Read Terror in the Balkans Online
Authors: Ben Shepherd
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II, #Science & Math, #Earth Sciences, #Geography, #Regional
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
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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’
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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-
ning and organization. In the days of the old Imperial Army, it was the
General Staff that had best afforded such an opportunity. Now, it was
the new Reichswehr Ministry.8 This agenda would, of course, eventually
dovetail perfectly with National Socialism’s aims for the armed forces.
The Reichswehr’s senior offi cers also hoped they would eventually
be able to assure Germany’s national strength and greatness by wedding
their mastery of technological warfare to the mobilized hearts and minds
of German society, both civilian and military. This was a mobilization
whose absence, they believed, had caused too many Germans to fall vic-
tim to the infl uence of defeatists, pacifi sts, and Bolsheviks during the
Great War. Weimar, they believed—perhaps not unreasonably, given the
republic’s fractious party system and its at best uneven popular appeal—
was incapable either of providing this popular rallying point or of safe-
guarding Germany’s national interests more generally.9
Not all military fi gures were so averse; indeed in 1928 the Defense
Minister, General Groener, sought to reconcile the Reichswehr with the
republic.10 But just one year later, the global economic crisis that followed
the collapse of the New York stock exchange fatally entrenched most
offi cers’ contempt for Weimar. Barely any country was hit harder by the
crisis than Germany. This was a consequence of its massive reliance on
US loans to pay off the war reparations that the Treaty of Versailles, a
treaty with the Weimar Republic’s signature on it, had imposed upon the
country. Now more than ever before, the majority of Reichswehr offi cers
believed that the best route to achieving their goals lay not in the republic
but in an authoritarian, national conservative government.
But in 1933, following the failure of two short-lived national conserva-
tive administrations to govern the country stably in the face of mounting
political chaos, the Reichswehr leadership hit upon a more radical solu-
tion: alliance with the Nazis.11 The Reichswehr gave its tacit approval as
a cabal of arch-conservative politicians prevailed upon the increasingly
doddery State President Hindenburg to award Hitler the chancellorship
in January of that year. Behind the conservatives’ maneuvering was the
tragically misconceived notion of “taming” Hitler once he was in offi ce.
This was the culmination of the economic and political corrosion of the
Weimar Republic that had been set in train when the global economic
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terror in the balk ans
crisis had broken over Germany. Already the corrosion had resulted in
six million unemployed, the lurch of German politics to extremes of left
and right, and frightening levels of social and political unrest. What fol-
lowed its culmination was, of course, incomparably worse.
The Austrian Bundesheer’s goals during the 1920s and early 1930s were
much more prosaic than the Reichswehr’s. Partly this was because the
old Royal-Imperial Army had not bequeathed a similarly formidable
technocratic tradition to live up to. The more pressing reason was that
the Bundesheer had no practical choice. Any grand ambitions it might
have harbored were scotched by the sobering economic and political
realities of postwar Austria—realities even more sobering than they were
north of the border. Many offi cers, facing a squeeze on their pay and
pensions, also resented the new dwarf republic for material reasons.12
Then, during the 1920s, War Minister Vaugoin of the governing center-
right Christian Social Party weeded out the—not inconsiderable—left-
wing elements within the army. By 1927 at the latest, the Bundesheer was
solidly loyal to the Christian Socials and their coalition partners, but
deeply ambivalent towards the democratic republic as an institution.13
This would of course impact enormously on how it would conduct itself
amid the violent political turmoil that ripped Austria apart during the
early 1930s.
For Austrians, the most catastrophic phase of the global economic cri-
sis, and with it the unfolding political crisis, followed the collapse of the
Vienna Credit Institute in 1931.14 The elections that followed in April 1932
saw a surge in support for the Austrian Nazis similar to that which their
comrades in Germany were then enjoying.15 The Christian Social chan-
cellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was profoundly alarmed at this development.
He saw it as a threat both to Austria’s internal stability and, following the
Nazis’ ascent to power in Germany, to Austria’s national independence.
Dollfuss might have countered the threat by forming an alliance with
the trade unions and the Social Democrats. But the distrust between
socialist left and conservative right, which had been poisoning Austrian
politics since the republic’s founding, prompted Dollfuss to dismiss that
option. Instead, he declared the formation of an Austro-fascist Catholic
Bridging Two Hells
61
“corporate state,” backed by Mussolini’s Italy and led by a new, post-
democratic political organization, the Patriotic Front.