Terror in the Balkans (9 page)

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

supply. This was the inevitable result of the Central powers’ material

disadvantage at the war’s start, the privations caused by the British naval

blockade, the ineptitude of German and Austro-Hungarian rationing,

and the two powers’ inability to exploit their occupied territories more

effectively.95 In October 1918 the 11th Austro-Hungarian Infantry Divi-

sion, stationed on the Italian front, issued a directive that is worth citing

at length for the particularly wretched picture it conveys:

The men’s clothing is in many cases in a desolate state; some are

wandering around in tatters. Though divisional command itself rec-

ognizes the current diffi culties, and that quantity and quality of the

available varieties leave a lot to be desired, this cannot be entirely to

blame for the often shameful and sleep-inhibiting state of the men’s

clothing and equipment . . . The division is convinced that many

men are selling or squandering items of clothing . . . It is likely that

uniforms are being worn out because a large portion of the troops are

sleeping fully-clothed at night . . . The men do not undress because

they will freeze during the night, but because they have no blanket

they freeze anyway. But every man is supposed to have a blanket;

whoever does not must have either squandered or sold it, or had it

stolen by another soldier to sell on.96

48
terror in the balk ans

Against this backdrop, a further peril to the discipline of both armies

emerged—the peril of Bolshevism. Even before the Bolsheviks seized

power in Russia in November 1917, the belief that radical revolution-

ary action from below could bring the confl ict to an end was winning

increasing currency across war-weary Europe. Indeed in July the Ger-

man Reichstag, inspired by the Petrograd Soviet’s call for peace “without

annexations or indemnities,” made a similar call itself.97 Anxious, and

not without reason, that Bolshevik-inspired appeals for peace might fur-

ther sap the resolve of soldiers and civilians alike, the high commands of

both the German and Austro-Hungarian armies rapidly came to regard

Bolshevism as a bacillus infecting the war effort.98

After March 1918 the specter of Bolshevism loomed even larger. That

month, in order to end the war and concentrate on defending its pre-

carious hold on power, the new Bolshevik government in Russia fi nally

signed a peace deal with the Central powers at Brest-Litovsk. Hundreds

of thousands of German troops, hitherto serving in the East, were now

transferred to the western front. Many had fallen under the infl uence

of left-wing ideas, if not always undilutedly Bolshevik ones, follow-

ing extensive fraternization with Russian troops.99 Similar numbers of

Habsburg POWs returned from Russian prison camps and were reinte-

grated into the Austro-Hungarian army. The army leadership, already

facing acute morale problems amongst soldiers from the empire’s subject

peoples, believed that many returning POWs had become infected with

Bolshevik sentiment. Ironically, even where they were not infected—as

was probably the case with the majority—the intrusive “screening pro-

cess” to which they were subjected served to further embitter many of

them against army, regime, and war in any case.100

During the months following the Russian Revolution, the Russian

Bolsheviks sought, with extreme ruthlessness, to suppress all internal

opposition real or imagined. Due to this, and to the savage civil war it

waged with anti-Bolshevik forces across Russia, Bolshevism came to be

widely seen as a harbinger of violence, chaos, and social and political

collapse. It also came to be associated with the Slavic East, wherefrom

revolution had fi rst emerged.

The most immediate brutalizing effect upon German and Austrian

soldiers was seen among the troops assigned to the occupied East. In

Forging a Wartime Mentality
49

the Ukraine, for instance, the Central powers propped up a succession

of non-Bolshevik governments throughout 1918, while seeking to exploit

the region for its grain and economic resources. Bolsheviks and other

radical groups sought to destabilize both the native government and the

foreign occupation regime, and desperate bands marauded the coun-

tryside for food. Both occupying powers responded with the severest

repression. The Bavarian Cavalry Division, for instance, took no prison-

ers in its fi ghting against the Bolsheviks. In Taganrog in June 1918 the

52d Württemberg Brigade killed twenty-fi ve hundred prisoners, includ-

ing not just Bolsheviks, but also civilians, women and children included,

from the surrounding area.101 That said, the Central powers’ response

to the insurgency was not one of unbridled and unprovoked brutality.

German forces in particular, their Austrian comrades more belatedly,

increasingly sought to differentiate between insurgents in particular and

the population generally. Nor should it be forgotten that the Bolsheviks’

own methods could be immensely brutal, even though they did not mor-

ally justify the retaliatory killing of women and children.102