Table 13. Selected items extracted by Germany from the occupied territories, 1914–18
* Total mined (not only for German use) † Germany and Austria-Hungary
Sources: Belgium: P. Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ, 1996), pp. 75 and 77, A. Henry, Études sur l’occupation allemande en Belgique (Brussels, 1920), p. 194, and A. Solanský, ‘German Administration in Belgium’, unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University (1928), p. 115. Poland and Ober Ost: V. G. Liulevičius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne, 2000), p. 73, I. Ihnatowicz, ‘Gospodarka na ziemiach polskich w okresie I Wojny Światowej’, in B. Zientara, A. Mączak, I. Ihnatowicz and Z. Landau, Dzieje Gospodarcze Polski do 1939 r. (Warsaw, 1965), p. 457, J. Molenda, ‘Social Changes in Poland during World War I’, in B. K. Király and N. F. Dreisziger (eds.), East European Society in World War I (Boulder, CO, and Highland Lakes, NJ, 1985), pp. 189–90, S. Czerep, ‘Straty polskie podczas I wojny światowej’, in D. Grinberg, J. Snopko and G. Zackiewicz (eds.), Lata wielkiej wojny. Dojrzewanie do niepodległości, 1914–1918 (Białystok, 2007), p. 188 and M. Bemann, ‘ “. . . kann von einer schonenden Behandlung keine Rede sein”. Zur forst-und landwirtschaftlichen Ausnutzung des Generalgouvernements Warschau durch die deutsche Besatzungsmacht, 1915–1918’, Jahrbücher für Osteuropas, Neue Folge 55(1) (2007), pp. 10 and 24. Romania: Abteilung V. des Wirtschaftsstabes des O.K.M., ‘Ausfuhr aus Rumänien und Bessarabien bis zum 20. September 1918’. AVA Vienna: MdI, Präsidium 22/Bukowina 1900–1918 (Karton 2096): Akte 37818.
Close examination indicates that the agricultural resources of occupied territories did help to alleviate the food shortages of the besieged Central Powers. Germany’s population had consumed 13.3 million tons of grain annually in peacetime. Taking into account animals’ consumption, its needs were over 25 million tons, one-fifth of which had been imported. The 500,000 tons that were taken on average yearly from occupied lands in wartime thus compensated for between one-tenth and one-sixth of the lost imports. Animal-rearing in the occupied lands was even more important to the Central Powers. As the Reich’s own pig stock plummeted from over 25 million to around 10 million, the more than two million taken from the east provided a substantial contribution to alleviating Germans’ hunger.59 The conquest of Romania was especially significant. Ludendorff exaggerated when he claimed that ‘in the year 1917 only Romania enabled Germany, Austria-Hungary and Constantinople to keep their heads above water’.60 Peaceful trade, which between the autumn of 1915 and August 1916 had permitted the Central Powers to import 2.5 million tons of grain, was much more effective than military domination in securing food supplies.61 Nonetheless, the capture of Romania’s full granaries in December 1916, in the midst of the acute shortages of the ‘turnip winter’, was timely, and through rigorous exploitation Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottomans were also able in subsequent years to exchange very extensive resources for the worthless, unbacked currency they introduced into the occupied country (see Table 14).
Table 14. Selected items exported from Romania by the Central Powers, 1916–18
* Wheat, rye, corn, barley, flour and corn flour
Source: Abteilung V. des Wirtschaftsstabes des O.K.M., ‘Ausfuhr aus Rumänien und Bessarabien bis zum 20. September 1918’. AVA Vienna: MdI, Präsidium 22/Bukowina 1900–1918 (Karton 2096): Akte 37818.
Moreover, official export figures do not tell the full story. Armies lived partly off the land. German forces in Romania, for example, themselves consumed 267,879 tons of food and fodder from the occupation zone between 1916 and 1918.62 Consumption by the Habsburg military was even more significant, for the force was distinctly reluctant to share captured bounty with their own population. The German and Austro-Hungarian armies had very different conceptions of the war they fought and their relations to their homelands. Especially under Ludendorff after 1916, the German military recognized that the new industrial warfare demanded the fusion of state, society and the army. By contrast, Habsburg officers steadfastly persisted in their outmoded view of themselves and the army as separate and superior to civilians, and acted as if the home front barely mattered. They evinced none of their German counterparts’ urgent concern to help the suffering homeland with food. Instead, they vigorously defended their exclusive access to the agriculture of occupied lands. Civilian purchasing agents were forbidden from entering conquered territories and, if discovered, they were arrested and deported. The AOK’s monopoly on food from the occupied territories enabled its officers to maintain an extravagant lifestyle in 1917 and 1918, indifferent to the desperate hunger of their own people. Other ranks also derived some benefit: Habsburg training units were transferred to Serbia and Poland for the sole purpose of feeding them. The army estimated that 15 per cent of its total cereal needs were met by resources from the occupied territories.63
On top of official exports and military consumption, significant amounts of food were dispatched privately to the homeland, ensuring that the armies’ statistics never fully represented the extent of resources removed from conquered territories. Within the German occupying forces, soldiers were permitted to send 5-kilogram food parcels to friends and relatives; extensive use was made of this privilege. In just eight months in 1916–17, troops in Romania sent home enough foodstuffs to fill 1,002 wagons. A further 18,000 tons were brought back by men on leave. Similar arrangements were in place for the Habsburg army, where furloughed men were allowed to bring 25 kilograms of provisions home with them from the occupied lands.64 For soldiers’ beleaguered families, the periodic supplements to their inadequate official ration were welcome. Anna Kohnstern in Hamburg rejoiced whenever the family’s Uncle Friedrich arrived from the Belgian rear areas ‘overloaded’ with butter, bacon, fat, beans and even live rabbits.65 However, the mass purchases of food by the Central Powers’ troops did not endear them or their regimes to occupied civilians. German soldiers flooded the conquered territories like a swarm of locusts. The purchasing power of the German mark made these troops the favoured customers of farmers but ensured that for everyone else prices rose to abominably high levels. Already in 1915, disgruntled city dwellers in both enemy and allied countries were blaming German troops bitterly for rapid inflation and hunger. Even in the countryside, peasants also eventually became disgusted with visits from foreign soldiers looking to buy items for themselves or on official requisitioning missions. They started to hide their grain. As the demands became greater, the ruses adopted to keep food out of the hands of occupying forces became more elaborate. In Romania, some peasants even hid stores of food in coffins and held fake funerals.66
*
The Central Powers’ occupation regimes may all have had economic exploitation as their most pressing goal but the means adopted and the style of rule varied among the conquered territories. Regions run purely by the military were treated differently from those managed by army–civilian hybrid authorities. The culture, prejudices and procedures that administrators brought with them shaped how they governed and treated inhabitants. What they encountered when they arrived in the occupied regions also mattered. Contemporary international law envisaged local authorities continuing their functions under occupation, but in the east invading armies found that Tsarist officials had retreated, leaving lawless and devastated territories. Local elites might be negotiated with or ignored, and the occupying forces also had to decide how to balance competing multi-ethnic interests. The Central Powers’ long-term plans for conquered territories influenced these decisions. Germanization schemes in the Baltic or the strip of Polish land to be annexed to the Reich appear to point towards the larger, genocidal racial reorganization of the east desired a quarter of a century later by the Nazis. However, large, utopian schemes were generally not a feature of German or Austrian occupation practices in the First World War. There was some limited state-building but much more confusion and chaos, which,
along with the overriding need to plunder resources for the war effort, hindered the formulation and implementation of grand new designs.67
The First World War’s most notorious occupation regime, and the clearest antecedent for Nazi methods of domination in eastern Europe, was Ober Ost in the Baltic. Ludendorff founded this military state in 1915, and his domineering personality and the martial culture of its soldier-administrators stamped the state’s character. Ober Ost was a testing ground for a new form of more total mobilization; it was here that the future First Quartermaster General developed and practised his ideas for a centralized war effort run by command. It was also the prime object of the general’s longer-term colonizing ambition. Its rule was marked by idealism – of a sort; Ludendorff described the occupation as ‘a work for civilization’ which ‘benefited the army and Germany as well as the country and its inhabitants’.68
Ober Ost’s rulers saw themselves as conveyors of culture. ‘German Work’, labour imbued with the highest moral motives, would tame the wild land and raise its peoples from sloth and ignorance. The military authorities’ press section trumpeted their achievements. Not only was the infrastructure damaged by the Russians in their ‘scorched earth’ retreat repaired, but new roads, railways and telegraph lines were built with remarkable speed; already by the end of 1915, 434 bridges had been erected, including one spanning the great Bug River, alone in what would become Ober Ost’s southernmost Białystok province. Officers intervened in agriculture, taking over the management of abandoned estates, and brought new industry to the region: jam factories, dairies, and potato and mushroom drying facilities were all constructed. Twelve million marks were invested in setting up saw mills, wood-processing plants and carpentry workshops in order to capitalize on the dense forest that covered the south of the territory. The army promoted not only what it regarded as a much needed work ethic among the inhabitants but also hygiene and education; under its watch the number of schools doubled to more than 1,350. Ludendorff and his subordinates dreamed of turning this neglected backwater into a productive region capable of contributing to German security. Ober Ost could become a granary, protecting the Reich in future wars from the deprivation its people were now facing. Moreover, the work undertaken would, it was hoped, prepare the way for settlement by ethnic Germans who would form for the Reich a living barrier against the barbarous east.69
In reality, behind this utopianism lay an extremely oppressive military regime. Ludendorff staffed its bureaucracy with officers and experts in uniform, and shut out all civilian influence. The principle on which the occupation was built, laid down explicitly in the closest thing that this military state had to a constitution, the ‘Order of Rule’ of 7 June 1916, was that ‘the interests of the army and the German Reich always supersede the interests of the occupied territory’.70 The military rulers imposed a repressive and obsessive system of control. Inhabitants over ten years of age were registered, photographed and issued with an identity card, for which each was compelled to pay one mark. During 1915–17, 1.8 million people, nearly two-thirds of the scattered population, were put through this compulsory procedure. A survey of possessions was undertaken, which covered everything from land ownership and cattle to household utensils. Fearing the spread of disease and espionage, the occupation authorities restricted people’s freedom of movement: not only was Ober Ost sealed off from the outside world by chains of border posts but the new state was itself divided arbitrarily into districts between which inhabitants were not allowed to move without the permission of local commanders. Even in their own areas, travel by horse, wagon and boat or on skis also required a pass. The documentation of the local population, census of their goods and restrictions on their movement, as well as the ‘German Work’ of road and railway building, laid the foundation for highly effective exploitation. Contrary to the assumptions of the experts who tried in the 1940s to calculate the profits of occupation, the initial, large expenditures on infrastructure and administration were more than recouped: while materials imported into Ober Ost were valued at 77,308,000 marks, those removed were worth nearly five times more, at 338,606,000 marks. The population was taxed heavily, not only through a graded head tax and duties on land, housing and profits, but also indirectly through the imposition of state monopolies on cigarettes, liquor, beer, salt, sugar, saccharin and matches. Fishing licences raised extra revenue, as did a bitterly resented charge imposed on dog owners. These levies placed a disproportionately heavy burden on the poor.71
The occupation authorities were above all focused on harnessing Ober Ost’s agricultural and human resources. Initially, the Russian army’s earlier depredations meant that there was little food to be had. Ludendorff, who was otherwise dismissive of what he termed ‘false humanitarian reasons’, admitted in his memoirs that to ward off starvation his army had shared its provisions with Ober Ost’s urban population during the winter of 1915–16; clearly, despite the parallels highlighted by recent historiography, there remained some considerable distance between Imperial German occupation practices and the genocidal ‘hunger plan’ that the Nazis intended to apply to the same region a quarter of a century later.72 However, once the new harvest was ready in 1916, requisitions became ever more systematic and extreme. The quotas imposed on farmers were extraordinarily high. Although only yields for hay, clover, rape-seed and flax were adequate, the army took grain, tubers and vegetables not solely for its own use but also to feed the German homeland (see Table 15). The military was especially ruthless in tapping the territory for meat supplies. One-third of all meat eaten by the 1–2 million German troops on the Eastern Front came from Ober Ost.73
The other commodity of major value to the military occupation authorities was manpower. The railway and road building, farming and logging praised by propaganda as ‘German Work’ were in fact to a very great extent the products of the forced labour of Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians, Poles and Jews. The military administrators who ran the Ober Ost state easily applied their habits of command and expectations of unconditional obedience to the helpless civilians under their control. Compulsory labour was patronizingly justified as a moral lesson to teach work-shy easterners the value of honest graft. Local measures, such as setting the unemployed to repair roads or ordering peasants to work on abandoned estates, began immediately, in the autumn of 1915. In January 1916 the central authorities, unable to attract sufficient manpower at miserly rates of pay for their ambitious projects, pondered a more systematic organization of compulsory work. Soon after, worker columns appeared, into which inhabitants were temporarily conscripted to carry out specific tasks near their homes. The ‘Order of Rule’ published in the summer laid down the tasks that inhabitants of both genders could be compelled to undertake and set stiff penalties of 10,000-mark fines or five years’ imprisonment for refusal.74
Table 15. Selected foods taken from the 1916 harvest in Lithuania* by the German army (tons)
*Lithuania was initially one province of six within Ober Ost. In July 1916 the Vilna province was merged into it, making Lithuania around one-third of the total land area ruled by the military state.
Source: A. Strazhas, Deutsche Ostpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Der Fall Ober Ost, 1915–1917 (Wiesbaden, 1993), p. 47, n. 203.
In October 1916, with Ludendorff now at the OHL demanding the extension of compulsory labour everywhere to assist in the new industrial drive, Ober Ost’s administration took a final step: it decreed that workers pressed into forced labour could be deployed outside their places of habitation. This opened the way for Civil Worker Battalions (ZABs), the harshest manifestation of forced work practised by Germany in the First World War. The life of those enslaved in these units was truly miserable. The pay was a tenth of that earned by free unskilled labourers; rations, at 250 grams of bread per day, were inadequate for heavy labour; and accommodation was in draughty barrack camps surrounded by barbed wire. Beatings were frequent, illness was endemic and the prisoners – for that is what they were – had littl
e or no contact, written or otherwise, with their families. The battalions were officially disbanded in September 1917; in practice, however, they continued in existence under different titles and their personnel, after being intimidated into signing contracts, were recategorized as ‘volunteers’. Exactly how many people were subjected to compulsory labour is unknown. There were five ZABs in Ober Ost, each notionally containing 2,000 men, although escapes, death and disease eroded their numbers. Those conscripted temporarily to work in labour columns, which contained women as well as men, were much more numerous. Jews, who were particularly vulnerable to both the unemployment that was used to justify and excuse the columns and to officials’ prejudices, were disproportionately affected. In the Lithuanian province of Ober Ost alone, a credible estimate is that 130,000 inhabitants were so misused.75
The coercion of the Ober Ost regime was effective in the short term at thoroughly plundering the land’s material and human resources. However, it also had severe costs: it was wasteful and highly counter-productive for the realization of goals in the medium and longer term. The frantic efforts to gather as much food as possible in 1916 disastrously depleted the animal stocks on Lithuanian and Latvian farms and left insufficient seed for the 1917 harvest.76 Above all, the state’s reliance on intimidation and naked violence to underpin its authority was not only immoral and illegal but also no way to promote production. The population was alienated, not motivated: the frequent beatings and humiliation at the hands of gendarmes, punitive fines for misunderstanding decrees that were poorly translated or posted only in German, sudden and indiscriminate manhunts for work details, and payment in worthless ‘East Marks’ gave no reason for the people to strive for Ober Ost. Forced labour was carried out slowly and reluctantly. Open defiance was dangerous: when villagers in the Girkalnis district, for example, refused to surrender goods on demand, their houses were burned down and they were bloodily beaten up, placed in chains and marched around the area as a warning to others. Over 1,000 people were executed alone in the Lithuanian province of Ober Ost.77
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