Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  THE CAUSES OF SHORTAGE

  Nothing, not even high casualties, the intervention of new enemies or annexationist war aims, did more to destabilize central European societies than food shortages. The ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 was the turning point; it was then that the peoples’ patience snapped. Discontent and protests before the winter were but a prelude to the ubiquitous, more violent and increasingly politicized street and industrial unrest that defined urban life in 1917. Their importance makes it worthwhile to delve deeper into the causes of these shortages and the authorities’ response. How was it that living conditions became so bad? Did the Central Powers’ rulers recognize the threat that nutritional shortages posed, not just to the lives of their subjects, but to the very existence of their states? How effective were their countermeasures?

  The Germans’ basic problem was that their country, even in peacetime, had not been self-sufficient in agricultural produce. A quarter of the grain and two-fifths of the fats consumed by its people and animals had been imported before 1914.40 War damaged this inadequate agricultural base. Food production, which already in 1914 and 1915 fell by 11 and 15 per cent from its 1913 levels, plummeted by 35 per cent in 1916 and by 40 per cent in 1918.41 There were two causes. First was a shortage of labour. The army conscripted farmers and workers, removing the most skilled managers and fittest men from the country’s farms. By 1916, over a quarter of German male rural labourers were under sixteen and nearly a sixth over sixty. One-third of the nation’s farm horses were also drafted. These animals, inured to hard labour, were ideal for pulling the army’s guns and supplies, but their absence hindered farms from sowing and harvesting all the land cultivated in peacetime. Second and even more important was the fertilizer shortage. The artificial fertilizers available to farmers, most especially the nitrates that in peacetime had been mostly imported from abroad, fell by around two-thirds. Farmers also had only half the natural dung available in peace because their livestock catastrophically declined both in numbers and weight. Germany’s cattle declined by over a tenth, from 11,320,000 in 1913 to 9,528,000 in 1918, and its pigs by more than half, from 25,659,000 to 10,270,000.42 Poor feeding meant that these animals weighed just half the mass normal in peacetime, and produced less dung for the fields. This in turn meant fewer crops, and a vicious circle of ever diminishing supplies. Adolf von Batocki, President of the War Food Office established in May 1916, was not wholly wrong to complain that ‘it is the shortages of supplies, not the system, that is to blame for our present situation’.43

  Austria-Hungary, a much less industrialized society, had by contrast been self-sufficient in the major foodstuffs before 1914. The fact that wartime deprivation was greater than in Germany, and that the Austrian half of the Monarchy was at times reliant on Reich food aid, thus requires some explanation. Three factors were responsible for negating the initial Habsburg advantage. First, the foundations of disaster were laid already in 1914, with the Russian invasion of Galicia and Bukovina. These Crownlands were extraordinarily important for the Austrian half of the Empire’s food supply, rearing almost a third of its cattle and growing over a third of its wheat and around half of its potatoes in peacetime. Both were devastated by the invasions. The population was displaced, draught animals were taken and farm infrastructure was destroyed. In 1915 the area sown with rye fell to 35.3 per cent, wheat to 18.4 per cent and barley and oats to just 5 per cent of that cultivated in the last pre-war years. The land never recovered during the conflict. In 1917 yields for these crops were just 25 per cent, or in the case of rye, 35 per cent of those in peacetime.44

  Second, agriculture in the rest of the Empire suffered similar problems to those experienced by farmers in Germany, not only making it impossible to replace Galician production, but actually resulting in an even larger food deficit. There was the same shortage of animal and human labour: the Habsburg army took 814,000 horses, about a fifth of all those in the country, on mobilization. Millions of men were conscripted. The dung and fertilizer needed to regenerate the soil were also in short supply.45 Statistics for food production in the region that at the war’s end became the Austrian Republic illustrate how severely war affected even land untouched by military action (see Table 8).

  Hungary’s agriculture was less badly damaged, ironically because it was so underdeveloped. Artificial fertilizers had received only limited use there in peacetime, and so their disappearance from the market in wartime impacted on its yields less than those of the more modern, intensive methods of farming used in much of Austria and Germany. Nonetheless, by 1916, many crop harvests had fallen to three-quarters or less of the 1913 level and by the conflict’s final year, most crop yields were little more than half of those in the last full year of peace (see Table 9).

  The third factor, which explains why the deprivation in Austria was particularly severe, was the lack of solidarity between the two halves of the Empire. Even in peacetime, Austria could cover only two-thirds of its population’s flour, one-third of its beef and just under half its pork consumption. Hungary, which had produced large agricultural surpluses despite the backwardness of its farms, had supplied over 90 per cent of the necessary imports. Vienna had been especially dependent on Magyar trade, most of the meat consumed in the city before 1914 having come from across the nearby border.46 For the Austrian population, it was therefore a catastrophe that, by 1916, Hungarian imports had dropped to around half of the milk and meat, less than a third of the fat and just 3 per cent of the cereals that had been supplied in peacetime (see Table 10).

  Table 8. Austrian crop yields, 1913–17 (area of post-1918 Austrian Republic only)

  Source: L. Grebler and W. Winkler, The Cost of the World War to Germany and to Austria-Hungary (New Haven, CT, 1940), p. 151.

  Table 9. Hungarian crop yields, 1913–18

  Source: L. Grebler and W. Winkler, The Cost of the World War to Germany and to Austria-Hungary (New Haven, CT, 1940), p. 153.

  Hungary took sole responsibility for military provisioning from mid-1916, which partly explains the collapse of its exports to Austria. The 500 million kilograms of flour and grain that were delivered to the army during the following year approximated the amount sent to the western half of the Empire during 1915. However, as already in 1915 the cereal exported to Austria had been a mere 37 per cent of what it had received in 1913, this was not much of a justification. Moreover, Austrian civilians did not benefit from the new arrangement as, despite Hungarian promises, the soldiers’ needs were not met and the army consequently requisitioned 290 million kilograms of Romanian grain marked for the Austrian population’s consumption. Austria, in spite of its straitened circumstances, also supplied most of the military’s sugar and 4,100,000 head of cattle, well over half of all provided.47

  Hungary, as Austria’s politicians and public were well aware, did not contribute its fair share to the Habsburg war effort. The Dualist system rendered Austria powerless to insist, however. Minister President Tisza not only refused to equalize rations across the Empire but also used Hungary’s unusually strong position to advantage in the decennial negotiations to renew the Compromise in 1917. His pursuit of narrow Magyar interests was obtuse, for it fatefully disregarded the fact that Hungary’s fate was bound to the survival of its starving Austrian neighbour. Yet it was also the product of a deeper problem: the rottenness of the Hungarian state. Tisza’s government lacked strong legitimacy due both to the highly restrictive franchise of the House of Representatives and to the fact that it had won its majority there in 1910 only through corruption and intimidation. Wartime appeals to the people to accept greater sacrifices inevitably provoked scepticism and unwelcome demands for a reciprocal increase in democracy. Already in the 1915 spring session of parliament, Tisza had needed to slap down a proposal to enfranchise all front veterans over twenty years old, which he had feared could open the door to universal suffrage. Maintaining the food supply in Hungary, at least at a level above that of Austria, was essential for avoiding both popular unrest
and calls for political reform.48

  Table 10. Food imports into Austria from Hungary, 1914–17

  Source: H. Loewenfeld-Russ, Die Regelung der Volksernährung im Kriege (Vienna and New Haven, CT, 1926), p. 61.

  Even more important, any tampering with agriculture or the food supply risked antagonizing the landed aristocracy and gentry who dominated Hungarian politics. Tisza, who was himself a large landowner, thus made strenuous efforts to avoid damaging their material interests in the first years of hostilities, even at the expense of the wider imperial war effort. The Habsburg War Ministry had already recommended suspending import tariffs on grain at the beginning of August 1914, but Tisza, fearing that this could lower food prices, blocked the measure until October, losing the Empire the opportunity to import stocks from Romania and Italy before those countries imposed export restrictions. The Hungarian government refused in subsequent years to follow Austria in setting maximum prices on agricultural goods, and thus diminish the profits of its most important constituency. Moreover, it even insisted that deliveries should be of perishable flour rather than more robust grain in order to ensure that Hungarian, rather than Austrian, mills were kept in business. When Tisza’s Austrian counterpart Stürgkh appealed for stricter Magyar measures to control food in December 1915, conjecturing that they could not be more difficult to introduce than the recent and successful decree to raise the age of military service to forty-two, he was missing the point. Whereas the latter affected a disenfranchised overwhelmingly rural populace, the former would damage crucial gentry support, much of which in any case was unsympathetic or actually hostile to Habsburg Austria. For Stürgkh, it was a straightforward contest between Hungarian ‘fodder interest’ or Austrian ‘human nourishment’. The Magyar Agriculture Minister, Count Hadik, made his government’s position on this question quite clear when he informed Austrian negotiators that ‘Hungarian cattle and pig breeding must come out of the war unscathed.’49

  While the Central Powers’ propaganda blamed the deprivation on a ruthless British ‘starvation war’, the causes were thus more complex. Britain’s naval blockade did not cause the shortages so much as force Germans and Austro-Hungarians back on their own ever shrinking resource base. The seal was far from hermetic at first but it gradually strengthened, especially once a new Ministry of Blockade was established by the British in February 1916. Strangling Germany and the Habsburg Empire of supplies was not merely a matter of sending naval patrols into the English Channel and North Sea or stationing ships off the Dalmatian coast. Ruthless coercion and imaginative diplomacy were equally important in stopping the flow of goods through neutral countries to the Central Powers. ‘Black lists’ of firms known to trade with the enemy were issued in February. British companies were banned from doing business with these firms, their vessels were denied fuel – a measure possible due to Britain’s monopoly over coaling stations – and, if they somehow made it to European waters, they were subject to being detained by Royal Navy patrols. The measure was a powerful deterrent for businessmen tempted by trade with the Central Powers. Even more intrusively, Britain replaced a failed voluntary rationing scheme with forcible rationing for neutral countries from June 1916. Seaborne goods in excess of the neutrals’ peacetime needs were now halted, in order to stem the massive re-export of goods from across the world by neutrals to Germany and Austria-Hungary that had taken place in the war’s first year. Attention was also given to limiting the flow of the neutrals’ own domestically produced goods to Britain’s enemies. A solution was found in the imposition of purchasing agreements on neutral powers, guaranteeing the Entente the right to buy a share of their produce. Often, these agreements were less lucrative for neutral powers than selling to Germans desperate for supplies. However, Britain’s threats to exploit its control over shipping lanes to reduce the rations or detain the ships of continental neutral countries usually sufficed to enforce compliance. From a humanitarian perspective it had highly perverse outcomes. As central European civilians became malnourished, Norwegian herring purchased by the British solely to stop their sale to the enemy were left to rot.50

  The Central Powers’ options to import food narrowed as their enemies multiplied. Italy’s declaration of war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915 closed off another market. Fertile Romania’s entry into hostilities on the side of the Entente in August 1916 was an even bigger blow. The defeat of Serbia in the autumn of 1915 had reopened the Danube waterways for half a year, enabling Germany and Austria-Hungary to import 2.5 million tons of cereal from Romania. The Central Powers did, at least in comparison to the Entente, develop an efficient purchase system. The first year of war brought chaos, as not only German and Habsburg state representatives but also those of their big cities, firms, communes and other private buyers bid up food prices on the open market. In September 1915, however, over two years before their enemies adopted similar measures, the states together centralized their foreign purchases by granting a monopoly to Germany’s Central Purchasing Corporation (Zentral-Einkaufs-Gesellschaft).51 Although not comprehensive – in the last years of the war, other state authorities took more responsibility for food imports – import statistics from this agency illustrate the dire effect of Britain’s tightening blockade, Romania’s entry into the war and finally the start of hostilities with the United States in April 1917 on the Central Powers’ ability to find external sources of supply (see Table 11).

  Table 11. German imports through the Central Purchasing Corporation (1000s of tons)

  Source: A. Skalweit, Die deutsche Kriegsernährungswirtschaft (Stuttgart, Berlin and Leipzig, 1927), p. 24.

  The decline of the Central Powers’ domestic production and the closing off of external sources of supply through encirclement and naval blockade placed a premium on efficient management. The German and Habsburg peoples had been assured in the war’s early years that food would suffice, if consumed sparingly, and from this sprung the expectation, reasonable but wrong, that their leaders would ensure the provision of adequate sustenance. In accordance with the central values of ‘war culture’, not only should all have enough but distribution of scarce resources should also be equitable. The ability of governments to meet these expectations had become by 1916 a key test of their legitimacy.

  (MIS)MANAGING SHORTAGE

  Attempts at food management by German and Austro-Hungarian officials in the first eighteen months of war had been a disaster. Uncoordinated local controls, a focus on ensuring that food was affordable for consumers rather than on incentivizing production, and a total failure to understand the complex system of agriculture had damaged output and created new shortages. With food becoming scarcer and public anger growing, the Central Powers’ leaders were spurred to reform. Germany acted first by establishing a War Food Office (Kriegsernäherungsamt) under the War Ministry on 22 May 1916. The new office projected an image of a dynamic, impartial directorate run not only for but also by the people. Its council was composed in the best traditions of the Burgfrieden, with representatives of the Social Democrats, trade unions, cities and bourgeois women’s groups. The man picked to lead it was the former President of East Prussia, Adolf von Batocki. Having faced off Russian invasion in 1914–15, he would, it was hoped, now overcome this latest existential threat against Germany.

  Batocki was greeted excitedly by the press as a ‘Food Dictator’, fuelling vastly inflated public expectations. His War Food Office in fact did not have centralized control over provisioning. The army’s supply remained outside the remit of the War Food Office and its authority was confined to Prussia, not the whole of Germany. Worse still, the Prussian Agriculture and Interior Ministries continued to exercise influence over food questions, leading to jurisdictional wrangling. The War Food Office did notch up some achievements. It imposed better coordination on the lower sections of the bureaucracy and introduced much needed tighter regulation on more foods. It also helped that a belated decision was made to forbid the deputy commanding generals in the regions from issuing orders
affecting the food supply and prices without prior consultation with the War Ministry. Nonetheless, the War Food Office did not have the power to coordinate supply in Germany. Even had it been given such authority, the reduction of yields, the British blockade and the serious errors of earlier food policy were already insuperable obstacles to feeding the Reich’s population.52

  The War Food Office may have fallen far short of the hopes that Germans invested in it, but to Habsburg subjects despairing at their own leaders’ fumbled attempts to manage supply, it appeared a model of efficiency. Given Austria’s dire food situation after the invasion of Galicia and the reluctance of the Hungarian government to help, the listlessness of Stürgkh’s government was scandalous. Bread rationing was adopted in Austria only in April 1915, two months after the Germans set an example. As foodstuffs grew scarcer, criticism of government inaction became louder. In comparison with the Reich’s impressive sounding ‘Food Dictator’, the Inter-Ministerial Commission set up in Austria a week later, on 30 May 1916, to better coordinate supply policy looked feeble; it was merely another layer of bureaucracy on top of an indolent administration. A ‘Food Office’ was founded within the Interior Ministry at the start of October, but it was merely the product of an internal rejigging of responsibilities rather than a radical overhaul of provisioning. Three weeks later, on 26 October, the Hungarians upstaged Stürgkh’s administration by establishing in their half of the empire a People’s Food Office with responsibility for centralizing and managing public supply. Finally, with the people crying out not just for a food dictator but, as one report put it, for ‘a Messiah’, the Austrian government was moved to more decisive action. A new Office of the People’s Food Supply (Amt für Volksernährung), with a chief reporting directly to the Minister President, began work after just three weeks of rushed preparation on 1 December 1916. Like the German War Food Office, it incorporated a council. The seven members included agricultural, industrial and military representatives and politicians, among whom was the Social Democrat Karl Renner. Attention was also given to ensuring the appointees had a mixed ethnic composition, in the hope that by involving all interest groups the Empire’s damaged legitimacy might be restored.