A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  Colonel Redl, the press speculated, was the sort of overworked flunky who had become common during the twenty-four years when Friedrich Beck, the emperor’s rather lazy boon companion, had been chief of the general staff. Beck and his section heads had routinely dumped all of their tasks on ambitious subordinates like Potiorek, Conrad, and the recently deceased colonel. Redl had been requested by his final commander, General Giesl (the very portrait of the indolent Austrian general, three chins sagging down the collar of his tunic), precisely because Giesl remembered Redl from Vienna as a tireless worker bee. By all accounts, Redl never stopped working, arriving early at the office, working late, repairing to the coffeehouse to read the newspapers, and then returning to the office to work late into the night. He had been on the verge of being promoted to general but apparently had cracked under the pressure. Other reporters speculated that Redl’s nerves might have been broken by dangerous “covert operations” abroad.

  “We have no idea why he shot himself,” the Neue Freie Presse conceded on Monday, May 26. “We hear that he came to Vienna in a car on Saturday night and was met by three officers, who escorted him to his hotel room, conferred with him, then left.” After the officers departed, Redl left the hotel, dined at a nearby restaurant, wrote notes and letters, took a short walk, returned to his hotel at midnight, placed 3,000 crowns ($600) on the desk, and shot himself.41 He was discovered at five o’clock on Sunday morning by his batman, who was sent by the three officers of the previous day to awaken him. By midweek—after the batman also killed himself—every paper was on to the story, the Neuen Wiener Journal reporting a “very odd funeral.” Why had such a revered officer been given a secret funeral, without military escort and with civilian pallbearers and a covered coffin, and then rushed without ceremony from the garrison morgue to an unmarked grave in Vienna’s vast Central Cemetery?42

  By the end of the week, everything came out. The war ministry—pushed by the tabloids, which had been speculating since midweek on Redl’s sex life—released a brief statement announcing that Redl had killed himself “because of homosexual affairs that led him into financial difficulties that he mitigated through the sale of classified military material to the agents of a foreign power.”43 Put more simply, Redl had sold Austrian and German military secrets to his Russian lovers for sex and money. Each time he had tried to extricate himself, the Russians had threatened to expose him. The Presse, which had held off on the unsavory story while the tabloids tested it, now submitted as well: “We had taken this dignified, beautiful officer for a dashing ladies’ man, but in fact he seems to have ‘fallen.’”44

  The truth was that Alfred Redl had been a Russian spy since at least 1905, when, as a forty-one-year-old captain, he had been sent to study Russian in the Caucasus and had instead studied certain Russians a little too closely, a secret that his Russian hosts kept as Redl climbed the ladder in Vienna.45 As deputy chief of military intelligence in Vienna, he had run counterespionage, enabling him to betray not only Austrian and German secrets but also Vienna’s best Russian informants. As general staff chief of Prague’s VIII Corps—one of the four Echelon B corps in Conrad’s floating reserve—Redl had betrayed the German-Austrian plans for combined action in Poland and Galicia in the event of war with Russia. The regularity with which classified Austro-Hungarian plans were discussed in the Russian press had finally triggered an internal investigation that led to Redl. His downfall was an envelope stuffed with 6,000 crowns that his Russian handlers had sent (from Germany) to his Viennese post office box but which he had not collected in time. It had been “returned to sender,” where German officials opened it and put two and two together, something the Austrians had failed to do over the course of a decade.46

  The Redl Affair, Auffenberg recalled, “delivered one shock after another,” the last arguably the worst. Instead of interrogating Redl to discover the extent of his treason and contacts, the general staff officers who summoned Redl to Vienna had handed him a pistol instead and permitted him to shoot himself, presumably, as the British military attaché put it, “for the purpose of obviating unpleasant disclosures.” Vienna’s Arbeiter Zeitung spoke for most when it asked: “How was the enemy able to buy such a gifted and experienced staff officer of the Austrian army?”47 The Presse found it “astonishing that such a highly talented officer, enjoying the boundless trust of his superiors”—he had even earned entrée to Franz Ferdinand’s inner sanctum at the Belvedere as a Vertrauensmann, a trusted source—“could become a traitor to the fatherland.”It would be impossible to overstate the humiliation the Redl Affair rained on Vienna.

  Indeed, it was the implications of Redl’s treason for the Austrian military that worried its leaders the most. Conrad—who had barely survived the espionage affair in April involving his son—did not want Redl now divulging his mentors (Conrad among them), accomplices, and methods.48 It was Conrad, dining at the Grand Hotel on the Kärtner Ring when Redl was arrested, who had ordered the arresting officers to question Redl in his hotel room, then give the colonel a pistol and the option to kill himself. Conrad hoped in this blundering way to make the Redl problem disappear: the press would merely report that a distinguished officer had killed himself in the sort of despairing suicide that was only too common among Austria-Hungary’s ill-paid officers.

  In his hasty debriefing, Redl had cooperated minimally, taking most of his secrets to the grave, but what little his captors learned from questioning him and later cracking open the safe in his Prague apartment was horrifying: Redl had sold the Russians the latest version of Plan R—updated in 1912—including all mobilization and deployment plans, orders of battle and march tables, German mobilization plans for the eastern border (gleaned in Redl’s personal meetings in Berlin with Moltke during the First Balkan War), the technical specifications of German and Austrian war matériel, and sketches of the Galician fortress complex of Przemysl as well as its provisioning arrangements. Redl sold the Russians secret general staff critiques of Austro-Hungarian maneuvers. He routinely warned the Russians of any organizational or technical reforms being pondered in the Austro-Hungarian war ministry, betrayed Austrian spies to the Russians, concealed Russian spies from the Austrians, falsely accused innocent Austrian officers of espionage (to maintain his reputation as a dogged spy hunter), and summarized the strengths and weaknesses of the Austro-Hungarian generals destined for army and corps commands. Redl’s summary of Conrad as “an able tactician but no judge of men” seemed confirmed by the affair, which, the British embassy observed, “deeply embarrassed and discredited Conrad.”49

  For Franz Ferdinand, who had protected Conrad despite his bumptiousness, this flood of revelations was the last straw: it revealed gross incompetence on Conrad’s part and handed critics of the Habsburg army on both sides of the Leitha all the ammunition they needed to further crimp military budgets and prerogatives. Among other items, Redl’s safe in Prague had contained naked photographs of the cavalry lieutenant Redl had consorted with whenever in Vienna. “People are now saying that the army is a hotbed of abnormal sexual activity and perversions,” one paper wrote. Another focused less on sex and more on money: “We are spending millions on the army on the assumption that at least there will be no treason, and now comes this incredible scandal: an officer at the highest level, spying undetected for fourteen years. What else can we conclude but this—that the army is a blind puppet, a preserve of feudal lords and bourgeois snobs, a disaster.”50

  No one could fathom just how the security culture in Conrad’s general staff could have been so slack that Redl, the son of a Galician civil servant, could have escaped suspicion even while amassing the means to employ five servants, rent a luxury apartment in Prague, purchase a luxury apartment in Vienna, and stable four thoroughbred horses. Redl also drove a thirty-six-horsepower Austro-Daimler car worth 16,000 crowns at a time when hardly anyone owned a car, spent an estimated 100,000 crowns a year, and accumulated a fortune of 2 million crowns on a colonel’s salary. Redl paid his serv
ants alone 7,000 crowns a year, which was equal to the annual salary of two army majors. How could this ostentation have gone undetected?

  The archduke, a religious man, was also outraged by Redl’s homosexuality, which officers still referred to as la Potsdamie—the “Potsdam disease,” a reference to its rumored prevalence in the Prussian court. It turned out that the hotel where Redl shot himself—the Klomser, just a short walk from the Hofburg—was the same place where Redl regularly drove from Prague to meet with his boyfriend, Lieutenant Stefan Horinka, whose apartment in Vienna’s Josefstadt district had been, according to the landlady, the scene of “wild orgies.” Redl would stop in for sex with Horinka and tell the landlady that he was “visiting his nephew”; she wasn’t fooled, but did wonder how an army officer could dress and travel around so handsomely. The landlady’s assumptions about Redl conformed to the general public skepticism about the army: “I assumed that he was engaged in some shady dealings at the ministry, probably selling draft deferments to rich fathers for their sons.”51

  This was the greatest gay scandal to hit Vienna since the emperor had exiled his brother Archduke Ludwig Viktor to the provinces in 1904, and it shined a light again on all of the things that the Habsburgs had hoped to cram into the shadows: steam baths, masseurs, and cruising for boys in the Stadtpark, the Prater, and along the Danube Canal, all haunts of the libidinous Redl. And all of this had happened on Conrad’s watch. Redl’s career had started under Beck but accelerated under Conrad, who even now refused to fire or discipline anyone for the Redl Affair other than Lieutenant Horinka, who received three months’ hard labor and reduction in rank to private.52 Franz Joseph was so sickened by the revelations that he turned most of his military authority over to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whom he now made “General Inspector of the Combined Armed Forces,” a step the emperor never would have taken otherwise. The last man to wield this authority—to command the army and navy and oversee the general staff—had been the old emperor’s uncle, Archduke Albrecht, who had died in 1895.53 Franz Ferdinand was at least as disgusted by the revelations as Franz Joseph was, but the pious archduke also considered Conrad’s proffer of a suicide option sinful. He once again began pushing for Conrad’s replacement, this time by someone who would clean house and restore discipline and morality. Generals Tersztyánszky and Potiorek were mentioned, despite Potiorek’s own rumored homosexuality.

  All of the Dual Monarchy—and not just the Austrian press and the military—fixated on the Redl Affair. Conservatives saw the episode as yet more evidence of the “social sickness” that was rotting Austria: “the striving for money and career, egoism, materialism, vanity, and the total neglect of moral behavior. All of this has penetrated even into the k.u.k. officer corps.”54 The Reichsrat exploded with indignation, demanded that the army turn the affair over to the Ministry of Justice, and rang with embarrassing questions: Why had Redl not been arrested and brought before a proper court-martial? How had he achieved such rapid promotion to the directorship of a vital war ministry department and the position of general staff chief of a corps? How had his extravagant lifestyle gone unnoticed? Why had he been permitted to take his own life? Why were the Germans not invited to take part in an inquiry, considering that Redl had betrayed their secrets too? Exactly which secrets had he sold? Was any future war with Russia now irreparably compromised? The army’s feeble efforts to defend itself—“Redl wore the tunic of the emperor but was never really an Austro-Hungarian officer, because the officer corps is pure”—were ludicrous, elliptically anti-Semitic (Redl was Jewish and therefore impure), and dismissed as the hogwash they were.55 The Hungarian parliament recoiled in horror at the revelations of ineptitude, corruption, and depravity in the already despised Common Army. Berchtold, who had been besieged by Conrad since late 1912 over the need to fight a war with Serbia “once and for all,” now saw the siege lifted, as a deeply embarrassed Conrad fell silent.56

  The guns of the Balkan League shortly broke the silence. All the league’s member states had been nibbling at Macedonia since the 1890s—Bulgarians raiding Greek villages, Albanians raiding Serbs, everyone raiding the Turks—and they now opened their mouths and tried to swallow as much of it as they could.57 Serbia had committed before the Balkan War to deliver most of northern and central Macedonia to the Bulgarians, but Belgrade, having been forced out of Albania by the great powers, now refused to cede the Macedonian territory. The Greeks, who had beaten the Bulgarian army to Salonika by just a day in November 1912, refused to cede any ground there or in Thrace. The Rumanians piled on, demanding Bulgaria’s Danube port of Silistria as well as southern Dobrudja. The Austrians, reduced again to impotent spectators in their prime sphere of influence, watched abashedly, a Budapest daily opining in March that “the Austro-Hungarian monarchy has lost more prestige in the Balkan War than even the defeated Ottoman Empire.”58 The raw energy and élan of these young Balkan states, which were fighting the Turks (and each other) to unify their peoples, would not be overlooked by the bored, dispirited Slavs and Rumanians of the Habsburg monarchy.59

  At the annual Austro-Hungarian army maneuvers in Bohemia in the summer of 1913, Archduke Franz Ferdinand took Conrad aside and told him that he wanted to lay on a second set of maneuvers for 1914. There would be the usual September maneuvers simulating war with Russia, but the archduke wanted to precede those maneuvers with a large-scale military exercise in Bosnia in June to intimidate the Serbs and serve as a long-overdue Balkan show of force. The archduke even had a date in mind, June 28—Serbia’s national holiday, commemorating the Christian kingdom’s defeat by the Turks in 1389 on the Field of the Blackbirds in Kosovo.60

  While the Austrians plotted, the Bulgarians incited a second Balkan War, intending to redress the unequal results of the first. In July, they were thoroughly defeated by the other members of the now defunct Balkan League. Bulgaria’s loss was Serbia’s gain; Belgrade more than doubled its territory and increased its population by a third, claiming most of north-central Macedonia from Skopje south to Monastir (Bitola). Again, the Austrians were conspicuous by their absence at the peace terminating the war in August 1913, and the Germans further undercut their Austrian ally by affirming the terms of the peace over Austria’s objections and agreeing to expanded borders for Rumania, Bulgaria, and Serbia.

  The days when Vienna could disparage Serbia (as Aerenthal once had) as a “rascally boy” stealing apples from the Austrian orchard were clearly over, yet even in drastic times such as these, the two halves of the Dual Monarchy could not work together effectively. Meeting in 1913 to discuss an urgent increase to the military budget and annual draft contingent, the delegations that connected the Austrian and Hungarian governments became bogged down instead on the question of whether off-duty Habsburg officers could moonlight as security guards at the Hungarian parliament, or whether they must be disqualified as “troops of a foreign power.”61 The whole empire seemed to be crumbling. A piece in a British journal titled “The Break-Up of the Austrian Empire” had the subtitle “Perhaps Today, Possibly Tomorrow, Certainly the Day After.” It predicted that the monarchy would shortly be partitioned by the Germans, Italians, Russians, Serbs, and, most mortifying of all, Hungarians.62

  Habsburg army maneuvers in Bohemia in 1913 reflected this prevailing unease; they were the occasion for a public altercation between Conrad and Franz Ferdinand. Conrad actually stormed out of the maneuvers after accusing the archduke of ruining them. Franz Ferdinand responded in kind, calling the general staff chief “a Wallenstein,” a reference to the victorious Austrian generalissimo of the Thirty Years’ War who had conspired against the Habsburgs until his assassination.63 The cause of the spat between Conrad and this latest Habsburg revealed much about the continued travails of the Austrian army. Maneuvers had degenerated under Beck, who had raced through them in a day or two to fit the emperor’s shrinking energy and attention span and deployed ruses to magnify the size of the attacking force to appease the emperor’s appetite for spectacle.64 Conrad wa
s more professional and up-to-date. He’d designed the 1913 maneuvers in two parts. A first period of four days would test the operational abilities of the commanders as two armies—fourteen thousand men to a side—approached each other over the rolling hills around Kolin and Budweis and deployed for battle. A second period of three days would test their tactical abilities.

  Conrad’s complaints about the archduke were, in this instance, entirely justified. Franz Ferdinand cut short the first phase of the maneuvers, depriving the commanders—Generals Brudermann and Auffenberg, who shortly would find themselves in real battles with the Russians—of the opportunity to reconnoiter an enemy army on the move and deploy to fight it. The archduke then abruptly terminated the battle phase at the moment when Brudermann’s army was collapsing and ordered an exercise against a “flagged enemy” for the following day instead. This practice of taking troops from the defense, leaving flags in their place, and adding them to the attack had been widely used by Beck for dramatic effect but had been dropped by every other European army “because it led to situations not represented in war.” More serious maneuvers by 1913 featured an unpicturesque but realistic “empty field,” as cavalry dismounted and infantry and guns entrenched or took cover. Attachés referred to flagged exercises on a crowded field as “giving the girls a show,” and indeed the archduke was overheard ordering a colonel to move his unit for the flagged exercise to a spot “where it could be seen more easily from the hill,” where Franz Ferdinand sat with his wife and children.