg formations did seek to avoid

antagonizing the population without reason. They strove instead to

ensure that their troops regard the population with a discriminating eye.

Such, for instance, were commands issued by Lieutenant General Szur-

may’s corps, to which Adalbert Lontschar’s 24th Infantry Regiment was

subordinate, in June 1915. Szurmay’s orders to tighten security included

making village headmen responsible for order with their lives, but they

did not include taking hostages. This, Szurmay believed, would be

“pointless, and potentially harmful to the innocent.”78 Szurmay inter-

vened against excessive harshness in a further directive around the same

time: “Not cruelty, but fair and considerate strictness in the handling of

penal and preventative measures, guarantees success without embitter-

ing a population well-disposed towards the Crown.”79

Yet Szurmay’s moderation had its limits. For he was concerned here

to restrain brutality against the empire’s own eastern Slavic subjects; he

imposed fewer such restraints once his troops were in enemy territory

proper. Here, fear of spies and saboteurs, and of the civilians who might

be aiding and abetting them, increased markedly. In February 1916, Aus-

tro-Hungarian XVII Corps reported sightings of explosives-armed Rus-

sians seeking to destroy railway lines. These Russians, it alleged, had

come from a school in Kiev that had been training men and women in

explosives techniques before sending them into Austrian-occupied terri-

tory.80 That same month, on the strength of a warning in Polish pinned

to a telegraph pole, XVII Corps reported with alarm the presence of

twenty-fi ve Cossacks, mostly dressed in Austro-Hungarian uniforms.

These, it announced, had been roaming the villages, collecting bread,

Forging a Wartime Mentality
45

hay, and oats, together with information on Austrian troop dispositions,

from the population.81 Of course, civilian subterfuge was something

with which troops on other fronts had to contend also. But on the eastern

front, it could exacerbate racial prejudice that was already there.

Yet these cases remind one that, harsh though the Austro-Hungarian

army’s conduct could be, it was not waging a racial war in the East any

more than in the Balkans. The same could be said, broadly, of the Ger-

man army. Indeed, many ordinary soldiers left more positive accounts

of the peoples they encountered on the eastern front. They often, for

instance, eulogized the colorful appearance, pretty girls, and idyllic

peasant lifestyle of rural Poland and the Ukraine.82 But the harshness

both armies nonetheless practiced was doubtless nourished further by

embedded prejudice towards the Slavs, just as it was by the arduous con-

ditions soldiers in the East had to endure.

The Great War was also a war that, more than any other before, impacted

directly upon civilians as well as combatants. Nowhere was this clearer

than in the realms of economic procurement and production. On the

side of the Central powers, so severe did the resource shortfall against

the Allies become that labor, foodstuffs, and other economic materials

from occupied Europe became increasingly crucial. Indeed, advancing

German and Austro-Hungarian troops were expected to live off the land

from the war’s fi rst weeks. In the West, for example, II Bavarian Army

Corps ordered its troops at the end of September 1914 to “obtain sup-

plies in enemy territory with all means.”83 In February 1915 I Bavarian

Army Corps reminded its men that “mildness towards the inhabitants

is harshness against our Fatherland.”84 Belgium and northern France

would suffer dreadfully from German depredations, particularly when

large tracts of their territory were laid to waste by withdrawing or retreat-

ing German troops during 1917 and 1918.85

In the occupied East, meanwhile, the Germans not only exploited

labor and food, but also waged an ideological campaign to “civilize”

these “backward” regions to German standards. This was not a blue-

print for later Nazi schemes; it was, after all, accompanied by degrees

of restraint and cultivation the Nazis never practiced.86 Even so, the

46
terror in the balk ans

German occupiers still viewed the region as racially and culturally infe-

rior. Civilians were subjected to profoundly demeaning treatment. More

fundamentally, the region fell prey to a campaign of economic exploita-

tion in some ways even more ruthless than the one in the West.87

All this was intrinsic to a new kind of warfare that instrumentalized

civilians like never before. It also included the terroristic killing of civil-

ians that had taken place in the war’s opening weeks. “Necessary” harsh-

ness towards civilians was another facet of the Great War that impressed

itself upon many offi cers.88

But while systematized exploitation was desired, wild exploitation—

the kind that threatened the troops’ discipline and longer-term inter-

ests—emphatically was not. In time, the subject of military discipline

within both the German and Austro-Hungarian armies during the Great

War would become of great interest to the German army under the Third

Reich. For the army would come to believe that it was the steady erosion

of that discipline that had sapped the troops’ fi ghting power and made

them more susceptible to the “pernicious” ideology of Bolshevism.

Discipline problems became apparent at the very outset of the cam-

paigns in both East and West. In late August 1914 II Bavarian Army

Corps, embroiled in fi ghting on the Franco-German border, reported

that “(despite) the instructions issued in the Corps command of

8/22/14, there are still cases of the rough seizure of inhabitants’ private

property. The men are to be repeatedly instructed that every unauthor-

ized seizure . . . is to be regarded as
plunder
and, in accordance with

judicial military regulations, punished with imprisonment of at least 43

days.”89 In the East, Austro-Hungarian III Corps reported in Septem-

ber of the same year that “lone soldiers, excluded from all regular sup-

ply and mostly without or with only very little in the way of cash, have

begun to maraud, indeed plunder, and therefore constitute an acute

danger to discipline.”90

By 1916, indiscipline was affecting the troops’ general morale, fi ght-

ing spirit, and respect for superiors. This was a portent of the increas-

ingly widespread erosion of discipline that would affl ict the Central

powers’ armies during the war’s fi nal year. By August 1916 I Bavarian

Army Corps was describing how “on numerous trips within the corps

area, defi cient posture, dishevelled dress and poor acknowledgement of

Forging a Wartime Mentality
47

superiors became increasingly apparent in the troops marching along

the roads.”91 Matters were worse just months later, when in December

II Bavarian Army Corps reported mounting cases of self-mutilation.92

“The robustness of the offi cers and men has left much to be desired in

recent times,” the commander of the 11th Austro-Hungarian Field Artil-

lery Brigade, with which Walter Hinghofer was serving, declared in

December 1917. “I make all regimental commanders personally respon-

sible for raising military spirit in all our batteries.”93 Indiscipline also

made itself felt in other forms; on the Italian front in May 1918, the 14th

Austro-Hungarian Infantry Regiment gave vent to its desperation at the

rising incidence of venereal disease. “The men are to be strenuously

reminded,” the regiment directed, “that contracting such diseases is

punishable, for it is due to this that men have to withdraw from war

service for a long period.”94

One reason why discipline was deteriorating was increasing lack of