Terror in the Balkans (7 page)

best-selling 1929 antiwar novel
All Quiet on the Western Front
, went on to

embrace pacifi sm. But men like Ernst Jünger—whose bellicose memoir

of life as an assault troops offi cer,
Storm of Steel
, gained similar levels of

recognition—recalled the experience with a visceral thrill. In one pas-

sage Jünger described how:

the turmoil of our feelings was called forth by rage, alcohol and the

thirst for blood . . . As we advanced heavily but irresistibly toward

the enemy lines, I was boiling over with a fury which gripped me—it

gripped us all—in an inexplicable way. The overpowering desire to

kill gave me wings. Rage squeezed bitter tears from my eyes . . . Only

the spell of primeval instinct remained.20

One extract does not do justice to the complexity of Jünger’s many-

faceted character over the course of his life. But it does encapsulate the

way in which many young German offi cers imbibed the experience of the

western front. In time, many men of a similar outlook to Jünger would

become infused with the Social Darwinist belief that the western front

was the ultimate test of men’s ability to survive. And that, in surviving,

they had demonstrated such strength, endurance, and resourcefulness

that they constituted nothing less than a new, superior breed of man.

Wedded to this belief was their considerable lust for violence.

34
terror in the balk ans

Yet there was another counterpoint, more commonplace than

Remarque’s eloquent pacifi sm, to the fanaticism of Jünger and his ilk.

Most German soldiers may not have been turned against war in all its

forms by their experience of the western front, but there is ample evi-

dence that many failed to embrace war anything like as enthusiastically

as Jünger did.21 They also often regarded the enemy not through the

red mist of battle, but with a fraternal feeling for comrades-in-suffering.

Fraternization with the enemy on static sectors of the front alarmed high

commands in all armies. Never more so was this the case than when

fraternization took the form of “live and let live” arrangements, such as

reciprocal warning of impending artillery bombardments.22 In Novem-

ber 1915, for instance, I Bavarian Army Corps reported that “there have

lately been further cases of forbidden dealings with the enemy. The

guilty will be punished severely.”23

It should also be recognized that life on the western front was not one

of unremitting horror in any case. Had it been, it is doubtful that many

soldiers could have withstood it. Considerable time was spent out of the

trenches, be it for rest and refi tting or for rear area duties such as road-

clearing and requisitioning. None of this detracts from the hellish ordeal

which soldiers serving in the trenches endured. But it does demonstrate

that the western front was a many-sided experience.24 All told, then, it

would be too simple to assume that German army offi cers fi ghting in

World War II were irrevocably, brutalizingly scarred by what they had

experienced on the western front during the Great War.25

The experience of other fronts, and its brutalizing effect upon the men

involved, have received considerably less attention from Western his-

torians. Just as on the western front, that effect was not always as uni-

formly, durably malign as one might expect. Yet malign to a great extent

it certainly was, and the immediate and longer-term impact upon offi cers

could be profound indeed.

In the Balkans, all three Austro-Hungarian attempts to vanquish Ser-

bia in 1914—in August, September, and December—were humiliatingly

routed by the Serbian army. The spectacle was conveyed by the journal-

ist Egon Erwin Kisch: “the fl ight had begun and swept us further on. A

Forging a Wartime Mentality
35

routed army—no, an unrestrained horde ran in senseless fright back to

the border. Coach drivers whipped their horses, cannon drivers spurred

and hit theirs, offi cers and men pushed forward and slithered between

the wagon columns or trudged in road ditches.”26 The scapegoat for all

this was the army’s “disloyal” Czech troops. The immediate culprits,

however, were primarily General Conrad, whose plan to split his already

defi cient forces against Russia and Serbia was thoroughly unrealistic, and

theater commander General Potiorek, whose cack-handed performance

as commander of the Austro-Hungarian invasion guaranteed ignomini-

ous failure even more surely. More fundamentally, these disasters were

the legacy of decades of atrophy brought about by chronic underfund-

ing and stultifying institutional conservatism.27 In turn, the campaigns

heaped further humiliation upon the Habsburg Empire.

Only with substantial help from Germany, together with new ally

Bulgaria, did the Austrians fi nally crush Serbia in autumn 1915, before

carving up its territory with the Bulgarians. And even then, the escape of

the Serbian army through the mountains to the coast, taking with it tens

of thousands of Austro-Hungarian prisoners on a winter death march,

could only stoke Austrian hatred further. The conditions of the march,

culminating in an Allied naval evacuation to Italy, are described in a

letter from a captured Austro-Hungarian medical offi cer caught up in it:

(October 1915) . . . And so we marched two days to Prizrend [
sic
:

probably Prizren in Kosovo]. Here the conditions deteriorated; we

were assigned to the combat offi cer prisoners. Each of the offi cers

had to carry his own baggage, and we received something to eat plus

bread only once a day, and that only in principle, and it got worse.

From Prizren to Dobra we marched across Albania; the weather was

terrible: wind and rain, we were soaked every day, and were unable

to sleep for cold. Sometimes we stayed around the fi re to sleep in a

sitting position. Many offi cers’ boots wore out, and they had to con-

tinue walking barefoot. At Dobra there was nothing to buy but dried

chestnuts, which was all we had to eat one day.28

At Valona, their destination on the coast, they fi nally received enough

to eat. Even so, “you can imagine that if our offi cers suffered like this,

36
terror in the balk ans

how badly the poor soldier prisoners fared. The route was strewn with

the bodies of prisoners who died of cold and hunger . . . We have nothing

left, everything is ruined.”29

The fl ight, largely intact, of the Serbian army into Allied territory

soon created a focal point for deserters from the southern Slavic units

of the Austro-Hungarian army. Indeed, desertion would in time become

endemic among troops from all the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s subject

peoples, as the empire found itself mired in an increasingly unwinna-

ble struggle that devastated its economy and stoked its subject peoples’

desire for peace and independence. This desire, and the epidemic deser-

tion it increasingly spawned, would be exploited by Allied propaganda

to great effect.30 In September 1918, fi nally, the Serbian army would be

instrumental in breaking the Macedonian Front—the key military event

that heralded the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s complete collapse.31

All this—the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the atrocities of Ser-

bian irregulars, the military humiliations of 1914, the death march of

1915, the corrosive effect the Serbian army’s survival continued to have

upon morale within the Austro-Hungarian army, and the Serbian army’s

direct role in the empire’s disintegration in autumn 1918—made it pos-

sible for Wehrmacht commanders to stir Austrian hatred and resentment

of the Serbs during World War II.32

Yet here too, it would be wrong to imagine that there was an enduring

thread of continuity between the incubation of hatred in one war and

its murderous channeling in the next. Serbia suffered terrible privations

throughout the war, with a worse loss of life per head of population than

any other combatant nation. As well as the 275,000 men lost in battle,

eight hundred thousand civilians perished from diseases born of war-

time privations. 33 And the occupation regime the Austrians imposed

had a fearful impact upon the Serbian population. Much of the coun-

try’s economic resources were ransacked, its menfolk were deported for

labor in the empire, and its intelligentsia were imprisoned.34 Neverthe-

less, Habsburg occupation in Serbia was less piratical and oppressive

than it might have been. For the Austrians did not seek systematically

to ethnically cleanse the Serbian people. Their aims were akin instead

to those of nineteenth-century imperialism, seeking to subject Serbia to

absolutism and decisively weaken the foundations of nationalism within

Forging a Wartime Mentality
37

the country.35 In 1917, they suppressed a Serbian uprising with consider-

ably less indiscriminate severity than they might have done.36 Overall,

Austria-Hungary’s occupation of Serbia was less vicious than Bulgar-

ia’s.37 More needed to happen during the decades that followed, then,

to ensure that it was the hateful precedent of 1914–1915, not the some-

what less hateful one of 1916–1918, that would hold greatest sway over

Austrian-born offi cers’ behavior in Yugoslavia during World War II.

Another theater in which the Austro-Hungarian army saw action—one

that, like the western front, was marked by arduous conditions, and by

grueling stalemate interspersed with ruinously costly offensives by both

sides—was the Italian front.38 This theater came into being after Italy

entered the war on the Allied side in May 1915. Much of the fi ghting took

place amid terrain that was unforgiving in the extreme, such as the tow-

ering Dolomites or the harsh, otherworldly terrain of the Carso plateau.39

Actual fi ghting, when it came, was as pitiless as anything on the western

front. Captain Abel, an offi cer of the Austro-Hungarian army, wrote:

The incoming shells are visible to the naked eye; they look like black

sausages. If their effect were not so terrible, the sight of Carso veter-

ans leaping this way and that to avoid the shells would be ridiculous.

Not realizing that they must dodge the shells, many of the newcom-

ers are blown up. As soon as the bombardment ends, the Italians

rush out of their advance positions—usually very close to our front

line—and jump into our trenches.40

Disease was a further cross to bear, particularly later in the war as

mounting food shortages sapped the troops’ physical and psychologi-

cal strength.41 In spring 1917 the Austro-Hungarian 43d Rifl e Division,

among whose offi cers was a future regimental commander in Yugoslavia,

Adalbert Lontschar, was assailed with malaria. Matters were not helped

by the almost simultaneous conviction of one of the division’s staff doc-

tors, Doctor Popper, for theft.42 At the beginning of August 1918 the

Austro-Hungarian 87th Infantry Regiment—home to a future divisional

commander in Yugoslavia, Karl Eglseer—was assailed likewise.43

38
terror in the balk ans

The bitterness of the “White War,” as the historian Mark Thompson

aptly titles it,44 also possessed a darker impulse, national and cultural in

character. Many Austrian offi cers shared General Conrad’s excoriating

assessment of the Italians as the “congenital enemy.” This animus had

originated in the Wars of Italian Unifi cation during the nineteenth cen-

tury. It resurged when fi rst Italy refused to enter the Great War on the

side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, its partners in the so-called Triple

Alliance, in summer 1914, and then entered the war on the opposite side

the following spring.45 It fi rst manifested itself during the Great War when

Austro-Hungarian combat aircraft bombarded Venice, then as now one

of Italy’s most important historical and cultural centers. The historian

Alan Kramer likens such actions to the warfare of cultural destruction the

Germans perpetrated when they torched the university library in Lou-

vain.46 Italian civilians, such as those who found themselves under fi re

from Austro-Hungarian and German artillery at the Battle of Caporetto

in 1917, also felt the impact of the Austrians’ bitter resolve.47

Italian POWs suffered also. Admittedly, this was largely due to gen-

eral wartime privations, brought about by British naval blockade and by

the Central powers’ often inept “system” of rationing.48 But not entirely.

For instance, while captive Italian offi cers need not have expected condi-

tions as wretched as their men’s, they were still the subject of their cap-

tors’ detestation. Thus, for instance, decreed the rear area command of

the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army in August 1915:

This state [Italy] benefi ted greatly from our alliance; as an alliance

partner, she treacherously stabbed us in the back . . . It is forbid-

den therefore to engage [captured Italian offi cers] in normal social

interaction such as the shaking of hands or general conversation. By

this treatment, captured Italian offi cers must be made to realize that