Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Czernin’s folly soon became apparent. The Germans quickly muscled in, established themselves at the centre of power in Kiev and confined Habsburg troops to just three of the land’s nine provinces. The National Council predictably proved incapable of delivering what it had promised. Even after the Germans deposed it and set in place a leader who had the support of most Ukrainian landowners, the Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, little was extracted. In the end, only 42,000 railway wagons carrying food, 18,000 of which went to Austria-Hungary, rolled westward. The grain delivered to all Central Powers totalled just 113,400 tons, just over half of which went to the Habsburg Empire and most of the rest to Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.16 One of the German units tasked with extraction, the 224 Division, outlined the problems it faced. First, it asserted testily the food was ‘simply not there’. The Central Powers had fallen victim to Ukrainian trickery and their own wishful thinking at Brest-Litovsk. Moreover, what food was available, reported the division, was not easy to get. The Ukrainian government was impotent and the Germans lacked the troops to organize a thorough extraction, and could not persuade the peasants to sell. A particular gripe with the division was the need to be friendly. ‘With strictness, certainly by using weapons, really significant supplies might have been retrieved,’ it argued. However, after the peace treaty this type of conduct was no longer practicable.17 The German army was in fact fairly civilized in its dealings with Ukrainians, working with local authorities and, unlike its conduct at the outbreak of war, restraining itself from violence against civilians. Its Habsburg ally, by contrast, had learned nothing. Karl ordered his army to ‘requisition with no remorse, even with violence’. Unlike the Germans, it saw no need for judicial process and in the early summer swift executions of people labelled as ‘suspected robbers’ or ‘Bolshevik murderers’ multiplied. Moreover, by setting up its own purchasing agencies in the territory, the Habsburg army also impeded the civil authorities tasked with food purchases.18

  The Habsburg Empire had never ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Ukrainians, for to have tried to pass it through the Reichsrat would have meant revealing the secret clause promising a Ukrainian Crownland in eastern Galicia. The failure of the Ukrainian National Council to keep up its end of the bargain with food deliveries, and its replacement by the Hetman, enabled Austria-Hungary quietly to drop this clause. However, by this point the ill-effects of the peace made at Brest-Litovsk were already being felt. The March treaty with Russia ended the hard fighting on the Eastern Front but fatefully opened the way for the return of prisoners, who brought the soft poison of Bolshevism into the army. The February treaty with Ukraine provoked immediate and dramatic reactions. After the Germans published the treaty, the entire Regency Council in Warsaw immediately resigned in protest, as did the Habsburg military governor in Lublin, Count Szeptycki. On 15 February the Polish Auxiliary Corps, the remnants of the Polish Legions that had gone to war with Piłsudski in 1914, mutinied. A battle with Austro-Hungarian troops left many dead, but 1,600, including their commander, General Józef Haller, managed to defect to Russian lines. They would later form a core part of a new Polish army being prepared to fight with the western Allies in France.19 Worst of all, however, was the reaction in Habsburg Galicia. Foreign Minister Czernin’s disregard for Polish national interests at Brest-Litovsk finally divorced Polish society from the Habsburg cause.

  GOODBYE GALICIA

  The commitment of Galicia’s Polish population to the Habsburg cause had waned since the heady days of 1914 and 1915, when the Polish political parties had established their Supreme National Committee and society had rallied around the Polish Legions. The Emperors’ declaration of an independent Kingdom of Poland in November 1916 had been well received.20 Thereafter, however, the mood had soured. There had been a political crisis in the summer of 1917 when two-thirds of the Polish Legionaries, by this point transferred to German control in occupied Congress Poland, had refused to swear an oath of loyalty set by the Central Powers to an as yet unknown future king of Poland and to promise ‘loyal comradeship in arms with the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary’. Piłsudski, whom the Germans rightly regarded as being behind the refusal, was imprisoned and the recalcitrant Legionaries interned.21 In Galicia, the shabby treatment of a formation in which large swathes of Polish society had invested so publicly was bound to demoralize people, although few came out to protest against Piłsudski’s arrest.22 According to the Habsburg censor, social concerns were most pressing for the majority. By the autumn of 1917, letters were full of complaints about the ‘unbearable conditions of living’ and expressed ‘increasing impatience’ for ‘speedy relief from the misery of the war’. Galicia was gripped by strikes in January 1918. When, in the spring, the authorities diverted food from Galicia to starving Vienna, they clumsily ensured that economic grievances in Galicia would peak simultaneously with the political shock from the treaty with Ukraine.23

  The news that Chełm would go to Ukraine caused outrage in Galician society. The politicians of the Reichsrat’s Polish Circle bitterly denounced the treaty. National Democrats and Socialists were especially scathing. Ignacy Daszyński, the leading Socialist light, declared ‘the star of the Habsburgs [to have] gone out in the Polish sky’. The conservatives were at first more hesitant about a total break with the Monarchy, but the later revelation of the secret agreement to divide Galicia administratively between Ruthenes and Poles alienated them too. After fifty years of loyalism, Polish politicians had been pushed into opposition by Czernin’s catastrophic diplomacy.24 In sharp contrast to what was perceived as Habsburg betrayal, the Allies had raised their ideological bid for the Poles’ support. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, had demanded a month earlier in his influential manifesto for a post-war world, the ‘Fourteen Points’, that ‘an independent Poland should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant’.25

  Among the Polish people of Galicia, there was also anger and a feeling of betrayal. ‘For the blood and toil of our soldiers, for the despair and tears of our sisters and mothers, for agony, torment, for hunger and impoverishment, for the death of our best youth in the Legions they pay us with a Fourth Partition of Poland’ raged one protest appeal. It caught the general feeling of disgust well.26 A general strike was called by a united front of all Polish parties. The Polish peasant leader, Wincenty Witos, was still impressed with the public response when he recalled it two decades later. ‘On this day, everything stopped completely all across Galicia,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘Work stopped in offices, factories, workshops . . . while in every city, town, village mass protest rallies took place.’27 In Lwów, the day began with a Mass. The city’s Progressive Jewish community showed solidarity, holding services in their synagogues. At the city’s central symbolic points, the town hall and the statue of Poland’s national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, stages had been erected and patriots harangued a 20,000-strong crowd. The release of Piłsudski and the interned Legionaries, the end of Prussian militarism, and separation from Austria were all demanded. The associations so important in Polish Galician civic society, the scouts, schools, Sokół gymnasts and elderly veterans of the 1863 uprising against Russia were all out in force. Senior officials and university professors also took part. The participation of peasants from the surrounding region was enthusiastically taken as proof of the unity of the entire Polish nation.28

  Particularly ominous for Emperor Karl and his regime was the widespread participation of officials in the demonstrations. In the fortress town of Przemyśl, the district chief and his staff attended, while the city’s bishop supported the protests with a sermon. In Cracow too, officials took part and in many smaller towns they helped to organize the protest. Ever since Galicia had received de facto autonomy in 1869, its Polish administration had been nationally minded, bu
t before the war this had not been incompatible with dynastic loyalty. Now, however, the presence of officials at protests so explicitly anti-Habsburg and pro-independence was a sign that these allegiances were in opposition and that the Crownland’s administration was separating from the state. The removal of Habsburg symbols and their replacement with Polish eagles was also a sign of a political shift at the grassroots level. Railway officials filed off the dynasty’s crown on their cap badges. The public unscrewed Habsburg eagles from official buildings and symbolically hanged or burned them. In schools too a new age was starting. In classrooms, the obligatory portraits of the Emperor were thrown out and replaced with pictures of Piłsudski, the man who represented the ideal of an independent and united Poland.29

  Nowhere were protests against Brest-Litovsk more dramatic, violent or filled with symbolism than in Cracow. As the traditional heartland of loyalist conservatism and home to the Supreme National Committee, which from 1914 had attempted to realize the Austro-Polish solution desired by the dynasty, the city had particular reason to feel betrayed. News of the treaty reached Cracow on the day it was signed, 9 February 1918. The city’s students already had a demonstration planned for 10 February in the marketplace in protest at the shooting of a school pupil in riots at Lwów at the beginning of the month. The reports from Brest-Litovsk turned this into a major event, with 10,000 people attending.30 Thousands gathered in the following two days and attacked the city’s German consulate. On 11 February around 500 people, about one-third of whom were students and schoolchildren, also attempted to rescue Polish Legionaries under Prussian escort at the city’s railway station.31 On 12 February the crowds confronted troops from a Ruthenian unit sent to pacify the city, and shots were fired in the main square, although nobody was injured.32 With passions riding high, the protests in Cracow peaked on 13 and 14 February, when the crowds became so large and so violent that the police were forced to withdraw. Signs marked with the double-headed Habsburg eagle were defaced, removed or replaced with Polish eagles. Austrian medals were nailed to trees for people to spit at or hung around dogs’ necks, and obscene caricatures were posted up in public depicting Kaiser Wilhelm II being hanged or wearing nothing but a spiked helmet.33 The protest’s focal point was in the main market. Up to October 1917, the Column of the Legions had stood here, testimony both to the Polish nationalism and Habsburg loyalism of the community. In February 1918 the marketplace became the site of a very different symbolism. A display of three paintings was set up. In the middle was a crucified Christ, and flanking him were pictures of Kaiser Wilhelm and Emperor Karl. Below was written ‘Jesus Christ, never on the Cross were you in the company of such rascals.’34

  Brest-Litovsk did not just snap the last threads of allegiance felt by Galician Poles for their monarch. Its failure to bring the promised flow of Ukrainian food also meant the continuation of a supply crisis that broke multi-ethnic central European society. National conflict and above all virulent anti-Semitism would stamp the region in the war’s aftermath. While in many places this had roots in the pre-war period, its intensification and brutalization was a wartime product. In large part at the political level it stemmed from the new legitimacy conferred on ‘national self-determination’, and the expectations and disappointments this fuelled, from 1917. However, at the societal level, massive wartime deprivation, the result of total mobilization and British blockade, had a lasting and decisive impact on the ethnically mixed communities of east-central Europe. People withdrew for protection into their own ethnic groups, and as communities nationalized, Jews in particular came to be regarded less as unwanted neighbours than as malign foreign objects with no right to belong. Even in places where ethnic relations had been relatively harmonious in peacetime, understanding between different peoples collapsed.

  The city of Cracow provides an excellent illustration of how twentieth-century conflict destroyed once thriving multi-ethnic communities. On the eve of war, Jews had made up one-fifth of its 183,000 inhabitants. The people had lived in the city since the thirteenth century. This long history contained episodes of discrimination and persecution. In 1495 they had been forced out of the city to Kazimierz, a place just south of the city’s castle that became known as Cracow’s Jewish district. There had been growing religious intolerance in the seventeenth century, and one Jew had been burned at the stake for blasphemy in 1663. Yet there had also been moments of unity, as in 1846 when revolution took hold of Cracow and the community sent 500 ‘Israelite Brothers’ to the insurrectionists’ army. By the early twentieth century, Cracow Jews were more likely than their co-religionists elsewhere to use Polish, and their political leadership was firmly integrationist and pro-Polish. They remained distinct, yet not separate citizens; while intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was almost unheard of, they rubbed shoulders, traded and shared the municipality’s lively popular press. As an indication of these harmonious relations, when anti-Semitic riots rocked western Galicia in 1898, Cracow had stood aloof. Jews had a special place in their hearts for the city. They identified closely with it and, although they possessed their own communal council, actively participated in the city’s governance. In 1914 no fewer than twenty of the eighty-seven city councillors were Jewish.35

  In the first years of the war, Cracow’s Jews had participated in its Polish national and Habsburg loyalist ‘double mobilization’. Several hundred had joined the Polish Legion. The unity of Cracow’s citizens, regardless of faith, and the contribution of its Jews were symbolized by the inclusion of the arms of Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter, on the base of its Column of the Legions in 1915.36 However, as food shortages and hardship gripped the city, the mood became less inclusive. Food prices spiralled; potatoes sold at five and flour at over fifteen times their pre-war prices at the end of the ‘turnip winter’ in February 1917. Jews, who were greatly over-represented among small traders and dominated key food industries in Galicia, above all milling, were widely suspected of hoarding and profiteering.37 The city’s first major hunger demonstration took place in March 1917. Although this and subsequent protests were directed at city authorities, the burgeoning anti-Semitic feeling was sufficiently obvious by May to prompt a suggestion that the Jewish community should set up a home guard to protect itself.38 At the end of the year, there was a warning of what was to come when hunger demonstrators in the centre of town decided to march south on Kazimierz. They were stopped by police.39

  It was in April 1918 that resentment finally broke out into open racial violence. Cracow was already in a state of militant turbulence. The January strikes and riots had caused 140,000 crowns of damage and ended with twenty-six policemen injured and sixty-three people arrested.40 The protests over Brest-Litovsk in February had further stoked the inflammatory mood. Positive, violent action had replaced legality, and all faith in the authorities was gone. Class and ethnic grudges prevailed. An eavesdropped conversation between two women on a tram was indicative of people’s attitudes. If the bread shortage continued, the women decided, ‘we won’t go to the town council or governor, we’ll just demolish the shops where they sell cakes and rolls’. They resented Jewish neighbours for monopolizing black-market food supplies. Flour from Congress Poland was not to be had because ‘the Jews . . . buy it up for any price’.41 The final collapse of Cracovian society, and of its relationship with political authority, fittingly came at a food market in the north of the city. Christian shoppers, bitter at the high prices and accusing Jews at the market of attempting to outbid them for the scarce goods, set off five days of anarchy in which the two communities clashed with each other and with the security services. The Viennese press characterized the Christians’ attack more or less accurately as ‘a proper pogrom’.42 On 16 April, the first day of clashes, several hundred protesting youths took the trouble to walk the twenty-five minutes from the north of Cracow to Kazimierz, plundering Jewish shops along the way while the police stood by. Attacks on Jewish property continued on the following day, and soldiers were ordered ont
o the streets. This calmed the city on 18 April, but there was further violence against the Jewish population on 20 April.43

  The Cracow violence made a powerful impression well beyond the boundaries of Galicia, for the Austrian capital’s newspapers quickly picked up on the story, which shocked and outraged Vienna’s large and influential Jewish community. It was among the earliest in a series of pogroms that rippled across Galicia in the summer and would peak during the collapse of the Central Powers in the autumn of 1918.44 It was also notable for other reasons, however. First, it was not only Christian resentments that translated into racial violence. On 19 April, when the north of the city was quiet, Jews in Kazimierz, enraged by the previous days’ plundering and rumours that one of their own had been killed by Christian rioters, rose up. Christian traders at a flea market were attacked by over one hundred Jewish youths armed with sticks and iron bars.45 Second, despite the animosity between Cracow’s two communities at this stage of the war, they were united in their hatred of municipal and state security forces. Both Christian and Jewish crowds fought with soldiers: one reserve officer was chased around the city’s main marketplace by youths on their way to Kazimierz on 16 April. Soldiers who attempted to help him were restrained by rioters.46 On the next day, Habsburg soldiers opened fire on a crowd pelting them with stones, killing a fourteen-year-old boy and wounding three others.47 In the Jewish quarter on 19 April, police and troops were also attacked by large crowds; one account even suggests that civilians there fired shots.48

  The demise of Cracow’s once thriving multi-ethnic community under the pressures of war was only the saddest example of collapse sponsored by the unmitigated hardship. By the summer Galicia was becoming ungovernable. The Cracow Military Command was spot on when it warned in May 1918 that ‘it cannot be discounted that the masses, discontented by the long deprivation, viewing the flawed social and national structure of the state as the cause of the situation in which they find themselves, reject the state with these foundations and yearn for a social and national reform or revolution’.49 In the cities, the mood was reported to be ‘very excitable . . . anti-dynastic and anti-Austrian’. Respect for the Monarchy had plummeted to the point where it was widely rumoured that Emperor Karl was a drunk, whose addiction was being exploited by his advisers to enact measures against the Poles.50 The Galician countryside swarmed with tens of thousands of army deserters. These formed dangerous armed robber bands, contemptuous of the weak security services arrayed against them. They intimidated the gendarmerie. One post stationed near the town of Jarosław was left a note in Polish on the door of its headquarters warning ‘Give us peace, and we’ll also leave you in peace. Otherwise your life will be forfeit.’ Anxiously, police authorities begged for help in fighting this ‘deserter plague’.51