Read Terror in the Balkans Online
Authors: Ben Shepherd
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II, #Science & Math, #Earth Sciences, #Geography, #Regional
Also widespread across society, and likewise insinuating itself into both
offi cer corps, was anti-Slavism. The pre–Great War anti-Slavism of the
imperial German offi cer corps was particularly directed against “the
East.” This is not surprising; it was founded both in centuries-old Rus-
sophobia, common to the West generally, and in notions of Germany’s
“moral mission” to civilize its backward, inferior eastern neighbors.28
Such notions had grown stronger since the demise of the independent
Kingdom of Poland and the infl ux of millions of Poles into the eastern
provinces of Prussia itself.29 Anti-Slavism grew stronger still in reaction
to the expansionist pan-Slavic ideology that increasingly animated the
foreign policy of Tsarist Russia, particularly over the Balkans, in the
years up to 1914.30
In the German offi cer corps, anti-Slavic views went to the top. In
February 1913 Hellmuth von Moltke, chief of the German General Staff,
opined to his Austro-Hungarian opposite number, Conrad, that any
future war would be “a struggle between Slavs and Teutons” for the
preservation of “Germanic culture.”31 Conrad dismissed talk of a race
war, reminding Moltke that Slavs comprised 47 percent of the Habsburg
Empire’s population.32 But six months on Moltke remained stuck in the
same groove, asserting to Conrad that the European war would come
“sooner or later,” and that it would be “primarily a struggle between
Germans and Slavs.”33
Yet though the Pan-Germans were strongly anti-Slavic, there were
other educated bourgeois German circles, circles from which ever more
offi cers were now being drawn, that harbored a different attitude. This
attitude, condescending though it was, did acknowledge Russia’s contri-
bution to the cultural and intellectual life of Europe. At any rate, it was
an attitude certainly more favorable than Moltke’s stance.34 True, new
offi cers harboring such sentiments may well have found them stifl ed fol-
lowing their admission into the offi cer corps. But this did not mean they
were going to automatically convert to Moltke’s strident anti-Slavism.
The extent of such anti-Slavism within the German offi cer corps as a
whole, then, should not be overstated.
General Conrad, for his part, was not best-placed to rebuke his Ger-
man counterpart for anti-Slavism. When he recalled his tour of duty fi ght-
ing Slavic irregulars in Habsburg-occupied Bosnia between 1878 and
Before the Great War
21
1882, he railed against their “cruelty,” “bestiality,” and “bloodlust.”35 By
the early twentieth century, growing numbers of ethnic Germans within
the Habsburg Empire would have sympathized. This was down partly
to the advent of biologically based racism during the 1870s and 1880s. It
was also down partly, especially after universal suffrage was introduced
in 1907, to Pan-Germanism’s swelling political mobilization in the face
of what many Austrians perceived as “Slav encroachment and Jewish
emancipation.”36 But probably the most powerful source of burgeoning
anti-Slavism within the empire, and ultimately the most cataclysmic, was
the empire’s confrontation with Serbia.
During the decade before the Great War, Serbia became a signifi cant
Balkan power and an increasingly anti-Habsburg one. In particular, the
Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 enabled it to expand its territory considerably.
Consequently, pan-Slavists in both Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire regarded one another with growing interest. Eventually, the
idea of unifying Serbia with the southern Slavic peoples of the empire—
something that would, of course, be fatal to the empire’s future—began
taking root.37 Unsurprisingly, those years saw Austrian journalists
take an increasingly bellicose line against Serbia; Leopold Mandl, for
instance, wrote of the “Austro-phobic putrefaction in the nation” that
was the foundation of Serbian foreign policy, and warned that Serbia’s
goal was “the liberation and reunifi cation of all lands that are inhabited
by Serbs”—including those within the Habsburg Empire itself.38 In
1908, Austria-Hungary almost went to war with Serbia, and Serbia’s ally
Russia, over the surprise Habsburg annexation of Bosnia. And just as
some offi cers saw the apparently imminent confl agration as a conven-
tional battle between states, others viewed it as a battle between superior
Germans and inferior Slavs.39
Yet while fear of Serbia and Russia as hostile states was strong, racial
contempt for Slavs in the “modern” biological sense did not affect the
army’s outlook or policy, or its offi cers’ behavior. Indeed, as Conrad
indicated in his exchanges with Moltke, generic anti-Slavism was hardly
a viable policy for an empire that encompassed such a voluminous num-
ber of Slavs itself—not least among the rank and fi le of its own army.
So numerous were the army’s Slavic troops that the need for a tolerant,
understanding attitude on the part of the army’s predominantly German
22
terror in the balk ans
offi cer corps was clearly a given. Army doctrine encouraged it, Franz
Josef himself demanded it, and the vast majority of Habsburg offi cers
practiced it.
Conrad himself was an avowed Social Darwinist—a worldview that sig-
nifi cant numbers of offi cers seem, at least at fi rst sight, to have shared.40
But Conrad’s brand of Social Darwinism thought in terms of strong
and weak states rather than strong and weak races. He believed that the
Habsburg Empire, were it to survive, must reinvigorate itself with a pro-
active, aggressive foreign policy against its principal foreign enemies.
These enemies, in Conrad’s view, were Italy—despite the fact that Italy
and Austria-Hungary were offi cially in alliance—and of course Serbia.
Such a policy, Conrad argued, would strengthen the monarchy not just
against external enemies, but also against the corrosive effects of ethnic
nationalism within the empire. He accordingly promoted it with tireless
energy. The historian Holger Herwig writes:
A glance at Conrad’s outpourings during the seven years before 1914
provides insight into his fertile mind. In 1907 Conrad demanded
war against “Austria’s congenital foes” Italy and Serbia; the next
year versus Russia, Serbia, and Italy. In 1909 he counselled military
action against Serbia and Montenegro; in 1910 against Italy; and in
1911 versus Italy, Serbia, and Montenegro. The year 1912 saw con-
centration on the struggle against Russia and Serbia. The next year
was especially productive, with military studies readied for con-
fl icts with Albania, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, and even Russian
Poland. The fi nal six months of peace in 1914 saw renewed plans ver-
sus Montenegro, Romania, Russia, and Serbia. Each of these years
also brought contingency plans against numerous combinations of
the above-named powers.41
Even though Conrad’s Social Darwinism was national rather than
biological in character, then, the resulting policy was profoundly belli-
cose. Such a policy could only be credible, of course, with an army capa-
ble of executing it. Conrad tried to get round the lack of resources the
Before the Great War
23
army’s fi nancial straitjacket imposed, by making the bulk of the army’s
combat manpower—the infantry—as tough and offensive-minded as
possible. Extreme infantry training ensured that Conrad’s Social Dar-
winism impacted directly upon the army’s soldiers, as well as upon the
foreign and military policy for they were intended to promote. The war
games of Conrad’s revamped infantry maneuvers awarded the greatest
number of points to those units that advanced farthest and seized the
greatest number of objectives. This ignored the fact that the revolution-
ary development of defensive fi repower would, come actual war, render
such rapid advances impossible. The maneuvers also took the cultiva-
tion of strength and the purging of weakness to drastic lengths; so enor-
mous were the distances soldiers were now expected to march that some
died from heat exhaustion.42 The hardening psychological effect upon
the offi cers who underwent and survived this ordeal was likely to make
itself felt in future years.
But even the Social Darwinism of Conrad’s harsh training regime and
the transformation in military spirit it was designed to generate were not
omnipotent within the Habsburg offi ce corps. They came up against
the entrenched “aristocratic conservatism” that still characterized army
culture. Many senior offi cers, at least, shared the mutaphobic stance of
the emperor and the inspector general of the army, and this hindered
Conrad’s “fresh, radical” approach.43 The impact of Conrad’s Social
Darwinism may also have been limited because even many of the offi cers
who were infl uenced by it may have viewed it not so much as a radical
departure, than as a rebranded justifi cation of imperial expansion and
the old hierarchical system.44
Social Darwinism within the German offi cer corps enjoyed a much
more lethal outlet—Germany’s colonial wars against “inferior” peoples
in Africa and Asia. The worst example was the Germans’ particularly
savage suppression of the Herero Rebellion in German Southwest Africa
in 1904–1905.45 The extent to which German soldiers’ experience of colo-
nial campaigns further brutalized the imperial German military mind-
set should not be overstated. The number of troops serving in these
campaigns was self-selecting and very small;46 among other things, it
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terror in the balk ans
included none of the German-born offi cers featured in this study. But the
army’s conduct of colonial campaigns was not a fringe issue; it fi gured
prominently, for example, in the 1907 elections for the German parlia-
ment. Defenders of the army’s conduct depicted it as a national security
issue, and so embedded was military culture in middle-class German
circles that politicians from many points of the political spectrum sup-
ported the troops unreservedly.47
Such clamorous approval could only strengthen the German mili-
tary’s hard-line stance on colonial suppression. But such a stance had a
strong base within the German military already. For the ferocity of Ger-
man colonial warfare was not just a product of Social Darwinist racism.
These were wars in which the Germans were fi ghting not conventional
troops, but armed irregulars. The revulsion with which the Imperial
German Army regarded such opponents surpassed that exhibited by
any other regular army during the decades before 1914. Identifying how
durably the army’s abhorrence affected the German military mind-set
is important to understanding what shaped its conduct of counterinsur-
gency during World War II. This is an ideal point at which to consider
how such abhorrence came about.48
The waging of ruthless counterinsurgency colonial warfare, suffused
by racist thinking, was far from unique to the German military during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Armies of all the major
European colonial powers, and of the United States, waged successive
counterinsurgency campaigns during the decades before 1914, usually
against indigenous peoples resisting imperial rule. Such campaigns usu-
ally demanded the type of fi ghting, amid the kinds of conditions, for
which conventional troops were not traditionally prepared. The conven-
tional troops ordered to contend with all this were liable to lash out ruth-
lessly against civilians. This might be out of hatred and distrust, desire to
somehow compensate for their own shortcomings, pressure from above
for results, or brutalizing fear and frustration. The troops’ brutality was
also fueled—barring exceptions such as the British campaign against the
white Boers in southern Africa between 1899 and 1902—by the racism of
the period. Put simply, white soldiers who had imbibed racist attitudes
Before the Great War
25
found it easier to kill noncombatants of a darker skin color, and their
commanders usually stood ready to encourage them.
Yet the early decades of the twentieth century brought signs that some
armies, at least, were beginning to appreciate the benefi ts of hearts-and-
minds measures to counterinsurgency. Behind this was a dawning real-
ization that active support, or at least passive cooperation, could make
mounting a successful counterinsurgency campaign considerably easier.
It might even be crucial to that campaign’s success. Measured treatment
of insurgent deserters and prisoners, widespread use of propaganda,
and, perhaps most importantly, social and economic measures of practi-
cal benefi t to the population all rendered valuable service in this cause.49
But the German military—some saner heads aside—largely failed to
properly appreciate this approach. The corrosive infl uence of its own
particularly harsh counterinsurgency history proved too strong. In
Clausewitz, the doyen of Prussian military thinkers, the German mili-