The success of farms in employing just one or two prisoners did not escape the notice of hard-pressed small entrepreneurs. To businesses struggling in a land where the best and brightest men had been called to the army, prisoners appeared to offer salvation. Helene Grus, the proprietor of a hairdressing salon in Posen, wrote for example to her local military commander in April 1918, hopefully requesting that she be allocated a prisoner skilled with scissors. Her husband had been called up in September 1916, and it had been a nightmare to find replacement staff. Her only German assistant, she complained, was ‘so mentally substandard and so deficient in professional training that he not only does not serve the current clientele properly but through his behaviour and disorderliness diminishes and drives away this clientele from the business’.41 Whether her request was granted is unknown, but it does illustrate the degree to which prisoners at work became a normal part of the fabric of wartime society.
Yet the use of forced labour was never unproblematic, even in this most benevolent guise. The presence of Russian soldiers within German society during the war had two negative consequences. The first was that it caused considerable social angst. Some women formed relationships with prisoners, and a few hundred became pregnant. The press exaggerated these cases into a national moral crisis. Anxieties about female sexuality combined with wartime xenophobia. Home district generals banned relations with the enemy. Women who dared defy their strictures were pilloried in the press as traitors and punished, sometimes with months in prison; to right-wingers, the relationships were further evidence of a selfish home front letting down the supposedly selfless heroes in the trenches.42
More seriously, the presence of hundreds of thousands of barely supervised enemy soldiers in the German society and economy inflamed official paranoia. In the cities they were seen as a threat to public order. Obsessive fears peaked in the summer of 1917, when the Prussian War Ministry warned that British and French agents were coordinating preparations for a mass prisoner revolt, the signal for which would supposedly be contained in weather reports sent from Switzerland. To thwart the imagined threat, censorship was tightened, police were put on high alert and guards were instructed to use their weapons at the first sign of a prisoner mutiny.43 While the feared mass uprising never materialized, there was also a constant and more justified anxiety about prisoner sabotage of war production. The suspicions of home district commanders were fuelled by fires, explosions and apparent accidents in factories producing for the war effort. The default position came to be to assume prisoners working there were guilty. As the general in command of the XVII Army Corps district warned in mid-1917, ‘the suspicion of sabotage by war prisoners may only be regarded as ruled out if another perpetrator or another cause is conclusively identified’.44
Most frightening to officials, however, was the knowledge that Germany was, ironically, totally dependent for its survival on hundreds of thousands of unsupervised enemy soldiers on its farms. On their labour rested the country’s fragile food supply. No wonder then that the discovery that French intelligence was exhorting its countrymen in captivity to commit acts of sabotage caused German authorities to panic. Prisoners were being sent instructions and equipment for harming potatoes and livestock. So-called ‘extirpators’, instruments designed for poking out potatoes’ eyes, as well as ingeniously disguised delayed-action incendiary devices, were discovered hidden in cakes, toothpaste tubes and tins with false bottoms in captives’ Red Cross parcels. According to German intelligence, the French even experimented with biological warfare, supplying pastilles to prisoners that would infect German cattle with anthrax.45 The danger, which was greatly overestimated, prompted the home district generals to issue hysterical proclamations. The captives, the rural population was told, were working to a devilish enemy design: ‘According to a large-scale, calculated plan, our next harvest will be destroyed by the prisoners of war.’ People were commanded to be ‘mistrustful and watchful towards every prisoner of war . . . even if he appears to you to be friendly to Germans’. Clergy, teachers and mayors were asked to alert the public to the French sabotage operation, and farmers were told to keep a close watch on their prisoners and ordered not to arrange letters or packages for them, or else they might themselves have to answer for treason.46 The conspiracy theory took root at the highest levels that prisoners were already responsible for the country’s suffering. The Deputy General Staff in charge of the army on the Reich’s home front spread the fantastical but frightening story among officials that by destroying the country’s seed potatoes, prisoners had caused the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17.47
The Germans’ use of forced labour at home demonstrated the difficulty and costs of compulsion. The Third OHL’s harshest use of coercion, its attempt forcibly to transport reluctant Belgian workers to the Reich, failed totally and attracted heavy international condemnation. The Polish civilians illegally detained at the war’s outbreak and exploited on large eastern estates were of more yet still limited value. They were poorly motivated workers with high absconding rates.48 Strikingly more successful was the legal use of military prisoners in agriculture. These men were generally treated well and proved indispensable to the Reich war effort. Yet even in this case, there was a heavy societal and moral price to pay for forced labour, for the use of these prisoners encouraged spiralling paranoia, mistrust and racism. These experiences did not wholly discredit the economic possibilities of harsh coercion, but they did demonstrate that it was ill-suited to a relatively free society, complete with press and parliament and under international scrutiny. In the Central Powers’ occupied territories, where such conditions did not exist, there was more scope for ruthlessness and brutality. Even there, however, the coercive exploitation of human and material resources proved to have serious costs.
THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
The Central Powers had conquered extensive enemy territories in the first half of the war. By the end of 1916, they had overrun an area of 525,500 square kilometres, which, if its resources could be mobilized, could help to alleviate their siege and bolster their war economies significantly.49 Twenty-one million foreign subjects, equivalent to around a third of the Reich’s population, lived under German domination. There were around six million people in occupied Belgium, 300,000 in Luxembourg, two and a half million in north-eastern France, six million in the north of Congress Poland, known under the Germans as the General Government Warsaw, and nearly three million in so-called Ober Ost, which comprised Courland, Lithuania and Białystock-Grodno. Some 3.4 million Romanians, conquered at the year’s end, were ruled by a regime run by the Germans, but in which the other Central Powers retained influence. Austria-Hungary too had occupied territories, more modest than those of its ally yet still extensive. The Habsburg military controlled 45,000 square kilometres in the south of Congress Poland, covering the districts of Piotrków, Kielce, Radom and Lublin, which were home to around four and a half million people, and Serbia, whose war-ravaged population numbered 1.4 million. Montenegro and Albania also lay under Austro-Hungarian rule.50
The Central Powers imposed a variety of occupation regimes on these territories. Belgium and Poland had one of the Germans’ typically confused chains of command with a military Governor General answering solely to the Kaiser supported by a civilian bureaucracy under the purview of the Reich Chancellor. Most other areas were placed under exclusive army control. When territory on the Baltic was overrun in 1915, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, at that time commanding Germany’s armies on the Eastern Front, determinedly resisted civilian interference and created their own military state, Ober Ost. Occupied north-eastern France, an area of 21,000 square kilometres, along with the western corner of Belgium was designated as a rear-line area and carved into six regions run by armies operating on the Western Front.51 By the time half of Romania was conquered, a shortage of suitable personnel meant that installing a civilian administration was not feasible, and so the military also ran this territory in combination with allies and local eli
tes willing to collaborate. The Habsburg conquered territories all had the Austro-Hungarian Army High Command (AOK) as their ultimate authority. Larger territories like southern Poland, Serbia and Montenegro were ruled by a military governor. Smaller regions, like Albania or later captured Italian lands, were placed under corps commands. All these administrations had similar tasks. The first priority for any occupation regime was pacification. This was a precondition for a second, central objective, economic exploitation. The antagonism that this provoked among inhabitants undermined a third, longer-term aim pursued in many territories, namely to cement permanent German or Habsburg domination through suborning the population or winning over local elites.52
1. ‘I DID NOT WANT THIS!’ Kaiser Wilhelm II denies responsibility for the war. Wilhelm was fond of belligerent rhetoric in peace and bore ultimate responsibility for his government’s disastrous decision-making in July 1914, but the world conflagration frightened him and he blamed Russian aggression for forcing his hand.
2. A PEOPLE’S WAR. Old Civil Railway Watchmen and young war volunteers in the German city of Göttingen, 5 September 1914. The old men, who had come forward to protect the railway from spies and saboteurs, are equipped with armlets and obsolete rifles. For the war volunteers, bayonets appear to be the only weapons left.
3. ATROCITIES (1). ‘Campaign of 1914. Marianne’s Punishment’. This German propaganda is supposed to be a humorous comment on the ability of the Kaiser’s army to beat the French Republic (personified by a wanton Marianne) but comes uncomfortably close to portraying the sexual rapacity of conquering soldiers.
4. ATROCITIES (2). ‘Beginning of August 1914. Deportation of francs tireurs’ (original caption). The Belgian or French women’s defencelessness contrasts strikingly with the powerful build and fixed bayonets of the German soldiers escorting them.
5. ATROCITIES (3). Austro-Hungarian troops hang a civilian in Galicia, 1914. Franz Joseph’s army far exceeded its German ally and enemies in murderousness, massacring between 25,000 and 30,000 of its own Ruthenian (Ukrainian) population for largely imaginary acts of treason in 1914–15.
6. ATROCITIES (4). Other Ruthenes suspected of treachery were forcibly deported westwards. Note the soldiers around this group, probably autumn 1914 or early 1915.
7. THE INVASION OF GERMANY (1). The Russian army parades in the German city of Insterburg, East Prussia, 3 September 1914. General Rennenkampf, commander of the First Army, and Grand Duke Nikolai, commander-in-chief of the Tsar’s army, are the figures marked 1 and 2.
8. THE INVASION OF GERMANY (2). Refugees hurry to Allenstein’s railway station, summer 1914. Some 800,000 people fled their homes during the first and 350,000 during the second Russian invasions of East Prussia.
9. THE INVASION OF GERMANY (3). German civilians, alongside some military dead, massacred by the Russian army during its bloody raid on the East Prussian town of Memel, March 1915.
10. NAIL FIGURES (1): ‘The Iron Hindenburg of Berlin’. Nail figures were the most striking material expression of Austrian- and Reich-German war culture, representing and reinforcing communal pride, solidarity and patriotism. None was more imposing than Berlin’s ‘Iron Hindenburg’. Constructed out of Russian alder wood and iron, the figure was 12 metres tall and weighed 33,300 kilograms. Around 20,000 people hammered in nails on the day of its unveiling, 4 September 1915.
11. NAIL FIGURES (2): ‘The Iron Knight’ in Hermannstadt (Sibiu). German communities as far east as Transylvania erected nail figures.
12. NAIL FIGURES (3): ‘The Column of the Legions’ in Cracow. Galician Poles eagerly imitated Germans’ nail figures, but used them to further their own nationalist aims. While in German parts of the Habsburg Empire money from nailing went to imperial causes, the funds raised by Cracow’s column were given to the families of Piłsudski’s national-minded Polish Legions.
13. ‘GOD PUNISH ENGLAND’. Hatred as one motivation to fight. Children were the most ardent ‘haters’. They were also among the most dedicated members of the war community, helping with the harvest, collecting valuables for war causes and acting as a conduit by which state propaganda could reach their parents.
14. ‘GIFTS OF LOVE’. Love, not hate, was the emotion that really underpinned popular support for the war: love for the Fatherland, love for one’s local community and, above all, love for the husbands, fathers and sons in the army. Here, German soldiers on their way to the front are receiving sustenance from Red Cross helpers, 1914.
15. THE ‘FORTRESS PEACE’. An idealized image of the proletariat stalwartly offering its services for Germania’s protection. The slogan on the shield is the Kaiser’s famous phrase ‘I no longer recognize any parties.’
16. HUNGER. People queuing to buy food in Cracow in 1916. Two policemen escort away a queue-jumper, while others keep order in the crowd.
17. THE WAR ON LAND (1). Austro-Hungarian soldiers manning one of their elaborate trenches on the Eastern Front, June 1916. The trench’s depth offers protection from shellfire, and staves and brushwood weatherproof its high walls. However, troops would need time to get from its ‘fox hole’ shelter to the upper firing platform; a weakness which would prove fatal during the Brusilov offensive.
18. THE WAR ON LAND (2). A standard Austro-Hungarian field service postcard. The soldier could choose from nine different languages but was permitted to send only one compulsorily optimistic message: ‘I am healthy and doing well’.
19. THE WAR ON LAND (3). German troops carry out a realistic practice assault behind the Eastern Front, spring 1916. The German army’s trust in its men’s intelligence and readiness to use training to cultivate initiative set it apart from its ally and goes far to explain its impressive combat performance.
20. THE WAR ON LAND (4). ‘How fateful “iron rations” are in the field’. A German military pun: the soldier on the right has been tied to a tree after eating his emergency ‘iron rations’ without permission; a punishment known as Anbinden that was practised until 1917. The soldier on the left is running from a very different ‘iron ration’ fired over by the enemy.
21. THE WAR AT SEA (1). A German U-boat crew on the High Seas. A shell has exploded prematurely in their deck gun, destroying its barrel; just one of many hazards faced by submariners.
22. THE WAR AT SEA (2). Allied merchant seamen surrender in their lifeboats. Their fate now depended in part on the U-boat commander who had sunk their ship. Some commanders left their enemies to drift, but others disobeyed orders to act ruthlessly and helped the wounded or even gave victims a tow towards land.
23. THE WAR AT SEA (3). Direct hit. A U-boat torpedoes an Allied merchant vessel. U-boat warfare was typically conducted at such close quarters.
24. CONQUERORS (1). ‘Who is the Victor?’ A propaganda poster illustrating the Central Powers’ extensive conquests and contrasting them with the measly Entente gains, end of 1917.
25. CONQUERORS (2). ‘The little enemy eats and speaks, / You Germans, you’re not barbarians after all!’ The Germans imagined themselves as kindly culture-bearers in the occupied zones. Yet in stark contrast to this propaganda, they were ruthlessly extracting and exporting homewards as much food as they could lay their hands on.
26. THE END (1). German prisoners taken at the Battle of St Quentin Canal, 2 October 1918. In the war’s final four months 385,500 German soldiers surrendered, a devastating loss of manpower which unnerved Ludendorff and crippled his army’s fighting power.
27. THE END (2). Corpses on the Italian Front.
28. THE END (3). Revolution! Insurgents loyal to the revolutionary workers’ and soldiers’ councils take control of the streets of Berlin, 9 or 10 November 1918.
29. ‘THE LAST GREETING’. A woman mourns her fallen husband with two of his wounded comrades. There were 533,000 war widows and 1,192,000 orphans in Germany by the armistice in November 1918.
The defining feature of the Central Powers’ occupation regimes was their exploitative nature. Administrators were quite frank about thei
r goal; as Major von Kessler, the head of the German Economic Staff in Romania, put it, the occupation authorities’ most pressing task was ‘to get out of the land what can be gotten out’.53 Experts in the 1940s looking back on 1914–18 doubted that the Central Powers had been very successful. They assessed Germany’s gross profits from its conquered lands at 5,700 million gold marks, covering little more than 5 per cent of its total direct war expenditure. Once the expenses of occupation were subtracted, these lands appeared of even less value.54
However, contemporary figures point to a different conclusion. Large quantities of diverse resources were extracted from the occupied territories (see Table 13). Moreover, the Central Powers’ leaders, especially their military men, attributed an importance to them belying these modest figures. Above all, the food produced there, while not worth much in monetary terms, was invaluable in sustaining Germany and Austria-Hungary under siege. Ludendorff stressed in his memoirs how ‘the occupied territories helped us with food supplies’ and even asserted that after 1916 ‘we should not have been able to exist, much less carry on the war, without Rumania’s corn and oil’.55 Major General Franz von Wandel, Prussia’s Deputy War Minister, also rated their enforced contribution highly when he told the Reichstag in March 1916 that it was thanks to the economic committees tasked with resource extraction in conquered regions that ‘our men in the field are so well fed’ and that ‘large supplies [can be] conveyed from the occupied territories into the home country’.56 Habsburg commanders were no less convinced of the value of the far smaller foreign territories under their control. For the Deputy Chief of the Habsburg General Staff, Major General von Höfer, they were ‘the anchor of hope’ in the desperate days at the end of 1916. Without them, he thought, ‘holding out until the beginning of the new harvest is impossible’.57 To Colonel von Zeynek, the Chief of the AOK’s Quartermaster Section, they ‘offered us a very important means to keep the army alive’.58
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