Terror in the Balkans (76 page)

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-

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-