The imaginations of German and Habsburg leaders were excited by the capture of this eastern territory. For Austria-Hungary, the conquest of Congress Poland offered its best chance finally to implement long-delayed and much-needed structural reform. In August 1915, as Warsaw fell, the Germans appeared to be leaning towards conceding the territory to their ally, albeit at the price of economic concessions and a border strip.31 Habsburg leaders were keen. While the problem of how to deal with Serbia once it was vanquished had prompted acrimonious debate, all had agreed as soon as Russia entered the war that Congress Poland must be annexed. The question was how? Even more than other aspects of the Empire’s foreign policy, war aims were defined by the need to maintain a fragile domestic balance within the realm. Schemes for replacing the Habsburg Dualist structure with a Trialist one were proposed. The Finance Minister, Leon Biliński, and the Polish Supreme National Committee wanted Galicia and Congress Poland to be fused as a new Habsburg state. Conrad von Hötzendorf, who was less enthused by annexation in the north, envisaged a different third state, this one constructed from Habsburg South Slav possessions tied to a newly annexed Serbia.
Both schemes were blocked by Minister President Tisza, whose priority was to preserve Hungary’s influence in a Dualist system. Instead, in August 1914, a classic Habsburg contortion was adopted. In the spirit of Count Taaffe, a former Austrian Minister President who had described his job as keeping Franz Joseph’s fractious peoples in a state of ‘well-tempered discontent’, a solution was agreed that would only partially satisfy everybody.32 Austrian Poles would be united with their compatriots further north, but at the cost of predominantly Ruthenian eastern Galicia, which would be removed from their control and joined with Bukovina and some Ukrainian territories annexed from Russia, satisfying Ruthenes’ aspirations for their own Crownland. The Austrian Germans, including Minister President Stürgkh, welcomed the idea, for under cover of giving Poles complete autonomy over domestic affairs in their new, more ethnically homogeneous Crownland, Polish deputies could be removed from Austria’s Reichsrat, leaving Germans to overawe the troublesome Czechs. The Hungarians could also live with the new structure. An enlarged but divided Galicia would have no claim to be a Trialist state, and instead would occupy a sub-Dualist position within Austria. To maintain balance between the two halves of the Monarchy, Hungary would also grow, absorbing Bosnia-Herzegovina, thus resolving the long-standing dilemma of what to do with this orphan territory, along with Austrian Dalmatia.33
The disastrous performance of Habsburg military commanders in Galicia and Serbia during 1914 made these ambitions moot. Far from carving up conquered territories, Franz Joseph’s ministers and diplomats spent the first months of 1915 fending off German calls to purchase Italian and Romanian neutrality by relinquishing the Austrian Trentino or part of Hungarian Transylvania.34 However, the eastern victories in the summer of 1915 upturned the strategic situation, placing territorial gain and reform back on the agenda. This was true not only in Austria, but also in Hungary, where the calls of the restless Croatian parliament, the Sabor, for Croatia to be joined with Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina added urgency. Tisza, despite his Magyar imperialist instincts, understood South Slav aspirations must be partially met if they were to be neutralized and he gradually developed a dual strategy. The first arm of this strategy was to continue to oppose Serbia’s annexation, which he feared would lead to a South Slav bloc threatening Hungary’s privileged position within the Empire. After Serbia was finally conquered with German and Bulgarian help in the autumn of 1915, Tisza advocated Austria-Hungary’s own border strip, in which the populace of north-west Serbia, including Belgrade, would be replaced with loyal Magyars and Germans. Like the strip planned by the Germans in the north, which was intended for defence but had a secondary purpose of cutting Prussian Poles off from their eastern compatriots, Tisza’s strip was intended to quash irredentism by dividing Habsburg South Slavs from the remnants of Serbia.
Tisza also recognized that the advances in the east offered an opportunity to please the Sabor. The second part of his strategy built on this insight and was intended to give some satisfaction to South Slav ambitions. In October 1915 he proposed in Vienna the transfer of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia to Hungary. His suggestion, and with it some lessening of South Slav discontent, failed to make headway for two reasons. First, Stürgkh was reluctant to hand over Dalmatia. Second, the deal would have been contingent on the Austro-Polish solution being implemented, and by the time Tisza made his move the Germans were already having second thoughts about the wisdom of relinquishing the conquered Polish territory on the relatively generous terms discussed in August. In November, determined to cement Austrian German political control inside the Empire and Reich German economic dominance over it, Bethmann broke to István Burián, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, the unwelcome news that the issue of Poland was still on the table only if Vienna first agreed to join his Mitteleuropa project.35
Further north on the Eastern Front, Lithuania and Courland were marked from their occupation in the summer of 1915 as areas of unequivocally German expansion. The plans for these regions bore similarity to the population transfers and annexation envisaged for the neighbouring Polish border strip, but on a much larger scale; Ober Ost, as the militarized state set up in this region during the war was known, covered 108,808 square kilometres.36 The project could also be presented in humanitarian terms, thanks to the Tsarist regime’s brutal deportation of hundreds of thousands of Russian-subject ethnic Germans from the region over the winter of 1914–15. While the Reich government had never regarded the so-called Volksdeutsche with much interest before the war, it now asserted a right, ominously on the basis of shared ethnicity, to protect these ‘tortured and persecuted countrymen’, and they immediately became central to Baltic colonization schemes.37 The Berlin University Professor of Agronomics and Germany’s foremost expert on settlement, Max Sering, set out in an influential report in the autumn of 1915 proposals for annexing and Germanizing the territory. Courland, today in western Latvia, was judged easily assimilable because its landowning barons and small urban bourgeoisie were ethnic Germans. The other 90 per cent of inhabitants were mostly illiterate Lett peasants. With the right education and an influx of settlers, who would be drawn from Russia’s 1.8 million German subjects, it was thought possible to Germanize them within a couple of generations. Lithuania, which was more densely populated, was regarded by Sering as a greater challenge. Nonetheless, if the native Polish aristocracy were deported, and with exemplary administration, he thought optimistically that Lithuanians might be won over to German rule.38
Major General Erich Ludendorff, the Chief of Staff on the Eastern Front, ruled Ober Ost as his own personal fiefdom. He shared Sering’s conviction that the Baltic lands must be retained, and at the end of April 1916 began to prepare for colonization by ordering reports on the ethnicity and religion of the indigenous population, land ownership and soil quality.39 His Social Darwinism and German supremacism, beliefs he shared with the Reich’s rabid political right, account in part for his actions. However, in the spring of 1915 Ludendorff had rejected what he condemned as the ‘exaggerated demands’ circulating at home. Besides the Briey mines, Liège and a border strip, an annexation of the Congo and reparations, which combined was a far more modest set of aims than those laid out in Bethmann’s September programme, he wanted ‘only minor border corrections’ in the east. Not until October did he advocate the annexation and colonization of Courland and Lithuania. His change of opinion owed much to opportunism: with the Baltic now in German hands and Russia beaten back along the entire Eastern Front, plans, not only dreams, of conquest were possible. Yet, although not generally recognized, the shift was also motivated by Ludendorff’s appreciation of the changing nature of war. Already in April 1915 his letters to Moltke, now Chief of the Deputy General Staff in Berlin, responsible for the army at home, evince a preoccupation with the Reich’s food supply. During 1915, as shortages drast
ically worsened, recognition dawned that the conflict was no traditional battlefield contest but a new struggle for resources. Ludendorff was focused not only on winning total victory in this new type of conflict but he also had an eye on the next war. He drew two conclusions. First, he saw control and the ruthless extraction of resources as means to compete with the material superiority of the Entente. Ober Ost became a brutal experiment in extreme exploitation. Second, in order for Germany to survive over the long term, Ludendorff regarded conquest as indispensable. The country must expand or perish. As he warned at the end of 1915, ‘we shall be reliant only on ourselves and on our power. Nothing else matters!’40
German plans for conquest and settlement advanced in subsequent years. The border strip soon acquired rationale beyond the initial defensive considerations. Friedrich von Schwerin, a Pan-German official who was founder of the Society for the Furtherance of Inner Colonization and was brought in by the government to work on the project, considered it a panacea for the Reich’s domestic problems. The settlement of ethnic Germans from Russia would resolve once and for all the competition between Poles and Germans for possession of the eastern marches. It would offer an agricultural counterweight to the growing industry of the Reich, and deferential peasants’ votes would slow the rise of the Social Democrats so disturbing to Prussian conservatives like Schwerin. The new territories, he argued, could even provide a stable base for the fulfilment of German ambitions to be a world power. By 13 July 1915, when a meeting was held at the Reich Chancery, the government was clearly set on annexation, and the occupation administration in Poland received an oral order to begin discreetly settling Russian Germans in the designated area and, where possible, move Jews and Poles out. Wholesale forced expulsion was not agreed, however, and in the war’s middle years the civilian administration backed away from this idea, although military circles, led by Ludendorff, continued to plan for deportations and colonization in the Baltic.41
These plans pointed the way towards the Nazi future. The new wartime focus of Germans’ most ambitious expansionist aims away from overseas towards eastern Europe, the preoccupation with racial reliability, the use of population statistics, and the readiness to consider radical options like forced expulsion and resettlement, all were ominous precursors of Hitler’s ‘Generalplan Ost’. This Nazi plan of 1941 intended to cleanse Poland, the Baltic and the western Soviet Union of 45 million Slavs and replace them with German soldier-peasants.42 Nonetheless, two provisos should be stressed. First, Imperial German designs for expansion in the east were not, unlike Generalplan Ost, genocidal. Indeed, as the war continued, civilian decision-makers’ doubts about expulsion grew and even the more ruthless military pronounced as unnecessary wholesale deportation.43 Second, the German plans appear unexceptional in the context of equally or often more radical and advanced projects in contested borderlands by other imperial powers. Hungary’s leader, Tisza, also wanted a resettled border strip in northern Serbia. More significantly, France had already begun to remove suspect people from the thin strip of Alsace-Lorraine that it captured. Even worse, in the conflict’s immediate aftermath, France expelled 200,000 inhabitants who lacked at least one French grandparent.44 Probably the best subjects of comparison are Germany’s foe, Russia, and its ally, Ottoman Turkey. The Russian army’s schemes for the ethnic reorganization of Galicia may not have been so carefully planned as German designs for the Baltics and the Polish border strip, but they were no less radical. Moreover, while German decision-makers, as historians have noted, ‘could never resolve on an open break with international law through annexation during the war’, the Tsar unhesitatingly declared his intention to retain eastern Galicia, and his army was already deporting Jews and Germans and launching its campaign to assimilate Ruthenes during the first year of the conflict.45
While the actions of the Russian army in Galicia, its empire’s western regions and the Caucasus were brutal, the Ottoman state’s treatment of its Armenian minority was genocidal. Over the previous two decades, the Muslim state had sanctioned bloody pogroms against this Christian minority, which numbered around 1.3 million people in 1914 and had most of its lands in eastern Anatolia. After the nationalist, modernizing Young Turks seized power in 1908, the minority became even more imperilled. The following year, between 15,000 and 20,000 were massacred. The new Ottoman leaders’ distrust of Armenians grew first with the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and reached fever pitch during the First World War. Like Ruthenes in the Habsburg borderlands, the whole community was suspected of collaborating with the Russians, yet the fact that the state, not just the army, regarded the minority as traitors allowed local measures and massacres to radicalize into the extermination of a whole people. In February 1915, Armenian units in the Ottoman army were disarmed and the following month the decision was taken to deport the minority. The official excuse later given was that this was a security measure, and the main deportations from 23 May did indeed begin after an uprising in the city of Van on the Caucasus Front. However, as Armenian leaders in distant Constantinople were first arrested and other communities far from the war zone deported, this was clearly not a complete explanation. The deportations were designed to kill. Some Armenians, after being forced to leave most of their possessions, travelled in crammed and sealed cattle wagons on the Ottomans’ German-built railway. Most, however, were set walking on a circuitous route to nowhere. Often, their guards shot or hacked them to death after a few days, stealing what belongings the wretched people had taken with them. Others were led many hundreds of kilometres on death marches towards the Euphrates River, and across to the Syrian desert. Foreign missionaries were forbidden from helping them and German soldiers and diplomatic staff, who might possibly have halted the violence, refused to intervene. The brutality of guards, the absence of preparations to receive the deportees, and the frequent refusal to provide food, water or shelter for them when it was available, testify that the purpose of the action was not to deport but to kill. Some women did escape by converting to Islam, some through forced marriage to Muslim men. The Ottoman state took some Armenian orphans into homes and gave them new Turkish identities. These were a small minority, however. A million people perished through thirst, hunger, disease, exhaustion and execution.46
German plans to reorganize populations – and unlike the schemes of other continental states, they remained only plans – were thus not unique but situated somewhere in the middle of a continuum of continental European barbarity. Nor were the Reich’s more conventional schemes for annexation as irrational or inflexible as has been claimed. For Bethmann, no less than other German leaders, perpetual security meant continental hegemony, and the German government was under considerable pressure from conservatives, whom it regarded as its natural supporters, to make extensive gains. The Chancellor’s readiness to pursue large maximum aims was the source of much righteous moral outrage among German historians in the 1960s, yet in the strategic context of 1915 this was only realistic policy, for return to the status quo was unacceptable to all major belligerents. The Russians were approached with proposals for a separate peace three times during the first eight months of 1915, yet although Bethmann was able to offer military and economic use of the Turkish Straits, Russia’s main war aim, each time the Tsar refused.47 The western Entente was no less uncompromising. The French were interested only in victory.48 British leaders in contrast did consider an American-mediated compromise peace in early 1916, as they struggled to readjust to reality their expectations of a short war and limited participation. Yet even then, they still envisaged emerging as overall winners. A memorandum drawn up between Colonel Edward House, the policy adviser to US President Woodrow Wilson, and the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, conspired to bring about a peace comprising not only the restoration of Belgium, but also the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine to France and an outlet to the sea for Russia. Germany would be offered the sop of compensation from France’s colonial holdings and threatened with American intervention if it refused.49
The agreement, had it ever been implemented, would have stood little chance of winning the acceptance of the Central Powers, for it disregarded both enemy sentiments and strategic reality. For German leaders, the surrender of any national territory would clearly have been an admission of defeat. At a point where their armies stood on French and Belgian soil and had just conquered vast tracts of Russian territory, conceding so much would have been not only unacceptable but also inexplicable to a German public still largely supportive of the war. It would inevitably have destabilized the imperial regime.
German and Habsburg leaders’ pursuit of maximum war aims in 1915 may not have won them the moral high ground, but in the absence of any possibility of a separate peace or an acceptable general peace it cannot be dismissed as irrational. Both governments regarded territorial gain as essential to shore up their domestic positions. Moreover, in Germany especially, collective security was rejected; Bethmann and the military agreed that after what they considered to be the deliberate encirclement of the pre-war years, safety could be guaranteed only by overwhelming strength. Defence and aggression blurred as they sought to win continental hegemony. Nonetheless, this course inevitably led to problems. The large advances, ambiguous official statements and agitation by annexationists, which was less heavily censored by sympathetic military officials than left-wing opinion, all raised Socialist fears that the people had been duped. The radical firebrand Karl Liebknecht had accused the government of a ‘capitalist war of expansion’ as early as September 1914, and in December 1915 he and the nineteen other SPD deputies who voted against further war credits justified their action as a rejection of plans of conquest.50 The growing antagonism between the annexationist right and the more cautious left was by this time undermining the political Burgfrieden. Suspicion that a war of conquest was being fought also grew among the peoples. In Austria, the Czech population had become increasingly disgruntled. By early 1916, even some German troops had taken to calling the war a ‘swindle’.51 This was ominous, for civilians and soldiers were about to face new, unprecedented hardships and sacrifice. The middle war years would be defined at the front by a new, intense and terrifying type of battle, the Materialschlacht, and at home by extraordinary hunger peaking in the awful misery and deprivation of the ‘turnip winter’.
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