My husband had hidden himself in the haystacks. These were set alight by the Russian soldiers. When my husband rushed out, he was asked by the soldiers to hand over all his cash. My husband gave them 200 marks and pleaded for his life, for the sake of his eight children. The Russians said to him, after they had the money, he need not worry and could go; they wouldn’t do anything to him. Scarcely had my husband taken a few steps, when he was shot down by them.
After mortally wounding the farmer, the Russians burned down the whole farm, with the exception of a single cottage. Anna S.’s six-year-old son, Josef, perished in the flames, along with a nanny, a female farm labourer and all of the cattle. Her fourteen-year-old son was shot and wounded, and one of the family’s male labourers was killed. She had fled barefoot with her remaining seven children.58
Executions and massacres were condoned and carried out at the order of Tsarist commanders. This was not true of either plunder-related violence or rape. Where sexual assault was reported, thorough investigations were launched and, if the perpetrator could be identified, severe punishment was meted out.59 Nonetheless, women were intensely vulnerable in the war zone. Requisitions and house searches offered troops ample opportunity to enter dwellings, and even if the victim reported rape, attackers were difficult to track down in the chaos of the battlefield. The number of sexual assaults that took place during the invasions was never firmly established. East Prussian officials recorded 338 cases, but as not all districts reported and as the victims of sex attacks were notoriously unwilling to come forward, this figure is certainly far too low.60 A more reliable estimate might be reached by extrapolating from pregnancies resulting from rape. Two and a half years after the invasions, thirty-seven ‘Russian children’ were in receipt of state support and the provincial authorities knew of another eleven who had been stillborn or since died. If modern obstetric research’s findings that 5 per cent of rapes lead to pregnancy are also applicable to the early twentieth century, this would suggest that the invaders committed nearly 1,000 sexual assaults in the province.61
Horrendous human suffering lies within these statistics. A single testimony, by Anna N., a twenty-year-old who was seven months pregnant when she was attacked in October 1914, might serve as representative of the ordeal. Her account of what was done to her was neither sensational nor even emotional but is all the more powerful for being delivered in the matter-of-fact tone that rape victims of all nationalities typically adopted before authority:
Three Russian soldiers came on foot into our village in Wysockem, Lyck district, and searched our house. They searched all rooms for men, but found nobody. My mother and I stayed in the hall while this went on. One of the Russian soldiers pushed me violently from the hall into the room and demanded that I give myself to him. I resisted and was then violently thrown to the floor by the soldier. After he had finished with me, a second Russian soldier, who had waited in front of the door and refused my mother entry, came in. This one threw me on the bed and also forced me to surrender myself to him. After this one too had finished with me, the two soldiers left the house and departed. The third soldier had already earlier gone away. He had obviously been against entering, for he said to his comrades that they should leave me in peace.
The whole awful episode took just ten minutes but its effects were enduring. Anna N.’s child was stillborn, and she was still sickly from the attack in January 1915.62
The Russian army’s most distinctive and extensively used tool of oppression was deportation. New Field Regulations issued at the end of July 1914 granted the Tsarist army unlimited authority over the population in war zones, including this power of removal. Whether in international law it was legal was more ambiguous, for its use had not been foreseen. During the first invasion of East Prussia, thousands of men were arrested and taken. Most were of military age, and were removed to stop them from joining the German army, a measure that Prussian authorities accepted as legitimate.63 Others were press ganged with their farm wagons to serve in the Tsarist military’s supply column, a clear violation of the 1907 Hague Convention. Whether legal or not, the arrests and deportations caused anguish to the men and their families. One father expressed his raw pain in a letter to Prussian authorities in which he pleaded for help to recover his seventeen-year-old son, dead or alive. On 29 August, he told officials, forty Cossacks had suddenly descended on his farm, firing their carbines. The family had been terrified:
My wife, my only child, my 17-year-old sturdy son Josef, and I fled from one room to the other, and finally in the furthermost chamber fell together on our knees and jointly prayed. The savages fell upon us like a cat or a wild beast falls on a bird family in its nest. We were mercilessly punched, pushed, thrown about. My wife screamed, was punched half to death, body searched. They pushed me to and fro with their rifles and mercilessly carried away my only son. The boy cried . . . ‘Father, save me, father save me.’ I pleaded, implored, cried as only a father can for his only child. Nothing helped.
The father followed the soldiers and his son to the edge of the nearby town, despite being threatened and beaten back. Eventually, he wrote, ‘I had to return; my child was stolen. It was in broad daylight. My God, my God!’64
After the Russians broke into East Prussia for a second time in November 1914, occupying the province’s eastern districts, deportation practices radicalized drastically. The army’s spy mania did not disappear quickly like the Germans’ franc tireur delusion but instead spiralled to new heights that autumn. The Chief of the Russian General Staff, Nikolai Ianushkevich, decided in October to make full use of his power to deport, commanding that front areas should be emptied of all enemy subjects in order to maintain operational secrecy and protect the troops from spying or ambushes.65 First enemy subjects and then, over the winter of 1914–15, hundreds of thousands of ethnic German Russian subjects were cleansed from the Tsarist Empire’s western regions. East Prussians were caught up in these vast movements. The static front in the province assisted this new Russian project, permitting the consolidation of supply lines that in turn facilitated the removal of large numbers of people, and also loot from systematically organized plundering. Not only men as earlier but also women and children, among a total of 13,000 East Prussians, were forcibly transported to the Russian interior.66
The numbers of deported would have been far higher had the head of the East Prussian civil administration, Adolf von Batocki, along with the provincial authorities and army, not organized an evacuation as the Russians advanced. Some 200,000 people from endangered areas were assisted to safety at the start of November and mostly billeted across northern and central Germany. About 50,000 made their own arrangements to escape to the hinterland, and 100,000 refugees travelled across to the western districts of East Prussia.67 For those who refused evacuation and took a great risk in remaining, Russian confusion and poor coordination sometimes proved their salvation. Despite the Chief of Staff’s order, the Tsarist commander in East Prussia, General Sievers, initially told his units to sweep German men towards enemy lines. Lower-ranked officers also had their own security concerns and solutions with the consequence that deportations were haphazard. In some places, everybody was taken, elsewhere only military-aged men, and in other areas people were left undisturbed.68 Still, according to the head of Gumbinnen County, in his invaded eastern districts over 30 per cent of the inhabitants who had not evacuated were deported.69 Desperate East Prussians fled into the province’s thick forest for protection. One man who ran off when the Russians came to his village in mid-December dug a hole in the side of an isolated gully and stayed there through the winter, living off flour mixed with cold water and unthreshed rye. He had no knowledge of the liberation in February 1915 and was discovered only at the beginning of April when, weak from hunger, he decided to give himself up and returned home.70
Those people who neither evacuated nor escaped underwent a miserable and dangerous odyssey.71 Most were transported with great inefficiency and in appalling condit
ions across thousands of kilometres. Infants and old people, who were numerous among the deportees, perished on the journey. The majority were dumped either on the Volga River or between it and the Ural Mountains. The US embassy in Russia, the neutral representatives tasked with checking on their welfare, was by the autumn of 1915 expressing alarm about their condition. Nowhere did Russian civil authorities have much idea of who the deportees were or feel responsible for their well-being. There was no official financial support and, to make matters worse, some authorities had banned the prisoners from paid work. In some areas, they therefore sat in compulsory idleness and penury. Elsewhere they were put to hard forced labour. American officials visiting the Volga observed ‘very real suffering’ and a ‘lack of sufficient nourishment’. Unsurprisingly given the harsh conditions in which the deportees were transported and the deprivation they faced in internment, many died. Almost one-third of the deportees, over 4,000 people, did not survive to see their homeland again.72
The invasions and the violence that accompanied them inflicted great suffering on East Prussia’s inhabitants but, rather counter-intuitively, strengthened the wider German war effort. The Reich lost little of economic value, for the province was by national standards poor, agricultural and sparsely populated. Only its capital, the port city of Königsberg, was of significance and fortunately it was never captured. Instead, the invasions gave two major psychological boosts to the Reich’s mobilization. First and most famously, the victory over the Russian Second Army at Tannenberg in the last days of August 1914 provided a powerful morale uplift for an anxious public. In Berlin, the arrival of refugees from the eastern border earlier in the month had caused great unease. News of the victorious battle, in which 92,000 prisoners and 400 guns were taken, was greeted with what the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt described as ‘unbelievable enthusiasm’.73 The commander of the defending Eighth Army, Paul von Hindenburg, became a household name overnight. The Kaiser, aware of the immense political capital that came with being seen as the liberator of East Prussia, would hurry to the province the second time it was freed, in mid-February 1915, but by then it was too late. Hindenburg’s reputation as the country’s ‘Saviour’ was already firmly fixed. The fame and popularity that he and his Chief of Staff, Erich Ludendorff, won from their defence of the province set them on a meteoric rise that would culminate two years later in appointment to the command of the German army and, ultimately, to the duo becoming Germany’s de facto wartime leadership.74
Second, less well recognized but even more significant, the Russian invasions provided the German public at the very start of hostilities with a terrifying warning of the consequences of defeat. The invasions were a formative trauma undergone not only by East Prussians but vicariously by the entire German nation. Germans hundreds of kilometres from the fighting read in their newspapers vivid, frightening and largely accurate reports of Tsarist atrocities. Troops fighting in the province, a good number of whom hailed from other parts of the Reich, added credibility to the journalism with their own, often exaggerated stories of the enemy’s brutality. Most important in transmitting East Prussia’s trauma to the rest of the country were the floods of refugees. During the Russians’ summer attack, 800,000 refugees, more than a third of East Prussia’s population, left their homes and headed westwards. The second invasion in the autumn produced fewer refugees, but thanks to the better organized official evacuation they travelled much further. Chartered trains took 34,000 to Pomerania, 21,000 to Schleswig, 20,000 to Lüneburg, 12,000 to Potsdam, and many others to different destinations across the Reich. Another 80,000 East Prussians went to relatives, mostly in Berlin and Westphalia. These people brought Germans in the centre and west of the country face to face with the consequences of invasion. Their numbers were swelled by military evacuees, as in November, fearing a deep invasion of the Reich, the army removed thousands of young men from other eastern frontier provinces. The purpose of the measure was to protect them from deportation, but according to the popular rumour mill it was necessary because the Russians routinely cut off the hands of fit German males. The measure and the myths that accompanied it underlined for all Germans the great danger faced by the Reich.75
The invasions not only inflamed widespread feelings of fear but thus quite literally brought together the German people, cementing the national solidarity that had formed at the start of hostilities. In the face of the destruction and atrocities, both true and exaggerated, it could hardly be questioned that the conflict was being fought for a good and just cause. Even the Social Democrats, the most sceptical of all Germany’s political groupings, regarded the Tsarist campaign in East Prussia to be ‘a flaming symbol of a thoroughly barbaric method of warfare’.76 Regardless of the fact that many East Prussian refugees were Polish-speaking Masurians or Lithuanians, all were feted as German brothers and what was widely presented as their ‘sacrifice for our holy cause’ was publicly honoured.77 The most powerful sign of the solidarity felt across the country, and a mark of how much other Germans identified with the beleaguered people in the invasion zone, was the spectacular success of the national fund-raising campaign to alleviate their suffering and repair the damage. Donations flooded in from all parts of the Reich, and by May 1916 had reached the impressive sum of twelve million marks.78 The trauma inflicted by this vicarious invasion, and the intense emotions of fear, anxiety and anger that had accompanied it, were not quickly forgotten. For the rest of the conflict, East Prussia would stand as an awful warning of the consequences of allowing enemy troops onto German soil. The memory and myths of the invasions would retain their ability to mobilize and unify the German people long after all danger from the Russians had passed.
RACE WAR
In Galicia, the Russian campaign of 1914–15 had a very different course and outcomes from the attacks further north. The Habsburg Crownland was, at 77,300 square kilometres, more than twice the size of East Prussia. With 8,025,675 inhabitants, 15 per cent of Austria-Hungary’s population, and a large if poor agricultural sector, it was economically a much more significant territory. Although Galicia and East Prussia were both multi-ethnic places, competition and conflict were far more marked among the peoples of the Habsburg territory. Polish aspirations for greater autonomy or independence clashed with Ukrainophiles’ hopes for a separate Crownland. The Viennese bureaucracy wished in vain that all peoples might invest more in the Austrian state idea. The Russians too had their own vision for the land. Galicia’s annexation was one of their primary war aims and there an idealistic rhetoric absent in East Prussia marked the Tsar’s campaign. The chaos of the Habsburg army’s deployment in August 1914 combined with its inferiority in numbers and equipment to give the Russians an excellent chance of success.
The Russians’ ambition and ideological aims in Galicia were manifest from the very start of the invasion. The Tsar’s army, the instrument of Europe’s most autocratic state, considered itself to be fighting a war of liberation. It regarded Ukrainian speakers as a ‘Russian people’ and aspired to unite their home, Eastern Galicia, to the Russian Motherland. The commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, issued an appeal to Galicia’s inhabitants on 16 September 1914 couched in idealistic language:
In the name of the great Russian Tsar I declare to you that Russia, which has more than once shed her blood for the emancipation of peoples from foreign yokes, seeks nothing but the restoration of right and justice. To you, peoples of Austria-Hungary, she will now bring freedom and the realization of your national aspirations.79
The contrast with Rennenkampf’s nervous warning not to resist on his entry into East Prussia could hardly have been greater. The army’s ethnographers and officers had high hopes of a friendly reception from the Crownland’s 3.2 million Ruthenes, or ‘little Russians’ as they thought of them. They were less confident about its 3.8 million Poles. Not only was the Galician Polish elite largely content with its autonomy under the Habsburgs but the brutality with which the Tsarist regime had suppressed t
he 1863 uprising in Congress Poland and the 1905–6 revolution still rankled. Confessional differences also mattered. Russian military ethnographers blamed Poles’ hostility on ‘Catholic fanaticism’.80 In an attempt to win over this people, Grand Duke Nikolai addressed a public manifesto to them on 14 August 1914, promising a reunification of the Polish nation, ‘joined in one under the sceptre of the Russian Emperor’.81 The Tsarist High Command’s conciliatory stance shaped its soldiers’ conduct. Jan Słomka, mayor of the Galician village of Dzików, found for example that, just so long as they were sober, Russian troops were polite and friendly when they arrived in September 1914.82
The Russian army’s invasion of Galicia was thus not at first so dominated by the delusions of civilian resistance and by the military punishments and reprisals that marked its conduct in East Prussia. Nonetheless, there was violence. This was aimed at the Crownland’s two smallest peoples, its 872,000 Jews and 90,000 Germans. The Tsarist officer corps regarded both ethnic groups as malign alien influences within a Slavic land. While the Germans were objects of fear, the Jews were targeted due to what one observant contemporary – the Jewish aid worker Shloyme Rappaport-Ansky, who travelled widely in Galicia during the occupation – called ‘the bestial anti-Semitism permeating the entire army’.83 Pre-war military ethnographic studies had portrayed Jews as untrustworthy rather than threatening: the materialistic ‘kikes’, officers agreed, were too selfish, cowardly and busy making money to put up resistance. At most, they might become paid spies for both sides.84 Once the campaign began, Russian units did sometimes convince themselves that Jews had ambushed them and reacted violently. On 29 August, in the northeastern border village of Liwcze, for example, seventeen men and one woman, among them some Jews, were shut in a house and massacred by Tsarist troops as reprisal for shots said to have come from the settlement.85 Generally, however, Russian assaults on Galicia’s Jewish population took the form of unruly pogroms motivated by prejudice and poor discipline. These were generally less lethal than the military punishments in East Prussia, for the primary intention was not to kill but rather to humiliate, rob and rape. The deaths that did take place were more usually the result of vicious sexual assault or brutal handling than of officially sanctioned execution.86
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