In the small hours of Friday morning, 28 August, well before the agreed deadline, a Russian captain appeared with carts at the depot. The main Russian force had already pulled out, leaving behind only a couple of battalions, and the food was urgently needed. Yet in spite of the night’s tremendous exertions, Allenstein was still well short of its targets. Little more than half of the sugar and salt demanded had been gathered, less than a third of the grits and rice, and only a small amount of tea and no pepper. Instead of the 120,000 kilos of bread that the officer had come to collect, the city had only 25,096 kilos.30 There therefore followed some anxious hours for Mayor Zülch. The captain disputed the weight of the bread delivered by the city, and it was only after fierce argument that he relented and issued a receipt. Shortly after, a general arrived, complaining about the bread’s quality and threatening retribution for the shortfall. Again, Zülch stood his ground, explained that the city had done everything possible to cooperate, and succeeded in convincing the Russian that punitive action would be unjust.31 After the general finally departed, the weary mayor returned home to sleep, but as he arrived back was recalled to settle payment for the supplies. This entailed yet another argument about the amount and value of the goods, which lasted for several hours. At midday, just as a compromise had been found, the sound of gunfire was heard and the meeting was interrupted by the Russian city commandant who stormed in, waved a bandaged hand at the mayor and cried ‘your people have shot at me’.32
In fact, the shot that wounded the officer had not been fired by a civilian franc tireur but by German troops from the Eighth Army who were quickly closing in on the city. Standing on the roof of their bakery, Rittel and his helpers saw grey-clad soldiers in skirmishing order coming from the east. From the edge of the city, startled Russians came running back. Others took up positions in gardens and on crossroads, but were soon forced to flee by advancing German infantry. The fighting, although brief, was punctuated by moments of brutality; General Paul von Hindenburg’s troops, many of whom were from Prussia’s eastern borderlands, wanted to exact retribution from the invaders of their homeland.33 In the bakery, Rittel’s daughter was confronted by two German riflemen who smashed through the locked doors and, weapons at the ready, demanded to know the whereabouts of the Russians who had helped with the baking. When the frightened girl was unable to tell them, they conducted a frantic search, discovered their enemies cowering in the coal cellar, and beat them with rifle butts before bundling them outside. Elsewhere, the liberators were even more vicious: three Russian prisoners were put up against the wall of Hirschberg’s hotel by German troops and, in sight of his family, shot. By half past three that afternoon, Russian resistance in Allenstein had been broken. A few hours later, the former city commandant lay dead on a battlefield 10 kilometres to the south, and the officer who had negotiated payment with Mayor Zülch yet had never handed over any money had been captured along with many men. Liberating soldiers were received jubilantly by the population, who thrust flowers, cigarettes and their remaining food at them. Although fire-fights with isolated Russian stragglers continued until Sunday and caused some alarm, news of the great German victory won by the Eighth Army soon spread, bringing confidence that the Tsarist army would not return. Allenstein’s ordeal was over.34
Undoubtedly, Allenstein came away lightly from occupation. There were no atrocities against its population, the Russians were thrown out so quickly and unexpectedly that they had no opportunity to destroy any major infrastructure, and the liberation itself cost the lives of only three German soldiers, an officer and one female civilian, the last hit by a bullet in the fighting.35 Yet it would be wrong to conclude that the city was never in any danger. The Russians were nervous of civilian resistance, and the occupation took place at a particularly tense time, during the Battle of Tannenberg. Although Russian commanders acted with moderation and their troops were well-disciplined in Allenstein, on the day the city was liberated there were massacres in two small towns nearby, Soldau and Ortelsburg.36 The municipal officials who bravely remained in Allenstein when other authorities had evacuated deserve much credit for the absence of bloodshed: the police chief, who defused tension between the crowd and the first Russian patrol, sensibly cleared the city of German soldiers and posted men at its entrances to tell the invader that it was undefended; Hirschberg and lesser functionaries such as Rittel who collected the supplies demanded by the occupying force; and above all Mayor Zülch, who negotiated with Russian senior officers, organized citizens to comply with their orders, and received a well-earned Iron Cross for his efforts.37
Invasion, even though brief and bloodless, profoundly affected the city’s inhabitants. As their local newspaper observed, ‘anyone who didn’t go through these Allenstein “Russian days” cannot grasp how deeply we who stayed behind felt the ignominy of Russian rule in our German city’.38 The occupation was extremely frightening. Rittel’s daughter, for example, was very shaken by her experiences. In November 1914, when German troops pulled back again on the Eastern Front and evacuated supplies and wounded from Allenstein, she forced the family to flee. Many who had been through the first invasion clearly felt similarly, for the exodus from the city was even greater than in August.39 The intense emotions which invasion had elicited, fear, humiliation, and also pride at the civic solidarity that had been displayed under occupation, not only stamped the city’s collective psyche but were also literally built into its physiognomy. Once the danger had passed, the plans for Allenstein’s new town hall were altered. Scenes from the invasion, including ‘the negotiation with the enemy general about the fate of the city’ and the ‘baking of bread during the tyranny’ were sculpted on a bay jutting out from the main building. The city’s rancour towards its foes was also lastingly inscribed in stone. Long after the war’s end, on each of the seven keystones in the frames of the hall’s lower windows, could be seen gargoyles, representing an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Russian, an Italian, a Serb, a Japanese and an Indian.40
RUSSIAN ATROCITIES
Not everywhere in East Prussia was invasion so brief and bloodless as in Allenstein. The stories brought by the panicked refugees who had arrived in the city at the beginning of August had a firm basis in truth. From the first days of the war, raiding Tsarist troops had shot inhabitants and burned hamlets and farmsteads along the border. Once the Russian First Army under General Paul Rennenkampf invaded the east of the province on 15 August, followed five days later in the south by General Aleksandr Samsonov’s Second Army, the violence became much worse.41 Even the German military was shocked. Lieutenant Colonel Max Hoffmann, the First General Staff officer of the defending Eighth Army, exclaimed with horror on 23 August that ‘there has never been such a war as this, and never will be again – waged with such bestial fury. The Russians are burning everything down.’42 Indeed, the destruction was immense. While East Prussia’s few cities escaped largely unscathed, three-fifths of its small towns and more than a quarter of its villages and farms were scarred or ruined. 100,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Worst of all was the loss of civilian life. Some 1,491 East Prussians died at the hands of Russian troops, most during the first invasion in August and September 1914. Some were executed, others were the victims of plunder-related killing, and still others died in massacres induced by panic or perpetrated as officially sanctioned reprisals. The scale of the violence was, proportional to East Prussia’s much smaller population, no different than that of the more famous contemporaneous German atrocities in Belgium and France.43
The Russian army invaded East Prussia primed to meet civilian resistance. The force had long experience of counter-insurgency warfare, but unlike for its German enemy past trauma with francs tireurs did not shape its suspicion of enemy subjects. Instead, its distrust stemmed from its use of ethnic profiling. Tsarist commanders had prepared for the coming conflict by commissioning ethnographic studies of the populations in the lands over which they would fight, linking race explicitly to political reliability. Ger
mans were identified as the most dangerous among the border peoples. East Prussia, where four-fifths of the 2,064,175 inhabitants were German and the remainder Polish-speaking Masurians loyal to the Prussian Crown and Lithuanians, could thus only be regarded as extremely hostile territory.44 As soon as the Russian First Army crossed into the province, General Rennenkampf attempted to deter the expected opposition through a blunt warning. Promising not to harm peaceful civilians, he laid out draconian penalties for those who attacked his troops. ‘Any resistance carried out by the inhabitants against the imperial Russian army will be ruthlessly punished, regardless of gender or age,’ he admonished. Disregarding international law, he also threatened collective punishment, promising that ‘places in which even the smallest attack on the Russian army is perpetrated . . . will be immediately burned to the ground’.45
The Russian army’s violence during the invasion was motivated in large part by the belief that this warning had been widely flouted by civilians. As Quartermaster General Iurii N. Danilov, the Tsarist military’s third-in-command, later recalled, officers who had served in East Prussia ‘unanimously’ testified ‘to the excellent organization of the support given to [enemy] troops by the German population’. A spy fear gripped the army. Units reported that windmills were being turned to track their progress as they marched. The people were said to be betraying troop movements with light signals and by ringing church bells. Inhabitants were even thought sufficiently fanatical that they would set their own homes alight to produce a smoke signal for their own side; a curious case of Russians’ anxieties being projected onto the victims of their own violence. There were also paranoid accusations of armed resistance. Francs tireurs were rumoured to rove the countryside on motorcycles and bicycles, German soldiers in mufti to be mingling among the population, and seemingly innocuous civilians to be plotting to poison unsuspecting Tsarist soldiers.46
Like the stories that were simultaneously gripping the Kaiser’s army in Belgium and France, all this was fantasy. Later German investigation uncovered only isolated cases of shooting by foolhardy individuals in East Prussia; the mass of the population followed the admonitions of their own authorities not to antagonize the invader.47 The Russians’ greatest fear, spying, was also rare. At the start of the invasion, brave telegraph and postal officials did take great risks to get word to the German army of the enemy’s arrival. In one celebrated incident, the postal director in the border village of Eydtkuhnen kept the Russians talking on the ground floor of his building while upstairs his staff hurriedly telegraphed Prussian military and civil authorities to warn of their arrival and then smashed the equipment. Elsewhere, courageous female telephone operators ensured the news reached the German army. Fräulein Moritz of the Memel postal service was one such example, hopping on her bike when the Russians came and riding under rifle fire to the nearest German watch to warn it of the danger. Seldom, however, did spying extend any further than these spontaneous acts of heroism. There were no spy rings, no intricate plots. The postmaster of the village of Kolletzischken, who found himself with a working telephone and heroically transmitted reports of Russian troop movements to the other side of the front until his line was discovered in early September, was probably unique.48
As in the west, the initial, highly disorientating mobile combat fuelled the invaders’ fears and presumptions of civilian resistance. Skirmishes with small well-camouflaged German patrols easily prompted jittery Russians to jump to the conclusion that they were being attacked by the population and to exact retribution. On some fifty separate occasions, after coming under fire from German troops in or near a village, Tsarist soldiers undertook no investigation but simply burned down some or all of the surrounding houses.49 The violence was at its most intense at, although certainly not limited to, crisis points. In the south of East Prussia, the bloodiest period was during the last, confused days of Samsonov’s advance, when his Second Army was being encircled by German defenders. In the east, killings spiked in September, as Rennenkampf’s army hurriedly retreated. Its logistics and discipline partially collapsed and its scared, frustrated and hungry soldiers were gripped ever more tightly by delusions of spies and francs tireurs and vented their rage on civilians.50 The bloodshed was also exacerbated by the Tsarist military’s patchy discipline. This made some units prone to panic and violence. It also meant that plunder, often accompanied by assaults and murder, was a ubiquitous feature of this campaign. While some Russian combat units were praised for the strict control in which their officers held them, supply columns were condemned as bands of thieves. Small fast-moving cavalry patrols without officer oversight were also reported to have behaved particularly atrociously. As the Evangelical Church in East Prussia observed pithily after interviewing its clergy, they ‘stole, robbed, murdered to their hearts’ content’. Cossacks, the army’s elite but unruly light horsemen, were especially feared.51
The Russians’ racialized preconceptions, mixed discipline and disorientation in fluid fighting combined to turn the East Prussian countryside into an extremely dangerous place in August and September 1914. Men were most at risk. Many victims had inadvertently attracted the invader’s attention. Putting on or even possessing any item of military clothing was a major error, for the Russians were convinced troops in mufti were hiding among the local population. Unfortunately, German reservists had often taken hard-wearing army footwear, a cap or jacket back with them to civilian life after their peacetime conscript service as a souvenir or for use in the fields. The scope for confusion was large. Possession of a pair of army boots or a military pass could cost a man his life in 1914.52 The hypersensitivity of the Russians to spying made other articles dangerous too. Farmers in breeches and gaiters were assumed to be Prussian officers, telescopes, whistles and even notebooks were considered evidence of treacherous activity. For one individual, possession of a school atlas was sufficient to be landed in trouble. Cyclists were among the greatest victims of the invasion. One in twenty of all those killed by the Russians was on a bike. In the poverty-ridden Tsarist Empire, privately owned bicycles were a rarity, and so soldiers and officers tended to regard them as military machines and to assume that their riders were disguised combatants. Trials were generally seen as superfluous. As one East Prussian gendarme reported, ‘cyclists [whom the Russians] met on the street had their bicycles broken up without ceremony and they themselves were also for the most part shot’.53
The Russians not only executed individuals but also mercilessly punished whole communities for perceived resistance. On 2 September, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the Tsarist army’s commander-in-chief, ordered that places whose inhabitants fired upon troops should suffer ‘complete destruction’.54 This, however, merely legitimized a practice that had already been going on for weeks. The small town of Neidenburg was subjected to a punitive artillery bombardment on 22 August after an erroneous report that its citizens had shot at reconnoitring Cossacks. Villages became sites of massacres in similar circumstances. Among the long list of obscure habitations which experienced bloodshed, a few that suffered most deserve mention. In the village of Santoppen, twenty-one people were killed on 28 August, among them two women and a Catholic priest. The bloodshed may have been intended as a reprisal for shooting, as two Cossacks had been fired on near the village earlier in the day, probably by a German patrol. Alternatively, signalling may have been uppermost in the Russians’ minds, for the village’s church bells had been rung that afternoon, ironically sounding death knells for a man shot by the Russians on the previous day.55 In Bischofstein on 29 August, after a fire-fight with a six-man German patrol that had then hurriedly dispersed, the Russians executed thirty-six men in the town and the surrounding area.56 The bloodiest massacre of the invasion was perpetrated on the same day in Abschwangen. After German cavalrymen had shot a senior Russian officer travelling in a car through this village, Tsarist troops stormed in, killed some of its male inhabitants, and set the place alight. The men who remained were gathered in two groups
at either end of the village. One group was executed, but the other was pardoned after a local councillor named Graap stepped forward and presented a note that he had been left by a Tsarist officer quartered in the village, which testified to his good conduct. The massacre, arson and mass execution cost sixty-one lives.57
For East Prussians, this was a terrifying period. The case of Anna S., the wife of a wealthy farmer in the southern district of Rössel, illustrates the awful abruptness with which a family’s fortunes could change under invasion. We have her story because in mid-September she told it at the Allenstein County offices, where she had gone to plead for help. ‘On 31 August, a Cossack patrol rode by our farm,’ she recounted. The Cossacks had skirmished with German troops who, outnumbered, had withdrawn. There then arrived Russian infantry, who apparently had not seen the patrol fight but had heard the shots and were convinced that they had come from the farm. They threatened all present with bayonets and demanded to know ‘where the German soldiers are hidden’. Tragedy followed, as Anna explained:
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