Hitler's Bandit Hunters (4 page)

Armed intervention had long been a feature of German political history, the most noteworthy examples being von Schill and the attempted storm of Westphalia (1807); the Freikorps and the Landwehr, raised to ward off French retribution at Prussian defection in Russia (1813); and the pacification of the 1848 revolution.
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In 1912, the Great General Staff carried out a feasibility study
into the possibility of intervention in towns threatened by armed insurgents.
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The demands made by the army on society for men and resources were, according to Alfred Vagts, inexorably leading toward revolution.
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The Zabern incident of 1913 was an indication of the attitudes that prevailed between the army and society. A lieutenant insulted the people of Alsace; this triggered public outrage. The commanding officer stood by the lieutenant as a matter of honor, declared martial law, and arrested civilians who jeered the army.
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European war in 1914 dampened the friction between the army and society.
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From 1815, the study of warfare flourished, especially among the armies of Europe. Antoine-Henri Jomini took Napoleon’s legacy and rooted it into the texts of military science.
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Jomini’s presence with the “master” was long enough to establish his credentials as a scholarly pretender to Napoleon’s interpretation of warfare. Jomini’s
Summary of the Art of War
(1837) had such a profound impact on the study of warfare, as Michael Howard observed, that his principles were institutionalized into the armed forces of Europe with the growing expectancy of a general European war.
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The thrust of Jomini’s ideas lay with the offensive through the concentration of superior force at a decisive point in battle. He ruled that success was assured when an army secured its own lines of operations (
lignes d’opérations).
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Under Jomini’s influence, Prussian officers serving in the rear areas became as mindful of the enemy as their comrades in the front line were. The baggage train became a mobile barracks and depot; and advances in railway engineering hastened the transformation, which in turn led the railway to become integrated into the field security functions. Jomini’s teachings were used to champion a distinct Prussian–German way of warfare that became the mantra for every efficient officer.
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He declared that the aggressive prosecution of war, fully secured in the field, was a winning strategy.

Oberstleutnant Albrecht von Boguslawski, inspired by Jomini, tried to proliferate the military scientist’s ideas of operational technique. In 1881, Boguslawski published a series of lectures titled
Der kleine Krieg (The Small War).
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This book described the tactical procedures for the conduct of both partisan and antipartisan warfare. In the final chapter, the book addressed the problem of training and explained that adequate training was fundamental to achieving success. Intensified training correspondingly raised the level of expertise, providing the ambitious commander with alternative ploys such as night operations. A subsequent review by a British military journal included the partial translation of
Der kleine Krieg
into
Partisan Warfare.
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Boguslawski’s reviewer was impressed by the function of partisan warfare, which included gathering enemy intelligence, preventing a surprise attack, keeping the enemy occupied with tactical movements, and harassing the enemy without becoming compromised. The continued resistance against invaders by civilians struck the reviewer into commenting,

[W]e must imagine an invader to have occupied one or more provinces, making it incumbent on the defender not only to threaten his flanks and rear to the utmost, but also to make the public at home and abroad believe that the provinces in question are not really subdued. Such acts must often, in order to gain the end in view, be combined with armed resistance on the part of the civil population.
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The British review mildly rebuked Boguslawski for not defining his terms of reference. Definition and classification was already commonplace in international military scholarship. It was germane to the general acceptance of a codification and legislation for the conduct of war. Boguslawski avoided classifications of combatants and even included guerrilla-style operations in his examples. This went against Francis (Franz) Lieber’s principles of classification for belligerents and nonbelligerents. Lieber was a Prussian immigrant in America and a professor of law at Columbia University. During the American Civil War, he had answered legal questions over the standing of “guerrilla parties” that had become the accepted terms of reference for small-war combatants.
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Lieber strongly approved of partisan warfare as legally acceptable but in equal measure disapproved of guerrillas in any form. He labeled guerrillas self-constituted bands of armed men conducting irregular war. In Lieber’s opinion, guerrillas relied on the dynamics of the band, lacking regular status or permanent standing, and consequently, they were outlaws—bandits. The explanation of Lieber’s attitude stems from his experience of soldiering in the Prussian Freikorps during 1813–14. Guerrilla war bore too striking a resemblance to the stereotypical banditry from the Thirty Years’ War of Lieber’s Prussian middle-class schooling. The tenets of Lieber’s ideas remain strong today, but we should be mindful of his background and the prejudices underpinning his judgments.
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The Prussian regulations for the code of conduct in war were revised in 1856 and still in force when the
War Book (Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege
) was introduced in 1902. These revised regulations followed after a long series of vicious parliamentary squabbles between the military and the antimilitarist lobbies.
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During the Franco–Prussian War and the subsequent occupation of France, Germany proved capable of applying a strict legal code in its military administration. Even in the 1940s, this occupation was regarded as legally sound and relatively properly administered.
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However, Lieber’s fundamental belief in the professional soldier’s code of honor as the means of applied self-regulation was at odds with changing developments in warfare and the incremental effects of colonialism. The international attempts to impose humanitarian controls in war that led to The Hague and Geneva conventions (1899 and 1907) were the products of Lieber’s thinking. Lieber and humanitarianism, however, were both made redundant when the 1902 German
War Book
stated, “What is permissible includes every means of war without which the object of the war cannot be obtained; what is reprehensible on the other hand includes every act of violence and destruction, which is not demanded by the object of war.”
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Laws and wars were turning into conflicts of interpretation, judged by the victor.

In February 1871, a senior British officer was so appalled by Germany’s war making against France that he wrote to
The Times
arguing that the aggression should no longer be tolerated. The article particularly identified the institution of terror used by the Germans on the grounds of security and therefore “military necessity.” The Germans used the system of “cantonment,” billeting soldiers and animals with civilians. Added to this, they ruthlessly enforced hard fighting on the French and imposed a strict regime of occupation. The collapse of the French army did not lead to the collapse of France. An upsurge of the People’s War led by civilian militias known as francs-tireurs (“free-shooters,” in German
Freischärler
) caused the Germans large-scale organizational problems and legal headaches in trying to impose their rule. The campaign against the francs-tireurs had a lasting impact on the German way of war. The Great General Staff declared that all Freischärler were guerrillas and irregulars, and thus illegal. A franc-tireur who survived beyond the immediate moment of capture, which was far from certain, faced court-martial and a minimum prison term of ten years’ hard labor.
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The collective view of German war making, then and now, was the tendency toward the overreliance on fear as a deterrent, without compensating for the countervailing response of desperation.
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In the 1890s, the social benefits of education and a rising tide of nationalistic jingoism coincided in the popularization of the military through literature. The public gorged on cheap and cheerful stories of war and adventure. This literature dispensed with legal precaution regarding the treatment of irregulars, foreign civilians, or the realities of war. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Franco–Prussian War inspired a proliferation of celebratory books or
Festschriften.
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One such Festschrift, by Professor Theodor Lindner, University of Halle, typically was embossed with Iron Crosses and Germanic eagles and proclaimed German mastery in war.
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To determine his argument for balance and accuracy, Lindner included examples of German soldiers’ less-than-honorable behavior. In many respects, this distinguished Lindner from court historians of the time. Lindner exposed two security issues. The first was guerrilla warfare during occupation. By 1873, the army had dispensed with the threat of the francs-tireurs through careful handling of the occupation. When Lindner published his book, however, the franc-tireur had become a virulent form of state-encouraged fanaticism and a social outlaw symbolic of France. The term
Franktireur
represented an extreme form of guerrilla in German military terminology.

Explaining the nature of this fanaticism, Lindner described an incident
reputed to have taken place on September 9, 1870, when francs-tireurs blew up the town arsenal of Laon. Forty men were killed, and many local inhabitants, including the commander of a Prussian cavalry division, were wounded.
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Lindner judged the indiscriminate violence as immoral and completely unethical. He then broached the subject of civil-military relations in occupied France in general and Alsace-Lorraine, where the civilian population proved largely hostile toward Germans, in particular. The French civilians took potshots at the soldiers attributing them the status of barbarians (
Barbaren
). Lindner upheld German honor, justifying German actions under the most trying circumstances. Most significant, he praised the troops for remaining true to their “soldiers’ code,” labeled the French as underhanded, questioning their national ability to comprehend modern warfare, and concluded that the Germans were superior warriors.
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Mark Stoneman has explained that the ill-treatment meted out by soldiers of the Bavarian army against French civilians earned them lasting international notoriety. He concluded that the veterans’ subsequent justifications for their actions were based on a combination of excuses, including military necessity, pride in their army, and social Darwinism.
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Lindner’s second issue concerned the behavior of the soldiers and the problem of supply. Even with the system of cantonment, German soldiers plundered shoes and boots from French citizens, even stripping them in the streets. The real problem was the failure of the regular supply channels, but Lindner could not admit this. He chose to excuse outright theft of underwear on the grounds that the troops wished to remain “human.” Food shortages that led the troops to pillage “empty” houses were declared acceptable because the homeowners had fled. Likewise, he condemned “sneaky” French attempts to hide away food but condoned the “cleverer” German ability to root out the goods. Lindner explained that the troops resorted to stripping “wet” walls, digging up “foul smelling dung heaps,” and bayoneting recently planted herb gardens to find buried food and wine.
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Lindner adopted wit and humor to explain away the widespread theft of chickens. The chickens, he wrote, overcome by the disgrace of national defeat, chose to commit suicide. They hurled themselves under the wheels of passing Prussian army carts or jumped into soldiers’ cooking pots. The climax of his tale was a cockerel, the symbol of France, which “followed the call to arms and vigorously attacked a group of German soldiers.”
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Lindner explained that once the occupation was established, the army resolved its supply problem by imposing taxes—collected through the military administration—on French communities and using this money to pay French farmers to deliver cattle and food.
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In 1891, Alfred von Schlieffen, a Prussian of the old school and a disciple of Jomini, became the chief of the Great General Staff. Schlieffen invigorated the German officer corps with the challenge to reach the fame of generalissimo or
Feldherr
. In rising to the level of senior command or great generalship
(
Feldherrnkunst
), the professional officer was expected to live the dictum that for every problem, there was a military solution. The implications of such ideas, drummed into every soldier, forged a peculiar mindset. Schlieffen also had the measure of great leadership in which a commander not only defeated enemies but annihilated them.
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This annihilation became the only acceptable measure of success in war. Schlieffen set out to transform the conscript Imperial German Army into a machine employed to fulfill the offensive spirit. In so doing, he offered ambitious officers rapid advancement but the side effect was a system imbued with internal competition, career jealousy, and bureaucratic inertia. Since the end of the First World War, Schlieffen’s life has been subject to considerable interpretation.
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Gunther Rothenberg argued that Schlieffen instilled the economy of effort, maneuver, and the concentration of force into all levels of the army. An observation made in 1952 of the German high command concluded that Schlieffen’s ideas “permeated the German officer corps even to the lower ranks.”
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Recently, Robert Foley suggested that “Schlieffen the man” became “Schlieffen the idea” within the German army.
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