Terror in the Balkans (8 page)

we despise a state that has behaved itself like Italy has, and that we

therefore cannot treat its offi cers as social equals.49

By fostering such odium towards prisoners, on top of the odium Austri-

ans already directed against Italians for their country’s sneak declaration

of war, orders such as these helped to dehumanize the enemy. It would

be going much too far to argue that this was a direct harbinger of the

Forging a Wartime Mentality
39

ideologically driven pitilessness offi cers would display during World

War II. Such orders tended to look backward—to more traditional notions

of honorable and dishonorable conduct—rather than forward. But at the

same time, dehumanizing the enemy in this way still constituted a step

down that future path, albeit a relatively small one. It is a further sign that

the Italian front, like other Great War battlefronts, engendered some of

the radicalization that would motivate many offi cers later.

Finally, from 1914 through to early 1918, along an immense front from the

Baltic to the Black Sea, the German and Austro-Hungarian armies faced

the armies of Russia. This front was not characterized by bloody, immobile

stalemate in the way of the western or Italian fronts. Here, amid mountains,

forests, swamps, and seemingly endless plains, the stalemate was often

bloody
and
mobile, with immense advances matched by equally immense

retreats. The cumulative strain of war steadily sapped the strength of Russia

and, eventually, Austria-Hungary to a terminal degree. Only in early 1918

did the new Bolshevik government in Russia sue for peace, bringing to an

end more than three years of ferocious struggle across seemingly limitless

terrain, amid sometimes unimaginably harsh environmental conditions.50

And even after that, soldiers of the Central powers found themselves locked

in bitter struggle with Bolshevik forces in many parts of the East.

The war in the East was not characterized by modern, industrially

charged carnage of the kind seen on the western front. Instead, it was char-

acterized by savagery and chaos such that the historian Michael Geyer

has justifi ably described it as “the Wild War.”51 More than any other

theater of the Great War, moreover, it was in the East that German and

Austrian troops could be brutalized not just by the fi ghting conditions

they endured, but also by their experience of the landscape, of its native

population, and of the political forces that convulsed the region as the war

continued. In other words, while the East was not necessarily
the
most

brutalizing environment in which German and Austrian soldiers served

during the Great War, it could certainly brutalize them in particularly

diverse ways. For this reason, together with the fact that several offi cers

featured in this study served on the eastern front, the characteristics of

this theater of war warrant some space here.

40
terror in the balk ans

In 1914 many Austro-Hungarian offi cers contemplated the coming

struggle with the Russian army—nicknamed the “Steamroller” by vir-

tue of its alleged ability to overwhelm its opponents with its irresistible

size—in a cold sweat. Colonel Brosch of the 1st Tyrolean Kaiserjäger

Regiment believed he would witness the fi nal destiny of the Habsburg

Empire “not as an uncommitted bystander, but as a resigned combatant

who will see the black steamroller, which will obliterate us, approach,

but who cannot stop it.”52 But Conrad, ever the aggressor in matters stra-

tegic, immediately went over to the attack. And as in Serbia, the Austro-

Hungarian army’s shortcomings brought disastrous failure and colossal

death tolls each time. The Germans, to the detriment of their own plans,

were repeatedly forced to divert troops southward to bale the Austrians

out. The Austro-Hungarian army had soon decimated and debilitated

itself to a point where it resembled a territorial and militia army.53

The desperate fi ghting, the harsh conditions, and the Austrians’

increasingly apparent military impotence are all conveyed in the war

diary of Karl Eglseer’s 87th Infantry Regiment:

11/22/14 . . . The Russians penetrated behind the second and third

companies, and a violent battle ensued . . . Of the third battalion,

only a small fraction was able to break through. A large part was

captured by the enemy. At the same time the second battalion, posi-

tioned at Werretyczos, was outfl anked on the right and driven back

after resisting heavily. The regiment fought valiantly, but its weak-

ened position, the excessive distance of the . . . battle groups and

the lack of reserves all made a successful defense impossible. The

Russians’ tactic was, clearly, to penetrate in overwhelming strength

through dense terrain into the empty gaps between our (positions)

. . . Major Leimser, the third battalion’s commander, was captured

together with between 12–14 other offi cers of the regiment . . . Due

to the great cold, the heavy snow, and having to spend four nights

out in the open, the regiment’s fi ghting capability and supplies were

completely exhausted.

11/28 . . . Losses from 11/20–11/28/: 2 offi cers and 10 men dead, 3

offi cers and 100 men wounded (almost all on 11/20 and 11/22/). 7

Forging a Wartime Mentality
41

offi cers and 129 men taken prisoner. 11 offi cers and 655 men missing

altogether (including those taken prisoner).

12/21 . . . At 3pm the enemy attacked the right fl ank of the 47th

Infantry Regiment. At the same time, the 87th was comprehensively

attacked in overwhelming strength. It was therefore forced at 3pm

to withdraw to and re-establish defenses in the previously occupied

area of Lazy. Major Seidel’s attack was unable to make any impact.

There was no support from our own artillery to be detected.

12/24 . . . 5.10pm the order came for heightened vigilance and battle

readiness, for the Russians were aiming to surprise us . . . The Rus-

sians broke through the second battalion; the fi rst battalion was also

compelled to abandon its position. The regiment assembled in the

town square at Zmigrod. The panic and fear of the Italian troops54

. . . weakened discipline so much that the offi cers were only able to

restore it by fi ring their revolvers into the air. The regiment, particu-

larly the second battalion, had suffered painful losses again. It was

later established that its companies had fought stubbornly. Lieuten-

ant Eglseer and Captain von Wanka were caught up in the struggle,

wounded badly, and captured. This overwhelming blow seems to

have been spearheaded by the enemy’s cavalry.55

As this diary indicates, the environment was especially pitiless during

winter. It was never more so than it was for the Austro-Hungarian troops

whom General Conrad committed to a horribly misconceived offensive

in the Carpathian Mountains during winter 1914–1915.56 But the envi-

ronment could be unforgiving at any time of year, as Private Wilhelm

Schulin, serving with the German 26th Infantry Division north of Brest-

Litovsk, recounted in summer 1915:

Exertions, privations, very heavy knapsack, neck and shoulder pain

from the rifl e and long, diffi cult marches; extremely tired feet and

body. Bad roads—either uneven asphalt or deep sand—and always

the uneven fi elds, marching up and down deep furrows. Often in

double time, and usually no water or at best stinking water, no bread

for days on end.57

42
terror in the balk ans

Despite all this, some German and Austro-Hungarian observers favor-

ably contrasted the eastern front with the industrial slaughter and

smaller scale of the western front. They romanticized the notion of a mil-

itary campaign waged across wild, unspoiled expanses, making greater

use of “classic” elements of warfare such as cavalry.58 But there is little

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