Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  ‘UNWELCOME CO-EATERS’

  The Russian invasion of Galicia had a profound impact on Austria-Hungary. Not only did the Habsburg and Tsarist armies’ brutality undermine the credibility of both imperial regimes among peoples in the Crownland but, as with East Prussia, the effects of invasion reverberated over much greater distances. Unlike in the Reich, however, these effects were wholly negative. The seeds of the Habsburg Empire’s collapse were sown by the invasion. Economically, Galicia was, in contrast to the Reich’s invaded province, a crucial region. It was indispensable for Austria’s food supply, containing about one-third of the western half of the Empire’s arable land. The invasion disrupted its agriculture, destroyed infrastructure and depleted cattle. In the Crownland’s east, the number of horses and cows dropped by over 40 per cent and that of pigs by a catastrophic 70 per cent.152 This damage to farming would soon be rued in kitchens across Austria and be a key cause of the shortage and starvation that brought social and political turmoil in later war years. Additionally, Galicia was the Central Powers’ main source of petroleum. Its oil industry suffered significant damage: two-thirds of its derricks were burned down, some wells set on fire, and around a million tons of oil were lost through damage to reservoirs and production stoppage. Here, however, the retreating Tsarist army missed a potentially decisive opportunity. Too intent on beating up Jews to recognize the strategic importance of oil fields, it undertook no systematic sabotage and even left 480,000 tons of oil in storage tanks. Galicia went on to supply three-fifths of the Central Powers’ wartime petrol and diesel. Germany’s notorious U-boat campaigns later in the conflict would not have been possible without it.153

  The invasion of Galicia not only damaged Austria-Hungary economically but also tore apart its fragile society. As in East Prussia, waves of refugees rippled from the Crownland spreading the shock and trauma to distant parts of the Empire. The humanitarian disaster was even greater than in the Reich because the Russians penetrated much deeper and several major cities had to be evacuated. Over a million people fled their homes and sought shelter in the Austrian heartlands to the west in 1914–15.154 They imposed an immense financial burden on the Habsburg state. In total, 2,243.1 million crowns were spent on war relief for refugees, which was 2.36 per cent of Austria-Hungary’s direct war expenditure.155 More damaging, however, was the social cost. The Empire had just about coped in peacetime with internal disputes between neighbouring peoples over local power and resources. When hundreds of thousands of Galicians suddenly arrived in the west of the Empire, placing huge strains on infrastructure, they exposed the weakness of a vast multi-ethnic empire at war. The solidarity felt across the German nation state towards East Prussian refugees was not seen in Austria, where Germans, Czechs, Slovenes and Hungarians regarded the impoverished Jewish, Polish and Ruthenian arrivals as unwelcome foreigners. The large population movements soon inflamed racial strife and, due to the great number of Jews among the refugees, a virulent anti-Semitism.

  Refugees’ woes had already begun in Galicia, where official hostility added to the hardships of flight. The Habsburg army had not foreseen that masses of people would flee westwards and evinced little sympathy for them. At best, refugees were regarded as an unpatriotic nuisance, selfishly obstructing roads urgently needed for military transport. At worst, gripped like its opponent by spy paranoia, the army treated them as objects of fear and suspicion. Commanders warned hysterically that disguised Tsarist officers were mixed in among the refugees. Some were said to be reconnoitring behind Austrian lines, others to be heading to the Empire’s major cities in order to make contact with Russian prisoners of war.156 More justifiably, refugees were also feared as disease-carriers who might spread a cholera or typhus epidemic into Austria-Hungary’s heartlands. The civil bureaucracy, although also initially surprised by the mass exodus, acted ruthlessly. The Austrian Interior Minister, Baron Karl Heinold von Udyński, deliberately attempted in early October to reduce the speed at which the wretched people could escape the Crownland. The number of special evacuation trains was decreased and Galician authorities were ordered to cease issuing free rail passes to refugees.157

  As well as attempting to slow the flood, Habsburg authorities took measures to direct and control it. An early intention to treat evacuees who left on military orders differently from refugees departing of their own volition proved impracticable, as both groups mixed on trains out of Galicia.158 Instead, refugees’ experiences were shaped by other criteria. Wealth and social standing were extremely important. Those capable of supporting themselves could go where they wished. The impoverished majority, however, were caught up in the workings of a huge bureaucracy. They were, so far as possible, stopped from travelling on ordinary trains and collected for dispatch in special refugee transports. To supervise them, police boarded the transports at three so-called ‘embarkation stations’, Wadowice, Ujzsolna and Oświęcim; many of the wretched Jewish refugees who passed through the last of these locked in cattle wagons in 1914 and 1915 would return in similar transport three decades later when, under its German name, Auschwitz, it was the most infamous killing centre of the Holocaust. The transports then steamed to ‘Inspection Stations’, the two largest of which were situated at Prerau and Ungarisch-Hradisch (today Přerov and Uherské Hradiště in the Czech Republic). Here the refugees were disembarked, registered and divided according to ethnicity and religion. They then passed through a minimum two-week quarantine period. The accommodation was poor and overcrowded, the food bad, and compulsory baths in cold water made many of the people ill. These places consequently bred rather than isolated epidemic disease. If the refugees survived this period, they were distributed to the camps or communities earmarked to house them. Ruthenes were sent to Carinthia, while Poles were divided in a rough ratio of three to one between Bohemia and Carniola (a region today in Slovenia). Jewish refugees were transported to Moravia.159

  Instead of fleeing westwards, some Galician refugees chose to head south, into Hungary. Yet in an early demonstration of the lack of solidarity that was to plague the Habsburg war effort until 1918, the Magyar government took the view that the refugees were a purely Austrian problem and refused to assist. Many were stopped at border posts, although often they simply crossed at other points. Tens of thousands were ejected from Magyar lands. Others stayed but were not made welcome. An appeal sent to the Austrian Ministry of the Interior by some of these impoverished people in November 1914 explained their tragic situation:

  It is already four months since we Galician refugees were thrown out of our homeland, where we left behind all our goods and possessions – [We are] in a land (Hungary) where no one understands us and we don’t understand them[.] There is no mercy[,] we are considered to be animals . . . We remain poor and naked, our elder sons are on the field of battle, our small children cry for bread, we are numb with cold and no one cares for us.

  Begging for help, the refugees asked the Minister ‘either to take pity with bread in order to keep us alive, or to have all of us shot, as starvation is much worse than death’.160

  The plight of refugees in Austria was, however, often little better. Those sent to barrack camps, around 200,000 people by mid-1915, suffered most. The camps had been built hastily in the first months of war with the intention of both housing the refugees and, no less important, isolating them from the Austrian hinterland’s population. They were prisons. Even under Austria’s unusually draconian emergency laws, the indefinite incarceration of subjects not accused of any crime was illegal. The Interior Minister acknowledged this but consciously prioritized what he termed ‘important state interests’ above the law, lamely hoping that the measure might, at some later point, be justified. Perhaps no more could be expected of a government which, since the closure of the Reichsrat in March 1914, had ruled unconstitutionally. Living conditions in the camps were awful. The camp at Chotzen in Bohemia, built to hold 22,000 Polish refugees, offers a typically miserable example. Each of its thirty-seven barracks of 878 squ
are metres was supposed to hold 530 people. Every family was allocated a small room with wooden walls on three sides and a canvas screen on the fourth. Rooms that backed onto an exterior wall had access to light but were too far from the two stoves in the middle of the barracks to be warm. Rooms on the inside were warm but had no light. A journalist who visited the camp condemned the conditions as ‘horrendous’. The air, he wrote, ‘is putrid, stinking and damp’. There was hardly any privacy: ‘The crying of ill children, boys playing on mouth harmonicas and the noise made by several arguing women . . . as well as the loud and threatening orders of the barrack commandant fill the air here and unite in a symphony of such discord that any person would seek to exit this terrible place of refugee misery as quickly as possible’. As a result of the unsanitary living conditions and lack of medical care, there were numerous epidemics. A third of the Polish refugees incarcerated in Chotzen perished.161

  Despite early intentions to house all refugees in camps, the flood of people from Galicia and, later, from the border with Italy was so large that no more than a fifth could be accommodated.162 Most were either billeted on smaller communities across the land or managed to make their own way to one of the Empire’s great western cities. Few corners of Austria were left untouched by the waves of refugees. In November 1914 there were 90,000 refugees in Bohemia, 6,000 in Carinthia and 4,000 in Upper Austria. Moravia and Styria had 25,000 each, and Salzburg and Carniola 5,000 each. In spite of belated attempts to bar entry, Vienna was, with 140,000 refugees, a particularly important destination.163 These large numbers did not reflect any enthusiasm in the Crownlands to take in Galician refugees. Although Austria’s Interior Ministry ruled that refugees might constitute no more than 2 per cent of a community’s inhabitants, thus limiting the burden of helping these people, only areas with labour shortages expressed any interest in taking them in.164 The hostility that Galicians met from bureaucrats and public alike contrasted strikingly with the great public sympathy that East Prussian refugees attracted in Germany. To a large degree, this reflected the more tenuous ties between peoples in a multi-ethnic empire compared with the solid ‘imagined community’ of a modern nation state. East Prussia, with its past of Teutonic Knights, castles and border skirmishes, occupied a central position in German national mythology and was imagined as an integral part of the Reich. Austrians, by contrast, felt no such affinity to Galicia. The land was a peripheral imperial possession. No romantic history linked its peoples to the rest of Franz Joseph’s realm. To his subjects in the more developed west, Galicia’s conservatism and poverty were more resonant of barbaric Asia than Austria or Europe.165

  The lack of a strong bond between the disparate Habsburg lands was accentuated by three further circumstantial factors generating hostility towards refugees. First, the narratives disseminated by governments and newspapers to explain the unfortunate people’s plight encouraged fear and distrust. In sharp contrast to Germany, where public praise of East Prussians was fulsome, in Austria Galicians were scapegoated for the Habsburg army’s first catastrophic defeats. The stories of Ruthenes’ treachery that gripped the front were spread by newspapers throughout the Empire, and the segregation of so many refugees in camps, the like of which was not seen in the Reich, also sent a strong signal that the new arrivals were criminal. Suspicion and fear prevailed. Miecisław Schwestek, one of 3,000 Galician and Bukovinian railway employees evacuated to Tyrol, found the people there hostile even at the end of September 1914. They made no distinction between Poles and Ukrainians and, he complained, were ‘suspecting us of treason’.166

  Second, in the autumn of 1914, just as the refugees arrived en masse in the west, the first food shortages and price inflation were starting to be felt across Austria. The newcomers were naturally blamed and resented, in the words of one Crownland head, as ‘unwelcome co-eaters’. By April 1915 the Viennese Police were warning presciently that unless food shortages eased, attacks on refugees by the population were to be expected.167 Above all in the capital, although also in Bohemia and elsewhere, these economic grievances were closely tied to a third factor: anti-Semitism. Jews made up two-fifths of the refugees in Austria, but they were the vast majority of the 200,000 sheltering in Vienna. Many had gone to the capital in the hope of staying with family or friends. Others had been directed there by authorities who hoped that the city’s large Jewish community would help to support its impoverished Galician co-believers. Hostility was immediate: complaints that Vienna was ‘overfilled’ with refugees were already heard in mid-September, when fewer than 50,000 had arrived in this metropolis of one million souls. A month later, signs were posted around the city, telling the refugees to go home.168

  Jewish refugees were special targets of hatred in Vienna in part because of their numbers and also because the city had a history of anti-Semitism, formed during earlier waves of Orthodox Jewish immigration. Since the stock market crash of 1873 middle-class Viennese had tended to regard Jews as practitioners of a particularly selfish and ruthless brand of capitalism, and this prejudice dovetailed very neatly with new wartime economic grievances.169 Accusations that Jewish refugees were spongers and spivs were soon voiced out loud and grew more numerous as supplies of food and household items diminished. Wild rumours were widely believed. One typical story claimed that a single Jew had managed to corner the supply of matches in Budapest, raising prices sky high. In fact, contrary to the implication of such stories that Jewish refugees had immense wealth at their disposal, most lived in conditions of abject penury. Municipal authorities, terrified that the refugees might stay, strove to make life unbearable for these unwelcome guests, denying them work permits and repeatedly urging them to return home at the earliest opportunity. The state support for refugees, at 70 hellers, covered only a third of minimum living costs. To make ends meet, refugee families crowded into rooms together, contributing to a rise in epidemic disease during the first half of 1915. Both the Interior and Finance Ministers recognized the patent inadequacy of the support, yet straitened state finances ruled out any increase to a realistic level. Refugees who complained risked having even this slender allowance cut.170

  Austrian attitudes towards refugees were, in fairness, not characterized solely by indifference and hostility. There were individuals and private organizations who worked tirelessly to alleviate suffering and intervene with government on behalf of refugees. Foremost among them was the Vienna-based Central Welfare Bureau for Refugees from Galicia and Bukovina. This body, which was funded by the Interior Ministry, paid out support and distributed warm clothing, helped refugees to find accommodation, employment and medical aid, and managed nurseries, schools and even a library. Charities too chipped in to help. Zionist and assimilationist Jewish organizations vied to assist and gain adherents among the refugees.171 Nonetheless, the assistance had limited impact. The refugees were too numerous and the state’s generosity and competence severely limited. Civil society urgently needed to be engaged, yet there was little public understanding of the suffering endured by refugees, a situation not improved by extremely tight Austrian censorship that suppressed all suggestion of state weakness. Reports on the hardship of refugees were banned. The tenuous bond between the Empire’s peoples was implicitly acknowledged in the division of the refugees by nationality and faith. Military disaster in Galicia did not bring them together. Instead, the flood of people from periphery to centre greatly exacerbated social tensions and racial antagonism, and had highly negative consequences for the state and its war effort. The head of the Central Welfare Bureau summed up the disappointing result incisively. ‘Instead of the expected deepening of the common thought of the Great Austria and Whole Austria idea, the conflicts have become greater,’ he observed, ‘bitterness grows daily.’172

  The invasions of Germany and Austria by Russia do not receive much mention in history books today. The victims have been forgotten, their suffering and the wrongs inflicted upon them disregarded. Yet the importance of the Russian attacks cannot be overstated. The T
sarist army’s invasions in the east, far more than the contemporaneous German attack and ‘atrocities’ in the west, offer the closest link between the campaigns of 1914 and the genocidal horrors of the mid-twentieth century. Racial ideology, anti-Semitism and ambitious plans to remould and exclude populations, all hallmarks of later Nazi actions in the same region, characterized these operations. The army’s embrace of ethnicity as a marker of political loyalty and its radical readiness forcibly to move whole communities would be seen again under Joseph Stalin on an even greater scale. The loss of life among Habsburg and Hohenzollern subjects in 1914 was still relatively modest. Yet the Russian violence, and the motives behind it, heralded the descent of east-central Europe into the century’s ‘Bloodlands’.

  The invasions had inverse outcomes for Austria-Hungary and Germany. The loss of Galicia was a catastrophe for the Habsburg state. The Russians destroyed infrastructure and dislocated the people. It soon became clear that without the agriculture of this undervalued Crownland, Austrians would suffer terrible hunger. No less disastrous, the flood of refugees fleeing the war zone exposed how tenuous was the solidarity between the peoples of the multi-ethnic Empire. The arrival in the interior of hundreds of thousands of desperate Poles, Ukrainians and above all Jews provoked racial conflict and anti-Semitism. By contrast, the Russian attack on East Prussia actually increased Germany’s ability to wage war. Outrage at the violation of national territory and Tsarist atrocities strengthened German solidarity, cemented conviction in the righteousness of the national cause, and acted as a terrible and lasting warning of the penalties of defeat. The victories over the Russians produced new saviour-heroes, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and lifted public morale. This boost to popular confidence and the strengthening of solidarity would be much needed. With the opening offensives and desperate defensive battles at an end, and the outcome still in the balance, a new, very different type of conflict, a struggle of endurance that they were ill-equipped to win, now confronted the Central Powers.