Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The AOK was responsible for much of this damaging repression, even though Bohemia lay outside its jurisdiction in the ‘hinterland’. Its misguided assumption that political agitation was undermining the discipline of Czech units caused the AOK to petition for ever harsher measures: it wanted more house searches, a ban on all but explicitly patriotic organizations, and an order forcing civilians to hand in their letters open at post offices so as to facilitate censorship. The AOK also had little faith in Bohemia’s civil administration, regarding it as infiltrated and corrupted by national interests. It therefore appealed to the Emperor to extend its powers into the Crownland. Initially Conrad von Hötzendorf, the moving force in the AOK, wanted direct authority over Bohemia’s military courts and administration. By the beginning of December 1914, however, he was demanding nothing less than a purge of its bureaucracy and the replacement of the Statthalter, Prince Thun, widely regarded as Czechophile, with a general. This power grab failed. The AOK was denied the authority that it desired and although Thun was removed in March 1915, a civilian was appointed as his successor. Austrian Minister President Stürgkh rightly objected to military encroachment, believing its reforms would provoke unrest in Bohemia.162

  The AOK’s intervention in Bohemia was just one aspect of the most damaging of all Austria-Hungary’s ‘local wars’: the Habsburg army’s war on its own peoples and civil administration. During the first half of hostilities, the military made a sustained although uncoordinated effort to excise hated national sentiment and disloyalty among the non-German and Magyar peoples. The repression began with mass arrests by individual military commanders and gendarmerie in South Slav lands during July and August 1914. This was followed in the autumn by the extraordinarily bloody reprisals against supposedly traitorous Ruthenes. The AOK’s pressure for harsh measures against Czechs in Bohemia and its later discrimination against Italian speakers in the Monarchy’s south were motivated by the same paranoia about nationalist agitation. Conrad believed the expansion of military control to be the most effective means to fight the apparently ubiquitous treason. He asked the Emperor to install military men as Crownland heads not only repeatedly for Bohemia but also for Galicia, Bukovina, Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia. He requested too that martial law be applied across the Austrian half of the Empire. The High Command was even prepared to support an intrigue to unseat Minister President Stürgkh in the autumn of 1915. Stürgkh was, with some justice, considered ineffective in running the war effort, but his success in thwarting almost all the military’s demands for extra powers may also have earned him its enmity.

  The army’s encroachment into the government’s sphere in part reflected the dissolution of boundaries between military and civil affairs in a period of total war; domestic agitation, if it undermined the citizen army’s combat performance, was naturally of concern to the High Command. However, already in 1914, the AOK’s agenda went well beyond ensuring the efficient management of the war effort; it aimed at a drastic reform of the Habsburg state. Conrad’s vision of change was less a master plan than an evolving wish list. In November 1914 he primarily wanted to use the state of war to force through measures enabling national interests to be overridden in favour of the military. His demands included a larger and better-paid officer corps, more recruits in peacetime and, bound to provoke a strong reaction in Hungary, the incorporation of the Honvéd and Landwehr into one united army. There was a hint of what was to come in Conrad’s wish for the ‘ruthless combating’ of anti-state and anti-military agitation and the ‘regeneration of the nationally fragmented state civil service’.163 Ten months later, after convincing itself of ‘the unreliability and antipatriotic cast of mind of a large part of the population’, the AOK’s reforms were further reaching. As a note to the Emperor signed by Conrad’s superior, Archduke Friedrich, explained, an ‘inner consolidation’ of the Monarchy was necessary. Schools must be used to inculcate loyalty to Austria, the bureaucracy reconstructed so that nationalist influences were excluded, and all movements hostile to the state were to be crushed. Dynamic government would be needed to break through the peoples’ resistance and impose a new constitution.164

  The army was right to see the prioritization of national over imperial interests and the Empire’s fragmented structure as impediments to waging total war. In everything else, however, it was wrong. The Emperor was wise to grant the military few of the extra powers that it sought over the domestic administration and not to attempt to implement most of its reforms, for they would have alienated large swathes of his subjects. The Austrian government also recognized this and resisted; Stürgkh criticized the AOK’s ‘distance from reality’ (‘Weltfremdheit’).165 Even so, its actions seriously harmed the Empire’s war effort. Mutual suspicion and acrimony were the inevitable results of Conrad’s incessant assaults on the civil administration. Moreover, the army anyway wielded sufficient power in the war zones and exceeded its authority in the hinterland to inflict real damage on the population’s commitment to the Austrian state and war. The AOK completely failed to understand the ‘double mobilization’ underpinning the Habsburg peoples’ will to fight. Certainly, the national loyalties and interests that it attacked sometimes took treasonous form, and more often weakened inter-ethnic solidarity and encouraged parochial concerns with local wars rather than the greater imperial conflict. Nonetheless, when correctly channelled, national allegiances complemented rather than contradicted imperial loyalties, as the successful call to arms in 1914 had revealed. The army’s narrow conception of national and imperial interests as inevitably in opposition only became true when its disproportionate and inept repression started to drive them apart. Military paranoia and hatred of national interests disregarded the realities of waging conflict with a multi-ethnic society, damaged the state’s legitimacy and undermined one of the dual pillars supporting the Habsburg war effort.

  The war culture that grew up across central Europe in 1914 and 1915 was a highly adaptive response to the conflict’s mutation into a long attritional struggle. It developed from within societies rather than being imposed by governments. Love was at its core, manifested through family support, community solidarity and a hierarchy of sacrifice, at the top of which stood the front-line soldiers. The culture was inclusive: children and women could participate by sparing and saving, sacrificing and collecting for troops and for the community’s war victims. Regional or, most effectively, municipal loyalties were crucial, for they permitted local elites to bridge the distance between individual and state. In Germany, mayors, teachers, priests and journalists in cities or parishes were key figures in mediating the mobilization, harnessing more parochial loyalties for the national cause. In Austria-Hungary, these same figures frequently had national sympathies but continued to underpin a dual national and imperial mobilization in 1915. However dangerous this was in the long term for the multi-ethnic state, it was unavoidable: on family love and thousands of local mobilizations rested national and imperial resilience in the uniquely gruelling and all-embracing conflict.

  Hatred, the emotion more usually associated with war culture, proved destructive. A clear view of who was the enemy certainly helped warring states mobilize their populations. The Habsburg Empire’s failure to provide an imperial war narrative adversely affected its peoples’ commitment and unity, and the strength and purpose of its war effort. Nonetheless, at best hatred was a double-edged sword. It turned inwards and attacked the solidarity within the societies of both Central Powers. In Germany, the hatred of Britain inflamed by encirclement and blockade evolved, thanks to the immoderation of annexationist conservative elites and the unrealism of the navy, into a rancorous internal dispute about U-boats that undermined trust in the national government and the Burgfrieden. In Austria, the army’s pathological hatred of nationalists and fear of political subversion led it to launch wars against distrusted ethnic groups among its own peoples, South Slavs, Ruthenes, Italians and Czechs, stoking animosity and damaging the Empire’s stability and reputation. The
divisions that had been opened would only become wider and the questions of why the war was being fought and how victory could be won more pressing as 1916 brought a new intensity of combat and, for civilians, unimaginable hardship.

  6

  Security for All Time

  MITTELEUROPA

  When the First World War began, idealistic slogans had rung out across Hohenzollern and Habsburg lands. Leaders, politicians, clergymen, academics and newspapers had mobilized their peoples for a struggle against criminal regicide and a perfidious international conspiracy. Great principles were at stake. The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy had taken up arms to preserve its ‘honour’ and ‘rights’. Germans were fighting ‘for the fruits of our peaceful industry, for the inheritance of a great past, and for our future’.1 In East Prussia and Galicia, the brutality and barbarism of Cossack hordes had exposed the bloody threat posed to European civilization by the Tsar’s ‘Asiatic’ Empire. In the west, selfish English materialism and perverse French individualism challenged what German intellectuals claimed to be the purer, heroic communality of their own culture. Above all, leaders in Germany and Austria-Hungary were careful to emphasize that the war was ‘purely defensive’. ‘We are not incited by lust for conquest,’ the Kaiser had proclaimed. ‘We are inspired by the unyielding determination to keep for ourselves and all future generations the place which God has given us.’2

  How far did the Central Powers’ official aims fit this rhetoric of an honourable and defensive war in 1914–16? For what were their men actually fighting and dying? German leaders entered the conflict with no firm goals, but their army’s rapid advance through Belgium and into northern France soon focused minds on the fruits of victory. Already on 9 September 1914, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg approved the first highly secret but still provisional war aims programme. Written by his principal assistant, Kurt Riezler, this document stated boldly that ‘the general aim of the war’ was ‘security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time’. This disarmingly simple aim was to be the basis of German policy throughout hostilities. While it was defensive in conception, the intention to achieve everlasting security was extraordinarily ambitious. When combined with a world view that regarded security as a zero-sum game to be won through domination not cooperation, it soon slid into aggression. To secure Germany ‘for all imaginable time’ could not, even in Bethmann’s mind and certainly not for the more hawkish elites around him, mean merely a return to the unstable status quo of the last peacetime years. Instead it required permanent control of invasion routes and the subjection of dangerous neighbours: ‘France must be so weakened as to make her revival as a great power impossible for all time. Russia must be thrust as far as possible from Germany’s eastern frontier and her domination over the non-Russian vassal peoples broken.’3

  The September memorandum was a list of maximum demands to be imposed if the German army succeeded decisively in beating the French in the west. Two broad themes ran through it. First was security. France was to be eternally exposed to the threat of invasion through possible border adjustments in the Vosges, the seizure of the Belfort fortress in that region, and the razing of other frontier defences. Her military potential would be eliminated by a war indemnity ‘high enough to prevent [her] from spending any considerable sums on armaments in the next 15–20 years’. Belgium was to be ‘reduced to a vassal state’ and like France made vulnerable by the confiscation of the fortress and city of Liège that the German army had found so difficult to defeat one month earlier. The memorandum was intent on establishing, along with the enduring security of the Reich’s western border, a base for continuing war against its most formidable enemy, Britain. The maritime power’s perfidious influence on the continent would be negated through the occupation of Belgium’s naval ports. The taking of the French coast from Dunkirk to Boulogne, possibly joined to the new submissive Belgian state, would enable the Kaiser to station his navy opposite Dover, permanently threatening the United Kingdom’s southern coast.

  The second preoccupation in the September memorandum was economic. It emphasized and furthered German peacetime imperial goals in seeking ‘a continuous Central African colonial empire’. However, the document mostly broke with the past in focusing less on overseas possessions than on formal and informal economic expansion in Europe. The Germans planned to grab some valuable economic assets from their enemies. The Longwy-Briey mines, which yielded 81 per cent of French iron ore and were already in German hands, were to be permanently annexed. Avariciously, the Chancellor’s memorandum also envisaged taking the premier commercial entrepôt of Antwerp. A German-owned corridor would run from the city south-east to Liège, which would become German Lüttich. However, the keystone of the new economic order envisaged in the September programme was a more subtle ‘central European economic association through common customs treaties, to include France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, Poland, and perhaps Italy, Sweden and Norway’. Here lay the beginnings of Bethmann Hollweg’s infamous Mitteleuropa project. It was not a new idea. Proposals for closer European economic integration had circulated for decades. Walther Rathenau, the director of the big electrics firm AEG, had suggested as recently as 1913 that an economic association might calm western European antagonism and counter US competition.4 However, the wartime scheme was much more ruthless, informed not by pan-European idealism but rather nationalist ideology: the association would be ‘under German leadership and must stabilize Germany’s economic dominance over Mitteleuropa’. It would guarantee German goods European markets in any future peace, regardless of residual war antagonism. The project was also envisaged as a weapon against Britain. As Riezler explained, the association would establish a ‘European blockade’, gaining time for the Germans (rather optimistically) to stoke revolution in British India and Afghanistan.5

  While the September programme enunciated overarching German aspirations for security and economic hegemony, and while a Belgian vassal state continued to occupy a central role in both, official war aims evolved throughout hostilities. Bethmann’s priorities shifted with the fortunes of war and he was far from the sole arbiter of aims within the government: the Kaiser, for example, had wanted in early September to annex Belgium, whereas the Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, wished to see it partitioned.6 The public too had their own ideas. Although discussion of war aims was banned from mid-October 1914 on the grounds that it could upset the Burgfrieden, conservatives pressured the government for extensive annexations. Bethmann was barely exaggerating when he complained of ‘a greedy nationalism that wants to annex half the world’.7 The Reich’s most extreme nationalists, the tiny but influential Pan German Association, as well as its industrialists and intellectual elite, demanded huge swathes of territory. The ‘Petition of the Six Economic Associations’, submitted by middle-class, agricultural and industrial clubs on 20 May 1915, was only the most notorious of numerous appeals for conquest. It advocated in the west the total subordination of Belgium, the annexation of the French coast as far as the Somme, extensive border adjustments, the Briey iron ore mines and the coal mines in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais departments. Economic assets were to be transferred to German hands. Similarly ambitious aims were formulated for the east, along with a demand for a large colonial empire. Placing a fig leaf over its naked greed, the petition argued that only the weakening of the Reich’s enemies, not treaties, could secure a permanent peace. It also justified its demands by making a connection that was to become increasingly important in driving expansionist goals in an ever more total war. ‘Our actual experiences in this war prove,’ it argued, ‘that our military successes, particularly in a long war, and their further exploitation depend to a large extent upon the economic strength and ability of our people.’ Economic demands, the six associations insisted, ‘must be viewed in the light of the urgent necessity for the greatest possible increase of our national strength, and also from a military standpoint’.8

  Germany’s intellectuals, as well
as businessmen and landowners, overwhelmingly supported large-scale annexation. Seven weeks after the six economic associations submitted their petition, a similar appeal signed by 1,347 learned men, including many of the country’s most highly respected professors, was submitted to the Chancellor. A counter-petition organized by the historian Hans Delbrück, which wisely warned against the annexation of independent peoples, was supported by only 141 liberals.9 A War Aims Majority desirous of expansion also dominated the Reichstag, although the bourgeois parties of which it was composed differed in their views of how much should be taken: the Progressives sought territorial additions to strengthen Germany’s security, but most deputies in parties further to the right wished for extensive economic gains.10 Only the Social Democrats (SPD) stood outside this consensus. The party remained officially committed to an interpretation of the war as a struggle for narrow defensive goals.