Terror in the Balkans (75 page)

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

Bolshevism also came to be associated, due to the ethnic background

of many leading Bolsheviks, with Jews.103 Major Bothmer, a German offi -

cer stationed in Russia in 1918, vilifi ed the Jews as the source of all Bol-

shevik infection there. His diary ghoulishly detailed how he would “just

love to see a few hundred of these Jew-boys strung up from the walls of

the Kremlin, dying as slowly as possible so as to enhance the effect.”104

But the Great War was nourishing anti-Semitism well before the Revo-

lution. One reason for this was the troops’ encounters with eastern Jews.

This was a people whose alien appearance and customs could affront

even an assimilated German Jew such as Victor Klemperer. Klemperer

described how a visit to a Talmud school in 1918 had “repelled me as if

with fi sts,” for the “swirl of people” in these rooms at prayer or recitation

of holy texts represented for Klemperer “repellent fanaticism . . . No,

I did not belong to these people, even if one proved my blood relation

to them a hundred times over . . . I belonged to Europe, to Germany,

and I thanked my creator that I was a German.”105 Such views were far

from universal; other commentators, such as the Bavarian writer Ludwig

Ganghofer, regarded the eastern Jews much more positively. “In amongst

the farmers you see groups of Jews in their long black dress,” he wrote. “If

50
terror in the balk ans

you need to ask the way or enquire as to some other matter, you are best

off approaching one of these lock wearers; they are pleasant and friendly,

answer knowledgably, (and) almost always speak good German.”106 It is

nevertheless clear that there was widespread contempt towards eastern

Jews within the German army.107

In Germany itself, anti-Semitism within the popular press reared

its head following the fi rst setbacks at the front. Newspapers depicted

Jews as cowards, shirkers, and profi teers, and many on the political right

hoped to exploit such prejudices for political gain.108 Lieutenant Colonel

Max Bauer, a fanatically anti-Semitic offi cer, wrote:

There is a huge sense of outrage at the Jews, and rightly so. If you

are in Berlin and go to the Ministry of Commerce or walk down the

Tauentzienstraße, you could well believe you were in Jerusalem.

Up at the front, by contrast, you hardly ever see any Jews. Virtually

every thinking person is outraged that so few are called up, but noth-

ing is done, because going after the Jews, meaning the capital that

controls the press and the parliament, is impossible.109

In 1916, delusions over the extent of Jewish “shirking” led the Ger-

man army to implement a demeaning “head count” of its Jewish soldiers.

This operation eventually concluded that Jews were after all fulfi lling

their national duty every bit as much as Gentiles. But not before it had

devastated the morale of many loyal, patriotic Jewish soldiers.110

The war strengthened anti-Semitism in Austria-Hungary also. Here

too, the anti-Semitic press fanned long-standing resentments towards

Jews, likewise depicting them as shirkers and black marketeers. One of

the “foundations” for these rumors, as in Germany, was the underrepre-

sentation of Jews among the army’s rank and fi le. The simple explanation

for this, which the rabble-rousers chose to ignore, was that most rank-

and-fi le soldiers were peasants and most peasants were not Jewish.111 In

Vienna, anti-Semitic contempt was exacerbated by an infl ux of Galician

Jewish refugees fl eeing persecution from the Tsar. Their appearance was

very different to that of the empire’s assimilated Jewish population, and

their arrival put immense strain on the capital’s already acute housing

Forging a Wartime Mentality
51

shortage. There was similar resentment towards eastern Jews arriving in

Berlin between 1917 and 1920.112

But there was still no simple straight line between this anti-Semitism,

however abhorrent, and the deadly anti-Semitism that infl uenced the

conduct of German army units in the service of the Nazis a quarter-

century later. Apart from the German army’s shameful anti-Semitic head

count of 1916, the belligerent anti-Semitism that increasingly contami-

nated German society during the Great War did not inform German mil-

itary policy.113 Jewish soldiers serving in the still relatively enlightened

Austro-Hungarian army, meanwhile, were not compelled to suffer any

kind of head count; Conrad, his own anti-Semitism notwithstanding,

opined that “it does not seem appropriate to draw up statistics on the

basis of religious distribution.”114

In any case, the core reason why the Central powers were losing the

war by 1918 was neither the Bolsheviks nor the Jews, but their own mili-

tary and economic weakness. The weakness had been exacerbated by

the increasingly megalomaniac way in which the military dictatorship

running the German government since August 1916 was conducting the

war.115 By 1918, against an Allied coalition vastly strengthened by the

entry of the United States into the war, the Central powers’ defi cien-

cies were mercilessly apparent. The extent of their material privations

became especially clear to soldiers participating in Germany’s desper-

ate fi nal offensives on the western front in the spring and early summer

of that year, when advancing German soldiers stumbled upon veritable

treasure troves of supply in captured Allied trenches.116

By September the German army was fi rmly on the defensive, fi ghting

a doomed struggle against an Allied coalition now enjoying the prospect

of millions of fresh American troops. There is much to be said for the

view that, following the failure of its fi nal offensives, the German army

became stricken with levels of disobedience that amounted to a “covert

military strike.”117 But in reality, considerable though indiscipline was,

its effect was not terminal. For the army’s resistance stiffened, albeit ulti-

mately in vain, as the fi ghting approached German soil.118 In October

52
terror in the balk ans

1918 Major General von Endres, commander of I Bavarian Army Corps,

sought to rally his troops for the fi nal effort:

(The enemy’s) purpose is clear; he wants to bring the war with all

its terror into our beloved Fatherland and bring us to our knees . . .

But he will not succeed . . . No Frenchman, Englishman, American

or Italian will cross our border. If every man does his duty to the

utmost, we will succeed in halting their onslaught and achieve an

honorable peace. The Fatherland is in danger; you can save it!119

Vain though such rallying calls would ultimately prove, the great

majority of German soldiers responded to them as the borders of their

Fatherland were threatened during the weeks before the Armistice. That

they did so would be taken as further proof in interwar military circles

that the Imperial German Army had not been vanquished in the fi eld

at the end of the Great War. Instead, many would claim, the army had

been “stabbed in the back” by defeatist elements at home. This take on

events was at odds with the reality of autumn 1918. For the army, if not

yet actually defeated militarily, could no longer avoid that inevitable

fate—regardless of any temporary stiffening in its resistance or of what

happened at home. But the “stab-in-the-back” myth would endure in

post-1918 Germany nonetheless.

Meanwhile, following peace with Russia, the only remaining battle-

front on which Austro-Hungarian troops remained committed was in

Italy. But by now the Royal-Imperial Army’s fi ghting power was so far

gone that its last ever offensive, on the River Piave in June 1918, came to

naught almost immediately.120 Over the next few months, what remained

of the troops’ discipline, and with it the army itself, disintegrated com-

pletely.121 Attempts to stem the fl ood were in vain. The fact that the new