Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Nonetheless, far from cowing inhabitants, the repression provoked resistance that ultimately destabilized the state. German officials and police were murdered in growing numbers and magazines filled with confiscated goods were set alight. Men who had fled to the forests to escape compulsory labour turned to banditry and partisan warfare, both terrorizing the population and undermining the occupiers’ grip on the land. The half-hearted efforts of military rulers in 1917, after the Russian revolution, to co-opt local elites fooled nobody into thinking that inhabitants’ wishes would now be seriously considered. In Courland, in the north of Ober Ost, other peoples were ignored and only the Baltic German barons were called to a new Land Assembly. In the south, a Lithuanian council, the Taryba, was allowed to convene in the autumn; a foolish act, as German leaders were unwilling to make any real concessions to Lithuanian nationalist aspirations and arrogantly overestimated their ability to coerce it. The Taryba in fact refused to confer greater legitimacy on the occupation, worked to thwart hardening German plans for permanent control and then declared Lithuanian independence on 16 February 1918. Despite intense pressure, it held steadfastly to this position over the summer months and, when the German war effort collapsed in the autumn, was instrumental in forming a Lithuanian national government.78

  The warped utopianism of the German regime in Ober Ost was driven by Ludendorff’s nationalism and militarist ambitions, but the extreme brutality and control mania exercised there were not due to him alone; they had deeper roots in German military culture. In north-eastern France, the occupation regimes of the Western Front armies bore some striking similarities to the one in Ober Ost. Most obviously, these occupations shared that regime’s obsession with control and utilized many of the same tools to achieve it. The German military photographed all French citizens and issued identity cards that had to be carried at all times. People were not permitted to travel outside their own communes without applying for a pass, and having good reason. Privacy was eliminated: every house had to display a list of its residents, and periodic spot parades were held by the Germans to ensure that everyone was present. All residents were ordered to keep their doors unlocked. The male population, suspected as being most likely to resist, was controlled particularly carefully. In January 1915 all military-aged men living in Lille, the major city in the zone of occupation, were ordered to register, under threat of imprisonment. Some were interned in Germany. The military-aged men who remained in the occupation zone received a red (presumably for danger) identity card, instead of the white one issued to other civilians, and were obliged to gather once a month in order to be counted.79 In fairness, these French areas directly behind their lines were highly sensitive for the German armies. Resistance, unlikely though it was, had the potential to cause dangerous disruption to the forces’ supply lines, and hostile acts such as espionage and the assistance of escaped Entente prisoners were undertaken by French agents or civilians. The armies here had valid security concerns, but their reaction was very heavy-handed.80

  More difficult to justify, but indicative of mentalities similar to those in Ober Ost, was the occupiers’ control of the French population. Civilians could be moved around based on the needs of the military. The most shocking example took place in April 1916, when to solve an agricultural labour shortage and ease food supply problems in the cities, the Sixth Army’s Quartermaster General simply removed between 24,000 and 30,000 people, mostly women, from Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing to the countryside. As in Ober Ost, forced labour was a feature of the occupation. Temporary local work columns for field labour or fortification building had been formed as early as 1914. The further radicalization of these practices was not a local initiative but a result of Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s appointment to head the German army. The Third OHL, drawing on its experiences in the east, ordered the introduction of ZABs. Twenty-five battalions were established in the rear areas between October 1916 and the spring of 1918. Around 30,000 French civilians were enslaved at any one time in these labour units, but exhaustion, illness and deaths induced by the hard work, inadequate food and beatings by guards ensured that many more men passed through them.81

  The major difference between the German regime in Ober Ost and those in occupied France was that the latter lacked the brutal idealism of the former. There were no plans for German settlement in occupied France. Nor was there a desire to spread a mantra of ‘German Work’. The so-called ‘Economic Committees’ of the German armies were only organizations of plunder, not production. The armies’ rear areas contained a third of France’s metallurgical industry and mines that had produced half of its pre-war coal output, but the damage to these installations, the displacement of their workforce and the front’s proximity meant that they could not be put to work for the Reich. Instead, the military occupiers looted the facilities, de-industrializing the region by scrapping or transferring its machinery to Germany. The devastation that they left was crushing. All twenty-four large metallurgical plants and ten car, cycle and arms factories, 205 of 209 steel mills, rolling mills and foundries, 106 of 110 engineering factories and 492 of 500 smaller metallurgical establishments were damaged or destroyed.82 The land too was ravaged rather than improved. Four-fifths of occupied France’s grain harvest was sent to Germany and its pig herd had fallen from 356,000 in 1914 to just 25,000 by 1919.83

  Not all German occupation regimes had the hard-wired brutality of Ober Ost and the armies in north-eastern France. The Governor Generals, General Bissing in Belgium and General Hans Hartwig von Beseler in Poland, who ran two other important occupied regions, were well disposed to their territories and prepared to act with moderation, stances that cast doubt on whether German military culture was so deterministically violent as sometimes claimed. Their attitudes were reinforced, rather than determined, by their civil administrations, which were generally more alert to the costs of flouting international law than were soldiers. Longer-term hopes of tying Poland and Belgium to the Reich, most likely as satellite states with restricted sovereignty, also militated in favour of conciliatory conduct. Nonetheless, moderation proved a difficult line to hold under wartime pressures. The overriding need to extract resources, demands from authorities beyond the occupation zones and the difficulty of motivating indifferent or even hostile populations to work for Germany’s war effort all pushed the regimes towards an extensive use of coercion. The large-scale plunder carried out by the Central Powers to satisfy immediate wartime needs inevitably had costs for their longer-term objectives.

  Bissing’s Belgium offers a good illustration of some of the problems. The Governor General wished that Belgium would eventually fall under the permanent control of the Reich, he was keen not to alienate Belgians totally, and he was even prepared to use local Flemish separatists as a means to reduce French influence and tie the state closer to Germany. He wished not to ruin Belgian industry but rather set it to work for the German war effort.84 However, his plan was thwarted from two sides. First, German military, political and economic elites opposed it. The Prussian War Ministry was reluctant to grant contracts to Belgian firms, and German industrialists, who were well connected with the military and with the civilian administrators in the General Government Belgium, also lobbied against a programme that aimed to revive a major competitor. Both they and the Reich government preferred to use the opportunity proffered by war to eliminate competition and infiltrate Belgian industry with German capital. Second, Belgian civilians ruined Bissing’s design by their unwillingness to collaborate. Although half a million Belgian workers, half of the country’s workforce, were unemployed as a result of the war, there was widespread passive resistance against contributing to the German war effort. Quarries refused to supply crushed stone to the military administration and factories rejected orders that they knew came from German sources. The personnel of the Belgian railways, from navvies to managers, refused to work for the occupiers.85 Belgians also at first displayed little willingness to work in Germany. Recruitment only picked up in 19
17, in part from fear induced by the forced deportations over the winter of 1916–17, but, more importantly, due to greater incentives, including bonuses, family benefits and formal equality between Belgian and German workers. Some 160,000 Belgians signed contracts for employment in the Reich.86

  Belgians were exceptional in their sustained passive resistance to German occupation. This was possible only because they could rely for sustenance on the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB). Organized by the millionaire mining engineer and future American president Herbert Hoover, the CRB supplied more than five million tons of food to Belgium and north-eastern France during the First World War.87 The British allowed the food to pass through the blockade on condition that the Germans abstained from requisitioning it or the equivalent home produce. A further convention in July 1915 reserved all Belgium’s bread grains for domestic consumption, and in April 1916, German purchases and requisitions of all foodstuffs in the territory were halted completely. The agreements came too late to stop the country’s agriculture from being destroyed; in 1919, Belgium had just 327,332 pigs, compared with 1.5 million before the war.88 Nonetheless, the CRB’s food aid kept Belgians alive and, by relieving them of the need to earn, made possible a four-year strike that effectively sabotaged Bissing’s hopes of industrial mobilization. In contrast to the 1,500,000 tons of pig iron and 900,000 tons of steel manufactured in Belgium before the war, the occupiers managed to coax only an annual 100,000 tons in 1915 and 1916. In February 1917 the Third OHL ordered all ‘non-essential’ plant to be closed. Some 151 Belgian factories were decommissioned, 24,000 machines transported to the Reich and another 12,000 machines put into storage.89 The sole industry to maintain significant production was coal mining; the CRB did not provide this essential fuel and, with no other source of supply, the Belgians had to dig it out or freeze. While the mines never yielded as much as their annual peacetime 22.8 million tons, 16.9 million tons were dug out in 1916 and 13.9 million in 1918. Up to half of this coal was sold in Belgium, a tiny amount was exported and the rest went to the German army and railways. It proved a useful but not critical supplement to a nation that in peacetime had produced 277.2 million tons of coal annually.90

  The occupation of the northern half of Congress Poland under Governor General von Beseler was another regime that ought to have been moderate. The General Government Warsaw (GGW), as this area was known, was saved from Ludendorff’s grip by Bethmann Hollweg and Falkenhayn in 1915 and organized on the Belgian model. Beseler, the conqueror of the fortresses of Antwerp and Novogeorgievsk, was appointed despite having little political experience and no familiarity with the complex politics surrounding Europe’s Polish question. Nonetheless, proving that the Prussian officer corps was not wholly incapable of empathy and open-mindedness, he prepared for his new responsibilities by reading Polish history, consulting with both Poles and Germans, and travelling widely around his area of rule. In stark contrast to Ludendorff, whose interests in the population of Ober Ost did not extend beyond what it could contribute to the German war effort, Beseler’s studies gave him some sympathy for the Poles. The population, he thought, ‘is certainly gifted and has good qualities’. His attitude mirrored that of the more benevolent among contemporary colonists, who justified domination of foreign peoples as a pedagogic exercise in self-government. German rule in the GGW took the form of a balancing act, in which imperial authorities sought to ensure permanent control over Poland, while simultaneously granting increasing powers of self-government to the local Polish elites.91

  Two factors besides Beseler’s initial goodwill set limits on the harshness of occupation practices in the GGW. First, as in Belgium a civilian administration answering to the Chancellor worked below the Governor General. This had been established at Bethmann’s behest and against Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s wishes already in January 1915 in what was then a thin strip of occupied territory, and its jurisdiction was expanded once the GGW was established in August.92 The other factor that should have restrained excesses against the GGW’s population was the Poles’ importance for Germany and Austria-Hungary domestically and on the international stage. The Central Powers’ large Polish minorities maintained a fervent interest in the welfare of their compatriots across the border; Prussian officialdom noted, for example, the large sums that Poles in Germany’s eastern marches donated to a ‘Committee for the Suffering in the Parts of Russian Poland Occupied by German Troops’. Abuses were reported and redress demanded by the minority’s representatives, supported by at least some German Socialists, in the Reichstag.93 Moreover, the exercise in Polish state-building undertaken by the Germans in the GGW required the collaboration of local elites and thus also served to restrain overtly brutal behaviour. The high point of these efforts was the proclamation made by the German and Austrian monarchs on 5 November 1916 promising the creation after the war of an independent Poland.94

  Nonetheless, the exigencies of blockade and war against superior powers meant that the immediate priorities of the GGW regime were the same as those of other German occupiers. The head of its civil administration, Wolfgang von Kries, defined his mission as ‘to maintain peace and order in the area of administration, to secure the homeland’s connection with the fighting front and, through the area of administration’s economic assistance, to support the [Reich’s] war economy, above all with food’.95 The last goal, economic exploitation, was the most important. Even though the GGW contained two major cities, Warsaw and Łódź, and its cereal harvest plummeted to a mere 35 per cent of the peacetime level, huge quantities of food were taken. Northern Polish farms yielded not only 1.2 million tons of grain but also 220,000 tons of potatoes, 26,000 tons of oats and 40,000 tons of sugarbeet for the Reich or its soldiers. Millions of animals were bought or requisitioned.96 The GGW’s civilian occupiers exceeded their military counterparts in Ober Ost in their reckless exploitation of the land’s forests, felling nearly 8,000 hectares. Already in 1917, officials conceded that as a result, ‘the future Polish state will have difficulties in covering its wood needs’.97 Taxes were heavy. As in Ober Ost, the state asserted profitable monopolies over all manner of goods, from grain, salt, sugar and meat to matches, cigarettes and petroleum. Only one-third of these funds were reinvested in the territory, while the rest went to the German war effort.98

  The burdens imposed by the occupiers eased Germany’s own supply problems at the expense of the lives of the GGW’s Polish and Jewish population, especially in the cities. In Warsaw, the official ration was set in mid-1916 at just two-thirds of the already utterly inadequate levels current in the Reich. By the spring of 1918 it was, at 891 calories, only about half the size. Worse still, impoverished and frequently unemployed residents of Warsaw were less able than Germans, for whom such supplements became extremely important, to afford extra nutrition on the black market. The Polish Socialist Party estimated plausibly that the population of Warsaw ate just 39 per cent of the food consumed by Germans. How many died of starvation is unknown, but weakened by malnutrition and cold due to severe fuel and clothing shortages, and lacking the soap essential for hygiene, the vulnerability of residents to disease certainly increased. Overall, the city’s death rate doubled between 1914 and 1917. Old people and children were especially numerous among the victims.99

  The GGW regime thus proved hardly less callous and exploitative than Ober Ost. It was also oppressive: thousands of people were interned and, as in the west, cities were forced to pay heavy ‘contributions’, in Poland’s case totalling six million roubles.100 The regime’s main claim to humanity lay in the lesser use of coercion within its borders. Forced labour was introduced by the Governor General only very briefly in October 1916, principally at Ludendorff’s urging. The legislative foundation was provided by a ‘decree for the combating of idleness’ issued on 4 October, and shortly afterwards mayors were ordered to submit lists of unemployed. Around 5,000 workers, half from Łódź, were dragooned into ZABs and sent to Ober Ost, while a larger number were made to accept
temporary work in their home areas. The overwhelming majority of the people taken were Jews, a hamfisted and unsuccessful attempt by Beseler to limit Polish outrage. The policy was halted immediately after the Central Powers’ proclamation on 5 November promising an autonomous Poland.101

  The harnessing of Poland’s manpower for the German war effort was central to the GGW regime, but persuasion and, sometimes, trickery rather than force were the principal tools used, with considerable success. Poland was an indispensable source of immigrant labour. Already in March 1915, even before the great advances in the east, German authorities began to recruit workers from Polish territory to replace conscripted German men.102 Commercial agents were active from the start of 1915, but in the summer occupation authorities granted the ‘German Worker Central’ (Deutsche Arbeiterzentrale – DAZ), an organization set up in peacetime to place Polish seasonal workers with employers, a near monopoly. The offers of work in Germany were not unwelcome to Poles: as a result of wartime economic disruption, fighting and damage to factories and infrastructure by the retreating Russian army, there were 200,000 unemployed in the GGW. However, men and women who signed up frequently found that the pay and conditions they were promised either failed to materialize or were soon reduced. Worst of all, the DAZ did its best to obscure the fact that agreeing to employment in Germany was a one-way ticket; workers had no right of return. When knowledge of this fact spread among Poles, their readiness to contract themselves to Reich employers waned.103