Read Terror in the Balkans Online
Authors: Ben Shepherd
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II, #Science & Math, #Earth Sciences, #Geography, #Regional
doubt that the region’s social and economic backwardness, and its mind-
numbing size, often made a profoundly negative impression upon Ger-
man and Austrian troops.
This impression grew stronger the further the two armies advanced
into the territory of the Russian Empire. Crossing into the East, a Ger-
man military offi cial noted, “I have never seen a border like this, which
divided not just two states, but two worlds. As far as the eye could see,
nothing but a scene of poverty and
Unkultur
, impossible roads, poor vil-
lages and neglected huts and a dirty, ragged population with primitive
fi eld agriculture, a total opposite of the blooming German landscape in
neighboring Upper Silesia.”59
The East’s scarcely conceivable distances and rudimentary road net-
work also made it considerably harder to supply the troops.60 The men
of the Austro-Hungarian 57th Infantry Division, in an army whose supply
capabilities were found severely wanting in any case,61 were complain-
ing about supply as early as August 4, 1914.62 Under these conditions,
disease was an ever present danger. Among the German army, there were
2.8 sick cases for every one wounded man in the West as against 3.7 sick
cases for each wounded man in the East.63 Indeed, lack of hygiene and the
consequent fear of contamination were recurrent themes in accounts of
life on the eastern front by all levels of German and Austrian personnel.64
The III Austro-Hungarian Army Corps was alarmed at the possibility of
a cholera outbreak among its men as early as October 1914.65 In January
1915 Adalbert Lontschar’s 43d Austro-Hungarian Rifl e Division urged its
troops to drink boiled water so as to avoid not just cholera, but typhus
and dysentery also.66 Austro-Hungarian XVII Army Corps, which among
its formations counted the 11th Field Artillery Brigade—with which Wal-
ter Hinghofer, a future divisional commander in Yugoslavia, was serv-
ing as a staff offi cer—was blighted by something approaching the Seven
Plagues. Among other things, it faced a cholera alarm in August 1915,67
Forging a Wartime Mentality
43
put an entire settlement off-limits when it was hit by typhus in February
1916,68 and was harried by a visitation of fl ies in April 1917.69
German soldiers in particular often extended their disdain at the
region’s backwardness to its Slavic population also.70 At the Great War’s
start, the German government had some trouble stoking up anti-Russian
sentiment among the troops; it had after all been a quarrel involving Rus-
sia and Austria-Hungary, not Germany, that had precipitated the entire
confl agration in the fi rst place. But Russia’s brief, unsuccessful invasion
of eastern Prussia in August 1914 presented German propagandists with
a great opportunity.71
The Russians did not comport themselves like a barbarian horde dur-
ing this short-lived onslaught. They did, however, plunder and destroy
property, and sometimes kill civilians.72 This was nothing the Germans
themselves were not doing in the West, and on a larger and more system-
atic scale. And there are balanced contemporary German accounts of
the invasion acknowledging that many Russian troops behaved correctly
during its course.73 But for many German soldiers already weaned on a
measure of anti-Slavism, such brutality as the Russians did deal out in
eastern Prussia, together with German propaganda’s exploitation of it,
seemed to confi rm age-old prejudices about the barbaric East. Thus, for
instance, did Gottard Heinrici, who would go on to serve as a senior fi eld
commander during World War II, accuse the Russians of perpetrating
acts of “blind destruction and mindless annihilation of a kind we never
would have thought possible.”74
Perceptions of the “Wild East” became further embedded for German
and Austrian troops as the war continued. On November 27, 1914, troops
of the Austro-Hungarian III Army Corps, to which Karl Eglseer’s 87th
Infantry Regiment was subordinate, stumbled upon the bodies of muti-
lated Austro-Hungarian soldiers in a recently reoccupied village. The
Russian troops they had been facing had been Kalmuks from Siberia.75
In January 1915 the 43d Rifl e Division uncovered cases of captured or
wounded Austro-Hungarian soldiers being “mutilated and murdered in
a bestial manner by Russian soldiers.” This time the perpetrators com-
prised Circassian and Siberian irregulars in part, but also regular Rus-
sian troops. It was also alleged, on the basis of statements by Russian
44
terror in the balk ans
prisoners of war, that Habsburg offi cers in Russian captivity had been
brutally mistreated.76
Incidents like these, and the sentiments they engendered or strength-
ened, were hardly going to improve relations between advancing Ger-
man and Austro-Hungarian troops and the eastern Slavic peoples they
were encountering. Nor was the fact that the troops detected “danger-
ous” levels of Russophile sympathy amongst those peoples. Indeed, they
detected it among peoples living within those easternmost reaches of the
Habsburg Empire through which they marched, as well as those living
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