Hitler's Bandit Hunters (7 page)

The transition of the war from a military campaign into a full-scale security operation coincided with the deterioration in the treatment of the Herero. They went from classification as valiant foes to objects for extermination. On the grounds that they had committed brutalities, Trotha had ordered the Herero to leave Namibia.
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The extermination of the Herero was only partly attributable to full-blown military or Bandenbekämpfung operations. The German military occupation lasted from 1904 until 1912. The ethnic cleansing of the Herero people led to a population reduction from eighty thousand in 1904 to
twenty thousand by 1912.
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The scale of killing was new, but the extreme behavior was not, as the China expedition bears out. The political reverberations and criticism of the army’s performance again seeped into German society. At a time of great power rivalry and following the kaiser’s criticism of British behavior during the Boer War, Trotha’s failure became the army’s national embarrassment. Schlieffen ensured that Trotha never served in the field again, and he died in retirement in 1920.
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Throughout 1905, Schlieffen had to defend himself against accusations that he had harmed the good name of the army.
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Perhaps this political criticism, more than his fall from a horse, eventually led to his retirement in 1906. Epp’s fundamental criticism of the army reflected Schlieffen’s drive for professionalism: “If we want to make serious military progress, we must do this through the education of the people…. The soldier class must become a fundamental element and pillar of the nation.”
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Two recent and original pieces of research into the German armed forces during the First World War have refocused our attention on the army’s performance and repositioned perceptions of its underlying motivations. John Horne and Alan Kramer conducted an exhaustive study of the 1914 atrocities committed by the army in Belgium and France.
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Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius examined the “Ober Ost” (
Oberbefehlshaber Ost
) and found a military government that aspired to utopian idealism.
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Together, their work provides a framework for a brief but structured analysis of German military security in the First World War. An analysis of the troops, the Etappen, and the occupation highlights the continuous swing away from offensive military operations and toward the expansion of the rear area as the basis of the German war effort. Within this enlargement of security, Bandenbekämpfung played a small but significant part in the war. In the stages, Germany’s war depended on the success of the rigid application of Schlieffen’s (modified) plan. The massive Cannae of the Western allied forces was meticulously planned, with offensive operations running to a forty-two-day schedule. The army initially sliced through Belgium, supported by the home depots and the mobile Etappen that relentlessly pushed troops and replacements to the front. By August, however, the scale of operations and the unexpected resistance from the Allies kept stalling the German progress, and the logistics system backed up as railheads were unable to distribute supplies fast enough. The Russian invasion of eastern Germany caused apprehension. Eventually, a Cannae victory was scored at Tannenberg, but it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The long road of failures since 1891 was, in the light of Germany’s military record, consistent. The general staff descended into a strategic depression and was unable to cast off the inertia until 1918.

There is every reason to assume that Schlieffen analyzed Trotha’s
failure, and there is also every reason to believe he was unable to accept that Cannae hamstrung the army with an impossible tactical task. After Schlieffen retired, the general staff looked to Clausewitz for solutions to make the plan work, including reducing friction in operations and increasing the impact of the surprise essential in gaining superiority over a larger opponent.
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Between August and October 1914, the army deliberately killed sixty-five hundred French and Belgian civilians. Horne and Kramer wrote that these acts were isolated to the deliberate killing of civilians, plundering, and causing widespread destruction.
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Horne and Kramer proposed reasons for the killing, including the presence of colonial officers, the franc-tireur paranoia that gripped the popular press, and the speed in which orders were issued to punish civilians for a host of crimes. Had the army ordered a “shoot first and ask questions afterward” policy? Were the soldiers “trigger-happy” troopers? Did they believe in the franc-tireur myth? And how many of the million who invaded Belgium pulled the trigger on defenseless civilians?

The potential of a franc-tireur threat held implications for Schlieffen’s plan and a two-front war. The rapid drain on reserves could not afford the luxury of an 1870–71 style security campaign. The Landwehr of 1914–18 played a central part in offensive operations. Landwehr regiments organized as divisions and brigades and participated in major battles. One frontline infantry regiment, six Landwehr regiments, and four Landsturm regiments successfully carried out the Battle of Nowogeorgiewsk (1915) northwest of Warsaw.
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An indication of the change can be found in the record of the 6th Landwehr Infantry Regiment, which served all four years on the Eastern Front. Initially deployed on August 28, 1914, this regiment was formed from three battalions with a single machine-gun company. More than 1,550 officers and men were killed while serving with the regiment, and collectively they tell an interesting story. From the large numbers of casualties suffered in 1914, the majority came from the former German towns of Glogau and Fraustadt in Upper Silesia, reflecting the three battalion depots. By the end of the war, the casualties were men drawn from across Germany.
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During the war, regiments were swallowed up not by the Etappe, but to fill gaps in the front. Not for the first or the last time, German security troops were posted to frontline duties in times of emergency. By 1917, in the east, these units were integrated into an occupation organization. The 9th Etappen Inspectorate of the 8th Army, for example, contained the 45th Reserve Field Artillery Regiment, 8th Cavalry Division, 1st Cavalry Division, 19th Landwehr Division, and the 7th Mobile Railway Command for railhead duties.
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The Etappen grew into an enormous establishment in an effort to support the army, exploit the occupation, and impose social control. In the west, the Etappen evolved a static structure with an offensive capability to exploit breakthroughs. The Mobile Etappen were also used to erect a defensive line prior to a retreat.
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On the Western Front, the frontline trenches and the Etappen
caused the overlapping of layers of military establishment, which in turn led to a melting pot of front and rear echelons.
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The range of humanity that was capable of passing through the Etappen charged with overseeing a particular area was colossal. There was the clockwork movement of fighting units back and forth to the front, the arrival of replacements, the care system for casualties, the movement of prisoners of war, the collection of forced labor, and the ubiquitous army of entertainers, including publicans, actors, musicians, and prostitutes. The relations between the controllers and the interlopers led to difficulties and, in Richard Holmes’s opinion, caused the vehement cultural distinction between “front and rear” and the adoption of the invective “rear-area swine” (
Etappenschweine).
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This situation was common to soldiers of all armies, but in the German army, the Etappen represented more than the extension of authority and jurisdiction: it was the regulator of a military society. Ernst Jünger left an impression of one Etappen commander: “One Captain of Horse dubbed himself the King of Quéant, and made his appearance every night at our round table, where he was greeted by upraised right hands and a thunderous ‘Long Live the King!’”
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The introduction of integrated operational intelligence, counterintelligence, policing with secured perimeters and guard networks, and border controls began to take shape in German security policy. When Maj. Gen. Fritz Gempp, of German military intelligence, recorded the outbreak of irregular fighting (
Freischärlerkampf
) in Antwerp, on September 29, 1914, there was no such system of security in place.
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Gradually a system developed that included an industry of occupation bureaucracy, with everything from identity cards, transit papers, rationing systems, population censuses, the recording of inhabitants of individual buildings, and the regulation of schools and businesses. In the west, there were celebrated espionage cases. From the post-war writing of Gottfried Benn, the famous German poet, we have an account of Edith Cavell’s execution in 1915. Benn served in the German occupation of Brussels as the army’s senior medical officer. He had the duty of attending the execution and later wrote an account of what happened. Benn’s skills articulated a snapshot of the German occupation; collection-detention camps for deported French and Belgian females, prior to being assigned for hard labor (Cavell was briefly imprisoned in one such camp), were located in the Aachen area.
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The railway line between Brussels and Aachen, operated by the Etappen military railroad, a journey today of less than two hours, was constructed and paid for with loans from the Bank of Brussels in the 1840s. By September 1916, this railway was working flat-out and the camps were bursting to cope with Ludendorff’s order to extradite twelve thousand Belgians into forced labor; by October his weekly demand was twenty thousand.
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German methods were driven toward absolute security and massive economic exploitation. These drives required the disposal of large numbers of civilians through collaboration.
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From the few documents that have survived, it is
possible to piece together a snapshot of occupation, as French and the Belgian civilians were held hostage to their very existence.
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The German occupation of Northern France led to the organization of six districts with headquarters in Valenciennes, Laon, Cambrai, Vouziers, Charleville, and Vervin. Helen McPhail found that the army controlling the sector determined the regulation of occupation. The system depended on the active collaboration of town and village mayors to regulate the civilian population.
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On the Eastern Front, there were shifting priorities with the experience of victory and annexation of formerly Russian territory. Liulevicius thought that in the Ober Ost the Germans displayed a form of rule that encompassed both bureaucracy and technology, reaching a peak of professional occupation.
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He argued that the occupation authorities espoused a military utopia that came to underpin Nazi ideology and war making. This is a credible assumption, but as always in German history, there remain those loose strands that indicate the potential for other influences and direction. In the central area of the Eastern Front, the German army entered Warsaw on August 4, 1915, and Field Marshal Falkenhayn immediately established a general government under General von Beseler.
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Records from the Warsaw general government survive and indicate that it was a complex organization with an in-depth security network of guard posts and strongpoints strung across the city.
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German civilians attached to the Etappen in the east included university professors, architects, accountants, doctors, hunters, foresters, and significant numbers of public servants. The depth of planning, infrastructure rebuilding, introducing an education system, and distributing publications, however, was not evidence of “enlightened” occupation. Evidently, innocent care facilities arranged for the benefit the troops were also amenable for terrorizing civilians.

Gempp’s description of the security problem on the Eastern Front as “ruthless struggle” showed that pacification was in reality the application of terror to galvanize the population into accepting German rule.
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Bandenbekämpfung operations, according to Gempp, were instituted to combat a deliberate Russian policy of leaving troops behind to raise chaos within the German rear areas.
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Gempp wanted the masses of Russian stragglers to be processed quickly and ruthlessly. He felt it was necessary to have captured Russians placed in work battalions and detailed to projects for the German war economy. The vast numbers of Russian prisoners, he complained, were in wide-open areas unguarded and thus granted the opportunity to escape and join the guerrilla bands or become “bandits.” The problem of the large open spaces on the Eastern Front diminished attempts to reach a state of total security. Military intelligence relied heavily on deserters, prisoners of war, and local civilians for information. Gempp alleged that the Jewish community furnished numbers of spies and agents to assist him. He regarded them as his best source of intelligence. In 1915, Gempp noticed that the Russians were
making special efforts to scout and conduct reconnaissance behind German lines.
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Therefore, he believed Russian deserters no longer brought reliable information; in other words, they were actively practicing disinformation on the Germans. In other sectors, the Russians were disrupting lines of communications and destroying munitions. In commenting on a message from November 21, 1915, Gempp noted that during a partisan operation the partisans had donned Austrian uniforms.
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Liulevicius confirmed Gempp’s commentary. He referred to the case of Gen. Rochus Schmidt, a former member of the East African “colonial forces” who commanded the gendarmerie in the Ober Ost. His duties included crushing armed resistance and banditry. By 1917, the bands had grown immeasurably because of the impact of German measures imposed on the native populations. A cycle of violence developed as Germans forced natives to inform on the bands, or suffer punishment, while the bandits in turn began to kill German soldiers rather than restrict themselves to looting. The problem grew so large that the German authorities resolved to introduce passive measures of clearing away the ground of obvious places of ambush, traveling in convoys, and suspending all movement at night.
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During 1915 in Cracow, the army erected delousing camps to cleanse soldier’s uniforms of lice. It soon became accepted practice to delouse local Jews because of their inherent “dirtiness,” an early harbinger of Nazi crimes.
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Liulevicius found evidence of similar facilities in the Ober Ost. Delousing stations were used as part of a public health system that employed special plague troops to locate sick people and quarantine them.