Legacies of violence: Eastern Europe's First World War 9783486741957, 9783486857566, 3486741950

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Legacies of Violence

Europas Osten im 20. Jahrhundert Schriften des Imre Kertész Kollegs Jena Herausgegeben von Wlodzimierz Borodziej und Joachim von Puttkamer Band 3

Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century Publications of the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena Edited by Wlodzimierz Borodziej and J­ oachim von Puttkamer Volume 3

Oldenbourg Verlag München 2014

Legacies of Violence Eastern Europe’s First World War Edited by Jochen Böhler, Wlodzimierz Borodziej and Joachim von Puttkamer

Oldenbourg Verlag München 2014

The Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena “Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. Historical Experience in Comparison” at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena is an institute for the advanced study of the history of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.   The Kolleg was founded in October 2010 as the ninth Käte Hamburger Kolleg of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). The directors of the Kolleg are Professor Dr. Włodzimierz Borodziej and Professor Dr. Joachim von Puttkamer.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress Dieses Werk ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Die dadurch begründeten Rechte, insbesondere die der Übersetzung, des Nachdrucks, des Vortrags, der Entnahme von Abbildungen und Tabellen, der Funksendung, der Mikroverfilmung oder der Vervielfältigung auf anderen ­Wegen und der Speicherung in Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, bleiben, auch bei nur auszugsweiser Verwertung, vorbehalten. Eine Vervielfältigung dieses Werkes oder von Teilen dieses Werkes ist auch im Einzelfall nur in den Grenzen der gesetzlichen Bestimmungen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes in der jeweils geltenden Fassung zulässig. Sie ist grundsätzlich vergütungspflichtig. Zuwiderhandlungen unterliegen den Strafbestimmungen des Urheberrechts. © 2014 Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH Rosenheimer Straße 143, 81671 München/Deutschland www.oldenbourg-verlag.de Ein Unternehmen von De Gruyter Lektorat: Dr. Julia Schreiner Herstellung: Karl Dommer Einbandgestaltung: hauser lacour Gedruckt in Deutschland Dieses Papier ist alterungsbeständig nach DIN/ISO 9706. ISBN 978-3-486-74195-7 e-IBSN 978-3-486-85756-6

Table of Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VI Jochen Böhler/Włodzimierz Borodziej/Joachim von Puttkamer Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

I. A World in Transition Joachim von Puttkamer Collapse and Restoration: Politics and the Strains of War in Eastern Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

Mark Biondich Eastern Borderlands and Prospective Shatter Zones: Identity and Conflict in East Central and Southeastern Europe on the Eve of the First World War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25

Jochen Böhler Generals and Warlords, Revolutionaries and Nation-State Builders: The First World War and its Aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe . .

51

II. Occupation Jonathan E. Gumz Losing Control: The Norm of Occupation in Eastern Europe during the First World War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69

Stephan Lehnstaedt Fluctuating between ‘Utilisation’ and Exploitation: Occupied East Central Europe during the First World War . . . . . . . . . . . .

89

Robert L. Nelson Utopias of Open Space: Forced Population Transfer Fantasies during the First World War . . . . . . 113

VI   Inhalt III. Radicalization Maciej Górny War on Paper? Physical Anthropology in the Service of States and Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Piotr J. Wróbel Foreshadowing the Holocaust: The Wars of 1914–1921 and Anti-Jewish Violence in Central and Eastern Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Robert Gerwarth Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated States of Central Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 IV. Aftermath Julia Eichenberg Consent, Coercion and Endurance in Eastern Europe: Poland and the Fluidity of War Experiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Philipp Ther Pre-negotiated Violence: Ethnic Cleansing in the ‘Long’ First World War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Dietrich Beyrau The Long Shadow of the Revolution: Violence in War and Peace in the Soviet Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Commentary Jörn Leonhard Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War – A Commentary from a Comparative Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331

Acknowledgements This volume is the result of the workshop on Legacies of Violence. Eastern ­Europe’s First World War held at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena from 13 to 14 April 2012. At this workshop, respected scholars of Eastern European history discussed the state of the art and presented recent research on the topic. Their presentations were then commented on by a renowned specialist in Western European history. The editors would like to express their deepest gratitude to the management of the Imre Kertész Kolleg, Daniela Gruber, Diana Joseph, and Raphael Utz, for their splendid organisation of the workshop and their support during the editing process. Thanks are also due to the student assistants Michal Korhel, Thomas Marx, Tim Nerlich, Felix Petzold, Franziska Rohdewald, Alexander Walther, Philipp Weigel and Christian Werkmeister, who ensured that everything ran smoothly. The editors owe a great debt of gratitude to the authors of this volume for their cooperativeness and patience. Translations for the volume were provided by Allison Brown, Berlin (Dietrich Beyrau’s contribution), Antoni Górny, Warsaw (Maciej Górny’s contribution), and Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller, Berlin (Philipp Ther’s contribution). All the English texts were thoroughly proofread and edited by Brenda Black, Munich (the contributions by Dietrich Beyrau, Joachim von Puttkamer and Piotr J. Wróbel) and Anne Boden, Berlin/ Jena (all the other contributions and overall editing). Christian Werkmeister, Jena, formatted and standardised all the contributions, compiled the manuscript, transcribed all the Russian and Ukrainian terms, and prepared the name index. Julia Schreiner, Munich, was our partner at the Oldenbourg Publishing House. It was a pleasure to work with all of the above and their professionalism and efficiency were very much appreciated. Unfortunately, a paper on paramilitarism and the rise of fascism in interwar Eastern Europe, which was presented at the workshop, could not be included in this volume. The editors are therefore deeply indebted to Oxford University Press and to Robert Gerwarth for allowing us to reprint his brilliant recent study “Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated States of Central Europe”, in: idem/John Horne (eds.): War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, Oxford 2012, 52–71 in part III. Radicalization. Finally, we want to express our gratitude to the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, whose generous funding of the Imre Kertész Kolleg and its scholarly undertakings made both the workshop and this volume possible.

Introduction The First World War in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe differed in many ways from its counterpart in the West. In terms of its duration, the persecution of ethnic minorities, deportations and the death of millions of civilians, ideological conflicts, paramilitary activities, political turmoil and the ­reshaping of the post-war landscape, it was arguably more extreme. Violence also played an ever-greater role beyond the battlefields at the beginning and towards the end of the war in the East. While in the West, parameters such as warring parties, war aims and coalitions remained quite distinct, in the East they were blurred or even reversed in the course of events. As Theodore Weeks has aptly put it, “World War I transformed Europe and one may argue that its greatest impact was precisely on Eastern Europe.”1 The short-term reasons for this are manifold. Firstly, while in the West clear-cut armies mostly serving states with clear boundaries soon found themselves in a deadlock grip, the demise of four continental Empires turned Central and Eastern Europe into a ‘shatterzone’ of ethnic, social, national, and political fragmentations, intensified existing tensions, and predetermined future lines of conflict, which would be fought out by armies and bands of all colours and orientations.2 Secondly, the Eastern frontline was not static: twice, in 1914/15, and again from 1917 onwards, it swept across large parts of Central and Eastern Europe like a giant windshield wiper, leaving the indigenous population at the mercy of retreating or advancing armies and turning millions into refugees. The most extreme case was arguably former tsarist Ukraine, where from late 1917 to the beginning of 1920 “some towns […] changed hands as many as twenty times, and no one government controlled for longer than eight consecutive months any sizable core territory.”3 Thirdly, with the Balkan Wars, fighting in the East started two years earlier than in the West, and, after the 1917 October Revolution and the final defeat of the Central Theodore R. Weeks: Vilnius in World War I, 1914–1920, in: Joachim Tauber (ed.): Über den Weltkrieg hinaus. Kriegserfahrungen in Ostmitteleuropa 1914–1921. Lüneburg 2009, 34–57, 34. 2 Omer Bartov/Eric D. Weitz (eds.): Shatterzone of Empires. Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington 2013; see also the contribution by Joachim von Puttkamer to this volume. On the use of the term ‘shatterzones’ in this sense, see Peter Holquist: Forms of Violence during the Russian Occupation of Ottoman Territory and in Northern Persia (Urmia and Astrabad), October 1914–December 1917, in: Bartov/Weitz, Shatterzone of Empires, 334, 354. 3 Stephen Velychenko: State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine. A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922. Toronto 2011, 3. 1

2   Introduction Powers had turned the distribution of power upside down, this fighting merged into a bloody civil war and a variety of conflicts, with new states trying to establish themselves on the imperial ruins and no clear frontline to speak of. The fact that the First World War – with its preludes and aftermaths – lasted more than twice as long (1912–1921) in Central and Eastern Europe than it did in Western Europe (1914–1918) is often overlooked. To understand the turns and turmoil of the First World War in our area of interest, it is crucial to keep in mind that in the almost one hundred years preceding the outbreak of the war, the region constituted a national, ethnic, religious and linguistic patchwork, ruled by the four – later belligerent – major empires of continental Europe. Yet that prehistory is not one of constant quarrels and uprisings. Although the notion of a ‘Long Peace’ in Europe from 1815 to 1914 has recently been challenged, in the decades following the Congress of Vienna – where post-Napoleonic Europe was redistributed – at least the heartlands of Central and Eastern Europe sailed relatively peaceful waters.4 But the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had spread the ideal of national self-determination, and – unlike Bonaparte’s troops – they proved resistant to all counter-measures and advanced into the central, eastern and southeastern parts of Europe, increasingly contesting the imperial order. While empires tend to simplify complicated demographic structures through integration – dynasties rule over subjects that differ in terms of belief, identity, and language – nation states do so by including a majority that allegedly shares a common cultural heritage, language and political goal, and excluding a minority that allegedly does not. And since nation states are never established on a tabula rasa, their construction always necessitates opposition to and victory over the ruling powers and, once their advocates have gained the upper hand, a certain amount of social engineering in order to approach the ideal of national homogeneity. In our case, the picture gets even more complicated, because the contested empires tried to follow nationalistic strategies in order to survive towards the end of their existence.5 In doing so, they only accelerated the process of decline, because, once unleashed, nationalism and the conflicts it inevitably provoked proved impossible to control in the long run. The southeastern fringes of Europe, and especially the Balkans, ­witnessed the establishment of (para-)nation states long before 1912, and were Sheldon Anderson: Metternich, Bismarck, and the Myth of the ‘Long Peace’, 1815–1914, in: Peace and Change, 3 (2007), 301–328; Alexander V. Prusin: The Lands Between. Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992. Oxford 2010, 18–27. 5 Omer Bartov/Eric D.Weitz: Introduction. Coexistence and Violence in the German, ­Habs­burg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, in: Bartov/Weitz, Shatterzone of Empires, 1–20, 3. 4

Introduction   3

thus already prone to violence, ethnic conflict and war in the pre-1914 era.6 In Central and Eastern Europe, mass scale violence – with the important exception of bloodily suppressed national uprisings, anti-Jewish pogroms, the 1905 Revolution, and growing terrorism, first and foremost in tsarist Russia – was unleashed only after the outbreak of the Great War, and, with a ven­geance, in its aftermath. It is still important to note that many of the violent characteristics of the First World War beyond the battlefields of Eastern Europe did not materialize out of thin air, but were largely preordained by the political developments of the preceding decades in the region. Thus, the Great War was the catalyst rather than the originator of endemic violence, canalizing the various currents of ethnic, national and political homogenization and modernization, and sweeping away all those groups that were seen to be alien or hostile to those projects. For example, in the first year of the war, Russian domestic policy targeted ethnic minorities, above all Jews, but also ethnic Germans, Ukrain­ ians and Poles. Tsarist generals pursued a policy of Russification and scorched earth in the western provinces that dated back to the nineteenth century, but was radicalized in the context of the unexpected nightmarish events of 1914/15.7 This does not mean that the First World War in the East was conducted in a more brutal manner than in the West from the very beginning. On the contrary: the horrors of Western trench warfare, in which modern weapons exacted their deathly toll, have often been described. The fatalities there surpassed all known records at that time, and millions of soldiers returned home horribly disfigured or dismembered.8 Even in the first weeks of the German invasion, the Belgian and French civilian population suffered mass shootings and other atrocities at the hands of the imperial troops.9 In comparison, the See the contribution by Mark Biondich to this volume. On the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which lie beyond our focus of interest, see Uğur Ümit Üngör: The Making of Modern Turkey. Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford/New York 2011, 8–54; Holquist, Forms of Violence, 334–361. 7 Theodore R. Weeks: Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914. DeKalb 1996; see the contribution by Jochen Böhler to this volume. 8 Gary Sheffield (ed.): War on the Western Front. In the Trenches of World War I. New York 2007; John Ellis: Eye-Deep in Hell. Trench Warfare in World War I. Baltimore 1989; for a literary description, see the classic novel by Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front. Boston 1929; see also Bernd Ulrich: Soldatische Kriegserfahrungen im industrialisierten Krieg, in: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (ed.): Dossier ‘Der Erste Weltkrieg’. Bonn 2013, at: http://www.bpb.de/geschichte/deutsche-geschichte/ersterweltkrieg (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013). 9 John Horne/Alan Kramer: German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial. New Haven 2001. 6

4   Introduction three years of German and Austrian occupation in former partitioned Poland passed rather quietly – with the exception of the destruction of the town of Kalisz.10 In general, the inhabitants of occupied Central and Eastern Europe found themselves at the mercy of their respective occupying forces, and thus “under the conditions of war became the object of military and state interests, which often, but not primarily, manifested themselves in repression.”11 In many instances, planning was far removed from reality. German generals boasted about Germanizing the military zone of Ober Ost in the Baltics and creating a border strip (Grenzstreifen) between Germany and Russia ‘cleared’ of the Polish population that had lived there for centuries.12 But by and large, “the German and Austrian occupation – despite all the negative side effects of the war such as famine, looting, destruction, human losses, and reprisals – had a positive effect in terms of Polish aspirations to a nation state. Among other reasons, Poles were able to give the national Polish option a go because the Austrian and particularly the German policy towards Poland during the First World War was conflicting, ambivalent, and inconsistent.”13 The same goes for the Habsburg occupation of Serbia, which, after initial atrocities comparable to those committed in Belgium and France at about the same time, assumed the guise of a rather traditional form of military government. The norms of occupation began to lose their force in the East after 1914, but up to 1917 there were at least attempts to restore or stick to them in order to avoid a complete loss of control.14 On the other hand, as the épuration of Alsace in

Arkadiusz Woźniak: Kalisz 1914. Pogrom miasta. Kalisz 1995; Laura Engel­ stein: “A Belgium of Our Own”. The Sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3 (2009), 441–473; Cezary Król: Besatzungsherrschaft in Polen im Ersten und im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Charakteristik und Wahrnehmung, in: Bruno Thoss/Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds.): Erster Weltkrieg, Zweiter Weltkrieg. Ein Vergleich: Krieg, Kriegserlebnis, Kriegserfahrung in Deutschland. Paderborn 2002, 577–591; see also the contribution by Stephan Lehnstaedt to this volume. 11 Dietmar Neutatz/Lena Radauer: Besetzt, interniert, deportiert. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Zivilbevölkerung im östlichen Europa, in: Alfred Eisfeld/Dietmar Neutatz (eds.): Besetzt, interniert, deportiert. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die deutsche, jüdische, polnische und ukrainische Zivilbevölkerung im östlichen Europa. Essen 2013, 10–25, 11. 12 Vejas G. Liulevicius: War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge/New York 2000; Imanuel Geiss: Der polnische Grenzstreifen, 1914–1918. Ein Beitrag zur Deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Lübeck 1960; see also the contribution by Robert L. Nelson to this volume. 13 Król, Besatzungsherrschaft in Polen, 577–582; see also the contribution by Jonathan E. Gumz to this volume. 14 Jonathan E. Gumz: The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia. 1914– 1918. Cambridge 2009. 10 Mieczysław

Introduction   5

1918/19 shows, ethnic cleansing as a means of shaping the post-war order was not confined to the East.15 The year 1917/18, when the war in the East changed for good, was the turning point. With the convulsions of the Russian revolutions, the short-lived German occupation of Eastern Europe from the Baltics to the Balkans, the emergence of dozens of competing national projects, and the return of millions of armed and dispossessed soldiers – brutalized or war weary – into devastated landscapes, large parts of East Central Europe became a hotbed of military and paramilitary violence.16 Those material factors went hand in hand with a radicalization of thought in the face of the complete destruction of the pre-war political and social order. Cultural anthropologists took advantage of hitherto undreamt-of possibilities and produced massive studies on prisoners of war, thus refining the theories of the nineteenth century for application in the twentieth.17 Revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ideologies, already formulated in the decades before the outbreak of the war, now seemed to make perfect sense to millions of followers, and the historical zero hour seemed exactly the right time to put them into action.18 The antiSemitism that had dominated thoughts and conversations in all of fin-de-siècle Europe served as a universal pretext to victimize Jews, be it as the alleged culprits of lost battles, as hostages, or as popular targets for rampages, rapes, and pogroms.19 In the light of these developments, it can surely be stated that the ferocious character the First World War assumed in the East from 1917 onwards facilitated the further development and implementation of radical ideas throughout the European continent at the turn of the 1920s, a process that would otherwise probably have been confined for a longer time to the colonies, where it had been ongoing for centuries. How did the experience of uninhibited violence affect the European post-war order? There are no simple answers to that question. The experience of war and civil war did not necessarily brutalize whole generations.20 Mass participation in the national struggles for freedom was not always, it seems, a matter of voluntariness, and many war veterans returned home war weary and struggled for the contribution by Philipp Ther to this volume. Gerwarth/John Horne (eds.): War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War. Oxford 2012; see also the contribution by Jochen Böhler to this volume. 17 See the contribution by Maciej Górny to this volume. 18 See the contribution by Robert Gerwarth to this volume. 19 See the contribution by Piotr J. Wróbel to this volume. 20 Robert Gerwarth/John Horne: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War. An Intro­ duction, in: Gerwarth/Horne, War in Peace, 1–18; Dirk Schumann: Europa, der Erste Weltkrieg und die Nachkriegszeit. Eine Kontinuität der Gewalt?, in: Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), 24–43. 15 See

16 Robert

6   Introduction peace and pensions when the arms fell silent.21 As a child of revolution and civil war, the Soviet Union harboured a radicalized state ideology and domesticized violence against its own population in a programme of ‘inner colonization’ for years to come. The nascent democracies rising from the ashes further to the west had to struggle with inflation, terrorism, ­unsettled conflicts between majorities and minorities, and street fights between the followers of antagonistic political ideas.22 Under this constant pressure, virtually all states of post-war Central and Eastern Europe had assumed authoritarian traits by the 1930s.23 When the Second World War swept across the region in 1939, it brought the horrific traits of the First World War in its wake: pogroms, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and, ultimately, a wave of paramilitary violence and civil war when control broke down in German-occupied Eastern Europe and the old struggle for the post-war order started again. Were these continuities or legacies of the First World War? Although the ugly countenances of both world conflicts look very much alike, the editors of this volume opt for the latter, as reflected in the title. In their judgement, there was no automatic followthrough, no seamless transition from one war to the next. Almost two decades of – admittedly fragile – peace lay between the early 1920s and the late 1930s. The Germans, unquestionably the main perpetrators and initiators of war crimes during the Second World War, had behaved completely differently as the occupying force in Poland, Ukraine and Russia before 1918. But the first global conflict had caused problems – including intensified ethnic tensions in the nation states it had produced – and introduced theories and methods to ‘solve’ them – such as ethnic cleansing and genocide – which had not been forgotten when the demons of war awoke once again. The First World War, and in particular the course it took in Central, Eastern and Southeastern ­Europe between 1912 and 1921, had opened a Pandora’s box. The agents of violence in 1939 were now free to plunder it for the arsenal they considered appropriate to realize their megalomaniac dreams of national magnitude and ethnic homogeneity. And they did. Jena/Warsaw, September 2013



The editors

Eichenberg: Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge. Polnische Veteranen des Ersten Weltkriegs und ihre internationalen Kontakte, 1918–1939. München 2011; see also the contribution by Julia Eichenberg to this volume. 22 See the contribution by Dietrich Beyrau to this volume; Marc Conway/Robert Gerwarth: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, in: Donald Bloxham/Robert Gerwarth (eds.): Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge/New York 2011, 140–175, 150–155. 23 Erwin Oberländer/Rolf Ahmann/Hans Lemberg/Holm Sundhaussen (eds.): Autoritäre Regime in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa, 1919–1944. Paderborn 2001.

21 Julia

I. A World in Transition

Joachim von Puttkamer

Collapse and Restoration: Politics and the Strains of War in Eastern Europe Ten years ago, the German historian Aribert Reimann challenged George Kennan’s nearly proverbial notion of World War I as “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century and the beginning of what amounted to a second Thirty Years’ War. Reimann brought together theories of the time on cultural patterns and symbolic orders in European societies, arguing that the Great War was, on the contrary, a catalyst of the crisis of European modernity, with its potential for boundless industrial violence turning from the colonial peripheries back onto the center of government. The outbreak of World War I should thus be seen not so much as the collapse of nineteenth-century Europe and the birth of a polarized world shaped by the challenges of communism, National Socialism, and the Cold War, but rather as the culmination of the technological and intellectual potentials of the nineteenth century and the first crisis of industrial modernity.1 Reimann’s argument is directed against interpretations of the war that focus on Germany as its primary instigator. However, in its plea for considering the wider European context, it is mostly informed by a Western perspective, with Eastern Europe being conspicuously absent. Yet, the basic question of whether World War I is to be seen as an epochal break or as a catalytic condensation of long-standing developments of nineteenth-century modernity – the rapid and disorderly revival of the multiple ways of European thought, as Paul Valéry put it – applies here as well.2 This can be most easily demonstrated with a short glance at the changes in the map of Eastern Europe. As the outcome of the First World War, four continental empires collapsed, and new nation states emerged in Eastern Europe. Long-cherished hopes for a resurrection of an independent Polish state came true, as did the aspirations to creating nation states in the Baltic region and in Czechoslovakia, which only a few years earlier had seemed utterly unrealistic, if not outright inconceivable. The improAribert Reimann: Der Erste Weltkrieg. Urkatastrophe oder Katalysator? in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 29–30/2004, 30–38; George F. Kennan: The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order. Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890. Princeton 1979, 3. 2 Paul Valéry: The Crisis of the Mind, in: The Athenaeum, 11. 4. 1919 and 2. 5. 1919; at: http://www.historyguide.org/europe/valery.html (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013). 1

10   Joachim von Puttkamer vised unification of the Habsburg South Slavs with victorious Serbia brought about the new Yugoslav state. Romania was substantially enlarged, whereas Hungary lost two thirds of her former territory in what is still described even today as a traumatic experience. Bulgarian aspirations were thwarted once again, and with short delay, the idea of Greater Greece collapsed in catastrophe. Torn between horror and fascination, Eastern Europeans looked on as Marx’s ‘spectre of communism’ gave birth to the Bolshevik state out of the ruins of tsarist Russia. Contemporaries saw this conflict-ridden transition from empires to nation states as a major turning point in the history of Eastern Europe, and later historians of the region have followed this interpretation. Yet, new insights into the nationalizing tendencies within the continental empires throughout the nineteenth century, and into the imperial nature of major nation states such as Germany, call for a reconsideration of conventional wisdom for the Eastern half of Europe as well. The following rather summary exploration of the changes in the political order in Central and Eastern Europe links the indisputably sweeping, epochal effects of the First World War on Eastern Europe with aspects of continuity and multiple processes of acceleration and compression. It picks up on Jörn Leonhard’s notion of the war as a “dual watershed” in European and global history that had a dynamic impact on very different aspects of social, political, and intellectual developments throughout Europe.3 According to this perspective, World War I can be seen as a catastrophic incubator of twentieth-century modernity, arising from the crisis of the nineteenth century. In Eastern Europe, historians have only stressed such aspects of dynamic continuity from the late nineteenth century for the Balkans, for the obvious reason that here, the establishment of nation states had begun much earlier, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and seemed to be nearly completed by the Balkan Wars in 1912/1913. The course and impact of World War I on areas north of the Danube has been much less researched, since it does not seem to add much to our understanding of the war’s specific nature. Furthermore, the immediate postwar period in this region appears in general accounts as a nearly impenetrable jungle of overlapping revolutions and national conflicts that is better left to a handful of specialists.4 In summarizing the available literature, the following account will therefore focus mainly on tsarist Russia and on the Habsburg Monarchy as the two empires that collapsed in 3 4

Jörn Leonhard: Der Erste Weltkrieg. München 2014 (forthcoming). John Keegan: The First World War. London 1998; Niall Ferguson: The Pity of War. London 1998; Michael Salewski: Der Erste Weltkrieg. Paderborn 2003.

Collapse and Restoration   11

direct consequence of the war, which therefore allow for insights both into the breakdown and the restoration of political authority and into the prewar weakness and postwar renewal of liberal constitutionalism.5

Political systems before the war The general form of political rule in Eastern Europe in 1910 was constitutional monarchy. This might appear trivial, but it is not. Moreover, this meant very different things in different countries: popular representation in parliament drew on highly different traditions. In most countries concerned, it had rather destabilizing effects. One factor was suffrage. Universal male suffrage was well established only in the Balkans – in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece – where it had developed from traditional forms of local self-government and was based on notions of peasant democracy. North of the Danube, the electoral system had originated in noble landownership and property as the entrance ticket to political participation and was mostly designed in one way or the other to keep socialists as far away from parliament as possible. Suffrage in both Romania and Hungary was highly restricted. Tsarist Russia established a highly complicated curial system in 1905, which was readjusted in 1907, after two general elections had shown that the peasants did not vote conservative. In the Habsburg Monarchy, universal and equal male suffrage was established in 1907 in only the Austrian lands, with the not-so-tacit hope that the social democrats might balance national fragmentations.6 This hope was not well founded. Almost everywhere, parliaments had ­become the focal points of national expectations and national strife. The homogeneous nation state might not have been the dominant form of political ­organization up to 1914, but even within the Russian Empire, and particularly in the Habsburg Monarchy, it dominated political thought, even among social democrats. Political parties and the public sphere were structured along naWhere not indicated otherwise, the following account is largely based on Joachim von Puttkamer: Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. München 2010. 6 William A. Jenks: The Austrian Electoral Reform of 1907. New York 1974; Vasilij Melik: Zusammensetzung und Wahlrecht der cisleithanischen Landtage, in: Helmut Rumpler/ Peter Urbanitsch (eds.): Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918. Volume VII/2: Verfassung und Parlamentarismus. Die regionalen Repräsentativkörperschaften. Wien 2000, 1311– 1352; András Gerő: The Hungarian Parliament, 1867–1918. A Mirage of Power. New York 1997; Dittmar Dahlmann: Die Provinz wählt. Russlands Konstitutionell-Demokratische Partei und die Dumawahlen 1906–1912. Köln/Weimar/Wien 1996. 5

12   Joachim von Puttkamer tional lines, which reshaped and deepened social fragmentations that played out in both parliamentary and local politics.7 The Badeni crisis had devastating effects on the reputation of parliamentarianism in Austria, not only among the aristocratic elites of the Habsburg Monarchy. Whether one looks at German liberalism, Old and Young Czechs, or the Hungarian liberals, the picture is always the same.8 With the advent of mass politics, national liberalism no longer had a central position, as it had had since helping establish parliamentary representation in the first place.9 In tsarist Russia, the limits of support for parliamentary representation were felt the most quickly. In the elections to the first and second State Duma in 1906 and 1907, the liberal Cadets and their more conservative Octobrist brethren had to acknowledge that their basis in the electorate was limited to a small group of urban intellectuals and the more liberal segments of the landed nobility, with little hope for popular support, let alone a parliamentary majority.10 In an ironic twist, one might say that in the years preceding the war, bourgeois, national liberalism in its classic form was dominant only in Romania and Greece, and even there its position was far from secure. And of course there was the dominant position of national democracy in Poland, but there are difficulties with grouping the Polish national democrats among the classical manifestations of national liberalism.11 Instability of government control was one of the weaknesses of constitutional monarchy. It became increasingly difficult to muster the majority need  7 Among

the vast literature on this subject, the local case studies by Jeremy King and Ulrike von Hirschhausen have been particularly influential: Jeremy King: Budweisers into Czechs and Germans. Princeton/Oxford 2002; Ulrike von Hirschhausen: Die Grenzen der Gemeinsamkeit. Deutsche, Letten, Russen und Juden in Riga 1860–1914. Göttingen 2006. See also Eleonóra Babejová: Fin-de-Siècle Pressburg. Conflict and Cultural Coexistence in Bratislava 1897–1914. Boulder/New York 2003.   8 Lothar Höbelt: Kornblume und Kaiseradler. Die deutschfreiheitlichen Parteien Altösterreichs 1882–1918. Wien/München 1993; Alice Freifeld: Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914. Washington/Baltimore/London 2000; Bruce M. Garver: The Young Czech Party, 1874–1901, and the Emergence of a Multi-Party System. New Haven 1978.   9 Robin Okey: The Habsburg Monarchy c. 1765–1918. From Enlightenment to Eclipse. New York 2001, 355. 10 Mary Schaeffer Conroy (ed.): Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia. Case Studies on Local Self-Government (the Zemstvoes), State Duma Elections, the Tsarist Government, and the State Council before and during World War I. Niwot 1998; Terence Emmons: The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia. Cambridge 1983. 11 Brian Porter: When Nationalism Began to Hate. Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland. Oxford 2000; Pascal Trees: Wahlen im Weichselland. Die Nationaldemokraten in Russisch-Polen und die Dumawahlen 1905–1911. Stuttgart 2007.

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ed to pass a budget. As a consequence, it is difficult even for specialists to keep track of the names of the numerous prime ministers in St. Petersburg, Vienna, or Hungary on the eve of the war. The military managed to keep aloof from parliamentary politics, and authoritarian fantasies were rife among bur­ eaucratic and military elites. The independent actions of the Austrian military that helped bring about the war might be a case in point; the doubtful political role of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in interfering with nationality ­issues and conceiving of the future shape of the monarchy another.12 And ­finally, there was Serbia, where the military had staged a violent coup d’état in 1903 and subsequently provoked the Austrian government into the fatal polarization that came to a head in 1914.13 In the ongoing debates on the perspectives of constitutional government both in Russia and the Habsburg Monarchy at the beginning of the century, fairly strong arguments have been put forth that the political systems of both empires were far from being exhausted and that it is likely there would have been an evolutionary, reformist development towards more liberal forms of government along Western European lines, had it not been for the war. In recent studies, the Habsburg Monarchy seems to fare somewhat better than tsarist Russia in this respect. But in spite of the impressive development of political participation and creativity in addressing political blockades, the overall picture shows liberal parliamentarianism on the decline in both empires.14 Mark Mazower argued several years ago that liberal democracy had had its chance in the 1920s, and that it failed.15 One might add that throughout Eastern Europe, liberal constitutionalism was in a similar situation before the outbreak of the war and that the structures necessary for a breakthrough to liberal democracy were far from well established.

R. Williamson: Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War. Basingstoke 1991; Günther Kronenbitter: ‘Krieg im Frieden’. Die Führung der k. u. k. Armee und die Großmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906–1914. München 2003. 13 Gale Stokes: Politics as Development. The Emergence of Political Parties in NineteenthCentury Serbia. Durham 1990; Holm Sundhaussen: Geschichte Serbiens. 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Wien/Köln/Weimar 2007, 205–210. 14 Gary B. Cohen: Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy. New Narratives on Society and Government in Late Imperial Austria, in: Austrian History Yearbook 29 (1998), 37–61; idem: Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914, in: Central European History 2 (2007), 241–278; Geoffrey A. Hosking: The Russian Constitutional Experiment. Government and Duma, 1907–1914. Cambridge 1973; Abraham Ascher: P. A. Stolypin. The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia. Stanford 2001. 15 Mark Mazower: Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century. London 1998, 1–39. 12 Samuel

14   Joachim von Puttkamer

World War I With the outbreak of war, a further shift towards authoritarian rule occurred, as can be most clearly observed in the Habsburg Empire. The Reichsrat in ­Vienna was suspended. For good reasons, there was little confidence that parliaments within the monarchy would serve as an instrument to foster patriotism and support the war effort. In tsarist Russia, the situation was somewhat different, but the outcome was similar. Even though the Duma served as a platform to commit the public to Russian national unity in defense of the father­ land, it was frequently adjourned, and when it met, the endeavors to form a  government of ‘national confidence’ that would be supported by a broad ­majority of a ‘Progressive Bloc’ came to naught.16 Thus, the administration and the military bore the brunt of the war effort. During the first months of fighting this might not have caused serious problems. On the contrary, patriotic mobilization seemed to overcome political tensions and social fragmentations, or at least to cover them up for the moment. The Viennese government felt backed by the German press in support of a war for which it had intensely pressed, whereas the Czech political parties fell into consternated silence when faced with alldeutsch enthusiasm. Karel Kramář’s call for heroism in the face of unprecedented horrors was neutralized by his incarceration and a death sentence that was later commuted to imprisonment.17 Mobilization went smoothly, and in spite of spectacular cases of desertion, loyalty within the imperial army remained surprisingly high and was undermined by supply crises and military defeat only at a much later date.18 The same holds true for tsarist Russia, where national mobilization quickly took on aggressive forms of Russian war nationalism. Yet violent Kirschke Stockdale: Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918. Ithaca/London 1996, 218–237; Manfred Hildermeier: Geschichte Russlands. Vom Mittelalter bis zur Oktoberrevolution. München 2013, 1061–1067. 17 Petronilla Ehrenpreis: Kriegs- und Friedensziele im Diskurs. Regierung und deutschsprachige Öffentlichkeit Österreich-Ungarns während des Ersten Weltkriegs. Innsbruck/ Wien/Bozen 2005, 50–55.; Zdeněk Kárník: Die Idee der Donaumonarchie und das Verhältnis der tschechischen Parteien zum Deutschen Reich, in: Hans Mommsen/Dušan Kováč/Jiří Malíř (eds.): Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Beziehungen zwischen Tschechen, Slowaken und Deutschen. Essen 2001, 15–46; Martina Winkler: Karel Kramář, 1860–1937. Selbstbild, Fremdwahrnehmungen und Modernisierungsverständnis eines tschechischen Politikers. München 2002, 271–285. 18 Martin Zückert: Imperial War in the Age of Nationalism. The Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War, in: Jörn Leonhard/Ulrike von Hirschhausen (eds.): Comparing Empires. Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century. Göttingen 2010, 500– 517. 16 Melissa

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r­ esentment became visible early on in the form of mobilization riots, and ­patriotic sentiment began to give way to war-weariness and the erosion of monarchic authority within less than a year.19 In the long run, the social ­mobilization that went hand in hand with mass recruitment and war propaganda turned out to be of a highly ambivalent nature. By 1916 at the latest, the strains of warfare on everyday life were being felt more keenly with each passing month. With no end to the fighting in sight, trust in the bureaucratic administration eroded progressively. In the Habsburg Monarchy, German-centered war propaganda increasingly alienated the Slavic population.20 In her study on the effects of war on everyday life in Vienna, Maureen Healy has vividly demonstrated how the social fabric began to fall apart, and with it the authority of imperial administration.21 Similar processes have been observed in the urban centers of tsarist Russia, where the food shortage was felt even more sharply, ultimately revealing the failure of the authorities and sparking the revolution.22 To what extent did this erosion of authority affect the military? For the Russian army, the answer seems to be fairly clear: due to mass mobilization, social tensions and peasant unrest were present in the army almost from the first day of the war, and with the benefit of hindsight one rather wonders how the Provisional Government actually thought it could mobilize the army for one last great effort in the Kerensky offensive in the summer of 1917.23 In the Habsburg army, the situation is more complicated. The debate about the extent of Czech desertions does not need to be repeated here, since in general, the Austrian army seems to have remained fairly stable until defeat became obvious in the autumn of 1918.24 Only in the tsarist prison camps, which housed several hundred thousand prisoners of war after the disastrous F. Jahn: Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I. Ithaca 1995; Joshua A. Sanborn: Drafting the Russian Nation. Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925. DeKalb 2003, 29–38; William C. Fuller: The Foe Within. Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia. Ithaca 2006; Eric Lohr: Politics, Economics and Minorities. Core Nationalism in the Russian Empire at War, in: Leonhard/Hirschhausen, Comparing Empires, 518–529; Peter Gatrell: Russia’s First World War. A Social and Economic History. Harlow 2005, 87–107. 20 Mark Cornwall: The Undermining of Austria-Hungary. The Battle for Hearts and Minds. Basingstoke/London/New York 2000. 21 Maureen Healy: Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire. Total War and Everyday Life in World War I. Cambridge 2004. 22 Lars T. Lih: Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921. Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford 1990; Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 154–175. 23 Allan K. Wildman: The End of the Russian Imperial Army. 2 volumes. Princeton 1980– 1987. 24 Zückert, Imperial War, 511–516. 19 Hubertus

16   Joachim von Puttkamer campaigns in Galicia in late 1914, did the Austrian army disintegrate along national lines.25 The war effort of the Polish legions and the Czechoslovak l­egion might be another argument that military mobilization was more and more influenced by national sentiment. One effect of this erosion of authority was the return of participatory forms in administering the war effort and facing its impacts on society. In tsarist Russia, local self-government and industry took over the responsibility of organizing transport and supplies.26 The humanitarian care of up to six million refugees from the Western and Caucasian war theatres mobilized social initiative and reinforced notions of ethnic difference at the same time. In assuming a hitherto unknown humanitarian task, the various Latvian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, Polish, and Armenian national refugee committees thus helped pave the way for the emerging nation states.27 In coping with refugeedom, the Russian Empire experienced a rapid shift towards nationalization in the populace, which resulted from a rupture of the social and political fabric. Such processes of establishing national identities had been observed in the Habsburg Empire for decades, where they had reinforced political conflict and the unwillingness of all parties to yield and compromise. Now the welfare institutions that had been established by the various nationalities during the war took over social politics from the Habsburg state und thus strengthened the progression of national segregation in everyday life.28 The revival of organized participation was felt in party politics as well. In the Russian Duma, the Progressive Bloc had already formed in 1915, in a ­remarkable effort to restore a strong liberal core within a parliament that had been shaped by more-or-less malleable and badly organized right-wing nationalists since the elections of 1912. In Vienna, the Reichsrat was reconvened in 1917, which paved the way for public debates on a possible postwar order. At the same time, monarchical authority continued to wane. Whereas the aging Franz Josef had still been able to command some respect and public veneration, his successor Karl was perceived as a weak political figure, as was Tsar Rachamimov: POWs and the Great War. Captivity on the Eastern Front. Oxford/ New York 2002; Reinhard Nachtigal: Rußland und seine österreichisch-ungarischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1914–1918. Remshalden 2003. 26 Lewis Siegelbaum: The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–1917. A Study of the War Industries Committees. London/New York 1983; Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 108–131. 27 Peter Gatrell: A Whole Empire Walking. Refugees in Russia during World War I. Bloomington 1999, 141–170; Nick Baron/Peter Gatrell (eds.): Homelands. War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia 1918–1924. London 2004. 28 Tara Zahra: Kidnapped Souls. National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948. Ithaca/London 2008, 79–105. 25 Alon

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Nicholas II, who in October 1915 had personally taken command of the Russian army, thus repeating a mistake that the young Franz Josef had himself dearly paid for more than half a century earlier. This crumbling of monarchy triggered an overall collapse of authority that is crucial to my argument. Long before the war, the constitutional monarchs might have already lost their command over the complicated bureaucracies acting in their names, but they still formed the core of public and popular representation of statehood and provided a basis for political loyalty and identification.29 In hindsight, there were obvious dangers in this emphasis on the symbolic power of the monarch and his veneration by the people, rather than on the creation of functioning state institutions. Yet in 1910 it must have been very difficult for anyone but socialists to imagine, let alone forecast, that within less than a decade, age-old dynasties like the Habsburgs and the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Wittelsbachs might simply disappear almost without a trace.

Revolutionary breakdown When monarchic power did collapse in the coming years, it was accompanied by the collapse of the military. The Russian army was the first to fall, in 1917, and the process continued in late 1918 throughout the areas hitherto controlled by the German and Austrian armies. It created a power vacuum and a chaotic scramble for control on the western and particularly the eastern fringe of emerging Poland, as well as in the Baltic states.30 The Lemberg pogrom in November 1918 and the protracted armed conflict between Poles and Ukrainians over a city central to both groups’ national claims is only the most grim and prominent example of many incidents showing the effects of military breakdown in areas already rife with ethnic violence.31 Nor was this scramble limited to the former areas of fighting and occupation; it also directly affected the hinterland, especially the capital cities. The disappearance of monarchy might be marginal if we consider the change from monarchy to republic as a change in political form only. But it was only the tip of the iceberg in a truly revolutionary disintegration and Unowsky: The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism. Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916. West Lafayette 2005; Richard S. Wortman: Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Volume 2: From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II. Princeton 2000, 307–528. 30 See also the contribution by Julia Eichenberg to this volume. 31 Alexander V. Prusin: Nationalizing a Borderland. War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920. Tuscaloosa 2005, 75–91. 29 Daniel

18   Joachim von Puttkamer r­ ebuilding of authority. This quickly became visible in Russia. Foreign Minister Pavel Miliukov’s promise in April 1917 that Russia would continue the war and strive to control the Turkish Straits sparked the first coalition crisis and forced him to resign. However, it also had much broader significance: Miliukov had also unwillingly demonstrated that a patriotic appeal for a renewed war effort would not rally the people around their new revolutionary government and convince them to endure further hardship.32 This became even more obvious two weeks later, when the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries joined the Provisional Government. As Ziva ­Galili has demonstrated, even appeals by a Menshevik minister of labour, Matvej Skobelev, could not restore authority among the workers. With revolutionary expectations running high, the gulf between workers and educated elites, most visible in the conflict between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government, could no longer be bridged.33 In a situation where both the economy and the army were falling apart, the Bolshevik call for further polarization seemed completely irresponsible. It was precisely this stubborn refusal to take responsibility for the war effort that brought them to power. The price they paid was a disastrous civil war, which all other revolutionary groups had hoped to avoid and an equally ­disastrous peace treaty, which no other government would have concluded. In Russia, the breakdown of authority had gone too far to be stopped by the parliamentary, representative government, which had never been firmly rooted in Russian society. With the half-hearted abdication of Emperors Wilhelm and Karl in November 1918, a similar collapse of political authority seemed imminent in Germany and in Austria as well. Furthermore, the downfall of monarchy also threatened the political stability of the new nation states, in spite of their status as victors of the war. In the Czech lands, social unrest throughout the spring of 1919 caused the Kramář government to collapse, while the aspirations of Sudeten Germans to break free from the debris of the Habsburg Monarchy and to adhere, with or without Austria, to a democratic Germany culminated in the clashes of 4 March, when Czech troops opened fire on Sudeten German demonstrators.34 The South Slav territories of the former 32 Stockdale,

Paul Miliukov, 249–257. Galili: The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution. Social Realities and Political Strategies. Princeton 1989. 34 Lothar Höbelt: Deutschösterreich und die Sudetendeutschen 1918–1919, in: Hans Lemberg/Peter Heumos (eds.): Das Jahr 1919 in der Tschechoslowakei und in Ostmitteleuropa. München 1993, 159–166; Daniel E. Miller: Forging Political Compromise. Antonín Švehla and the Czechoslovak Republican Party, 1918–1933. Pittsburgh 1999, 46–58. 33 Ziva

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Habsburg Monarchy stumbled into unification with the Kingdom of Serbia, whose army seemed the only force strong enough to preserve internal order and to avert Italian aggression.35 Revolutionary breakdown was imminent also in Romania, where public order threatened to collapse in the wake of the hasty retreat of the defeated occupiers and the fall of the pro-German Marghiloman government. But since the reputation of King Ferdinand had not been affected by anti-German and anti-Austrian sentiment and war-weariness during the occupation, it was possible to quickly restore public order in the now-victorious country that was rejoicing over an unheard-of territorial enlargement.36 All in all, the political constellation in the newly established nation states and even in revolutionary Hungary was quite similar to the one Russia had experienced 18 months earlier in the wake of the February Revolution. The new governments were shaped by uneasy alliances between liberal nationalists, social democrats, and agrarian socialists who had been strengthened by mass mobilization. And just like the Russian Provisional Government, they embarked on democratic parliamentarianism and land reform. Yet the new democratic governments had one important advantage when trying to stem the same revolutionary tide that had brought them to power: they were not forced to continue an unpopular war against an overwhelming foe. The newly formed communist parties were thus deprived of one of their major arguments and the one that Lenin had used so skillfully. The wars that Poland or Czechoslovakia actually did have to fight for their newly proclaimed independence were rather improvised and against enemies who were also improvising. Here, continued military mobilization ultimately had a consolidating and unifying effect. There is one obvious exception. The Hungarian democratic Károlyi government lost what little credit it might have enjoyed among the revolutionary crowds in Budapest when it had to admit that its conciliatory approach towards the victorious Entente would not save historical Hungary from dismemberment. Yet frightening the Entente with the spectre of Soviet world

Banac: The National Question in Yugoslavia. Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca/London 1984, 115–140; Sabrina P. Ramet: The Three Yugoslavias. State-building and Legitimation, 1918–2005. Washington/Bloomington 2006, 43–44; Aleksandar Jakir: Dalmatien zwischen den Weltkriegen. Agrarische und urbane Lebenswelt und das Scheitern der jugoslawischen Integration. München 1999, 86–106. 36 Lisa Mayerhofer: Zwischen Freund und Feind. Deutsche Besatzung in Rumänien 1916– 1918. München 2010, 345–372. 35 Ivo

20   Joachim von Puttkamer revolution was not enough to preserve Hungary’s territorial integrity either. For a brief moment, Hungary was pushed to the brink of civil war.37

Restoring authority However, the primary problem from late 1918 onwards was not only how to mobilize military potential in defense of the new nation states; given the high expectations as well as the disappointments already suffered by these states, it was equally, if not more crucial to rebuild and maintain political authority. In Soviet Russia, the Bolsheviks had to begin almost from scratch. Restoring order, building a new political system, and mobilizing for civil war in the countryside and against foreign invasion was an extremely violent and painful process. The Bolsheviks survived because they controlled the major urban centers and most of Russia’s industrial potential and because of their ruthlessness and military efficiency. They survived because in 1917 they had risked surrendering control over the countryside and let the peasants take the land, thus neutralizing them politically and hastening the demise of the old elites and the breakdown of the traditional social order. It took more than a decade of painful readjustments of agrarian politics and millions of casualties before the Bolsheviks actually managed to enforce their vision of socialism and ­Soviet rule in the Russian countryside.38 In Eastern Europe, a complete breakdown of authority had been averted by the revival of participatory forms of government and administration during the war, which had put broad and more-or-less leftist national coalitions in power. If we compare the political systems in 1920/1921 with the situation in 1910, one can highlight three basic differences.39 The ambiguities of universal suffrage had been basically eliminated. Universal, equal, and direct male suffrage was now the rule. Female suffrage was by now equally on the agenda throughout the region, even though in Romania and Yugoslavia it remained an empty promise. In most states, new constiSiklós: Revolution in Hungary and the Dissolution of the Multination State 1918. Budapest 1988; Ignác Romsics: Hungary in the Twentieth Century. Budapest 1999, 99–108. 38 Evan Mawdsley: The Russian Civil War. Boston 1987; Vladimir N. Brovkin: Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War. Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922. Princeton 1994; Orlando Figes: Peasant Russia, Civil War. The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921. Oxford/New York 1989; Aaron B. Retish: Russia’s Peasants in Revolu­ tion and Civil War. Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922. Cambridge 2008. 39 Von Puttkamer, Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, 66–82. 37 András

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tutions were passed that asserted parliamentary control of their respective governments. As a result, peasant parties now occupied a central position, whereas before the war they had been important only in Serbia and Bulgaria. In Czechoslovakia and Poland, social democrats seemed to be their natural allies. With the peasants at the center of the national idea, agrarian concerns now gained lasting importance. This constellation opened up new possibilities for radical land reform, which was crucial in linking the nation state to political projects that promised economic and social betterment for the vast majority of the population. Such projects became possible because the war had deeply discredited the old elites. They were compatible with monarchy, since monarchic rule was either no longer based on the landed nobility or never had been, as in Bulgaria or Yugoslav Serbia. Romania even embarked on agrarian reform under a liberal government, years before a unified peasant party came to power in 1928. Even Hungary saw major land reform legislation, though this was heavily diluted with the emasculation of the Small Landholders’ Party and their absorption by the ruling Party of National Unity. Far-reaching internal colonization projects demonstrated the degree to which these reforms were conceived of as projects that combined social reform with the consolidation of the nation state.40 With this shift towards parliamentary democracy, the authoritarian challenge to constitutional government had not vanished, but it had taken on new forms. The idea of radical emancipation was carried to extremes by the new communist parties, which sooner or later developed in all countries and perpetuated the threat of violent revolutionary upheaval. The ten per cent communist vote in Yugoslavia in 1921 shows that communists could count not only on urban workers, but also on a rural proletariat. At the other extreme, the development of a new and radical right was most visible in Hungary and Romania. Finally, one should emphasize the great leap in internationalizing minority rights that went along with minority treaties and the League of Nations. The close link between the establishment of national sovereignty and foreign interference on behalf of minority rights had already been established during the nineteenth century. As Holly Case demonstrates in her current research project, foreign infringement on national sovereignty had not been limited to Roszkowski: Land Reforms in East Central Europe after World War One. Warszawa 1995; Dietmar Müller/Angela Harre (eds.): Transforming Rural Societies. Agrarian Property and Agrarianism in East Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Innsbruck/Wien/Bozen 2010.

40 Wojciech

22   Joachim von Puttkamer minority rights as enshrined in international treaties, but informed the everyday practice of consular diplomacy in Southeastern Europe and began to blur the distinction between foreign and domestic social policy.41 But whereas before the war, great powers such as Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain had taken legal charge of national minorities in the Balkans, these groups now appealed to a European public by formally addressing an international institution designed for precisely this purpose. This seemed to be a democratic improvement. Yet, as research on international minority protection during the 1920s has shown, it deepened national conflict rather than reducing it.42

Conclusions To sum up the argument: the changes in the political systems brought about in Central and Eastern Europe by World War I can be interpreted in terms of the erosion, collapse, and re-establishment of political and social authority, at least in Russia, Germany, and the Habsburg Monarchy. This collapse of authority was not limited to the collapse of empires, but had far-reaching effects on the social fabric in general. In this respect, I would argue for a strong element of discontinuity rather than an acceleration of existing developments. Interpreting the war and its aftermath in terms of the erosion, collapse, and restoration of authority has several advantages. It links the collapse of military occupation in the territories of Poland, western Russia, and the Baltic states to the collapse of political authority in the cities, and it helps to interpret local eruptions of violence and pogroms in a broader context. In this context we will also have to rethink the diverging developments of revolutionary Russia and East Central Europe in a comparative perspective, rather than singling out revolutionary Russia as unique and unparalleled. Focusing on questions of political authority also raises the question to what extent Serbia or Bulgaria can be included in this picture, and why, for example, Romania did not collapse after its military defeat in early 1918. This might finally help us to unCase: Loaded Questions. Project Overview and a Relational History of European Foreign Ministries in the 19th Century. Project Presentation, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, 7. 2. 2012. See also the contribution by Mark Biondich to this volume. 42 Carole Fink: Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938. Cambridge 2004; Martin Scheuermann: Minderheitenschutz contra Konfliktverhütung? Die Minderheitenpolitik des Völkerbundes in den zwanziger Jahren. Marburg 2000; Christian Raitz von Frentz: A Lesson Forgotten. Minority Protection under the League of Nations: The Case of the German Minority in Poland, 1920–1934. Hamburg/New York 1999.

41 Holly

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derstand the reconstruction of authority more fully, rather than just in terms of national mobilization. In East Central and Southeastern Europe, the war resulted in forms of democratic mobilization that had scarcely been on the horizon in 1914. And the nation state provided an apt framework for these forms. The simultaneous collapse of the Russian, German, and Austrian Empires and the breakdown of authority paved the way for the nation state and for parliamentary democracy. At the end of the war, social emancipation and ­national mobilization went hand in hand. And they had become more violent than ever before. There was a considerable price to pay for this new attempt at democracy.

Mark Biondich

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones: Identity and Conflict in East Central and Southeastern Europe on the Eve of the First World War East Central and Southeastern Europe were historically diverse and culturally stratified borderlands, considerably distinct from Western Europe with its relatively homogeneous nation states. Geography, history and politics combined to produce a complex cultural and ethno-linguistic mosaic, which experienced significant duress in the modern period as a result of nationalism, the emergence of nation states, and the concomitant territorial claims made on historical, ethnic and linguistic grounds. This was a protracted process that began in the nineteenth century and came to fruition in the twentieth century against the background of imperial decline. The ‘long’ nineteenth century witnessed the eventual demise of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian Empires, often with fateful consequences for the ethnically and culturally diverse imperial borderlands. These same borderlands became ‘shatter zones’ as they experienced dramatic episodes of mass violence and even ethnic cleansing. The borderlands’ vulnerability to state and communal violence during periods of rapid modernization stemmed both from their diversity and from the incongruity of imperial, ethnic and state frontiers. They would be caught up in a destructive dynamic of imperial collapse and nationalist struggle, with broad implications for both the regions in question and Europe as a whole.

The context: identity and violence in contested ­borderlands In recent years, there have been several studies of borderlands as ‘shatter zones’ or ‘zones of violence.’1 However, much of this literature has focused on 1

See for example the collection of essays in Omer Bartov/Eric D. Weitz (eds.): Shatterzone of Empires. Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington 2013; Robert Gerwarth/John Horne (eds.): War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War. Oxford 2012; Mark Biondich: The Balkans. Revolution, war and Political Violence since 1878. Oxford 2011; Julia Eichenberg/

26   Mark Biondich successive waves of violence in the period after the First World War, primarily between 1917 and 1923, that is, the period coterminous with the dissolution of the Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman and German Empires. Some of these studies examine the period up to the Second World War and even beyond. These works also draw a clear distinction between wartime violence perpetrated by imperial authorities and the paramilitary and parastate violence between 1917 and 1923. The collapse of imperial authority produced a power vacuum that was contested by numerous groups; the absence of state control enabled them to wield violence indiscriminately yet not without purpose. As Julia Eichenberg and John Paul Newman have recently argued, “The result was the creation of a violent milieu of imperial ‘shatter zones’, which transcended pre-existing state and political borders and in which a number of paramilitary and parastate actors with a variety of conflicting ideological visions and programmes fought for control.”2 As these new studies have shown, a great deal of the violence arose from the process of consolidating national revolutions in formerly imperial lands. Perpetrated by paramilitary or parastatal forces, the violence was characterized and conditioned by imperial collapse and the creation of power vacuums, the absence of legitimate authorities exercising monopolies of violence, and the appearance of groups that attempted to fill this power vacuum by employing violence for their own ends. But one of the main fixtures of these shatter zones of empire was their ethnic, cultural and religious diversity. Given the fact that these shatter zones were ethnic borderlands, nationalists and nationalism came to play an increasingly important role there. While territory has long been seen as a source of conflict between states and peoples, and has been researched as such, borderlands as distinct and identifiable social spaces and processes have remained relatively under-researched by comparison.3 Although these transitional zones are located on the margins of power centres – or between two or more power centres – they are continually in a state of flux. These borderlands should be understood conceptually as hybrid entities, historically constituted zones of ethnic contact John Paul Newman: Aftershocks. Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War (Introduction), in: Contemporary European History 3 (2010), 183–194; Alexander V. Prusin: The Lands Between. Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992. Oxford 2010; Aviel Roshwald: Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires. Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, 1914–1923. London 2001. 2 Eichenberg/Newman, Aftershocks, 185. 3 Ira William Zartman: Introduction. Identity, Movement and Response, in: idem (ed.): Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and Motion. Athens, Georgia 2010, 1–18, 2.

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   27

where, as Peter Thaler and others have noted, numerous nerve lines linked different cultural groups. Ethnicity was often a matter of personal choice, while identities were frequently malleable rather than resolutely fixed.4 Beginning in the nineteenth century with the rise of the modern nation state, borders progressively became lines of demarcation. As a consequence, nation states and empires increasingly sought to consolidate their borders and exercise authority in borderlands in order to establish a secure connection between political territories on the one hand and identity on the other. From the turn of the twentieth century onwards, heterogeneous borderlands were subjected to policies of homogenization with little regard for the everyday practices of local communities. These borderlands never constituted a multiethnic idyll, but neither should they be understood as zones of perpetual instability and violence. Several recent studies of these borderlands suggest that violence was driven primarily by state elites and nationalizing states; over the course of the twentieth century the borderlands were moulded and transformed into relatively homogeneous spaces by various state projects. Kate Brown’s important study of the multi­ ethnic mosaic that was the borderland between Russia and Poland – historically home to Poles, Jews, Germans, Ukrainians and Russians – emphasizes the role of states (the Soviet Union, and briefly the Third Reich) in modernizing and ‘homogenizing’ this space, which by the immediate post-Second World War period had become a fairly homogeneous Ukrainian ethnic space within the Soviet Union. Brown’s study retraces the borderland’s encounter with modernity and shows how different regimes regimented this complex community into distinct ethnic groups, initially by bureaucratic means and later by force, despite the fact that local people often resisted attempts by the centre to ascribe identities to them. A sequence of revolutions and wars fundamentally reshaped the borderland over a period of decades.5 Similar patterns were observed elsewhere in the region, although the circumstances may have been considerably different. Theodora Dragostinova’s recent study of the fate of Bulgaria’s Greek minority examines how states and people approached the subject of national belonging during the final transition from empire to nation states in the Balkans. Dragostinova treats nationality not as a fixed category that repeatedly engendered conflict, but as a complex process that was continually being redefined. The period of her inquiry is Peter Thaler: Fluid Identities in Central European Borderlands, in: European History Quarterly 4 (2001), 519–548. 5 Kate Brown: A Biography of No Place. From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. Cambridge 2005. 4

28   Mark Biondich the first half of the twentieth century, beginning with the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of Balkan nation states. This was a period during which communities were often compelled to abandon their land and occasionally displaced to putative and ascribed homelands. As tensions between Bulgaria and Greece grew at the turn of the twentieth century, the Ilinden (St. Elijah’s Day) Uprising (1903) in Macedonia led to an influx of Macedonian Slav refugees to Bulgaria and initiated a struggle between Bulgarians and Greeks over the future of the province. The influx of these refugees and the growing nationalist tensions led to attacks against the Greek minority throughout Bulgaria. While the majority remained in Bulgaria, more than 20 000 Greeks fled their homes and were welcomed in Greece, where the authorities offered them expropriated Muslim property in Thessaly. Disillusioned with their putative Greek homeland, roughly one quarter returned to Bulgaria. In light of the reluctance of most ethnic Greeks to abandon Bulgaria and the disillusionment of those who did, Dragostinova suggests that their loyalty was tied not to the Bulgarian or Greek nation state as such, but rather to their native places and narrowly conceived ‘homeland’.6 Dragostinova thus suggests that the common understanding of identity should be reconsidered and questions the popular basis of ‘ethnic un-mixing’; national identities were still mutable and ethnically distinct communities in the borderland had managed to sustain a measure of local solidarity. The Greek minority in Bulgaria would survive the Balkan Wars and First World War, only to be swept up by the post-war formal population exchanges planned under international supervision. Dragostinova’s study shows that ordinary people, when faced with the prodigious capabilities of the modern nation state, often had little recourse other than acquiescence. Yet it also suggests that many ordinary people had an ambivalent attitude toward nationalism and state-sponsored nationalist programs at that time. Over time, however, and primarily as a result of political violence, former borderlands in East Central and Southeastern Europe became homogenized and local identities more firmly fixed. Pamela Ballinger’s study of the Julian March – the former Habsburg borderland, which was disputed by Italy and Yugoslavia after 1918 and is now divided among Italy, Slovenia and Croatia – and its contested identities, narrates the region’s twentieth-century history, focusing specifically on the political violence and displacement associated with the Second World War. Ballinger notes the complex relationship between borderland and identity, especially among the Italian population. She observes 6

Theodora Dragostinova: Between Two Motherlands. Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949. New York 2011.

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   29

competing models of identity that envision Istria (and the wider region) as either purely Italian or as historically characterized by ethnic and linguistic (Italian-Slavic) hybridity. Here too, identity is viewed as contingent and malleable, but Ballinger demonstrates how violence shaped the experiences of those who inhabited the borderland.7 Macedonia serves as yet another case that further exemplifies the linkages between borderlands, violence and identity formation. The conflict in antebellum Macedonia (1903–1908) between the native Macedonian Slav national movement and Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia, represented the first instance of modern political violence among Orthodox peoples in the Balkans. The importance of this fact should not be underestimated. In the nineteenth-century Balkan wars of independence, which were waged against the Ottoman Empire, Muslims had been the primary victims of national revolutionary violence. For broad segments of the Balkan rural population, however, religion still remained a far more formative reality than nationality. The violence perpetrated among Orthodox Christians in Macedonia – violence that was promoted by the neighbouring states of Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia – served to assert the primacy of national loyalties over religious identities.8 One of the primary objectives of the violence pursued by state-sponsored paramilitaries and irregulars was to compel the Macedonian Slav peasantry to declare itself in favour of one of these national causes. This was no simple task – the peasantry obdurately refused to identify with any nation – but irregular warfare among Orthodox Christians in the region gradually shattered a common identity historically rooted in Orthodoxy in favour of the state-sponsored national identities. One Greek activist was met with incomprehensible stares when he asked a group of Macedonian peasants if they were of Greek or ­Bulgarian nationality. The bewildered peasants made the sign of the cross and answered, “Well, we are Christians, what do you mean by Romaioi [Greek] or Voulgaroi [Bulgarian]?”9 How and whether these peasants decided in favour of the competing claims was influenced significantly by coercion and opportunity. A Greek military officer who led a paramilitary unit in Macedonia ­observed that violence – “the persuasion of the gun” – ultimately determined whether a village community opted for Greek or Bulgarian identity. In actual fact, the process was far more complex and depended on a range of consideraPamela Ballinger: History in Exile. Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Princeton 2003. 8 For a fuller discussion of this point, see Dimitris Livanios: ‘Conquering the Souls’. Nationalism and Greek Guerrilla Warfare in Ottoman Macedonia, 1904–1908, in: Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (1999), 195–221. 9 Mark Mazower: The Balkans. A Short History. New York 2002, 39. 7

30   Mark Biondich tions, but these often had little to do with the national orientations or preferences of local communities.10

Antebellum divergences: the Balkan borderlands on the eve of 1914 Between 1917 and 1920 the East Central European borderlands would be caught up in a vortex of imperial collapse, national revolutions and protracted armed conflicts. There had been no nation states in these borderlands on the eve of the First World War, only three imperial enterprises. However, the postwar crisis in these borderlands had more to do with the consolidation of the (six) existing nationalizing states than it did with their creation as such, although Albania and Yugoslavia were de facto post-war creations. Towards the end of the First World War, two revolutionary currents came into play: national self-determination, fuelled by the wartime policies of the Great Powers (and Allied and Bolshevik slogans of national self-determination); and social revolution, which was influenced by Western liberal ideologies and the example of the Bolshevik Revolution. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, the East Central European borderland was firmly in the grasp of the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy and Germany. After 1917 this borderland would first become a shatter zone and then change hands repeatedly in the process of being transformed into a space of devastating violence, which was driven by nationalizing states and ideological agendas linked to new Soviet and Nazi imperial projects. As Alexander Victor Prusin’s recent work has demonstrated, while these borderlands became a zone of violence between the outbreak of the First World War and the Soviet pacification of the region in the mid-1950s, their ethno-linguistic and cultural diversity had not produced sustained periods of violence before 1914. This would change after the beginning of the First World War, when imperial authorities (and subsequently, the new nation states) increasingly began to view ethnic identities in the borderlands with circumspection. Ethnic identities and allegiances were often seen to be incompatible with the projects of the imperial authorities, which, particularly under the conditions of total war after 1914, drew fewer distinctions between internal and external enemies. The progressively coercive attempts by imperial and later national authorities to impose identities on the diverse borderlands exacerbated existing tensions and hastened the struggle between 10 Livanios,

‘Conquering the Souls’, 197.

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   31

states and communities. These circumstances may not necessarily have made political violence inevitable, but they certainly increased its likelihood. Prusin’s study of ‘the lands between’ emphasizes the role of new nation states in the interwar period and their suspicion and persecution of minor­ ities, while noting that the region’s experience of imperialism and imperialist policies conditioned the conflicts that were subsequently played out in the borderlands to a certain degree. Over time, nationalism and socioeconomic modernization shaped the nature of borderland conflicts, which increasingly manifested themselves in ethnic and national terms. The worst bouts of violence were witnessed, however, in the context of imperial conflicts during the First World War and, far more ominously, during the Second World War. In both world wars, ideological conflicts were laid over existing nationalist tensions, thereby engendering multiple conflicts. Nevertheless, on the eve of the First World War these borderlands had not yet become shatter zones, nor can they justifiably be labelled a “cauldron of conflict.”11 The violence witnessed in East Central Europe after 1917, specifically in the imperial borderlands once separating Imperial Germany, the Russian Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, was already under way in the Balkan borderlands a decade earlier. These borderlands had already become putative ‘shatter zones’ on the eve of the First World War, owing to the protracted decline of the Ottoman Empire and the existence of recently established nation states. What made the Balkan borderland – and its contested spaces of Macedonia and Kosovo in particular – problematic in the antebellum period was the ­inherent tension between state-backed nationalist programmes and the ethnocultural heterogeneity of the region. Policies of national homogenization and ideologies of irredenta were problematic, because the nascent nation states restricted citizenship to the dominant nation. As the prevailing discourse of nationhood was institutionalized by the native political elites, by the first decade of the twentieth century the attempts of the Balkan states to achieve national homogenization produced intense interstate rivalries which, when coupled with imperial decline, led to discriminatory practices against national minor­ ities and ultimately to violence and forced population exchanges. The Balkan states were in the main what Rogers Brubaker has called nationalizing states, that is, polities that are “ethnically heterogeneous yet conceived as nation states, whose dominant elites promote (to varying degrees) the language, culture, demographic position, economic flourishing, or political hegemony of

term is taken from Edward D. Wynot: Cauldron of Conflict. Eastern Europe 1918– 1945. Wheeling 1999.

11 The

32   Mark Biondich the nominally state-bearing nation.”12 The nationalizing policies pursued by political elites, often drawn from quite dissimilar ideological tendencies, aimed to transform these states into genuine nation states. What all Balkan elites shared in the prewar era was a commitment to the nationalist project, the homogenization of their societies and the ideology of irredenta, which ­entailed challenging the territorial status quo in the Balkans and potentially destabilizing the European state system.

The Balkans in the shadow of the Congress of Berlin On the eve of the First World War, the Balkans could already look back on a recent history of internecine violence, which had been waged initially by paramilitaries in Macedonia (1903–1908) and later by states during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). The immediate roots of this violence lay in the RussianOttoman War (1877–1878) and the so-called Eastern Crisis (1875–1878), both of which were intimately connected to the Eastern Question. The Eastern Question encompassed a number of diplomatic and political issues stemming from the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the ultimate disposition of its territories, which necessarily had implications for the European state system and resulted in periodic diplomatic struggles among the Great Powers. In the Balkans, the Eastern Question manifested itself in periodic crises, which originated in native national revolutionary wars after 1804 and in the establishment of independent Balkan states in the period from 1830 to 1878. The Eastern Crisis was addressed by the European Great Powers in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin, which granted formal independence to Montenegro, Romania and Serbia, and created the Principality of Bulgaria and the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia. Moreover, the Habsburg Monarchy occupied BosniaHerzegovina and Great Britain occupied Cyprus in order to counterbalance the expected Russian influence in the newly autonomous Bulgaria. The Congress of Berlin thus gave birth to the independent Balkans. Greece had achieved independence in 1830, but it was 1878 before independence was conferred on Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro. For all practical purposes, the Treaty of Berlin heralded the end of the Ottoman Empire as a significant European power. Its European possessions now consisted of a narrow piece of territory south of the Balkan Mountains extending from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. None of the leaders of the Balkan states believed in 1878 that their Brubaker: Nationalism reframed. Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge 1996, 57.

12 Rogers

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   33

respective national unifications had been completed, however. Expansionist foreign policies after 1878 reflected the prevailing view among ruling nationalist elites that independence was incomplete and laid the groundwork for conflict due to the increasingly incongruous claims stemming from their discordant national ideologies. Each Balkan state aspired to acquire additional territory, demanding lands supposedly governed by its people in the distant past, regardless of the legitimacy of comparable historical claims by others or the fact that these lands were inhabited by peoples of a different religion or nationality. The result was latent belligerence directed at the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and war over how the spoils should be divided. The Congress of Berlin cast a long shadow over the Balkans; its decisions set forces in motion that shaped Balkan politics up to the First World War. This was largely the case because the Berlin settlement failed to provide longterm solutions to the national aspirations of the Balkan peoples and manufactured a number of conflicts, because it did not follow the nationality principle when creating the new borders. Admittedly, in such a complex borderland it was almost impossible to implement the nationality principle. Yet none of the Balkan peoples had achieved national unification by 1878. This became the foremost objective of the foreign policies of their nation states and it resulted in repeated crises: the unification of Eastern Rumelia with Bulgaria and the ­resulting Serbo-Bulgarian War (1885); the Greco-Turkish War (1897); the ­Ilinden Uprising in Macedonia (1903); the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary (1908); the proclamation of Bulgarian independence (1908); and the Albanian uprisings (1910–1912). Serbia had been denied an opportunity to appropriate Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Instead, it found itself in a lasting albeit initially latent confrontation with the Habsburg Monarchy, which eventually led to the Sarajevo assassination in June 1914. Greece had gained new territories in Epirus and Thessaly, but the new borders had to be determined in negotiations with the Ottomans. In July 1881 the Great Powers compelled the Ottomans to surrender most of Thessaly and part of Epirus, but Greek nationalists had hoped for Crete and the Aegean Islands, and continued to dream of Constantinople and much of Anatolia. Bulgarians were deeply aggrieved at the ‘loss’ of Eastern Rumelia and Macedonia, which remained under Ottoman rule, the former as a semi-autonomous province under international supervision and the latter as an integral component of the Sultan’s remaining Balkan possessions. The Bulgarian state was squeezed between the Danube and the Balkan Mountains, with access to the Black Sea but not to the Aegean. The Berlin settlement was greeted in Romania with equal bitterness. Romania had declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1877, during the Russo-Turkish War, but nationalist opinion was incensed by Russia’s be-

34   Mark Biondich trayal of its ally at Berlin. Romania ceded to Russia the province of Bessarabia, a major grain-producing region that commanded the Danube delta. This was seen as a violation of Romanian sovereignty. The predominantly Muslim Albanians initiated their own national movement in 1878, fearing the partition of their lands by Great Power fiat. The Treaty of Berlin had ended the Eastern Crisis but laid the foundation for new frictions. In the decades after the Congress of Berlin, the Habsburg Monarchy was the dominant power in the Balkans. Taking advantage of the Berlin settlement, it extended its influence through its occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (1878) and secret alliances with Serbia (1881) and Romania (1883, renewed in 1902 and 1913), in which it offered protection in return for economic and political concessions. It also exercised considerable influence in Bulgaria and increasingly among the Albanians. In the process of extending its commercial influence, the Habsburg Monarchy erected a network of railways in the region that strengthened its position over Russia at least until 1903. The Russian Empire was far less satisfied with the Berlin settlement. During the Eastern Crisis, it had based its entire stance in the Balkans on support for Bulgaria, but this proved problematic when Bulgarian domestic developments began to undermine Russian influence in the short term. In 1881 Russia renewed the Three Emperors’ League with Germany and the Habsburg Monarchy. Although it lapsed in 1886, Austro-Russian cooperation in the Balkans continued into the early twentieth century. In April 1897 the Habsburg and Russian emperors Franz Josef and Nicholas II agreed in the short term to maintain the status quo and advocated reform to mitigate the risk of upheaval, even if they were clear that Ottoman rule would eventually end. They discussed the disposition of Bosnia-Herzegovina and envisaged the creation of an Albanian state and the partition of the remaining Ottoman territories by the Balkan states. Austro-Russian cooperation found expression in the Muraviev-GołuchowskiAgreement (1897) and again during the crisis precipitated by the Ilinden Uprising (1903) in Macedonia. But as the Great Powers drifted into adversarial alliances, the escalation of their rivalries gave Balkan developments greater salience and ultimately set the stage for the events of 1914.

Balkan imperialisms: the Macedonian Question up to 1914 Balkan state and nationalist rivalries between 1878 and 1914 centred on three borderlands and their ‘Questions’: the Macedonian, Albanian, and South Slav Questions. The latter revolved around the national character and ultimate

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   35

disposition of the remaining de jure Ottoman territories in the Balkans, from Bosnia-Herzegovina in the north-west to Kosovo and Macedonia in the centre. The Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia (1878) pushed the South Slav Question into the background, at least until the Annexation Crisis (1908–1909) and the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), when the Albanian Question also emerged as a diplomatic issue. In the decades immediately after the ­Berlin Congress, the most complicated issue in the Ottoman Balkans was the Macedonian Question. From 1878 to 1912 it preoccupied Ottoman and ­European statesmen and contributed significantly to regional instability and violence.13 Macedonia was of strategic importance for the Balkan states, as it commanded the communication route down the Morava and Vardar valleys and offered both Bulgaria and Serbia a vital outlet to the sea. It also possessed fertile plains and considerable agricultural wealth. Control of Macedonia would have given any Balkan state the required strength to assert itself as the dominant regional power. For the Ottoman authorities, Macedonia meant not only rule over more than one million Muslims, but also substantial tax revenues and agricultural produce with which to feed the empire. Given Macedonia’s proximity to the Straits, the European Great Powers could not ignore the looming regional conflict. Among the Balkan contenders, Bulgaria and Greece appeared to have the advantage. Although militarily weaker than Bulgaria, the Greek position was seemingly buttressed by the traditional role of the Orthodox Church. However, the formation of the Bulgarian Exarchate (1870) created a level playing field that, when coupled with Bulgaria’s military resources and apparent ethnographic advantage, appeared to portend Bulgaria’s eventual triumph. Serbia appeared to have the weakest position, as it lacked an ecclesiastical presence in Macedonia comparable to the Greeks and Bulgarians and, according to most contemporary census figures, had few co-nationals in the region. Romania too claimed the Romance-speaking Vlachs as co-nationals, but this was largely aimed at constraining Bulgarian influence. It was far from clear to the Great Powers which if any Balkan state had the most legitimate claim, insofar as legitimacy entailed stability. Reliable census data were absent, while Balkan nationalists offered contradictory and often questionable statistics. the Macedonian Question, see Fikret Adanir: Die makedonische Frage. Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1909. Wiesbaden 1979; Andrew Rossos: Macedonia and the Macedonians. A History. Stanford 2008, 99–126; Nadine Lange-Akhund: The Macedonian Question. Boulder 1998. For a discussion of Macedonia between the Congress of Berlin and the First World War, see Elisabeth Kontogiorgi: Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia. The Rural Settlement of Refugees 1922–1930. Oxford 2006, 11–40.

13 On

36   Mark Biondich Macedonia became the focal point of Balkan rivalries following two events: Bulgaria’s unification (1885) and the Greek-Ottoman War (1897) that had been sparked by the Greek nationalist claim to Crete. The events of 1885 and 1897 demonstrated that the status quo imposed by the Berlin settlement could be challenged successfully – the Great Powers responded to both crises by subverting the letter of the treaty they had crafted – and focused Balkan rivalries on Macedonia. Macedonia did not exist as an administrative entity within the Ottoman Balkans but was organized after 1878 into the three provinces (vilayets): Salonika, Monastir, and Kosova. It lay between Thrace and Albania, bounded in the south by the Aegean, in the north by the Šar Mountains, and in the west by Lake Ohrid. It had a remarkably heterogeneous population, with no single nationality in the majority. On the eve of the First World War, historic Macedonia is likely to have had between two and three million inhabitants, with Macedonian Slavs forming the single largest group.14 According to Ottoman census data, Macedonia was equally divided between Muslims and Christians. From 1870 the Ottoman authorities counted two Orthodox millets in the Balkans: Greek Orthodox and Bulgarian Exarchate. The majority of the non-Muslim population belonged to the latter. The towns were in the main Muslim and Greek or, in the case of Salonika, largely Jewish, while the countryside was predominantly Slavic and Muslim. The Muslim population included Turks, Albanians, Pomaks, and Roma. In Macedonia, as in BosniaHerzegovina, ethnicity could not always be clarified on the basis of linguistic criteria. While the three Slavic communities in Bosnia were linguistically virtually identical but differentiated by religion, the situation in Macedonia was far more labyrinthine. Macedonian Slavs had the same faith as Bulgarians and Greeks, but were linguistically related to the former. Many foreigners who visited Macedonia assumed that the local Slavs spoke a dialect of Bulgarian, although more astute observers were far less certain and concluded that the Macedonian Slavs were neither Serbs nor Bulgarians. The political struggle for Macedonian autonomy was taken up after 1893 by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), which sought the territorial integrity of autonomous ‘Macedonia’ within a wider Balkan federation and the equality of its citizens, regardless of nationality or creed. In late 1894 a rival organization known as the Supreme Committee was formed in Sofia, largely as an instrument of the Bulgarian ruling elite. By 1897/98 IMRO had organized regional committees in Macedonia and launched a campaign of 14 Rossos,

Macedonia and the Macedonians, 5. Kontogiorgi cites Ottoman census figures from 1904 and 1906, but does not offer a breakdown of the population. See Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange, 20–24.

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   37

violence; clashes between IMRO detachments and the Ottoman gendarmerie became commonplace. At the same time, nationalist elites in Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia asserted their claims to Macedonia in a myriad of ways. They promoted relief agencies, sympathetic churches, schools, and various cultural activities. Denying the existence of a Macedonian Slav nationality, these elites based their claims on a combination of ethnographic, cultural, and historical proofs. They claimed to be in the majority in Macedonia, although the politics of statistics revealed enormous anomalies. Cultural propaganda was followed by the activities of militant societies – particularly after 1897 – which dispatched irregulars to Macedonia under the guise of brigandage. The Balkan governments and their diplomatic consuls in Macedonia supported these groups, providing them with money, weapons, and diplomatic protection. Adopting the tactical offensive, IMRO initiated an insurgency against the Ottoman state, a conflict that evolved into an irregular civil war in which the insurgents embarked on a gradual process of state building. By 1903 IMRO had established a state within a state.15 Following the abortive Ilinden Uprising (1903), from which IMRO never fully recovered, the insurgency shifted from IMRO to a contest between paramilitaries sponsored by the Balkan states. From the late 1890s until 1912 the Ottoman provinces that constituted Macedonia and Kosovo figured conspicuously as contested imperial borderlands – putative zones of violence or even shatter zones – where the Balkan states waged initially informal and later formal wars against the Ottoman Empire, one another, and the indigenous Macedonian Slav and Albanian national movements. The Ilinden Uprising had prompted, as its plotters had hoped, European intervention. Austria-Hungary and Russia imposed the Mürzsteg Programme (October 1903), a reformist agenda that dictated that European officials would supervise the local Ottoman gendarmerie and civilian administration. The Mürzsteg Programme was never fully implemented, however, and conditions improved only slightly. Between 1904 and 1908 Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian detachments continued to contest Macedonia, clashing at the same time with Macedonian armed groups and Ottoman officialdom. This violence would continue until external circumstances – the Young Turk Revolution (1908), the fall of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1909), and the Bosnian Annexation Crisis (1908–1909) – brought the insurgencies to an end. the IMRO, see Duncan M. Perry: The Politics of Terror. The Macedonian Revolutionary Movement, 1893–1903. Durham 1988. Perry argues convincingly that IMRO was by no means indiscriminate in its violence – at least not in its original form – and in those regions where it first established a presence, it attempted to serve as a symbol of law and order in the face of Ottoman decline. See ibid., 206–209.

15 On

38   Mark Biondich Thus at the beginning of the twentieth century Macedonia presented a complex set of problems. The Ottoman leadership under Sultan Abdülhamid II failed to implement meaningful reforms, while the majority of Balkan Christians (and, increasingly, Muslim Albanians) under Ottoman rule no longer believed that reform would provide either meaningful or lasting solutions to their problems. The Balkan states had no long-term interest in Ottoman stability and promoted instead revolutionary violence when it suited their interests. The Great Powers, while advocating reform at critical junctures, as in 1897 and 1903, were guided by their own imperial interests and the stability of the European state system rather than a desire for successful reform as an end in itself. The confluence of failed Ottoman reform, Balkan state rivalry, and Great Power competition meant that revolution and violence would remain driving forces in Macedonia in the antebellum period, transforming the central Balkans into a putative shatter zone. Similar to Macedonia, the neighbouring Albanian lands were in open revolt between 1909 and 1912. At the Congress of Berlin, the European Great Powers began awarding some Albanian-populated territory to the newly independent Balkan states. It was in this context, in June 1878, that the first political manifestation of a modern Albanian national movement appeared in the form of the League of Prizren. Convened as an assembly of ‘all Albanian lands’, the league initially enjoyed the tacit approval of the Ottoman authorities; the Ottoman administrator of the Prizren district (sancak) participated as an observer. The league had demanded several reforms, in particular the creation of a unified Albanian administrative district within the Ottoman Empire, encompassing the Albanian populated vilayets of İşkodra (Shkodër), Kosova, Monastir (Bitola), and Yenya (Janina). Following the assassination in early September 1878 of Mehmet Ali Pasha, the Ottoman delegate to the Berlin Congress who was sent to Kosovo to implement the Montenegrin claims granted at Berlin, the league turned against the Ottoman state and Sultan ­Abdülhamid II. Its purpose was now to defend Albanian (rather than Muslim) land. In April 1881 Ottoman troops suppressed the league. At that stage, the role of the Albanian diaspora became more pronounced, as did that of the Great Powers. In 1897, when Vienna was striving to increase its influence among the Albanians, the French-educated Faik Konitza obtained Habsburg support for his émigré newspaper Albania. All the major programmatic documents of the Albanian national movement after 1878 demanded the unification of the four vilayets into an Albanian administrative entity.16 16 On

the Albanian national movement and its relationship with the Ottoman Empire, see Stavro Skendi: The Albanian National Awakening 1878–1912. Princeton, 1967; George

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   39

Albanian nationalism generally remained autonomist, too weak to achieve its programme unilaterally and fearful of Greek and Serbian territorial expansionism. As a result, Albanian national elites initially worked with the Ottoman authorities, and several Albanians were involved in the Young Turk movement and its political wing, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), convinced that constitutionalism would address the concerns of the empire’s minorities. However, ‘Ottomanism’ as practiced by the Young Turks after their 1908 revolution entailed modernizing the empire, centralizing authority in Constantinople, and suppressing all nationalisms that undermined their unitarist conceptions of empire. Resistance to Young Turk centralization resulted in Albanian revolts in 1909–1910, centred on Kosovo and western Macedonia. Ottoman reprisals were harsh and only bolstered support for the insurgency. Although Ottoman forces had retaken most of the towns in Albanian-populated regions by mid-1910, and reasserted imperial authority with reprisals against the insurgents and civilian population, Ottoman authority was limited to the towns and lowland areas. Despite Sultan Mehmed V’s visit to Prishtina in June 1911 and his declaration of an amnesty for insurgents, a new Albanian revolt occurred in 1912, which led to the capture of Skopje, the administrative centre of Kosovo vilayet. Ottoman reverses in Libya during the Tripolitanian War (1911–1912) convinced Albanian rebels to press their claims. The revolt ended only in September 1912 when the Ottoman authorities granted the insurgents’ demand for a broad administrative autonomy, namely, the formation of an autonomous Albanian administration centred on the four Albanian-populated vilayets. However, in the following month the First Balkan War began, and much of the newly autonomous Albania was occupied by Serbian, Montenegrin, and Greek armies. With the partition of the Albanian lands imminent, on 28 November  1912 a National Assembly at Vlora (Vlorë) declared Albania’s independence and appointed a Provisional Government. As a result of the diplomatic support of both Italy and the Habsburg Monarchy, an Albanian state was born. So too was the modern ‘Albanian Question’. The Albanian revolts demonstrated yet again the significant interplay of imperial decline, nationalism and Great Power intervention. What made Balkan developments problematic – and gave the region a measure of strategic significance – was the fact that the region increasingly became one of the main theatres of Great Power rivalry in the antebellum period. The conclusion of the Anglo-French (1904) and Anglo-Russian (1907) Gawrych: The Crescent and the Eagle. Ottoman Rule, Islam and the Albanians, 1874– 1913. London 2006.

40   Mark Biondich ententes gave Balkan issues greater salience within Great Power rivalries. The Young Turk Revolution (July 1908) led the Habsburg Monarchy to formally annex Bosnia-Herzegovina, which set off the Annexation Crisis (1908–1909) and heightened tensions between Vienna and both Russia and Serbia. The Annexation Crisis did not provoke a war between the powers of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) and the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia), but the Habsburg Monarchy’s presumed victory and Russia’s capitulation destroyed the decade-long Austro-Russian condominium in the Balkans. The Habsburg Monarchy now appeared to threaten the independence of Serbia and Montenegro and defy the small power imperial projects of virtually all the Balkan states. As a result, the Annexation Crisis initiated a chain of developments that pushed Serbia and Bulgaria together, and forced Russia to seek the formation of a unified Balkan bloc to check ­Vienna’s influence. After the June 1903 regicide in Belgrade, the return of the Karadjordjević dynasty and the rise of the military in Serbian politics, Serbia’s foreign policy underwent a fundamental reorientation, premised on cooperation with Russia and Bulgaria as a basis for a possible future Balkan confederation. From 1903 until the February Revolution (1917), Serbia remained in the Russian diplomatic orbit. But Serbo-Bulgarian rapprochement proved difficult, as the central issue dividing Belgrade and Sofia after 1903 was the Macedonian Question. In Bulgaria, the Macedonian Question had been the primary preoccupation of Bulgarian nationalist discourse since 1878, and neither the crown nor the political and military elites were prepared to renounce the Bulgarian claim. Serbia wished to prevent the creation of a Great Bulgaria at virtually any cost, but had more modest objectives in Macedonia. Like Greece, Serbia was amenable to partition, but even Athens and Belgrade failed to reach agreement on their respective spheres of influence.17 However, the Annexation Crisis emboldened Bulgaria and Serbia to contemplate a Balkan solution to the Eastern Question. Protracted negotiations between Russia, Serbia and Bulgaria on the one hand, and between Serbia and Bulgaria on the other, eventually culminated in the Serbo-Bulgarian Treaty of Alliance (13  March  1912). Bulgaria and Greece formed a loose alliance on 29 May 1912 and penned a subsequent military convention. In August 1912 Bulgaria and Montenegro concluded a verbal agreement, while Serbia and Montenegro signed a formal alliance in early October 1912. Despite significant odds, a Balkan League was born and its purpose was evident from the Rossos: Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalries and Russian Foreign ­Policy, 1908–1914. Toronto 1981.

17 Andrew

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   41

outset: to subvert the political and territorial status quo in Southeastern Europe. A secret annex to the Serbo-Bulgarian alliance provided for a territorial settlement based on the division of Macedonia into separate zones, with a contested sector to be reserved for future Russian arbitration. Although Russia served as the protector and arbiter of the Serbo-Bulgarian alliance, it saw the regional entente primarily as a defensive arrangement directed against the Habsburg Monarchy rather than the Ottoman Empire. Macedonia would prove to be the alliance’s Achilles’ heel; the Serbs and Bulgarians were never able to resolve their territorial disputes, while the Greeks and Bulgarians merely side-tracked them. Nevertheless, the prospect of territorial expansion at the Ottoman Empire’s expense was a powerful inducement for action. The political uncertainty caused by the Young Turk revolution and the Annexation Crisis only weakened the Ottoman government’s position in the Balkans. Fortified by the outbreak of the Italo-Turkish War (1911), and citing the Albanian insurgency (1910–1912) as emblematic of mounting instability and violence on Ottoman territory, the Balkan states opted for war. In early October 1912 they presented a collective diplomatic note to the Ottoman representatives in Athens, Belgrade and Sofia, demanding the immediate implementation of ­reform across Ottoman territory in Southeastern Europe. After the empire ­rejected their diplomatic démarche, the Balkan states severed relations and declared war.

The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913 With respect to the nature and scale of violence, the Balkan Wars should be viewed as a critical moment of escalation, when killing and atrocities became far more widespread than before. Violence crossed an important threshold in 1912; the earlier state-sponsored but covert paramilitary (irregular) violence directed against the Ottoman Empire was replaced by overt state-directed violence against both empire and peoples. In short, the Balkan Wars played an important role in escalating norms of violence in the region and again focused the attention of the Great Powers on the region. The massive scale of the violence visited upon the populations of Macedonia, Kosovo and Thrace during and immediately after the wars left a bitter legacy; the seeds of revenge had been planted and would be harvested at critical junctures in later years.18 The the Balkan Wars, see Richard C. Hall: The Balkan Wars 1912–1913. Prelude to the First World War. London/New York 2002; Edward J. Erickson: Defeat in Detail. The Ottoman Army in the Balkan Wars, 1912–1913. Westport 2003; Valery Kolev/Christina Koulouri

18 On

42   Mark Biondich Balkan Wars thus proved decisive for identity politics and the treatment of minorities. The First Balkan War began on 8 October 1912, when Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Within days of the initiation of hostilities, Serbia and Bulgaria together had mobilized nearly 600 000 troops. Eventually, the combined forces of the Balkan League fielded more than 700 000 troops from among a combined total population of 10 million. Additional levies of reservists and officially sanctioned irregulars would increase these numbers over the following months. They confronted two Ottoman armies in the Balkans, one in Thrace and the other in Macedonia, which had a combined strength of perhaps 250 000. The Greek navy’s seizure of several Aegean islands effectively prevented the Ottoman military from reinforcing its Balkan garrisons. Superiority in numbers and Western technology (modern field artillery, aerial ­reconnaissance, wireless telegraphy, ships) dictated the Ottomans’ disastrous outcome: for the first time, the empire confronted relatively modern Balkan armies rather than brigands and poorly equipped irregulars. The Bulgarians directed their main attack at the Ottoman capital, moving into eastern Thrace and defeating the main Ottoman force at Kirklareli and besieging Edirne (Adrianople) by late October. The Serbian army joined the Montenegrins in taking Prishtina and Novi Pazar. The decisive battle in Macedonia was at Kumanovo, where the Serbian army inflicted defeat on the main Ottoman force. Kumanovo decided the outcome of the war in Macedonia, as it opened the way to Skopje and the occupation of Kosova vilayet. It was immediately hailed as a great symbolic victory and revenge for the Ottoman defeat at Kosovo Polje (1389). By mid-November 1912, the Serbian army had advanced to ­Bitola and Ohrid, where it linked up with the Greek army. The Montenegrins quickly laid siege to Shkodër, while in the south the Greek army pushed into Macedonia and Epirus, taking Salonika in early November. It was within this fluid military context that a group of Albanian delegates met at Skopje on 14  October  1912, appealing to the Great Powers and organizing an armed ­resistance to the Balkan states. On 28 November 1912 a National Assembly at Vlora declared Albania’s independence. The Albanian National Assembly won the diplomatic support of Italy, which hoped to use the new state to extend its

(eds.): The Balkan Wars, Thessaloniki 2009. Hall and Erickson both focus heavily on the military dimension of the wars, including atrocities against non-combatants. They should be read with Katrin Boeckh’s work, which provides a discussion of the domestic ramifications of the Balkan Wars on these states. See Katrin Boeckh: Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan. München 1996.

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   43

influence in the Adriatic, and the Habsburg Monarchy, which was determined to keep Serbia from securing a direct outlet to the sea. By 3 December 1912, when the European Great Powers established a twomonth truce, the Ottomans had lost their remaining territories in Europe with the exception of a few besieged towns. On 16 December 1912 parallel peace negotiations began in London under British mediation; the Great Power diplomats met separately from the representatives of the Balkan states and the Ottoman Empire. When the truce expired on 3  February  1913 without a ­negotiated solution, hostilities resumed and Ottoman defeats continued. The Greek army captured Janina on 6 March, the Bulgarian army captured Edirne on 28 March, and Shkodër fell to the Montenegrins on 22 April. By the spring of 1913 Ottoman rule in the Balkans had effectively come to an end. On 30 May 1913 the Great Powers imposed the Treaty of London on the combatants. Serbia was granted Kosovo and parts of north-west Macedonia, but its hopes for a corridor to the Adriatic through northern Albania were frustrated. Greece acquired southern Macedonia with Salonika but was denied its ambitions in southern Albania. Bulgaria gained part of Thrace, but most of Macedonia remained in Serbian and Greek hands. The rapid defeat of the Ottoman Empire had transformed the Balkan conflict into a European crisis. During the diplomatic conference at London in 1912/1913, Serbia and Montenegro had looked to Russia to defend their territorial gains in the face of Austro-Hungarian opposition; the fate of the Serbo-Bulgarian alliance rested in the balance. Russia had sought to sustain the territorial gains of its Balkan allies, but when confronted with resolute ­obstruction by Austria-Hungary and Germany, it surrendered on the central issues. Serbia was denied access to the Adriatic Sea, following the decision of the Great Powers to sanction the creation of Albania; and Montenegro’s claim to Shkodër was rejected. By conceding on these issues, Russia may have avoided the risk of a wider European war for which it was unprepared, but it also inadvertently doomed the Serbo-Bulgarian alliance and thus the Balkan League. Denied access to the Adriatic, Serbia sought compensation in Macedonia and found an ally in Greece, which still hoped for additional gains in Thrace and Macedonia. The two sides concluded a secret alliance on 1 June 1913, aimed at imposing on Bulgaria a new settlement in Macedonia that reflected the military reality on the ground. Russian efforts at mediation proved abortive. The Bulgarians, who had done the bulk of the fighting against the Ottoman army, believed that their erstwhile allies were attempting to satisfy their own ambitions at Bulgaria’s expense. On the night of 29 June 1913, the Bulgarians launched a surprise attack on Serbian and Greek positions in Macedonia, initiating the Second Balkan War.

44   Mark Biondich The Second Balkan War proved disastrous for Bulgaria, as Serbia and Greece were joined by Romania, Montenegro, and the Ottoman Empire. The fighting had ended by 31 July and the war was formally concluded on 10 August  1913 with the Treaty of Bucharest between Serbia, Greece, Romania, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. Greece extended its gains in Macedonia and Epirus, while Serbia gained more Macedonian territory. Bulgaria received only a small part of eastern Macedonia, but managed to secure an Aegean coastline. The new frontiers were subsequently ratified in a series of separate treaties between the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria (29  September  1913), Serbia (14 November 1913), and Greece (14 March 1914). These treaties also regulated the status of Ottoman-owned property and Muslim minorities in the Balkan states, who were given four years to decide if they wished to remain under Christian rule or emigrate. These provisions were never implemented, in part because the Great War created a new set of circumstances where Serbia and later Greece found themselves at war with the Ottoman state. In the event, the Balkan Wars brought the Macedonian Question to an end. The Albanian Question was only deferred, as a third of the Albanian population found itself outside the new state, primarily in neighbouring Serbia. By late 1913 the political geography of the Balkans had been set and, with the exception of the Bulgarian territories on the Aegean ceded to Greece in 1919, these frontiers were largely maintained for the better part of the twentieth century. Having lost 83 per cent of its land and 69 per cent of its population in Europe, Ottoman rule in Southeastern Europe came to an abrupt end. It is impossible to understand Ottoman policy after 1913 without appreciating the traumatic effect the disaster of the Balkan Wars had on the Ottoman psyche. The Ottomans lost lands that had been the lifeblood of the Empire for centuries. In June 1913 the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress established a dictatorship that would lead the Ottoman state to the end of the First World War. In many respects, the Balkan Wars prefigured twentieth-century warfare, combining attributes of modern technology (wireless telegraphy, aerial reconnaissance), national liberation, and war on the enemy’s culture and civilian population. The ideology of integral nationalism was combined with the revolution in fire power and communications with lethal consequences.19 The widely reported atrocities against civilians and captured combatants were not a discrete phenomenon or merely a by-product of the fighting, but rather part of the longer-term project of nation-state building and served as a prelude to this interpretation, see Alan Kramer: Dynamics of Destruction. Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford 2007.

19 For

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   45

the far greater carnage that befell Europe in 1914. The Balkan Wars were the Ottoman state’s first ‘total war’ and the Balkan states mobilized nearly three quarters of a million men to prosecute the war effort. Soldiers and civilians alike suffered the appalling effects of modern warfare, yet without the infrastructure of modern medicine. The violence perpetrated by the belligerents was widespread and systematic.20 When Serbian troops moved into Kosovo and Macedonia in October 1912, they proceeded to wipe out entire Albanian villages. In their ‘liberated’ territories, the Serbian authorities treated the population harshly, directing most of the violence at Muslims generally and Albanians specifically. The Habsburg envoy in Belgrade alleged that the Serbian authorities were sponsoring or tolerating violence against Muslims and non-Serbs in the new territories, including pillaging, arson, and executions, thereby prompting a large exodus. Montenegrin troops also followed a scorched earth policy against several Albanian villages, whose inhabitants were expelled or fled. The International Commission on the Balkan Wars of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace detailed a litany of atrocities and cruelties committed on all sides. Reporting on conditions in territories under Serbian and Montenegrin control, it found “whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind.” It understood these methods as part of official policy, “with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.”21 When the Bulgarians captured Edirne in late March 1913, their violence was directed at combatants and civilians alike, including Muslims, Christians (Greeks, Armenians) and Jews. On the Thracian front, the retreating Ottoman forces exacted revenge in several Greek-populated villages.22 The British vice-consul in Macedonia Hubert E. W. Young reported extensively on Bulgarian atrocities against civilians in Sérres, Cavalla and Xanthi, despite the fact that the authorities had surrendered to the Bulgarians without a fight. As occupation regimes and rudimencrimes against humanity and war crimes perpetrated during the Balkan Wars, see The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (ed.): Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. Washington 1914; republished as The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect, with a new introduction and reflections on the present conflict by George F. ­Kennan. Washington 1993. The Report can also be found online at: Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan War (1914), at: http://www.archive.org/details/reportofinternat00inteuoft (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013). 21 Carnegie Endowment, Report, 151. 22 Ibid., 131. 20 On

46   Mark Biondich tary administrations were established, various pressures were exerted on the population to conform to the new nation states.23 One of the objectives of the Balkan combatants had been to eliminate potentially hostile populations by way of ethnic cleansing. This was to be achieved by various means, including murder, intimidation and expulsion. The actions of all the Balkan combatants were also driven by fears that Great Power intervention would dictate a settlement at variance with their own plans, as had occurred in the past. The expulsion of Muslims and others from their occupation zones therefore served to buttress their diplomatic claims. The result was the wholesale destruction of villages and the murder or expulsion of many of their inhabitants. While Muslim civilians of different nationalities were the primary victims of this concerted campaign, the Carnegie Commission found the belligerents’ treatment of enemy combatants to be equally harsh and a violation of the laws and customs of war. The Balkan Wars contributed immensely to the region’s reputation in the Western imagination as a zone of endemic violence and brutality. This was the image conveyed by the Carnegie Commission’s report and other contemporary observers. The scale of the violence that was visited upon the populations of Macedonia, Kosovo and Thrace during and immediately after the Balkan Wars left a bitter legacy. The Balkan Wars proved decisive for identity politics and the treatment of minorities. Despite the forced population displacement, the Balkan states now possessed significant minority populations; they ceased to be, as Serbia and Greece had been until 1912, relatively homogeneous nation states. The ruling political elites of these states were unaccustomed to governing multiethnic societies. Moreover, as the Second Balkan War had been the first modern, conventional armed conflict between Balkan Orthodox nation states, with a high level of popular mobilization, nationalist rhetoric, and killing on an unprecedented scale, it could be said to mark the final victory of secular nationalism and the modern nation state in the Balkans.

From the Balkan Wars to the First World War The Balkan Wars sealed the Macedonian Question and deferred the Albanian Question, but they brought the South Slav Question to the forefront. The BosGerolymatos: The Balkan Wars. Myth, Reality, and the Eternal Conflict. New York 2001, 240. See also the discussion of Greek attitudes and violence against Bulgarians in Keith Brown: Wiping out the Bulgar Race. Hatred, Duty, and National Self-Fashioning in the Second Balkan War, in: Bartov/Weitz, Shatterzone of Empires, 298–316.

23 André

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   47

nian Annexation Crisis had much to do with the South Slav Question, the most difficult nationality problem in the Habsburg Monarchy on the eve of the First World War.24 In particular, Vienna was concerned that its large Serb minority in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and southern Hungary, was a ­precarious irredentist force. Between 1882 and 1903, when Serbia had been a ­client state of the Habsburg Monarchy, the South Slav Question was hardly pressing. But after 1903, as Austro-Serbian relations deteriorated, the idea of settling scores with Serbia, preferably through war, received more attention in Habsburg military and political circles.25 The outcome of this situation was the decision to put an end to the ambiguous status of Bosnia-Herzegovina by annexing the provinces, thereby closing the door to Serbia’s irredentist hopes while risking a European diplomatic crisis by unilaterally violating the terms of the Treaty of Berlin. The significance of the Bosnian Annexation Crisis was thus considerable, but it was the Balkan Wars that left a trail of consequences behind them. One of the most important of these was the exacerbation of Austro-Serbian hostility. The Habsburg Monarchy concluded that Serbia was a threat, a dangerous focal point of attraction to her South Slavs. For her part, Serbia deeply resented the frustration of her aims in Bosnia (1908) and Albania (1912), for which the Habsburg Monarchy was held responsible.26 The South Slav Question provided the immediate pretext for the chain of events leading to the First World War. The assassination on 28 June 1914 of the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, precipitated the actions leading to war. The Habsburg Monarchy blamed Serbia for the assassination and used the occasion to try to suppress Serbia as a Balkan regional power and forestall any undermining of its authority in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbian government had not planned the assassination, although some officers of the Serbian army had connections to the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, and probably knew of his plans. In the summer of 1914, both the Habsburg Monarchy and Serbia believed that their domestic and international prestige were in jeopardy. After gaining Germany’s promise of support, on 28 July 1914 a recent assessment of the South Slav Question and literature, see Janko Pleterski: The South Slav Question, in: Mark Cornwall (ed.): The Last Years of Austria-Hungary. A Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth Century Europe. Exeter 2002, 119–148. 25 Christian Promitzer: The South Slavs in the Austrian Imagination. Serbs and Slovenes in the Changing View from German Nationalism to National Socialism, in: Nancy M. Wingfield (ed.): Creating the Other. Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe. New York 2003, 193–194. 26 On Serbia and the origins of the Great War, see the overview provided by Richard C. Hall: Serbia, in: Richard F. Hamilton/Holger H. Herwig (eds.): The Origins of World War I. Cambridge 2003, 92–111; Andrej Mitrović: Serbia’s Great War, 1914–1918. London 2007. 24 For

48   Mark Biondich the Austro-Hungarian authorities declared war on Serbia, setting off a chain of events that led to the First World War. For the Serbian regime, the terms of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum would have undone the progress it had made since 1903 in achieving independence from Habsburg influence. Both sides believed that they were in a strong position to win a limited war, while neither side considered the possibility of a wider European conflict, nor did they believe that their differences could be settled by negotiation. There was generally too little fear of war. Elsewhere in the Balkans, the mood in 1914 was generally sombre and the wave of popular enthusiasm for war seen in Paris, London and Berlin was almost entirely absent. Serbia had no choice and there, as in pro-Serbian Montenegro, the war was seen as defensive and a struggle for national survival. War aims were articulated early on and the Serbian political establishment hoped that an Entente victory would lead to Serbian national unification through Serbian expansion into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia at the very least. In the Ottoman Empire, governed by a CUP dictatorship that retained power until the last days of the realm, the losses suffered during the Balkan Wars at the hands of former imperial subjects were a painful pill to swallow. The widespread atrocities perpetrated against Balkan Muslims dealt a shattering blow to Ottomanist ideals and invigorated those with a Turkist outlook. The CUP leadership concluded that the assurances of the Great Powers as a collective were worthless, as their previous declarations in support of the territorial status quo had proven to be hollow. This led the Ottomans to seek an alliance with a Great Power patron. Initially rebuffed by each of the Great Powers, the July Crisis altered matters considerably, and in August 1914 a German-Ottoman alliance was concluded. The empire initially declared its ‘armed neutrality’ as a prelude to direct participation in the autumn of 1914. In Sofia, Bucharest and Athens, politicians were divided. While initially opting for neutrality, none of the Balkan states could ignore the war and the opportunities it appeared to provide. All three states weighed the decision for war in terms of the potential to realize long-standing nationalist agendas. Bulgarian opinion remained divided as long-standing Russophile sentiment competed with the painful trauma of the Balkan Wars. However, in October 1915 Sofia entered the war on the side of the Central Powers and obtained most of Macedonia as compensation. In Romania, which had been formally allied to the Habsburg Monarchy since 1883, the war produced a fissure among the political class. Eventually, Romania signed a military convention with Britain and France and declared war on the Habsburg Monarchy on 27 August 1916. The Greek decision to enter the war was the most difficult of all. The country

Eastern Borderlands and Prospective ­Shatter Zones   49

had barely digested its recent territorial acquisitions from the Balkan Wars. It remained deeply involved in southern Albania, where Athens continued to support Greek irregulars against the nascent Albanian state, and the Greek political class was also divided. Both the Entente and the Central Powers violated Greek neutrality. The Entente’s occupation of Salonika (in the autumn of 1915) and Corfu (January 1916), which was used as an asylum for the retreating Serbian army, was deeply resented in Athens and prompted Bulgarian troops to occupy the area north of Salonika in May 1916. Greece would formally declare war on the Central Powers on 30 June 1917; it was the last European country to enter the Great War. The decision to enter the First World War was thus protracted and difficult, but, as in the Balkan Wars, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece sought to realize their national aspirations and fulfil their ideologies of irredenta.27

Conclusions Recent case studies of the ‘shatter zones’ of empires as regions prone to a sudden rise in violence after 1917 have drawn attention to several features of ‘aftershock’ violence. They include the collapse of empire and the creation of power vacuums; the dissolution of the state security apparatus and the concomitant loss of a state monopoly on violence; and the emergence of parastatal structures and entities that pursue their own interests through violence. Typically, the cessation of violence is coterminous with the formation of new states that exercise a monopoly on the use of force and violence. These features already manifested themselves to varying degrees in the Balkans at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in Macedonia and the Albanian lands. In these Balkan borderlands, the steady decline of the Ottoman Empire created a power vacuum. This vacuum was first filled by indigenous movements that used violence in the name of future nation states and later by neighbouring states, which sought to consolidate their future political borders – and thus neutralize competing claims to them – by compelling local communities to adopt state-sponsored national identities. This occurred against the background of Ottoman decline and repeated (and ultimately futile) attempts to reassert the empire’s political authority and monopoly on violence. At the same time, the Great Powers intervened in the region (1903, 1908, 1912–1913) to manage potential shocks to the European state system. The arRichard C. Hall: Bulgaria, Romania and Greece, in: Hamilton/Herwig, The Origins of World War I, 389–413.

27 See

50   Mark Biondich gument that I have put forward here is that a distinction needs to be made before the First World War between East Central and Southeastern Europe. The former was dominated by empires in 1914, but the existence of recently established nation states pursuing their own small power imperial projects in the latter made the Balkans a putative zone of strategic instability. The instability and violence of the antebellum period had little to do with primordial hatred, however. As the works of Prusin, Dragostinova, Brown and others have shown, the communities inhabiting the East Central and Southeastern European borderlands were often ambivalent about and even hostile to the homogenizing bureaucratic state and nationalist projects. This would change over time, however, as communities were progressively nationalized. As a result, the level of popular participation in political violence would also increase over time. As populations gradually came to be defined in ‘national’ terms, the foundation was laid for the exclusion of minority communities in heterogeneous societies and borderlands. However, mass violence had less to do with the inherent nature of the borderland than it had with underlying patterns associated with modernity, nationalism, and the evolution of the modern state. The combination of new technologies of warfare, enhanced state powers of control, and the ideology of integral nationalism drew ever finer lines between dominant nations and ‘others.’ In this regard, the decisive turning point was the First World War, as empires and states now asserted ‘total’ claims over the lives of their citizenry and engaged for the first time in large-scale population displacement.

Jochen Böhler

Generals and Warlords, Revolutionaries and Nation-State Builders: The First World War and its Aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe* If we cast a glance at the maps depicting the course of the First World War in Eastern and Western Europe, one difference is striking. While in the West, an almost static frontline divided the warring parties for years, the Eastern European theatre of war witnessed a number of abrupt changes of scenery and ­actors. Here, the existence of several different centers of conflict made the war a highly disturbing, confusing, and at the same time mobilizing experience for civilians and soldiers alike.1 When settlements, towns, cities, and whole ­regions witnessed the coming and going of different masters, all harboring different objectives and plans concerning the local population, discord was virtually unavoidable. And this discord was not limited to the antagonistic relationship between the occupied and the occupants.2 Fractures often ran through the local population when the changing luck of war led to the formation of variable alliances with retreating or advancing troops, which were sometimes massive armies in full uniform and sometimes not much more than a bunch of armed paramilitaries in rags. Occasionally, locals had no hesitation in taking up arms to defend their homes or to fight for more or less idealistic goals. With the old imperial order crumbling at breathtaking speed, with revolutionary and national movements evolving apace, with millions of returning or deserting soldiers and uprooted civilians roaming a lunar landscape devastated by the war, from 1917 onwards the region formerly covered by tsarist Russia and Habsburg Galicia increasingly turned into a ‘Wild East’, where life became more and more dangerous and dependent on the caprices *

This contribution introduces the findings of recent studies on war, revolution, and civil wars in former tsarist Russia and Habsburg Ukraine 1914–1921, thus offering an interpretational framework for the different violent phenomena in that very area and time span. For a continuation of this line of thought into the 1920s and 1930s, see the contribution by Dietrich Beyrau to this volume. 1 Joshua A. Sanborn: Unsettling the Empire. Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in ­Russia during World War I, in: The Journal of Modern History 2 (2005), 290–324. 2 As the example of tsarist Russia shows, we can use these terms even in reference to domestic regions where the local population was often harassed by compatriot soldiers.

52   Jochen Böhler of fate. The Russian Civil War alone took the lives of between 2.5 and 3.3 million people, and the overall population decline within the borders of Soviet Russia between 1918 and 1920/21 amounted to more than 10 million – almost 7  per cent of the population.3 Not all of them fell victim to direct violence; many succumbed to the inevitable side effects of the war: fatal epidemics and famines significantly added to the death toll.4 As cataclysmal as the effects of the First World War on the region formerly covered by tsarist Russia and Habsburg Galicia were, not all forms of violence beyond the battlefields were revolutionary or new, nor did they completely vanish as soon as the storms subsided. To understand their inner mechanisms and dynamics, we have to look backwards and forward in time, thus locating them within a series of increasingly radical measures taken by armed groups – legitimized either by state authority or by their own force – against civilians in Eastern and Central Europe. In so doing, we come to understand that the First World War in the East was not merely a ‘seminal catastrophe’ that burst into the region completely unannounced, but rather a transitional phase linking the nineteenth with the twentieth century and introducing methods and techniques that had often been planned and sometimes tested, but never before put into practice in such an extreme form.

The reign of the Russian generals The first to suffer under the hardships of war were the millions of civilians in the western territories of tsarist Russia – from the Baltic to the Black Sea – who, in the tidal waves of advancing and retreating armies, had to flee their homes. These mass migrations were triggered not only by looting and atrocities perpetrated by the enemy armies; they constituted an integral part of the Russian military administration’s policies of Russification and ‘scorched earth.’ Unable to conquer German lands, tsarist generals had extended their operational area over large parts of Russia, and were determined that the advancing German and Austrian armies would not be left with any housing, provisions, Mark Conway/Robert Gerwarth: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, in: Donald Bloxham/Robert Gerwarth (eds.): Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge/New York 2011, 152; Dietrich Beyrau: Der Erste Weltkrieg als Bewährungsprobe. Bolschewistische Lernprozesse aus dem ‘imperialistischen’ Krieg, in: Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), 99. 4 Paul Julian Weindling: Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe 1890–1945. Oxford 2000; Bertrand M. Patenaude: The Big Show in Bololand. The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford 2002. 3

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or free labor in the country they were about to invade. When normal life became impossible in areas affected by the scorched earth policy, the local population had to leave, often forced to burn down their own houses and barns. Furthermore, army policies were directed against parts of the local population that were considered to be non-Russian and therefore suspected of sympathizing with the enemy. This affected above all Jews, whose language was often mistaken for German, and the numerically less significant German settlers on the western frontier.5 Spy mania spread among the military ranks, resulting in the eviction of unwanted inhabitants from entire districts. By the summer of 1915, up to 600 000 Russian Jews had been displaced and hundreds of thousands of refugees were living on the streets of larger towns and cities in the Baltic coastal area, Congress Poland, and Galicia. The latter had been conquered in the autumn of 1914 and evacuated in the summer of 1915 by tsarist troops. There, persecutions were directed mainly against the local Jews, although Ukrainians and Poles were also subject to looting by the advancing and retreating armies.6 Much further south, the main victims of Russian soldiers’ excesses were Transcaucasian Muslims.7 With the steady advance of German and Austrian troops and the occupation of Congress Poland in the course of 1915, the figures for displaced persons were propelled into hitherto unknown dimensions as a stream of refugees and expellees, chased by the invading armies of the Central Powers and the retreating tsarist troops, poured eastward into Belorussia, where they sometimes outnumbered the local urban population by a factor of three, and “entire provinces adjacent to the theater of war – Pskov, Smolensk, Vitebsk, Minsk, and Mogilev – were ‘crowded to the limit.’” By now, Ukrainians and Poles had been added to the Russian military’s catalogue of enemies. For many of those ostracized, the journey ended in Siberian forced labor camps, while their property was seized and distributed to Russian soldiers or inbound ­Russian settlers. The estimated number of 3.3 million displaced persons at the end of 1915 shows just how deeply the problem affected Russian society as the Eric Lohr: The Russian Army and the Jews. Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I, in: Russian Review 3 (2001), 404–419; see also the contributions by Jonathan E. Gumz and Piotr J. Wróbel to this volume. 6 Alexander V. Prusin: Nationalizing a Borderland. War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920. Tuscaloosa 2005; see also the contribution by Piotr ­J. Wróbel to this volume. 7 Peter Holquist: Forms of Violence during the Russian Occupation of Ottoman Territory and in Northern Persia (Urmia and Astrabad), October 1914–December 1917, in: Omer Bartov/Eric D. Weitz (eds.): Shatterzone of Empires. Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington 2013, 334–361. 5

54   Jochen Böhler war continued. By early 1917, this figure had almost doubled.8 These uprooted masses were a crucial factor in Russia’s descent into revolution, and presumably added more to the postwar chaos than the revolution itself.9 Nevertheless, this avalanche of flight and expulsion cannot be equated with planned ethnic cleansing. Although practiced by Russian authorities half a century before in the Western Caucasus, deportation and forced migration accompanied by expropriation and resettlement were not consistent state policy in tsarist Russia.10 While some generals applied such ruthless methods in 1914/1915 in order to – as they saw it – ‘secure’ the frontier and remunerate soldiers and citizens of the titular nation at the expense of ethnic minorities, some Duma politicians criticized such harsh measures and insisted that they were counterproductive. In any case, the expulsion of millions of ‘internal ­enemies’ into the interior or even beyond resulted in the de facto Russification of those parts of the empire’s western provinces adjacent to the front.11 Before the war, Russia itself had begun to engage in national projects. However, since the ruling elites were rather wary of granting autonomy to the people, these attempts to adapt the empire to the necessities of modern times were often contradictory and inconsistent. They also competed with dozens of other non-Russian national movements, which had been boosted by the 1905 Revolution and the following short period of fragile and treacherous freedom.12 When Russia entered the war, the mood in the country shifted towards Russian nationalism and patriotism and against the allegedly disproportionate influence of minorities on state and war policies. This development found favor in public opinion and its most fervent supporters were in the highest military ranks of the tsarist army.13 While civilian authorities were in favor of upholding law and order, anti-German and anti-Jewish looting campaigns and pogroms in the front zones – carried out by soldiers (often Cossaks) and supported by the local population – started as early as August 1914 and were largely tolerated by army commanders.14 Martial law had granted the General Gatrell: A Whole Empire Walking. Refugees in Russia during World War I. Bloomington 1999, 17–22, 25, 3.   9 This argument is presented in Peter Holquist: Making War, Forging Revolution. Russia’s Continuum of Crises, 1914–1921. Cambridge 2002. 10 Idem: Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence, 1905–21, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3 (2003), 627–652, 634–635. 11 Lohr, The Russian Army; Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland. 12 Lohr, The Russian Army, 5–6. For further elaboration of this topic, see Theodore R. Weeks: Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914. DeKalb 1996. 13 Lohr, The Russian army, 6–7. 14 Ibid., 17.   8 Peter

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Staff (Stavka) almost unlimited authority in civilian affairs as well, including the right to order confiscations and deportations. The Stavka commander Nikolai Nikolaevich Ianushkevich was convinced that the Germans and Jews in Russia were in the service of the enemy and became notorious for his harsh large scale measures against ‘enemy aliens,’ with other generals following suit.15 Thus, expropriation and mass expulsion in Russia during the first years of the Great War were actually the result of a bundle of measures taken against alleged internal enemies – and thus considered part of the war effort rather than part of a ‘purification’ campaign – and did not reflect a consistent state nationalization policy. To understand what happened in Russia’s western provinces in 1914/1915, other factors must be taken into account. First and foremost, it was the incompetence of the Russian military personnel combined with the inadequacy of the military apparatus in the face of an almost insurmountable task that led to chaos and uncontrolled violence. At the start of the war, the Russian government had acted as it had done so often before and placed responsibility for the imperial periphery in the hands of military administrators. In areas like Congress Poland, people were so used to the implementation of martial law that they would probably have been quite surprised had they been subject to a purely civilian administration during the war, of all times.16 The division of the Russian landmass into a heartland under the civilian rule of the Council of Ministers and a western cordon sanitaire administered by the Stavka was consistent with imperial customs and logic and was nothing contemporaries, including the Russian government, initially worried about. Things took an unforeseen turn only when it emerged that martial law meant that the armies in the western provinces were completely independent of civilian control. This fatal flaw was partly due to the fact that the tsar as the ultimate imperial authority had not assumed the full supreme command as planned, which would have placed him in control of both the Stavka and the Council of Ministers. When he passed the mantle to his nephew, the Grand Duke Nicholas, both institutions became virtually separate, ­resulting initially in a dual form of government in wartime Russia. Theoretically, both institutions were supposed to cooperate. Yet in reality, in the first year of the war they acted independently of, if not against, each other. The atmosphere between both factions was poisoned by rivalry, bonfires of vanities, and ­mutual mistrust. Even in the field, army commanders and their chiefs of staff, if ­dependent on different parties to the palace intrigues, would not communicate with each other. Incompetence at the highest levels of the military hierarchy, 15 Ibid., 16 See

19–21. Holquist, Violent Russia, 633.

56   Jochen Böhler which was furthered by the old imperial system of outright nepotism, meant that in 1914/1915 there was no consistent – not to speak of effective – Russian war policy.17 Nevertheless, as a result of the armies’ expulsions and destruction “hundreds of thousands of people had hit the roads in the context of direct violence or barely veiled force. These were violent migrations, occasioned by the war and conducted in conditions of grave peril.”18 Had the war, as expected by most contemporaries, lasted only a few weeks, even these problematic constellations would not have been a cause for concern for the Russian leadership. Once the fighting was over, a civilian government would probably have compensated the population for all the hardships and injustice the war had brought. But no one was prepared for the months and years of embittered battles to come. Instead of a fast victory, in the first year of the war the Russian armies – despite initial successes – suffered severe losses of manpower, material, and territory. As hundreds of thousands of frustrated Russian soldiers retreated from the front, they were joined everywhere by masses of disappointed civilians in search of scapegoats that would make the defeat both understandable and bearable. Even if the Stavka had been willing to control and stem arbitrary violence against minorities by a marauding soldiery supported by local misfits, it would almost certainly have failed in this task. Absorbed with managing supplies and constantly revising strategies in order to hold back a technically superior enemy, the Stavka did not allocate sufficient personnel to deal with administrative tasks: in 1914 “a total of eight men in the Stavka (including orderlies) were supposed to administer an area larger than the entire state territory of each of the European powers with which Russia was at war.”19 However, as mentioned above, the generals were not at all willing to champion the interests of the suppressed and persecuted parts of the civilian population. In their view, it was entirely logical to render potential helpers of the enemy forces harmless; the relentless laws of war dictated this. Incompetent commanders such as General Danilov even reckoned that the large-scale requi­ sitions without compensation – in other words: looting – conducted by his William Graf: The Reign of the Generals. Military Government in Western Russia, 1914–1915. PhD thesis, Ann Arbor 1972, 40–51, 158–180. This fascinating study of the Russian military’s domestic policies at the beginning of the First World War has not been published as a book, but a copy is available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI7227395 (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013). 18 On the impact of these policies on relations between Russian soldiers and civilians and the hardships they brought to the western provinces, see Sanborn, Unsettling the Empire, 307. 19 Graf, The Reign of the Generals, 30. 17 Daniel

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soldiers on Russian territory were in accordance with martial law.20 While he was mistaken here, the policy of scorched earth implemented area-wide in the summer of 1915 did indeed comply with an official decree obliging the military authorities to supervise the destruction of all buildings and other property “which, according to military considerations, may impede the movement or actions of our troops or be favorable to the enemy.”21 These ‘tactics’ were anything but new in Russian military history; they only repeated the scorched earth policy applied a century previously when Napoleon’s troops marched to Moscow, with the difference that now, they were being employed in hitherto undreamt-of dimensions. Disastrous as the campaign against ‘internal enemies’ was in its consequences for those directly affected, the results were far from pleasing to its advocates: ethnic Germans played such an important role in the Russian economy and military apparatus that their complete removal would have been suicidal, especially during a war with enormous losses and no end in sight. But the campaign was proof of the almost unlimited power the Russian generals wielded in a highly mobilized and militarized society at war.

Civil wars in Europe’s ‘Wild East’ The endowment of tsarist military leaders with extraordinary powers and competences proved even less controllable when state authority was challenged in Russia. As early as 1914/15, “virtually every facet of life [had come] either directly or indirectly under the authority of the military commands in the theater of operations.”22 After the Revolutions of 1917, the generals had to opt for or against the new Russian government, and the legitimacy (or otherwise) of their campaigns was a matter of perspective. As commanders of the Red Army, they were regarded either as traitors or heroes of the revolution; as commanders of the White Armies that, with allied support, would fight the Bolsheviks in the following years, they were either the last representatives of the old Empire or counterrevolutionaries. For the people living in the areas occupied by their troops, they were often neither one nor the other, but merely leaders of enormous brigand gangs that terrorized the local population by drafting arbitrarily, requisitioning, plundering, and organizing punitive expe-

20 Ibid., 21 Ibid., 22 Ibid.

54. 35.

58   Jochen Böhler ditions and shootings of civilians.23 The leaders of peasant armies who oscillated between the Reds and the Whites added to the confusion, the most prominent example being Nestor Makhno in Ukraine.24 But Makhno and his men were by no means an extraordinary phenomenon: in the final stage of the war, the grey zone between regular army units in dissolution and bands of marauders was populated by numerous local warlords who reigned within a belt that ran along the western borders of tsarist Russia, stretching from the Baltics to Ukraine.25 Although the transition from the reign of the tsarist generals to the reign of warlords in the same areas might appear seamless, there was a significant difference. As arbitrary as the measures taken by the former may have appeared to those who were affected by them, their legitimacy derived from the imperial crown, and, as argued above, they were in line with the traditional policy of ‘securing’ the borders of the empire. When the imperial order collapsed, legitimacy shifted from the abstract ideal of state legislation to the brutal reality of the laws of the jungle. Historically, the return of warlords to the European scene is more reminiscent of the turmoil of the Thirty Years’ War than it is of the state policies characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Joshua Sanborn has coined the concept of an “absence of functioning state control” to explain this atavism: In 1917, regime change and military defeat led to a full-blown collapse of the state and a near-total erasure of the distinction between civilian and military power. By 1918, uniformed men with guns held power throughout the former [Russian] empire, and they were only partly organised into hierarchies of power with a centralised chain of command. They ruled through terror, and on occasion with charisma, but they ruled locally and tyrannically virtually everywhere. The decade from 1915 to 1925 was an era of warlords all across Eurasia.26 Sanborn: The Genesis of Russian Warlordism. Violence and Governance during the First World War and the Civil War, in: Contemporary European History 3 (2010), 195–213. 24 Felix Schnell: Räume des Schreckens. Gewalträume und Gruppenmilitanz in der Ukraine, 1905–1933. Hamburg 2012; David Leuenberger: Bäuerliche Revolution in der Ukraine. Selbstverständnis und Handlungsräume der Machno-Bewegung im Russischen Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1921. MA thesis, Jena 2010. 25 On Belorussia, see Janusz Cisek: Białoruskie oddziały gen. Stanisława Bułak-Bałachowicza w polityce Józefa Piłsudskiego w okresie wojny polsko-bolszewickiej, marzec-grudzień 1920. PhD thesis, Wrocław 1993; Oleg Łatyszonek: Ziełony Dąb. Przez pięc lat stawiali opór bolszewikom. Dopiero dziś mówi się o nich na Białorusi, in: Uważam Rze (special issue “Historia”), 25. 4. 2013, 72–75. 26 Sanborn, The Genesis of Russian Warlordism, 196; Jörg Baberowski: Krieg in staatsfernen Räumen. Rußland und die Sowjetunion 1905–1950, in: Dietrich Beyrau/Michael Hoch­ geschwender/Dieter Langewiesche (eds.): Formen des Krieges. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Paderborn 2007, 290–309, calls it “areas distant from the state” (staatsferne Räume). 23 Joshua

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We must bear in mind, however, that the virtually unlimited exercise of power and violence was not confined to the vacuum left by the empires, but, as we have seen, also preceded it, and, as we will see, was integral to the revolutionary and national state-building processes fought out between rivaling formations on the ruins of those empires. Thus, violence was not limited to the distant state periphery, but also furthered the emergence of states at the very center. Cynical as it may seem, in the period between 1915 and 1918 the region witnessed relatively peaceful times with the occupation of large parts of western Russia by the Central Powers and the establishment of the district of Ober Ost (the area under the command of the Supreme Commander of the German forces in the East, covering Lithuania, Latvia, and parts of Belarus), the Government General (Generalgouvernement) of Warsaw under German rule, and the Military Government General (Militärgeneralgouvernment) of Lublin under Austrian rule, as well as the recovery of Galicia and the occupation of Russian Ukraine. The occupation was harsh; the territory was bled dry, with hundreds of thousands of civilians drafted for forced labor in the German Reich, thus undoubtedly producing a blueprint for times to come. But it was in no way comparable to the wave of mass violence and genocide that swept across the same territory a quarter of a century later, when German and Austrian soldiers reappeared on the scene.27 With the collapse of the Central Powers in the West in November 1918, however, the eastern borderlands, which had been completely ceded to them under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk only a few months before, suddenly had to be vacated. This was the moment the different nationalist movements in the region had been waiting for to implement their goals. In the meantime, revolutionary Ober Ost, see Vejas G. Liulevicius: War land on the Eastern Front. Culture, national identity and German occupation in World War I. Cambridge/New York 2000; see also the contribution by Robert L. Nelson to this volume. On the territory of former Congress Poland, see Cezary Król: Besatzungsherrschaft in Polen im Ersten und im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Charakteristik und Wahrnehmung, in: Bruno Thoss/Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds.): Erster Weltkrieg, Zweiter Weltkrieg. Ein Vergleich: Krieg, Kriegserlebnis, Kriegs­ erfahrung in Deutschland. Paderborn 2002, 577–591; Arkadiusz Stempin: Deutsche Besatzungsmacht und Zivilbevölkerung in Polen. Juden und Deutsche im Vergleich, in: ­Alfred Eisfeld (ed.): Besetzt, interniert, deportiert. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die deutsche, jüdische, polnische und ukrainische Zivilbevölkerung im östlichen Europa. Essen 2013, 153–172; see also the contributions by Jonathan E. Gumz and Stephan Lehnstaedt to this volume. On Ukraine, see Mark von Hagen: War in a European Borderland. Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918. Seattle 2007; Wolfram Dornik et al. (eds.): Die Ukraine. Zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fremdherrschaft 1917–22. Graz 2011.

27 On

60   Jochen Böhler Russia was fighting on all fronts, against the same separatist movements to stem the continuous erosion of its territory, and against the ‘counterrevolutionary’ White Armies for its very existence. Both state-building processes – the ‘nationalizing’ states of Eastern Europe and the ‘revolutionizing’ Soviet state – should not be seen in isolation from each other. They were “parallel projects, driven by similar perceived imperatives of state power, rather than two separate universes.”28 What Dan Diner has called “a distinct arc of conflict” which “spanned Central and Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to northern Italy and the Adriatic” was simply the final stage of a global conflict that had mutated from a largely conventional war into revolution, several civil wars, and national conflicts.29 While their epicenter was in Central and Eastern ­Europe, their repercussions were felt as far away as Paris, Washington, or ­Irkutsk.30 Especially at its very end, the First World War was characterized by different forms of paramilitary violence.31 It was surely also due to the giant population movements and losses, the devastated landscape, and the destroyed or plundered resources, that the struggle for life and death in Central and Eastern Europe from 1918 onwards was not limited to soldiers, but increasingly affected civilians as well. In the Baltic countries, civil wars were sparked by declarations of independence in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and the subsequent invasion by the Red Army in 1918/1919. “With the Soviet spreading Communism by infection and by attacking armies,” Herbert Hoover would recall in 1951, “with the Balt element endeavoring to control the governments, with an uncontrolled Germancommanded army in their midst, and rank starvation everywhere, these peoples were fighting on four fronts. In this almost impossible setting, however, the people of each state at once organized provisional republics.”32 Hoover knew what he was talking about: from 1918 to 1921 he had headed the then largest relief action in world history, which was carried out by the American

point is also made in Nick Baron/Peter Gatrell: Population Displacement, StateBuilding, and Social Identity in the Lands of the Former Russian Empire, 1917–23, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4 (2003), 51–100, 70–72. 29 Dan Diner: Cataclysms. A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge, Madison 2008, 64. 30 On the notion of several ‘civil wars’ in this period, see Holquist, Making War, 5; see also Jochen Böhler: Enduring Violence. The Post-War Struggles in East-Central Europe 1917– 1921, in: Journal of Contemporary History 3 (2014, forthcoming). 31 Robert Gerwarth/John Horne (eds.): War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War. Oxford 2012. 32 Herbert Hoover: The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover. Years of Adventure, 1874–1920. New York 1951, 369. 28 This

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Relief Administration and fed millions of starving people in Central and Eastern Europe.33 As in the other parts of the former western Russian provinces, the situation on the Baltic coastline was further complicated by the fact that the Central Powers had lost the war, but their troops had not yet managed to leave the area. Entire German units refused to demobilize and joined the White Armies in their fight against the Red Army. Since there was a tradition of German colonization in the Baltic states reaching back to medieval times (Baltic Germans still made up large parts of the nobility and upper classes), in the eyes of the German troops, their fighting was legitimate, even if they had already crossed the line to paramilitarism. “The Red and White terror campaigns and the proliferation of various paramilitary groups,” writes Tomas Balkelis, “stand out as the most visible instances of this new wave of ‘brutalization’ in the ­region.” However, this violence was not just a logical continuation of the war, nor was it merely the result of the brutalization of hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers due to their prior frontline experience. It was in fact the consequence of the nationalization of Baltic soldiers in the Russian army towards the end of the war and the frustration of German soldiers who refused to accept defeat after their own front had been propelled further eastwards than they had ever dreamt of. In the meantime, the men on the other side of the line cast their lot with the Bolshevik revolution.34 Since the center of our area of interest had once been the site of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, which was liquidated by Russia, Prussia, and Austria towards the end of the eighteenth century, it is not surprising that it was the emerging Polish state that engaged in a number of armed conflicts with neighboring powers when defining its new boundaries in the period from 1918 to 1921. As had been the case further north, service in imperial army units defined by nationality had shaped the later Polish state troops, most of whom had supposedly dreamt of achieving national independence while they still wore Russian, German, or Austrian uniforms. In late October 1918 about one million Polish veterans of the Great War roamed the territories predestined to become the Second Polish Republic in just a couple of days. The two major conflicts the young Polish state would have to fight out were the recapture of Galicia, where Ukrainian nationalists had occupied Lemberg and declared a Western Ukrainian state in early November 1918, and the Polish-Soviet war in The Big Show; Matthew Lloyd Adams: When Cadillacs Crossed Poland. The American Relief Administration in Poland, 1919–1922. PhD thesis, Savannah 2005 (to be published in 2014). 34 See Thomas Balkelis: Remobilization of German and Lithuanian Paramilitaries after the Great War, in: Journal of Contemporary History 3 (2014, forthcoming). 33 Patenaude,

62   Jochen Böhler 1920. Polish soldiers were also involved in the realignment of state borders to the north and west, fighting Lithuanian ­national forces in and around Vilnius and German paramilitaries in Upper Silesia.35 All these military actions were accompanied by atrocities committed on both sides, such as looting, rape, the torture and execution of prisoners and civilians, and pogroms. This violence apparently stemmed from the fact that state armies in the region were often only in the process of being formed when the fighting was going on. Many combatants obviously internalized the paramilitary character of the conflicts and felt no obligation to adhere to international laws on warfare.36 Inadequate equipment and non-functioning supply lines also prompted the troops to take whatever they needed from the local population. “There is such a shortage of boots in the Polish Army that the soldiers will go to any length to get them,” observed the American lawyer ­Arthur Lemann Goodhard on a visit to Poland in 1919 with the Morgenthau Commission, whose task it was to investigate anti-Jewish pogroms committed by Polish soldiers. “This shortage of essentials is one of the reasons why the Polish officers have not been able to suppress robbery with as firm a hand as they should have. One of them said to me, ‘When my men are going barefoot, I have to close one eye while they try to get boots for themselves.’”37 But brutal assaults of the local population in the making of nation states were by no means limited to the troops. It seems that the sheer complexity and the obscurity of war aims and frontiers, and the difficulty of distinguishing between friend and foe further radicalized the conduct of war after 1918. Towards the end of the war, the old order in which clearly defined states had confronted each other collapsed. For many combatants in 1918 and the years that followed, it was not yet clear what the new world order would look like. The soldiers of the Western allies who came to northern Russia in 1918/1919 as part of an international intervention force under British command barely understood why they had to fight the Red Army, when officially, peace had already been concluded in Paris. “[The American soldier] had gone into the army to fight Germany, and here he found himself after the armistice fighting an unknown foe with whom the United States was not at war.” This loss of further reading, see Włodzimierz Borodziej: Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert. München 2010, 97–124; Piotr J. Wróbel: The Revival of Poland and Paramilitary Violence, 1918–1920, in: Rüdiger Bergien/Ralf Pröve (eds.): Spießer, Patrioten, Revolutionäre. Militärische Mobilisierung und gesellschaftliche Ordnung in der Neuzeit. Göttingen 2010, 281–303. 36 Peter Gatrell: War After the War. Conflicts, 1918–1922, in: John Horne (ed.): A Companion to World War I. Malden 2012, 558–575, 559. 37 Arthur Lehman Goodhart: Poland and the Minority Races. London 1920, 88–89. 35 For

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orientation fueled a general sense of frustration among the soldiers and led to numerous atrocities against the Russian civilian population.38 Paramilitary fighters not engaged in well-defined revolutionary or state-building processes chose to make sense of the chaos by following a radicalized ideology, which legitimized violence against combatants, and often made violence against entire political or ethnic groups, including women and children, an aim in itself. This was true above all of the emerging paramilitary fascist combat units engaged in ‘counterrevolutionary’ struggle, especially when that struggle was fanned by the traumatizing experience of defeat and the failure of demobilization.39 Thus, in the period immediately following the Great War, when Central and Eastern Europe were turned into a hotbed of nation states emerging out of the chaos left by war and revolution, the region witnessed a wave of violence that cannot be explained in simple terms, but was shaped by different factors that varied from place to place and from situation to situation. The absence of any kind of state control ultimately encouraged ruthless warlords to fill the vacuum; national and revolutionary struggles produced violence as widely tolerated ‘side effects’ of the respective state-building processes; underequipped soldiers and paramilitaries vented their frustration on the local ­population and lived at its expense; and ideological warriors worshipped and practiced autotelic violence. What was common to all these phenomena was – besides the mere will to survive by standing on the victor’s side – a longing to fill the void left by the dissolution of the old order and a desire to find new meaning and orientation in the form of idealistic or ideological goals such as national independence, social justice, or racial superiority. Since all these goals competed with each other – and were often mutually exclusive – their advocates in Central and Eastern Europe were convinced that they could only be achieved through the use of arbitrary force.

Albertson: Fighting Without a War. An Account of Military Intervention in North Russia. New York 1920, 36–37. 39 Robert Gerwarth: The Central European Counter-Revolution. Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War, in: Past and Present 200 (2008), 175– 209; see also the contribution by Robert Gerwarth to this volume. 38 Ralph

64   Jochen Böhler

Conclusions It has been stated that since Russia – unlike other European countries – was not separated by the sea from the ‘colonies’ at its southern periphery, methods of colonial warfare could be more easily imported from one end of the country to the other.40 Yet the conduct of the Russian army in the first year of the war was not consistent with a purely colonial or nationalist agenda. It was influenced by several different factors and only to some degree represented the continuation of the paracolonial policies previously deployed in the borderlands. The exigencies of warfare as defined by the local military authorities also encouraged this conduct. As Daniel William Graf has summarized, “the army’s nationality policies [in 1914/1915] are at bottom the extension and ­intensification of the historical patterns of behavior of the tsarist regime, but now under the pressure of circumstances created by Russia’s involvement in a war for which she was unprepared.”41 But one must look forward and backwards to understand the key role the war played in transmitting patterns of violence from prewar to revolutionary and postwar Russia. Firstly, although they were not a consistent state policy, the enormous population movements “marked an important early step away from the world of empires and the mixing of populations during the so-called long peace of the century prior to 1914 toward population division in the age of nationalizing states and war.”42 Eric Lohr has drawn our attention to the striking fact that as early as 1915 Mikhail Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich, the commander of the Petrograd military district, proposed the complete liquidation of the “hostile elements” which, due to the expulsions from the western territories, had flooded the Russian heartland. After the revolution, BonchBruevich would serve the Bolsheviks.43 Others proved less capable of adapting to the new circumstances. The Cossacks, who had constituted some of the most violent units in terms of their treatment of the local population between 1914 and 1919, now became the target of brutal ‘de-Cossackization’ programs in the Don Basin.44 Secondly, Peter Holquist has stated in reference to the conduct of Russian troops not only in Armenia and Persia, but also in our area of interest, that

40 Holquist,

Violent Russia, 633. The Reign of the Generals, 119. 42 Eric Lohr: Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I. Cambridge 2003, 121. 43 Ibid.,155; Holquist, Violent Russia, 638. 44 Holquist, Making War, 166–205. 41 Graf,

Generals and Warlords, Revolutionaries and Nation State Builders   65

this arbitrary military violence led into revolutionary chaos. Between 1917 and 1921, it assumed a specific shape, which can be labeled revolutionary violence yet was not so much a child of the revolution itself, but first and foremost of the prerevolutionary war years from 1914 to 1917.45 This is an important argument. It points to the transcendent character of violence, which as a macrostructure rarely appears out of the blue, but usually has a pre- and post-history. So, while the Bolsheviks looked to the revolution for their philosophy of power and control through violence in the 1920s, the revolutionary violence itself had partly evolved from a tradition of Russian autocratic state policy and the war experience that directly preceded the revolution. While the Red Army defended the revolution and carried it further on its bayonets, other agencies in the region pursued state-building programs. As Holquist argues, these two developments were complementary rather than antagonistic. Following the logic of paramilitary and parastate violence, they formed two sides of the one coin forged in the fires of postwar struggles in Central and Eastern Europe.46 These struggles intensified when independent warlords, counterrevolutionary paramilitaries and Allied intervention forces entered the scene, thus adding to the total confusion and overthrow of values and order. The seamless transition from ‘total war’ via ‘total revolution’ and civil wars to a permanent ‘class war’ waged against parts of its own society in peacetime, however, makes the Russian experience a special case.47 Rather than national revolutions, the regional struggles for national independence in future Poland and the Baltics were actually part of the Eastern European civil wars after 1917. Societies that went from war and civil war to peace without a revolutionary break managed to domesticize and stem violence once the weapons fell silent. Instead of taking power from an authoritarian state by force, the nationalist movements in those societies erected their state structures in a power vacuum left by the furious finale of the First World War and were challenged only by competing movements with similar dreams for different people. Violence had been a means to achieve this goal, but in the long run it would prove rather counterproductive and destabilizing in a society mainly designed along democratic lines. The example of the Second Polish Republic clearly shows how violence transitioned from war to peace in the midst of a state-building process, and how it was later domesticated and

45 Holquist,

Forms of Violence; idem., Making War. Violent Russia, 644–645. 47 Ibid., 640–641. 46 Holquist,

66   Jochen Böhler channeled by state structures, resulting in a resolute, but all in all rather moderate Polonization program in the region bordering Soviet Russia in the interwar period.48 In the meantime, Soviet Russia had entered a state of permanent class struggle, fought with the weapons forged in the fires of war and revolution.

Smogorzewska: Kresowe osadnictwo wojskowe, 1920–1945. Warszawa 2003; Dominik Kaźmierski: KOP jako cywilizator. Bronili wschodniej granicy, budujęc szkoły i lecznice; in: Uważam Rze (special issue “Historia”), 25. 4. 2013, 14–16; Paweł Rzewuski: Diabeł Poleski. Wojewoda Kostek-Biermacki był twardy, ale bronił biednych, in: ibid., 18–21; see also Kathryn Ward Ciancia: Civilizing the Village. Environmental and Human Transformation in Poland’s ‘Wild East’, 1918–1939. Lecture at the 44th ASEEES Annual Convention in New Orleans, 17. 11. 2012.

48 Janina

II. Occupation

Jonathan E. Gumz

Losing Control: The Norm of Occupation in Eastern Europe during the First World War How does an occupier control an occupied country? In many accounts of ­occupations, control emanates from the interplay between the occupiers’ policies and the population’s accommodation or resistance to such policies. This immediately leads to a series of questions that guide research on occupation. What were the government’s plans for a particular occupied territory? How did interest groups from the occupying country compete for resources in the occupied country? What were the views of those administering the occupation? As always, those who are supposed to be controlled play a role in this equation. What, if any, forms of resistance were open to the occupied? What motivated resistance? The quick equivalence made between an occupied country and a conquered country helps shape these questions. The occupying state can do what it pleases with the conquered country. Restraints are usually generated internally among the occupiers as well as from within the occupied territory. When handled in this way, occupation loses its dimension as an international norm. The absence of this dimension derives from the experience of the Second World War, when occupation as an international norm was shattered and its international elements declared irrelevant. But what if we wind the clock back to before the Second World War? For historians of World War I, this requires that we proceed forward from the assumptions of 1914, not backward from the assumptions of 1945. Then the importance of the international norm of occupation increases. That norm is impossible to understand without recognizing the degree to which it was linked to the maintenance of state sovereignty in Europe and the containment of war. Occupation sought to maintain the theoretical sovereignty of a defeated state. War containment in the nineteenth century was predicated on the clean divide between civilian and military spheres in war. If sovereignty was called into question, occupation, and with it war containment, also came under pressure, leading to violence on the ground. Occupation as devised in the late nineteenth century applied to Europe alone and much of the colonial world was excluded. If we view occupation as an international norm with a precise meaning in the pre-1914 world, we can place its transformation during the First World War in perspective. Given occupation’s close connection to the world

70   Jonathan E. Gumz of pre-1914 European sovereign states, it comes as no surprise that its ­unraveling in Europe began precisely where state sovereignty experienced its greatest crisis during the war. That place was Eastern Europe. But in order to understand the transformation of occupation, it does not suffice to recognize how abstract concepts might be linked and plot where those concepts collapsed. The collapse of occupation as a norm in Eastern Europe was a dynamic process subject to a range of contingencies that arose in the early years of the war and was intimately related to the crises experienced by the oldest imperial sovereignties in the war: the Habsburg Empire and tsarist Russia. It was this wartime crisis of imperial sovereignty in 1914 and 1915 that paved the way for the fall of occupation across Eastern Europe. It called fundamental assumptions with regard to occupation in the pre-1914 world into question. This process accelerated after 1917 with the progressive and massive implosion of imperial Russian sovereignty. It did not unfold in the same way everywhere, and there were exceptions to the rule. Nonetheless, I believe that focusing on the broader process allows us to better situate occupation during the First World War within the history of occupation in the twentieth century. In this short article I would like to develop the outlines of a broader argument regarding the transformation of occupation and the expansion of violence during the First World War. First, in order to understand the dynamics at play in violence in the context of occupation we have to properly situate occupation as an international norm specific to the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That norm should not be slotted into a broader history of human rights as has often been done with attempts to regulate war after the Franco-Prussian War. Rather, occupation should be connected to classic nineteenth-century norms such as sovereignty and war containment. It is helpful to think of these attempts to regulate war as expressions of norms as opposed to hard and fast laws. Too often, arguments regarding the ‘breaking of international law’ devolve into a laundry list of violations and remarks about the disregard for international law. Yet norms are far more robust than laws, and violations of norms do not render norms irrelevant. It is only when the norm appears to disappear completely and is not even referenced, that we witness a definitive break with it. Second, occupation became a fragile norm in Eastern Europe over the course of the war. The origins of that fragility lay in the initial violence of the war. The first year of the war in the East called the sovereignties of imperial Russia and the Habsburg Empire into question. This process was rooted in the empires themselves, but also in the contingent events of the war in these empires, and the policies devised for the occupied territories. The close links between sovereignty, war containment, and occu-

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pation meant that the faltering of one of these norms called the others into question. By the end of the war the nineteenth-century norm of occupation in Eastern Europe had been eroded. In turn, violence in the occupied territories became increasingly uncontained. Germany found itself an actor in this process and was overtaken by it, even though it had avoided the crisis of sovereignty that struck the Habsburg Empire and imperial Russia. Leaving its expansive war aims to one side, until at least late 1916, Germany generally tried to stay within the boundaries of the Hague Conventions in places such as ­occupied Poland and Belgium. But gradually this approach was abandoned in favor of a new type of transformative occupation, which was often styled as an intervention. In such interventions, the German military, itself in a state of partial dissolution, became less capable of controlling violence, becoming a mere player in the violence in the occupied territory. The turn from the norm of occupation by 1918 signaled a complete reversal of the German stance at pre-war international legal conferences in defense of war containment and in favor of occupation.

Occupation as a norm on the eve of war If we view occupation as a norm that assumed a particular form over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, our gaze is inevitably drawn to the international legal conferences in the 30 years following the Franco-Prussian War. These conferences sought to establish a norm of occupation that was commensurate with the standards of European conflict in the late nineteenth century. Such a norm ran the gauntlet of professional military interests and those of the emerging profession of international law. It was clear that the norm of occupation would be invoked in any conflict that involved one or more of the Great Powers. Before World War I, imperial Russia was at pains to show, for example, that it adhered to the norm of occupation in the Russo-Turkish War.1 As with all norms, this norm did not require absolute adherence in order to remain relevant. As studies in political science have shown, states transgress norms, but the power of a norm can be such that they

1

Peter Holquist: The Russian Empire as Civilized State. International Law as Principle and Practice in Imperial Russia, 1874–1878, in: National Council for Eurasian and East European Research 2004, at: www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/2004_818-06g_Holquist.pdf (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013); Eric Myles: ‘Humanity’, ‘Civilization’ and ‘the International Community’ in the Late Imperial Russian Mirror. Three Ideas ‘Topical for Our Days’, in: Journal of the History of International Law 2 (2002), 310–334.

72   Jonathan E. Gumz feel compelled to portray themselves as acting in accordance with that norm. Thus, a norm can be reinforced even when it is violated in practice.2 What were the specific features of the norm of occupation? One line of argument places it within a narrative of the progressive humanization of war. Such an argument emphasizes the Martens clause, which declared that elements of war and occupation not directly addressed by the Hague Conventions remained under the dictates of the “principles of humanity and the civil­ ized conscience.” But as Antonio Cassese argues, the importance now attached to the Martens clause does not reflect the importance attributed to it at the Hague Conference of 1899. At that time it was considered – even by its author – a clever diplomatic trick to keep the conference from collapsing into dis­ agreement.3 If we avoid a Whiggish perspective on law and occupation, we see just how much sovereignty and war containment shaped the norm of occupation in the late nineteenth century. Occupation sought to protect European state sovereignty by treating the occupying power as a ‘trustee’ for the departed sovereign government. The Brussels Declaration of 1874 used the term “usufructuary” to describe the occupier. The Hague Convention of 1900 determined that the occupier was bound to respect existing laws insofar as they did not interfere with “military necessity” and was to avoid transforming the country it occupied. Local officials were to remain in their posts and obey the occupying authorities to ensure as little disruption as possible in the lives of the occupied.4 Armies could requisition supplies and continue to collect taxes in occupied countries in order to support the occupying forces. The norm of occupation attempted to reinforce the sovereignty of the occupied country and assumed that the lower levels of bureaucracy would continue to function in occupied countries. This meant that defeated countries had an incentive to accept defeat and hope for a more amenable deal at the peace table instead of choosing to continue what might be an ever more destructive conflict. Those who resisted an established occupation did not receive the protection of belligerent status and attempts to explicitly recognize resistance to oc2

The more historically inflected literature from political scientists offers an interesting approach for historians to consider. See for example Sarah Percy: Mercenaries. The History of a Norm in International Relations. Oxford 2007; Richard M. Price: The Chemical Weapons Taboo. Ithaca 1997; idem: A Genealogy of the Chemical Weapons Taboo, in: International Organization 1 (1995), 73–103; Jeffrey W. Legro: Which Norms Matter? Revisiting the ‘Failure’ of Internationalism, in: International Organization 1 (1997), 31–63. 3 Antonio Cassese: The Martens Clause. Half a Loaf or Simply Pie in the Sky?, in: European Journal of International Law 1 (2000), 216. 4 See the Declaration Concerning the Laws and Customs of War, Brussels, 27 August 1874, at: http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/135?OpenDocument (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013).

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cupation were rejected at the Hague Conference of 1899.5 Although delegates such as Fedor Martens realized that such uprisings might well occur and even considered them noble undertakings, they also recognized that such uprisings ran extreme risks and would probably be crushed by occupying armies. Yet, in line with the moderate liberalism of many international lawyers, such a defeat was seen as part of a nation’s progressive development. This did not mean that resistance was legalized, however. German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian military delegates resolutely opposed the legalization of resistance to occupation and warned that such legalization could escalate violence. These arguments followed the nineteenth-century tradition of contained conflict and clear distinctions between soldiers and civilians. A careful reading of the Hague discussions reveals that if any country at the conference wanted to depart from contained war in Europe, it was Belgium, not Germany. Certainly, within the German army, as Isabel Hull has argued, some believed war could no longer be contained by norms and was simply the playing out of unrestrained force.6 But it was the Belgian delegate who rued the fact that the Hague Conventions separated civilians from conflict and de-legitimized patriotic resistance against an established occupation.7 The question of when an occupation actually began or was made ‘effective’ further underscored a general consensus regarding the problem of legalizing resistance to an occupation. The reason why some countries wanted the moment of effective occupation pushed back as far as possible was that this allowed them to challenge an enemy farther into an invasion. In order to quickly extend their control over a territory, others wanted effective occupation to be relatively easy to achieve. This entire disagreement, however, revealed a much broader consensus as to the inadvisability of resistance to occupation and the importance of containing war in Europe. Both sides recognized that once an occupation was in force, resistance had to end. Seen from this perspective, occupation, in particular the way in which it both limited and allowed for violence, can also be understood as the product 5

This was the clear implication of explicitly granting belligerent status to civilians who rose up to defend their country against invasion but behaved in accordance with the laws and customs of war enshrined in article 2 of the 1899 Hague Convention. See Article 1, Chapter 1, Article 2, Annex to the Convention (II) with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land, The Hague, 29 July 1899, at: http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/150?Open Document, (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013). 6 Isabel V. Hull: Absolute Destruction. Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca 2005, 123–125. 7 Quoted from a speech by Auguste Beernaert in James Scott (ed.): The Proceedings of the Hague Peace Conferences. The Conference of 1899 and 1907. New York 1921, 502–504.

74   Jonathan E. Gumz of complex negotiations between two emerging professions in the late nineteenth century: the professional officer corps and the international legal profession.8 War was the territory on which these professions staked their claims. Like many professional debates, this discussion strove to achieve workable ­solutions to the situations the contending professions were trying to regulate. The most explosive theme in the discussion was violence against civilians in war and occupation as well as the officer corps’ concern that conscript armies might find themselves exposed to civilians who attacked soldiers with impunity. In this respect, it should come as no surprise that representatives of the German officer corps, whose Prussian element had developed the model of officer professionalization, took the most aggressive stance in these negotiations. The solution to this professional face-off between the military and the international legal professions in the European context was a norm of occupation that limited violence and blocked the transformation of the sovereign state temporarily defeated in war.9

From the crises of 1914 and 1915 to the demise of the norm of occupation This norm of occupation came under pressure from the very beginning of the war. That pressure resulted from the gradual loosening of control over violence in occupied territories and the moments prior to established occupations, when the rules governing belligerency were hazy at best. Furthermore, the fragility of the Habsburg and Russian armies led to a series of practices that undermined the distinction between soldier and civilian. Yet, for the Habsburg army and, to a lesser extent, the Russian army, the initial violence of this period, on their own territory and on the territories they occupied, was the violence of pre-1914 armies. That is to say, both armies sought to police the borders of violence in war and to resolutely suppress what they viewed as the unjustified interference of civilians in war or their subversion in occupation. Yet this policing was quite violent. It was often infused with fears of ‘subversive’ ethnic and religious groups and it began to unhinge various sovereign claims in these regions. On the development of the profession of international law, see Martti Koskenniemi: The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960. Cambridge 2002. 9 Nehal Bhuta: The Antinomies of Transformative Occupation, in: European Journal of ­International Law 4 (2005), 721–740. 8

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The Habsburg and Russian armies were fragile forces when the war began. They were conscript armies managed by small professional officer corps. As with all professional officer corps, they asserted their dominance over the sphere of war based on claims to expert knowledge, but their armies were filled with conscripts, in which they had little confidence.10 The Habsburg army had not fought for 40 years and the Russian army’s performance in the Russo-Japanese war raised troubling questions about the army’s reliability. There were perpetual doubts within the officer corps as to whether these armies would actually function in the event of war. Contrary to the ­image of a rush to arms in 1914, the mobilization efforts of the Russian army were plagued by resistance in the countryside. This resistance was fueled by concerns about the fairness of conscription and the abundant alcohol that flowed before conscripts departed for their mobilization depots.11 By mid-1915, the Russian army lacked officers to control the huge influx of territorial recruits (opolcheniye), who had been called up to replace the losses of the previous ten months.12 As late as mid-1917, the Habsburg Army High Command (Armeeoberkommando, AOK) was concerned that the officer corps could not control the soldiers without the authorization to tie them up in public as punishment for infractions of military regulations. Such concerns about the reliability of the mass of soldiers, however, did not lead to curtailments of the armies’ ­operational goals. The armies were faced with a punishing set of tasks in 1914. For example, in August 1914 the Habsburg Fifth Army was directed to attack eastwards into Serbia, traversing deep river gorges and mountainous terrain in sweltering heat with inadequate equipment. The soldiers could not cope in such conditions. When the Fifth Army encountered a partially uniformed Serb Third Levy, panic broke out not only among the soldiers, but also among the officers. Conscripts who had been pushed beyond their limits believed that civilians were participating in combat and, encouraged by their officers, they lashed out violently. The Habsburg army was primed to police the boundaries between soldiers and civilians. As early as July 1914 the army reached the conclusion that Serb guerrillas – or Komitadjis, as the army frequently called them – were “outside international law.” They were to be “completely

10 The

template for these officer corps, at least regarding their professionalization, remained the German officer corps. See Michael Geyer: The Past as Future. The German Officer Corps as Profession, in: Konrad Jarausch/Geoffrey Cocks (eds.): German Professions. 1800–1950. Oxford 1990, 183–212. 11 Joshua Sanborn: The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation. A Reexamination, in: Slavic Review 2 (2000), 267–289. 12 Norman Stone: The Eastern Front, 1914–1917. New York 1975, 166.

76   Jonathan E. Gumz wiped out.”13 The army also availed itself of a wide-ranging and fearsome military legal arsenal in order to handle perceived transgressions of this boundary. But even this was, at times, not enough. Thus, when the Habsburg army invaded Serbia in late August, it went on a fear-induced rampage through northwestern Serbia in particular, killing 3,000 civilians, convinced that the Serb army and state had deliberately enlisted civilians to fight against the invading Habsburg army. Habsburg officers repeatedly stressed that the Serb state and army were intentionally violating international law. The commander of the Fifth Army, General Liborius Frank, declared that “the brutal, deceitful actions of the Serb military and Serb population against our troops […] violated every norm of war and all laws of humanity.”14 In addition to fears about civilian participation in war, the Habsburg and Russian armies faced a series of almost unremitting military disasters in the first year of the war. Such disasters lead us into the realm of classic military history, but before we immediately discount it, we would do well to remember the size and scale of the losses involved. Both armies suffered setbacks so ­severe over the course of this year that they could not but call the state’s sovereign claims into question. In this respect, the Habsburg and Russian armies went through a far longer period of sustained heavy casualties than the armies on the Western front, whose war of movement had ended by late fall 1914. The Habsburg army’s own history claims that the army was a “militia” army by late 1914.15 Both armies lost many experienced line officers and non-commissioned officers, resulting in critical shortages of leaders at the front. With Italy’s entry into the war in May 1915, the Habsburg army faced a three-front war. If we take the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów and the Great Retreat together, the Russian army suffered over one million casualties in a little over four months.16 This level of loss in such a concentrated period of time was astounding. Moreover, one can only imagine what it must have been like to live in areas that witnessed 800 000 casualties in a period of a couple months in the Carpathian winter campaign of early 1915.17 The defeats suffered in these areas were experienced on the ground as shocks. In Galicia, for example, a Armee, Oskar von Hranilović: Über Wesen, Ausrüstung und Kampfesart der Komit­ adschis. July 1914, Östereichisches Staatsarchiv Wien (ÖStA), Kriegsarchiv (KA), NFA, Box 2. 14 6. Armee, 5. AOK to the War Ministry, AOK, and 6. AOK. Op. No. 403/20, 26 August 1914, ÖStA KA, NFA, Box 13. 15 Edmund Glaise von Horstenau et al. (eds.): Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg, 1914–1918. Wien 1930. 16 Richard DiNardo: Breakthrough. The Gorlice-Tarnów Campaign, 1915. Santa Barbara 2010. 17 Graydon Tunstall: Blood on the Snow. The Carpathian Winter War of 1915. Lawrence 2010. 13 2.

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Jewish supporter of the Habsburg Monarchy asserted that “with the appearance of the Cossacks, the aura of invincibility, which the army as a supranational force and the monarchy as a whole had for many Galician Jews was lost, and with it the belief in the Monarchy as a whole.”18 Such defeats did not dampen efforts by the Habsburg and Russian armies to assert their control over areas such as Galicia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and ­Poland. Attempts by both armies to control these areas had the potential to ­further destabilize them and the empires that ruled them. Military techniques used to assert control in areas near the front bled over into occupation practices in Galicia and Serbia. The Habsburg army relied heavily on military law to deal with the slightest civilian disturbance near frontline areas and, increasingly, at home. In a highly retributive military legal system, the rear was to be brought into line with the war and kept in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the army. Of course, this was highly problematic, as the task of policing civilian society in areas near the front quickly overstretched the capacities of the Habsburg military legal system. An uncertain army now waded into the highly contentious waters of denunciation, further undermining the broader claims of the Habsburg state to legal impartiality. Moreover, the army emasculated the Habsburg state administration in this process, creating the perception that it was no longer capable of representing the state’s longstanding claims to impartiality and equal justice. This process reached its institutional climax in late March 1915 after the fall of Przemyśl with war against Italy looming. At this point, the army was able to secure a summary form of martial law (Standrecht) for all army operational zones, which now covered about a third of the empire, thereby eliminating an emergency system of justice where the death penalty was the only possible sentence for the accused. The imposition of military law also extended to occupied territories, undermining the claims by the Habsburg army that it was operating within the norm of ­occupation in places such as army-occupied Serbia. The civilian population there was exposed to the full force of Habsburg military law and Standrecht. This practice was unheard of. No one at the Brussels or Hague conferences had ever envisioned that an entire occupied population would be subjected to military law in such a routine manner. Moreover, in debates on Habsburg military law prior to the war, army lawyers had argued that military law could not approximate civilian law because of the need for discipline within a military organization. Against that background, the enforcement of military law in wartime Serbia appears even more out of bounds. In practice, this meant that M. Schuster: Zwischen allen Fronten. Osteuropäische Juden während des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1914–1919. Köln 2004, 128.

18 Frank

78   Jonathan E. Gumz Serbian civilians could be tried for lese-majesty (Majestätsbeleidigung) under martial law and executed for such offenses, as in Šabac in 1916.19 The Russian army felt similarly uncertain, although in this case uncertainty was even more closely connected to ideas about ethnic unreliability in the borderlands of the empire. As in the Habsburg Empire, these ideas of unreliability bled into army-run occupations. Like the Habsburg army, the Russian army was able to secure wide-ranging powers in areas near the front. It targeted Jews and Germans near the border and in occupied areas as groups that allegedly supported widespread spying and undermined military operations. The same sense of vulnerability that lay behind this search for traitors also led the army to exceed the limits of occupation law when it came to coercive measures in occupied areas.20 For the Russian army, assessments of the reliability of ethnic groups had been part and parcel of universal conscription since its introduction in the 1870s.21 When it came to the war, however, these notions of ethnic reliability introduced more disorder in the regions where the Russian army fought and, in turn, made the war even more difficult to control. Army commanders such as Nikolai Ianushkevich were deeply anti-Semitic and described as “obsessed with the idea of spies and spying” by suspect groups.22 The norm of occupation made wide-ranging concessions for military necessity, and for the Russian army, that military necessity demanded heightened surveillance and targeting of Jewish communities. These practices had a long history in Russian colonial military practice, but they were also common in situations where a Russian army unit believed it had been betrayed or even fired upon by local civilians.23 Yet it was equally clear that the targeting of suspect ethnic and 19 See Gericht des Kreiskommandos Šabac to the AOK. 28 April 1916, ÖStA KA, NFA, AOK-

Quartiermeister-Abteilung (Qu.Abt.), Box 2389; Gericht des Kreiskommandos Šabac to the AOK. 1 May 1916, ÖStA KA, NFA, AOK-Qu.Abt., Box 2389; Gericht des Kreiskommandos Šabac to the AOK. 5 May 1916, ÖStA KA, NFA, AOK-Qu.Abt., Box 2389. 20 Peter Holquist: Les violences de l’armée russe à l’encontre des juifs en 1915. Causes et limites, in: John Horne (ed.): Vers la guerre totale. Le tournant de 1914–1915. Paris 2010, 191–219; idem: The Role of Personality in the First (1914–1915) Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina, in: John Klier (ed.): Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Bloomington 2011, 52–73; Alexander V. Prusin: Nationalizing a Borderland. War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920. Tuscaloosa 2005; see also the contribution by Jochen Böhler to this volume. 21 Werner Benecke: Militär, Reform und Gesellschaft im Zarenreich. Die Wehrpflicht in Russland 1874–1914. Paderborn 2006. 22 Eric Lohr: The Russian Army and the Jews. Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I, in: Russian Review 3 (2001), 404–419. 23 Peter Holquist: To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia, in: Ronald Suny/Terry Martin (eds.): State of Nations. Empire and Nation Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford 2001, 111–144.

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religious communities operated at the edge of the norm of occupation, moving into the realm of those colonial practices of military control that the norm of occupation eschewed. On the ground, they certainly did little to contain violence and actually encouraged it. In the context of the Great Retreat in 1915, there was extensive hostage-taking of Jews in areas such as occupied Galicia, as well as Russia proper. As the army careened out of control, motives other than security began to play a role in the treatment of Jews. Robbery and plundering featured increasingly in army attacks on Jewish communities. A policy ­designed to secure the Russian army’s control of occupied areas and areas near the front actually destabilized these areas, making them harder to control and weakening Russian claims to sovereignty there. Moreover, the charges of treason and spying thrown around by the army and largely directed against suspect ethnic and religious groups also backfired on elements of the multinational tsarist state; the Russian public increasingly believed that key figures all the way up to the tsarina were actually German spies.24 This further undermined tsarist authority. In addition, as Peter Gatrell has argued, the wave of refugees triggered by events such as the Great Retreat and the army’s determination to protect itself against suspect groups such as the Jews rolled the instability of the front back into the Russian interior.25 Apart from their internal repercussions, these policies also had repercussions for the pre-1914 norm of occupation. Army violence, even when it was allegedly aimed at maintaining the solider/civilian divide, only increased disorder in these regions. In turn, they became more difficult, not easier, for ­armies to control. The formal sovereignty of the state in such areas and the claims that came with it were undercut. Ironically, the sovereign claims of the state in these areas became more extreme and more contested than ever before.26 In the Russian Empire, this process was particularly advanced, because the war undermined the sovereign claims of the state in a region where those claims were, according to Jörg Baberowski, already weak to begin with. This further undermined occupation as a norm because sovereignty was such a key element of that norm.27 The pre-1914 norm of occupation relied heavily on C. Fuller: The Foe Within. Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia. Ithaca 2006. 25 Peter Gatrell: A Whole Empire Walking. Refugees in Russia during World War I. Bloomington 1999. 26 On conceiving sovereignty as a series of claims, see James J. Sheehan: The Problem of Sovereignty in European History, in: The American Historical Review 1 (2006), 1–15. 27 Jörg Baberowski: Kriege in staatsfernen Räumen. Russland und die Sowjetunion 1905– 1950, in: Dietrich Beyrau/Michael Hochgeschwender/Dieter Langewiesche (eds.): Formen des Krieges. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Paderborn 2007, 291–310. 24 William

80   Jonathan E. Gumz the continued functioning of a local administration, but in many cases local administrations had either completely disappeared or had been completely marginalized by national armies prior to occupation.28 If sovereignty was ­central to the pre-1914 norm of occupation, could such norms still be relevant when the sovereign claims of the Habsburg Empire and the Russian Empire were being increasingly eroded? From here, events took one or other of two paths. The first further reinforced the norm of occupation and backed away from extensive violence. The leaders of the Habsburg Empire chose to follow this path. They made a desperate attempt to restore the empire’s claims to sovereignty both internationally and domestically. This attempt can only be sketched out in a cursory fashion here. It led, however, to a recall of the Parliament (Reichsrat) in the Austrian half of the empire, a series of secret peace feelers in the Sixtus mission, an attempt to impress upon Germany the pressures at play in the empire and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to curb the Third Supreme Command’s dramatic expansion of the war. It also resulted in the curtailment of the army’s interventions in domestic politics and its application of military law to civilians. Occupation regimes, especially that in Serbia, were also moved back into the norm of occupation. For Serbia, this meant that Standrecht, the emergency system of justice administered by the army, was gradually abandoned. More­ over, the occupation regime in Serbia found that proposals for forced labor programs and the right to kill suspected guerrillas or Komitadjis were struck down by the AOK because they conflicted with the pre-1914 norm of occupation. The legal officer at the Army High Command noted that these proposals by the occupation regime in Serbia were unacceptable because “in the occupation administration, international law must be upheld.”29 It is well known that this attempt to bolster Habsburg sovereignty failed for a variety of reasons. Calling back the Parliament seemed to embolden nationalist groups burning with resentment at their treatment at the hands of the army since 1914. The growing prominence of the United States in world politics meant that soundings in the direction of nineteenth-century great power politics and restraint went unnoticed or even backfired. Ultimately, no one would notice an attempted,

the eclipsing of civilian authorities by military authorities in these empires, see Mark Mazower: Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century, in: The American Historical Review 4 (2002), 1175. 29 AOK-Qu.Abt., AOK to Military General Governmant of Serbia, “Zwangsarbeit, Kriegs­ leistungen, gesetzliche Einführung in Serbien”. 9 July 1917, ÖStA KA, NFA, Box 2458; AOK-Qu.Abt., M.V.S. Heranziehung der Bevölkerung zur Dienstleistung nach §52 der Haager Landkriegsordnung. 15 July 1917, ÖStA KA, NFA, Box 2459. 28 On

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hesitant return to the norm of occupation. Occupation could not be manipulated in a way that bolstered Habsburg sovereignty. If the Habsburg Empire met its crisis of sovereignty with an attempt to reassert its sovereign claims, re-contain conflict, and re-anchor itself in pre-1914 norms, the tsarist Empire, the Provisional Government, and their successors went even deeper into the war. The collapse of authority across Russia gathered pace in 1917. This also led to extensive surveillance and control, which although rooted in the tsarist regime’s own war, were radically expanded during the Russian Civil War. This story needs no retelling here as it has already been ably recounted by historians such as Peter Holquist, Peter Gatrell, and Orlando Figes to name a few. However, its implications for the norm of occupation have often been neglected.30 The conflict itself became de-centered and a story of wars within wars as authority collapsed. This meant a departure from the pre-1914 norm of occupation by 1918. The assumptions of sovereignty and war containment in the pre-1914 norm of occupation became increasingly irrelevant. Control of occupied territories was bitterly contested and occupation regimes found themselves searching for new forms of control. Of course, the colonial model that Europe had exported across the world presented itself as an option. Yet now this model had to be deployed in a far more violent and contested situation under conditions of extreme privation. The entire pre-1914 international system, which undergirded the norm of occupation, had lost all relevance under these circumstances. While the leadership of the Habsburg Empire attempted to move back into this system with certain consequences for some of its occupied territories, across the western borderlands of Russia an attitude of hardened realism was beginning to shape conflict. Given such ruthless realism, the niceties of pre-1914 occupation praxis appeared dangerously naïve. Occupation was often abandoned altogether, and interventions came to the fore.

German control in the East Germany’s position was arguably stranger in this context than that of any ­other power. At the two Hague Conferences in 1899 and 1907, Germany had portrayed itself as the arch-occupier and was considered by other participating countries as such. It had encouraged the creation of a norm of occupaFiges: A People’s Tragedy. The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. New York 1996; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking; Peter Holquist: Making War, Forging Revolution. Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921. Cambridge 2002.

30 Orlando

82   Jonathan E. Gumz tion structured around war containment and sovereignty, battering down, often brutally, the arguments of delegates from countries such as Belgium. As Alan Kramer, John Horne, and Laura Engelstein have shown, Germany was responsible for many atrocities in the frenzied initial months of the war.31 But we would be better advised to view this violence alongside that of the Austro-Hungarian army or the Russian army in East Prussia in the summer of 1914. This was part of a frenzied and overheated attempt to maintain the divide between soldier and civilian in the context of an overly ambitious timetable for the invasion of Belgium and France, which led ultimately to transgressions of the norms of war.32 Yet Germany did not undergo the same crisis of sovereignty experienced by the Habsburg and Russian Empires in the first year of the war. In fact, German occupations initially seemed to hew to international norms of occupation. Despite the immediate chaos of the Great Retreat, in Poland, Germany instituted a traditional occupation administration largely in line with 1914 conceptions of occupation.33 That is not to say that right-wing German pressure groups such as the Eastern Marches League did not envision something far more transformative for Poland. Yet the Governor-General of Poland Hans Hartwig von Beseler sought to “maintain calm and order with severity and fairness.” This was all very much in line with the Hague Conventions. The German administrative state also made an appearance in occupied Poland, infringing on Russian sovereignty there. Various Prussian municipal ordnances were introduced and elements of municipal government were reorganized.34 Despite this, Germany kept many Russian laws on the books, including those concerning Jews. This was consistent with the aim of the norm of occupation to bolster the soverHorne/Alan Kramer: German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial. New Haven 2001; Laura Engelstein: “A Belgium of Our Own”. The Sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3 (2009), 441–473. 32 Michael Geyer: War and Terror. Some Timely Observations on the German Way of Waging War, in: idem (ed.): War and Terror in Contemporary Perspective. Washington 2003, 52–54. 33 At least until 1916, when the demands of German industrial groups for foreign labor reached fever pitch and there was a change in command in the German occupation of Belgium, the German army did rely heavily on the Belgian municipal bureaucracy, in line with the Hague Convention. See Sophie de Schaepdrijver: La Belgique et la Première Guerre Mondiale. Brussels 2004. 34 Jesse Curtis Kauffman: Sovereignty and the Search for Order in German-Occupied Poland, 1915–1918. PhD., Stanford 2008, 40–41 and 74–75, quotation: 40. For a recent article that contrasts German rule in Poland during the First and Second World Wars, see Winson Chu/Jesse Kauffman/Michael Meng: A Sonderweg through Eastern Europe: The Varieties of German Rule in Poland during the Two World Wars, in: German History 3 (2013), 318–344. 31 John

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eignty of the departed state.35 From the perspective of the international Jewish community, the German army represented lawfulness and the Russian army represented arbitrary rule during the war.36 But after the collapse of Russian imperial sovereignty, the basis for the pre1914 norm of occupation became desperately fragile. The pre-1914 norm of occupation had envisioned the containment of conflict in an occupied territory and conflict intensified in its absence. As Vejas Liulevicius has shown, Germany’s actions in the East in 1917 and 1918 increasingly tended towards more ambitious attempts to control occupied territories through ‘movement policy’ (Verkehrspolitik). A good deal of scholarship has examined the cultural perceptions that fueled such policies, but much of this scholarship pays little attention to the international context that shaped the wars in which such policies were implemented. Such ambitious efforts to control territories and peoples in the East and the violence that often attended them were only possible because the categories that had previously applied to occupation had become irrelevant. Despite their attempts to hew to the pre-1914 norm of occupation earlier in the war, the German state and army increasingly turned away from that norm. Occupation, with its restrictions on violence and transformation, did not seem to apply to the East anymore and it did not offer Germany the same opportunities. In the aftermath of the Great Retreat, it was already argued in German governmental circles that the severity of Russian scorched earth policies deprived Russia of legal title to the territory it had abandoned in the summer of 1915.37 Such arguments, which undercut the entire pre-1914 norm of occupation, did not take immediate hold, but by 1918 it was clear that the norm of occupation was on the wane. Most German ‘occupations’ on former Russian territory in 1918 were perceived as interventions on behalf of subordinate, ‘independent’ governments. Germany now conducted increasingly intense, small-scale wars in countries with which it was actually at peace from an international legal perspective. Thus, Lithuania was transformed into a quasi-independent state ruled in actual fact by Ober Ost. Similarly, Ukraine did not have a German occupation regime, but the German army, along with the Habsburg army, intervened on behalf of the Ukrainian Central Council (Rada). General Wilhelm Groener, the chief of staff of the German intervention force in Ukraine, found this to be an entirely new situation. Groener notFink: Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938. Cambridge 2004. 36 Report Nr. 2 from the Jewish Conjoint Committee, 27. 7. 1915, Institute for Jewish Research New York (YIVO), Wolf-Moskowitz Collection, Documents Relating to the Ill-Treatment of the Jewish Population in the Eastern War Zone, June 1915, MK 502.5, frame 872. 37 Vejas G. Liulevicius: The German Myth of the East. 1800 to the Present. Oxford 2009, 136. 35 Carole

84   Jonathan E. Gumz ed that there was no “proper occupation” in Ukraine. The German army, he explained, had barely enough force to cover the entire country and could only be described as a “thin net.” Meanwhile, the collapse of the tsarist state made the norm of occupation and its strictures about maintaining local administrations seem irrelevant. As Groener observed, the local administration was no longer to be found as the tsarist one had been “destroyed.”38 This is not to discount German perceptions of the ‘foreignness’ of the East, but simply to argue that the absence of a local administration – the key to governing an occupied territory according to pre-1914 norms – was not a pure fantasy stemming from cultural images of the East in the German imagination. Even the Habsburg Empire found itself drawn away from the pre-1914 norm of occupation in places such as Ukraine. Like the Germans, Habsburg officers and diplomats found Ukraine in a state of disarray, with little evidence of the pre1914 norms of occupation. “Every part of the state apparatus is destroyed; complete anarchy reigns,” reported a Habsburg official in Kiev, “there is no administration in the countryside.”39 The absence of occupation meant that the entire logic of war containment was undermined. It is ironic that the moment when visions of German control in the East seemed most acute coincided with a time when such control was beyond the Germans’ reach. In the aftermath of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin argued that the Germans would find it more difficult to control territory in the East and would have to station even more soldiers there. The Germans simply did not understand the nature of the war being fought there, he explained.40 Instead of leading an occupation as the pre-1914 norm had envisioned, the German army became one of many armed groups in the territories where it intervened in the East. One German unit executed approximately 2,000 captured Bolsheviks near Taganrog after being attacked in mid-1918. This incident bore all the hallmarks of uncontained conflict. The Germans involved in this atrocity believed that the conflict lay outside the standard rules of warfare. Moreover, the German unit was characterized by a dangerous mix of ­local superiority and broader insecurity.41 As this brutal incident shows, the German Groener: Lebenserinnerungen: Jugend, Generalstab, Weltkrieg. Göttingen 1957, 383–398. 39 Auszug aus dem Bericht eines Vertreters der k. u. k. Mission in Kiew, 10. 3. 1918, in: ­Theophil Hornykiewicz (ed.): Ereignisse in der Ukraine 1914–1922. Deren Bedeutung und historische Hintergründe. Volume 2. Philadelphia 1967, 317. 40 Winfried Baumgart: Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918. München 1966, 28. 41 Reinhard Nachtigal: Krasnyj Desant. Das Gefecht an der Mius-Bucht. Ein unbeachtetes Kapitel der deutschen Besetzung Südrußlands 1918, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Ost­ europas 2 (2005), 221–246. 38 Wilhelm

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army was a player in the violence that accompanied its intervention in Russia, but it can more accurately be viewed as one of many “warlords” in Russia.42 The German army was eventually superseded by the Freikorps, a paramilitary organization that was much better equipped to deal with the war in the East in 1919. As historians such as Klaus Theweleit, Vejas Liulevicius, and most recently, Annemarie Sammartino have demonstrated, the Freikorps did not see itself as a classical military organization.43 Atrocities and violence as selfexpression now dominated the scene. The line between soldiers and civilians was increasingly blurred. Moreover, references to the world of the pre-1914 norm of occupation disappeared. It was no longer necessary to slot the exertion of force in a foreign country into this old norm. Violence had an entirely new logic and the international norms that had shaped war in 1914 were ­irrelevant. It was purely a matter of maintaining influence and exerting force within these territories, without any constraints on the violence that could be brought to bear in these situations.

Conclusions As occupation disappeared across Eastern Europe in 1918, the Allied and ­Associated Powers began planning the occupation of the Rhineland. Marshal Ferdinand Foch referred to the Hague Conventions and the pre-1914 norm of occupation as the basis for Allied rule in the Rhineland. These were not empty words and the extent to which the Allies attempted to adhere to this norm in their occupation of the Rhineland was striking.44 Well into the interwar years, a directive went out to Belgian civil servants that in the event of enemy occupation, “they will be allowed to take a formal and written engagement to continue to exercise conscientiously and loyally their function and undertake nothing, nor omit anything which might be harmful to the enemy administration of occupied territory.”45 Such moments, which appear to be in line with Sanborn: The Genesis of Russian Warlordism. Violence and Governance during the First World War and the Civil War, in: Contemporary European History 3 (2010), 195–213. 43 Klaus Theweleit: Male Fantasies. Minneapolis 1987; Vejas Liulevicius: War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge 2000; Annemarie Sammartino: The Impossible Border. Germany and the East, 1914–1922. Ithaca 2010. 44 Ernst Fraenkel: Military Occupation and the Rule of Law. Occupation Government in the Rhineland, 1918–1923. New York 1944. 45 Pieter Lagrou: Regaining the Monopoly of Force. Agents of the State Shooting Fugitives in and around Belgium, 1940–1950, in: Past and Present Supplement 6 (2011), 180. 42 Joshua

86   Jonathan E. Gumz the pre-1914 norm of occupation, can only raise questions in the light of ­Eastern Europe’s experience of occupation in the latter years of the First World War. The persistence of the pre-1914 norm of occupation in the West coupled with its fragility in the East should be understood as part of two broader trends in post-World War I European history. First, we can place it within the progressive limitation of sovereignty in Eastern Europe over the first half of the twentieth century. From this perspective, the interventions across Eastern Europe in the latter part of the war, themselves brought on by the way in which occupation had been undermined, can be linked to the League of ­Nations’ Minorities Treaties. Both operated based on assumptions of limited Eastern European sovereignty. These treaties sought to create an international structure of limited sovereignty and humanitarian norms across Eastern Europe (excluding the Soviet Union of course) and were deeply resented by countries such as Poland.46 In the absence of imperial sovereignties, this new international structure for the region separated sovereignty in the East from sovereignty in the West. In essence, this can be read as one of the international responses to the uncontained violence that accompanied the demise of occupation in the latter years of the war. The fragility of sovereignty in Eastern Europe after 1916 persisted into the Second World War, when it was completely eviscerated in many countries.47 This laid the foundation for sub­ sequent transformative occupations in the region taken over by the National Socialists and the Soviet Union. Second, the shift away from the pre-1914 norm of occupation in Eastern Europe signaled a moment when Eastern Europe became more like the rest of the world, with the German intervention in a place like Ukraine in 1918 representing a more chaotic version of the British attempt to create a limited sovereignty with special protection of British security interests in a place like Iraq in 1932.48 From this perspective, the presence of empires in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe brought that region back into the realm of European ‘civilization,’ at least with regard to international affairs.49 Thus Eastern Europe was not only a cultural creation of the Enlight-

46 Fink,

Defending the Rights. an example of the persistence of sovereignty and small states in Eastern Europe, see Holly Case: Between States. The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II. Stanford 2009. 48 Susan Pedersen: Getting Out of Iraq – in 1932. The League of Nations and the Road to Normative Statehood, in: The American Historical Review 4 (2010), 975–1000. 49 Larry Wolff: Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford 1994. 47 For

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enment, but also an international creation of the First World War in which the fall of sovereignty and the collapse of occupation played a central role. Of course, this all looks quite different from the world of 1914, with large portions of Eastern Europe anchored in the norm of occupation. In this sense, we can look more broadly through the lens of occupation to see how the First World War created an international divide between Eastern and Western Europe, which had been absent at the beginning of the war. That this divide would be predicated on a radical reversal of the logic of occupation, a reversal that paved the way for an expansion of violence as opposed to its containment, was the most tragic part of occupation’s fragility in this part of the world.

Stephan Lehnstaedt

Fluctuating between ‘Utilisation’ and ­Exploitation: Occupied East Central Europe during the First World War Conquests have two simple goals: to increase one’s own influence and to weaken the enemy, simply because territory and the people living on it mean an increase of power. Until the early modern age, and already during the ­Seven Years’ War, Silesia was occupied because it was prosperous and – by the standards of the time – economically significant. Since then, conflicts have not only been conducted on an ever greater, ‘total’ scale, but increasingly also with economic objectives.1 When the First World War broke out in 1914, no one thought of economic consequences. Quite the contrary: the leaders on all sides believed that peace would soon be restored after a brief period of fighting. None of the sides was adequately prepared for a long war. After initial successes in the West, and in the East from 1915, the Central Powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies – soon found themselves in the role of occupiers, administering ­extensive territories in the Russian Empire and in Serbia and Romania.2 ­Although aggressively expansionist ideas were expressed in some quarters, specific plans for the new territories did not exist and were often developed locally.3 What was clear was that the conquered territories should contribute to the war effort – all the more so given the increasingly visible lack of arms, food, and workers at home. These shortages were due on the one hand to a lack of preparedness and, on the other, to conscription on a massive scale. FurtherSee Stig Förster: Das Zeitalter des totalen Krieges, 1861–1945. Konzeptionelle Überlegungen für einen historischen Strukturvergleich, in: Mittelweg 8/6 (1999), 12–29. 2 See Norman Stone: The Eastern Front 1914–1917. London 1998; Gerhard Paul Groß (ed.): Die vergessene Front. Der Osten 1914/15. Ereignis – Wirkung – Nachwirkung. Paderborn/München 2006. 3 For a general assessment, see Richard F. Hamilton: War Planning. Obvious Needs, Not So Obvious Solutions, in: Richard F. Hamilton/Holger H. Herwig (eds.): War Planning 1914. Cambridge 2010, 1–23. On Ober Ost, see Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius: Von ‘Ober Ost’ nach ‘Ostland’?, in: Groß, Die vergessene Front, 295–310; Lutz Köllner: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in beiden Weltkriegen. Berichte und Bibliographien. München 1980, 14. 1

90   Stephan Lehnstaedt more, a growing shortfall in food resulted from the British naval blockade, which prevented imports. The main economic objectives of the various occupations were developed against this background. It was envisaged that the ­occupied territories would provide workers and above all food. As the economies of the conquered territories were largely agricultural, significant benefits in the field of armaments were not foreseen. While there were some major factories, for example in Warsaw and Łódź, most of them were out of service during the war due to a lack of the means of production. Large quantities of raw materials were gathered, mainly in the form of coal from the Dąbrowa region between Cracow and Katowice, which Germany and Austria-Hungary divided among themselves.4 However, such commodities were far less significant than manpower and food. This is also true of the financial contribution made by the occupied territories. The sums that flowed in from the occupied territories made little impact on the gigantic credits needed to cover the cost of men and material in the huge armies.5 The task of comparing economic policies in the occupied territories is difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, Germany was not the only occupying power; it shared many territories with Austria-Hungary and later Bulgaria – and for a time with Russia. A further difficulty arises from the fact that both military and civil administered regions existed. One must also be aware that there were different post-war plans for different conquered territories and their status varied accordingly. Poland, for example, was portrayed as a nation freed from the Russian yoke, while Serbia, which was regarded as the cause of the war, was described as an enemy country. Accordingly, the policies developed by the Central Powers shifted between cooperation and authoritarian rule. From the Russian point of view, the occupation in Eastern Prussia was too short-lived to deliver economic results. The Russians saw the occupation of Galicia from August 1914 to June 1915 as a re-conquest and a re-unification with the motherland and started Russifying the country.6 Yet recent research has shown that the attempted integration was unsuccessful due to the lack of time. However, the general principles of the Hague Convention were respectArthur Hausner: Die Polenpolitik der Mittelmächte und die österreichisch-ungarische Militärverwaltung in Polen während des Weltkrieges. Wien 1935, 376–378; Ferdinand Friedensburg: Kohle und Eisen im Weltkriege und in den Friedensschlüssen. München 1934, 138. 5 See for example Theo Balderston: War Finance and Inflation in Britain and Germany, 1914–1918, in: Economic History Review 42 (1989), 222–244. Economic data on the ­belligerent countries can be found in Stephen N. Broadberry/Mark Harrison (eds.): The Economics of World War I. Cambridge 2005. 6 Christoph Mick: Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt. Lemberg 1914–1917. Wiesbaden 2010, 85, 111–127. 4

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ed. There were many confiscations and expropriations, and the Russians deployed forced labour, especially on their retreat.7 However, I will not deal with the occupation of Galicia in this article, because it was not long enough to give rise to economic principles. At this early stage of the war it was still assumed that it would soon be over and that policies could wait until peacetime. But even if we ignore Galicia, there was no one single form of occupation economy in Eastern Europe during the First World War. Factors such as the personnel in charge, ethnic and geographical structures, and destruction by military operations all had an impact on local policies. Any analytical comparison or description is also complicated by the fact that over the course of the war various local objectives, but also instructions from Berlin and Vienna, were subject to dynamic adaptation. We must approach this subject in small steps, focussing on specific aspects, without neglecting the context. For this reason, I begin my observations with the Kingdom of Poland, which was occupied from the summer of 1915 to the end of war by Germany and AustriaHungary and divided into the Government General (Generalgouvernement) of Warsaw and the Military Government General (Militärgeneralgouvernment) Lublin. In two steps, I present labour policies and the retrieval of food and compare them phenomenologically.8 Based on recent studies, I highlight simi­ larities to and differences from the occupations in Ober Ost, Ukraine, Romania and Serbia. However, for reasons of space this comparison must be brief. My subsequent analysis of the Central Powers’ policies is thus limited and may not succeed in fully explaining their different characteristics. Instead, the scope of this article is limited to a functional comparison of models of policy enforcement with a particular focus on the extent to which the occupying powers resorted to cooperation or violence to yield as many workers and as much food as possible for their own purposes.

Labour market policy Labour policy in the occupied territories can be divided into two parts: the policy within the regions themselves and the policy for the transportation of 7 8

Ibid., 93, 129–131. On the theoretical challenges of a comparison, see Ludolf Herbst: Komplexität und Chaos. Grundzüge einer Theorie der Geschichte. München 2004, 85–91. See also Jürgen Kocka: Historische Komparatistik in Deutschland, in: Heinz-Gerhard Haupt/Jürgen Kocka (eds.): Geschichte und Vergleich. Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung. Frankfurt am Main 1996, 47–60.

92   Stephan Lehnstaedt manpower to the Reich. In the summer of 1918 up to 240 000 Poles and some 24 000 Lithuanians worked in the Reich. Some had come there before the war and others had arrived after the outbreak of the war.9 In the nineteenth century, seasonal workers from Poland were already widespread on estates east of the Elbe, but this phenomenon greatly increased during the war and also spread to other areas. Given the mass mobilisation of millions of men at home, there was a dire need for qualified personnel in the armaments industry. This personnel was to be recruited in other countries. The occupation authorities were therefore responsible for coordinating the labour market, which had to provide workers for both the occupied region and the Reich. This was true not only of the German-occupied territories in the East, but also of the Austro-Hungarian spheres of influence. In the Dual Monarchy a similar lack of manpower could be observed. In many cases, the measures taken by the occupiers in pursuit of their goals did not differ from those deployed at home. Of course, certain activities carried on as normal, and as a rule farmers did not have to fear recruitment. In fact, most locals were not affected by the new regulation of the labour market. Precisely for this reason the question has to be asked: what kind of coercion was used and to what extent was it used? In his seminal study on labour policy in the Government General of Warsaw and Ober Ost, Christian Westerhoff proposes the following definition of forced labour: “work that takes place as a result of the threat or use of physical violence. This implies for those affected, that they have not started work according to their own will, that they do not perform it voluntarily, or that they themselves cannot decide when the work will end.”10 The aspect of compensation is implied in this definition, because its adequacy or not is assessed by the worker who decides to terminate their employment. Based on this definition, during the first two years of the war, approximately until the summer of 1916, there was no forced labour in the Government General of Warsaw – the assignment of prisoners of war will not be addressed here. In contrast to previous studies, Westerhoff can show that no forcible deportation to the Reich took place before 1916.11 Relief work carried out during this period with the aim to restore or improve infrastructure destroyed by fighting affected some 83 000 men. Despite the hard conditions of this work, it was usually no problem to find volunteers in Warsaw and Łódź, because the Westerhoff: Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg. Deutsche Arbeitskräftepolitik im besetzten Polen und Litauen 1914–1918. Paderborn/München 2012, 259–264. 10 Ibid., 13. 11 Ibid., 111.   9 Christian

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unemployment rate in cities was high and the Germans offered a reasonable payment. In rural areas some recruitment was forced, but it was always limited in time and even remunerated. These so-called Hand- und Spanndienste were still backed by the Hague Regulations (Land Warfare Convention), and were, at least by the legal standards of the time, hardly objectionable.12 A similar trend was observed in the Military Government General Lublin, where conditions in the labour battalions were generally worse, especially because the Hungarian guards were considered brutal.13 As in the German part of Poland, the local authorities were allowed, if necessary, to forcibly assign work to inhabitants – but always in compliance with the Land Warfare Convention.14 The area was much more agrarian – 85 per cent of Poland’s production and 78 per cent of its industrial workers were found in the Government General of Warsaw – and thus the unemployment rate was lower. This in turn meant that significantly less men were interested in participating voluntarily in the necessary infrastructure measures.15 In connection with the equally unpopular recruitment for work in the Dual Monarchy, these measures sometimes led to acts of resistance on the part of entire villages, which tried to dodge forced labour by fleeing into the woods. Usually, collective monetary penalties were imposed.16 Nevertheless, by December 1915 the Dual Mon­ archy had organised over 81 000 men into 328 civilian worker divisions (Zivilarbeiterabteilungen) – many of them not voluntarily.17 The occupiers were well aware of this, but in view of alleged military necessity, “national economic factors and any other considerateness had to take a back seat.” Any “objection on humanitarian or other grounds had to be dismissed.”18 There was a shortage of workers in Austria-Hungary, which the Dual Monarchy sought to at least partly remedy with recruitment in Poland. However, this was far less focused than in the German zone. The significantly more 12 Ibid.,

131–133. Zieliński: Stosunki polsko-żydowskie na ziemiach Królestwa Polskiego w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej. Lublin 2005, 213. 14 Tamara Scheer: Zwischen Front und Heimat. Österreich-Ungarns Militärverwaltungen im Ersten Weltkrieg. Frankfurt am Main 2009, 151. 15 Jan Molenda: Social Changes in Poland during World War I, in: Béla Király (ed.): East Central European Society in World War I. New York 1985, 187–201. 16 Materielle Situationsmeldung des Militärgeneralgouvernements Lublin (MGL), 28. 1. 1916. Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych Warszawa (AGAD), 312/45; “Bericht aus Lublin”, 3. 2. 1916, AGAD, 312/41. 17 Statistik, Dezember 1915, AGAD, 312/41. For a different assessment that does not rely on AGAD sources, see the standard work Manfried Rauchensteiner: Der Tod des Doppel­ adlers. Österreich-Ungarn und der Erste Weltkrieg. 2nd edition. Graz 1994, 463. 18 Armeeoberkommando (AOK) an MGL, 6. 12. 1915, AGAD, 312/40. 13 Konrad

94   Stephan Lehnstaedt modest results were also due to the strong agricultural character of the Military Government General Lublin, where by far the majority of residents worked on their own farms and had no interest in leaving them. Thus in the second half of 1915 not even 13 000 people were sent to Austria-Hungary.19 At the same time, workers from the Lublin region went to Germany, because of the higher wages there. In 1915 the Central Powers allowed each other to recruit in their respective territories, but in the face of an increasingly competitive relationship, this practice was soon called into question and restricted.20 The greater success of the Germans also lay in their substantially better ­organised employment agency. While Austria-Hungary had appointed Robert Steiner as a contact to the Viennese Industrialists’ Association (Wiener Industriellenverband), the parastatal German Worker Office (Deutsche Arbeiterzen­ trale), which had already been active before the war, now expanded directly to Poland and, in addition to centres in Warsaw and Łódź, gradually established branches in each district, thus taking charge of the workers directly.21 By contrast, it was mid-1916 before a central office for an employment agency was established in Lublin to coordinate efforts at local level. It provided a weekly digest of jobs and requests for work, which was then circulated among the authorities. These digests were usually six to eight pages long, evidencing the low unemployment rate.22 The conditions for enlisted Poles in Austria-Hungary and in Germany did not differ substantially. The men received an employment contract, wages, food and lodging; beyond that they were entitled to free Sundays and holidays. As recruitment was based on the principle of voluntariness, the only ­element of obligation was the prohibition on returning. During the war only employers could terminate employment contracts, not the workers themselves. Prospective workers were usually alerted to this fact.23

19 Jahresbericht

des MGL 1916, Östereichisches Staatsarchiv Wien (ÖStA), Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (HHStA), PA I, Liasse Krieg 11a/920. 20 Generalgouvernement Warschau an Reichskanzler, 26. 11. 1915, Bundesarchiv Berlin Lichterfelde (BA), R 1501/119798. 21 Bestimmungen über die Anwerbung von Arbeitern in Polen für die Arbeit in der Monarchie, 1916, ÖStA, Kriegsarchiv (KA), AOK-Quartiermeister-Abteilung, Referenten-Faszi­ kel/2589; Ludger Heid: Maloche – nicht Mildtätigkeit. Ostjüdische Arbeiter in Deutschland 1914–1923. Hildesheim 1995, 361. 22 Verordnung des MGL betreffend die Einrichtung der Arbeitsvermittlung, 6. 6. 1916, ÖStA KA, AOK-Quartiermeister-Abteilung, Referenten-Faszikel/2589. 23 Ibid. On the Germans, see Westerhoff: Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, 100–105, 113– 114.

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In particular in Warsaw and Łódź, the ‘Manchester of the East’, rampant unemployment could be observed under the occupation. This was due to the loss of these cities’ previous markets – particularly in Russia – which were now located behind the front. The Germans had also deprived many companies of their production capabilities by confiscating and plundering materials needed for the war effort. Supplies of raw materials were unthinkable during the war, because cotton, which the German Reich had to import, was even lacking in domestic factories. There were also firm plans to harm Polish business competitors – a policy that was not only implemented by the administration, but also repeatedly demanded by representatives of German industry.24 For all these reasons, the number of workers in the Government General of Warsaw diminished from a pre-war level of 350 000 to somewhat under 200 000.25 This development was welcomed by the occupiers because it encouraged unemployed persons to volunteer for work in Germany. As German factories and agriculture were considered to be vastly more efficient than their Polish counterparts, there was also no interest in combating unemployment in the occupied territory.26 Economic migration to Germany was further promoted by the introduction of ‘compulsory labour’ (Arbeitszwang). This did not amount to forced labour, but it meant that unemployed persons who rejected an offer of work (for example, in Germany) no longer received benefit payments.27 Conditions further deteriorated in the Government General of Warsaw in the autumn of 1916, when the total mobilisation of all resources was propagated in the context of the Hindenburg Programme. The war had exposed German economic inefficiency in contrast to the Entente powers. In the new Third Supreme Army Command (Dritte Oberste Heeresleitung, OHL) Erich Ludendorff tried to alleviate the material state of emergency in the Reich with completely unrealistic plans.28 This was accompanied by a change of strategy in labour market policies. After an initial phase in which Poles already workConze: Polnische Nation und deutsche Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Köln 1958, 133–134; Andreas Hofmann: Reweaving the Urban Fabric. Multiethnicity and Occupation in Łódź, 1914–1918, in: Marcus Funck/Roger Chickering (eds.): Endangered Cities. Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars. Boston/Leiden 2004, 81–94. Statistical data on the evacuation of resources can be found in the Vierteljahrsbericht der Zivilverwaltung für Russisch-Polen für die Zeit vom 5. 1. bis zum 25. 4. 1915, AGAD, 314-2/1. 1. 25 Vierteljahrsbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem General-Gouvernement Warschau für die Zeit vom 1. 1. 1916 bis zum 31. 3. 1916, AGAD, 314-2/5. 3. (5.) 26 Westerhoff: Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, 66. 27 Ibid., 100–105. 28 Roger Chickering: Das Deutsche Reich und der Erste Weltkrieg. München 2002, 95. 24 Werner

96   Stephan Lehnstaedt ing in Germany were generally prevented from returning, far more severe procedures could be observed from the autumn of 1916. In the context of the Hindenburg Programme, the homeland armaments industry needed even more manpower. Initially, it was thought that this would come from Belgium, because the workers there were considered more efficient. However, the recruitment campaigns proved unsuccessful, partly because the civil administrations in the West refused to use coercion. Yet the Governor General of Warsaw Hans Hartwig von Beseler was reluctant to ­ignore proposals by the OHL to use more force, even if they were not binding in the Warsaw region – not least because von Beseler was under constant pressure to justify himself vis-à-vis Ludendorff, who claimed he indulged the Poles too much.29 At the beginning of October 1916, a regulation to combat ‘work shyness’ (Arbeitsscheu) was issued in addition to the aforementioned compulsory labour decree. Recipients of benefit payments could now no longer just be denied this money if they rejected an offer of employment, but could be drafted directly for work. Such forced employment was common in civil worker battalions (Zivilarbeiterbataillons), which were deployed to a far lesser extent in the Government General than in Ober Ost – and thus far from the homes of those concerned. To all intents and purposes, the new regulation for Warsaw did not differ much from the ‘work shyness’ regulation in Germany, but it required some creativity on the part of lawyers to interpret such measures as still acceptable within the framework of the Hague Land Warfare Convention. The clearly coercive character of this regulation also had the desired effect: many men volunteered for work in the Reich purely in order to escape the battalions.30 The fact that the ‘work shyness’ regulation was abandoned in December 1916, only two months after it had been introduced, shows just how hurried this measure had been taken in the Government General of Warsaw. By then, approximately 5,000 men had joined civil worker battalions, but this recruitment method proved inefficient and discouraged cooperation with the locals, which was an explicit political goal after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Poland on 5 November 1916.31 In Warsaw, the capital of the new Polish state, Michael Spät: Für eine gemeinsame deutsch-polnische Zukunft? Hans Hartwig von Beseler als Generalgouverneur in Polen 1915–1918, in: Zeitschrift für Ostmittel­ europa-Forschung 4 (2009), 469–500, 497. 30 Westerhoff: Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, 198–204. 31 Wolfgang Steglich/Wilhelm Winterhager: Die Polenproklamation vom 5. November 1916, in: Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 1 (1978), 105–46; Leon Grosfeld: Die Proklamation des Königreichs Polen am 5. November  1916, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft Beiheft 3 (1956), 135–176. 29 Robert

Fluctuating between ‘Utilisation’ and Exploitation   97

the protests against the German recruitment procedures were so vociferous – with a focus on the gap between practice and propaganda – that forced recruitment already ceased there on 6 November 1916. Indirect economic pressure seemed to be a far more effective means of winning workers for the homeland.32 The experience of the Dual Monarchy in the Military Government General Lublin was similar. It had introduced obligatory labour even earlier than the Germans – and had also witnessed its failure. Initially, it had foreseen that 490 civilian worker divisions, each with 250 men, would be called up in 1916 to make road surfaces and carry out improvements on rivers. This goal was never achieved and only 122 divisions actually materialised. However, coercion was required even for this low number, because the local population went into hiding and even fled into the forests from units that had already been set up. People regarded the payment offered as too small and also feared that they would be sent to the front. The civilian worker divisions were doomed to fail because at that time the conditions of recruitment for work in Austria or Germany were much better. As early as June 1916 Lublin asked army headquarters for permission to abandon coercive measures and instead introduce a recruitment policy based on genuine incentives.33 It is remarkable that this turn­ around did not serve as a warning to Warsaw, because both Government Generals usually kept close tabs on each other. This was probably due to the extreme requirements of the OHL under Ludendorff and Hindenburg on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to the disdain, which the Germans had for their ally. They simply did not consider Austria-Hungary competent enough.34 In the last two years of the war similar recruitment procedures operated in both parts of Poland, usually without any element of obligation. However, new studies show that the Germans – in an imitation of k. u. k. practice – used coercion for the first time in agriculture (in the form of the aforementioned Hand- und Spanndienste) in 1917 and 1918. Instead of cultivating their own fields, farmers were obliged to care for arable land on larger estates, because it was thought that the potential for good yields was greater there.35 Remarkably, Polish big land owners were particularly in favour of this procedure.36 32 Westerhoff,

Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, 207–208 and 242–243. For a general assessment of Central Power politics towards Poland, see Damian Szymczak: Między Habs­ burgami a Hohenzollernami. Rywalizacja niemiecko-austro-węgierska w okresie I wojny światowej a odbudowa państwa polskiego. Kraków 2009. 33 MGL an AOK, 30. 6. 1916, ÖStA HHStA, PA I, Liasse Krieg 11a - Polen/919. 34 Robert J. Wegs: Die österreichische Kriegswirtschaft, 1914–1918. Wien 1979, 50. 35 Westerhoff, Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, 308–309, 321–322. 36 Marek Przeniosło: Chłopi Królestwa Polskiego w latach 1914–1918. Kielce 2003, 6.

98   Stephan Lehnstaedt At the same time, the Central Powers focused on recruiting workers for the homeland. Attempts on both sides to resort to coercive measures were usually rejected, because they seemed politically inopportune.37 Considerable successes were achieved on the German side, where the aforementioned 240 000 Poles were deployed, among them – despite an often anti-Semitic policy – 30 000 to 35 000 Jews.38 By comparison, by the spring of 1917 the Dual ­Monarchy had recruited 102 000 seasonal workers in agriculture and a further 15 000 in industry.39 The reasons for this lower figure lay in the huge competition from the Germans, who could offer larger financial incentives, and in the fact that there were fewer unemployed persons in the territory controlled by Austria-Hungary. Other occupied countries in Eastern Europe did not supply Austria-Hung­ ary and Germany with nearly as many workers. In the Polish case, the tradition of seasonal economic migration and the proximity to Germany and AustriaHungary had led to these results. The fact that the country was occupied for a long time and was, with the exception of Ukraine, by far the most densely populated territory the Central Powers had conquered, also played a role here. Approximately 70 000 people had already come to the Dual Monarchy from Serbia one year after its defeat at the end of 1915 and subsequent occupation by k. u. k. forces. A further 11 000 worked locally for the new rulers. The numbers for Montenegro are 10 500 and 3,000 labourers respectively.40 Thus the administrative arrangement in the enemy state was similar to that in Military Government General Lublin, even if political considerations were not as important there. But by 1916 it was generally accepted that even there, more could be won with incentives than coercion.41 Ober Ost represented the other extreme, a region comprising Lithuania and Northern Poland, which was under German military rule without any civil administration. Committed to the idea of efficiency, both Ludendorff and 37 Chef

des Ersatzwesens an Außenministerium Wien, 24. 3. 1917, ÖStA HHStA, PA I, ­ iasse Krieg 56/22-28/1038; AOK an MGGL, 29. 3. 1918, in: Kazimierz W. Kumaniecki L (ed.): Czasy lubelskie. Wspomnienia i dokumenty, 18. 6. 1916–2. 11. 1918. Kraków 1927, 108–111. 38 Heid, Maloche – nicht Mildtätigkeit, 139–145; Westerhoff, Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, 259–260. 39 Presentation given by Hauptmann Schubert in Vienna, 3. 4. 1917, in: Kumaniecki, Czasy lubelskie, 111–116. Figures for 1918 are not known. 40 Übersicht über die bisherige wirtschaftliche Ausnutzung der okkupierten Gebiete von Polen, Serbien und Montenegro, 22. 12. 1916. ÖStA KA, AOK-Quartiermeister-Abteilung, Referenten-Faszikel/2590. 41 Jonathan E. Gumz: The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914– 1918. Cambridge 2009, 160–170. The conclusions there relate to agriculture. The book does not contain information on labour market policy.

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Hindenburg sought to establish a kind of ideal management there with little regard for politics. This meant that few workers were to be sent to the Reich, because they were required locally, for example, to establish a model forestry company in the vast forests of Białowies.42 As I mentioned above, even civil worker battalions from the Government General of Warsaw, in which over 16 000 men had to serve, were deployed in Ober Ost. Forced labour was common, because the occupiers did not rely on native inhabitants and structures in agriculture, preferring to install German officers as estate managers, who depended heavily on forced labour. Arbitrary physical punishment and collective contributions were the preferred means of encouraging the ‘cooperation’ of the locals; wages were only paid irregularly. Forced labour was an explicit goal of the occupation. It was thought that in this way the native population would learn more about order, efficiency and cleanliness. In the long run this policy proved very uneconomical, because the allegedly well-managed economy of the territory was overburdened with bur­ eaucracy and could not function without the support of locals. By 1926 the German Reichstag had already come to the conclusion that the Government General of Warsaw had been much more efficient than Ober Ost.43 In 1916 the occupation of Romania was divided between Germany and Austria-Hungary. However, reliable information is only available for the German part. There was a dire lack of workers there after the invasion, because a large part of the population had fled together with the country’s army from the advancing troops of the Central Powers. It should be noted that the military administration acted in a far more humane way than the troops in the rear. As Romania was treated as an occupied enemy state, recruitment policy was quite severe there. For example, all able-bodied people were obliged to register themselves. This rule was, however, only partially implemented.44 The army administration set up worker battalions by announcing the desired number of men and the wages to be paid, and threatening that a failure to reach the required numbers would lead to unpaid forced recruitment. In spite of this, there was a shortfall of approximately 25 000 auxiliary workers during the harvest of 1917, and only three quarters of those who volunteered were actually hired. This state of affairs led to even more coercion. Apparently, no lessons had been learned from previous occupations. Despite certain doubts 42 Westerhoff,

Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, 168–177.

43 Ibid., 161–162, 79. On ‘education’ in cleanliness, especially for Jews, see Paul Julian Weind­

ling: Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe 1890–1945. Oxford 2000, 103–104. Mayerhofer: Zwischen Freund und Feind. Deutsche Besatzung in Rumänien 1916– 1918. München 2010, 242, 250–251.

44 Lisa

100   Stephan Lehnstaedt about the effectiveness of the system, in 1917 Romania there was a tendency to barrack workers, using them not as temporary workers, but as permanent auxiliary labourers. However, regardless of the pressure exerted by the occupiers, the lack of workers could not be compensated for, for the simple reason that there were too few men. There was no question of transferring some of them to the Reich even by force.45 Yet it should not be forgotten that the vast majority of local inhabitants in all zones of occupation were not subject to oppression and continued to work as normal – usually as farmers, but also in factories. The Polish example shows that even in the context of the new rules, frequent strikes were possible. In the Government General of Warsaw the first strikes took place as early as 1915, and they occurred more and more frequently over the next years. The strikers usually demanded higher wages and sometimes also food and shorter working hours. Soldiers were seldom used as strike-breakers and violence was rare. Salary negotiations and compromises were common, especially in the mining industry. Of the 36 strikes in the summer of 1918, 6 resulted in the fulfilment of the strikers’ demands, 19 resulted in a compromise, and only 9 were unresolved. This also had reverberations for the k. u. k. occupation, which was confronted with similar demands for higher wages in the Dąbrowa mining district.46 When the Germans decided to pay their workers more, the Dual Monarchy was forced to increase its payments accordingly – to a level even higher than wages in Austria – in order to prevent labourers from migrating to the German zone of occupation.47

Food seizures The utilisation of the occupied territories was not just limited to food. In particular in Poland and Ober Ost, extensive forests existed, parts of which were extensively cleared.48 Plundering should also not be underestimated, nor should the utilisation of the occupied territories for horse supplies.49 The huge 45 Ibid.,

258–272. Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, 278–279. 47 Wegs, Die österreichische Kriegswirtschaft, 87–88. 48 See for example Martin Bemmann: “…kann von einer schonenden Behandlung keine Rede sein”. Zur forst- und landwirtschaftlichen Ausnutzung des Generalgouvernements Warschau durch die deutsche Besatzungsmacht, 1915–1918, in: Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas 55 (2007), 1–33. 49 In 1900 the hugely industrialised USA used only 25 per cent of all cultivated land for growing forage. See Jürgen Osterhammel: Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Bonn 2010, 932. 46 Westerhoff,

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food requirements of the armies could not nearly be covered. And where humans went hungry, there was usually also a lack of fodder for horses. Major efforts were also made in these areas. However, for reasons of space, I cannot examine these two aspects further here, and will focus on food production and seizures. During the war the Central Powers regarded nearly all the countries of Eastern Europe – especially Ober Ost, Serbia, Romania, and above all Ukraine – as rich grain stores that would prove useful to Germany (and AustriaHungary).50 Expectations for Poland were usually more modest. Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) and Galicia, which were already controlled by Prussia and Austria-Hungary in 1914, were not considered economically significant, and Congress Poland proved even less valuable in this regard.51 Yet, the expectations of the homeland for a substantial contribution during the food crisis remained high, and Governor General von Beseler in Warsaw had been fending off exaggerated demands from Berlin since the autumn of 1915.52 Yet von Beseler was interested in utilising Poland to the full and he regarded it as one of his major tasks to supply Germany with as much food as ­possible.53 The total quantities of food obtained during the war appear quite impressive: 220 000 tons of potatoes, 120 million eggs, 900 000 geese, 2,850 tons of butter, 20 000 train carriages filled with vegetables and fruit, 2,500 tons of bacon and smoked foods, as well as – in 1918 alone – 120 000 cattle.54 These figures do not include the food supplies that reached the Reich via unofficial channels or were consumed locally by soldiers in Poland. However, if we compare these statistics with domestic production in Germany at that time, it Ober Ost (ed.): Das Land Ober-Ost. Deutsche Arbeit in den Verwaltungsgebieten Kurland, Litauen und Bialystok-Grodno. Stuttgart 1917, 250; Vejas G. ­Liulevicius: War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge 2000, 68–69. Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse, 175. Mayer­ hofer, Zwischen Freund und Feind, 376. Wolfram Dornik/Peter Lieb: Die wirtschaftliche Ausnutzung, in: Wolfram Dornik et al. (eds.): Die Ukraine zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fremdherrschaft 1917–22. Graz 2011, 281–323; Frank Golczewski: Deutsche und Ukrainer 1914–1939. Paderborn 2010, 152–163, 246–249. 51 Hans Christian Heinemeyer: Kommentar. Die Auswirkungen des Ersten Weltkriegs auf die wirtschaftliche Verflechtung Zentraleuropas, in: Dieter Bingen et al. (eds.): Interesse und Konflikt. Zur politischen Ökonomie der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen, 1900– 2007. Wiesbaden 2008, 78–84; Conze, Polnische Nation und deutsche Politik, 13. 52 See for example von Beseler an seine Frau, 22. 10. 1915 and von Beseler an seine Frau, 15. 11. 1917, Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg im Breisgau (BAMA), N 30/53. I thank Robert Spät, Freiburg/Berlin, for providing me with a copy of the transcript. 53 Ibid., 131–133. 54 Wolfgang von Kries: Die wirtschaftliche Ausnutzung des Generalgouvernements War­ schau, in: Preußische Jahrbücher 235 (1934), 221–248, 239–241. 50 Presseabteilung

102   Stephan Lehnstaedt quickly becomes clear that the ‘utilisation’ of the occupied territories constituted only a drop in the ocean. Even in the worst war year 1916, the domestic potato harvest amounted to 25.1 million tons – one hundred times greater than the total imports from the Government General of Warsaw over the course of the entire war.55 As Poland had not been an export country for foodstuffs before 1914, and had suffered extensive destruction in the first two years of the war, drastic measures were required to get anything at all out of the country. The policy of the occupying forces was driven by the idea that the locals should not be any better off than the people at home. While this policy bore little resemblance to the intentional hunger politics that would be favoured 30 years later, it led, nevertheless, to food shortages that were far more severe than in Germany.56 Of course, we must distinguish between the urban and the rural population here. While food producers in rural areas were quite well supplied, the workers and the lower classes in towns (especially in Łódź and Warsaw) were hit very hard. In October 1915 the daily bread ration in Warsaw was 160 grams, while it still was 225 grams in the German Reich. And in May 1917 the inhabitants of Warsaw received only 131 grams of bread and 205 grams of potatoes per day, compared to the daily ration of 237 grams of bread and 357 grams of potatoes in the Reich. Before the outbreak of the war the daily bread consumption in urban Poland had been around 720 grams.57 Even more than the harsh labour policies, such food policies could hardly be seen to comply with the Hague Land Warfare Convention, which stipulated that occupied populations should have an adequate food supply. Yet the Central Powers argued that the Poles were a liberated people, who now stood on their side and was thus willing to make a contribution to a victory that would lead to its own independence. Accordingly, the Government General urged the municipal authorities in Warsaw to understand the sacrifices that were necessary for freedom and the victory of the German army.58 And the occupiers demanded quite a lot from the occupied: approximately two million urban dwellers were subject to the aforementioned rationing as a means of increas-

J. Mommsen: Bürgerstolz und Weltmachtstreben. Deutschland unter Wilhelm II, 1890 bis 1918. Berlin 1995, 683. 56 Christian Gerlach: Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944. Hamburg 1999. 57 Marta Polsakiewicz: Spezifika deutscher Besatzungspolitik in Warschau 1914–1916, in: Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 4 (2009), 501–537, 531. 58 Schreiben des Verwaltungschefs GGW an den Magistrat Warschau, 5. 8. 1918, AGAD, 314-2/18. 55 Wolfgang

Fluctuating between ‘Utilisation’ and Exploitation   103

ing exports.59 By 1916 their hunger was already so great that food transports were pillaged and had to be protected by German soldiers.60 Food supplies were particularly scarce in the months before the new harvest, when the supplies from the preceding year were dwindling. One Austrian observer noted a doubling of the mortality rate in Warsaw in 1916, a phenomenon he attributed mainly to malnutrition.61 Under these circumstances, a black market emerged and there was a huge increase in soup kitchens.62 Yet the Germans still wanted to export food. Governor General von Beseler referred to this objective in no uncertain terms in January 1916: “For us, ­Poland remained first and foremost an occupied hostile province, that was to be kept in order, used for our war purposes and – wherever compatible with the aforementioned goals – economically boosted.”63 Thus, in the first months after the conquest, there was an almost exclusive focus on forced or field ­requisitions for the troops, usually with no compensation of the population. Verbal orders were given for these requisitions, as written regulations did not yet exist. This system was only changed in the summer of 1915, when it became clear that the war would not end soon. The new tasks seemed impossible “without serious interventions in Polish economic life.”64 Yet, it is remarkable that despite the importance attached to exports of food, its seizure fell to the German civil administration, which usually issued regulations that were implemented via the courts and penalty orders. After an initial, short phase of unregulated requisitioning, a handover system was established. Farmers were to be forced to sell their harvests at a given price to the German authorities. Yet because significantly higher prices could be obtained on the black market, the peasants often evaded sales to the occupying forces.65 It was only by means of local controls, threshing units, and strict monitoring in conjunction with sanctions such as seizure and detention that the intended results could be even partially achieved. Although periods 59 Vierteljahrsbericht

des Verwaltungschefs bei dem General-Gouvernement Warschau für die Zeit vom 1. 1. 1916 bis zum 31. 3. 1916, AGAD, 314-2/5. 3. (5.) 60 Bericht über Tätigkeit und Zustände im Gouvernementsgebiet für die Zeit vom 1. 7. 1916 bis 30. 9. 1916, AGAD, 314/2. 61 Andrian an k. u. k. Außenministerium Wien, 24. 5. 1916, ÖStA HHStA, PA I, Liasse Krieg 11k-m/924. 62 Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz: Warszawa w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej. Warszawa 1974, 170–172; Jerzy Holzer/Jan Molenda: Polska w pierwszej wojnie światowej. Warszawa 1973, 161. 63 Immediatbericht von Beselers, 23. 1. 1916, BAMA, N 30/9. 64 Von Kries, Die wirtschaftliche Ausnutzung, 221–248, 225–227. 65 Vierteljahrsbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem General-Gouvernement Warschau für die Zeit vom 1. Oktober 1916 bis zum 31. Dezember 1916, AGAD, 314-2/8. 6. (8.)

104   Stephan Lehnstaedt of imprisonment were usually relatively short, they meant ruin and misery for whole families, if the most important worker of a subsistence economy was not present for sowing or harvesting. Yet even apart from that, the system did not function well in the eyes of the occupiers. It was obvious that coercion was not producing the desired results. For that reason, a National Grain Company (Landesgetreidegesellschaft) was established in Warsaw on 1 July 1916 to replace the previous Import Company (Wareneinfuhrgesellschaft). It was supposed to secure the harvest for the occupying forces by means of financial incentives.66 Yet the prices paid for requisitioned food in no way corresponded to the usual market value and did not allow farmers to buy goods on the free (black) market. Such payments amounted to partial expropriation. Against this background the next harvest “was willingly delivered only in the rarest cases”.67 Almost all of Government General’s military patrols had to be assigned to extract the contingents levied on the villages collectively. As the Military Government General Lublin faced similar problems, and the Central Powers found themselves severely criticised for their harsh pol­ icies, they together established a Polish agriculture council in May 1917 to ­organise the harvest in July.68 This organisation was not really autonomous, because it was supervised by a government commissioner and its only task was the “correct commercial management of grain purchases”.69 At local level, the occupying forces supervised the correct execution of the harvest seizure. Responsibility for the fulfilment of local contingents still lay in their hands and they threatened that they would use “power and coercion” if necessary to achieve that goal.70 Despite that threat, the attempt to force co-operation with the Poles was not successful, not least because the local committees could not pay the prices that the farmers were being offered on the black market. For that reason, it was decided that quotas would once again be regulated from above. Furthermore, instead of estimating the expected amounts for each locality or demanding only surpluses as before, Lublin now imposed a requisi-

66 Vierteljahrsbericht

des Verwaltungschefs bei dem General-Gouvernement Warschau für die Zeit vom 1. April 1916 bis zum 30. Juni 1916, AGAD, 314-2/6, 31; 42. 4. (6.) 67 Halbjahrsbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem General-Gouvernement Warschau für die Zeit vom 1. Oktober 1916 bis zum 31. März 1917, AGAD, 314-2/11. 68 Hausner, Die Polenpolitik der Mittelmächte, 366–372; MGL an Heeresbahnkommando Radom, 8. 8. 1917. AGAD, 312/1833. 69 MGL an Kreiskommandos, 14. 8. 1917, ÖStA KA, NFA, MGG Polen/1594. 70 Ibid.

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tion ratio on the counties.71 In many cases, this ratio was considered much too high, even in the eyes of the k. u. k. county commanders.72 The delegate of the k. u. k. foreign ministry in Warsaw characterised the policy pursued by its ally as varying between concessions and the “hard fist of a ruler”, but consistent with the principle of obtaining “as much as possible from the occupied territories”.73 Thus, in the summer of 1917 the Germans appointed two Poles to the board of the National Grain Company led by the cavalry captain of the reserve Ernst Graf von Seherr-Thoß. It was hoped that the Poles would increase the legitimacy of the organisation without gaining control over it.74 In the course of a similar reorganisation, Lublin restructured its Harvest Utilisation Office (Ernteverwertungszentrale) a short time later. It was now no longer responsible for executing the harvest seizure, but functioned exclusively as a purchase and sales institution, organising the transport of grain and potatoes to the homeland. The recruitment of more Polish personnel had the advantage of freeing up more soldiers for service on the front.75 At the same time, in the Military Government General Lublin the economic interdependencies that characterised even an agrarian society became clear. Since the few factories in the Lublin area produced mainly food and were now deprived of the raw materials necessary to do so, unemployment and poverty rose. The Polish autonomous administration in Warsaw also complained that tradesmen were crossing the country and buying food at prices higher than the maximum prices. Thus hunger and prices were growing apace.76 The functioning of the occupation systems was far from effective. The bad harvest in 1918 hit an already suffering population hard. Even for the Central Powers, the worsening hunger in their homelands meant a crisis. The k. u. k. administration advocated denunciation and rewarded informers with up to 20 per cent of the supplies seized due to their assistance. Anybody who hid grain or potatoes faced fines of up to 5,000 krones and imprisonment Mitzka: Die k. u. k. Militärverwaltung in Russisch-Polen, in: Hugo Kerchnawe (ed.): Die Militärverwaltung in den von den österreichisch-ungarischen Truppen besetzten Gebieten. Wien 1928, 8–52. See also Bericht Nr. 98 des Gesandten des Außenministeriums beim MGGL, 10. 9. 1917, ÖStA HHStA, PA I/56a/1,2/1011. 72 Monatsbericht Kreiskommando Pinczów, März 1918, AGAD, 312/1834. 73 Delegation Warschau an k. u. k. Außenministerium, 28. 3. 1916, ÖStA  HHStA, PA  I, ­Liasse Krieg 11k-m/924. 74 Halbjahrsbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem General-Gouvernement Warschau für die Zeit vom 1. April 1917 bis 30. September 1917, AGAD, 314-2/10, 57–61. 75 Protokollmeldung über die Auflösung der EVZ, 19. 7. 1917, AGAD, 312/1843. 76 Land- und Forstwirtschaft im GGW 1917–1918. Reichsamt des Innern an Verwaltungschef GGW, 2. 1. 1918, AGAD, 314-2/20. 71 Rudolf

106   Stephan Lehnstaedt for up to two years. They also faced the likelihood that their harvest would be seized, which meant economic ruin.77 In April 1918 Lublin once again took over the Polish harvest organisation and its stores. And although this institution had not been popular among the people, it appeared to be the lesser evil in comparison to the military administration. The population put up strong resistance to this backward step on the way to independent self-government, and force of arms was often required to proceed with it.78 The assessment of the situation and the steps taken in Warsaw were rather similar: “There is no advantage to be expected from cooperation, since the Poles’ knowledge of their own country is very poor, as has been repeatedly shown.”79 On the whole, the policies for Warsaw and Lublin were similar. Both occupying forces began with arbitrary plundering and only later established a formal administration for agriculture. Because Vienna and Berlin were not yet contemplating a longer war in 1915, their initial efforts were rather unmethodical and relied on the voluntary cooperation of the Poles. When this cooperation was not forthcoming, coercive methods were used and quotas were imposed. When they failed, the Central Powers once again emphasised cooperation with the Polish administration and created economic incentives. Yet even this approach did produce the desired results and it also entailed occasional negotiations with the locals, which contradicted the notion of direct rule. Therefore, from the autumn of 1917 onwards, both occupation regimes embarked on a carrot-and-stick policy. They declared their willingness to buy produce directly from farmers and owners of large estates without Polish codetermination and threatened severe sanctions in the case of obstruction. Of course it should be emphasized that hunger was less severe in the k. u. k. area of occupation. This was due less to a milder policy and more to the structural differences between the two parts of Poland. The Germans had to supply two large cities – Warsaw and Łódź – where the lack of food and employment was soon felt, while the vast majority of the population in the agrarian Lublin area was self-supporting. The negative effects of the occupation thus became apparent more quickly in the Government General of Warsaw.

77 Wirtschaftssektion

MGL 1918. Anleitung für die Bewirtschaftung der Ernte im Bereiche des k. u. k. Militärgouvernements Lublin, im Jahre 1918/19, Wien 1918, AGAD, 312/1835. (Druckschrift), 20–22. On punishment in the Government General of Warsaw, see ­Diverse Verwaltungsakten 1918, Aktenvermerk Verkehrsabteilung des Wirtschaftsausschusses GGW, 21. 8. 1918, AGAD, 314-2/15. 78 Bericht der EVZ an das MGL, 11. 4. 1918, AGAD, 312/1834. 79 Halbjahrsbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem General-Gouvernement Warschau für die Zeit vom 1. April bis 30. September 1918, AGAD, 214-2/12, 55–60, 64–68.

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It is not possible to compare how successful the two powers were in transporting goods to the homeland in absolute terms, because they used different calculation methods. The data for Germany, which I already gave, covers actual exports to the Reich, while the data for Austria-Hungary includes the supplies for the army. For Lublin, this amounted to 299 000 tons of potatoes, approximately one quarter more than the yield from the Warsaw region, as well as 141 000  tons of grain, which the Germans did not export at all from their Government General.80 Apart from the fact that a comparison in absolute terms makes little sense because of the different conditions, it should also be noted that domestic production was also much higher in the Austro-Hungarian case. The grain harvest alone was 28.5 million  tons81 during the war, exceeding grain imports from Poland by a factor of 200. In other words, the occupation of Poland contributed 0.5  per cent of the Dual Monarchy’s total grain supply during the war. In Poland the agricultural policies pursued by the governors general were constantly being readjusted. This was less a sign of flexibility as it was of dis­ orientation. Even for the occupying forces, the consequences of those fluctuating economic policies were clear. In a report to Berlin in the spring of 1918 von Beseler wrote: “The […] agriculture of the Government General of Warsaw is persistently losing its ability to perform and resist adversity. […] Furthermore, agricultural products of any kind had to be seized far beyond any degree reasonable for continuing with this economic system.”82 The situation in Ober Ost was not very different. There the effects of the war and requisitions had substantially reduced yields, with the result that the population in Grodno was dependent on army food stocks until 1916. At the same time, goods were already being exported from Lithuania. Unlike in ­Poland, here Ludendorff and Hindenburg were convinced that they could run the economy without cooperating with the locals. In Lithuania alone, the ­military placed 594 estates with 344 100 hectares under its own management. Farmers were obliged to deliver their crops in accordance with a strict system of quotas and under threat of force. The prices for the delivered food were substantially lower than in Germany and even lower than in the Government General of Warsaw. Requisition ratios varied, however, and served more as guidelines. Even in 1918 there were no generally accepted written standards, 80 Hausner,

Die Polenpolitik der Mittelmächte, 370. The last two years of the war brought a further 52 000 cattle, 38 000 pigs and 750 tons of butter. 81 Felix Butschek: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Wien 2011, 178. 82 Halbjahrsbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem General-Gouvernement Warschau für die Zeit vom 1. Oktober 1917 bis zum 31. März 1918, AGAD, 314-2/11.

108   Stephan Lehnstaedt and local commanders often decided arbitrarily on the amounts to be requisitioned. The only exception to this rule was the district of Białystok-Grodno, where each county was obliged to make just a single, small delivery. However, this did not mean that the population was sufficiently supplied; food rationing in Ober Ost was strict and supplies were inadequate.83 Northern Serbia – already devastated and plundered in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 – fell into the hands of the Dual Monarchy’s military administration in 1916. As much of the region’s population had fled beforehand, cultivation was almost impossible. The occupying forces of Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria initially had no interest in solving the hunger crisis there, because the head of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff Franz Graf Conrad von Hötzendorf had an almost pathological hatred for this enemy.84 In his view, food supplies to Serbia would be secured via neutral non-European countries, as in the case of Belgium. At the same time, the occupation army itself had to be fed with supplies from the territory. The prospect of exporting food was unthinkable under these circumstances. To prevent a humanitarian (and propaganda) disaster, food supplies had to be imported from the homeland or from Romania.85 After this initial famine was overcome, Serbia was also expected to export food. However, the Military Government General did not aim to change the existing structures. With the arrival of non-military specialists in April 1916, practical steps were taken: price incentives combined with the threat of force. However, the results of the 1917 harvest were very modest, and incentives, rather than sanctions, were increased. In 1918 some 350 million krones were invested to purchase the harvest in Serbia – with considerable success. The farmers made a handsome profit and quotas were even exceeded. This meant that a further famine was not only prevented, but food rations for peasants could also be approved in 1917, which although still too low, were at least higher than those in Vienna. It was 1918 before rations in Vienna were once again on a par with those in Serbia.86 A clearly more positive picture of the occupation of Romania emerged immediately after the war. Ludendorff himself stated that it “alone [had] kept us, Linde: Die deutsche Politik in Litauen im Ersten Weltkrieg. Wiesbaden 1965, 52–59; Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 67–71. 84 Tamara Scheer: Besatzungsregime im Vergleich. Serbiens Wirtschaft unter österreichischungarischer und bulgarischer Herrschaft (1915–1918), in: Carola Sachse (ed.): ‘Mitteleuropa’ und ‘Südosteuropa’ als Planungsraum. Wirtschafts- und kulturpolitische Expertisen im Zeitalter der Weltkriege. Göttingen 2010, 315–339. 85 Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse, 147–155. 86 Ibid., 160–170, 174–175. 83 Gerd

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Austria-Hungary, and Constantinople afloat in the year 1917.”87 And indeed, in the first six months after the invasion of the country, large quantities of food were seized and nearly one million tons of grain were exported to Germany and the Dual Monarchy. The occupying forces divided everything ­according to complicated schemes, with Germany receiving a third, AustriaHungary approximately 45 per cent, and Turkey and Bulgaria the remainder. Apart from exports, the locally stationed troops also had to be supplied with food. In the long run, however, these troops went hungry. By January 1918 supplies had already been so pillaged that even supplies to the units stationed in the occupied territory seemed endangered. Total exports in the period from September 1917 to February 1918 were less than grain exports in the preceding period.88 Given that Romania was a country that produced a food surplus, hunger was far less severe among the locals than it was, for instance, in Warsaw. The usual differences between urban and rural areas existed, which the occupying forces sought to neutralise in a complex distribution and rationing system. Thus even in the last year of the war, official rations in Bucharest exceeded those in every other city on the national territories of the Central Powers. Demands by Reich authorities to lower the allowances in Romania for this very reason were rejected by the military administration. In spite of a lack of meat, Bucharest was relatively well off – a significant black market with ruinous prices developed only in late 1918.89 It was possible to govern Romania with only minimal food requisitions and the harvest was secured by cash payments only. Expropriations were generally limited to machines and industrial raw materials.90 While the notion of a ‘useful’ occupation was at least partially realised in Romania, the expectations for Ukraine proved too ambitious. Before the war the country had been a large exporter of grain, but battles, revolution, and civil war had left their mark by the time the country was invaded by the Central Powers in 1918. Ukrainian farmers were not interested in cooperating with the new rulers, because the money they paid was too little to buy anything with. Furthermore, it soon became obvious that Germany and AustriaHungary did not have a united approach: k. u. k. units requisitioned the harvest by force, while the Germans first thought about installing an old-fashLudendorff: Meine Kriegserinnerungen, 1914–1918. Berlin 1919, 279. See also ­Davis Hamlin: ‘Dummes Geld’. Money, Grain, and the Occupation of Romania in WWI, in: Central European History 3 (2009), 451–471. 88 Mayerhofer, Zwischen Freund und Feind, 208–209. 89 Ibid., 222–225, 229–234. 90 Ibid., 165. 87 Erich

110   Stephan Lehnstaedt ioned barter system. Social conflict emerged as an urgent problem, culminating in the question of how the many large estates were to be distributed – and managed.91 The Germans proceeded pragmatically and argued that the person who cultivated a field should be entitled to the harvest. However, AustriaHungary was undecided and did not want to risk a conflict with the Polish aristocrats in Western Ukraine, with whom they hoped to cooperate.92 For these reasons, grain exports to the homeland were initially very limited, and the quantities agreed in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were not reached. The establishment of a more efficient seizure system did not change things. This system failed because the occupying forces lacked reliable data on the potential of Ukrainian agriculture and thus had to rely to a large extent on information provided by the Ukrainian Rada. The Rada was, of course, opposed to the plundering of the country by the occupiers and constantly set new targets with no serious intentions of fulfilling them. Nevertheless, the introduction of a new seizure system brought about a gradual cessation of forced k. u. k. requisitions. However, in this instance we can hardly speak of a united policy, but rather of conflict and rivalry between the Central Powers.93 Increasingly discontent with export quantities and frustrated with their ally, the Germans took control of grain seizures for the whole country in mid-May 1918 and compensated the Dual Monarchy for this loss with a food delivery directly from the Reich.94 By and large, the efforts of the Central Powers in Ukraine produced little in the way of success. Although the occupying forces cooperated with the local authorities, grain could only be obtained by resorting to military pressure or by paying prices far higher than those agreed. Even changes to the free trade system did not deliver noteworthy results. These changes were already seen to have failed at the time. The occupation of the ‘breadbasket Ukraine’ provided the Central Powers with just ten per cent of the originally envisaged crop, including animal fodder and leguminous plants: 102 000 tons, a tiny quantity.95 Even if one takes account of the economic agreements of September 1918,

Mędrzecki: Niemiecka interwencja militarna na Ukraine w 1918 roku. Warszawa 2000, 141–145. See Peter Borowsky: Deutsche Ukrainepolitik 1918. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Wirtschaftsfragen. Lübeck 1970, 85–90. 92 Dornik/Lieb, Die wirtschaftliche Ausnutzung, 284–287; Borowsky, Deutsche Ukrainepolitik 1918, 97–98. 93 Borowsky, Deutsche Ukrainepolitik 1918, 176–194. 94 Dornik/Lieb, Die wirtschaftliche Ausnutzung, 293–297. 95 Ibid., 311–312. 91 Włodzimierz

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which were meant to secure supplies beyond the end of war, only 129 310 tons of crops had arrived in Germany by 17 December 1918.96

Conclusions The occupation economy that operated during the First World War in Eastern Europe was not uniform. This finding is not as self-evident as it may seem at first glance. Despite different local conditions, clear parameters were set in Berlin and Vienna and – especially in time of war – independent action on the part of subordinated organs could not be assumed to be the norm. Yet the differences between Germany and Austria-Hungary are not so surprising, because the tensions between the Central Powers regarding occupation policy and economics are by now well known. Despite Berlin’s dominant position, the Dual Monarchy remained independent in the economic sphere.97 Yet notwithstanding these tendencies, the administrations in the occupied territories succeeded in acting independently. Policies were implemented differently in different regions. While comprehensive planning was favoured in Ober Ost, limited cooperation under the pretence of guaranteeing a formal independence was the norm in Poland or Ukraine. In all cases, the ‘pragmatists’ utilised the occupied territories more efficiently than those that relied on sheer coercion. Nevertheless, it should be noted that civilians’ experience of violence in the context of political and economic measures bears no resemblance to the excesses of the Second World War. Forced labour involved hundreds of thousands of men, but it was paid and its timeframe was limited. The people employed were also seen as workers, not as ‘disposable masses’. Punishment of farmers for failing to deliver their harvest was generally limited to economic sanctions. Imprisonment and the use of brute force were rare. Farmsteads were burned down and farmers were abused only in exceptional cases. In Poland such acts were severely punished, because the occupying forces tried to position themselves as liberators and upheld a strict code of ethics where transgressions of legal standards were not tolerated. Market incentives proved to be far more successful than the use of force, even if Serbia was the only country to exceed the prescribed grain quotas. Coercive measures were actually counter-productive, as the Germans discovered in Ober Ost. Looking to the nineteenth century, the occupiers viewed the slavery-based economy as entirely effective, because it was – as can be shown 96 Golczewski, 97 Wegs,

Deutsche und Ukrainer, 323–326. Die österreichische Kriegswirtschaft, 45–46.

112   Stephan Lehnstaedt nowadays – economically very successful and, under the conditions that ­prevailed at that time, even rational, at least for the slave owners.98 It is noteworthy that the planned utopia in Ober Ost did not become a model for other occupations – it didn’t make sense to contemporaries, nor did it prove super­ ior in retrospect.99 However, if Ober Ost was seen to anticipate the Nazi tyranny of World War II,100 then this was due to the charisma of the brilliant self-propagandist Erich Ludendorff and to an over-interpretation of sources, which were neglected in other regions. However, no twentieth-century national economy could have been managed effectively by taking such an ­approach, not even in agrarian Eastern Europe. The occupiers were unable to control complex systems solely by issuing orders from above. Thus, from their point of view, the organisation of a successful economy proved to be an insurmountable task that required constant changes of course. This is the essential similarity of the occupations; a more homogenous picture does not exist. During the First World War ‘the’ East bore no resemblance to the most northeastern zone of occupation, Ober Ost. The latter region was a special case, mainly due to the utopian claims associated with it. And even there, the government was not monolithic and perfectly organised. For example, instead of universal requisition rules, despotism reigned at local level. Nevertheless, food rations in Ober Ost were higher in 1917 than in the starving city of Warsaw, although the overall conditions in Poland were much better. 101

  98 Osterhammel,   99 Liulevicius, 100 Ibid.

101 Linde,

Die Verwandlung der Welt, 996, 1007. War Land on the Eastern Front, 97–98.

Die deutsche Politik in Litauen, 56; Polsakiewicz, Spezifika deutscher Besatzungspolitik, 531.

Robert L. Nelson

Utopias of Open Space: Forced Population Transfer Fantasies during the First World War German plans to forcibly move millions of people in the occupied East during the First World War are sometimes dismissed as unimportant because, ultimately, these fantasies existed only in the heads of planners and never actually happened. Yet, the various versions of the Nazi Generalplan Ost, none of which saw the light of day, are closely studied because, it is assumed, they would have happened if not for Stalingrad. The First World War plans were in fact rather serious, and personally pushed forward by the only man in the East who could make them happen, Erich Ludendorff, the leading figure in the German Supreme Army Command. Like the Generalplan Ost, these plans tell us a lot about just how radical many otherwise ‘moderate’ space and settlement planners in Germany had become. Before describing this wartime radicalization, I will first argue for the importance of the two prewar developments that provided great fodder for the imaginations of these planners: the fantasy and freedom of open Raum in the North American West, and the actual (and seemingly acceptable) ‘sorting’ of nations and peoples in the Balkans in 1912/1913. Out of the first fantasy Germans developed the program of ‘inner colonization’ from 1886, and it was the thinkers linked to this initial endeavor who were called upon in 1914/1915 to start fantasizing, and directly planning, forced population transfers in Poland, Latvia, and White Russia. I will then make comparisons to wartime empires that made no such plans (Austria-Hungary), as well as to those that went all the way with such ideas (the Ottomans and the Russians). Finally, through these last examples, and even more so by looking at the occupied East in the 1940s, I will push Norman Naimark’s argument that the violence inherent in the end goal of ethnic population transfers, an empty space, led ultimately to the movement of people not simply from one geographical space to another, but from life to death.1 In my earlier analysis, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War, utilizing journals produced by and for soldiers at or near the front, I was sur1

Norman M. Naimark: Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge 2001.

114   Robert L. Nelson prised and intrigued to see how the ‘little peoples’ of the occupied East were described by the Germans in what could only be termed colonial language. 2 Along the lines of Vejas Liulevicius, I found a German ‘mindscape’ of the East as a land to be ordered, of confusing amalgams of ‘primitive, dirty’ peoples who did not understand their proper ethnic roles and allegiances.3 For my next project I chose to trace the ways in which Germans conceived of Eastern Europe as a colonial space in the years leading up to 1914. This led directly and obviously to the Program of Inner Colonization, Bismarck’s governmentfunded project, dating from 1886, in which bankrupt estates in West Prussia and Posen (Prussian Poland) were purchased, broken up into smaller farms and provided to yeomen German farmers in an attempt to ‘dam the Slavic Flood’. This seemingly unstoppable ‘tide’ was the consequence of a higher Polish birthrate, as well as the flight of hundreds of thousands of Germans from the eastern provinces to industrial jobs in German cities or farms in North America. In studying this program, and especially its eminence grise, Professor Max Sering, I found interesting links between the German understanding of space, ethnicity, and what might be done in the East, and what Germans had seen, or believed they had seen, in the fantasy of the open West of North America.4

North America In 1883, a 26-year-old recent PhD student of Gustav Schmoller, named Max Sering, was sent on a six-month fact-finding tour of North America in order to find out why Germans were attracted to this land, and how once there they, along with North American farmers in general, were able to produce so much Robert L. Nelson: German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War. Cambridge 2011. Vejas G. Liulevicius: War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. New York 2000. I can trace my fascination with the eastern front in WWI to one moment: I arrived in Cambridge fully intending to write a typically western-front based dissertation on the German soldier newspapers. At my first meeting with my supervisor, Jay Winter, however, he pointed to a stack of papers next to my chair. “Read that,” he ordered and then claimed that it would more or less change the focus of First World War historiography. The manuscript was Liulevicius’, and Winter was correct in his prediction. 4 Robert L. Nelson: From Manitoba to the Memel. Max Sering, Inner Colonization, and the German East, in: Social History 35 (2010), 439–457. For a fascinating recent analysis of Eastern Europe as a colonial space and the North American roots of Germany’s frontier fantasies in the East, see Kristin Kopp: Germany’s Wild East. Constructing Poland as ­Colonial Space. Ann Arbor 2012; David Furber: Near as Far in the Colonies. The Nazi Occupation of Poland, in: International History Review 26 (2004), 541–579. 2 3

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grain so cheaply. First and foremost, Sering’s findings were that these two large land empires, the USA and Canada, were thriving thanks to their inner colonization: moving people out of the dirty, unhygienic cities of the East (New York, Montreal) and on to healthy farms in the West. Sering surmised that these nations were becoming ever stronger through yeomen farming: families were healthier, women had more babies (i.e. future soldiers), politics were becoming more rural/conservative, and these nations had achieved food security.5 According to Sering, it was because these farmers actually owned their own homestead (eigene Scholle) that they had a real and lasting connection to the land, cared about farming, and produced so much grain so cheaply. Upon his return to Germany, Sering quickly wrote up these findings for Schmollers Jahrbuch, publishing a long essay in 1884. He wrote that unfortunately Germans did not have the open and empty space of North America, and what space existed was overrun with deep traditions and laws.6 At the same time, the increasingly influential geographer Friedrich Ratzel was lamenting that Germany had not managed to grab any of that great American West. Ratzel praised this form of ‘settler colonialism’ as the best for any rising nation.7 And Sering’s Strasbourg teachers Gustav Schmoller and Friedrich Knapp were busy studying both American farmers in the West as well as the post-civil war South, as they moved the Verein für Sozialpolitik (VfS) ever further down the road to solving the so-called farmhand question (Landarbeiter­ frage). Indeed, in late 1885 it was decided that the theme of the annual meeting of the VfS in November 1886 would be inner colonization (innere Koloni­ sation).8 A year later, in the wake of Bismarck’s forced expulsion of 30 000 ‘Russian and Austro-Hungarian’ Poles from the eastern provinces, the Chancellor asked his advisor, Christoph von Tiedemann to write up a memorandum (Denkschrift) Max Sering: Die Landwirthschaftliche Konkurrenz Nordamerikas in Gegenwart und Zukunft. Landwirthschaft, Kolonisation und Verkehrswesen in den Vereinigten Staaten und in Britisch-Nordamerika. Leipzig 1887. 6 Max Sering: Die Landpolitik der Vereingten Staaten von Nordamerika, in: Schmollers Jahrbuch 8 (1884), 439–495. 7 On Ratzel and the German fascination with American ‘settler colonialism’, see Jens-Uwe Guettel: From the Frontier to German South-West Africa. German Colonialism, Indians, and American Westward Expansion, in: Modern Intellectual History 7 (2010), 523–552. 8 On Schmoller and the VfS becoming fascinated with settler colonialism in the North American West as a model for Prussian Poland, see Roland Baier: Der deutsche Osten als soziale Frage. Eine Studie zur preußischen und deutschen Siedlungs- und Polenpolitik in den Ostprovinzen während des Kaiserreichs und der Weimarer Republik. Köln 1980, 49–50; Andrew Zimmerman: Alabama in Africa. Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. Princeton 2010, Chapter 2. 5

116   Robert L. Nelson on the Polish problem. The resulting piece, which was provided to Bismarck in January 1886, suggested a program of buying failed estates, breaking them up into smaller plots, then settling them with yeomen farming families of German colonists brought in from various parts of the Reich.9 Bismarck acted immediately, and set up the Royal Prussian Settlement Commission (Königlich Preußische Ansiedlungs­kommission) with one hundred million marks. In October of that year, a pamphlet was provided to the new commission officers. It contained a short suggested reading section: the first five books were on the history of West Prussia and Posen, the sixth was called Manitoba and the Western Territories.10 Sering quickly established himself as the main ‘thinker’ of inner colonization, publishing the bible of the movement in 1893: Inner Colonization in Eastern Germany.11 In 1908 the journal Archiv für innere Kolonisation (AfiK) was founded, and many of the articles that appeared within it explicitly compared Germany’s colonization of Polish territory to worldwide inner colonial schemes, from Argentina to Russia.12 In 1912 the Society for the Promotion of Inner Colonization (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der inneren Kolonisation, GFiK) was founded and chaired by Sering, the district president (Regierungs­ präsident) of Brandenburg Friedrich von Schwerin, and Alfred Hugenberg (who had worked as an assessor for the Royal Commission in Posen in the 1890s). By 1914, however, inner colonization was largely deemed a failure. Although some 22 000 German families had been settled in Posen and West Prussia, German emigration from the region continued apace, while Poles continued to have a higher birthrate. In addition, Poles set up their own ‘counter-colonial’ program with Land Credit Banks to help Polish farmers stave off bankruptcy.13 Another obstacle the inner colonizers faced was the fact that Poles had rights and were subject to laws; they could not simply be treated as savages on the frontier. Ironically, one of the main frustrations for the inner colonizers was their fellow Germans, the conservative landed elites, the Junker. These gentlemen did not want their large tracts of land broken up Von Tiedemann: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Ansiedlungsgesetzes, 8  May  1907, in: Bundesarchiv Berlin (Lichterfelde), N/2308/231. Unfortunately, Tiedemann has not left us an intellectual history of his approach to this document. 10 Königlicher Landrath von Wittenburg, Bericht des Unterzeichneten zu Punkt 6 der Tages­ordnung vom 11. 10. 1886, in: Bundesarchiv Berlin Lichterfelde, N2308/65. 11 Max Sering: Die innere Kolonisation im östlichen Deutschland. Leipzig 1893. 12 Robert L. Nelson: The Archive for Inner Colonization, the German East, and World War I in: idem (ed.): Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East. 1850 through the Present. New York 2009, 65–93. 13 Scott M. Eddie: Landownership in Eastern Germany before the Great War. A Quantitative Analysis. New York 2008; Sabine Grabowski: Deutscher und Polnischer Nationalismus. Der Deutsche Ostmarken-Verein und die polnische Straż 1894–1914. Marburg 1998.   9 C.

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into smaller yeomen farms, and very much liked their seasonal, cheap Polish labor. On the eve of World War I inner colonizers were forlorn. Among their membership were some Pan-Germans who argued that what they needed was more space, and the ability to do whatever they deemed appropriate with the inhabitants of that space. Before leaving the New World behind us, we should refer once more to the fantasy of North America and its models for Europe. Sering’s understanding of the ‘empty space’ of the western frontier, and how one treated those in that space, represented two different approaches that would be pursued in Germany’s East: assimilation and forced population transfer. At least until the First World War, Sering strongly believed in the possibility of assimilation for ‘uncivilized’, or at least ‘half-civilized’ peoples. In Canada, he visited the Métis (‘halfbreed’) settlement at St. Laurent, where these people had been provided plots of land and taught ‘Western’ methods of farming, and were, in Sering’s eyes, being raised to become participating and fruitful members of Canadian society. This was in stark contrast to what he had seen at Umatilla in the Washington Territory: an Indian reservation on wholly unfertile land. A people had been pushed out of the way and onto land that would not keep them alive. They were supposed to die out. What sets Sering and early colonizers of the East fundamentally apart from later Nazi settlement planners is exactly this difference: Sering believed the Poles could be surrounded by German farmers and farming techniques and one day become assimilated members of the Reich, while Himmler believed Poles were unredeemable and had to be removed. Both fantasies are firmly grounded in the history and example of the North American West, a Romantic story that was a powerful backdrop to German reflections on the East.14

The Balkan Wars In addition to the more abstract ideal of forced population transfer in the ‘Wild West’, by 1914 German planners had a new, much more concrete example of what could be done to unwanted European populations: the deportations that took place during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. Already during these wars, and well before the 1914 publication of the Carnegie Commission’s astonishing and still authoritative Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, international corP. Kakel: The American West and the Nazi East. A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective. New York 2011.

14 Carroll

118   Robert L. Nelson respondents were informing the world of the nationalist projects that we now call ‘ethnic cleansing’. All sides in these conflicts attempted the inner colonization of their new borders through an admixture of assimilation and forced population transfer. It seems to have often been the case that if a local family swore allegiance to the newly arrived army or militia (or club-wielding band of ‘neighbors’), and stated that they were now Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, etc., they were left alone. If however the family, or indeed entire village, did not do so, rape, mutilation, arson, etc. followed, and an exodus of refugees was provoked. As the Carnegie Report indicated, and as the resulting internationally recognized treaties confirmed, forced population transfers were “tolerated” by the international community and were incredibly effective.15 These ‘small genocides’ effectively set in motion the development towards the first major genocide in Europe of the twentieth century. The influx of Muslim refugees, the Muhajirs, expelled from the Balkans into the Turkish heartland, led the Ottoman authorities to look for and delineate areas of settlement for these new colonists inside the empire. Throughout the first half of 1914, the Christian communities of Greeks and Armenians were the target, and as Ugor Ümit Üngör explains, Turkish officials in the Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants “drew inspiration from the methods of Western European colonial administrative machineries.”16 That the ethnographer Naci Ismail of the Committee of Union and Progress – the political party of the Young Turks responsible for the coming Armenian Genocide – used the pseudonym Dr. Fritz for his pre-war publications on Turkish imperial politics, and in 1918 published The Settlement of Migrants: The International Method of Assimilation using the nom de plume “Von P. Gotz”, described as “an official Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (ed.): Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. Washington 1914; republished as The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect, with a new introduction and reflections on the present conflict by George F. Ken­ nan. Washington 1993. The Report can also be found online at Archive.org: Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan War (1914), at: http://www.archive.org/details/reportofinternat00inteuoft (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013). On the German press reaction to the war, especially the feeling by 1912 that such excesses would indeed be a part of the next major European war, see Florian Kei­ singer: Unzivilisierte Kriege im zivilisierten Europa? Die Balkankriege und die öffentliche Meinung in Deutschland, England und Irland. 1876–1913. Paderborn 2008. Further, as Mark Biondich writes: “The actions of all the Balkan combatants were additionally driven by trepidation that Great Power intervention would dictate a settlement at variance with their own plans, as had occurred in the past: expelling Muslims and others from their occupation zones served to buttress their diplomatic claims.” See Mark Biondich: The Balkans. Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878. Oxford 2011, 82. 16 Ugur Ümit Üngör: Seeing Like a Nation-State. Young Turk Social Engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913–1950, in: Journal of Genocide Research 10 (2008), 15–39, 22–23. 15 The

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from the Prussian Ministry of Colonies,” indicates the influence of German inner colonial thinking.17 We shall revisit the Ottoman Empire and the ultimate cost and legacy of forced population transfer, but for now, we return to German planners and the Guns of August.

Germans in the East, 1914–1918: fantasies of forced movement Since the appearance in 1960 of Immanuel Geiss’s pioneering work, historians have been made well aware of the idea of the Polish border strip.18 Without the context of a larger story of German settlement among Poles, it is easy to dismiss the border strip project as an extravagant thought experiment of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s that ultimately never happened and thus has no historic weight or legacy. But when we look at three of the key figures the chancellor asked for direct assistance, Sering, Hugenberg, and Schwerin, the three chairmen of the GFiK, this episode becomes much more significant. Hugenberg’s proposal was the most radical, calling for the ‘clearing’ of Poles just east of the German-Russian border and the in-migration of Germans further east and outside the Reich to settle the newly opened land (prefiguring the Warthegau project of 1939).19 Schwerin’s two reports, appearing just before and immediately after the huge gains of the Great Advance of 1915, put forth a colonial program for the same space. His project was directly modeled on inner colonization in Posen and West Prussia, but included severely curtailed purchasing rights for any remaining Poles in order to stem speculation on property values. Schwerin’s two reports were well received at Ober Ost and gave the district president, according to Fischer, the ear of “the inner circle of the high Prussian bureaucracy.”20 Sering himself journeyed in August 1915 through Poland and Lithuania before finding his ideal space: Courland. In a convenient episode of outsourcing, the retreating Russian army had removed many male Latvians and many 17 In

this 1918 publication, written during or immediately in the wake of the Armenian genocide, Ismail discusses and contrasts internal and external colonization, and analyzes German, Russian and various other methods before deciding American internal colonization to be the best. Ugur Ümit Üngör: The Making of Modern Turkey. Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford 2012, 37–38. 18 Imanuel Geiss: Der polnische Grenzstreifen, 1914–1918. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegs­ zielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Lübeck 1960. 19 Catherine Epstein: Model Nazi. Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland. Oxford 2010. 20 Fritz Fischer: Germany’s Aims in the First World War. New York 1967, 116.

120   Robert L. Nelson Latvian families had fled their farms, resulting in the disappearance of two thirds of the population of Courland by the time the Germans arrived.21 Thus, without having to actually make the cruel decision to empty a space, Sering found a largely emptied one. He in fact found the North American West: “The country still lacks people and a transportation network. At an average of 25 persons per square kilometer and 19 persons per square kilometer outside the towns, the population density is as low as it is in western America.”22 Over the course of 1915 and 1916 he drew up plans for the settlement of two million Germans in Courland and simultaneously worked with Polish politicians on even more grandiose plans. In secret negotiations on the founding of the Kingdom of Poland, Sering wanted to trade colonial lands: if the new Kingdom would give up the Polish strip in its western regions, the Germans would provide White Russian land in the Grodno-Bialystok district for the uprooted Poles to travel to and colonize.23 After visiting Grodno-Bialystok in late 1916 he then had a change of heart and began using similar racial hierarchies to what he had discovered in North America. Perhaps, Sering wrote, it would be too difficult to uproot Poles, as they had a relatively strong ‘Western’ understanding of farming and the land. And in any case, those who would not ­assimilate would likely migrate to the newly founded Polish Kingdom to the East. White Russians however, proffered Sering, had little appreciation for property and would not mind that much should their farms be liquidated and provided to incoming Russians of German descent (Deutschrussen). In other words, the Poles were much like the ‘halfbreeds’ and the White Russians were more like Indian ‘fullbloods’.24 To paraphrase Locke’s argument for the theft of Indian land in the Carolinas some two hundred years earlier: White Russians merely passed over the land, but did not really use it, and thus had no right to it.25 V. Prusin: The Lands Between. Conflict in the Eastern European Borderlands, 1870–1992. Oxford 2010, 58. 22 “Dem Lande fehlt es bisher an Bevölkerung und an Verkehrswesen. Die durchschnittliche Bevölkerungsdichtigkeit ist mit 25 pro qkm und ausschliesslich der Städte mit 19 pro qkm so gering, wie im westlichen Amerika.” Max Sering: “Bericht über die eroberten Gebiete des Nordostens und über die deutsch-russischen Beziehungen von Geheimrat Seh­ ring [sic], Professor der Staatswissenschaft an der Universität Berlin”, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, N1210/131. 23 See the many letters and documents regarding these negotiations, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, N1210/121. 24 Sering, “Bericht über die eroberten Gebiete”. 25 Of course they were using the land, but throughout worldwide colonialism in this period, anything short of modern, western farming techniques was considered primitive and failed to equal property use and thus ownership. I discuss this in: Robert L. Nelson: Emptiness in the Colonial Gaze. Labor, Property and Nature, in: International Labor and Working-Class History 79 (2011), 161–174. On Locke, see Barbara Arneil: John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism. Oxford 1996. 21 Alexander

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By the winter of 1916/1917 Sering had caught the attention of Ludendorff, who twice invited Sering to Ober Ost to discuss settlement plans. One of the most detailed accounts of Ludendorff ’s thinking in this period also happens to be a very powerful indicator of the legacy of this utopian fantasizing: Dr. Robert Stupperich’s Siedlungspläne im Gebiet des Oberbefehlshabers Ost (Mi­ litärverwaltung Litauen und Kurland) während des Weltkrieges, which appeared in a 1941 issue of the Ostforscher periodical Jomsburg. Stupperich makes the connection to the earlier, pre-1914 envisioning of the East, claiming with regard to Ludendorff that the head administrators were “instructed by him to harness the experiences gained in the settlement of the Poznan Province.”26 Great pains were to be taken in order to accommodate the Lithuanians, a people believed likely to be allies of the Germans, while landowners deemed Russian or Polish were to be expelled, and somehow be provided land elsewhere. ­Despite many large schemes for the occupied East, according to Stupperich, a large-scale population exchange would only be conducted in Courland.27 ­Wilhelm von Gayl (a key officer in Ober Ost, and later head of GFiK when Schwerin died in 1925) went further, suggesting the expulsion of all Latvians. Sering disagreed, arguing that although these people had no literature or history, their culture was basically copied from the local Baltic Germans and they could thus be easily assimilated.28 During this same period, Erich Keup, the editor of the AfiK, was busy in his attempt to find the warrior-farmers that such Spartan colonies would require to reinforce the Deutschrussen. In 1918 he set up the Neuland AG in order to provide farm plots in Courland to veterans. AfiK was replete with articles on this subject as well as the rather powerful and utopian transformation of the understanding of space in the East. From its founding in 1908 through to ­early 1915, AfiK’s contributors had always argued that the land in Eastern Germany, Posen and West Prussia, was empty and in need of German farmers. Now, quite suddenly in early 1915, the very same journal proclaimed that Germany was full. Indeed, it was alleged that all of Poland was too densely populated, but the land of the Teutonic Knights, Couronia, was empty and yet full of promise.29

26 “Die

Verwaltungschefs werden von ihm angewiesen, die Ansiedlungserfahrungen, die in der Provinz Posen gemacht worden seien, sich nutzbar zu machen.” Robert Stupperich: Siedlungspläne im Gebiet des Oberbefehlshabers Ost (Militärverwaltung Litauen und Kurland) während des Weltkrieges, in: Jomsburg 5 (1941), 348–367, 353. 27 Ibid., 364. 28 Ibid., 362. Sering, “Bericht über die eroberten Gebiete”. 29 Nelson, The Archive for Inner Colonization.

122   Robert L. Nelson The desire to force out the enemy and fill the vacuum with one’s own settlers of course apes the Wild West and Balkan Examples. But here, in the mishmash of the East, the German desire for Ordnung went one step further: the occupied were to be sorted out as well. Although utopian fantasies tend to yearn for a tabula rasa, once one realizes that there are factors to contend with, the high modern mindset desires to have those factors sorted into clearly defined compartments.30 As part of Ober Ost’s scheme for categorizing and counting all members of the occupied East, the historical geographer Dr. Fritz Curschmann was seconded from his artillery regiment and sent into White Russia to document the people he found there. Specifically, he was to sort out yet another ‘loyal’ group (in Ludendorff ’s eyes anyway), the Ruthenians. The complexities of Curschmann’s mission are illustrated by the following example: “Curschmann was told of a member of the Russian Duma, from Pinsk, who spoke Polish, had a Lithuanian name, claimed he was a Ruthenian, but was born and raised in the Ukraine and had mainly Ukrainian interests at heart!”31 This last Sisyphean task, the impossibility of sorting out peoples who did not properly understand ‘one space, one race, one language’, led to the frustration so brilliantly depicted in Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius’ seminal War Land on the Eastern Front. In addition to the plans for population shifts I have already referenced, Liulevicius traces a mindscape of the East that developed and radicalized among the thinkers at Ober Ost: one that began with attempts to ­define and categorize land and people (Land und Leute), but that culminated in complete frustration and the rise of a race and space (Rasse und Raum) conception of the East. Thus, the seeds of a later mindset were planted: if one could not sort the populations, or in any case assimilate them to the new modern requirements, the land should ultimately be cleared of backward elements. In both the actual plans for Courland, and in the frustration with occupied peoples, a solid foundation for future Flurbereinigungen (reallocations of land) had been laid.

Comparative utopias? Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire In addition to North America, pre-1914 German inner colonizers had looked to the other great land empire, Russia, for examples of a settler colonialism here of course is James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven 1998. 31 Robert L. Nelson: The Baltics as Colonial Playground. Germany in the East, 1914–1918, in: Journal of Baltic Studies 42 (2011), 9–19, 15. 30 Seminal

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practiced inside the borders of a nation. Indeed, as Willard Sunderland points out, the Russians looked to America as a model for the interaction with and settlement among the ‘natives’ of Siberia and Kazakhstan.32 Sering himself took along 120 scientists for a grand field trip into western Russia in 1912, commenting on the progressive nature of Stolypin’s land reforms.33 In the very region Sering was to choose for Germany’s new eastern colony, the Baltics, a program of Russification had long been underway by the time the war broke out. And, as Eric Lohr points out, it was here that the first of Russia’s wartime forced population transfers took place with the deportation of many Baltic Germans. But, far to the south, in the first example of a truly modern ethnic cleansing, pursued with an efficiency only the Russians would achieve in the twentieth century, in certain areas of Volhynia, every last German was deported, with no exceptions allowed.34 Thus, throughout the period that Germans were thinking of ever more radical ways to treat specific ethnic groups, the Russians were already putting such thoughts into practice and this may well help explain why, in the 1940s, they were so much better at carrying out forced population transfers than the Nazis.35 The obvious comparison to be made with Germany’s utopian fantasies of the occupied East in World War I is with whatever it was the Habsburgs were planning. Surely the ‘Germans’ in Vienna had similar plans for the ‘reorganization’ of occupied Serbia, and the clearing and settling of Galicia. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. As Jonathan E. Gumz so powerfully illustrates for us in his study of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia, this was a backward-looking nineteenth-century Empire, not an ethnically ­defined Nation. A prime example of this is the fact that the military put the needs of the starving Serbs above the starving Viennese when it came to effectively running an empire, when it came to keeping all members of the empire copacetic.36 Further, as Cliff Wargelin illustrates with Graf Czernin’s variSunderland: The ‘Colonization Question’. Visions of Colonization in Late Imperial Russia, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 48 (2000), 210–232. 33 Max Sering (ed.): Russlands Kultur und Volkswirtschaft. Aufsätze und Vorträge im Auftrage der Vereinigung für staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung zu Berlin. Berlin 1913. 34 In an interesting twist, the Russians considered sending Jews over the front toward the Germans, with the notion that whoever possessed these people would surely have their hands full. See Eric Lohr: Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I. Cambridge 2003, 137–143. Prusin writes that “between 1915 and 1917 the Eastern Front witnessed one of the largest forcible migrations in modern history.” Prusin, Lands Between, 54. 35 Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York 2010. 36 Jonathan E. Gumz: The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914– 1918. Cambridge 2009. This of course in no way suggests that Austrians saw Serbs or 32 Willard

124   Robert L. Nelson ous diplomatic approaches to the main parties in Galicia, the Habsburgs were far more interested in maintaining a multi-national state than pursuing the ethno-nationalist policies of Germany.37 Yet, ethnic cleansing was nevertheless going on. When Czernin affirmed the transfer of the Cholm region to the Ukrainians, he likely did not consider the horror of forced population transfer that would occur once Ukrainian militias started smashing down Polish doors.

On the road to genocide? From forced population transfer to murder “Even when forced deportation is not genocidal in its intent, it is often genocidal in its ­effects.”38

Naimark claims that although ethnic cleansing, or population transfer, or forced deportation are different from genocide in intent (to clear out instead of to kill), they quickly bleed into each other, especially when, in order to clear out, one kills.39 This is of course what happened already during the First World War in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, as indicated above, it happened before the First World War in the Balkans. But in eastern Anatolia in 1915, the result of massive forced population transfer crossed the threshold to what many consider genocide. While the land of Christian Armenians had long been coveted by the Ottoman regime, the added backdrop of war and the fear of an ‘untrustworthy’ population so close to the Russian front were deemed sufficient reason to actually do what the Germans only ever talked about: to move more than a million men, women and children of one ethnic group from their homes (eastern Anatolia, or in the German case, western Poland) more than five hundred kilometers to an inhospitable environment (northern Syria, or again in the German case, Belarus). Around one million of the one and a half million Armenians died. One can only guess what might have hap-

other occupied peoples as equals: in his reflections on his experiences in the Balkans in 1878–1880, Conrad von Hötzendorf used such pejorative language to describe the bar­ baric Serbs that the Nazis were later able to quote him directly when justifying their own atrocities against Serbs. See Lawrence Sondhaus: Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf. Architect of the Apocalypse. Boston 2000, 30. 37 Clifford Wargelin: The Austro-Polish Solution. Diplomacy, Politics, and State Building in Wartime Austria-Hungary 1914–1918, in: East European Quarterly 42 (2008), 253–273. 38 Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 3–4. 39 Ibid.

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pened to the more than two million Poles targeted by inner colonizers for deportation.40 Of course, Hitler was not referring to Jews when he claimed that no one remembered the Armenians. He was discussing the Poles he was soon to have rounded up and forced out of the Warthegau. The opening 140-page article in the 1941 Festgabe für Heinrich Himmler, praises the groundbreaking work of the inner colonizers for their understanding of the importance of farmers, soil and space.41 But the authors reprimand the earlier thinkers for their slavish adherence to rights and the idea that the Poles were subjects to be treated with respect. It was on such grounds that Max Sering and his ilk were forced from the agrarian settler research scene in 1934.42 It was true that, even in his most radical phase during the heady days of the First World War, Sering had always remained a nineteenth-century cultural chauvinist. While toying with the idea of cleared spaces, he always believed that if one surrounded Slavs with the straight furrows of German farming, the half-civilized (halfbreeds, if you will) would become civilized, respectable Germans. In other words, people were redeemable, transformable. It was on this point that the Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture, SS-Obergruppenführer Walther Darré, strongly dis­ agreed with the Jew Sering (his maternal grandfather was Jewish). Darré and Konrad Meyer pointed out that Polish blood made assimilation impossible, and thus, rather than making Poles disappear through assimilation, they ­simply had to disappear. When the occupation of the East once again became a reality in 1939, the ideas of forced population transfer from 1914 now had complete ideological backing. Beginning in December 1939, from the very farms in the Posen Province that inner colonizers had attempted to settle pre-1914, Polish families were trucked to train stations along the Warta river and sent east, where they were dumped in Hans Frank’s hellish Generalgouver­ nement. But some of those Poles were back on their farms in the Warthegau two weeks later. The overwhelming and seemingly impossible task the Germans gave themselves of deporting the entire Polish population from the Warthegau Bloxham: The Great Game of Genocide. Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Oxford 2005. 41 Reinhard Hohn/Helmut Seydel: Der Kampf um die Wiedergewinnung des deutschen Ostens. Erfahrungen der Preussischen Ostsiedlung 1886 bis 1914, in: Festgabe für Heinrich Himmler. Darmstadt 1941, 61–174. 42 Irene Stoehr: Von Max Sering zu Konrad Meyer. Ein ‘machtergreifender’ Generationswechsel in der Agrar- und Siedlungswissenschaft, in: Susanne Heim (ed.): Autarkie und Ostexpansion. Pflanzenzucht und Agrarforschung im Nationalsozialismus. Göttingen 2002, 57–90. 40 Donald

126   Robert L. Nelson is well described and ridiculed in Phillip T. Rutherford’s, Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941.43 One of the surprising and inescapable conclusions of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands is the recognition of how much better the Soviets were than the Nazis at total forced population transfers.44 As mentioned above, early Russian ‘advantage’ or ‘foresight’ in such endeavors was apparent already in 1916. Yet, this Russian legacy ultimately also affected the development of German-ordered forced population transfers. If we follow Snyder’s overall thesis, it was the tragic intermingling of two totalitarian systems, back and forth over the bloodlands of East Central Europe, that mutually reinforced and radicalized the utopian (whether class- or race-based) plans that led to the murder of 14 million people.

Conclusions The creation of this radical environment in the East is the crucial link between the history I have laid out, a colonial history of East Central Europe from the 1880s to the 1930s, in which Jews are just another ‘dirty, primitive’, eastern ethnic group to be organized and shifted around, to the radicalization of the Holocaust. As Rutherford points out, during the first two years of the German occupation of Poland, while Jews were unquestionably targeted and ghettoized, the occupying authorities were mainly concerned with Germany’s truly ancient rival in the East, the Pole. The sheer numbers, organization, and resistance (and, soon enough, the need for the labor) of these people stymied a forced population transfer of truly gargantuan size. Although Jews were the number one threat in the mind of Hitler and many of the highest echelon Nazi thinkers, it must be recognized that the Jews were the first to be eliminated because, among many important factors, this goal was readily achievable. When did these ideas shift from transfer to murder? As we now know, along the lines of earlier population transfer developments in the Balkans, Anatolia and Volhynia from 1912 to 1916, Jews were initially to be erased from German-occupied Europe through forced deportation, whether east of the Urals or (and still hard to believe) far south to the island of Madagascar.45 T. Rutherford: Prelude to the Final Solution. The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941. Lawrence 2007. 44 Snyder, Bloodlands. 45 Among those supporting the idea that the Great War was the crossing of the threshold in terms of how to think big about entire populations and what you could do with them, are Naimark, but also Mark Mazower: Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century. London 43 Phillip

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Just as it had been among Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia in 1913, murder was always an accompaniment to the deportation of Jews from the 1930s to 1942. But then, in early 1942, when there was no Syrian desert remaining to push them toward, a decision was made that was unlike anything enacted during those earlier wars, or even in the Soviet-controlled lands of the 1930s. Not only would an entire ethnic group be erased from space, they were to be erased tout court. Many argue that the crossing of this threshold renders the Holocaust an event completely outside the trajectory of German utopian thinking about Eastern Europe over the previous five decades. I disagree.

1998; Alan Kramer: Dynamics of Destruction. Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford 2007; Cathie Carmichael: Genocide before the Holocaust. New Haven 2009; Biondich, The Balkans, 9.

III. Radicalization

Maciej Górny

War on Paper? Physical Anthropology in the Service of States and Nations The Great War was not restricted solely to battlefields. On 8  August  1914 Henri Bergson delivered the first of his speeches describing war as a clash between civilisation (represented by France and England) and German barbarianism. On 18 September of the same year, The Times published an address by British scholars and writers, criticising Germany. The address emphasised the supposedly aggressive character of German culture and its penchant for self-admiration.1 A comparable German response was not long in the making. In September 1914, 93 professors signed an Address to the World of Culture. In October three thousand German academics affixed their signatures to an even more radical Position of the Academic Teachers of the German Reich. Understandably, such statements made by luminaries of science in the first few months of the war draw the most interest from historians. This seems hardly avoidable given the calibre of the figures involved, including Émile Durkheim, Bergson, Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann. During the war, the term Krieg der Geister was already applied to this phenomenon. It aptly captures the character of the intellectuals’ political engagement. However, it also plays down two of its more important dimensions. First of all, as a subject of historiography, the Krieg der Geister seems even more confined to the western theatre than the military history of World War  I.2 The role of Eastern European intellectuals in this ‘war’ is typically ­neglected, even if – as Wolfgang J. Mommsen observes – historians recognise the necessity of altering this state of affairs.3 Secondly, the term Krieg der Geister describes an exceptional phenomenon. The talents of a host of notable figures – often renowned and of pacifist or, more commonly, liberal persuasion – were mobilised for the war effort. From the point of view of a less troubled time, indications of such engagement seem almost embarrassing and disWolfgang J. Mommsen: Bürgerliche Kultur und politische Ordnung. Künstler, Schriftsteller und Intellektuelle in der deutschen Geschichte 1830–1933. Frankfurt am Main 2000, 196–215, 201. 2 John Horne/Alan Kramer: German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial. New Haven 2001. 3 Wolfgang J. Mommsen: Der große Krieg und die Historiker. Neue Wege der Geschichtsschreibung über den Ersten Weltkrieg. Essen 2002, 6. 1

132   Maciej Górny tinct from the intellectual achievements that preceded and followed the war. From the perspective of the history of culture or science, this period can be seen as an interruption rather than a logical development. The observations that follow constitute a case study of these two forgotten aspects of the Krieg der Geister. The radicalisation of attitudes characteristic of this war of minds was not peculiar to intellectuals in Western Europe. Representatives of culture and science in Central and Eastern Europe also participated in this war. And, as we will see below, many of them partook in it far longer than those who fired the first salvos of the war of minds, in the same way the war in the east continued well after it had ceased in the west. Furthermore, from the perspective of the history of science, the radicalisation of attitudes did not always constitute an exception, nor was it always commensurate with an abandonment of previous scientific or artistic activities. To cite perhaps the most obvious example: historians who added new chapters to nationalist narratives did not necessarily have to alter the character of their previous works or forsake quality for the sake of the war effort, like Bergson or Hauptmann. The political implications of historiography are all too familiar and need not be invoked here. Instead, it is far more useful to consider those sciences whose institutional character was either not yet ­settled or was settled shortly before the outbreak of World War I. Representatives of disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry and geography contributed in fascinating ways to the Krieg der Geister, but their input has often been overlooked by historians. However, it was physical anthropology that really came into its own during the Great War. Why was this so? One of physical anthropology’s main objects of inquiry – the racial typology of humanity – proved to be a powerful tool in the symbolic distancing from the enemy, foreign not only in a spiritual or a metaphorical sense, but also in its biology. The second aspect of anthropologists’ involvement in the war effort extends beyond scientific or political discourse. The practice of physical anthropol­ ogy during the war often entailed physical violence, which was committed against persons subjected to analysis. The most unnerving example of such violence was the use of prisoners of war (POWs) for anthropological research. Yet even here, the war in the east blurred the line between civilians and the military. In addition to POWs, this research – and the racial stigmatisation that it often brought – was also visited upon civilians: refugees and the inhabitants of conquered or occupied territories. Finally, racial anthropology became a means of including an ‘ethnic substratum’ in contested territories in one’s own nation. The supposed racial traits of different groups of people served to justify territorial demands made during the Great War and the conflicts that shattered Eastern Europe after 1918.

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War as a catalyst to scholarship and professionalisation When distinguished European intellectuals raised their fountain pens in support of the combatting armies from behind their desks, racial anthropology was a discipline with next to no prestige and there were doubts as to its usefulness for the war effort. It had not yet been institutionalised as a science.4 The scientific standing of anthropology was in no way improved by its application in politics. In scientific milieus still dominated by liberals, as in Russia, the state approached the new science with suspicion, wary of its oppositional potential.5 At the same time, in countries where the notion of race came to be exploited by the radical right, anthropology was criticised by liberals. Reacting to the lack of professionalism within the discipline, proponents of racial anthropology sought to organise its basic tenets and techniques and rid it of at least some of its ideological taint. This task was taken up in two major works on the eve of the Great War. In 1913, Eugen Fischer released the results of several years’ research on the Rehoboth Basters – the offspring of blacks and Boers, who lived in parts of today’s Namibia.6 The main part of the book comprised detailed measurements of a sizeable group of Fischer’s research objects, including extensive commentaries and observations on their everyday life, psychology and social behaviour. Fischer’s main assumption was that biological traits were inherited in accordance with the laws formulated by Mendel. Such an assumption led him to reject the popular thesis, according to which ‘bastard’ people, such as the Rehoboth, represent an inferior human material distinct from both the parental races.7 Nor, Fischer argued, did the ‘mixed’ peoples constitute new racial types.8 The year 1914 saw the publication of the first, very extensive handbook on anthropology by Rudolf Martin.9 4 5

6

7 8

9

Paul Julian Weindling: Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945. Cambridge 1989, 53–55. See Marina Mogilner: Russian Physical Anthropology in Search of ‘Imperial Race’. Liberalism and Modern Scientific Imagination in the Imperial Situation, in: Ab Imperio 1 (2007), 191–223, 195. Eugen Fischer: Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardisierungsproblem beim Menschen. Anthropologische und ethnographische Studien am Rehobother Bastardvolk in Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika. 2nd edition. Graz 1961. Ibid., 298. Eugen Fischer: Das Problem der Rassenkreuzung beim Menschen. Vortrag gehalten in der zweiten allgemeinen Sitzung der Gesellschaft deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte in Wien 1913. Freiburg im Breisgau/Leipzig 1914, 22. Rudolf Martin: Lehrbuch der Anthropologie in systematischer Darstellung mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der anthropologischen Methoden. Jena 1914.

134   Maciej Górny The Swiss anthropologist patently rejected the equally popular tendency to identify race with nation.10 He also questioned the belief that women – whose bodily features approximated those of children far more than those of men – constituted a more primitive form of the human species.11 In Martin’s view, notions of humanity’s progressive racial degeneration, which harked back as far as de Gobineau, were unscientific. He stressed that like many similar generalisations, they could only be proven by taking very extensive measurements. In fact, a description of various techniques for collecting biometric data forms the core of Martin’s work. Among other things, it describes how to make gypsum casts of living people’s heads and notes the most commonly accepted scales for assessing eye, skin and hair colour. Yet despite their universally hailed professionalism, even Fischer and Martin constructed racial hierarchies in their books, positing the white representatives of the upper middle class at the top of the scale. Institutional and intellectual feebleness aside, anthropologists were also badly served by an apparent dearth of any practical application of their work for the military. In reality, the armies had no use for anthropologists; it was the latter who were dependent on the former. Years before the war, fresh recruits had been the most common research object for anthropologists, after students. A conflict on a massive scale was an ideal opportunity for scientists to meet the demands made by Martin. Interestingly, representatives of leading Western European scholarly institutions were not the first to exploit this opportunity. That honour goes to Niko Županić, a Slovenian student of geograph­ er Albrecht Penck, based in Berlin (and Vienna). In 1913 Županić conducted measurements on well over one hundred Turkish POWs, held in Belgrade since the First Balkan War. He managed to publish his observations in Serbia in the same year. Soon afterwards, he published the results of measurements he had conducted on Bulgarian POWs in captivity since the Second Balkan War.12 The conclusions of these pioneering undertakings were due to be presented at the German anthropological congress in August 1914. However, the outbreak of yet another war hampered Županić’s plans, and his research did not ultimately attract significant attention.13 Among the few responses to his findings was an extensive review penned by Julian Talko-Hryncewicz in 10 Ibid.,

9. 205. 12 Niko Županić: Pontijski bugari. Beograd 1913. 13 See Christian Promitzer: “Betwixt and Between”. Physical Anthropology in Bulgaria and Serbia until the End of the First World War, in: Reinhard Johler/Christian Marchetti/ Monique Scheer (eds.): Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones. World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe. Bielefeld 2010, 141–168, 157–159. 11 Ibid.,

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­ osmos in Lemberg, which included details of the biometric data Županić had K gathered during his research on Pontic Bulgarians.14 A far greater range of research objects was covered in the German and Austro-Hungarian studies of POWs inaugurated in 1915. Scholars in both countries became conscious of a growing opportunity at exactly the same time. In 1915 the German anthropologist Georg Buschan published an address to his peers in the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift: Under their banners, our enemies collected such a colourful mixture of peoples that nearly all the races of the world are represented in it. […] Perhaps we may never again be granted such an opportunity to find so many tribes – especially those from Eastern Europe – in the same place and at the same time, as we have now in our prisoner-of-war camps.15

During a short period of leave from the front, Buschan examined 75 prisoners from the camp in Stettin (today Szczecin) and testified to the necessity of state support for similar endeavours in other locations. The Austrian anthropologists Rudolf Pöch and Eugen Oberhummer reached similar conclusions during their visit to the Wegscheid camp near Linz. Oberhummer noted that even a passing acquaintance with the wealth of racial types collected there had led the scholars to acknowledge “the enormity of the possible rewards anthropological research could reap there.”16 The application for research funding presented by Pöch to the imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna in the Summer of 1915 lays bare two factors that made POWs particularly valuable to anthropologists: Members of a host of different nations, often hailing from the farthest provinces of the enormous Russian empire, were gathered in several places within our monarchy. In these exceptional circumstances, brought on by the war, science gained an unprecedented and, in all likelihood, unique opportunity of broadening its knowledge of those peoples. The task is all the more rewarding for the fact that so many Russian nationalities remain for the most part unknown, because under normal circumstances, organising research concerned with them proves difficult, time-consuming and costly.17 Talko-Hryncewicz: Niko Županič. Pontijski bugari. Prilog fizickoj antropologiji ­ alkanskog istoka, in: Kosmos 4/6 (1914), 476–479. b 15 Georg Buschan: Krieg und Anthropologie, in: Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 26 (1915), 773. 16 Eugen Oberhummer: Rudolf Pöch (gestorben am 4. März 1921), in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 4/5 (1921), 96–102, 100. See also Maria TeschlerNicola: Rudolf Pöch’s osteologische Lehr- und Forschungssammlung im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Ethik, in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 141 (2011), 51–66. 17 Prof. Dr. R.[udolf] Pöch, “Ansuchen um eine Subvention von K[ronen] 4000 für anthropologische Untersuchungen in den russischen Gefangenenlagern, Subventionen der math.-nat. Klasse 1914–1919”, 24. 6. 1915, Archiv der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien (AÖAW), Karton 6, 411/1915. 14 Julian

136   Maciej Górny Apart from the possibility of broadening human knowledge, another, perhaps more important gain was the unique opportunity to accelerate scholarly careers. In a later section of the application, Pöch wrote: The undersigned, as a representative of anthropology at the local university, considers it his duty not to let that opportunity go to waste, and hence chose to address the k. u. k. War Ministry, seeking approval for engagement in anthropological work in prisoner-of-war camps for myself and several of my students.18

The grand Austrian project, involving the examination of thousands of POWs, became a virtual doctorate factory, with dissertations published throughout the interwar period until as late as the 1960s. In their rivalry to be the first to exploit the growing opportunity, Austrian and Hungarian anthropologists significantly outpaced their German colleagues. From the outset, they were also granted more extensive support from the authorities, especially the military authorities. The railways also guaranteed scientists free travel throughout the state and shipped their equipment at no cost.19 The whole undertaking had a propaganda value. Numerous communiqués noted the triumph of Austro-Hungarian science. Pöch oversaw measurements conducted by a team of scientists supported by soldiers specifically assigned to the task. Several thousand POWs were examined, most of them from Russia. The director of this gargantuan project published extensive reports while it was in progress, describing the techniques used and hinting at early conclusions. First measurements of arm span, and head and body size were taken. After that, naked prisoners were subjected to an analysis of their skin and hair colour and the extent of their body hair. The instruments and reference tables used were selected in accordance with Rudolf Martin’s guidelines. Some of the research objects were also photographed, always in the nude, in a separate, well-lit room. Gypsum casts of the heads of chosen POWs were also made. In the case of particularly ‘exotic’ nationalities, linguists from Budapest, who were also employed in the project, recorded ­stories and folksongs. Films were also shot, depicting prisoners carving wood, dancing folk dances, and even engrossed in Muslim prayer.20 Pöch was well aware that he was setting scholarly standards in his field. Hence, he devoted a significant amount of his attention in the published re18 Ibid.

Pöch: III. Bericht über die von der Wiener Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in der k. u. k. Kriegsgefangenenlagern veranlaßten Studien, in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 47 (1917), 4, 77. 20 Rudolf Pöch: Bericht über die von der Wiener Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in den k. u. k. Kriegsgefangenenlagern veranlaßten Studien, in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 6 (1915), 219–231. 19 Rudolf

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ports to practical questions of measurement. For example, he was an inveterate enemy of the straws that were sometimes put into the examinee’s nostrils in the making of gypsum casts – this practice led to the disfigurement of the nose in the cast. As long as the research object was not ill with a cold, or ­suffering from polyps, Pöch claimed that he should be capable of breathing without additional help. Such care for the precision of the acquired data also explains Pöch’s insistence on the proper usage of the anthropometer. After ­trials with different kinds of tripods and footings, it was agreed that the tool would best retain a vertical position when held by two soldiers.21 Indeed, Pöch’s research became a source of inspiration for anthropologists throughout the monarchy. During the winter of 1915/1916, Georg Kyrle, a member of Pöch’s research team, conducted measurements on POWs very close to the frontline, even before they were delivered to camps.22 Viktor Lebzelter examined several hundred Serbian prisoners held at the Kraków prison camp as well as several Serbian Roma prisoners from the Dąbie camp.23 Kraków was also the sphere of activity of the Polish anthropologist Adam Wrzosek, one of whose post-war achievements was the founding of the journal Przegląd Antropologiczny. In his research, Wrzosek cited measurements conducted on nearly a thousand Russian and Serbian prisoners.24 Pöch’s assistant, Josef Weninger, concentrated on measuring black soldiers. The same methods and techniques were also applied to other groups. Rudolf Pöch’s wife (and doctoral student) Hella (née Schürer) ‘supplemented’ the data collected at prisoner-of-war camps with analyses of refugees from Volhynia, mainly women and children interned at the Niederalm camp near Salzburg.25 Because she had access to entire families, her observations focused in particular on the question of heredity. After the capture of Serbia, Lebzelter and Arthur Haberlandt conducted similar research on the Albanians who had joined volunteer units in support of the Austro-Hungarian army.26 Projects based directly on Austro-Hungarian research were also conducted after the war. In one of 21 Pöch,

III. Bericht, 84, 89. 99. 23 Viktor Lebzelter: Beiträge zur physischen Anthropologie der Balkanhalbinsel, in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 53 (1923) 1–22; idem: Anthropologische Untersuchungen an serbischen Zigeunern, in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 52 (1922), 1–3, 22–35. 24 Olga Willerowa: Spostrzeżenia nad barwą oczów i skóry u Tatarów, Ormian, Gruzinów, Mołdawjan, Serbów i Macedończyków, in: Przegląd Antropologiczny 1 (1926), 84–91. 25 Hella Pöch-Schürer: Beiträge zur Anthropologie der ukrainischen Wolhynier, in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 56 (1926). 26 Arthur Haberlandt/Viktor Lebzelter: Zur physischen Anthropologie der Albanesen, in: Archiv für Anthropologie 17 (1919), 123–143. 22 Ibid.,

138   Maciej Górny these projects, Polish anthropologists conducted measurements on tens of thousands of recruits in the early 1920s. ‘Anthropological photography’ was in this instance overseen by a former officer of the Austro-Hungarian army, Jan Mydlarski. Like his Austro-Hungarian colleagues, he followed the procedures advocated by Martin.27 The only significant change he made to the measurement methodology was the introduction of serological tests, based on the research Hanna and Ludwik Hirszfeld had conducted in Serbian military field hospitals.28 For the upholders of racial hierarchies, the major virtue of these tests was their potential to strengthen the assumed link between blood type and race.29 The Austro-Hungarian successes elicited the admiration and jealousy of German anthropologists. Prestige was very much at stake in Felix von Luschan’s attempt at a similar undertaking in the German Reich’s prisoner-ofwar camps. Among others, the measurements conducted by his pupil Egon von Eickstedt were quantitatively less impressive. They concentrated not on the nationalities of the Russian empire, but on the non-European soldiers of the Entente. Eickstedt’s study of the racial characteristics of the Sikhs was published after the war.30 Luschan, who hailed from Austria and was well connected with Austro-Hungarian anthropological circles, managed to combine the measurement methods employed in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Thanks to him, the Austrians gained access to German prisoner-of-war camps, which had many more representatives of exotic nationalities.31 Their research, which was funded by the Imperial Academy of Sciences, greatly extended Austrian collections of data, photographs and gypsum casts. Some of them were even given to Luschan and other German colleagues as a token of appreciation.32 Evidently, the Great War became a catalyst for the professionalisation of physical anthropology. The massive scale of the conflict helped to eliminate a Mydlarski: Sprawozdanie z wojskowego zdjęcia antropologicznego Polski, in: Kosmos 2/3 (1925), 530–583. 28 Ludwik Hirschfeld/Hanna Hirschfeld: Essai d’application des méthodes sérologiques au problem des races, in: L’Anthropologie 29 (1918–1919), 504–537. 29 See Marius Turda: The Nation as Object. Race, Blood, and Biopolitics in Interwar Romania, in: Slavic Review 3 (2007), 413–441. 30 Egon von Eickstedt: Rassenelemente der Sikh, in: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 4/5 (1920), 317–394. 31 Andrew D. Evans: Anthropology at War. World War I and the Science of Race in Germany. Chicago 2010, 141–145. 32 Prof. Dr. R.[udolf] Pöch, “Ansuchen um eine Subvention von K[ronen] 8000 für anthropologische Untersuchungen in den russischen Gefangenenlagern, Subventionen der math.-nat. Klasse 1914–1919”, 4. 7. 1917. AÖAW, Karton 6, 461/1917. 27 Jan

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key research problem of anthropology: the lack of accessible ‘research material’. Prisoner-of-war and refugee camps provided ample material. More importantly, anthropologists in Austria-Hungary and the German Reich managed to convince the authorities that their research had a bearing on the military effort. While the claim seems dubious at best (if anything, it was the anthropologists who depended on the army, and not vice-versa), a discursive connection made between anthropometric studies and national defence persisted in Central and Eastern European thought for a long time. The Polish ‘anthropological photography’ of the interwar period is proof of that.

Bending the rules Anthropological research took place in peculiar circumstances. In his handbook, Rudolf Martin had stressed that “tact and great seriousness on the part of the researcher are the prerequisites for all measurements on living people.”33 Thus, any form of coercion ran counter to the rules of the art. Yet, at the same time, coercion was part and parcel of the prisoners’ existence. The ambiguity of their situation is reflected in the contrasting observations of the anthropologists. The published works of the latter typically include warm remarks on their research objects. Eickstedt claimed that with their open and welcoming nature, the Sikhs had won his sympathy forever.34 Lebzelter opened his work on Serbs by thanking “all men who willingly [italics in the original] devoted their time of rest to participation in scientific research.”35 On the other hand, the private letters of the self-same anthropologists are replete with complaints about prisoners who tried to avoid taking part in the measurements and lied to the scientists about their origins.36 Without a doubt, at least some of the procedures were carried out without the consent of the research objects. It is also telling that Britons, who were deemed to be of higher racial value, did not have to endure anthropological measurements at all. The favour was, in fact, returned, as British anthropologists usually stopped short of spinning anti-German theories based on the observation of POWs.37 33 Martin,

Lehrbuch der Anthropologie, 106. Rassenelemente der Sikh, 318. 35 Lebzelter, Beiträge zur physischen Anthropologie, 3. 36 Britta Lange: AfterMath. Anthropological Data from Prisoner-of-War Camps, in: Johler/ Marchetti/Scheer, Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones, 319–320; Evans, ­Anthropology at War, 144–148. 37 Henrika Kuklick: Continuity and Change in British Anthropology, 1914–1919, in: Johler/ Marchetti/Scheer (eds.): Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones, 29–46, 36–38. 34 Eickstedt,

140   Maciej Górny This was not the only symptom of a departure from the rules introduced by Martin, which were frequently mentioned in wartime publications. Previously dominant racial hierarchies also tottered. Partly as a response to the experience of the camps, some anthropologists began to reconsider their positions with respect to European and non-European races. Luschan expressed his thoughts on the matter in a spirit of liberalism, recounting his own positive experiences with ‘coloured’ prisoners as proof of their high culture: And presently – he added – we learn from numerous letters from the front that their soldierly merits command unquestionable respect. But also in moral terms, they often outclass some of our white enemies and several of the ‘neutrals’. As an anthropologist, I finally have to concede that the hours I was allowed to spend in our prisoner-of-war camps were just as pleasant and instructive as any overseas travel, and I will hold only pleasant memories of the private meetings with many of our prisoners.38

In this confession, a critical attitude towards “some of our white enemies” was the sub-text of the re-evaluation of the non-European races. Andrew D. Evans observes that in both Austro-Hungarian and German research on prisoner-ofwar camps, the fundamental anthropological boundary between race and nationality was obliterated. Hatred of Germany and Austria-Hungary’s European opponents meant that instead of being recognised as members of a common racial community, these opponents were increasingly portrayed in a manner heretofore reserved for non-European ‘others’.39 The sympathy and admiration some anthropologists expressed for the ‘coloured’ enemy soldiers was nothing more than a rhetorical exercise. The point was not to symbolically raise them to the heights claimed by white Europeans, but rather to reduce some inhabitants of Europe to the assumed level of non-European races. This process took a slightly different course in Austria-Hungary than it did in the Reich. The key difference lay in divergent geopolitical perspectives. Pöch’s project was informed by the consciousness that Russia was the mon­ archy’s most dangerous adversary. This explained the interest in the various Russian nationalities. In Germany, on the other hand, the same point of departure – a fascination with racial difference – resulted in a chorus of indignant voices, decrying the French and the British for sending forth hordes of Negroes and ‘Asiatics’. This, in turn, raised the significance of research on ­African and Asian POWs. Anthropological research on POWs on a massive scale soon destabilised the beliefs previously espoused by specialists in the field. In a situation where scientists’ dominance over the objects of their research extended beyond von Luschan: Kriegsgefangene. Ein Beitrag zur Völkerkunde im Weltkriege: Einführung in die Grundzüge der Anthropologie. Berlin 1917, 116–117. 39 Evans, Anthropology at War, 145–146. 38 Felix

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merely symbolic superiority, the previously sacrosanct rules of research were summarily abandoned. As a result, pre-war racial hierarchies were increasingly called into question. Physical anthropology was fast approaching a war of minds.

Mongolisation: race as stigma ‘Mongolisation’ was the term that became the focus of wartime debates about race in Eastern Europe. From its inception, Pöch’s research sought to capture the particular features of anatomy that were identified as Mongolian. Attention was drawn, for example, to bowed legs and the ‘Mongolian fold’ (on the eyelids). In the scheme approved by scholars for recording collected data, a plus sign marked those features that were deemed characteristic of the Mongolian race and a minus sign marked all others.40 In line with his initial assumptions, Pöch planned to focus on the peoples of the Caucasus and Siberia as well as the Mongolians of southeastern Russia. However, by 1916 the number of Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians among the examinees had begun to rise.41 At the same time, the latter were the subject of a propaganda campaign devised to spread the belief that Ukrainians were totally unrelated to the Great Russians.42 After all, ethnic Russians accounted for only about 20  per cent of prisoners examined in Austria-Hungary.43 Characteristically, Pöch’s analyses tend to ignore those nationalities of the Russian empire that were also found in Austria-Hungary. The sole exception was the ‘Little Russians’, whose national identity remained unresolved. As Evans observes, this was anthropology’s contribution to the national integration of the monarchy. In spite of linguistic and racial diversity, as well as numerous mutual conflicts, these nationalities consistently maintained unity in the face of the ‘Mongolised’ enemy.44 In Otto Pfeifer’s view, this unity was confirmed, for instance, in the heroism displayed by the army during the recapture of Lemberg: 40 Pöch,

Bericht, 224. Pöch: II. Bericht über die von der Wiener Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in den k. u. k. Kriegsgefangenenlagern veranlaßten Studien, in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 4/5 (1916), 109–131. 42 Hannes Leidinger/Verena Moritz: Verwaltete Massen. Kriegsgefangene in der Donau­ monarchie 1914–1918, in: Jochen Oltmer (ed.): Kriegsgefangene im Europa der Ersten Weltkriegs. Paderborn 2006, 35–61, 60–61. 43 Rudolf Pöch: IV. Bericht über die von der Wiener Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in den k. u. k. Kriegsgefangenenlagern veranlaßten Studien, in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 1–3 (1919–1920), 150. 44 Evans, Anthropology at War, 149. 41 Rudolf

142   Maciej Górny Here, Russia threw in its entire arsenal of barbarous Siberian tribes, and they were met by […] units composed of all Slavic peoples of the monarchy working in perfect union with German, Hungarian, Romanian and Italian regiments, valiantly and loyally defending Central European culture.45

However, attempts to forge national unity based on an image of a ‘racial’ enemy entailed certain risks. Claims of Russia’s Asiatic character, it seemed, needed no particular explanation. Such claims were consistent with the dominant tropes of Russia’s wartime stereotyping, with only a sprinkling of new elements and a veneer of professional terminology. The anonymous author of an article about the Mongolisation of Russia in the Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft compared the process to the emergence of a Finnish nation as a result of the mixing of Slavic and Ural-Altaic racial elements. He concluded that while the Finns had achieved a high level of civilisation, Russians were actually in the process of degenerating, with a growing number of ‘somatic and psychic’ mongoloid elements becoming apparent. Russians, it was alleged, had a tendency to adopt traits that were typical of peoples of lower racial standing. The ‘Yakutisation’ of Siberian Russians was cited as proof of this.46 In the same article the author touched on another issue: the question of whether centuries of living side-by-side with Tartar nomads had led to the Mongolisation of the Ukrainians.47 This thesis was supported in a work by Hella Pöch, which was published after her husband’s death. Here she rejected the paradigm of Austrian wartime anthropology identified by Evans wholesale, concluding that Ukrainian refugees from Volhynia were, in fact, deeply Mongolised: Although our familiarity with the symptoms of Mongolisation remains imperfect, the characteristics described below […] compel me to accept their characterisation as a Mongoloid people. These are: the heavy fold of fat over the eye; the concave, short nose with a blunt tip and upturned nostrils; the big earlobes with lobule accreted or extending to the cheeks; the long, straight upper lip; large distance between the inside corners of the eyes; asymmetrically bulging cheeks with characteristic fat pillows; lower part of the face withdrawn, with a poorly developed chin. Height, at best, medium, stocky build, with short legs and arms. […] Women exhibit a tendency to an excess in the fat pillow. Scant bodily hair, hair on the head scant and straight.48

In 1924 Hella Pöch and Josef Weninger, the former assistant to Rudolf Pöch, published a methodological article concerned with the anthropological evaluation of facial features and skull shape. The re-evaluation of the racial value of Observator [Otto Pfeifer]: Germanentum, Slaventum, Orientvölker und die Balkanereignisse. Kulturpolitische Erwägungen. Kempten/München 1917, 33–34. 46 Die Mongolisierung Rußlands, in: Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft 2 (1915), 126–132, 129–131. 47 Ibid., 129. 48 Pöch-Schürer, Beiträge, 35. 45 Austriacus

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Ukrainians by Austrian scientists was borne out here, even in the photographs that accompanied the text. The authors placed images of ‘typical’ Vietnamese, Hindu, Senegalese and Georgian people next to a picture of a Ukrainian.49 It is not surprising that the problem of Mongolisation had a major impact on the activists of the Ukrainian national movement. It also became the focal point of a particular Polish-Ukrainian front in the European war of minds. In this struggle, the Ukrainian geographer and anthropologist Stepan Rudnytskii packed the biggest punch. Published in 1914, his book Ukraina und die Ukrainer included an entire chapter devoted to the racial make-up of Ukrainians. While he agreed that – like any other nation – Ukrainians were of mixed origin, he stressed that the racial mixture particular to them differed decisively from that of Russians or Poles. He also vehemently rejected the notion that the country had been forced into the Mongolian sphere of influence by history. Casually questioning an almost universally accepted view, he claimed that Eastern Europe was far less racially heterogeneous than the West. Invaders had only stayed in Ukraine for a short time and had not affected the local inhabitants in any way.50 For Rudnytskii, claims to any kinship between Ukrainians and Poles, Russians or Mongols were invalidated by the biometric data gleaned from publications devoted to Russian Ukraine. He emphasised this even more in the Ukrainian version of his book, which was published in 1916. With reference to an unusually minimalist table with basic statistical data on the build of Poles, Ukrainians and Russians he stated: These three rows of numbers, acquired through the application of exact and natural sciences, tell us more than any thick volume would. […] These few numbers prove in the plainest possible manner that we Ukrainians are an independent nation, neither Polonised Muscovites nor Russified Poles, but a nation that is also independent in its racial make-up, a statement that could not be made with respect to either Poles or Muscovites.51

To reiterate, Rudnytskii’s claim of racial independence did not mean that he defined Ukrainians as an entirely separate race. He reinterpreted the findings of anthropologists – primarily the most recent works of the Russian scholar Khvedir Vovk – without discarding the norms of scientific objectivism. Rudnytskii did not bend the data he used to fit his argumentation; instead he chose to qualify it with commentaries. Uncommented, the numbers he refers to in his book could just as well have been used to illustrate a racial kinship Weninger/Hella Pöch: Leitlinien zur Beobachtung der somatischen Merkmale des Kopfes und Gesichtes am Menschen, in: Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 6 (1924), 232–270. 50 Stefan Rudnyckyj: Ukraina und die Ukrainer. Wien 1914, 12–13. 51 Рудницький Степан: Чoмy ми xoчeмo caмocтiйнoї Укpaїни [Stepan Rudnytskii: Chomu mi khochemo samostiinoi Ukraini]. 2nd edition. Lviv 1994, 47. 49 Josef

144   Maciej Górny between Ukrainians and their neighbours. Nor was Rudnytskii original in his description of the physical attributes of the dominant anthropological type in Ukraine. Vovk also believed that Ukrainians were relatively homogeneous: “dark-haired, dark-eyed, of medium […] height, brachycephalous […] with straight noses”, relatively long legs and short arms.52 In his view, however, their contemporary features could only serve as a basis for a hypothetical assumption regarding the outward appearance of the primordial inhabitants of the country in a period when they still formed a single ethnographic entity with Belorussians and Russians. In the twentieth century, he wrote, those familiar with the history of Ukraine would never expect its citizens to represent any clear ethnic type.53 Rudnytskii’s assertion that Ukrainians represented the Dinaric (or Adriatic) race did not contradict the state of knowledge at the time. His statements were a direct reference to claims made by the French anthropologist Joseph Deniker in the early twentieth century.54 Here again, all he did was reinterpret the existing data to suggest that Ukraine was the central and relatively racially homogeneous kernel of a type Deniker had located primarily in the Balkans. The association Rudnytskii made between the Dinaric race and primordial Slavs was also new. Rudnytskii put a similarly radical slant on another of Deniker’s theses concerning the occurrence of the so-called Vistulian type (race Vistulienne) among Poles and, to a far lesser extent, Russians. This type was distinguished from the Dinaric race by its significant admixture of Mongolian blood. The Ukrainian anthropologist also cited measurement data, which, in his view, documented the similarity between Poles and Russians. Having concluded that Ukraine’s Polish and Russian neighbours were worthless in racial terms, in a book written after the war Rudnytskii advocated a programme of national eugenics for the Ukrainian intelligentsia. In addition to recommending ‘social hygiene’, he urged his fellow Ukrainians to avoid marriages with representatives of racially worthless nations: Poles, Russians, Romanians, Jews, Turks and Tartars. On the other hand, he advocated marriage with Nordic Germans, Dinaric southern Slavs and Bohemians.55

Хведір: Aнтpoпoлoгiчнi ocoбливocтi укpaїнcькoгo нapoдy (1916) [Khvedir Vovk: Antropologichni osoblivosti ukrainskogo narodu (1916)], in: idem, Cтyдiї з yкpaїнcькoї eтнoгpaфiї тa aнтpoпoлoгiї [Studii z ukrains’koi etnografii ta antropologii]. Praha [no year given], 31–32. 53 Ibid., 3, 32. 54 Joseph Deniker: Les races et les peuples de la terre. Éléments d’anthropologie et d’ethnographie. Paris 1900. 55 Rudnytskii, Chomu mi khochemu, 300–307. 52 Вовк

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Rudnytskii’s theses were wholeheartedly embraced by Ukrainian nationalists in the first few decades of the twentieth century, especially those that reflected on the similarities between Ukrainians, Poles and Russians. Rudnytskii’s claims were vehemently rejected by Polish authors. Stanisław Głąbiński, who called Rudnytskii’s works “an anthropological swindle”, offered the following response: After all, we are taught by history that the territories currently inhabited by the Little Russians were previously the dwelling place for numerous different peoples, which mixed with many incoming tribes and alien races (Mongols, Tartars, Vallachians) […]. Therefore, there is no way for us to seriously consider treating ‘Ukrainians’ as a specific racial type. […] Hence, Ukrainians do not belong to a distinct race, neither do they share […] a common past, a common culture; therein lies the reason for the absence of a singular name for the tribe.56

However, the most potent weapon in the Polish-Ukrainian war of minds was the ability to affect foreign opinion. In this regard, Rudnytskii achieved a commanding victory in Germany, where his theses were eagerly published and – more importantly – incorporated into works penned by German anthropologists and geographers.57 This reception is evidenced in articles published in the state-supported journal of German proponents of the ‘Ukrainian cause’, Osteuropäische Zukunft. The association’s first yearbook included a piece by Rudnytskii, in which he brief described his previous findings with particular focus on the Dinaric character of Ukrainians. Another of his articles opened the second yearbook.58 One of the following issues of the journal featured a more general article by the anthropologist Fritz Lenz, one of the most important German exponents of the racial hygiene movement. This article was ­devoted to the subject of Nordic elements in the ‘blood’ of Eastern European nationalities.59 Russians were said to have retained remnants of Nordic traits only at the western and north-western frontiers of their ethnic territories. At the same time, the centre had allegedly succumbed to a “Tartarisation”. Lenz

Głąbiński: Die Ukraina. Ein Problem oder ein Phantom? Von einem österreichischen Polen. Wien 1918, 18. 57 See Max Friederichsen: Die Grenzmarken des Europäischen Rußlands. Ihre geographische Eigenart und ihre Bedeutung für den Weltkrieg. Hamburg 1915, 89–90; Eugen Oberhummer: Die Türken und das Osmanische Reich. Leipzig/Berlin 1917, 21. 58 Stepan Rudnytskii: Zur Landes- und Volkskunde der Ukraine, in: Osteuropäische Zukunft 22 (1916), 347–351; Stepan Rudnytskii: Zur Landes- und Volkskunde der Ukraine, in: Osteuropäische Zukunft 1 (1917), 1–6; see also Oleksyj Kuraev: Der Verband ‘Freie Ukraine’ im Kontext der deutschen Ukraine-Politik des Ersten Weltkriegs. München 2000. 59 Fritz Lenz: Die nordische Rasse in der Blutmischung unserer östlichen Nachbarn, in: Osteuropäische Zukunft 2 (1917), 17–24. 56 Stanisław

146   Maciej Górny devoted slightly more space to Poles, contradicting the claim that they were closer to Germans than, for example, Estonians, on linguistic grounds. In racial terms, this claim is incorrect. Thus, Poles have decidedly less Nordic blood than Germans. They exhibit significant traces of the Turan and – interestingly – also the Mediterranean type, the sources of the latter being unclear. Perhaps these traits derive from the influence of the southern (Crimean) Tartars, who, unlike the northern (Kazan) Tartars, typically belong to the Mediterranean race.60

Lenz also agreed with Rudnytskii’s evaluation of Ukrainians. While he did not believe that they could be ascribed to the Nordic race, he suggested that they belonged to the Dinaric type, with traces of Mediterranean origins. He made no mention of any Tartar roots.61

The ‘war of the races’ Rudnytskii’s claims met with the approval of racial anthropology practitioners and amateurs in Germany, primarily because they were in line with a form of racial historiosophy that was hugely popular at the time. Reflections on the character and psychology of one’s own people and one’s enemies were often informed by a view of war as a clash between races that pitted the NordicAryan Germanics against a variety of different, less deserving anthropological types. That view was undergirded by contemporary scientific studies that distinguished between dolichocephalic and brachycephalic human skulls (with intermediary types). The former were identified as a marker of Nordic origins. Brachycephaly, on the other hand, was ascribed to numerous anthropological types and – as we shall see below – was sometimes associated with a positive identity, a fact illustrated, for example, by Rudnytskii’s theory. Hans F. K. Günther, soon to become one of the authors of the Nazi racial theory, commented on this genre of racial historiosophy in his Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1922). Unjust accusations were raised on both sides of the front, he claimed. Now that the war was over, it had to be openly admitted that the popular claim made in the Reich to the effect that Frenchmen did not have a single drop of Germanic blood in them was untrue. Günther saw a similarly erratic belief in claims that the English, and even the Germans themselves, had non-Germanic origins. For him, each of those theories ignored the basic findings of anthropology.62 Indeed, German publications on the racial 60 Ibid.,

20. 20–21. 62 Hans F. K. Günther: Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes. 3rd edition. München 1923, 7. 61 Ibid.,

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origins of the participating nations in the war rarely accepted that the Germans shared the dignity of Aryan roots with anybody other than their own Volk – even when the authors were professional craniologists. The wartime edition of Ludwig Wilser’s popular Die Überlegenheit der germanischen Rasse interpreted the conflict as the result of the aggression of racially worthless elements towards the Reich.63 In the eyes of Wilser and many other authors, the entire human culture was of Aryan making and Aryans were the direct ancestors of contemporary Germans. In their view, other nations did not have such a fine genealogy, and besides, they were subject to the perilous influences of ‘civilisation’. Even while some anthropologists – for instance, Karl Classen – stressed the racially mixed character of nations and the impact of the environment on the evolution of primary, ‘clean’ racial types, the results of their ruminations did not deviate significantly from the established pattern. Germans, albeit racially mixed, were always judged to be far more homogeneous than the southerners or Slavs, and hence more talented and intelligent.64 Interestingly, the ultimate, humiliating defeat of Germany did not lead to a retreat from these racial claims. Instead, German authors set out to detect AryanGermanic racial types among the military and political leaders of the victorious powers. Thus, after 1918, it suddenly became apparent that a purely Aryan heritage and a long, narrow, noble skull were characteristic not only of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, but also Joffre, Foch, Lloyd George and Wilson.65 The perception of war as a struggle between races was not exclusive to Germany. Both during the war and immediately thereafter, Finland proved to be an incredibly fascinating test ground for racial theories. According to a belief shared almost universally among well-educated Europeans, the country was inhabited by a Mongoloid people. Although this claim had already been put to task in Rudolf Virchow’s research in the 1870s, the most widespread interpretation in Germany focussed on a racial conflict between the Nordic type, bred in Sweden, and a primordial Mongol type. Even after 1918, professionals did not abandon this contention and referred to it quite often in public statements on Finland. In a work on the Finnish economy, which was published in the early 1920s, Otto Stünzner described his impressions of one of the thoroughfares in Helsinki: Wilser: Die Überlegenheit der germanischen Rasse. Zeitgemäße Betrachtungen. Stuttgart 1915, VI. 64 Karl Classen: Beiträge zum Indogermanenproblem, in: Korrespondenz-Blatt der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 1/4 (1918), 7. 65 Otto Hauser: Rasse und Politik. Weimar 1922, 111. See Erwin Baur/Eugen Fischer/Fritz Lenz: Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre. München 1921, 293. 63 Ludwig

148   Maciej Górny Looking from one of many comfortable benches […] at the people parading before one’s eyes, despite the equalising impact of fashion, one quickly notices two extremely dissimilar types: on the one hand, tall Swedes with narrow, oval faces, narrow and straight noses with closely drawn nostrils, usually blue-eyed blonds; on the other, short, stout and stocky Finns with broad faces, firmly drawn lower jaws and cheekbones, often saddle or upturned noses, brown-eyed and dark-haired.66

According to a young Swedish scholar Artur Eklund, Mongolian Finns were characterised by slowness, melancholy and an absence of culture, features that set them apart from their compatriots of Swedish stock – active, creative and cultured.67 In 1918 Finland witnessed the eruption of a civil war ­between ‘whites’ and ‘reds’, with the former emerging victorious. Clashes were neither extensive (the war lasted about three and a half months in all) nor bloody, particularly in the context of the continuing Great War and the Russian Revolution. For some observers, the conflict was not so much symptomatic of a class struggle, as it was of a race war. According to a simplified view of the conflict, the oppressed, primitive Finnish people had risen up against its Swedish masters. This view was integrated into a racial theory by Lars Ringbom, who claimed that the war had broken out between two distinct nationalities inhabiting Finland. The western part of the country was populated by those who claimed to have an admixture of Germanic blood, while the east was inhabited by FinnishSlavic mongrels. The former were individualists, the latter – primitive collectivists.68 Another scholar researching the same question concluded that the conflict was due to the fact that Finns were racially mixed, which, in turn, made Swedish domination unavoidable.69 In the pages of the Politisch-Anthropologische Monatsschrift, the following racist interpretation was accepted: “The civil war, in the end, was nothing more than a war between races, with the whites reliant on Swedish backing, and the reds unable to mobilise more than passive support among Swedes.”70 The ultimate victory of the whites was sometimes seen as a form of atonement – limited, but still soothing – for the German failure in the Great War. In this interpretation, the heroism of “the Swedish youth, the core of the yeoman class”, had allowed victory over the Stünzner: Finnland. Eine Sammlung von Aufsätzen: Streiflichter auf Volk und Wirtschaft. Frankfurt am Main 1921, 13. 67 Artur Eklund: Svenskt i Finland. Helsingfors 1914, 1–22. 68 Lars Ringbom: Inbördeskriget i Finland. Psychologiska anteckningar. Helsingfors 1918, quoted in: Aira Kemiläinen: Finns in the Shadow of the ‘Aryans’. Race Theories and Racism. Helsinki 1998, 150. 69 Georg von Wendt: Suomen molemmat kausat, suomalaiset ja itärnotsalaiset. Piirteitä kehityksestä ja tulevaisunden mahdollisuuksista. Helsinki 1919; see also Kemiläinen, Finns, 151. 70 Freiherr von Born: Finnland und die ‘russische Pest’, in: Politisch-Anthropologische Monatsschrift 5 (1919–1920), 220–224. 66 Otto

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“Asiatic hordes” advancing from the east. This victory meant that “the Baltic became a German interior sea!”71

New pretenders in the hierarchy of races The division of peoples into dolicocephalic and brachycephalic types, which operated on the basis of the disqualifying notion of ‘Mongolisation’, owed its attraction, for the most part, to its consistency with the state of contemporary anthropology. As a result, the discourse that grew so exponentially in Ger­ many drew in authors from other countries in search of the most elevated station available for ‘their’ racial types. The Swedes, who enjoyed the status of the most Nordic of all Nordics, had little trouble here. However, representatives of other nations could play the game as well, a fact proved by Stepan Rudnytskii. In his racial theory, the Ukrainian anthropologist and geographer also made good use of a term successfully applied in other contexts. The Dinaric race, although seen to be inferior to the Nordic race by most French and German anthropologists, was typically considered more elevated than other brachy­ cephalous types. The body shape associated with it suggested that it stood – literally – taller than the others: the rotund skull was supposedly accompanied by a large stature.72 The Dinaric face was also alleged to approximate that of the Nordics.73 In a standard post-war handbook of anthropology, the Dinaric type was ascribed a “considerable intellect”, imagination, artistic abilities and kind-heartedness, in addition to a modicum of carelessness and lack of organisational talents.74 These features paled in comparison with those of the Nordic race, but appeared in a better light when set against the Alpine race (which the author of the handbook identified as a western branch of the Mongolian race) or the wild, cruel and dim-witted Mediterranean race.75 The image of the Dinaric type was also affected by wartime experiences. In later years, the main ideologue of racism in Nazi Germany Hans F. K. Günther associated it with Bavarians and Serbs, who he considered “particularly trust71 Idem:

Völker- und Sprachenverhältnisse in Finnland, in: Politisch-Anthropologische Monatsschrift 6 (1918–1919), 276–281, 280–281. 72 Theodor Arldt: Germanische Völkerwellen und ihre Bedeutung in der Bevölkerungsgeschichte von Europa. Leipzig 1917, IX. 73 Gustav Kraitschek: Rassenkunde mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des deutschen Volkes, vor allem der Ostalpenländer. Wien 1923, 47. 74 Eugen Fischer: Spezielle Anthropologie. Rassenlehre, in: Eugen Fischer et al. (eds.): Anthropologie. Leipzig/Berlin 1923, 152. 75 Ibid., 151, 154.

150   Maciej Górny worthy due to their sense of dignity, patriotism, courage and a peculiar selfconfidence. These traits made soldiers originating from the Dinaric regions the best warriors of the southeastern front during the war.”76 In the opinion of most European anthropologists, the Dinaric race was centred on the Balkans. This notion was, inevitably, approved and expanded by Serbian anthropologists and anthropo-geographers. Jovan Cvijić, the foremost among them, incorporated it into his vision of the ethnographic breakdown of the peninsula. Although he refrained from applying racial hierarchies in his own work, he replicated the idealised physical descriptions of representatives of the Dinaric type, concluding that “degenerated individuals are almost absent within it.”77 Niko Županić showed a more consistent interest in anthropology. The year 1912 saw the reissue, in Vienna, of a new edition of his work, which justified Serbian claims to Albania. In the book, he criticised the ­nationalist exclusivism of French and German scientists, who had failed to reckon with the exceptional biological potential of some Balkan nationalities. Serbs, he claimed, retained an untainted, primal, Aryan Slavic character, especially in the south of the country: light skin and hair colour, blue or grey eyes, dolicocephaly and large stature. At the Slavic-Albanian border, the Nordic component mixed with remnants of the Illyrian, Romanised primordial population. As a result: The mixing of Serb and Illyrian blood gave one of the most noble anthropological alloys in Europe, the so-called ‘Dinaric’ or ‘Adriatic’ race. This race is characterised by a tall, slender (almost never stout) build, dark eye and hair colour, and rounded skull, perhaps slightly flattened at the back. The hawk’s eyes […] throw sparks and testify to a gallant heart. These people are full of zest and energy, with very lively facial features.78

The Serbs were supposedly characterised by a stern morality, typical for highlanders, and a patriarchalism, which Cvijić also noted. In his post-war works devoted to the ethnogenesis of the Yugoslavs, Županić reiterated his metallurgic metaphors, claiming that in the case of Serbs, racial mixing had brought formidable results: “Even precious gold does not have the most value or durability when found in its pure state; for this reason, in mints, it is alloyed with copper and other less valuable metals to impart it with more toughness, a vivid colour, or a beautiful sheen.”79 F. K. Günther: Kleine Rassenkunde Europas. München 1925, 57. Promitzer: Die Kette des Seins und die Konstruktion Jugoslawiens, in: Johannes Feichtinger/Ursula Prutsch/Moritz Csáky (eds.): Habsburg postcolonial. Machtstrukturen und kollektives Gedächtnis. Innsbruck 2003, 294–295. 78 Niko Županić: Altserbien und die albanesische Frage. 2nd edition. Wien 1912, 32–33. 79 Niko Županić: Etnogeneza Jugoslavena, in: Rad Jugoslavenske akademije znanosti i umjetnosti 222 (1920), 143, quoted in: Promitzer, Die Kette des Seins, 295. 76 Hans

77 Christian

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There was, of course, a world of difference between the significance ascribed to the Dinaric race by Deniker and Županić, and Rudnytskii’s interpretation of this type. Only the Ukrainian anthropologist perceived it as a primordial race and identified it with the Slavic type. In the eyes of other anthropologists, the Dinaric race was more likely to be a product of mixing. However, in the context of a European war of minds, such differences paled in the generally positive assessment of the Dinaric type. Significantly, this type seemed to be immune to the charge of Mongolisation. Polish anthropologists faced a far greater challenge, entering a discourse in which their nation occupied a subservient position. Of course, one could ­always join the debates without instigating a major polemic. In an essay published in 1919, Walenty Miklaszewski took a moderate course. He had conducted a poll among over 1,500 officers of various national backgrounds who had served in the Russian army and received treatment at the Ujazdowski hospital in Warsaw throughout the war.80 The conclusions of his research were practically limited to a corroboration of advanced degeneration among Russians. He claimed that they generally started smoking earlier than Poles, and smoked more, while also masturbating from an earlier age and more frequently. For an army whose cadres comprised for the most part such shoddy material, victory was a virtual impossibility: “It is beyond any doubt that the officers of the Russian army […] could not have stood up to that task.”81 Efforts to highlight differences in the biological quality of Poles and Russians did not, however, help solve the problem of ‘Mongolisation’. Frequently, dolicocephaly was identified with Germanic origins in the said discourse. This allowed archaeologists to make conjectures as to the ethnicity of the inhabitants of various countries. The trend spread like wildfire in archaeology toward the end of the nineteenth century and extended to interpretations of other findings as well. An ethnic character was ascribed to remnants of material culture, which, in turn, proved that a particular community was indigenous to a particular contested territory. In this case, bonds with supposed ancestors were treated rather literally. A leading exponent of the nationalist current in archaeology Professor Gustaf Kossinna from Berlin believed that “our ancestors, although long gone, bequeathed to us not only their flesh and blood, but also their ideas, spirit and character.”82 At the same time, Miklaszewski: Oficer armji rosyjskiej ze stanowiska rasy, in: Zagadnienia Rasy 2 (1918), 1–6 and 3 (1919), 8–14. 81 Ibid., 13. 82 Gustaf Kossinna: Die deutsche Vorgeschichte. Eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft. 2nd edition. Würzburg 1914, 4. 80 Walenty

152   Maciej Górny Kossinna was quite radical in his separation of the prehistoric Germanics and Slavs. The theory – endorsed by Ludwig Wilser and others – that primordial Indo-Germanic Slavs had lost their dolicocephaly after an influx of Asiatic blood, sounded positively benign when set against Kossinna’s findings.83 Towards the end of the nineteenth century Kossinna concluded that Slavs had been separated from their Indo-Germanic roots since prehistoric times, and were thus a thousand years behind in their development.84 Although he acknowledged the Slavs as distant kin, he also presented them as the complete antithesis to the Germanic tribes in terms of their spirit and culture. For Kosinna, it was only logical to ascribe all traces of any culture uncovered during his excavations in Central and Eastern Europe to the ‘proper’ Indo-Germanics, not to Slavs.85 Under these circumstances, it became necessary to take a stand with regard to the theory that primordial Nordics (identified with the Aryans) were longheaded and Germanic. Polish scholars adopted several different strategies when reacting to this claim. In their critique of the “Berlin-Austrian school”, Julian Talko-Hryncewicz and Edward Bogusławski focused on the indigenous character of Slavs in Polish territories, a notion that also helped solve a problem raised by measurements: the rather high incidence of ‘short-headed’ people in central and southern Poland.86 According to Talko-Hryncewicz, who based his observations on the research of Franz Boas, the dominant shape of the skull had changed over history. Thus, the long skulls found in excavations in Poland did not belong to Germanic peoples, but to primordial Aryan, longheaded Slavs.87 In time, the latter had come to be dominated by the shortheaded type, which, incidentally, “exhibited great reproductive powers and capabilities of assimilating the culture of which it was the bearer among the peoples of the East, and following from that, it created its own culture, effortlessly assimilating foreign elements, often even in the first generation, in both anthropological and cultural terms.”88 Wilser: Deutsche Vorzeit. Einführung in die germanische Altertumskunde. 2nd edition. Steglitz 1918, 66. 84 Jerzy Kmieciński: Nacjonalizm w germanoznawstwie niemieckim w XIX i początkach XX wieku. Łódź 1994, 88. 85 Heinz Grünert: Gustaf Kossinna, 1858–1931. Vom Germanisten zum Prähistoriker. Ein Wissenschaftler im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik. Rahden 2002, 105–107, 244–247. 86 Edward Bogusławski: Dowody autochtonizmu Słowian na przestrzeni zajmowanej przez nich w wiekach średnich. Warszawa 1912, 3–4. 87 Julian Talko-Hryncewicz: Człowiek na ziemiach naszych. Kraków 1913, 64. 88 Idem: Mieszkańcy Krakowa z X–XX wieku. Studjum antropo-bio-socjologiczne. Kraków 1926, 70. 83 Ludwig

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Jan Czekanowski used a twofold argumentation. On the one hand, he stressed that the post-war research had asserted “that the Nordic element is no less present in Poland than in Germany.”89 On the other hand, he concluded – as did numerous other Polish anthropologists after him – that most of the inhabitants of Poland could be ascribed to a mixed Nordic-Lapponoid type, also known as the Subnordic type. In this way, Czekanowski supported the contention of his German colleagues that Slavs were Mongolised Nordics. In this case, however, the form of the message was more important than its content. The dominant racial type in Poland was thus given the appropriately ennobling name of the ‘Sarmatian’ type in Polish treatises. Czekanowski had already used the term before the war, when he claimed that the typical division into Nordic, Mediterranean and Alpine types was inapplicable to Central and Eastern Europe. He believed it would only mislead the researcher, unable to reconcile conflicting data on cranial indices and hair and eye colour. Czekanowski suggested another division that also took account of the Dinaric and pre-Slavic types, beyond the Sarmatian type. He treated the other categories as supplemental and devoted most attention to the Nordics of northern Poland.90 He perceived the Slavs as a primordially Nordic racial type and compared their prehistoric expansion to that of the Germanic tribes.91 While Czekanowski vehemently criticised all attempts to identify racial types with nationalities, the tripartite division he proposed generally respected the boundaries between the nationalities of the Second Polish Republic: Poles, Ukrainians and Belorussians. He justified this concomitance by invoking the coincidence of racial and cultural traits: The Dinaric type constitutes a characteristic component of the Ruthenian population in the former Galicia, ‘throwing a red rooster’ being a fairly common means of exacting revenge among the Ruthenian peoples. This allows one to explain the correspondence between a ‘constitutional type’ of an arsonist and the Dinaric type.92

Nor could there be any doubt as to the hierarchy of the dominant racial types in the country. In his summary of the research into the relationship between race and school education, Ludwik Jaxa-Bykowski concluded that, in terms of their psychology, the Sarmatian race most closely resembled the Nordics: First of all, as far as gymnasia are concerned, there is a striking abundance of the Nordic race and […] the Sarmatian type even in places where they do not enjoy numerical superiCzekanowski: Zarys antropologji Polski. Lwów 1930, 432. Beiträge zur Anthropologie von Polen, in: Archiv für Anthropologie 2/3 (1911), 187–193. 91 Idem: Anthropologische Beiträge zum Problem der slawisch-finnischen Beziehungen. Helsingfors 1925, 12–13. 92 Czekanowski, Zarys antropologji Polski, 454. 89 Jan

90 Idem:

154   Maciej Górny ority among the population. Furthermore, the percentage [of these types] rises for each successive year of research. This is a fact undeniably related to the high level of ability of those components, which makes it easier for them to face competition during classificatory selection.93

In an article published in the Przegląd Antropologiczny, Jaxa-Bykowski made it abundantly clear that of the two privileged races, superior talents and dominance could only be ascribed to the Sarmatian race, “whose characteristic mark is evident on the young people in gymnasia and the entire Polish intelligentsia.”94 The name itself, which could lead foreign scholars to assume that people of this type had Asiatic roots, actually related to an entirely different period of history. The Sarmatian type, wrote Jaxa-Bykowski, which has, in the past, characterised that lively and abundant community of the nobility [szlachta], shines through today among our intelligentsia […] It is undeniably an effect of a rapid physical development, but also of that ‘cruel fantasy of knighthood’ immortalised by Sienkiewicz in his literary creation, Kmicic.95

Such glorious traits of character were beyond the reach of representatives of the Dinaric type, but the bottom of the Polish racial hierarchy was reserved for Belorussians, which were typically ascribed to the pre-Slavic type. Although Czekanowski made no comment to that effect,96 the term was understood as a synonym of the so-called Eastern race (Ostrasse), which, in turn, was identified with the Vistula race (Weichselrasse) cited by Rudnytskii. Polish anthropological research suggested that the number of representatives of this type in schools of the Second Republic had declined with every year of education. In accordance with the logic of the science he practised, Jaxa-Bykowski was inclined to explain that with reference to purely biological grounds: “Apparently, that type is incapable of maintaining the struggle for survival in schools and does not attain the level of more accomplished types.”97 He invoked the same reasons when debating the relationship between race and intellectual faculties in the whole country: “Here, the harmony is striking: the intellectual profile […] rises in accordance with the number of Poles in a given town and along the line drawn from the south-east to the west.”98 Jaxa-Bykowski: Antropologiczne podstawy wychowania, in: Encyklopedia wychowania. Warszawa 1933, 17–18. 94 Idem: Stosunki rasowe wśród naszych abiturientów gimnazjalnych, in: Przegląd Antropologiczny 6 (1932), 31. 95 Idem: Przyczynki do znajomości ras wśród naszej młodzieży szkolnej, in: Kosmos 51 (1926), 935–940, 935–936. 96 One of his students did. See Gizela Lempertówna: Przyczynki lwowskie do antropologii Żydów, in: Kosmos 52 (1927), 782–820, 811. 97 Jaxa-Bykowski, Przyczynki do znajomości ras, 936. 98 Ibid., 939. 93 Ludwik

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In response to a none-too-favourable image of Poles in the racial discourse dominant in Europe at the time, Polish anthropologists took the initiative. With the aid of newly formed state structures, they conducted widespread anthropological research, and used it to illustrate a new classification of racial types in the region. By reinterpreting received categories and introducing their own, they went some way to obliterating previous dogmas. It is quite telling that the term ‘Mongolisation’, which had played such a crucial role during the war, was almost completely absent in their writings. Finnish anthropologists followed a similar path. The young country was at odds with the interpretation of the civil war by Swedish and German authors, who perceived it in racial terms. This interpretation threatened the unity of Finnish citizens, many of whom found themselves associated with the nonEuropean Mongoloids. The anthropological research conducted in Finland from 1924 onwards was a deliberate attempt to debunk this categorisation. Groups of anthropologists traversed the country, conducting measurements based on a scheme derived from Martin’s handbook. As in Poland, they also conducted blood tests. And it was the latter – as Yrjö Kaarlo Suominen claimed in his summary of the research – that indicated that the Swedish-speaking inhabitants of the country differed from the rest only in their language, not in their race.99 Light skin colour was deemed a primordial characteristic of the type that inhabited Finland and could not therefore be the result of an influx of Nordic blood. According to Suominen, Finns had no kinship whatsoever with Mongols. Although the Finnish research did not refer to Czekanowski’s findings directly, his publications appeared in Finnish periodicals and scientific journals.100 The solution to the racial dilemma that Finnish anthropologists went on to adopt was, to a rather large extent, the application of the method proposed by the Polish anthropologist. Following in his footsteps, his Finnish counterparts refrained from using the generally approved division into European races, introducing in its stead a new category, which they called the ‘East Baltic race.’ Similar to the description of the ‘Sarmatian type’ in Poland, this race was said to be closely related to the Nordics, yet better adapted to the natural conditions prevalent in Finland.101

  99 Yrjö

K. Suominen: Physical Anthropology in Suomi (Finland), in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 59 (1929), 207–230, 209. 100 Jan Czekanowski: Übersicht anthropologischer Arbeiten in Polen im Laufe der Jahre 1913/14–1924/25. Helsinki 1925. 101 Suominen, Physical Anthropology in Suomi, 206.

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Racial revisionism: re-evaluating the ‘lower’ races The problem of Mongolisation did, however, play a certain role for anthropologists outside Poland or Finland. It was a much more pressing issue for Russia. Marina Mogilner claims that anthropology in the Russian Empire found itself unprepared for the challenges brought on by the year 1914. Its dominant currents were geared towards integrating the diverse nationalities within the country, rather than forming racial barriers to keep aliens at bay. It was only the advent of the Bolsheviks that sparked extensive anthropological research. The new elite subscribed to views that differed from those of AustroHungarian, German or Polish scholars. The only Russian anthropologist to raise similar issues was Ivan Alekseevich Sikorskii, a professor from Kiev who was boycotted by the liberal Russian mainstream.102 In 1915 he published a pamphlet about different forms of ethnic community.103 Setting out from a theoretical distinction between race and nation, he described the Russian ‘nationality’ as an exceptionally successful mixture of Slavic and Finnish elements. These elements were said to have mixed very early, and as a result, the Great Russian, Belorussian and ‘south Russian’ branches of the Russian nation all shared the same racial features. According to Sikorskii, the process of ­blending the two components into a single entity had occurred peacefully, as had the ultimate linguistic triumph of the Slavs. The union was further cemented by a common faith and, finally, a common history. From the perspective of anthropological debates during the war, Sikorskii’s approach to the problem of racial mixing seems to carry the most weight. In his evaluation of the problem, the Russian anthropologist went further than Županić, by introducing the counterintuitive concept of a ‘clean’ mixture. Russians, he claimed, were the offspring of a singular, utterly fortuitous blending of two races in ideal proportions. Throughout their later history, they had avoided all admixtures and retained their racial purity. This claim, in turn, allowed Sikorskii to conclude that the Russians were one of the most homogeneous Aryan groupings, characterised, among other things, by a high level of intelligence.104 Sikorskii saw no connection between the racial character of Russians and the Mongol peoples who inhabited the empire. For him, the latter belonged to 102 Могильнер

Марина: Homo Imperii. История физической антропологии в России (конец XIX – начало ХХ в.) [Marina Mogilner: Homo Imperii. Istoriia fizicheskoi antropologii v Rossii (konets XIX – nachalo XX v.)]. Moskva 2008, 247–260. 103 Сикорский Иван А.: Чтo тaкoe нaция и дpyгиe фopмы этничecкoй жизни [Ivan A. Sikorskii: Chto takoe natsiia i drugie formy etnicheskoi zhizni]. Kiev 1915. A version of Sikorskii’s text edited by Marina Mogilner can be found in Ab Imperio 3 (2003), 224–287. 104 Ibid., 249.

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the peripheral, racially inferior ‘aboriginals’ that hovered around central Russia and submitted themselves to the influence of Russian Aryan culture.105 The problem of the ‘Mongolisation’ of Russians effectively failed to materialise in this conjuncture. On the other hand, the anthropologist’s programme for inclusiveness and his familiarity with scientific circles in Kiev affected the critique of all attempts to ‘break’ the unity of Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians. Even before the war, Sikorskii had criticised the eminent Ukrainian ­historian and political activist, Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, claiming that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian nation, because the Ukrainians lacked a racial basis for the establishment of a common national history. The only concession the anthropologist was prepared to make was to admit that Ukrainians had slightly less Finnish blood than the Russians and the Belorusians. Even that, however, ultimately consolidated the unity of the empire; in the Russian psyche, it was the Finnish influence that shaped leadership capabilities.106 This latter motif played an important role in wartime reflections on race in Hungary and Bulgaria. In discussions of racial origins in 1870s Bulgaria, Slavic – and therefore Indo-European – ancestry had been highlighted. This changed with the decline in relations with Russia and Serbia in the following decades and the growing recognition of the Bulgarians’ partly Mongolian heritage in public discourse. Even Stefan Stambolov, the prime minister of Bulgaria, recognised this heritage and wrote at the end of the 1880s about the ‘Legacy of Asparuh’ that infused Bulgarians with leadership abilities unattainable to the Slavs (a fact exemplified, in his view, by the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth).107 The Balkan Wars only reinforced this trend. In 1914 Todor Panov, a lecturer at the Military Academy in Sofia, published an extensive treatise on the psychology of Bulgarians, in which he ‘unmasked’ the notion of their Slavic origins as one of the reasons for the state’s humiliation in 1913. Bulgarians, he urged, should pride themselves rather in their Asiatic blood, mythology and social order.108 Even less radical authors, who did not deny the bonds of kinship between Bulgars and Slavs, recognised the racial virtues of the proto-Bulgarians. The geographer Anastas Ishirkov imagined the ancient Slavs as peaceful farmers, whose destiny would probably have been lamentable had it not been for the invasion of a people “infused with a fighting 105 Mogilner,

Russian Physical Anthropology, 200–201. Homo Imperii, 260–261. 107 Stefan Detchev: Who are the Bulgarians? ‘Race’, Science and Politics in fin-de-siècle ­Bulgaria, in: Diana Mishkova (ed.): We, the People. Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe. Budapest/New York 2009, 237–269, 247. 108 See Balázs Trencsényi: A nép lelke. Nemzetkarakterológiai viták Kelet-Európában. Budapest 2011, 495–502. 106 Mogilner,

158   Maciej Górny spirit and a strict discipline – prominent virtues of all steppe peoples.”109 However, these theses failed to inspire Bulgarian racial anthropology, despite reappearing in numerous publications devoted to Bulgaria’s past. Krum Dronchilov, the most distinguished Bulgarian anthropologist of that period and a student of Felix von Luschan, produced scientific works that were far removed from the national ideology. His analyses were based on detailed studies in which POWs did not feature at all.110 For Christian Promitzer, this fact points to the persistence of the liberal paradigm in Bulgarian anthropology.111 The re-evaluation of racial hierarchies undoubtedly found its ideological expression in the Hungarian pan-Turanian movement, which was represented by a society founded in 1911 (Turáni Társaság). However, it met with resistance from local anthropologists who subscribed to the dominant European racial discourse. The question of race was addressed in the programmatic ­article Táj és faj written by Pál Teleki and published in the first issue of Turán magazine. Teleki subordinated this question to factors he deemed more important: landscape and climate.112 However, the question of race was the main focus of a manifesto penned by a prominent activist of the pan-Turanian movement, Alajos Paikert.113 Paikert, an agronomist, reversed the racial hierarchy and judged Turans to be a particularly valuable element: Russian Turco-Tartars are known to be highly intelligent, industrious and gifted merchants, bankers and entrepreneurs. One should also remember that by the time they were conquered by the Russians, they had already developed a culture more elevated than that of their conquerors. […] It is impossible to distinguish Russian Tartars from southern europ­ eans by their looks. They do not exhibit Mongolian traits but are in fact beautiful people with brown eyes and brown or black hair. They often have a classically noble physiognomy and their skin is almost totally white.114

According to Paikert, Russia had occupied territories inhabited by Turans and reaped the rewards of their genius. In illustrating his claims, Paikert devoted particular attention to the Tartar heritage of Peter the Great. In his opinion, Buddha had also been a Turan, rather than an Aryan. This noble heritage meant that the Turan peoples were destined to form alliances with the descendants of the Germanic tribes against Slavic Russia and England, which 109 Anastas

Ischirkoff: Bulgarien. Land und Leute. II. Teil: Bevölkerung, Volkswirtschaft, Siedlungsverhältnisse. Leipzig 1917, 3–4. 110 Krum Drontschilow: Beiträge zur Anthropologie der Bulgaren. PhD thesis, Braun­schweig 1911. 111 Promitzer, “Betwixt and Between”, 163–164. 112 Pál Teleki: Táj és faj, in: Turán 1 (1917), 17–30, 29–30. 113 Alois v. Paikert: Der turanische Gedanke, in: Turán 4/5 (1917), 183–190, and Turán 6/7 (1917), 291–297. 114 Idem: Der turanische Gedanke, in: Turán 4/5 (1917), 183–190, 185.

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“stands in striking contrast to the Germanic and Turan understanding of honour, manliness and openness.”115 As was the case with pan-Slavism or pan-Germanism, the geopolitical attraction of this programme derived from the prodigious extent of the construed communities. Paikert estimated the numerical strength of the Turan peoples at 610 million, which – as the activist Lajos Sarsi Nagy noted – imbued Hungarians with a sense of power. From that perspective, the ‘yellow peril’ became an opportunity and grounds for hope.116 For Paikert, the Turan peoples included representatives of European and Asian Turks, Bulgarians, Finns, Estonians, Tartars, Chinese, Japanese, people from the Caucasus and Siberia, Tibetans, and Koreans. Sarsi Nagy also added the inhabitants of India and Persia to that list. For Hungarian scientists engaged in the war of minds, this vision undoubtedly had many virtues. However, from an anthropological perspective it also raised certain problems. Foreign – particularly German and Austrian – anthropologists could hardly be expected to simply accept this ­re-evaluation and embrace the notion of Mongolisation as a culture-shaping process rather than a process of degeneration. Claims of ‘Tartar’ origins were often used by critics of the Hungarian national policy as a means of linking it to Asiatic brutality and oppression.117 Furthermore, none of the ‘Turan’ states boasted a distinguished scientific centre, and besides, the ideology in question did not play a similarly significant role anywhere beyond Hungary. The ambivalence of the position taken up by Hungarian anthropologists affected their role in Austro-Hungarian research on POWs. The different emphases in the two parts of the monarchy already became apparent in reactions to the research opportunities provided by war. Mihály Lenhossék, a student of Paul Broca, claimed: It is fascinating that nationalities speaking in tongues related to the Hungarian language, usually accessible to the sciences that focus on them only through exhaustive and costly expeditions […] found themselves within comfortable range of our research methods, and we are not dealing with this or that representative of those peoples, but, indeed, an entire collection of specimens akin to an anthology, subjected to an almost exemplary process of selection, unattainable by any kind of expedition because of the colossal space inhabited by those peoples.118

115 Idem:

Der turanische Gedanke, in: Turán 6/7 (1917), 291–297, 297. Sarsi Nagy: A turánizmus, mint nemzeti, faji és világeszme. A győzelem, a jó béke és a szebb jövő alapja. Budapest 1918, 5, 10. 117 J. F. Smetanka: The Demands of the Bohemian People, in: Journal of Race Development 2 (1917), 157–170, 168. 118 Michael v. Lenhossék: Anthropologische Untersuchungen an russischen Kriegsgefange­ nen finnisch-ugrischer Nationalität, in: Turán 3 (1917), 135–152, 137–138. 116 Lajos

160   Maciej Górny Even this introductory statement diverged from the standpoint of Rudolf Pöch’s research efforts. The treatment of POWs by Hungarians was also unique. A conscious effort was made to send all Ugro-Finnic Russian soldiers to Hungary for forced labour, for example, in factories in Budapest and as street-cleaners in Hungarian cities. Measurements were preceded by tests of the subjects’ knowledge of the Mordvin and Votian languages. The measurements conducted by Lenhossék led him to conclude that there were virtually no traces of any Mongolian heritage among the Chuvash and Mordvin examinees. Only the former displayed some Mongolian traits, “but it is beyond any doubt that we are not dealing with a primary Ugro-Finnic feature, but a foreign admixture, an effect of cross-breeding with foreign elements.”119 The Hungarian anthropologist went on to criticise the prevalent view in Europe that Ugro-Finns had Asiatic features and cited the German experts on UraloAltaic peoples Heinrich Winkler and Joseph Deniker in particular.120 The observations of Hungarian anthropologists led them to conclude that Ugro-Finns could not have been late arrivals from Asia. On the contrary, it was accepted as very likely that the peoples in question had moved in the opposite direction centuries before: from west to east. In this case, anthropological arguments were diametrically opposed to claims accepted by linguists and historical trad­ ition. Mihály Lenhossék distanced himself even more vehemently from the notion of a Mongolian heritage for Hungarians in his summary of one of his earlier works, prepared for German readers.121 In the introduction, he already questioned the merit of dividing races into ‘younger’ and ‘older’ types and criticised common errors made in establishing cranial indices. He went on to characterise the people of Hungary as unambiguously brachycephalic and part of the population of a broad belt inhabited by a ‘Central-European race’, which extended from central France, through Switzerland and Southern Germany, Tyrol and Austria, as far as Hungary. While the term was not mentioned, the geographical placement of the racial type in question suggested a connection between Magyars and the Dinaric race. Lenhossék also contradicted opinions expressed in the pan-Turanian periodical by stating that the ties of kinship between Hungarians and the Ugro-Finnic peoples of Siberia were strictly linguistic.122 In conclusion, however, he recalled the view expressed by the 119 Ibid.,

145. Winkler: Die altaische Völker- und Sprachenwelt. Leipzig/Berlin 1921. 121 Mihály v. Lenhossék: Über Anthropologie im allgemeinen und über die Aufgaben Ungarns auf dem Gebiete der Anthropologie (Selbstbericht), in: Archiv für Anthropologie 2 (1917), 145–156. 122 Ibid., 152. 120 Heinrich

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c­ o-founder of the Hungarian Anthropological Society Antal Herrmann at the beginning of the twentieth century: “a real Magyar generally does not deviate from any average European (or perhaps: Central-European), and one would be hard pressed to find any particular distinguishing traits, such as the protruding cheekbones of the Slavs or the slanted eyes of the Mongols.”123 Another shift in perspective on the racial origins of Hungarians was sparked by the defeat in the war and the Trianon Treaty. Under these changed circumstances, the Asiatic roots that allegedly differentiated Magyars from neighbouring ethnic groups became a cherished heritage once again. In 1923 Lajos Bartucz published an article on the anthropology of the inhabitants of the shores of Lake Balaton in the specialist journal Antropológiai Füzetek.124 The author, a leading Hungarian theoretician of race, stressed that nearly all foreign elements found in the area examined had arrived later than the Magyars. Only the Slavs had inhabited the shores of Balaton before the Magyars, but they were less numerous than the Avars, who, Bartucz was quick to add, were related to Hungarians and also present on the same territory. Both the Avars and the Magyars were seen to have Asiatic origins. In conclusion, the anthropologist criticised unnamed foreign scholars “who claim with relish that Magyars belong to the Central-European homo alpinus and that their previous Asiatic traits […] vanished without a trace.”125 Had it been levelled at the leading Hungarian anthropologists, Antal Herrmann and Mihály Lenhossék, that accusation would have been justified.

Toward one’s own: the inclusive use of racial ­anthropology Throughout the Great War and the territorial conflicts that followed, race proved an efficient means of symbolically excluding hostile nations from the civilised European community. The notion of ‘Mongolisation’ served to establish or consolidate one’s own community with the aid of the captivating image of the ‘alien’. This mechanism was already characterised by sociologists in the 1960s.126 However, it does not cover all the purposes racial concepts fulfilled

123 Ibid.,

153. Bartucz: Über die Anthropologie der Ungaren aus der Umgebung des BalatonSees, in: Antropológiai Füzetek 1 (1923), 61–80. 125 Ibid., 71. 126 Henri Tajfel: Human Groups and Social Categories. Studies in Social Psychology. Cambridge 1981, 152. 124 Lajos

162   Maciej Górny during the war of minds. As it turned out, these concepts were useful not only in the creation of an enemy image, but also in the construction of a ‘racial’ ally, friend and brother. I will reflect on two rather marginal instances of this second use below. Racial argumentation featured in the German programme for territorial expansion. It was also applied in the case of the Flemings, Latvians and Lithu­ anians, and even the Estonians. During the war, as well as later, German scholarly analyses treated inhabitants of the Baltic countries as ethnic groups with some relationship to Nordics, but suggested that they were strongly mixed, and perhaps even Mongolised. Post-war Latvian anthropology also stopped short of claiming Nordic racial purity.127 Furthermore, the Austro-Hungarian anthropologists working under Rudolf Pöch included Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians among the ‘Mongolised’ nationalities of the tsar’s empire.128 The fact that some German authors espoused a different view does not indicate a divergent scientific position, but rather an attempt to pay heed to the notion of annexing land together with people, a popular concept in Germany at that time. Georg Bonne, who had gone to Latvia during the war as a military doctor, devoted a thesis to the country’s inhabitants, which he claimed were totally Germanised.129 In his view, the previous, anthropologically divergent Baltic type had died off almost entirely, and hence “Latvians and Lithu­ anians should be unconditionally accepted as purely Germanic.”130 These origins also explained the behaviour of the Latvian soldiers: The conduct of the so-called Latvian battalions is also an expression of the Germanic ancestry of Latvians. Within the Russian army, they were distinguished by courage, dis­cipline and faithfulness, and they retained these qualities even in the revo­lutionary firestorm, which forced them to play a role vis-à-vis the Soviet ­government similar to that of the Germanic praetorians during the fall of Rome.”131 Paradoxically, the fact that there had been no mass defection of Latvian soldiers to the German side proved their Nordic character, evidenced primarily in fidelity to an oath.132 The inclusion of Latvia and Lithuania in the Reich was seen to benefit all parties: “The tribal nature of the Latvians will enrich our great Germanic family of nations in the same way as the Flemings do in the west, calling for the strong arm of the German Reich to aid the defence of their national and tribal freedom.133

Lūcija Jerums: Die Lettin vom anthropologischen Standpunkt. Rīgā 1935, 146–151; Gaston Backman: Die Augenfarbe der Letten. Lund/Leipzig 1921. 128 See Michael Hesch: Letten, Litauer, Weißrussen. Ein Beitrag zur Anthropologie des Ostbaltikums mit Berücksichtigung der siedlungs- und stammesgeschichtlichen Quellen. Wien 1933. 129 Georg Bonne: Die Letten. Ein germanischer Bruderstamm. 2nd edition. Berlin 1921. 130 Ibid., 14. 131 Ibid., 16–17. 132 Otto Seeck: Russen und Balten. Drei Vorträge. Bielefeld/Leipzig 1917, 99. 133 Bonne, Die Letten, 52.

127 See

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A different example of the use of racial theories in the name of kinship and friendship warrants particular attention, as it relates to a nation whose anthropological classification was far from unambiguous. We have already mentioned the concept of the origins of nations that became the focus of debate in Bulgaria, with opinions wavering between Slavic and Turan legacies. At a time when the country joined the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hun­g­ ary, references to a Germanic racial component also began to increase here. Although Georg Buschan stressed that the racial character of Bulgarians was significantly mixed, a fact evidenced by their brachycephaly, he also took pains to remind his readers that the incidence of tall blondes in Bulgaria suggested remnants of Gothic blood.134 Germany’s allies were similarly re-evaluated by Eugen Oberhummer, who tracked down elongated, Aryan skulls among Turks, and consequently judged them to represent an eastern branch of the IndoGermanics.135 The wartime conjuncture was exploited by the enfant terrible of Bulgarian historiography, Gancho Tsenov, who published several works in German, in which he propagated his virtually groundless theory of a Bulgar­ ian ethnogenesis. Tsenov claimed that ancient Thracians were racially identical to the Germanics and the ancient Greeks – a thesis also supported by Buschan. Following from this, Tsenov decided that the Huns were also a Thracian tribe; instead of coming from Asia, they were actually primordial inhabitants of the Balkans. This primordial grouping also included the inhabitants of ancient Troy, as well as Scythians and Macedonians. These Goths-Thracians-TrojansHuns-Scythians-Macedonians later went on to inhabit territories stretching from Rome to areas inhabited by Aryan Slavs. In a line of argument that is rich in spurious logic and curious associations, even the Romans came to be identified with Tsenov’s Thracians. In conclusion, the scholar identified all of those ancient peoples with the inhabitants of contemporary Bulgaria, the most ancient of all European nations.136 During the war and, to an even greater extent, in the interwar period, the lens of race also operated in views of one’s own community. As the war raged on, and particularly with the growing strain the sea blockade put on supplies to the Central Powers, it became increasingly more common to subject students to anthropometric analyses in order to obtain a perfect representation of the impact undernourishment had on their development. This research was 134 Georg

Buschan: Die Bulgaren. Herkunft und Geschichte: Eigenschaften, Volksglaube, Sitten und Gebräuche. Stuttgart 1917, 9. 135 Eugen Oberhummer: Die Türken und das Osmanische Reich. Leipzig/Berlin 1917, 19–20. 136 Gantscho Tzenoff: Geschichte der Bulgaren. Berlin 1917; idem: Goten oder Bulgaren. Quellenkritische Untersuchung über die Geschichte der alten Skythen, Thraker und Mazedonier. Leipzig 1915.

164   Maciej Górny pioneered by Martin, who initiated it directly after being nominated for a professorship at the institute of anthropology of Munich university.137 The undertaking, which often served propaganda purposes up to 1918 (Martin consciously sought to prove the destructive effects of the British blockade), continued afterwards in spite of the changed political climate.138 The experiences gained throughout the war became a powerful argument for expanding national institutions and programmes devoted to eugenics. Even during the war, hygienic societies (which also promoted racial hygiene) were founded in Central and Eastern European countries. After the war ministers of health with responsibility for maintaining the biological status of their citizens were appointed in the same countries – something that would have been a complete novelty in some Western European states. Eugenics was seen to promise the political restitution of the states that lost the war. A striking declaration was made by Werner Fischer-Defoy, a German doctor, in 1921: “The vital energy of the German nation, robbed of its most valuable individuals, injured in both body and soul, cast off from the zenith of its powers, may have been cut at its very base, yet it is hardly broken.”139 The interwar eugenics movement was far from homogeneous. It encompassed social hygiene, sexual education, pronatalism, efforts to improve the quality of life of workers, as well as negative eugenics, which was focused on limiting the fertility of social strata deemed less worthy. The experiences of the period from 1912 to 1918 led to a radicalisation of this latter current. In the case of Germany, Andrew D. Evans believes that these experiences were decisive in reshaping the paradigm of anthropology: the demise of the liberal science developed under Rudolf Virchow’s aegis and the birth of an ideology that found its purest expression in the Nazi science of race.140 War also significantly affected debates in other countries in the 1920s and the 1930s, resulting in the revival of the idea of a rejuvenation of races. Sterilisation of persons deemed genetically worthless was seen as one way of attaining this goal. Discussions of voluntary or compulsory sterilisation took place in most 137 Andrew

D. Evans: Science behind the Lines: The Effects of World War I on Anthropology in Germany, in: Johler/Marchetti/Scheer (eds.): Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones, 99–122, 114. 138 See L. Lukášová: Nynější stav tělesného vývoje školní mládeže v Praze, in: Antropologie 2 (1926) 2, 85–112. 139 Werner Fischer-Defoy: Sozialhygienische Gegenwartsströmungen. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der neuen Verfassung, in: Archiv für Soziale Hygiene und Demographie 1 (1921), 1. 140 Andrew D. Evans: A Liberal Paradigm? Race and Ideology in Late Nineteenth-Century German Physical Anthropology, in: Ab Imperio 1 (2007), 113–138, 127.

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European countries, and some of them introduced this measure. A particular understanding of caring for the nation also fed into the maternity support programmes that developed after World War I. In some cases, for instance in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, official state institutions formulated programmes for the creation of new races – in this particular case, the creation of a single race that united all the virtues of the southern Slavs of the Yugoslav race.141

Conclusions World War I constitutes one of the most seminal periods in the history of ­anthropology. It divides a period of ‘internationalist’ science from its purely national guise. As far as research practice is concerned, the paradigm change found expression in an almost universal disregard for the distinction between racial and national orders, which had previously been a basic tenet of the science. The efforts of the Austrian anthropologist to use measurements conducted on POWs to depict the conflict as a war between races inspired many others. Polish, Finnish and Ukrainian authors all strove to identify a specific racial type that was characteristic of the emerging nations. The notion of a correlation between racial and class origins, which had played a prominent role in racial discourse before the war, was pushed to the margins when the unity of nations became crucial to beating one’s enemies. From the perspective of an American racist, all these efforts were entirely pointless. As Madison Grant wrote in 1916: From a race point of view the present European conflict is essentially a civil war and nearly all the officers and a large proportion of the men on both sides are members of this [Nordic] race. […] It is the modern version of the old Berserker blood rage and is class suicide on a gigantic scale.142

The post-war racial discourse was dominated by the notion of biopolitics – a programme by the state to raise the racial quality of the nation.143 In its most radical guises, biopolitics embraced a way of thinking that was typical during the war but now sought to identify an enemy within society – among society’s ‘others’, the maladjusted and the antisocial.144 141 Marius Turda: Modernism and 142 Madison Grant: The Passing of

New York 1916, 200.

Eugenics. Houndmills 2010, 75–76. the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History.

143 Turda, The Nation, 413–415. 144 Philipp Sarasin: Zweierlei Rassismus?

Die Selektion des Fremden als Problem im Michel Foucaults Verbindung von Biopolitik und Rassismus, in: Martin Stingelin (ed.): Biopolitik und Rassismus. Frankfurt am Main 2003, 60–75, 67.

166   Maciej Górny Until recently, the period of World War I remained a gap in the history of anthropology.145 Nowadays, it makes sense to view it as a formative period for a new, interwar paradigm in anthropology. This is evidenced by the persistence of attitudes and research programmes shaped during the war. There are also other, more mundane continuities to consider. In accordance with the testament of the spiritus movens of the research on POWs Rudolf Pöch, who perished soon after the war, the Viennese Academy of Sciences took control of resources it received from the deceased and used them to finance the publication of doctoral dissertations based on data collected in the camps. The first of these dissertations were published right after the end of the war, and others appeared further into the interwar period. The Austrian Anschluss did not put a stop to this – only the publisher changed. The Viennese Anthropological Society was replaced by the SS Ahnenerbe foundation.146 During World War II, the Ahnenerbe foundation was an element of the ­institutional mosaic of the SS with direct responsibility for continuing anthropological research on POWs. The conclusions derived from its research proved as worthless as the observations of Pöch or Lebzelter. The summary of the measurements delivered to his superiors by Josef Grohmann sounds all too familiar. The SS anthropologist concluded that the analyses conducted on POWs failed to produce any evidence of a specifically Russian racial type: “The absence of any particularly Russian racial mixture reflects the landscape of the country.”147 Further anthropological research on a massive scale in Eastern Europe mostly affected two social groups, which had either not existed during World War I or had not been deemed of interest by scholars at the time. Experts employed by the Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt) selected candidates for volksdeutsch status or forced labour. Their evaluation had a profound effect on the fortunes of the examinees. A qualification (or lack thereof) for any of the four categories of the German Volksliste could mean, for instance, expropriation, compulsory resettlement, compulsory Germanisation, or in some cases, even death. Forced labourers accused of having unlawful sexual relations with German women could only avoid the most severe of punishments if a commission composed of racial anthropologists deemed them valuable biological material and recommended 145 Monique

Scheer/Christian Marchetti/Reinhard Johler: “A Time Like No Other”. The Impact of the Great War on European Anthropology, in: Johler/Marchetti/Scheer (eds.): Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones, 9–28, 9. 146 Karl Tuppa: Mischeren und Tipteren. Ein Beitrag zur Anthropologie der Türkvölker in Rußland. Berlin-Dahlem 1941. 147 Isabel Heinemann: “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”. Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas. Göttingen 2003, 535.

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their ‘re-Germanisation.’148 Unlike the period of the Great War, no recourse to scientific objectivism clouded the eliminative nature of this process and the ideology on which it was based. The ideological and personal continuities with German and Austrian anthropology during World War I are clear. By that time, Eastern European anthropologists were already largely incapable of taking any active part in this discourse.

148 Ibid.

Piotr J. Wróbel

Foreshadowing the Holocaust: The Wars of 1914–1921 and Anti-Jewish Violence in Central and Eastern Europe The Holocaust, one of the most horrible events in the history of humankind and one of the defining phenomena of the twentieth century, has been the subject of endless discussions. Among the most important and most frequent issues raised in these discussions are the causes of the Holocaust. Was it mostly a product of the twentieth century? To what extent did earlier events and ideas contribute to the murder of the European Jews? There is no final answer to these questions. Anti-Semitism certainly did not begin in the twentieth century, and historically there have always been periods in which public attitude was favorably inclined towards the Jews as well as periods in which prejudices and violence were greater. Up until the late nineteenth century the situation in Europe seems to have been relatively favorable for the Jews. Jewish-Gentile relations were good during the Spring of Nations of 1848. The Jews of Western Europe went through a process of successful modernization. There were instances of friendly relations between Poles and Jews before the uprising of 1863. Many Jews of the Russian Empire felt that they were experiencing a ‘Time of Hope’ under Alexander II. Later, the tide turned in most of Europe and conditions that encouraged anti-Semitism outweighed any previous acceptance. After the murder of Alexander II in 1881, the ‘Time of Hope’ was over. The situation for Russian Jews became increasingly dangerous and affected other Jewish communities in Europe, which faced a new growing wave of anti-Semitism coming from the West. The First World War was an even greater threat to the Jews, particularly the six million of them living in Central and Eastern Europe.1 The war unleashed an unprecedented outburst of state-managed hatred and violence and transformed political and social relations. The culture of the Ostjuden was pushed to the verge of destruction. Their situation improved in the mid-1920s, but it was difficult to stop the trends that had been initiated in 1914. In Central and Eastern Europe, the First World War paved the way for the Holocaust. True, the ‘Final Solution’ was the contribution of Adolf Hitler and his party. How1

Antony Polonsky: The Jews in Poland and Russia. Volume 3: 1914–2008. Oxford 2012, 28.

170   Piotr J. Wróbel ever, even if this systematic deportation and extermination of the Jews had not happened, after 1921 the local population was so hostile towards the Jews that it seems unlikely that the Ostjuden would not have had to face persecution and violence directed against them.

I. The Jews of Europe before 1914 Starting in the late nineteenth century, the situation of the East European ­Jewry worsened for a number of reasons. It should be noted that most of the contributing factors were not new; however, during this period earlier problems and tensions became greatly exacerbated and often took on new forms. By 1914, the Ostjuden had become more vulnerable than ever before. By the end of the nineteenth century, the demographic growth of the European Jewry had slowed, but the cumulative effect of this long-term population increase was striking. The demographic factor is important, since the intensity of antiSemitism usually corresponded to the numbers of Jews in particular countries and to the tempo of growth of Jewish communities. For about four centuries, most European Jews lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the seventeenth century, after the Khmelnytsky Uprising and a series of destructive wars, masses of Jews left Poland and revitalized Jewish communities in the West. This slowed the growth of the Polish Jewry only slightly, however. By the late 1700s, almost one million Jews, over 75 per cent of the world Jewry, lived in the Commonwealth. After it was partitioned in 1772–1795, about half a million Jews landed in Russia, which had not tolerated Jews before. An attempt to integrate them with the rest of the population failed. Russian Jews were restricted to the region on the western border known as the Pale of Settlement. According to the 1897 census, there were 5.2 million Jews in Russia – 4.1 per cent of the entire population of 126.4 million people and 46 per cent of all the Jews of the world. In the Pale of Settlement and the former Congress Kingdom of Poland, there were 4.9 million Jews (11.46 per cent of the population), and in the former Congress Kingdom alone there were 1.36 million Jews (14 per cent).2 Between 1820 and 1880, before the slowdown in demographic growth of the late nineteenth century, the entire Russian population grew by 87 per cent, but the number of Jews by 150 per cent. Between 1816 and 1913, the number of the inhabitants of the Congress Kingdom grew by 381  per cent but the 2

Piotr J. Wróbel: Przed odzyskaniem niepodległości, in: Jerzy Tomaszewski (ed.): Najnowsze dzieje Żydów w Polsce. Warszawa 1993, 25.

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number of its Jews increased by 822  per cent. The proportion of the Jewish population within the population of the Kingdom almost doubled, increasing from 7.8 to 14.9 per cent.3 The second-largest European concentration of the Jews was in AustriaHungary. In 1785, there were about 70 000 Jews in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia; about 80 000 in Hungary; and over 215 000 (almost nine  per cent of the population) in Galicia. In 1910, there were over 2.25 million Habsburg Jews, including 872 000 in Galicia (11 per cent of its population), 932 000 in Hungary, and 442 000 in the rest of Austria. In 1900, large Jewish communities existed in the main Austro-Hungarian cities, but the Jews were particularly predominant in the smaller towns of eastern Galicia (72.1 per cent of all the inhabitants in Brody, 57.3  per cent in Buczacz, 57.1  per cent in Rawa ­Ruska, etc.). In Galicia, even in the years 1901 to 1910, when the Jewish demographic growth slowed, the Jews were the fastest increasing group.4 In Prussia, the Jewish demographic trends were different than in Russia and Austria. The Hohenzollerns, who had previously tolerated only isolated small Jewish communities, ‘inherited’ 67 000 Polish Jews. Largely as the result of Prussian policies, demographic growth among Prussian Jews dropped steadily, reaching a zero growth rate by 1910. In 1905, less than 50 000 Jews lived in Prussian Poland. There were 410 000 Jews in all the provinces of the Kingdom of Prussia and 608 000 in the entire German Reich.5 There was a sizable Jewish community in Romania. In 1774, about 6,500 Jews lived in Moldavia and a smaller group dwelled in Wallachia. In 1899, the Romanian Jewry reached 266 000 (4.5 per cent of the population).6 The Bulgarian Jewish community also grew quickly: from about 18 000 in 1881 to 40 000 in 1910.7 The Serbian Jewry, on the other hand, totaled only 5,000 persons in 1912.8

3 4

5 6 7

8

Ibid., 26–28. Piotr J. Wróbel: The Jews of Galicia under Austrian-Polish Rule, 1869–1918, in: Austrian History Yearbook 25 (1994), 97–138, 105–08; Börries Kuzmany: Brody. Eine galizische Grenzstadt im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Wien 2011, 126. Piotr J. Wróbel: Żydzi wielkopolscy przed I wojną światową, in: Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce 1 (1991), 31–55, 33–39. Gershon David Hundert (ed.): The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Volume 2. New Haven/London 2008, 1569. Jakob Klatzkin (ed.): Encyclopaedia Judaica. Das Judentum in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Volume 4. Berlin 1929, 1197; Nathan Michael Gelber: Jewish Life in Bulgaria, in: Jewish Social Studies, 2 (1946), 103–126, 106. Fred Skolnik/Michael Berenbaum (eds.): Encyclopaedia Judaica. Volume 21. 2nd edition. Detroit 2006, 410.

172   Piotr J. Wróbel Outside Eastern Europe, the Jewish population was much smaller, although here, too, it grew quickly. Altogether, there were about 10.6 million Jews all over the world in 1900. Out of 8.7 million European Jews, 7.6 million lived in Central and Eastern Europe.9 Between Russia proper and Germany, they constituted the third-largest nationality after Poles and Ukrainians, but they were spread over a large area. They did not dominate numerically in any region and they became an urban-concentrated minority. Their large numbers worked to their disadvantage. Everywhere, including the countries where they had been living for centuries, many people considered them newcomers who multiplied in a way threatening to the local population. In most Western countries, the Jews enjoyed full citizen rights, at least in theory. In Eastern Europe their situation was different. In tsarist Russia, the Jews had never received citizens’ rights. After May 1882, when the ‘temporary laws’ were issued, the legal position of the Jews constantly worsened. Before the First World War, Romania emulated the Russian model and also refused to emancipate its Jews. They were declared foreigners and naturalized individually. In the early twentieth century, the authorities started removing the Jews from the villages. Some of the most outstanding Jewish leaders were expelled from Romania. Romanian Jews belonged to the most vulnerable Jewish communities of Europe.10 In Bulgaria, however, where the Jews were less numerous and usually at the lower end of the economic hierarchy, the authorities granted them citizen rights. The Serbian parliament followed suit in 1889.11 In Prussia, the Jews received full rights in 1869. Yet, in the army and the civil service, a person of Jewish religion had no chance of a successful career due to prejudices and arbitrary restrictions. Jews were usually isolated socially. In 1880, about 250 000 Germans signed a petition that demanded that the authorities stop Jewish immigration, identify and count the Jews, and expel them from civil service and teaching positions. Conversion and assimilation were the only way to achieve real equality. About 21 000 Prussian Jews converted between 1800 and 1924.12 Kotowski et al. (eds.): Handbuch zur Geschichte der Juden in Europa. Volume 2. Darmstadt 2001, 15. 10 Fred Skolnik/Michael Berenbaum (eds.): Encyclopaedia Judaica. Volume 17. 2nd edition. Detroit 2007, 378: William I. Brustein/Ryan D. King: Anti-Semitism as a Response to ­Perceived Jewish Power. The Cases of Bulgaria and Romania before the Holocaust, in: Social Forces 2 (2004), 691–708, 692; Victor Karady: Gewalterfahrung und Utopie. Juden in der europäischen Moderne. Frankfurt am Main 1999, 110. 11 Skolnik/Berenbaum, Encyclopaedia Judaica. Volume 21, 410; Brustein/King, Anti-Semitism As a Response, 695; Gelber, Jewish Life in Bulgaria, 104. 12 Lloyd P. Gartner: History of the Jews in Modern Times. Oxford 2001, 222–224; Wróbel, Żydzi wielkopolscy, 39.   9 Elke-Vera

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In Austria, the 1867 constitution granted Jews equal rights and terminated all feudal restrictions. Yet, in Galicia, the Jews were underrepresented in city councils, the provincial parliament, the civil service, and university positions. The 1867 constitution did not give the Jews the status of a ‘nationality.’ They were considered only a ‘religious group’ and they were not granted the national rights enjoyed by the recognized ‘nationalities.’ Israeliten were supposed to join non-Jewish ‘nationalities’ and consider themselves Poles or Germans of the Mosaic faith. If they were reluctant to do so, they often faced anti-Semitism. Only in Bukovina, where no nationality had a majority, were the Jews recognized as a de facto ‘nationality.’13 The Jews of Central and Eastern Europe did not form a homogeneous group. A crisis and erosion of the traditional Jewish community had already started in the seventeenth century. Later the Hassidic movement appeared in Ukraine and transformed the Eastern European Jews. The Hassidim became involved in a war against the traditional orthodox rabbinic Jews. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) appeared. Its supporters opposed orthodoxy and despised Hassidism. By the late nineteenth century, the Ostjuden were divided into several main groups. Assimilationists, Zionists, Jewish nationalists, and leftists were critical of or openly hostile towards each other. Jewish communal organizations lost their significance, were gradually replaced by other modern organizations, and were eventually unable to take care of their members.14 The economic situation of the Ostjuden contributed to their growing vulnerability as well. The Jews played a crucial role in the modernization and industrialization of Europe. Some famously rich Jews became symbols of capitalist exploitation, but they constituted a minuscule group. Their wealth was of a limited importance to the masses of poor Ostjuden. The traditional Jewish occupation as intermediaries between villages and towns almost disappeared. Artisans and traders were losing in the competition against big business and had to change their occupations. This retreat, accelerated by unprecedented political pressure, meant a defeat since there was no attractive economic space open to the Jews. Gradually, most of them ceased to be a useful ‘service minority’ and became unskilled workers. Those who survived in their shops or stores were usually poor and not much of an economic threat to Christian artisans and storekeepers.15 13 Wróbel,

The Jews of Galicia, 103–104. History of the Jews, 61. 15 Raphael Straus: The Jews in the Economic Evolution of Central Europe, in: Jewish Social Studies 1 (1941), 15–40, 36–39; Karady, Gewalterfahrung und Utopie, 15. 14 Gartner,

174   Piotr J. Wróbel In the nineteenth century, the old Christian anti-Judaism was supplemented with new, modern forms of anti-Semitism. It is difficult to disagree with the conclusion that “though persecution of Jews has a history of at least two millennia, the late nineteeenth and the early twentieth century witnessed a high-water mark in hatred against Jews, especially in western Christian socie­ ties.”16 In France, the Jews benefited from the 1789 revolution, and, during the next 150 years, the counterrevolutionary, reactionary, and clericalist forces considered them archenemies. In the second half of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism found a new supporter in the political Left, which saw the Jews as the exploiters of workers and peasants. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Dreyfus Affair provoked strong anti-Jewish feelings.17 In Germany, the Jews were frequently identified with capitalism. The victims of the early aggressive industrialization particularly resented the Jews, whom they saw as the successful ‘new men.’ Paradoxically, the long depression from 1873 to 1896, which hit the Jews especially hard, contributed greatly to the rise of antiSemitism. A number of outstanding German intellectuals opposed the emancipation of the Jews. Very few Christian citizens of the empire considered the Jews true Germans. By the end of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism became morally and politically acceptable. A growing group of scholars and politicians began to use ‘scientific’ terminology and claimed that the Jews were a biologically inferior race. In Germany, Austria, and France, a growing group of political parties and social organizations made anti-Semitism one of their most important, if not the most important, slogans. Yet nowhere in Europe was the turn from liberalism to anti-Semitism as visible as in Germany.18 This new anti-Semitism quickly spread to Central and Eastern Europe, where the rising middle class also saw the Jews as competition in their fight for limited resources. The new ideas strengthened the old peasant hatred of and the nobility’s contempt for the Jews and revived religious prejudices. In many regions controlled by Russia, Austria, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire, the Jews were a rapidly growing minority that was seen as overrepresented in the richest social classes and felt to have a different political agenda than the rest of the population.19 In Hungary, ‘National Socialist’ politicians established the I. Brustein/Ryan D. King: Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust, in: International Political Science Review 1 (2004), 35–53, 36. 17 Fred Skolnik/Michael Berenbaum (eds.): Encyclopaedia Judaica. Volume 2. 2nd edition. Detroit 2007, 214–216. 18 Gartner, History of the Jews, 213–37; Albert S. Lindemann: Esau’s Tears. Modern AntiSemitism and the Rise of the Jews. Cambridge 1997, 70–92. 19 Brustein/King, Anti-Semitism as a Response, 693–695. 16 William

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Anti-Semitic Club, which, among other ‘successes,’ won the majority in Bratislava during the 1884 elections. Even though the concept of ‘race’ was not accepted in Hungary, anti-Semitism developed on the basis of the old gentry mentality.20 In 1883, the openly anti-Semitic periodical Rola (Soil) appeared in Warsaw and was soon followed by similar publications. The National Democratic Party, formed in 1897, claimed that the Jews were the most dangerous enemy of Poland. In 1912, the party announced a Christian boycott of Jewish shops and trade and continued it, mostly in Warsaw, until the First World War.21 In Galicia, the peasants saw the Jews and the nobility as their foes. Many Poles also believed that the Jews were obliged to support the Polish government of ­Galicia against the Ukrainians. If the Jews did not do this, they were branded traitors. Anti-Jewish emotions increased in the region after the 1881/1882 ­pogroms in Russia, when a wave of desperate Jewish refugees moved through Galicia. In 1892, the Polish Peasant Party was established there and included anti-Semitic theories in its program. In the 1890s, anti-Semitic booklets appeared in Galicia, imported from Austria. The growing frustration of the impoverished Galician peasants turned them against the Jews. During the 1898 Reichsrat by-elections, a Polish peasant leader used radical anti-Semitic ­slogans and triggered anti-Jewish riots in 33 towns of western Galicia. Several months later, during the by-election to the Galician Diet, and again in 1903 and 1911, violence broke out once more. Quiet Galicia was turning into a hornet’s nest.22 A similar trend appeared in Russia, particularly its western territories and the Kingdom of Poland, where the locals were politically oppressed by the Russian rulers and turned against the Jews. After the Polish uprising of 1863, the Russian authorities applied special measures in its western gubernias and the Congress Kingdom. The Poles were oppressed, their civil rights were limited, and the authorities did their best to further reduce their influence. The Kovács: Neo-Antisemitism in Hungary, in: Jewish Social Studies 3 (1946), 147–160, 148; see also Paul Hanebrink: In Defense of Christian Hungary. Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944. Ithaca 2006, 10–33. 21 Robert Blobaum: The Politics of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Warsaw, in: The Journal of Modern History 2 (2001), 275–306; see also Brian Porter: When Nationalism Began to Hate. Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland. Oxford 2000, 164–167, 227–232. 22 Piotr S. Wandycz: The Poles in the Habsburg Monarchy, in: Austrian History Yearbook 3 (1967), 261–286, 279–281; Paul R. Magocsi: A History of Ukraine. Toronto 1996, 448; Wróbel, The Jews of Galicia, 130–132; Leila P. Everett: The Rise of Jewish National Politics in Galicia, 1905–1907, in: A. S. Markovits/Frank E. Sysyn (eds.): Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism. Essays on Austrian Galicia. Cambridge 1982, 155–165. 20 János

176   Piotr J. Wróbel Roman and the Greek Catholic Churches were suppressed. Many Poles were afraid that their existence as a nation was threatened.23 This tense atmosphere added to the Jewish misery. After the murder of Alex­ ander II, a wave of anti-Jewish violence swept through western Russia. In 1881 and 1882, about 224 pogroms took place there. Followed by anti-Jewish laws and an intensification of economic exploitation, they pushed many Jews to revolutionary movement, which, in turn, convinced the political right and the deeply religious Russian Orthodox people that the Jews were the enemies of the empire. In 1903, a mob killed 45 Jews during a pogrom in Kishinev. However, the real high tide of violence came during the revolution of 1905, when pogroms took place in about 300 towns. The tsar himself believed in an international Jewish conspiracy. Aggressive anti-Semitic propaganda developed ­especially quickly when, in 1911, a Jew in Kiev was accused of ritual murder. A significant part of the Russian public believed the accusation.24 Hannah Arendt considered Romania the most anti-Semitic country in prewar Europe.25 Both major political parties of Romania, the liberals and the conservatives, were anti-Semitic. As early as 1866, a mob destroyed a synagogue in Bucharest. The 1907 revolt of the peasants turned first against the Jews. In 1910, the National Democratic Party was formed and made antiSemitism an important aspect of its program. Between 1899 and 1914, about 70 000 Jews left Romania to escape persecution and oppression. Many, if not most, Romanian intellectuals and politicians disliked the Jews.26 The decisions of the 1878 Congress of Berlin, which limited the territorial gains of Bulgaria, provoked the anti-Semitic atmosphere there. Many Christian Bulgarians claimed that the Jews had been loyal towards the Ottomans. In 1884, there was a blood libel accusation in Sofia and, in 1890, in the town of Vratsa. The authorities tried to limit the Jewish participation in trade. In the 1890s and after 1900, anti-Jewish violent incidents happened in several towns, even though the Bulgarian Christian-Jewish relations had slowly started to improve.27 R. Weeks: Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914. DeKalb 1996, 93–97; Heinz-Dietrich Löwe: Poles, Jews and Tatars. Religion, Ethnicity, and Social Structure in Tsarist National Policies, in: Jewish Social Studies 3 (2000), 52–96, 67–71. 24 Wróbel, Przed odzyskaniem niepodległości, 13–25, 40–48. 25 Stephen Fischer-Galati: The Legacy of Anti-Semitism, in: Randolph L. Braham (ed.): The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry, New York 1994, 1. 26 Skolnik/Berenbaum, Encyclopaedia Judaica. Volume 17, 380; Karady, Gewalterfahrung und Utopie, 110. 27 Klatzkin, Encyclopaedia Judaica. Volume 4, 1195; Gelber, Jewish Life in Bulgaria, 105. 23 Theodore

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II. The First World War During the First World War, for the first time in almost two millennia, Jews participated on a mass scale in a war. Among the 65 million soldiers, there were about 1.5 million Jews. They constituted about two  per cent of all the mobilized men, even though they made up only about one  per cent of the population of the combatant states. The Entente mobilized 42  million men, including 1 055 600 Jews. In the Central Powers, the numbers were 23 million men and 450 000 Jews. About 8.5  million soldiers perished during the war, including about 170 000 Jewish citizens of the Entente and 54 000 in the central states. The total number of all the Jews who died during the war, including the victims of pogroms and deportations, was much higher. Some evaluations reach half a million people.28

The outbreak of the First World War The outbreak of the war surprised the Ostjuden and put them in a difficult situation. They did not consider any of the fighting nations an enemy. They did not have borders to defend. They were not interested in a conflict and did not see its purpose. Yet the war divided them once again. Some shared the patriotic enthusiasm that prevailed in Europe in the summer of 1914, but many sensed that a catastrophe was coming. The Jews of Germany did not expect the war and hoped that it would be local and short.29 Before 1914, the citizens of Germany did not know a lot about Russia, and the German Jews were mostly ignorant about Ostjuden. The ‘Germans of the Mosaic faith’ did not understand their brethren from the East and identified themselves exclusively with the German Reich.30 This identifiWeinryb: East European Jewry since the Partitions of Poland 1772–1795, in: Louis Finkelstein (ed.): The Jews; their history. New York 1972, 373; Ismar Elbogen: Ein Jahrhundert jüdischen Lebens. Frankfurt am Main 1967, 418; Abraham G. Duker: Jewish Territorialism. A Brief Historical Sketch, in: Contemporary Jewish Records 5 (1939), 8–9; Mordechai Altshuler: Russia and her Jews. The Impact of the 1914 War, in: The Wiener Library Bulletin 30/31 (1973/74), 13. 29 Stephen Magil: Defence and Introspection. German Jewry 1914, in: David Bronson (ed.): Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933. Heidelberg 1979, 212. 30 F. Koch: Russlands Zusammenbruch und augenblickliche politische Gestalten. [No place given] 1920, 69; Max Mayer: A German Jew Goes East, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 3 (1958), 344–357, 351; Alexander Carlebach: A German Rabbi Goes East, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 6 (1961), 60–121 60; Hans Delbrück: Russisch-Polen. Eine Reise-Studie, in: Preußische Jahrbücher 98 (1909), 104–122 104; Steven E. Aschheim: Brothers and Strangers. The East European Jew in Germany and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800– 1923. London 1982, 3; Sander Gilman: Die Wiederentdeckung der Ostjuden. Deutsche 28 Bernard

178   Piotr J. Wróbel cation became particularly strong in August 1914. The German Jews participated in the wave of national enthusiasm. They hoped that the war would integrate their community and bring them true equality. For several months, the anti-Semitic propaganda disappeared. The German government counted on help from the ‘world Jewry.’ Some army commanders believed that Russian Jews would sabotage the supplying of the tsarist army. The German Jews had found a ‘sense of belonging’ and identified themselves with Germany even more strongly.31 The outbreak of the war mobilized the German Zionists. They believed that the moment of ‘vengeance for Kishinev’ had come and that now they should help the Ostjuden. They hoped that Germany would create a new order in Central Europe and would finally offer the Ostjuden equal rights. In August 1914, the leading German Zionists formed the German Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Jewry (Deutsches Komitee zur Befreiung der russischen Juden). They created a list of requests to the German authorities, including the establishment of Jewish committees in the newly occupied territor­ ies in the East. They also presented the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs with documentation on the Jewish situation in Eastern Europe and a memorandum that suggested how the Reich should organize this part of the continent. The memorandum warned that the establishment of a Polish state would be dangerous since it would encourage Polish irredentist movements, and the Poles would persecute national minorities. The memo recommended the formation of a German-controlled multinational buffer state between the Baltic and the Black Seas.32 To the German authorities this sounded more like a utoJuden im Osten 1890–1918, in: Michael Brocke (ed.): Beter und Rebellen. Aus 1000 Jahren Judentum in Polen. Frankfurt am Main 1983, ii; Sidney M. Bolkosky: The Distorted ­Image. German Jewish perceptions of Germans and Germany 1918–1935. New York 1975, 5. 31 Leon Poliakov: The History of Anti-Semitism. Volume 4. Oxford 1985, 137–40; Selma Spier: The Fatherland, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 4 (1959), 294–308, 307; Magil, Defence and Introspection, 213; Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 142; Egmont Zechlin: Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg. Göttingen 1969, 87–92, 141; Nahum Goldman: The Autobiography. New York 1969, 48; Saul Friedländer: Die politischen Veränderungen der Kriegszeit und ihre Auswirkung auf die Judenfrage, in: Werner E. Mossel (ed.): Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution, 1916–1923. Tübingen 1971, 30; Zosa Szajkowski: Demands for Complete Emancipation of German Jewry During World War I, in: The Jewish Quarterly Review. 4 (1965), 350–363, 350; Jehuda Reinharz: The Zionist Response to Antisemitism in Germany, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 30 (1985), 105–140, 109. 32 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 119–27; Jehuda Reinharz (ed.): Dokumente zur Geschichte des deutschen Zionismus, 1882–1933. Tübingen 1981, 157. See also Julius Berger: Deutsche Juden und Polnische Juden, in: Der Jude 3 (1916), 137–149, 137–141; David Vital: Zionism. The Crucial Phase. Oxford 1987, 124; Kurt Blumenfeld: Im Kampf um den Zionismus. Briefe aus fünf Jahrzehnten. Stuttgart 1976, 44.

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pian vision than a realistic goal, but they promised the German Zionists some help. The Zionist committee changed its name to more neutral Committee for the East (Komitee für den Osten, KfdO), gained the support of several nonZionist organizations, and started presenting itself as representing all German Jews.33 The activities of the KfdO provoked protests from those Jews who did not share the German national enthusiasm and warned against chauvinism. The World Zionist Organization distanced itself from the KfdO, whose activities poisoned Polish-Jewish relations.34 Yet conservative Jews also approached the German authorities and asked for permission to send their representatives to occupied Poland. The outbreak of the war did not integrate the German Jewish community but added new divisions. The authorities ignored their promises and did not rush to make any decisions concerning the Ostjuden.35 The war enthusiasm in Austria was less impressive than in Germany. It was only apparent among educated Jews who volunteered to the army, fought with dedication, and suffered considerable casualties. Many Jews were promoted to officer ranks, received decorations, and occupied important positions, because in many units only Jewish soldiers spoke German. Austrian war propaganda used news about Russian cruelties to the Jews to mobilize the Jewish population to fight. Most Austrian Jews remained habsburgtreu, loyal to the Habsburg Monarchy, until the end of the war. The situation was different in Jewish conservative milieus. To them, the war could only disrupt their religious life. Orthodox Jews were not interested in politics and had a negative attitude towards the non-Jewish public and towards state involvement in their lives. These feelings predominated in Galicia, especially in small towns, where the Jews were not prepared for the war.36 In Russia, too, enthusiasm reigned in the first days of August 1914. The tsar was impressed by the Jewish show of support, and the Duma responded with a loyalty declaration supported by the representatives of national minorities. A Jewish deputy, Naftal M. Fridman, issued a statement that the Russian Jews had always been true sons of their fatherland. 33 Zechlin,

Die deutsche Politik, 164–165. Brothers and Strangers, 164–165. 35 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 134–177. 36 Max Grunwald: Vienna. Jewish Communities Series. Philadelphia 1936, 459–461; Arthur James May: The Passing of the Hapsburg Monarchy, 1914–1981. Volume 1. Philadelphia 1966, 301; George Clare: Last Waltz in Vienna. The Destruction of a Family, 1842–1942. Bury St. Edmunds 1982, 56; Donald A. Prater: European of Yesterday. A Biography of Stefan Zweig. Oxford, 1972, 68; William O. McCagg Jr.: A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918. Bloomington 1989, 206–219; Joachim Schoenfeld: Shtetl Memoirs. Jewish Life in Galicia under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in the Reborn Poland, 1898–1939. Hoboken 1985, 129. 34 Aschheim,

180   Piotr J. Wróbel The entire Russian Jewish press wrote in a similar tone. Jewish volunteers joined the army and many Jews believed that the war would change their situation. Yet, Jewish public opinion was divided. Those who were socialists ­criticized Germany for being feudalistic and militaristic. Likewise, many Jews blamed the Reich for starting the war. However, others sympathized with Germany and were hostile towards Russia.37 Similar divisions also surfaced among the Jews of Congress Poland. Most of them were afraid of the future. The Warsaw rabbinate published an appeal to pray for a Russian victory. The Bund (General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia; in Yiddish Algemeyner Yiddisher Bund im Lite, Poyln, un Rusland) distributed a leaflet that protested against the imperialist war. Reservists’ families were terrified by the mobilization. Many Jews did not want to go to the army, which was infamous for its anti-Semitism. Most mobilized Jews were summoned to far-away units. Trains were full of soldiers hostile to the Jews.38

The First year of the war: 1914–1915 In the former Congress Poland, western Russia, and Galicia, the Jews found themselves between a rock and a hard place. They tried to compromise with the Germans, but this did not bring any long-term positive results and antagonized the Poles. The Jewish situation was getting worse, and their communities became more divided, politically marginalized, and desperate. The Austrian defeat in Galicia shocked the Galician Jews. Almost every Russian unit, upon entering a town, harassed and robbed the local Jews. Some of these events assumed the proportions of a full-fledged pogrom, lasted several days, and caused the death of many people. The Austrian army also frequently accused the Jews of spying or siding with the enemy and sometimes treated them no better than the Russian soldiers did. Thousands of Jews fled Galicia.39 It is difficult to establish the exact numbers, because many of them tried Die deutsche Politik, 114; Jacob Frumkin/Gregor Aronson/Alexis Goldenweiser (eds.): Russian Jewry, 1860–1917. New York/London 1966, 57–58, 109; Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, 162–163; Bernard Wolfe: War comes to Russia, in: The Russian Review 2 (1963), 123–130; Czesław Jankowski: Z dnia na dzień, Warszawa 1914–Wilno 1915. Vilna 1923, 9–11. 38 Zosa Szajkowski: The German Appeal to the Jews of Poland, August 1914, in: The Jewish Quarterly Review 4 (1969), 311–320, 311; Isaac B. Singer: In my Father’s Court. London 1966, 231; Anne Kahan: The Diary of Anne Kahan, Siedlce, Poland, 1914–1916, in: YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 18 (1983), 142–145. 39 Alexander V. Prusin: Nationalizing a Borderland. War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920. Tuscaloosa 2005, 24–47; idem: The lands between. Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992. Oxford/New York 2010, 46–49; idem: A ‘Zone 37 Zechlin,

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to return to their towns, escaped again, or moved to nearby localities. Estimates vary between 200 000 and 400 000, which would be a half of the entire Galician Jewry. A report of the Austrian Ministry of Internal Affairs from the fall of 1915, when the Russians were pushed out of Galicia, still mentioned 340 000 refugees, mostly Jewish. In 1917, about 173 000 refugees were un­ employed in the Austrian part of the Empire.40 These Galician Jews, called Galitsianers, escaped mostly to Hungary, Moravia, Bohemia, and Vienna. The local administration was unprepared and did not manage to take care of the refugees. Camps were established where the refugees could live and receive food. Living in the camps was not obligatory and many refugees tried to survive on their own. Some of them escaped to Vienna, where about 137 000 persons, including 77 000 Jews, found shelter. Vienna’s Jewish community doubled. The Jews could settle where they wanted, but if they moved to the Jewish district they could count on community support. With the passing of time, the economic situation in Austria worsened. The number of refugees grew and food shortages started. The friendly attitude towards displaced persons disappeared. Since many refugees were Jewish, anti-Semitism increased. Many Jews could not find employment, moved around, and contributed to the impression of the ‘Judaization’ of ­Vienna. From 1916, appeals were heard to send the refugees back to Galicia or to build special camps for them in Moravia.41 The situation of the Galician Jews who stayed in their homeland and found themselves under the Russian occupation was even worse. They were the­ oretically given the same legal status as the Russian Jews, which, however, offered them few rights and little or no protection. Jewish community organizations were disbanded. The Russians used collective responsibility, took hostages, and ­executed innocent people. In the no-man’s-land between the fighting of Violence’. The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Eastern Galicia in 1914–1915 and 1941, in: Omer Bartov/Eric D. Weitz (eds.): Shatterzone of Empires. Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington 2013, 367–369. 40 Arieh Tartakower: Jewish Migratory Movement in Austria in Recent Generations, in: Josef Fraenkel (ed.): The Jews of Austria. London 1970, 289; May, The Passing of the Great Race, 311; Ignacy Schiper/Arieh Tartakower/Aleksander Haftka (eds.): Żydzi w Polsce odrodzonej. Volume 1. Warszawa 1932, 413; Pamiętniki Barucha Milcha, notebook 1, Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Warszawie (AŻIH). 41 Tartakower, Jewish Migratory Movement, 290–291; Elbogen, Ein Jahrhundert, 424; Gerhard Armanski: Die Gewaltmaschine. Das Lager als Signum und Stigma des Jahrhunderts, in: Sighard Neckel/Michael Schwab-Trapp (eds.): Ordnung der Gewalt. Beiträge zu einer politischen Soziologie der Gewalt und des Krieges. Opladen 1999, 131–132; Anson G. Rabinbach: The Migration of Galician Jews to Vienna, in: Austrian History Yearbook 11 (1975), 44–54, 54; Manes Sperber: God’s Water Carriers. New York/London 1987, 74; Shiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 413.

182   Piotr J. Wróbel a­ rmies, the Jews were frequently victims of robbers. The chief of the Russian military administration of Galicia, Grigorii Bobrinskii, had no organizational skills and no knowledge about the region that he was in charge of, but considered it an inherent part of Russia that needed to be ‘cleansed’ and integrated into the Russian empire. He was unwilling and unable to control the merciless, greedy, and incompetent apparatchiks sent to Galicia to russify it. The province was cut off from external help and ruled more harshly than western Russia. Some areas were isolated to stop the spread of typhus and smallpox. The tsarist authorities started a mass deportation of Jews to Russia.42 In the former Congress Kingdom of Poland, which was the first Russiancontrolled territory affected by the military operations, the first days of the war brought chaos. Panicking people returned from vacations to the cities and railway stations were overfilled. People hoarded provisions and many stores sold out of everything. Most banks froze deposits and credits. Prices rose and coal and provisions were in short supply. The army requisitioned horses, blocked trains, and used up gas supplies. People were forbidden to travel. The Jews suffered particularly in this chaos.43 The outbreak of the war brought an economic crisis as well. During the first year of the war, the front went through Congress Poland. Often, railway connections were damaged. Many towns lost buildings, numerous villages were burned down, and fields were covered with trenches and shell craters. Under such circumstances, initially, a sense of a solidarity prevailed and antiSemitism somewhat abated. The commander-in-chief of the Russian army, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, promised ‘the dawn of new life’ in his appeal to the Poles and Jews. The Jewish public debated what kind of liberal changes should be expected.44 W. Baron: The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets. New York/London 1976, 158; Shiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 413–415; Frank Golczewski: Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen 1881–1922. Wiesbaden 1981, 121; Daniel M. Graf: Military Rule behind the Russian Front 1914–1917. The Political Ramifications, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 22 (1974), 390–411, 397; Schoenfeld, Shtetl Memoirs, 135; Sperber, God’s Water Carriers, 80; Pamiętniki Barucha Milcha, notebook 1, AŻIH; Wróbel, The Jews of Galicia, 134; Aleksei Brussilov: A Soldier’s Note Book, 1914–1918. London 1930, 71, 109; Salomon Ansky: The Enemy at His Pleasure. A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I. New York 2003, 68–106; John Reed: The War in Eastern Europe. New York 1916, 235; Peter Gatrell: A Whole Empire Walking. Refugees in Russia during World War I. Bloomington 1999, 18. 43 Jankowski, Z dnia na dzień, 8–15; Kahan, The Diary, 141–144; Kurier Warszawski, 1–10. 8.  1914; Isaac B. Singer: A Day of Pleasure. New York 1969, 169; Wróbel, The First, 279–281. 44 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 129; Baron, The Russian Jew, 157; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 486; Marceli Handelsman (ed.): Polska w czasie wielkiej wojny, 1914–1918. Volume 2. Warszawa 1932, 6; ibid., Volume 4, Warszawa, 29–36, 139; 42 Salo

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In response, the German army distributed a flyer that promised the Jews liberation from the Russian yoke and equality under German rule. Yet the ­appeal failed. The Jews were afraid that the Russians would return. Furthermore, the German Jewish community represented by the KfdO was not satisfied with the flyer and demanded that the military authorities formulate their promises in more concrete terms. The Germans and the Austrians never issued such a manifesto, although they issued several flyers directed at the Jews. Starting in 1914, the KfdO started popularizing Yiddish as a mittelhochdeutscher Dialekt and a useful tool for German propaganda in the East. Yiddish was given a status it had not enjoyed before.45 After several months of fighting, the Russians had suffered substantial defeats and looked for a scapegoat. The press wrote about Jewish soldiers escaping to the enemy. Alleged Jewish spies were spotted everywhere. The Russian military command forbade writing letters in Yiddish. According to one popular explanation, the ‘German woman’ (the wife of tsar Nicholas II, Alexandra Feodorovna, who was of German descent) and the Jews were responsible for the war’s failure. Many Russians believed that the tsarina and the Jews were fighting against Russia and were using the Germans as a tool. The press inflamed public opinion against the Jews. The worse the Russian military performance, the more miserable the situation of the Jews became.46 The wave of anti-Semitism spread so widely that some intellectuals and politicians started defending the Jews. Premier Ivan Goremykin criticized the anti-Jewish attitude of the army because it weakened the Russian economy and discredited Russia abroad.47 Yet, the Russian government could not do too much. On 16 July 1914, a day before the announcement of general mobilization, Nicholas II signed a decree about the status of the army in wartime. A new structure of command was established. Army commanders became completely independent of the civilian authorities. The territories located west of the line St. Petersburg-Smolensk-Dnieper river were excluded from the “Opinia Żydowska”, in: Tygodnik dla Wszystkich, 1. 3. 1915; articles in: Izraelita, 11. 5. 1915; Kurier Warszawski, 6. 8. 1914. 45 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 124; Szajkowski, The German Appeal, 311–317; idem: The Struggle for Yiddish during World War I, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 9 (1964), 131–158, 131–155. 46 Michael F. Hamm: Liberalism and the Jewish Question. The Progressive Block, in: The Russian Review 2 (1972), 163–172, 163; Robert W. Coonrod: The Duma’s Attitude Toward War-Time Problems of Minority Groups, in: The American Slavic and East European Review 3 (1954), 29–46, 30; Israel Joshua Singer: Blood Harvest. London [no year given], 10; Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, 163; article in: Der Moment, 2–3. 1. 1917. 47 Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, 168; Frumkin/Aronson/Goldenweiser, Russian Jewry, 72.

184   Piotr J. Wróbel control of civilian administration and placed under the exclusive jurisdiction of army commanders. The civilian authorities lost control over the Pale of ­Settlement.48 The supreme commander became viceroy of an area larger than Germany and Austria combined. His subordinates, the local commanders, enjoyed full powers and the authority to make decisions in their regions. Overwhelmed by military matters and unprepared for their new roles, the commanders relied on administrative and police methods. Even the most minor protests were answered with the intervention of military courts. The army had been well known as a pillar of Russian anti-Semitism long before the war, and this attitude now made itself clearly felt in the form of Jewish persecution. Local commanders quickly initiated repressions against the Jews. As early as September 1914, the first cases of anti-Jewish violence took place, and a local commander ordered that all the Jews be removed immediately from the town of Puławy. The main headquarters also proved to be anti-Semitic: in January 1915, General Ivanov, the commander of the southwestern front, ordered that Jewish soldiers be removed from supply units. In March 1915, he ruled that all soldiers of Jewish background should be sent to the units serving on the frontlines.49 Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich claimed that, in the German- and Austrian-occupied territories, the enemy forces, encouraged by local Jews, were persecuting loyal Christian Russian subjects. To stop this in the future and to limit the alleged Jewish spying, the supreme commander ordered the removal of the Jews from the territories behind the front. Local commanders blackmailed Jewish communities and asked for protection money. The cities of western Russia became havens for Jewish escapees. Many Jews were put on trains, but most had to march on foot to the East.50 The evacuation intensified in January 1915 in central Poland and in Galicia. In February and March 1915, the Third Army, fighting on the southwest front against the Austrians, was instructed to drive the Jews out of communities located along the front and towards the enemy. In April 1915, the entire Jewish population of Courland, about 40 000 people, was deported. About 150 000 Jews were exiled from the Kaunas province in May 1915. Then the Jews were removed from the provinces of Grodno and Suwałki. Altogether, over half a million Jews were expelled from the western provinces between 1914 and 48 Graf,

Military Rule, 390. 392–398; Baron, The Russian Jew, 158; Weinryb, East European Jewry, 372. 50 Graf, Military Rule, 399; Vladimir Grossman: The Jewish Expulsion in Russia 1914, in: Joseph Leftwich (ed.): The Way We Think. A Collection of Essays from the Yiddish. Volume 2. New York/London 1969, 495–497. 49 Ibid.,

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1917. The displaced Jews joined masses of other refugees, amounting to about 2 076 000 people in European Russia in December 1915. The atmosphere worsened during the Russian army’s Great Retreat in 1915. The army leadership claimed that Jewish spies and wrongdoers were responsible for the military defeats. The retreating troops turned against the Jewish population in many areas. In August 1915, the governor of Warsaw warned that the army behavior might trigger a massive anti-Jewish pogrom at the end of the war.51 The anti-Semitic atrocities of the Russian army and deportations of the Jewish population were stopped by the successful offensive of the Germans and Austrians. The deportees, who found themselves in the territories taken by the Central Powers, were able return to their homes, which, however, frequently had been destroyed. The returnees had to find new jobs and rebuild their lives under new conditions. Their old world had disappeared.52 Those Jews who were not deported to Russia’s interior in 1914 and 1915 were crowded into the towns of central Poland, particularly in Warsaw. About 80 000 Jews from 140 localities lived in Warsaw under difficult conditions. The refugees tried to keep together and to preserve old community relations, but it proved to be impossible. Their savings were soon spent. The Christian population usually reacted negatively to the refugees and took over Jewish property abandoned during the evacuation. Robbing of the houses of displaced persons was frequent and to many people morally acceptable because they usually believed that the Jews would never return. In Warsaw, Polish committees pressed the authorities to remove homeless Jews from the city, preferably to Russia’s interior. Destitute Jews, argued the Poles, ate the food prepared for the local population and carried contagious diseases. They undertook preparations to expel the displaced Jews.53 The fall of 1914 brought a 51 Prusin,

Nationalizing a Borderland, 48–62; idem, The Lands Between, 49–59; idem, A Zone of Violence, 369–370; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 211; Joshua Sanborn: The Genesis of Russian Warlordism. Violence and Governance during the First World War and the Civil War, in: Contemporary European History 3 (2010), 195–213, 201; Graf, Military Rule, 399; Frumkin/Aronson/Goldenweiser, Russian Jewry, 58; Ansky, The Enemy, 3; Eric Lohr: The Russian Army and the Jews. Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I, in: The Russian Review 3 (2001), 404–19; Israel Cohen: Vilna. Philadelphia 1943, 359; American Jewish Committee (ed.): The Jews in the Eastern War Zone. New York 1916; Mark Levene: War, Jews, and the New Europe. The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf 1914–1919. Oxford, 1992, 49; Jonas Kreppel: Der Weltkrieg und die Judenfrage. Wien 1915, 11–14; Frumkin/Aronson/Goldenweiser, Russian Jewry, 58. 52 Graf, Military Rule, 400; Baron, The Russian Jew, 159; Weinryb, East European Jewry, 372. 53 Elbogen, Ein Jahrhundert, 425; Singer, In My Father’s Court, 232; idem, Blood Harvest, 11–58; Handelsman, Polska w czasie wielkiej wojny. Volume 2, 8; Grossman, The Jewish Expulsion, 497; Frumkin/Aronson/Goldenweiser, Russian Jewry, 62; articles in: Izraelita, 29. 3. 1915, 5. 7. 1915; Tygodnik dla Wszystkich. Opinia Żydowska, 24. 3. 1915.

186   Piotr J. Wróbel new wave of anti-Semitism. The press wrote about a Jewish invasion of Warsaw. Discussions about the future of Polish Jews started and some people ­argued that they should not receive citizen rights. A plan envisaged that the small towns abandoned by the Jews would be settled with Poles from abroad. Some newspapers called upon the people to continue the anti-Jewish economic boycott. The Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Germans and Austrians.54 After the outbreak of the war, the Poles organized self-help committees, which evolved into semi-self-government and citizens’ militias. During the 1915 evacuation, the Russians left public objects and the entire Warsaw economy in the hands of the local government. Yet, except for a small group of assimilated Jews, the self-government system did not include representatives of the Jewish population and treated it unfairly. The Jewish public was upset and came to the conclusion that the Poles considered the Jews unworthy to participate in citizens’ organizations.55 Increasingly, voices from abroad condemned the Poles and supported the Jews. Jewish activists in Russia declared that the future rights of the Poles should be curbed because it was clear that they followed the old chauvinistic traditions and would oppress national minorities. The progressive Russian intelligentsia also condemned the Polish attitude towards the Jews. Voices were heard from the center of the continent as well: George Brandes, a Danish writer of Jewish background, announced that the Poles did not deserve independence since they were going to oppress the Jews. An Italian writer, Luigi Luzatti, wrote in a similar tone. In Berlin, the KfdO continued its activities. The animosity between the Poles and the Jews grew, and attempts on the part of both Poles and Jews to reduce this animosity failed.56 In March 1915, the Russian authorities unexpectedly introduced fullfledged self-government in Congress Poland. The Jews were to participate in elections as part of an electoral group (kuria) for national minorities and could constitute only ten  per cent of self-government members (or 20  per Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 124–25; Stanisław Dzierzbicki: Pamiętnik z lat wojny 1915–1918, Warszawa 1983, 33; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 487; articles in: Tygodnik dla Wszystkich. Opinia Żydowska, 1. 3. 1915, 24. 4. 1915; Izraelita, 12. 11. 1914, 11. 5. 1915; Frumkin/Aronson/Goldenweiser, Russian Jewry, 59. 55 Handelsman, Polska w czasie wielkiej wojny. Volume 2, 11–47; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 138; articles in: Izraelita, 29. 3. 1915; Tygodnik dla Wszystkich. Opinia Żydowska, 1. 3. 1915, 25. 3. 1915. 56 Frumkin/Aronson/Goldenweiser, Russian Jewry, 59–62; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 487–490; Józef Wasercug: Doświadczenia wojny. Warszawa 1918, 25; Blumenfeld, Im Kampf, 46; articles in: Izraelita, 29. 3. 1915, 12. 3. 1915; Tygodnik dla Wszystkich. Opinia Żydowska, 14. 3. 1915, 25. 4. 1915. 54 Golczewski,

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cent, if they made up a town majority). A hectic electoral campaign started and many Jews hoped that this would be the end of the assimilationist domination in Warsaw.57 Important news for the Jews was also coming from Russia. Among other postulates, a Progressive Bloc formed in the Duma asked for the abolition of anti-Jewish restrictions. Pressed by the Entente, Russian public opinion, and practical matters linked to deportees’ problems, the Council of Ministers ­decided to take action regarding the Jewish issue. On 13  August  1915, the Jews were allowed to settle outside the Pale of Settlement, except for Moscow, Petrograd, and the territories administered by the ministries of war and the royal court.58

A stalemate: 1915–1917 In May 1915, the German and Austrian Armies pushed the Russians to the East. Only some Galician refugees returned home. The devastated province was unable to take care of the displaced people. Frequently, the Poles and Ukrainians were hostile towards the returnees. Jewish property was often looted and the refugees had nothing to return to. Those who decided to go back eked out a wretched existence. On the other side of the front the situation was similar. In 1916, Russians retook part of Galicia. This time they applied a milder policy to the Jews. Those Galitsianers who had been deported to Russia were allowed to return. About 35 000 people were repatriated. Yet they were not allowed to go back to their hometowns but were settled in different areas. Lacking employment in the new towns, they constituted a burden for the local population. After the 1917 February Revolution in Russia, their situation improved. The political and economic life revived in Russian-controlled territories. Eventually, the Germans retook eastern Galicia. In the last moment before their evacuation, the Russian units organized pogroms in Tarnopol and Kalush. Soon, an armed conflict between Poles and Ukrainians started. Both sides accused the Jewish population of siding with their enemies.59 By the end of 1918, there were still about 25 000 Jewish Galician refugees in Vienna. Often, the refugees did not want to return to their devastated homeMay 1915; Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 173; articles in: Tygodnik dla Wszystkich. Opinia Żydowska, 30. 4. 1915, 27. 5. 1915, 3. 6. 1915. 58 Frumkin/Aronson/Goldenweiser, Russian Jewry, 74. 59 Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 2, 416–19; Elbogen, Ein Jahrhundert, 424; Tartakower, Jewish Migratory Movement, 292; Grunwald, Vienna, 463; May, The Passing of the Great Race, 311. 57 Rozwaga,

188   Piotr J. Wróbel land. They became a serious burden to Vienna and the city authorities wanted to expel them. Yet it was against the law to deport Austrian citizens. In addition, Poles were waging a war against Soviet Russia, meaning that the refugees would have returned to a war zone. Finally, a Polish-Austrian agreement concerning the Galician Jews was signed in 1920. Several thousands of displaced persons, mostly from the poorest groups, came to Poland. They did not return to their native shtetls but stayed in big cities. Between the censuses of 1910 and 1921, the Jewish population of Galicia diminished by almost 20  per cent.60 On 6  August  1915, the Germans entered Warsaw. Many Jews welcomed them, as elsewhere in Poland, with joy and in the German language. The Jews hoped that their situation would improve and that the chaos that had prevailed before the Russian evacuation would end. They were gratified by General Erich Ludendorff ’s proclamation “To My Dear Jews” and other similar manifestos. The Jewish press in Warsaw wrote about a new, pleasant atmosphere in the city. The joy manifested by a majority of the Jews after the coming of the Germans and Austrians, along with concrete instances of Jewish support for the new occupiers, strengthened the already existing anti-Jewish bias among many Poles. They also watched with apprehension the activities of the KfdO. It depicted the Ostjuden as a part of the German cultural community, demanded for them national self-determination rights in Poland, and gathered information about Russian cruelties and the Polish co-responsibility.61 After the behavior of the Russian army, German rule at first seemed to promise a new, humane era for the Jews. Jewish organizations mushroomed. For several months, emigration to the neutral United States was allowed. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, one of the largest Jewish humanitarian assistance organizations, opened its offices in Warsaw. Jewish victims of the war received some help. The German press condemned the Russian anti-Jewish policies and confirmed that the Jews would be treated like all the other nationalities. The civilian authorities of the Government General of Warsaw established a Jewish section. Many Jews assumed that now they were recognized as a separate nation protected by the Central Powers. Some Jewish Jewish Migratory Movement, 292–293; Sperber, God’s Water Carriers, 146; McCagg, A History, 203–204. 61 Baron, The Russian Jew, 150; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 129–133; Singer, Blood Harvest, 73–76; Dzierzbicki, Pamiętnik, 63; Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 103; Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 165; Mayer, A German Jew, 351; Carlebach, A German Rabbi, 60; Gilman, Die Wiederentdeckung, 23–26; article in: Tygodnik dla Wszystkich. Opinia Żydowska, 1. 8. 1915. 60 Tartakower,

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politicians decided that they could be more assertive with the Poles. Yet, the optimism of Jews was soon over. The German administration became increasingly oppressive.62 The Germans entering Congress Poland knew about the Jewish pro-German sympathy but did not plan to exploit it. They were contemptuous of the Ostjuden and did not intend to use them in a Germanization action.63 Starting in late 1915, the Germans really felt the burden of the war and looked for a scapegoat. The excitement of August 1914 was forgotten; the old resentments reawakened and anti-Semitic organizations sprang up. In their search for individuals profiting from the war, the authorities investigated the black market and found some Jews there. On 11  October  1916, the Prussian Minister of War gave orders for a Judenstatistik. It was supposed to show how many Jews served in front units, behind the lines, in occupation forces, in military offi­ ces, or were exempted from service. The Jews became the ‘marked people.’ Starting in 1916, the German press began to publish openly anti-Semitic articles. In January 1917, a swastika appeared next to an anti-Jewish text on the cover of Hamburg’s Deutschvölkische Blätter.64 One of the most serious problems of those Ostjuden who lived in the territory occupied by the Germans was their relationship with the Poles and their institutions. In the summer of 1915, the leading politicians of German-occupied Warsaw formed a new organization, the Central Welfare Council (Rada Główna Opiekuńcza, RGO). It created 626 provincial councils in the territories of the Government General of Warsaw and became the basis for a new self-government. Yet, apart from a small minority, mostly assimilationist Jews, the RGO did not include representatives of the majority of Polish Jews. A ­similar thing happened in the Citizens’ Guard formed in Warsaw. The Jewish press complained that the Guard’s attitude sometimes bordered on antiSemitism. Jewish journalists complained that the activities of the Guard sent a message to the Polish inhabitants of Warsaw that the Jews were not protected A German Rabbi, 61; Baron, The Russian Jew, 161; Golczewski, Polnischjüdische Beziehungen, 146; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 493; Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 151–160; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 492, 498; Wolfgang von Kries: Deutsche Staatsverwaltung in Russisch-Polen, in: Preußische Jahrbücher 8 (1933), 130; Pinkas Varshe. Volume 1. Buenos Aires 1955, 157; Aleksander Kraushar: Warszawa podczas okupacji niemieckiej 1915–1918. Notatki naocznego świadka. Lwów 1921, 15; articles in: Der Moment, 3. 1. 1916–10. 1. 1916; Haynt, 4. 1. 1916–5. 1. 1916; Jüdische Rundschau 7. 1. 1916–21. 1. 1916. 63 A list of Jewish political parties in Poland. Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem (CZA), Z3/144; Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 115–117; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 128, 144–146. 64 Elbogen, Ein Jahrhundert, 420; Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, 142–151. 62 Carlebach,

190   Piotr J. Wróbel by law and that the time had come to ‘finish with them’ because the Poles were now in charge.65 In early 1916, the Germans agreed that city councils would be elected in the urban centers of the Government General. During the electoral campaign in Warsaw both Polish electoral committees used anti-Jewish slogans.66 The Jews formed a Jewish electoral association and signed an agreement with the Poles about a division of seats in the city council. A part of the Jewish public interpreted this as treason. An influential journalist, Noah Prilutski, formed a radical Folkskomitet, the Jewish Peoples’ Electoral Committee. Eventually, the city council consisted of 70 Poles and 20 Jews, including four supporters of Prilu­ tski, who defended Jewish interests in Warsaw in a strong and sometimes aggressive way.67 A conflict was growing, since the city council treated the Jewish population unfairly and some Polish deputies assumed an openly anti-Semitic attitude. The Zionists sent alarming messages to their colleagues in Germany and the United States, where some Jewish newspapers expressed a critical attitude ­towards Poles. This, in turn, antagonized the Poles, who did not understand why Russia was so popular in the United States while Poland was portrayed as a country of pogromchiks. It was not about anti-Semitism, concluded Feliks Młynarski, who would later become deputy president of the Polish Bank, but about a competition between nations, one of many such conflicts in Eastern Europe.68 In the third year of the war, the economic situation of the Polish Jewry became desperate. Poverty and hunger were widespread. About 70 000 Jews from the East were sent to work in the Reich. The American help stopped when the United States entered the war. In 1916, typhus appeared in Warsaw. The first 65 Die

Lage der Juden in Polen während des ersten Weltkriegs (no pagination), CZA, Z3/140; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 492; Handelsman, Polska w czasie wielkiej wojny. Volume 2, 112–131; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 159. 66 Ibid., 160; articles in: Kurier Warszawski, 8. 6. 1916–19. 6. 1916; Jüdische Rundschau, 30. 6. 1916. 67 Die Lage der Juden in Polen während des ersten Weltkriegs, (no pagination), CZA, Z3/140; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 496; Carlebach, A German Rabbi, 96; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 160; articles in: Jüdische Rundschau, 30. 6. 1916, 7. 7. 1916; Kurier Warszawski, 18. 6. 1916–24. 6. 1916, 1. 7. 1916–16. 7.  1916. 68 Organizacja Syjonistyczna w Królestwie Polskim w sprawie politycznych i narodowych uprawnień Żydów. Warszawa 1918, 10; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 146, 162–167; Jan Brzoza [Feliks Młynarski]: Żydzi amerykańscy a sprawa polska. Warszawa 1917, 3; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 498; Dzierzbicki, Pamiętnik, 134; Carlebach, A German Rabbi, 78, 93; Wasercug, Doświadczenia, 84.

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cases of typhus had been recorded in the German prisoner-of-war camps for Russian soldiers as early as December 1914. Between January and March 1915, Germans faced typhus epidemics in the camps and noticed that workers from the East also brought infected lice to the Reich. Its authorities realized that epidemics could cause higher casualties than military actions and started a war against the bacteria. In 1917 the mild epidemics of typhus in Warsaw developed into severe epidemics and, in early 1918, spread to the countryside and small towns of the region. The German occupation forces applied draconian colonial-style sanitary rules to the subjugated territories. Germans declared the Jewish districts in Eastern European towns and cities, particularly Warsaw and Łódź, to be the sources of typhus and started demonizing the Ostjuden. Sanitary police brutally deloused the Jews and moved them from their homes, ignoring Jewish religious rules and provoking resistance against ‘the German hygiene.’69At the same time, the political situation of the Polish Jewry also worsened. On 5 November 1916, the German and Austrian emperors proclaimed the creation of a Kingdom of Poland. The occupation authorities decided that the Jewish issue was the internal problem of the newly established Polish administration. Although the health problems had originally been assigned to the Polish authorities to solve, the Germans decided that the Jewish physicians were unsuited to epidemic control. The November proclamation divided the Jews. Some received the news with satisfaction. The Poles promised that the Jews would enjoy national minority rights but did not make any concrete declarations. The Jewish press in Poland and abroad wrote with apprehension about the future of Polish Jewry.70 In January 1917, the Germans allowed the Poles to organize a Provisional Council of State (Tymczasowa Rada Stanu, TRS) of the puppet Kingdom of Julian Weindling: Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe 1890–1945. Oxford 2000, 73–103. 70 Ibid., 103; Piotr J. Wróbel: Na równi pochyłej. Żydzi Białegostoku 1918–1939: Demografia, ekonomia, konflikt z Polakami, in: Przegląd Historyczny 2 (1988), 265–299, 293; Handelsman, Polska w czasie wielkiej wojny. Volume 2, 118; idem (ed.): Polska w czasie wielkiej wojny. Volume 3. Warszawa 1932, 91–118; Trude Maurer: Medizinalpolizei und Anti­ semitismus. Die deutsche Politik der Grenzsperre gegen Ostjuden im Ersten Weltkrieg, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 2 (1985), 205–230, 207; G. Weisman (ed.): Safer Praga. Tel Aviv 1947, 75; Pinkas Varshe. Volume 1, 157; Biography of Dr. Anna BraudeHeller. Yad Vashem Archives PH/03-2360; Carlebach, A German Rabbi, 79–87; Zosa Szajkowski: Jewish Relief in Eastern Europe 1914–1917, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 10 (1965), 24–56, 24–49; Die Lage der Juden in Polen während des ersten Weltkriegs (no pagination), CZA Z3/143; Regelung der Verhältnisse der Juden in Polen nach der Proklamation des Königreiches Polen 1916–1917, (no pagination), CZA Z3/156; articles in: ­Jüdische Rundschau, 17. 11. 1916; Das Neue Deutschland, 15. 11. 1916; Die jüdische Presse, 10. 11. 1916. 69 Paul

192   Piotr J. Wróbel Poland. Jewish political groups did not manage to send a common representative to the council. Eventually, among its 25 members, there was only one Jew, an assimilationist. The council started building a Polish administration and, of 350 newly hired officials, there were about 30 Jews, which reflected approximately the percentage of the Jewish population in the Kingdom. The Aguda (Agudat Yisra’el), a political movement of Orthodox Jewry established in 1912, and some other Jewish groups welcomed the TRS as the first steps towards Polish state. Yet, a large part of the Jewish public was ­disappointed again since most of the Jewish TRS appointees were assimilationists.71 In 1917, it became clear that the Germans would not do anything for the Ostjuden. When the TRS was reformed into the State Council in 1918, eight Jews, again mostly assimilationists, were among the 110 members of this new semi-parliament. Its governments usually ignored the Jewish problems. In 1918, large numbers of people, including Jews, started arriving from Russia. On 23 April 1918, the German authorities closed the borders of the Reich for the Jews. This Grenzsperre law included an explanation of this measure: the Jewish workers (it said), were lazy, dirty, and immoral; they used the pretense of employment in order that they might be allowed into Germany; and they might bring typhus from the East.72

The last year of the war: 1917–1918 The turning point of the war in Eastern Europe came in March 1917. After a revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II, the Russian army and government started falling apart. The Provisional Government was unable to stop this process, accelerated by the Bolshevik coup in late 1917. Some Russian regions, especially those close to the front, plunged into chaos. In 1916, about 36 per cent of the country’s male population of working age was enlisted. Between October 1917 and the spring of 1918, almost nine million soldiers melted away from the Russian army into civilian life.73 Most Bolshevik leaders 71 Archiwum

Akt Nowych (AAN), Tymczasowa Rada Stanu (TRS), file 11, 18; ibid., file 83, 35–46; Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 205; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 499. 72 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 176; Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 261; Gilman, Die Wieder­entdeckung, 25; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 168; AAN, TRS, files 3, 5, 6, 7, and 92; Schiper/Tartakower/Haftka, Żydzi w Polsce. Volume 1, 499; Zosa Szajkowski: East European Jewish Workers in Germany during WWI, in: Saul Liebermann/Arthur Hyman (eds.): Salo Wittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume. Volume 2. Jerusalem 1974, 889. 73 Roger Pethybridge: The Social Prelude to Stalinism. London 1974, 81.

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believed that the rigors of a civil war demanded cruelty. The majority of Jewish traders and artisans regarded the Bolsheviks with fear. Yet, while all the anti-Bolshevik forces identified the Jews with communism, the Reds considered anti-Semitism a token of counterrevolution. Thus, the Jewish masses eventually came to regard the Bolsheviks as saviors.74 Among those who left the army, there were numerous soldiers who moved to autonomous national non-Russian units. By the end of 1917, three Polish volunteer corps were formed. The largest of them reached almost 30 000 soldiers and controlled a large area in Belarus. The Poles believed that since they operated on the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth their activities were legitimate and would lead to reconstruction of the Polish state. The Bolsheviks saw the corps as belonging to the counterrevolutionary forces. The First Corps tried to defend Polish estates against the local peasants who understood the revolution as an opportunity to grab land and noble property. They attacked the estates and seized equipment, crops, and land. Not infrequently, they killed the landowners and their families. The Russian western provinces descended into chaos and violence. In some regions, it meant the end of the Polish-speaking population that had been living there for centuries. The peasants also turned against the Jews.75 The worst catastrophe happened in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Central Council (Rada), established after the fall of the tsarist regime, moved towards a program of independence, looked for allies against Russians and Poles, tried to repair Ukrainian-Jewish relations, and endorsed a plan for Jewish cultural autonomy. The Ukrainian Jews shifted their adherence from Russia to Ukraine. The Rada established a Secretariat for Nationality Affairs and, within it, a Vice-Secretariat for Jewish, Polish, and Russian Affairs. Later, on 24  January 1918, the Rada accepted the Law of National-Personal Autonomy and the director of the Vice-Secretariat became the minister of Jewish affairs.76 Yet it proved to be another disappointment for the Jews. The Bolsheviks answered the Ukrainian attempt at emancipation with a military intervention and took Kiev in January 1918. Similar processes started in Belarus, Latvia, 74–85; Robert Service (ed.): Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution. New York 1992, 13–16. 75 Wacław Lipiński: Walka zbrojna o niepodległość Polski w latach 1905–1918. Warszawa 1990, 269; Maurine Perrie: The Peasants, in: Robert Service (ed.): Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution, New York 1992, 12–34, 13–31; Zofia Kossak: Pożoga. Kraków 1948, 48; Rex Wade: The Russian Revolution 1917. Cambridge 2000, 127–138; Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz: Książka moich wspomnień. Kraków 1968. 162–172. 76 Henry Abramson: A Prayer for the Government. Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920. Cambridge 1999, 13–73. 74 Ibid.,

194   Piotr J. Wróbel and Estonia. An unprecedented violent anarchy appeared and the entire civilian population participated in fighting. Frequently, people had to fight on their own doorsteps to preserve remnants of their personal estate. The weakest and most vulnerable were attacked particularly frequently. Between ­November and December 1917, about 60 anti-Jewish pogroms took place in Ukraine. Masses of soldiers deserted from the Russian army and harassed the local population. The peasants joined these activities and started robbing estates, stores, and industrial facilities. In January 1918, the Rada proclaimed an Independent Ukrainian Republic, but the Jews, like all the other national ­minorities, voted against this decision. Ukrainians believed that the Jews were ungrateful: they opposed Ukraine’s independence even though Ukraine offered them autonomy. In addition, among the leaders of the invading Bolshevik army, there was a visible group of Jews. Ukrainians increasingly associated them with Bolshevism and attacked the civilian Jewish population. When the Bolsheviks took Kiev, many Ukrainians noticed that most of the Jewish activists did not escape with the Rada. A vicious circle developed: Ukrainians accused the Jews of being pro-communist and killed them. In response, the Jews tried to save their lives and joined the Bolsheviks. In 1919, about 75 per cent of the functionaries of the Kiev Cheka, the Emergency Commission for Combating Counterrevolution, were Jewish. In the summer of 1919, masses of Jews volunteered for the Red Army to avenge pogroms. In the eyes of the Ukrain­ ians, this was proof that the Jews wanted to seize power. Anti-Semitism became one of the most important political issues.77 The events of the First World War changed Eastern European peasants. Their traditional values, beliefs, and ways of life were destroyed. The ‘old thinking’ was unable to explain the recent events and to answer the new challenges. A cultural vacuum appeared since the old moral authorities, represented by tsars, the already crumbling Orthodox Church, traditional society, and folk culture had vanished. During the prolonged absence of any central authority, many young people switched to radical ideas, engaged in violent behavior, and The Social Prelude, 82–83; Bernadotte E. Schmitt/Harold C. Vedeler: The World in the Crucible, 1914–1919. New York 1984, 437–444; Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 54–87; Nicholas P. Vakar: Belorussia. The Making of Nation. Cambridge 1956, 96–97; Eugen von Engelhardt: Weissruthenien. Berlin 1943, 100–104; Круталевич В. А.: Рождение Белорусской Советской Республики: На пути к провозглашению Республики: Октябрь 1917–декабрь 1918 г. (V. A. Krutalevich: Rozhdenie Belorusskoi Sovetskoi Respubliki: Na puti k provozglasheniiu Respubliki: Oktiabr’ 1917–Dekabr’ 1918). Minsk 1975, 98–111; Orlando Figes: A People’s Tragedy. A History of the Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. New York 1996, 676; Петров Н.В./Скоркин К.В.: Кто руководил НКВД, 1934–1941. Справочник (N. V. Petrov/K. V. Skorkin: Kto rukovodil NKVD, 1934–1941. Spravochnik). Moskva 1999.

77 Pethybridge,

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turned against their old enemies. With this, an outburst of hatred, violence, and ­destruction was directed against the Jews.78 The escalation of violence stopped in early 1918, when the Germans and Austrians pushed the front eastwards, signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and occupied Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic provinces. The new stabilization was shaky. The establishment of a large Lithuanian state was beneficial for the Jews, argued Der Jude, an influential periodical edited by Martin Buber. The Jews would constitute a large group in Lithuania, continued Der Jude, and the Vilna, Grodno, and Białystok regions would not fall into the hands of intolerant Poles. Polish public opinion was seriously disappointed with the conditions of the treaty, especially with the transfer of the Chełm region from the former Congress Kingdom to Ukraine. In Galicia, a series of violent incidents took place. They were directed against the Jews, whom the Poles identified with Austria. The capture of Kiev by German and Ukrainian troops was ­followed by an anti-Jewish pogrom. Later, the economic exploitation of the former western Russia by the new authorities provoked a rebellion. Peasants attacked German and Austrian garrisons and robbed the Jews, landowners, Mennonites, and anyone richer than the destitute peasantry. The Germans ­accused the Jews of speculating and supporting the Bolsheviks. Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Bolsheviks built secret military structures, joined the growing chaotic conflict, and prepared themselves for the end of GermanAustrian control.79 In the winter of 1918, news about the revolution in Russia reached occupied Poland. Some Jews came to the conclusion that, since their brethren had been recognized as a separate nation in revolutionary Russia, it would be beneficial to the Jews if Poland and Ukraine were incorporated into Russia. Yet, rumors about chaos and violence were coming from the East, too. The Jewish population was confused and oscillated between hope and euphoria, disappointment and depression. Similar reactions were provoked by the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917. Initially, the Jews saw it as a solution to all Pawluczuk: Światopogląd jednostki w warunkach rozpadu społeczności tradycyjnej. Warszawa 1972, 94–124; idem: Wierszalin. Reportaż o końcu świata. Kraków 1974; Chris J. Chulos: Revolution and Grassroots Re-evaluation of Russian Orthodoxy. Parish Clergy and Peasants in Voronezh Province, 1905–1917, in: Judith Pallot (ed.): Transforming Peasants. Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930. New York 1998, 90– 106; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 398. 79 Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 87–112; Włodzimierz Mędrzecki: Niemiecka interwencja militarna na Ukrainie w 1918 roku. Warszawa 2000, 219–223; Lipiński, Walka zbrojna, 268; Joanna Gierowska-Kałłaur: Straż Kresowa a Zarząd Cywilny Ziem Wschodnich. Warszawa 1999, 7; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 168. 78 Włodzimierz

196   Piotr J. Wróbel their problems. Later, they realized that whatever the provisions of this declaration, it made little difference to the lives of the Ostjuden, at least by the end of the war.80

The fall of the German Empire: November–December 1918 The collapse of the German government in Eastern Europe in late 1918 opened a power vacuum there. The old authorities vanished; new governments had not yet established control, and the resulting chaos created an opportunity for violent forces to arise. They also turned against the Jews, whom the local population associated with the Germans. In Prussian Poland, the ‘Germans of Mosaic faith’ remained loyal to Germany until the first years of the interwar period or, frequently, even until 1933. In late 1918, Jews started escaping to Germany from the former Prussian Polish territories. Before 1914, Polish-Jewish relations had been bad there and, after 1918, when these lands were taken over by Poland, thousands of Jews moved to Germany. The German-Jewish press wrote about a ‘permanent pogrom’ in Poland.81 In German-occupied Warsaw, scuffles between Poles and Jews started in October 1918. Warsaw Jews started preparing to defend themselves and sent a memorandum to the Polish government (still supervised by the Germans), accusing the authorities of passivity and warning about the coming wave of anti-Semitism. On 11 November, when the German garrisons had already been evacuated or disarmed, a pogrom took place in Kielce. Four Jews were killed. In Warsaw, the Polish right-wing press attacked the Jews and linked them to Bolshevism. The National Democrats urged that the anti-Jewish boycott be continued. Most Poles were convinced that the Jews did not want to be citizens of Poland but would prefer to live in Russia, Lithuania, a Habsburg federation, or in Germany.82 Grade: My Mother’s Sabbath Days. New York 1986, 48; Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 216. 81 “Die Greuel der polnischen Hölle”, in: Jüdische Rundschau, 6. 10. 1920; Cecil Roth (ed.): Encyclopaedia Judaica. Volume 13. 1st edition. Jerusalem 1971, 948. 82 Henry Morgenthau: All in a Life-Time. London 1923, 403; Piotr J. Wróbel: Listopadowe dni, 1918. Warszawa 1988, 82; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 177; Isaac Lewin: A History of Polish Jewry during the Revival of Poland. The Political History of Polish Jewry, 1918–1919. New York 1990, 9–36; “Blutige Ausschreitungen gegen Juden in Warschau”, and “Judenhetze in Polen”, in: Jüdische Rundschau, 25. 10. 1918; “The Position of the Jews in Poland”, in: The Jewish Chronicle, 15. 11. 1918, 8; “Galician Jews’ Appeal”, in: The New York Times, 1. 3. 1919, 4; see also “Jüdische Chronik”, in: Neue Jüdische Monatshefte 2 (1918–1919), 48. 80 Chaim

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In western Galicia, Austrian power had collapsed by the end of October 1918. A Polish liquidation commission took over the government on 31 October, but it did not reach far outside Cracow. In about twenty places in western Galicia, peasants and townspeople attacked the Jews in the first half of ­November. Israel Cohen, sent to Poland by the World Zionist Organization in London, completed a list of 131 anti-Jewish incidents in Poland, mostly in western Galicia, between 1 November 1918 and mid-January 1919.83 In November 1918, the Germans evacuated Ukraine. On 14 November, the Rada regained power in Kiev, which became the scene of an anti-Jewish pogrom immediately after the Germans had left the city. The Ukrainian soldiers committed similar crimes in other localities.84 In eastern Galicia, the Ukrainians occupied the most important towns and military targets and proclaimed the establishment of a West Ukrainian People’s Republic on 1 November. Yet the predominantly Polish population of Lemberg rebelled against the Ukrainian authorities. The Jews declared neutrality but rumors had it that they supported the Ukrainians. On 22 November, the Polish army came from the West and took the city. A pogrom started almost instantly. Among the perpetrators were soldiers, officers, and people coming from various social groups. Most of them were not criminals and believed that the pogrom was revenge on the Jews of Lemberg for their pro-Ukrainian stance and economic exploitation of the Poles. The situation in Bukovina was similar to that in eastern Galicia; here many Jews were killed during the fighting between Romanians and Ukrainians.85 Altogether, in the course of November 1918, the Jews were attacked in over 100 localities in Polish-held areas.86 Romania declared war on Austria-Hungary in August 1916 and invaded Transylvania. The Central Powers answered with a counteroffensive, occupied most of Romania, and forced its government to sign a humiliating peace ­treaty A History of Polish Jewry, 51; Wróbel, Listopadowe dni, 50; Israel Cohen: A Report on the Pogroms in Poland. London 1919, 1–20; “Die Judenpogrome in Galizien”, in: Jüdische Rundschau, 19. 11. 1918. 84 Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 112. 85 Jerzy Tomaszewski: Lwów, 22 listopada 1918, in: Przegląd Historyczny 2 (1984), 279–285; Agnieszka Biedrzycka: Kalendarium Lwowa 1918–1939. Kraków 2012, 1–3; Eva Reder: Pogrom lwowski 1918. Inicjatorzy, bierni obserwatorzy, podżegacze, in: Agnieszka Kawalec/ Wacław Wierzbieniec/Leonid Zaszkilniak (eds.): Galicja 1772–1918. Problemy metodologiczne, stan i potrzeby badań. Volume 2. Rzeszów 2011, 38–55; Lewin, A History of Polish Jewry, 62–66; Morgenthau, All in a Life-Time, 410; “Pogrome in Polen und Galizien”, in: Neue Jüdische Monatshefte 3 (1918–1919), 51–56. 86 Paweł Korzec: Antisemitism in Poland as an Intellectual, Social, and Political Movement, in: Joshua A. Fishman (ed.): Studies on Polish Jewry, 1919–1939. New York 1974, 12–104; Celia S. Heller: On the Edge of Destruction. Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars. Detroit 1994, 50. 83 Lewin,

198   Piotr J. Wróbel in Bucharest in May 1918. Immediately after the Central Powers occupied, their governments received a request from a group of Romanian Jewish leaders to grant equal rights to the Jews. The initial Austro-German response was promising but in the end, the provisions for the Jews in the Treaty of Bucharest were vague and did not protect the Romanian Jews. The Romanian Jewish attempt to get help from the Central Powers gave anti-Semites new arguments. Many Romanian Jews fought bravely in the Romanian Army, but a number of them were shot as alleged spies.87 In November 1918, Romania re-entered the war. Immediately after the German evacuation of Bucharest, a mob looted its Jewish district. Romanian propaganda accused the Jews of collaboration with the Germans. The economic situation of Romanian Jewry, as of most people in war-devastated ­Romania, was critical. Yet the Jews were seen as a class of war profiteers. The Romanian authorities, afraid of a possible spread of the Bolshevik revolution into their territories, started an aggressive anti-communist campaign. Its ­anti-Semitic overtones strengthened the anti-Jewish attitude of the pop­ ulation.88

III. Border wars, the establishment of a new order in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Jews: 1919–1921 The German evacuation of Central and Eastern Europe started a series of wars between the successors of the defunct German, Russian, and Habsburg Empires. Frequently the Jews found themselves between two or more fighting sides and were victims of all of them. Robbing and killing the Jews became ‘by-products’ of the Central and Eastern European conflicts in 1918– 1921. In Ukraine, the number of pogroms was on the rise until the spring of 1919, when it decreased for a short while, and then rose again in May, when local Michael Gelber: The Problem of the Rumanian Jews at the Bucharest Peace Conference, 1918, in: Jewish Social Studies 3 (1950), 224–46; “Pogroms in Rumania”, in: The New York Times, 1. 2. 1919, 2. 88 H. Kadisch: Zur Lage der Juden im ehemaligen Donaureiche, in: Neue Jüdische Monatshefte 6 (1918–1919), 113–115; Radu Ioanid: The Holocaust in Romania. The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944. Chicago 2000, 11; Carl Iancu: Les juifs en Roumanie, 1919–1938. De l’émancipation a la marginalization. Paris 1996, 165–172; Gelber, The Problem, 246; “Bucharest now a city of gloom”, in: The New York Times, 14. 4. 1919; “Suffering of Jews after war related”, ibid., 15. 8. 1920, 3; articles in: Jüdische Rundschau, 24. 1. 1919, 52, 1. 7. 1919, 308. 87 Nathan

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warlords started killing the Jews.89 In the summer of 1919, the White Army of General Anton Denikin committed numerous crimes against the Jews. By December 1919, the Bolsheviks had reoccupied most of Ukraine. The Red Army, undisciplined like all the other forces, also killed Jews, albeit not as frequently as the others. However, the Bolsheviks also introduced elements of stabilization, broken only by the Polish-Ukrainian offensive of April/May 1920. The members of all of the various forces fighting in Ukraine were undisciplined volunteers who did not care about official policies and frequently did not listen to their respective governments. They thus had no compunctions about turning their aggression into pogroms against the Jews as well. These governments were unable to supply their soldiers properly and to establish an effective central authority in Ukraine. It is difficult to establish how many Jews were killed there between 1917 and 1921. The estimates vary from 30 000 to 200 000 persons. In addition, tens of thousands were wounded, many women were raped, and numerous people suffered from nervous shock. About 250 000 perished from starvation and disease, approximately 600 000 Jews lost their possessions, which were stolen or destroyed by attackers, and between 50 000 and 60 000 children were orphaned. This was a phenomenon that bordered on genocide, considering that, in 1918, the entire Jewish population of Ukraine was about 1.6 million.90 “Jews were killed on the roads, in the fields, on trains; sometimes whole families perished, and there was no one left to report on their fate.”91 Wartime conditions similar to those in Ukraine led to pogroms in other regions affected by the Polish-Soviet war of 1919–1920. Several anti-Jewish pogroms took place during the Polish-Lithuanian-Soviet conflict over Belarus and southeastern Lithuania.92 Pogroms also took place in the regions that Kenez, Pogroms in White Ideology, in: John D. Klier/Shlomo Lambroza (ed.): Pogroms. Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge 2004, 293–313; Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia. Volume 3, 37–39. 90 Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia. Volume 3, 34; Sanborn, The Genesis of Russian Warlordism, 208–209; Elias Heifetz: The Slaughter of the Jews in Ukraine in 1919. New York 1921, 175–182; Oleg Budnitskii: Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites 1917–1920. Philadelphia 2012, 217; Mark Levene: Frontiers of Genocide. Jews in the Eastern War Zones, 1914–1920 and 1941, in: Panikos Panayi (ed.): Minorities in Wartime. National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars. Oxford 1993, 83–117; Gerard Israel: The Jews of Russia. New York 1975, 122–137; Walter Dushnyck (ed.): Ukrainians and Jews. A Symposium. New York 1966, 151–154. 91 Budnitskii, Russian Jews, 217. 92 Jerzy Tomaszewski: Pinsk. Saturday 5 April 1919, in: Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry 1 (1986), 227–251; Józef Lewandowski: History as Myth. Pinsk, April 1919, in: Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry 2 (1987), 5–36; Lewin, A History of Polish Jewry, 143–149; Morgenthau, 89 Peter

200   Piotr J. Wróbel were under the undisputed control of the Polish authorities. In 1919, antiJewish riots took place in Kalisz, Dąbrowa, Busk, Lublin, Częstochowa, Chełm, Cracow, Warsaw, and in a number of places in western Galicia.93 In Latvia, Jews also found themselves between various fighting armies. In late 1918, Latvia became a theater of a war between the German Freikorps, the Latvian national forces, the Russian White Armies, and the Bolsheviks, who took Riga in January 1919. In the Latvian capital, several thousand Jewish youths joined the Bolsheviks. The majority of the Latvian Jews, however, suffered from the Red Terror and Bolshevik-imposed restrictions. In May 1919, many Jews welcomed the Landwehr, the Baltic German civil guard, and the German Freikorps that ejected the Bolsheviks from Riga. During the next several days, the Landwehr killed thousands of real or alleged Bolsheviks and plundered the city. In July 1919, Latvian national troops supported by the Entente recovered Riga and the rest of the country. Some parts of the city were completely destroyed and most of about 80 000 Jews who lived in Latvia in 1920 were left in poverty.94 During the First World War, most Hungarian territories were beyond the reach of the fighting armies, and the Hungarian Jews remained unaffected, except for economic problems. Yet, the rule of the Revolutionary Governing Council, dominated by Béla Kun and a group of communists, provoked a bloody counterrevolution. The counterrevolutionary National Army, led by Admiral Miklós Horthy, and Czech and Romanian forces took Budapest in All in a Life-Time, 411–412; “The Pinsk Pogrom”, in: The Jewish Chronicle, 2. 8. 1919, 2; Cohen, Vilna, 358–385; Hirsz Abramowicz: Profiles of a Lost World. Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II. Detroit 1999, 179–218; “Die litauische Regierung und die litauische Judenfrage”, in: Jüdische Rundschau, 1. 11. 1918, 351; “Die Lage der ­Juden in Litauen und Ostgalizien”, in: ibid., 17. 12. 1920, 615; Cyrus Adler/Aaron M. Margalith: With Firmness and Right. American Diplomatic Action Affecting Jews, 1840–1945. New York 1946, 156; Leonidas Donskis: Antisemitismus in Litauen. Tradition und heutige Erfahrung, in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 6 (1997), 21–23, 23; Ezra Mendelsohn: The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars. Bloomington 1983, 213–217. 93 Lewin, A History of Polish Jewry, 135–153, 183–185; Jerzy Tomaszewski: Spring 1919 in Rzeszów. Pogrom or Revolution, in: Buza Janos (ed.): Challenges of Economic History. Budapest 1996, 183–191; Morgenthau, All in a Life-Time, 413; “Das Leben der Juden in Galizien”, in: Jüdische Rundschau, 27. 5. 1919, 298. 94 Alfred Bilmanis: A History of Latvia. Westport Connecticut 1970, 278–325. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 244–247; “Die Lage der Juden in Lettland”, in: Jüdische Rundschau, 16. 11. 1919, 697; Mendel Bobe: Four Hundred Years of the Jews in Latvia, in: idem (ed.): The Jews in Latvia. Tel Aviv 1971, 21–77; Leo Dribins: Die ‘Judenfrage’ in der lettischen Presse in den Jahren 1880–1940, in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 5 (1996), 22–34, 27–32.

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August 1919. Kun escaped to Russia. Hungarian counterrevolutionary tribunals and Romanian military courts started a ‘White Terror.’95 Already in 1918, many Hungarians noticed a considerable number of Jews active in the pro-republican groups. In the chaos of late 1918, a number of Jews were victims of theft and rioting. Men of Jewish background were prominent in the leadership of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Even though the Jewish communists made up a minuscule portion of the Hungarian Jewry, in the eyes of anti-communists, their movement was first and foremost Jewish. As a consequence, the Jews constituted a large proportion of the victims of the counterrevolution. Altogether, about 3,000 Jews were murdered in about 50 localities. A group of new patriotic organizations encouraged pogroms and offered the Hungarian right a new ideology, the foundation of the Horthy regime. It emphasized the necessity of eliminating the Jews from Hungarian economic life and accused them of corrupting the Hungarian Christian society.96 After the First World War, Romania incorporated Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. As a result, the number of Romanian Jews trebled. Though no major pogroms happened, a tense atmosphere of anti-Jewish hatred was detectable in the newly acquired territories, which were populated by about half a million Jews. Especially in the former Austro-Hungarian territories, its Jews considered the ‘transfer’ to Romania a catastrophe.97 Under Western pressure, Kontler: A History of Hungary. New York 2002, 328–400; Jörg K. Hoensch: A History of Modern Hungary 1867–1994. London 1996, 85–106; Béla Bodó: Paramilitary Violence in Hungary after the First World War, in: East European Quarterly 2 (2004), 129– 172; Vera Ranki: The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion. Jews and Nationalism in Hungary. New York 1999, 90; Bennett Kovrig: Communism in Hungary. From Kun to Kadar. Stanford 1979, 19–67. 96 Cecil Roth (ed.): Encyclopedia Judaica. Volume 8. 1st edition. Jerusalem 1971, 1095; Ezra Mendelsohn: Trianon Hungary, Jews and Politics, in: Herbert A. Strauss (ed.): Hostages of Modernization. Studies on Modern Antisemitism, 1817–1933/39. Volume 3/2: Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia. Berlin/New York 1993, 893–915; Randolph L. Braham: Right Radicalism in the Immediate Post-War Period, in: ibid., 915–993; Nathaniel Katzburg: Hungary and the Jews. Policy and Legislation, 1920–1943. Ramat-Gan 1981, 34–59; Albert Kaas/Fedor de Lazarovics: Bolshevism in Hungary. London 1931, 313; Kovrig, Communism in Hungary, 44; Tamás Ungvári: The ‘Jewish Question’ in Europe. Boulder 2000, 92–96; Ranki, The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion, 87–90; Bodó, Paramilitary Violence, 137; Kovács, Neo-Antisemitism, 149–153. 97 Kadisch, Zur Lage der Juden; Carol Iancu, Les juifs en Roumanie, 165–172; “Bucharest now a city of gloom”, in: The New York Times, 14. 4. 1919, 9; “Suffering of Jews after war related”, in: ibid., 15. 8. 1920, 3; Romania’s acts in Bessarabia, in: ibid., 29. 8. 1919, 5; “Hungarian Jews Fear of Rumanian Invasion”, in: The Jewish Chronicle, 16. 5. 1919, 10; Ansky, The Enemy, 264–295; Charles Upson Clark: Bessarabia, Russia and Roumania on the Black Sea. New York 1927, 123–193; Carl Uhlig: Die Bessarabische Frage. Breslau 1926, 54–63; Keith Hitchins: Rumania. 1866–1947. Oxford 1994, 271–273. 95 László

202   Piotr J. Wróbel the Romanian government promised to grant the Jews full citizenship in the Treaty of St Germain on 9 December 1919 between Romania and the Allies. The promise was fulfilled in the 1923 constitution. Yet the situation did not change on a local level, where the Jews were considered the most dangerous ‘internal enemies’ and an ‘ethnic threat.’98 The transition from war to peace was relatively smooth in the newly established Czechoslovakia. With a strong tradition of liberal politics, it became the only East Central European state where democracy survived throughout the entire interwar period. Yet, the experiences of the Czechoslovak Jews in the first interwar years were not idyllic. Anti-Semitism was quite popular among the German-speaking Bohemians. Czech nationalists saw Jews as an element of Germanization, loyal Habsburg subjects, and capitalist exploiters. In several Czech towns and cities, mobs looted Jewish stores or attacked Jewish refugees from other countries. On 4  December  1918, a mob destroyed almost all the Jewish shops in Holešov in Moravia and killed two people. Anti-Jewish incidents in Czechoslovakia were far less numerous and dangerous than in the neighboring countries. Nevertheless, they continued until 1921.99 The situation was worse in Slovakia, where the local Jewry was regarded as a part of the Hungarian establishment and where anti-Semitism expanded noticeably since the nineteenth century. The collapse of Habsburg rule in Slovakia was accompanied by social turmoil. There was looting and personal assault in many places and rich Slovaks, Hungarians, and Jews were the victims.100   98 Mircea

Djuvara: La guerre Roumaine, 1916–1918. Nancy 1919, 192–196, 323–325; Carol Iancu: Jews in Romania, 1866–1919. From Exclusion to Emancipation. New York 1996, 176–181; “Anti-Jewish Agitation in Rumania”, in: The Jewish Chronicle, 3. 1. 1919, 10; “M. Take Jonescu on Rumanian Jewish Problem”, in: ibid., 4. 4. 1919, 8; Karady, Ge­ walterfahrung und Utopie, 111–112.   99 Inna Mirovska: Den Peti Svetel. Svedectvi poslednim protizidivskem pogromu na Morave. Praha 1998; Gershon Ha-Kohen: Tschechoslowakischer Brief, in: Neue Jüdische Monatshefte 23–24 (1918–1919), 514; Wilma A. Iggers: The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia. A Historical Reader. Detroit 1992, 326; Hillel J. Kieval: Languages and Community. The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. Berkeley 2000, 6–7; Rudolf M. Wlaschek: Juden in Böhmen. Beiträge zur Geschichte des europäischen Judentums im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. München 1997, 75–80. 100 Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 146–152; Felix Weltsch: Bohemian Jewry in Transition, in: The Menorah Journal 9 (1923), 332–337; Wlaschek, Juden in Böhmen, 75–80; Nancy Merriwether Wingfield: Minority Politics in a Multinational State. The German Social Democrats in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938. New York 1989, 11; “Masaryk Protects Jews. Cancels Bohemian Order for Their Deportation”, in: The New York Times, 22. 12. 1918, 5; Yeshayahu A. Jelinek: In Search of Identity. Slovakian Jewry and Nationalism, 1918–38, in: Yehuda Don/Victor Karady (eds.): A Social and Economic History of Central European Jewry. New Brunswick 1990, 207–227; Paul Diamant: Slowaken und

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IV. Conclusions The First World War was a turning point in the modern history of the Jews. Some scholars believe that this military conflict was the start of a ‘Thirty Years’ War’ that lasted until 1945. A similar continuity can be seen in the history of the Jews during and between both World Wars. In Central and Eastern Europe, devastating military activities did not end in 1918 but continued into the early 1920s. The Ostjuden had been divided before 1914, but the First World War deepened these divisions. Emotional divisions, such as different levels of involvement in the patriotic enthusiasm of 1914 or various attitudes towards the emerging nations in 1918, were followed by geopolitical partitions of the old Jewish communities. The territorial unity of the Ostjuden was destroyed. Half of them found themselves in Soviet Russia, where they were exposed to an accelerated acculturation. The other half was transferred from multinational empires to the newly established small national states, populated mostly by nationalistically inclined people. This fragmentation made the Jews more vulnerable. They faced a number of fundamental questions. Were they a nation and should they act as one? Or were they only a religious minority? What was their attitude towards the post-1917 revolutionary changes? The old world had disappeared. What should be their position in the new one? Should they stay in their old territories or should they emigrate? What was their national language? None of these questions were answered in the same way by all or even most Ostjuden.101 During the First World War, in several regions of Central and Eastern Eur­ ope the Jews fought for their rights and emancipation. In some cases, they were initially relatively successful, which shocked the Christian population accustomed to the underprivileged status of the Jews. Central and Eastern European Jewish communities often counted on German help, which negatively influenced Jewish-Christian relations in regions hostile to the Germans. In Austria and Prussia, most Jews stayed loyal to the imperial authorities until Juden, in: Neue Jüdische Monatshefte 6 (1918–1919), 122–125; “Die Prager Exzesse”, in: Jüdische Rundschau, 23. 11. 1920, 621; “Die Lage der Juden in der Slowakei.” Part 1, in: ibid., 31. 10. 1919, 545; Part 2, in: ibid., 21. 11. 1919, 596; Part 3, in: ibid., 3. 12. 1919, 642–643. 101 World Socialist Union of Jewish Workers – Po‘alei-Zion (ed.): Die Juden im Kriege. Denkschrift des Jüdischen Sozialistischen Arbeiterverbandes Poale-Zion an das internatio­ nale sozialistische Bureau. Den Haag 1915, 7; Jakob Klatzkin: Probleme des modernen Judentums. Berlin 1918, 155; Elbogen, Ein Jahrhundert, 417; Weinryb, East European Jewry, 345, 373; Bolkosky, The Distorted Image, 42.

204   Piotr J. Wróbel the end of the war, which put them on the losing side. There were Jewish politicians who hoped that a new Russia would be the best homeland for them and expressed it openly. They claimed that the newly rebuilt Polish state was unstable and would not last long, and they hoped that external forces would save Jewish communities from belonging to Poland. In several cities contested by Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, and Belorussians, Jewish leaders and newspapers expressed these views in a way that antagonized the Poles.102 Often, Western Jewish politicians and organizations tried to help the Ostjuden. Sometimes, these activities made the Jewish situation even worse. In 1918 and 1919, Western media reported frequently on the anti-Jewish atrocities in Central and Eastern Europe. Time and again, the coverage was surprisingly inaccurate. Many people took these phenomena as a confirmation of the existence of a Jewish worldwide conspiracy that planned to seize power in Central and Eastern Europe. This belief was strengthened by a concept of ‘JudeoCommunism.’ In the early 1920s, the words ‘Bolshevik’ and ‘Jew’ were synonymous to most Hungarians. Similar opinions existed in most Central and Eastern European countries, even though many leftist activists were antiSemites as well.103 In the Polish-Russian borderlands, where the Jews constituted a large part of the urban population as well as the educated, politically active population, Bolshevism was identified with the Jews.104 To many people, the appearance of the Jews in government positions previously reserved for the gentiles ­explained why the entire world had turned upside-down after 1917. Orlando Figes quotes a Russian sociologist who claimed in 1921 that: “Hatred of the Jews is one of the most prominent features of Russian life today.”105 None of the Central and Eastern European Great Powers intended to protect the Jews. On the contrary: both Russia and Germany used them as scapegoats to explain military failures. The post-1918 states had no intention of protecting the Jews, either. Usually, Jewish representatives were kept out of the new governments, which were first supervised by the Germans and then ­became increasingly independent. The Jewish masses were marginalized and excluded from the new societies. The post-war states were supposed to be

102 Karady,

Gewalterfahrung und Utopie, 54; Wróbel, Na równi pochyłej, 280–281. J. Wróbel: Failed Integration. Jews and the Beginning of the Communist Movement in Poland, in: Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry 24 (2012), 187–222. 104 Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 151; Leonard Schapiro: The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, in: Slavic and East European Review 40 (1961), 164; Petrov/Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD. 105 Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 676. 103 Piotr

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­ ational and not citizen states. The Jewish protests against unfair treatment n only strengthened anti-Semitism. Sometimes the Jews tried to support particular sides of the 1914–1921 conflicts, but if it helped their situation, it did so only for a limited time. Most frequently, the Jews found themselves caught between Poles and Germans, Poles and Ukrainians, Germans and Czechs, Hungarians and Slovaks, Romanians and Germans, the Reds and the Whites, and the Bolsheviks and everybody else. Several times between 1914 and 1921, the Ostjuden had great hopes, but all of them failed and left the Jews more disappointed, depressed, and divided than ever. Before 1914, state governments had never organized anti-Jewish vio­lence. The First World War and the postwar period brought an unprecedented brutalization of the civilian population. In some regions of Eastern Europe, the state institutions and the rule of law disappeared. Many became accustomed to violence and terror and learned how to use them in their own interest. Not infrequently, yesterday’s victims became the next day’s victimizers as soon as an opportunity appeared, and they struck twice as hard as their ­oppressors. Usually, the targets of the most frequent and brutal attacks were those who were the most vulnerable and defenseless – in many cases, the Jews. After 1918, many regions in Central and Eastern Europe slid into anarchy and war did not miraculously turn into peace with the signing of the armistice on 11 November. The civil wars were especially dangerous for the Jews. After 1921, the escalation of violence stopped. But people who had participated in past violent events no longer hesitated to turn to violence later on. Most of the anti-Jewish crimes of 1918–1921 remained unpunished and some even went unnoticed by outsiders. Those who killed or robbed the Jews between 1914 and 1921 knew how to do so twenty years later. Their experiences taught them that punishment or condemnation were unlikely to await them. They believed that they were patriots defending their nations and recovering the wealth that Jews had taken from them through ‘parasitic’ activities.106

106 John

D. Klier: The Pogrom Tradition in Eastern Europe, in: Tore Björg/Rob Witte (eds.): Racist Violence in Europe. New York 1993, 128; Piotr J. Wróbel: The Seeds of Violence. The Brutalization of an East European Region, 1917–1921, in: Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), 125–149; idem.: The Kaddish Years. Anti-Jewish Violence in East Central Europe, 1918–1921, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 4 (2005), 211– 236; “Poland. A Pogrom Wave: Widespread Massacres”, in: The Jewish Chronicle, 22. 11. 1918, 8; “Jews Massacred. Terrible Pogroms in Poland and Galicia: Many Hundreds Killed in Lemberg”, in: ibid., 6. 12. 1918, 8; Norman Davies: Great Britain and the Polish Jews, 1918–1920, in: Journal of Contemporary History 2 (1973), 119–142.

206   Piotr J. Wróbel Yet the most dangerous consequences of the First World War and the postwar civil war period were economic and social changes. Central and Eastern Europe, densely populated by Jews, became an important war theater. The economic foundations of the shtetl were irreversibly damaged. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported. They lost their property and sources of income. The deportations destroyed old social structures and transformed old communities into crowds of disoriented and destitute refugees. In the new environments, there was no space for them, no proper housing, and no jobs. The displaced did not understand the new dynamics, and the local population had no understanding for the Jewish refugees, who became a burden reluctantly supported by the state. Politicians planned to get rid of the ‘unnecessary’ Jews and the idea of putting them in a camp, a Lager, arose. Many refugees tried to return home, but neighbors had robbed their property and reacted violently when the Jewish refugees tried to recover it. Frequently, the refugees were able to return to their provinces but had to settle not in their native towns and villages but in other places. The war also transformed the world of those Jews who were able to stay in their hometowns. The pre-war economy vanished; sources of income and raw materials disappeared, and along with them, markets and the existing social order. The monetary and banking systems were paralyzed. Military requisitions took over the remnants of artisan and industrial production. Thousands of small Jewish artisans and traders were converted into a mass of unemployed workers exploited by the occupiers or state authorities. A large part of the labor force was conscripted into the army. Many young men died in action. After 1918, the new states supported the economic activities of members of the ruling nations. Frequently they were traders and craftsmen, the traditional competitors of the Jews. Hunger appeared in the larger cities, such as Warsaw or Łódź, accompanied by contagious diseases. Many people began to associate typhus with destitute Jews. Some believed that sick and hungry Jews should be isolated and controlled because their mere existence posed a threat to the rest of the society. The Entente also developed procedures against lice, mobilized hygiene institutes for strategic tasks, and organized mobile field laboratories: But two elements were distinctive on the German side – the German interest in the use of poison gases for delousing and mounting racial prejudice against the Polish Jews. Typhus worsened as the military situation deteriorated, and medical animosity against the eastern Jews – derided as treacherous vermin – intensified. […]. Two factors stand out as distinctive in the German response [to epidemics] – the development of poison gas and the ideology of Lebensraum. The extermination of rats, lice, moths, bedbugs, and beetles became caught up in the spiraling web of chemical and gas warfare.107 107 Weindling,

Epidemics, 91.

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The events in Central and Eastern Europe between 1914 and 1921 created an unprecedented potential for violence that had no good outlet during the short interwar period. Various kinds of violent incidents took place in the Polish eastern borderlands and in the western regions of the Soviet Union throughout the interwar period. Until 1924, it was relatively easy to cross the PolishSoviet border, and armed groups did so relatively frequently. The Polish military terrorized the local population but did not manage to stop banditry or suppress Belorussian guerillas. In eastern Galicia, many Ukrainians considered Polish rule a hostile occupation; they boycotted censuses and parliamentary elections, and committed acts of sabotage. The underground nationalist Ukrainian Military Organization was involved in numerous terrorist actions against Polish administration, landowners, and Ukrainian ‘collaborators.’ The atmosphere in eastern Galicia continued to be tense into the 1930s. The Polish governments did not have a consistent policy towards national minorities during the interwar period.108 On the Soviet side of the border the situation was equally explosive. Between January 1918 and July 1920, about seven million people died in Russia from hunger and disease. In 1919, the first concentration camps appeared in the territories controlled by the Bolsheviks, who believed that the rigors of the civil war demanded cruelty and triggered deliberately ruthless fanaticism. Also banditry was a serious problem in the Soviet borderlands in the 1920s. Later, the First Five-Year Plan, collectivization, organized hunger in Ukraine, and the Great Purge killed millions of people, deepened the antagonism between cities and the countryside, cemented the bitter hatred towards communism, and built up the potential for violence.109 It is likely that if a war had started in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s or 1940s without German participation, large-scale anti-Jewish violence would have taken place there anyway. There probably would have been no 108 Władysław

Broniewski: Pamiętniki, in: Polityka, 6. 2. 1965; Pawluczuk, Światopogląd, 127; Piotr J. Wróbel: Kształtowanie się białoruskiej świadomości narodowej a Polska. Warszawa 1990, 68; articles in: Gazeta Warszawska, 29. 1. 1921, 11. 8. 1921, 29. 11. 1921, 15. 7. 1922, 20. 10. 1922; Polska Zbrojna, 13. 7. 1922, 23. 9. 1922; Ilustrowany Kurier ­Codzienny, 24. 10. 1920, 12. 11. 1920, 18. 11. 1920, 9. 9. 1921, 28. 12. 1923, 30. 4. 1924, 23. 5. 1924, 24. 5. 1924, 6. 8. 1924, 1. 9. 1924, 13. 11. 1924, 15. 11. 1924, 1. 1. 1925, 3. 4.  1925, 11. 8. 1925. 109 Pethybridge, The Social Prelude, 83–100; Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Legacy of the Civil War, in: Diane Koenker/William G. Rosenberg/Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.): Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War. Bloomington 1989, 385–397; Mikołaj Iwanow: Pierwszy naród ukarany. Polacy w Związku Radzieckim, 1921–1939. Warszawa 1991; Sheila Fitzpatrick: Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. New York 1994, 234.

208   Piotr J. Wróbel ‘Final Solution’ and the survival rate would have been much higher than after the Holocaust; however, some other part of the local Jewry would have been murdered instead. Paula Olmer, a Jewish survivor from the town of Hrymailiv (Grzymałów) in the Tarnopil (Tarnopol) oblast said when she recalled the beginning of the Second World War and the July 1941 pogrom in her native place: “I guess the Ukrainians in our town were waiting for something like this.”110 The same situation prevailed in many other parts of Central and ­Eastern Europe.

110 An

interview given by Paula Olmert to the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (Interview no. 5264), quoted in: John-Paul Himka: What Happened in Hrymailiv in July 1941? Investigations and Memories of Violence in Small-Town Galicia. A presentation given during an International Conference at the Center for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto (24. 3. 2012– 26. 3. 2012) on ‘Jewish Life and Death in the Soviet Union during World War II’, 11.

Robert Gerwarth

Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated ­States of Central Europe* When Lieutenant Theodor Lohse returned to Berlin from the Western Front in November 1918 he encountered an alienating world of revolutionary upheaval: “They had destroyed the army, they had taken over the State […] the Kaiser had been betrayed, the Republic was a Jewish conspiracy.” Forced to earn a meagre living as a private tutor in the household of a wealthy Jewish businessman, Lohse soon despaired over his loss of professional prestige, the perceived national humiliation caused by military collapse, and the hostility with which his own family greeted his return from the battlefields of the Great War: They couldn’t forgive Theodor for having failed – he who had twice been mentioned in despatches – to die a hero’s death as a lieutenant. A dead son would have been the pride of the family. A demobilised lieutenant, a victim of the revolution, was a burden to his womenfolk […]. He could have told his sisters that he was not responsible for his own misfortune; that he cursed the revolution and was gnawed by hatred for the socialists and the Jews; that he bore each day like a yoke across his bowed neck and felt himself trapped in his ­epoch as in some sunless prison.1

The only escape route from the “sunless prison” of an invalidated existence presented itself in the form of paramilitary activity – an activity that offered structure and purpose when it was most needed. Lohse joined one of the many ultra-right-wing paramilitary organizations that mushroomed in the defeated states of Central Europe immediately after the war. Here he encountered like-minded ex-officers from the former imperial armies of Germany, Austria and Hungary, murdered alleged traitors within the organization’s ranks and battled with Communists on the streets of Berlin and rebellious Polish land labourers on Germany’s new Eastern border. The fictional life of Theodor Lohse, eternalized in Joseph Roth’s remarkably perceptive novel The Spider’s Web (1923), encapsulates the subject of this * This contribution was first published in: Robert Gerwarth/John Horne (eds.): War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War. Oxford 2012, 52–71. The editors are deeply indebted to Oxford University Press and to Robert Gerwarth for the permission to reprint this brilliant study. 1 Joseph Roth: The Spider’s Web. New York 2003, 4–6.

210   Robert Gerwarth chapter: the emergence of a violent counter-revolutionary subculture in the defeated states of Central Europe, where the transition from war to ‘peace’ was fraught with a whole range of seemingly unresolvable problems, notably the demobilization of some sixteen million defeated soldiers who had fought (and survived) the Great War; the collapse of traditional political authority; and the territorial amputation (or complete disintegration) of the former Central Euro­ pean Empires. The perceived threat posed by these developments triggered the emergence of a transnational right-wing milieu of revisionist militants in Central Europe, paramilitaries determined to violently suppress those internal and external enemies held responsible for defeat, territorial disintegration and revolutionary upheaval. In this respect, this chapter critically engages with George Mosse’s ‘brutalization thesis’ by suggesting that it was not the war itself, but the postwar experiences of defeat, revolution, and territorial amputation that left a range of devastating legacies in Central European history.2 Some qualifications to this general argument are necessary. What Benjamin Ziemann called the “transfiguration” of wartime experiences into peacetime society could take different forms: from conscious abstinence from the world of politics to pacifist activism or a violent refusal to accept the new realities in postwar Central Europe’s ‘cultures of defeat’.3 While the vast majority of the German, Austrian, and Hungarian soldiers who survived the Great War returned to ‘normal’ civilian lives in November 1918, hundreds of thousands of ex-servicemen did not. In Germany alone, estimates range from 250 000 to 400 000 men organized in roughly 120 Freikorps, whereas the combined membership in Austrian and Hungarian paramilitary organizations of the right amounted to less than half.4 Despite these quantitative differences, paramilitary subcultures in Ger­ many, Austria, and Hungary shared important characteristics. In all three countries, the leading figures involved in setting up and running paramilitary organizations of the right were junior ex-officers (mostly lieutenants and captains, occasionally colonels) from middle- or upper-class backgrounds such as George Mosse: Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford 1990. On the ‘transfigurations’ in postwar Germany, see Benjamin Ziemann: War Experiences in Rural Germany 1914–1923. Oxford/New York 2007, 214–218. On the ‘cultures of defeat’ concept, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch: The ‘Culture of Defeat’. On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery. New York 2003; John Horne: Defeat and Memory since the French Revolution. Some Reflections, in: Jenny Macleod (ed.): Defeat and Memory. Cultural Histories of Military Defeat since 1815. London 2008, 11–29. 4 Bernhard Sauer: Freikorps und Antisemitismus in der Frühzeit der Weimarer Republik, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 1 (2008); Robert Gerwarth: The Central European Counter-Revolution. Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War, in: Past and Present 200 (2008), 175–209. 2 3

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Hanns Albin Rauter, Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, Eduard Baar von Baarenfels, Beppo Römer, Gerhard Roßbach, Franz von Epp, István Hejjas, Pál Prónay, and Gyula Osztenburg, who had been educated and trained in the military academies of the late Habsburg and Hohenzollern Empires.5 In Hungary, it was not only Gyula Gömbös’s powerful veterans’ organization MOVE (Hungarian National Defence Union) or the Union of Awakening Hungarians, but also the much more sizeable Hungarian National Army that was dominated by former combat officers. Of the 6,568 volunteers who followed Horthy’s initial recruitment call of 5  June  1919 for the formation of the counterrevolutionary National Army, almost 3,000 were former army and cavalry officers and an additional 800 men were officers from the semi-military border guards, the Gendarmerie. Many of the activists in all three countries came from rural backgrounds and notably from the border regions where notions of embattled ethnicity were much more real than they were in larger cities such as Budapest, Vienna or Berlin. In the case of Hungary, the large influx of refugees from Transylvania further contributed to the radicalization of the atmosphere in Budapest, a capital city already militarized by the experiences of revolution and temporary occupation by Romanian forces.6 Paramilitary violence in the defeated states of Central Europe was generally most marked along the new German frontier with Poland and the Baltic states as well as in the ethnically diverse ‘shatter zones’ of the Habsburg Empire where irregular Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Slovenian militias, ‘nationalized’ through imperial implosion and newly imposed border changes, fought against both internal and external enemies for territorial control, material gain, or ideological fulfilment.7 In these contested borderlands, military conflict continued unabated, often taking a more unconventional (and sometimes even more brutal) form than during the Great War because the activists were no longer ‘restrained’ by traditional military discipline. It is this wave of postwar paramilitary violence in post-imperial Germany, Austria and Hungary, its origins, manifestations, and legacies, which this 5

See also the very detailed autobiographical account of this education in Ernst Heydendorff, “Kriegsschule 1912–1914”, Heydendorff papers, Österreichisches Staatsarchiv Wien (ÖStA), B 844/74. 6 Béla Kelemen: Adatok a szegedi ellenforradalom és a szegedi kormány történetéhez. Szeged 1923, 495–496. For Austria, see Walter Wiltschegg: Die Heimwehr. Eine unwiderstehliche Volksbewegung? München 1985, 274–280. For Germany, see Gerwarth, The Central European Counterrevolution. See also Heydendorff, “Kriegsschule 1912–1914”. 7 On the shatter zones, see Donald Bloxham: The Final Solution. A Genocide. Oxford 2009, 84–85; Alexander V. Prusin: The Lands Between. Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992. Oxford 2010, 73–211.

212   Robert Gerwarth chapter seeks to explore.8 More specifically, the purpose of this essay is to analyse the ways in which German, Austrian and Hungarian veterans and members of the so-called ‘war youth generation’ made the painful transition from war to peace, and how their search for a postwar project to justify their wartime sacrifices found its expression in the attempted ‘cleansing of the nation’ of social elements perceived to be obstacles to a ‘national rebirth’. It will do so by investigating nationalist perceptions of defeat and revolution and by explaining how these perceptions and memories served as a source of mobilization in the emergence of right-wing paramilitary groups in the defeated states of Central Europe.

Brutalization through defeat, revolution, and ­territorial amputation In explaining their refusal to demobilize and their determination to continue their soldierly existence after November 1918, paramilitary activists across Central Europe frequently invoked the horrors of returning from the front in 1918 to an entirely hostile world of upheaval, a perception triggered by both the temporary collapse of military hierarchies and public order.9 The prominent Carinthian Heimwehr activist, Hanns Albin Rauter, who returned to Graz at the end of the war, emphasized his first contact with the ‘red mob’ as an ‘eye-opener’: “When I finally arrived in Graz, I found that the Communists had taken the streets.” Confronted by a group of Communist 8

The subject has received remarkably little attention since the 1970s and transnational or comparative studies are altogether absent. For ‘classic’ studies, see Hagen Schulze: Freikorps und Republik 1918–1920. Boppard 1969; Robert G. L. Waite: Vanguard of Nazism. The Free Corps Movement in Postwar. Germany 1918–1923. Cambridge 1952; Gerhard Botz: Gewalt in der Politik. Attentate, Zusammenstöße, Putschversuche, Unruhen in Österreich 1918 bis 1938. 2nd edition. München 1983. 9 On the deterioration of the relationship between home front and war front in the later stages of the war, see Richard G. Plaschka et al. (eds.): Innere Front. Militärassistenz, Widerstand und Umsturz in der Donaumonarchie 1918. 2 volumes. München 1974; Mark Cornwall: The Undermining of Austria-Hungary. The Battle for Hearts and Minds. New York 2000; Manfred Rauchensteiner: Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn und der Erste Weltkrieg. Second edition. Graz 1994. That the revolution was brought about by men who had not served at the front was a common accusation made by right-wing ­veterans. See, e. g., Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, “Aufzeichnungen”, 21, Starhemberg Papers, Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv (OÖLA). On Germany, see ­Richard Bessel: Germany after the First World War. Oxford 1993; on Munich in particular, see Adam R. Seipp: The Ordeal of Peace. Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany, 1917–1921. Farnham 2009, 91–130.

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soldiers, “I pulled my gun and I was arrested. This was how the Heimat welcomed me.” Being arrested by soldiers of lower rank reinforced Rauter’s perception of having returned to a ‘world turned upside down’, a revolutionary world in which hitherto unquestionable norms and values, social hierarchies, institutions, and authorities had suddenly become obsolete.10 Experiences in Budapest and Munich were not dissimilar. Upon arrival in Hungary from the front in the late autumn of 1918, the Hussar officer Miklós Kozma was one of many war veterans ‘welcomed’ by disorderly crowds shouting abuse at the returning troops as well as by ordinary soldiers physically attacking their officers. In Kozma’s account, revolutionary activists always appeared as an effeminate “dirty crowd”, a crowd “that has not washed in weeks and has not changed their clothes in months; the smell of clothes and shoes rotting on their bodies is unbearable.”11 Ex-officers in neighbouring Bavaria echoed such impressions. The future Austrian Vice-Chancellor and Heimwehr activist, Eduard Baar von Baarenfels, for example, reported back to Austria from revolutionary Munich how he had witnessed jewellery shops being plundered, and officers being disarmed and insulted. The revolution, Baarenfels insisted, had “washed up the worst scum from the deepest depths of hell” – people who were now freely roaming the streets of Central European capital cities.12 What Baarenfels, Kozma, and many others described was a nightmare that had haunted Europe’s conservative establishment since the French Revolution, a nightmare that – ever since the Bolshevik takeover in Russia in 1917 – appeared to have become a reality: the triumph of a faceless revolutionary crowd over the forces of law and order. The image they invoked was partly influenced by a vulgarized understanding of Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules (1895), whose ideas were widely discussed in right-wing circles across Europe from the turn of the century. Le Bon’s juxtaposition of the ‘barbarian’ masses and the ‘civilized’ individual was also reflected in the ways in which many Austrian and Hungarian ex-officers described the humiliating experiences of being stripped of their military decorations by agitated crowds or lower-

10 Rauter

Papers, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) Amsterdam, Doc I 1380, H, 2. On the ‘world turned upside down’, see Martin H. Geyer: Verkehrte Welt. Revolution, Inflation und Moderne. München, 1914–1924. Göttingen 1998. 11 Miklós Kozma: Makensens Ungarische Husaren. Tagebuch eines Frontoffiziers, 1914– 1918. Berlin/Wien 1933, 459. 12 Eduard Baar von Baarenfels, “Erinnerungen”, 1947, ÖStA, MS B/120:1, 10–13. See also Anita Korp: Der Aufstieg vom Soldaten zum Vizekanzler im Dienste der Heimwehr. Eduard Baar von Baarenfels. MA thesis, Wien 1998.

214   Robert Gerwarth ranked soldiers.13 They refused to accept that military defeat had caused the collapse of the Central European Empires and regarded the revolutions in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest as an intolerable insult to their honour as ‘militarily undefeated’ officers. As the war veteran and infamous Freikorps leader, Manfred von Killinger, expressed in a letter to his family: “I have made a promise to myself, Father. Without armed struggle, I have handed over my torpedo boat to the enemies and watched my flag go down. I have sworn to take revenge against those who are responsible for this.”14 Confronted with public unrest and personal insults, the future Heimwehr leader, Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg came to a similar conclusion when he expressed his “burning desire to return to my soldier’s existence as soon as possible, to stand up for the humiliated Fatherland.” Only then, “the shame of a gloomy present” could be forgotten.15 Equally important for the remobilization of German, Austrian and Hungarian veterans was the experience of territorial disintegration. While the German cessation of Alsace-Lorraine in the Treaty of Versailles did not come as a surprise to most contemporary observers, German politicians of left and right vehemently rejected Polish territorial ambitions in West Prussia, Upper Silesia, and the Posen region. In the Treaty of St Germain, the German-Austrian rump state was forced to cede South Tyrol to Italy, Southern Styria to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Feldsberg and Böhmzell to Czechoslovakia whilst also being denied the Anschluss with the German Reich – a ruling rightfully interpreted by politicians of the moderate left and right alike as a flagrant violation of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. Hungary was hit even harder by the peace provisions: it lost two-thirds of its pre-war territory and one-third of its population according to the Treaty of Trianon.16 Yet as long as the Paris Peace Conference had not made a final decision on the redrawing of European borders, veterans across Central Europe tried to create new territorial realities through (para-) military action, ‘realities’ which they believed the peacemakers in Paris could not ignore. Since the armistice between the Allied Powers and Germany of 11 November 1918 did not speci“Aufzeichnungen”, 16–17. See also Emil Fey: Schwertbrüder des Deutschen Ordens. Wien 1937, 218–220. 14 Manfred von Killinger: Der Klabautermann. Eine Lebensgeschichte. 3rd edition. München 1936, 263. 15 Starhemberg, “Aufzeichnungen”, 20–22. 16 For a general account of the effects of St Germain and Trianon, see Robert Evans: The Successor States, in: Robert Gerwarth (ed.): Twisted Paths. Europe 1914–1945. Oxford 2007, 210–236. 13 Starhemberg,

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fy the exact extent of territorial losses, German, Polish, and Baltic paramilitaries were quick to undertake violent attempts to redraw the borders in their favour. In December 1918, the First Polish Uprising triggered a wave of often vicious fighting between Polish insurgents and German Freikorps in Upper Silesia and West Prussia, while up to 100 000 German volunteers fought in the Baltic region in 1919 to secure the ‘German cities’ of Riga and Vilnius.17 Simultaneously, from November 1918 onwards, Austrian volunteers were militarily engaged with Yugoslav troops in Carinthia.18 As ‘victories in defeat’, the violent clashes between Yugoslav troops and Austrian volunteers in Carinthia and the victory of German Freikorps over Polish insurgents in the 1921 ‘Battle of Annaberg’ soon played a crucial role in paramilitary memory culture, because they testified to the activists’ unbroken spirit of defiance against both external enemies and the ‘weak’ central governments. ‘Carinthia’ and ‘Anna­ berg’ became synonymous with the paramilitaries’ alleged military superiority over the ‘Slav enemy’. A popular poem of 2 May 1919, the day of the ‘liberation’ of the Carinthian village of Völkermarkt, celebrated the Carinthian “freedom from the Slav yoke” by emphasizing that “the freedom fighters triumphed over treason […]. You, Slav, should remember the important lesson that ­Carinthian fists are hard as iron”.19 The interconnected experiences of defeat, revolution, and territorial disintegration also contributed to the mobilization and radicalization of the socalled ‘war youth generation’, those teenage boys who had been too young to serve in the war and who were to gain their first combat experiences on the postwar battlefields of the Burgenland, Styria, Carinthia, or Upper Silesia. The unofficial chronicler of that younger generation of paramilitaries became Ernst von Salomon, a former officer cadet during the Great War who participated in the 1922 assassination of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau before publishing a widely read autobiographical trilogy on his postwar experiences: The Outlaws, The City, and The Cadets. Whilst walking through the streets of Berlin in his officer cadet uniform in November 1918, the 16Sauer: Vom “Mythos eines ewigen Soldatentums”. Der Feldzug deutscher Soldaten im Baltikum im Jahre 1919, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 10 (1995), 869–902; Tim Wilson: Frontiers of Violence. Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918–1922. Oxford 2010. 18 On Carinthia, see Darstellungen aus den Nachkriegskämpfen deutscher Truppen und Freikorps, volumes 7 and 8. Berlin, 1941/1942, and the autobiographical account by Jaromir Diakow, ÖStA, Diakow Papers, B 727. See also Walter Blasi: Erlebte österreichische Geschichte am Beispiel des Jaromir Diakow. MA thesis. Wien 1995. 19 On Carinthia and a reprint of the poem, see the anonymous text “Der Sturm auf Völkermarkt am 2. Mai 1919”, Kraus Papers, ÖStA, Kriegsarchiv (KA), B 694, 31. 17 Bernhard

216   Robert Gerwarth year-old von Salomon had an encounter he would subsequently describe as his ‘political awakening’: I felt how I turned pale, I pulled myself together and said to myself ‘stand to attention’ […]. I sensed chaos and turmoil. A huge flag was carried in front of a long procession of people, and the flag was red […]. I stood still and watched. Following the flag, tired crowds surged in a disorderly fashion. Women marched in front. They proceeded in their wide skirts, the grey skin of their sharp bony faces was wrinkled. […] Covered in dark, ragged cloths they were singing a song which was out of tune with the hesitant heaviness of their march […]. Here they were: the champions of the revolution. So this was the dark crowd from which the glowing flame [of revolution] was to emerge, the crowd set out to realise the dream of blood and barricades. It was impossible to capitulate to them. I sneered at their claims which knew no pride, no confidence in victory […]. I stood straight and watched and thought ‘cowards’ and ‘scum’ and ‘mob’ and I […] watched these hollow, dissolute figures; they are just like rats, I thought, grey and with red-framed eyes, carrying the dust of the streets on their backs.20

For many young officer cadets such as Ernst von Salomon, who had grown up on tales of heroic bloodshed but had missed out on their first-hand experience of the ‘storms of steel’, the militias offered a welcome opportunity to live their fantasies of a romanticized warrior existence. As Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg correctly observed, many members of the war youth generation tried to compensate for their lack of combat experience through “rough militarist behaviour” which was “nurtured as a virtue in large parts of the post-war youth” and which deeply affected the general tone and atmosphere within paramilitary organizations after 1918.21 What motivated these younger paramilitaries, who under different circumstances are likely to have lived ‘normal’ peaceful existences, was both a violent rejection of an unexpected defeat and revolutionary unrest, and a strong desire to prove themselves in battle. Austrian and Hungarian officer cadets, in particular, who had been mentally and physically prepared for a heroic death on the battlefield, felt a deep sense of betrayal when the war ended abruptly in 1918. Once they had joined paramilitary units dominated by former shocktroop officers, they were keen to prove their worthiness within a community von Salomon: Die Geächteten. Berlin 1930, 10–11 (English translation: The Outlaws. London 1931). 21 Starhemberg, “Aufzeichnungen”, 26. On the German war youth generation, see Michael Wildt: Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes. Hamburg 2000, and Andrew Donson: Youth in the Fatherless Land. War Pedagogy, ­Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918. Cambridge 2010. For Austria and Hungary, no comparable studies on the war youth generation exist to date. Older studies suggest, however, that the percentage of teenage volunteers may have been as high as 50 per cent. On Hungary, see Kelemen, Adatok, 495–496. On Austria, see Walter Wiltschegg: Die Heimwehr. Eine unwiderstehliche Volksbewegung? München 1985, 274–280. 20 Ernst

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of often highly decorated warriors and ‘war heroes’, a community that offered them the opportunity to act upon their adolescent power fantasies and to live up to the idealized image of militarized masculinity promoted in wartime propaganda.22 However, romanticized fantasies about warriordom were not the only reasons for joining a paramilitary formation. In addition, and this applied primarily to Hungary and the embattled German borderlands, large numbers of landless labourers were attracted by the prospect of theft, plunder, rape, extortion, or simply by the opportunity to settle scores with neighbours of different ethnicity without fear of state reprisals. In addition, local paramilitary groups were often formed out of fears of disbanded and impoverished soldiers rather than with a clearly defined political aim.23 Together, the veterans and members of the war youth generation formed explosive subcultures of ultra-militant masculinity in which violence was not merely perceived as a politically necessary act of self-defence in order to suppress the communist revolts of Central Europe, but also as a positive value in itself, as a morally correct expression of youthful virility that distinguished the activists from the ‘indifferent’ majority of bourgeois society unwilling to rise in the face of revolution and defeat. In marked contrast to the upheaval that surrounded them, the militias offered clearly defined hierarchies and a familiar sense of belonging and purpose. The paramilitary groups were fortresses of soldierly camaraderie and ‘order’ in what the activists perceived as a hostile world of democratic egalitarianism and communist internationalism. It was this spirit of defiance, coupled with the desire to be part of a postwar project that would imbue meaning to an otherwise pointless experience of mass death during the Great War, devalued by defeat, that held these groups together. They perceived themselves to be the nucleus of a ‘new society’ of warriors, representing both the eternal values of the nation and new authoritarian concepts for a state in which that nation could thrive.24 The paramilitaries’ inclination to use extreme violence against their enemies was further exacerbated by fear of world revolution and stories (some true, some exaggerated or imagined) about communist atrocities both inside and outside their respective national communities. Although the actual number of casualties inflicted during the ‘Red Terror’ of 1919 was relatively 22 Gerwarth,

Central European Counter-Revolution, 175–196. Bodó: Militia Violence and State Power in Hungary, 1919–1922, in: Hungarian Studies Review 2 (2006), 121–167, 131–132; Ziemann, War Experiences, 227–239. 24 Jürgen Reulecke: “Ich möchte einer werden so wie die …” Männerbünde im 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main 2001, 89–101. 23 Béla

218   Robert Gerwarth low, accounts of mass murder, rape, corpses’ mutilations, and prisoners’ castrations by revolutionary ‘savages’ in Russia and Central Europe featured very prominently in conservative newspapers and paramilitaries’ autobiographies where they served the purpose of legitimizing the use of violence against dehumanized internal and external enemies accused of pursuing a policy of total annihilation.25

Manifestations of violence The actual levels of physical violence differed remarkably in the three defeated states of Central Europe. The situation in post-revolutionary Hungary and Germany was far more extreme than in Austria. In the revolutionary ‘hotspots’ of Munich, Berlin and the industrial areas along the Ruhr and Saale rivers, the violent clashes between left and right left thousands of people dead. In Hungary alone, between 1,500 and 4,000 people died in 1919–1920. By contrast, the vast majority of the 859 political murders in interwar Austria occurred in the early 1930s, not in the immediate postwar period.26 In order to explain the relative salience of the Austrian right in the years immediately after 1918, two factors need to be taken into consideration.27 First, the apparently limited activism of the Austrian right (limited when compared to the situation in Hungary and further East), owed much to the existence of a strong militarized left, most notably the Volkswehr and the socialist party guard, the Schutzbund.28 In Tyrol, for example, 12 000 Heimwehr men, 25 See, e. g., “Revolution überall”, in: Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 12. 11. 1918, 2; “Bestialische Er­

mordung von Geiseln” by Bavarian communists, in: Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 3. 5. 1919, 2. exact number of deaths inflicted by postwar paramilitary violence is still disputed. On Germany and the borderlands, see Hagen Schultze: Freikorps und Republik, 1918– 1920. Boppard 1968; Sauer, Vom “Mythos eines ewigen Soldatentums”; Wilson, Frontiers of Violence. For Hungary, a member of the 1918 Károlyi government, Oszkár Jászi, estimated that the counterrevolution claimed the lives of at least 4,000 victims, but this figure has recently been revised downwards to 1,500. See Oszkár Jaszi: Revolution and CounterRevolution in Hungary. London 1924, 120; Bodó, Paramilitary Violence, 167. For Austria, Gerhard Botz has established the relatively low figure of 859 victims of political violence during the first Austrian Republic (12. 11. 1918–11. 2. 1934), but this figure does not account for the murders committed by the numerous Austrian volunteers who fought in German Freikorps. Botz, Gewalt, 237. 27 On the salience of the Austrian revolution, see John W. Boyer: Silent War and Bitter Peace. The Revolution of 1918 in Austria, in: Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2003), 1–56. 28 On this, with particular reference to the Tyrol, see Richard Schober: Die paramilitärischen Verbände in Tirol 1918–1927, in: Thomas Albrich et al. (eds.): Tirol und der Anschluß. Voraussetzungen, Entwicklungen, Rahmenbedingungen 1918–1938. Innsbruck 1988, 113–141. 26 The

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two-thirds of them armed, faced roughly 7,500 Schutzbund members in 1922.29 Both sides kept each other in check and their self-limitation was, in many ways, a strategy for survival since victory in a potential civil war was anything but a foregone conclusion.30 Hence, throughout the 1920s, both sides largely confined themselves to symbolically charged gestures of military strength such as the largely non-violent Heimwehr and Schutzbund marches through ‘enemy territory’.31 Secondly, and this is frequently ignored in historical analyses of interwar Austria, many of the most violent activists of the right spent much of the peri­ od 1918–1921 outside Austria. Austrian members of the infamous Freikorps Oberland, for example, including the future Heimwehr leader, Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, helped to crush the Munich Councils’ Republic in 1919. During the third Polish Uprising of 1921, to name another example, student volunteers from Innsbruck University joined the Upper Silesian Selbstschutz in its struggle against Polish insurgents. Both examples testify to the transnational dynamic of counter-revolutionary and ethnic violence in postwar Central Eur­ ope, a dynamic that facilitated concrete cooperation and exchanges between German, Finnish, Russian, Hungarian, Austrian, and Italian opponents of the ‘Bolshevization’ and ‘Balkanization’ of Europe.32 Local newspapers in Austria frequently offered detailed reports about violent developments in Italy, Finland, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, and Bavaria which profoundly affected the way in which counterrevolutionary activists in Austria perceived their own situation.33 The revolutions in Munich and Budapest in particular featured prominently in the minds of Austrian paramilitary activists (if only as a scenario they desperately wanted to prevent repeating itself in Austria) and many of the atrocities attributed to the revolutionary left were a direct reflection of Lösch: Die Geschichte der Tiroler Heimatwehr von ihren Anfängen bis zum Korneuburger Eid, 1920–1930. PhD thesis, Innsbruck 1986, 162. 30 Gerhard Botz: Handlungsspielräume der Sozialdemokratie wahrend der ‘Österreichischen Revolution’, in: Rudolf Altmüller et al. (eds.): Festschrift Mélanges Felix Kreissler. Wien 1985, 16. 31 See Alfred Krauss: “Revolution 1918?”, Krauss papers, ÖStA, KA, B 60, 5e, 1. 32 Michael Gehler: Studentischer Wehrverband im Grenzlandkampf. Exemplarische Studie zum ‘Sturmzug Tirol’ in Oberschlesien 1921, Oberschlesisches Jahrbuch 5 (1989), 33–63; idem: Studenten und Politik. Der Kampf um die Vorherrschaft an der Universität Innsbruck 1918–1938. Innsbruck 1990; Sabine Falch: Zwischen Heimatwehr und Nationalsozialismus. Der ‘Bund Oberland’ in Tirol, in: Geschichte und Region 6 (1997), 51–86. Finally, see Hans Steinacher: Oberschlesien. Berlin 1927. 33 See, e. g., the following articles in the Innsbrucker Nachrichten: “Der Krieg im Frieden”, 25. 5. 1919; “Gegen den Bolschewismus”, 17. 11. 1918, “Die Sowjetherrschaft in Ungarn”, 26. 3. 1919, “Die Verhältnisse in Bayern”, 10. 4. 1919; and “Bayern als Räterepublik”, 8. 4. 1919. 29 Verena

220   Robert Gerwarth the horror stories about the ‘Red Terror’ that raged in Austria’s border-states. In addition, some Heimwehr activists felt inspired by the example of Hungarian or German militias who fought in the borderlands or against communist insurgents, defying the pacifist majority in their countries. “Full of envy”, Starhemberg recalled, “we fantasised about participating in the struggles of our German comrades who overthrew the Councils’ Republic after Eisner’s assassination, or the actions of the Hungarian volunteer army which restored Hungary’s honour under Horthy’s leadership.”34 In Hungary, where the Red Terror of 1919 claimed the lives of between 400 and 500 victims, violent fantasies of retribution were based on much more tangible first-hand experiences. The atrocities committed by the so-called ‘Lenin Boys’ under the leadership of József Cserny in particular spurred the imagination of nationalist activists. After the fall of the Béla Kun regime, the time had come to ‘avenge’ these crimes. The Hungarian ex-officer, Miklós Kozma, wrote in early August 1919: We shall see to it […] that the flame of nationalism leaps high […]. We shall also punish. Those who for months have committed heinous crimes must receive their punishment. It is predictable […] that the compromisers and those with weak stomachs will moan and groan when we line up a few red rogues and terrorists against the wall. The false slogans of humanism and other ‘isms’ have helped to drive the country into ruin before. This second time they will wail in vain.35

Kozma’s reasoning was taken to its extreme in the Hungarian Plain and, even more dramatically, in the Baltic Freikorps campaign where previously disciplined troops transformed into marauding mercenaries reminiscent of those of the Thirty Years’ War, modern warlords who plundered and murdered their way across the countryside, transforming it into a landscape of destruction.36 Still in 1946–1947, whilst waiting for his execution in a Polish prison, the former Camp Commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß, recalled the Baltic campaign as a manifestation of previously unseen violence: “Aufzeichnungen”, 23. On the transnational context, see Gerwarth, Central European Counter-Revolution, 175–209. See also Bruno Thoss: Der Ludendorff-Kreis. München als Zentrum der mitteleuropäischen Gegenrevolution zwischen Revolution und Hitler-Putsch. München 1978; Lajos Kerekes: Die ‘weiße’ Allianz: Bayerisch-österreichisch-ungarische Projekte gegen die Regierung Renner im Jahre 1920, in: Österreichische Osthefte 5 (1965), 353–366; Ludger Rape: Die österreichischen Heimwehren und die bayerische Rechte 1920–1923. Wien 1977; Horst G. Nusser: Konservative Wehrverbände in Bayern, Preussen und Österreich. München 1973. 35 Miklós Kozma: Az összeomlás 1918–1919. Budapest 1935, 380. On Kozma’s war experience, see Kozma, Tagebuch eines Frontoffiziers. 36 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius: War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge 2000, 233–246.

34 Starhemberg,

Fighting the Red Beast   221 The fighting in the Baltics was of a wildness and grimness which I neither experienced during the Great War nor in any of the subsequent struggles of the Freikorps. There was no proper front, the enemy was everywhere. Whenever there was a clash, it turned into pure slaughter to the point of complete annihilation […]. Countless times I saw the horrifying images of burned out huts and charred or rotten bodies of women and children […]. Back then I believed that there could be no intensification of this destructive madness!37

Less intense, but new in terms of quality, was the simultaneous internalization of conflict, the identification and persecution of ‘community aliens’ who had to be rooted out before a national rebirth could occur. In Germany prominent republican politicians such as Walther Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger were assassinated by right-wing extremists. In Hungary, prominent intellectual critics of the Hungarian White Terror such as the journalist Béla Bacsó and the editor of the socialist democratic daily Népszava, Béla Somogyi were abducted and murdered by members of the infamous Prónay battalion.38 A further 75 000 individuals were imprisoned, and 100 000 went into exile, many of them to Soviet Russia where Stalin eventually killed those who had escaped Horthy’s death squads. Given that many leaders of the Hungarian revolution, including Béla Kun, managed to escape before they could be arrested, others had to pay for their ‘treason’.39 Socialists, Jews, and trade unionists, when caught, were dragged into the barracks and beaten unconscious. “On these occasions”, the Hungarian militia leader and temporary head of Horthy’s bodyguard, Pál Prónay, recalled, “I ordered an additional fifty strokes with the rod for these fanatic human animals, whose heads were drunk with the twisted ideology of Marx.”40 For Prónay and many others, the de-humanized (‘human animal’) and de-nationalized (Bolshevik) enemy could be tortured and killed without remorse, because these acts were legitimized and necessitated by the holiness of the cause: the salvation of the nation threatened by a socialist abyss and territorial amputation. Against the background of civil war and revolution, the activists were convinced that they lived in an age of unfettered violence, in which the internal enemy, who had broken the rules of ‘civilized’ military conduct, could only Höß: Kommandant in Auschwitz. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen des Rudolf Höß, introduced and commented by Martin Broszat. Stuttgart 1958, 34–35. 38 On the assassination of Somogyi and Bacsó, see Ernő Gergely/Pál Schönwald: A SomogyiBacsó-Gyilkosság. Budapest 1978. 39 Rudolf Tokes: Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The Origins and Role of the Communist Party of Hungary in the Revolutions of 1918–1919. New York/Stanford 1967, 159. See also Gyorgy Borsanyi: The Life of a Communist Revolutionary. Béla Kun. New York 1993. 40 Pal Prónay: A határban a halál kaszál. Fejezetek Prónay Pál feljegyzéseiből, edited by Agnes Szabó and Ervin Pamlenyi. Budapest 1963, 90. 37 Rudolf

222   Robert Gerwarth be stopped through the use of the same kind of extreme violence which their opponents were – rightly or wrongly – believed to have employed during the brief ‘Red Terror’ in Bavaria and Hungary. Younger paramilitaries who had not served in the Great War often proved particularly violent. In Germany, one of the most widely discussed cases of paramilitary atrocity involved a number of fraternity students from Marburg who had shot more than a dozen previously imprisoned ‘Spartakists’ in Thuringia.41 On another occasion, during the Communist uprising in the Ruhr in 1920, a young student volunteer joyfully reported in a letter to his parents: “No pardon is given. We shoot even the wounded. The enthusiasm is tremendous – unbelievable. Our battalion has had two deaths, the Reds two or three hundred. Anyone who falls into our hands gets the rifle butt and is then finished off with a bullet.”42 And even the Hungarian militia leader, Pál Prónay, infamous for ruthlessly torturing and burning his victims alive, was positively surprised by the “overly ambitious and highly motivated new recruits” who tried to impress him by “beating up Jews outside the gate of the barracks or by bringing them in where they can give them a real thrashing.”43 The postwar project of ‘cleansing’ the nation of its internal enemies was viewed by most paramilitary activists as a necessary precondition for a ‘national rebirth’, a form of violent regeneration that would justify the sacrifices of the war despite defeat and revolution. In some ways, this abstract hope for national ‘rebirth’ out of the ruins of empire was the only thing that held the highly heterogeneous paramilitary groups in Germany, Austria, and Hungary together. Altogether, the paramilitary upsurge of the months after November 1918 looked more like an attack on the new political establishments and the territorial amputations imposed by the Western Allies, than a coordinated attempt to create any particular form of authoritarian new order. For despite their common opposition to revolution and the common hope for national revival, the activists involved in right-wing paramilitary action did not necessarily share the same ideological aims and ambitions. Quite the opposite: paramilitary activists of the political right in Central Europe were in fact deeply divided by their divergent visions of the future form of state: there were strong legitimist forces, particularly in the Hungarian community in Vienna, from Der Marburger Studentenprozeß. Leipzig/Berlin 1921, as well as Michael Lemling: Das ‘Studentenkorps Marburg’ und die ‘Tragödie von Mechterstädt’, in: Peter Krüger/ Anne C. Nagel (eds.): Mechterstädt, 25. 3. 1920. Skandal und Krise in der Frühphase der Weimarer Republik. Münster 1996, 44–88. 42 Max Zeller, as quoted in Nigel H. Jones: Hitler’s Heralds. The Story of the Freikorps 1918– 1923. Murray 1987, 50. 43 Prónay, A határban, 41. 41 See

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where two attempts were undertaken to restore the last Habsburg King Charles to the throne of St Stephen, but also proto-fascist activists who despised the monarchy nearly as much as they loathed communism. Some royalist paramilitaries in Austria, too, demanded a restoration of the Habsburg monarchy (though not necessarily under the old Kaiser) and found themselves in direct confrontation with those in favour of a syndicalist form of independent Austrian government. Others, notably those organized in the Austro-Bavarian ‘Oberland League’, a radical minority of some 1,000 men, favoured unification with the German Reich.44 For the großdeutsch right in Austria, defeat and imperial dissolution thus offered another postwar project whose fulfilment would justify the wartime sacrifices: the creation of a Greater German Reich. General Alfred Krauss, for example, who in 1914 had interpreted the Great War itself as a unique opportunity to ‘re-negotiate’ the power structure within the Habsburg Empire in favour of its German citizens saw the collapse of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire as an opportunity for the ethnic “unmixing of peoples”.45 “Great is the time in which we live”, Krauss noted in a somewhat deluded essay of 1920, for großdeutsch “unification can no longer be hindered.”46 Furthermore, as the ‘Oberland League’ phrased it in its pamphlet The Policy of German Resistance, a national ‘rebirth’ was only possible through a thoroughly critical engagement with the ‘ideas of 1789’, driven by the traditions of the enlightenment and humanism. The ideas of 1789 are manifest in modern individualism, bourgeois views on the word and economy, parliamentarianism, and modern democracy […]. We members of the Oberland League will continue on our path, marked out by the blood of the German martyrs who have died for the future Reich, and we will continue, then as now, to be the shock troops of the German resistance movement.47

Despite the widespread urge to ‘redeem’ themselves in the face of a double humiliation by military defeat and revolution, it would therefore be wrong to suggest that all paramilitaries in Central Europe shared the same motivations for getting involved in counterrevolutionary activities. Catchphrases such as the ‘Freikorps spirit’ in Germany, the ‘Szeged Idea’ in Hungary (Szeged being the headquarters of Horthy’s counter-revolutionary National Army in 1919), or the ideas underpinning the ‘Korneuburger Oath’ of the Austrian Heimwehr Hans Jürgen Kuron: Freikorps und Bund Oberland. PhD thesis, München 1960, 134; Falch, Zwischen Heimatwehr und Nationalsozialismus, 51; Lösch, Die Geschichte der ­Tiroler Heimatwehr, 162. 45 Alfred Krauss, “Schaffen wir ein neues, starkes Österreich!” (1914), Krauss papers, ÖStA, B 60. 46 Idem: Unser Deutschtum! Salzburg 1920, 8–9. 47 “Die Politik des deutschen Widerstands” (1931), ÖStA, B 1477. 44 See

224   Robert Gerwarth movement, are clearly suggesting a unity of political aims and motivations that never existed. They were retrospective constructions of unity that were intended to give meaning to violent actions that were usually carried out without a univocal political agenda. Yet, as long as the perceived threats of ‘international Bolshevism’, ‘international Jewry’, and ‘international feminism’, as well as a fear of national decay and territorial disintegration persisted, there was a clear common goal that temporarily seemed more important than disagreements about the future form of government. Still, in 1931 the German-born assassin of Rosa Luxemburg and subsequent military organizer of the Austrian Heimwehr, Waldemar Pabst, wrote a political programme for a White International, his “favourite child of the future”, in which he articulated a “minimal consensus” for counter-revolutionary movements across Europe: “The path towards a new Europe lies in the […] replacement of the old Trinity of the French Revolution [liberté, egalité, fraternité] which has proven to be false, sterile, and destructive with a new Trinity: authority, order, justice […]. Only on the basis of this spirit can a new Europe be built, a Europe that is currently torn up by class war and suffocated with hypocrisy.”48 The pamphlets published by right-wing militants in the 1920s demonstrate quite clearly that the paramilitary world of postwar Central Europe was a world of action, not ideas. Against whom these actions should be directed was consequently one of the most widely discussed themes in paramilitary circles. For the former infantry general and commander-in-chief of the Habsburg Empire’s Eastern Armies, Alfred Krauss, the “enemies of the German people” included “the French, the English, the Czechs, the Italians” – a clear indication of the continuity of wartime propaganda after 1918. More dangerous than the nationalist ambitions of other countries, however, were the internationalist enemies: “the Red International”, the “Black International” (political Catholicism), and, “above all”, the “Jewish people, which aims at mastery of the Germans”. All other enemies, Krauss was certain, stood in the paid service of the latter.49 Unsurprisingly, given such widespread sentiments, the Jews, although a small minority of no more than five per cent of the Austrian and Hungarian populations, suffered most from right-wing paramilitary violence after the Great War. As Jakob Krausz, a Jewish refugee from the Hungarian White Terror, observed in 1922, anti-Semitism did not lose its intensity during the war. Quite the opposite: it unfolded in a more beastly way. This war has only made the anti-Semites more brutal […]. The trenches 48 Pabst

Papers, Bundesarchiv Berlin Lichterfelde, NY4035/6, 37–39. Unser Deutschtum, 7–13.

49 Krauss,

Fighting the Red Beast   225 were flooded with anti-Semitic pamphlets, particularly those of the Central Powers. The more their situation deteriorated, the more intense and blood-thirsty the anti-Semitic propaganda became. The post-war pogroms in Hungary, Poland, and the Ukraine, as well as the anti-Semitic campaigns in Germany and Austria were prepared in the trenches.50

As Krausz correctly observed, one of the main reasons for the violent antiSemitism in Central Europe after 1918 was that the Jews became the projection screen for everything the paramilitary right despised. Paradoxically, they could simultaneously be portrayed as the embodiment of a pan-Slavic revolutionary menace from ‘the East’ that threatened the traditional order of Christian Central Europe, as ‘red agents’ of Moscow, and as representatives of an obscure ‘Golden International’ and western democratization. In Hungary, by contrast to Germany and Austria, anti-Semitic violence was tolerated by the state authorities and at times applauded by the nationalist press.51 A report on anti-Semitic violence published by Vienna’s Jewish community in 1922 reported that “more than 3,000 Jews were murdered in Transdanubia”, the broad region of Hungary west of the Danube.52 Although these figures are probably exaggerated, there can be no doubt that the White Terror specifically targeted Jews in substantial numbers. A typical case of anti-Semitic violence in Hungary was reported to the police by Ignaz Bing from Bőhőnye in October 1919: “During the night before 1 October, a group of sixty White Guards came to our community and ordered that every Jewish man had to appear immediately on the market square.” The Jewish men, seventeen altogether, who were entirely innocent of Communist activity, followed the order. When they had assembled, “they were beaten and tortured and – without any interrogation – they [the soldiers] started hanging them” – an act of violence Krausz (ed.): Martyrium. Ein jüdisches Jahrbuch. Wien 1922, 17. See also Frank M. Schuster: Zwischen allen Fronten. Osteuropäische Juden während des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1914–1919, Köln 2004. 51 On Hungarian anti-Semitism after 1918, see Robert M. Bigler: Heil Hitler and Heil Horthy! The Nature of Hungarian Racist Nationalism and its Impact on German-Hungarian Relations 1919–1945, East European Quarterly 3 (1974), 251–272; Béla Bodó: ‘White Terror’, Newspapers and the Evolution of Hungarian Anti-Semitism after World War I, in: Yad Vashem Studies 34 (2006); Nathaniel Katzburg: Hungary and the Jews. Policy and Legislation, 1920–1943. Ramat-Gan 1981; and Rolf Fischer: Entwicklungsstufen des Antisemitismus in Ungarn, 1867–1939. Die Zerstörung der magyarisch-jüdischen Symbiose. München 1998. 52 Josef Halmi: Akten über die Pogrome in Ungarn, in: Krausz, Martyrium, 59. See also Oskar Jászi: Magyariens Schuld. Ungarns Sühne. München 1923, 168–79. Josef Pogány: Der Weiße Terror in Ungarn. Wien 1920. British Joint Labour Delegation to Hungary: The White Terror in Hungary. London 1920, and “The Jews in Hungary”. Correspondence with His Majesty’s Government, presented to the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Council of the Anglo-Jewish Association, October 1920, UK National Archives, Kew (TNA), FO 371/3558, 206720. 50 Jakob

226   Robert Gerwarth that served the dual purpose of eliminating the ‘source of Bolshevism’ and giving a public demonstration of what would happen to an enemy who fell into their hands.53 In Austria and Germany, anti-Semitism was equally widespread even though it never assumed an even remotely similar violent character prior to 1933–1938. Before 1914, anti-Semitism in Austria had been common currency among right-wing politicians who bitterly complained about the high numbers of Jews from Galicia and the Bukovina who had migrated to Vienna. When in 1918 Galicia fell to Poland and the Bukovina to Romania, the number of Jewish ­migrants further increased, accelerated by large-scale pogroms in Galicia and Ukraine. In 1918, 125 000 Jews lived in Vienna, although German-Austrian ­nationalists maintained that the number was as high as 450 000.54 The postwar influx of ‘Eastern Jews’ fanned anti-Semitic feelings in Vienna which – since the days of Karl Lueger and Georg von Schönerer – were never far from the surface and which had been reinforced by the popular wartime stereotype of the ‘Jewish profiteer’.55 After 1918, right-wing veterans maintained “the Jew” had become the “slaveholder” of a defenceless German people, determined “to exploit our peril in order to make good business […] and to squeeze out our last drop of blood”.56 The identification of “the Jewish people” as the “wirepullers” behind revolution and imperial collapse was generally linked to the hope that “the German giant will rise again one day” and that then, “the day of reckoning must come for all the treason, hypocrisy and barbarism, for all their crimes against the German people and against humanity.”57 Similar to Hungary, anti-Semites in Austria usually appealed to Christian principles and linked the notion of Jewish responsibility for the military collapse to older Christian stereotypes of ‘Jewish treason’.58 In consequence, 53 Halmi,

Akten über die Pogrome, 64. Bruce F. Pauley: Politischer Antisemitismus im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit, in: Gerhard Botz et al. (eds.): Eine zerstörte Kultur. Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Buchloe 1990, 221–223. 55 On the history of anti-Semitism up to the Great War, see Peter Pulzer: The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. 2nd revised edition. Cambridge 1988; and John W. Boyer: Karl Lueger and the Viennese Jews, Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, 26 (1981), 125–144. On the image of the ‘Jewish profiteer’ in wartime Vienna, see Maureen Healy: Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire. Total War and Everyday Life in World War I. Cambridge 2004. On anti-Semitism in Austrian universities, see Michael Gehler: Studenten und Politik. Der Kampf um die Vorherrschaft an der Universität Innsbruck 1919–1938. Innsbruck 1990, 93–98. 56 Krauss, Unser Deutschtum!, 20. 57 Ibid., 16–17. 58 See, e. g., the article series on “The Racial-Political Causes of the Collapse”, in: Neue Tiroler Stimmen, 9., 10., and 30. 12. 1918 and 2. 1. 1919 as quoted in Francis Ludwig Carsten: 54 See

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Christian Socialist politicians such as the Tyrolese Heimwehr leader, Richard Steidle, suggested that “only a thorough reckoning with the spirit of Jewry and its helpers can save the German Alpine lands”.59 Anti-Semitism after 1918 was further exacerbated by the widespread perception that a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ was at the heart of the revolutions of 1918–1919. The fact that the intellectual leader of the Red Guards, Leo Rothziegel, and prominent members of the ­Social Democratic Party such as Victor Adler and Otto Bauer were Jewish was referred to constantly. Although physical violence against German or Austrian Jews remained the exception, the language of violence used by German and Austrian paramilitaries certainly foreshadowed the infinitely more dramatic wave of anti-Jewish violence of the late 1930s and 1940s. Whether Hanns Albin Rauter expressed his aim to “get rid of the Jews as soon as possible” as a student leader in Graz or Starhemberg attacked the “Jewish war profiteers” as “parasites”, the rhetoric of violent anti-Semitism constituted a tradition on which radical nationalists would build in subsequent decades.60

Legacies Crude notions of violently ‘un-mixing’ the ethnic complexity of the new German, Austrian and Hungarian borderlands, coupled with militant anti-Bolshevism and radicalized anti-Semitism directed against the ‘enemy within’ created fateful legacies for all three societies. The Hungarian White Terror revealed much of the later chauvinist and racist mood in the country, notably through its sudden and sanguinary animus against the Jews. It was revived with added fury (and on a broader popular basis) in the 1930s, exacerbated by the frustrations caused by the Great Depression. In Austria and Germany, too, anti-Semitism and anti-Slavic sentiments would resurface with renewed intensity after the brief moment of political staRevolution in Central Europe, 1918–19. Berkeley 1972, 261. See also Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 8. 4. 1919. On the broader context, see Paul Rena: Der christlichsoziale Antisemitismus in Wien 1848–1938. PhD thesis, Wien 1991; and Christine Sagoschen: Judenbilder im Wandel der Zeit. Die Entwicklung des katholischen Antisemitismus am Beispiel jüdischer Stereotypen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Entwicklung in der ersten Republik. PhD thesis, Wien 1998. 59 Tagespost, 27. 5. 1919. 60 Rauter Papers, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) Amsterdam, Doc l-1380 Pr 6-12-97, 46–47; Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, “Meine Stellungnahme zur Judenfrage”, Starhemberg Papers, OÖLA.

228   Robert Gerwarth bilization in the mid-1920s gave way to economic depression and political turmoil. For many Austrian, German, and Hungarian fascists of the 1930s, the experiences of 1918–1919 provided a decisive catalyst for political radicalization and a catalogue of political agendas whose implementation was merely postponed during the years of relative stability between 1923 and 1929. Some of the most prominent paramilitary activists of the immediate postwar period would resurface in the central European dictatorships of the right. In Hun­ gary, Ferenc Szálasi and many other Arrow Cross members of the 1940s, including the infamous militia leader Pál Prónay, repeatedly pointed to the period between November 1918 and the signing of the Trianon Treaty as the moment of their political awakening. In Austria and Germany too, personal continuities between the immediate postwar period and the Nazi dictatorship are easy to identify. Robert Ritter von Greim, leader of the Tyrolese branch of the ‘Oberland League’ after 1922, became Göring’s successor as commander of the German Luftwaffe in 1945; Hanns Albin Rauter, who had contributed decisively to the radicalization of the großdeutsch wing of the Styrian Heimwehr, became Higher SS and Police Chief in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, whilst his compatriot and friend, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, succeeded Reinhard Heydrich as head of the Nazis’ Reich Security Main Office in 1943. For all of these men, the fascist dictatorships of Central Europe provided an opportunity to settle old scores and to ‘solve’ some of the issues, which the inglorious defeat of 1918 and the subsequent revolution had raised. Yet, whereas in Italy – as Emilio Gentile points out in his contribution to this volume** – paramilitary violence provided a key source of legitimacy for Mussolini’s totalitarian regime and a model for violent practices against opponents of the fascist state, the relationship between post-1918 paramilitarism and the fascist dictatorships of Central Europe in the 1930s was more complicated. Many of the most prominent paramilitaries of the immediate postwar period – including Ludendorff, Horthy and Starhemberg – were dedicated anti-Bolsheviks and committed anti-Semites in 1918, but their conservatism and regional loyalties made them suspicious in the eyes of the Nazis. Starhemberg, who had entertained close personal relations with Hitler until 1923 (and indeed participated in the unsuccessful Munich putsch of 9 November 1923), began to oppose the Austrian Nazi movement in the 1930s, rejected his own postwar anti-Semitism as ‘nonsense’, insisted on Austrian independence in 1938, and even served in the British and Free French forces during the Second to Emilio Gentile: Paramilitary Violence in Italy. The Rationale of Fascism and the Origins of Totalitarianism, in: Gerwarth/Horne, War in Peace, 85–103, the volume in which this contribution was originally published.

** Refers

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World War.61 Starhemberg was not the only prominent paramilitary whose vision for a national Austrian ‘rebirth’ was incompatible with that of Nazism. Captain Karl Burian, founder and head of the monarchist combat organization ‘Ostara’ after the end of the Great War, paid for his continued royalist beliefs in the 1930s with his arrest by the Gestapo and his execution in 1944.62 Not entirely dissimilar to the situation in Germany, where the direct personal continuities between the Freikorps and the Third Reich ended with the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934, Austrian paramilitary veterans had to come to the realization that Nazism was not always compatible with the ideas for which they had fought in 1918. The fact that the Nazis themselves ended many personal continuities between the postwar paramilitary conflicts and the emerging Third Reich by decapitating the SA in 1934 and murdering many Heimwehr activists after the Anschluss of 1938 did not prevent them from celebrating the ‘Freikorps spirit’ as one of the key inspirations for and forerunners of the Nazi movement. It was no coincidence that the largest memorial ever to be built in Nazi Germany was the Annaberg monument which commemorated the joint GermanAustrian effort to ‘liberate’ Upper Silesia during the Third Polish Uprising of 1921.63 What mattered far more than the largely invented tradition of personal continuities was that the Nazis set out to violently resolve the issues that had been raised but not settled during the turbulent period between 1917 and 1923.

Conclusions Post-imperial Central Europe witnessed the emergence of a sizeable paramilitary subculture, one that was shaped by the successive traumatizing experiences of war, defeat, revolution, and territorial disintegration. Those members of the male wartime generation active in this subculture fed on a doctrine of hyper-nationalism and shared a determination to use violence in order to suppress a (real or alleged) revolutionary threat and to avenge their perceived humiliations at the hands of external and internal enemies.

61 In

the 1930s, Starhemberg rejected the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy as “nonsense” and “scientific” racism as a propagandistic “lie”, see Starhemberg, “Meine Stellungnahme zur Judenfrage”. 62 See the Gestapo file on Burian, Burian papers, ÖStA, B 1394. 63 James Bjork/Robert Gerwarth: The Annaberg as a German-Polish Lieu de Memoire, in: German History 3 (2007), 372–400.

230   Robert Gerwarth If the war had laid the foundation for the creation of a violent subculture of demobilized officers, defeat and revolution significantly contributed to the radicalization and enlargement of this paramilitary milieu. Ex-officers brutalized by the war and infuriated by its outcome joined forces with, and transmitted their ‘values’ to, members of a younger generation, who compensated for their lack of combat experience by often surpassing the war veterans in terms of radicalism, activism, and brutality. Together the veterans and members of the war youth generation formed an ultra-militant masculine subculture that differed from the ‘community of the trenches’ in its social make-up, its ‘liberation’ from the constraints of military discipline, and its self-imposed postwar mission of destroying both the external and internal enemy in order to pave the way for a national rebirth. Everywhere in the region, anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Slavism – often amalgamated into a single enemy image of ‘Jewish-Slav Bolshevism’ – operated as touchstones for paramilitary movements. Unlike during the Great War, violence was primarily directed against civilians and more specifically against those perceived to be ‘community aliens’ who had to be ‘removed’ in one way or another before a new utopian society could emerge from the deb­ ris caused by defeat and revolution. The desire to ‘cleanse’ their new nationstates from these broadly defined enemies went hand in hand with a fundamental distrust of the democratic, capitalist ‘West’ whose promises of national self-determination clashed violently with postwar realities in Austria, Hun­ gary, and the German borderlands. If, however, paramilitaries in all three countries shared similar fantasies of violence, they differed in their ability to live out these fantasies. Whereas in post-revolutionary Hungary and the ethnically contested borderlands in the German East, fantasies turned into reality on a large scale, Austrian paramilitaries at home either had to ‘confine’ themselves to small-scale fighting in the Austrian borderlands with Yugoslav troops or they had to join forces with German Freikorps in Munich or Upper Silesia, where violent action against a common enemy was possible. Although in a small minority everywhere in the former Habsburg and Hohenzollern Empires, paramilitary activists managed to overcome their marginality within the majority of veterans by creating parallel universes of tightly-knit veteran communities with few ties to mainstream society and by linking their postwar fate to similar paramilitary groups in the other defeated states of Central Europe who shared their determination to challenge the moral and political authority of the Wilsonian postwar European order. These international ties with other revisionist forces in Central Europe were one of the lasting legacies of the immediate transitional period from war to ‘peace’. Perhaps more importantly, the men who continued their military ca-

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reers well into the postwar period created a language and practices of violent exclusion of all those they perceived as obstacles to a future national rebirth, which alone could justify the sacrifices made during the war. More than direct personal continuities between the postwar period and the fascist dictatorships of the 1930s and 1940s, it was this legacy of national redemption through violent exclusion that proved to be of fatal significance for Central Europe during the Second World War.

IV. Aftermath

Julia Eichenberg

Consent, Coercion and Endurance in ­Eastern Europe: Poland and the Fluidity of War Experiences In October 2005 the Polish historian Piotr Szlanta published an article titled C.K. dezerterzy? (Imperial and Royal Deserters?) in Mowią Wieki, a Polish popular science history magazine. The article discussed the morale of the Habsburg army during the First World War.1 Szlanta’s article uses an interesting peg for his story: C.K. dezerterzy was, as the author notes, a cult comedy broadcast in 1986. The TV series by Janusz Majewski recounts the adventures of a group of Habsburg soldiers who flee their barracks, desert the army, and muddle through with wit and charm on their escape route through Austria. The small group of soldiers includes representatives of the various minorities in the Habsburg army. The main character, the Pole Kania, is accompanied by the Hungarian Benedek and the Viennese Jew Haber. They are later joined by the Czech Chudej and Baldini, an Italian prisoner of war. The series depicts the Habsburg army as a chaotic bunch of rebelling minorities, commanded by  constantly shouting, but intellectually inferior Germans and Austrians. ­Today, the prevailing image of the Polish soldier in the armies of the Central Powers during the First World War is shaped by the notion of the quick-witted Pole, an embodiment of the Polish national self-perception with its emphasis on the Poles’ spirit of defiance and their intellectual superiority over the occupier. This one-sided interpretation of the Poles in the ranks of the imperial armies – much inspired by the literary figure of Svejk – is particularly interesting given that they had a rather negative reputation for a long time. Military service for the ancien regime powers was not compatible with the national narrative that eventually crystallised in Poland and it was not acknowledged by society. At worst, these soldiers were seen as mercenaries, collaborators or traitors. At best, they were regarded as people who had served the occupier without putting up much resistance and had therefore betrayed the national cause. In order to secure their status in terms of commemoration and social benefits, they therefore had to locate their war experiences within 1

Piotr Szlanta: C.K. dezerterzy? Morale armii monarchii naddunanskeij podczas pierwszej wojny światowej, in: Mowią Wieki 10 (2005), 22–27.

236   Julia Eichenberg the dominant narrative of the struggle for Polish independence during the border wars after 1918.2 The significance of the First World War for European history has been thoroughly discussed. However, it is only recently that Eastern Europe has begun to pay more attention to its history between 1914 and 1918 (with the exception of the history of national independence struggles), the history of what been described as a “forgotten war”.3 By the same token, Eastern Europe has received too little attention in scholarship on the First World War. It is only in the past decade that there has been a renewed interest in the Great War in Eastern Europe, triggered or at least helped by the publication of Liulevicius’ War Land on the Eastern Front.4 While it is obvious that the study of Eastern Europe fills a geographical void (and more) in our understanding of the First World War, can the – predominantly Western European – historiography of the First World War provide new insights into the history of Eastern Europe? In this article, I will demonstrate that there is much to be gained from taking one of the major discussions of Western European First World War Studies – the discussion of consent vs. coercion – and rethinking it with regard to Eastern Europe. At first, the attempt to apply this particular discussion of First World War studies to the Eastern European war experience might seem surprising. After all, the concept of consent describes the commitment of soldiers to fight for their country, their state or their nation. It was developed within French historiography as an attempt to explain the continuance of total war in the trenches. Why did soldiers not desert when they feared for their own lives? Why did they keep on fighting, when they had lost hope in the ‘short war’ they had set out for? The concept of consent explained the will to win, the will to continue fighting even under atrocious circumstances. A group of historians, most of whom were connected with the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, introduced the concept of consent to understand what kept soldiers from ­deserting. It was accompanied by the idea of a ‘war culture’ (culture de guerre), denoting a war-prone attitude linked to strong nationalist feelings and selfdefence. Historians engaging with the idea of consent accordingly focused on Julia Eichenberg: Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge. Polnische Veteranen des Ersten Weltkriegs und ihre internationalen Kontakte, 1918–1939. München 2011. See especially chapter 2, 101–169. 3 Robert Traba: Zapomniana Wojna. Wydarzenia 1914–1918 w polskiej i niemieckiej pamięci zbiorowej, in: idem: Kraina tysiąca granic. Szkice o historii i pamięci. Olsztyn 2003, 155–162. 4 Vejas G. Liulevicius: War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge 2000. 2

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ideology, the press, propaganda and sometimes religion. The consent theory eventually came in for some criticism and led to a historians’ debate that remained French-centred at its heart, but had a significant impact on the broader field of First World War studies. Critics of the concept of consent proffered the idea of coercion, arguing that the common soldier did not care for great ideas, but stayed put simply because he was afraid of the consequences of desertion. Thus ‘coercion’ was introduced as a term that explained what was called a ‘culture of obedience’, in which the ordinary soldier was forced to continue fighting in a total war. Historians who engaged with the idea of coercion (for example, Cazals and Rousseau) often focused on social history, but also on the history of schools and education and their impact on educating ‘obedient patriots’. They discussed mobilisation statistics as well as letters and memoires that portrayed the suffering of the individuals subject to coercion.5 While this may have been a “very French debate” at first glance, references to Eastern Europe quickly become clear.6 Without ever explicitly referring to these historiographical concepts, public commemoration and professional research on the First World War in Eastern Europe has for a long time relied on them in their own special way. The concept of coercion corresponds to the public – and, for a long time, professional – portrayal of serving in the imperial armies of Germany, Austria and Russia. The frontlines of the First World War did not coincide with the borders of the later Eastern European nation states. The experiences of combatants and non-combatants alike were very diverse and cannot be categorised according to their subsequent nationality. National narratives emerged to deal with this complex memory, which in some Eastern European countries encompassed fratricidal battles and the atrocities and pogroms of allegedly ‘post-war’ countries. These narratives dominated the public memory of the war and had a lasting impact on perceptions of the war and the experience of wartime violence. The concept of consent on the other hand, seemed to be almost exclusively reserved for the portrayal of participation in the respective national struggles for independence. It was assumed that consent could only refer to voluntary service in battles for state sovereignty or the defence of the new borders, never Rémy Cazals/Nicolas Offenstadt (eds.): Si je reviens comme je l’espère. Lettres du front et de l’arrière, 1914–1918. Paris 2003; Frédéric Rousseau (ed.): Guerre, paix et sociétés 1911– 1947. Paris/Neuilly 2004. 6 Pierre Purseigle: A Very French Debate. The 1914–1918 ‘War Culture’, in: Journal for War and Cultural Studies 1 (2007), 9–14. 5

238   Julia Eichenberg to service in the imperial armies. The understanding of consent with regard to war experience in Eastern Europe was consistent with the dominant narrative of a collective and unanimous striving for independence. The myth embraced the struggle of whole populations, but memory focused on ‘young, able-bodied men’. The paradigm of consent crystallised around the figure of the legionnaire. These legionnaires, members of the Polish, Czech, and Croatian legions, played a central role not only in the armed struggles to build their respective nations, but also in the later consolidation of those states. Their voluntary service embodied the will to national sovereignty.

The Eastern European fluidity of war experiences The First World War completely redrew the map of Europe, in particular Eastern Europe. It is impossible to discuss the impact of war and violence without taking account of the redrawing of borders on the territory formerly ruled by the three ancien régime empires. This redrawing created new states – even they turned out to be temporary, as in the case of Ukraine. Each one of these states started to construct its own national remembrance of the war. These national memories, these narratives of war experience, shaped the individual and official commemoration of the war. While the First World War may have had a seemingly positive political impact on nation-building, its social and cultural legacy was disastrous for Eastern Europe. The assumption that the war was less violent on the Eastern Front has been revised by historiography.7 In fact, harsher weather conditions, a less developed rail network, and a war of continuous movement placed a “far greater physical strain” on the soldiers fighting in the East.8 The male population of the not-yet independent states of East Central Europe fought as conscripts and professional soldiers in the imperial armies. Some nationalities, including the Poles, fought in all three of them. The case of Poland shows how difficult it is to gather even even basic information. There are various estimates of the number of Poles who fought in the war. The most commonly accepted figures suggest that about 1.5 million Norman Stone: The Eastern Front 1914–1917. London 1976; Nándor F. Dreisziger: The Dimensions of Total War in East Central Europe, 1914–1918, in: Béla K. Király/Nándor F. Dreisziger (eds.): East Central Europe and Society in World War I. Boulder 1985, 3–26; Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front; William C. Fuller: The Eastern Front, in: Jay Winter et al. (eds.): The Great War and the Twentieth Century. New Haven 2000, 30–68. 8 Alexander Watson: Enduring the Great War. Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918. Cambridge 2008, 19–24. 7

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Polish soldiers fought in the imperial armies (most of them in the Russian army). However, some estimates go up to about three million men, while the actual figure is probably closer to 2.25 million.9 The majority of Polish ­soldiers fought on the Eastern Front, traversing the future Polish state. Tragic encounters saw Poles fighting Poles, devastating the countryside they wanted to be an independent state. The Polish experience of the war was manifold and subject to change. This was because Poles fought on both the Eastern and the Western Fronts and thus experienced different theatres of war, military cultures, comrades, languages, and weapons. Mobile war also took its toll on the civilian population. Refugees streamed in droves across Eastern Europe.10 People were ‘strategically evacuated’ by the armies or fled conflict zones fearing for their lives.11 Many retreated together with one army for fear that they would be recruited by the opposing army. Others fled when their livelihood was threatened after the Russian army applied its ‘scorched earth’ policy. Nearly everything that could be of use to the enemy was taken and the rest was destroyed. In accordance with the orders of the Russian High Command, infrastructure and whole villages were razed to the ground and fields were burned.12 When men aged between 18 and 45 were ordered to withdraw with the Russian army to avoid recruitment by the Central Powers, many of their families decided to join them.13 The German and Austrian occupation put an end to combat in East Central Europe. But it was only temporary and did not improve the situation of most people.14 Food and raw materials were confiscated for export to the German Reich, and ­diseases and poor nutrition weakened the population.15 As a result, the pop­ ulation on the territory of what was to become the Second Polish Republic decreased by 14.9  per  cent from 30.9 million in 1914 to 26.3  million in 1919.16 Dudek: Polish Military Formations in World War I, in: Béla K. Király/Nándor F. Dreisziger (eds.): East Central Europe and Society in World War I. Boulder 1985, 454– 470, 455. 10 Peter Gatrell: A Whole Empire Walking. Refugees in Russia during World War I. Bloomington 1999, 15–33. 11 Frank M. Schuster: Zwischen allen Fronten. Osteuropäische Juden während des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1914–1919. Köln/Weimar/Wien 2004, 126. 12 Ibid., 221–222. 13 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 17–20. 14 Andrzej Garlicki: The Second Republic. Hopes and their fulfilment, in: Timothy Wiles (ed.): Poland between the Wars, 1918–1939. A Collection of Papers. Bloomington 1989, 18. 15 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 241–242, 251. 16 Norman Davies: Heart of Europe. The Past in Poland’s Present. Oxford/New York 2001, 98.   9 Lesław

240   Julia Eichenberg The conscripts to the armies of the ancien régime, mobilized to defend the weakened empires instead of fighting for their own national state, seem to embody coercion. According to national myths, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats and Hungarians only continued fighting for fear of being court martialed for disobedience. At the same time, national memories tend to emphasise that most of these men deserted as soon as they could, preferring the life of prisoners of war (POWs) to that of a soldier in the imperial armies. Once incarcerated as POWs, these men apparently could not wait to volunteer for military formations set up under their own ‘national’ flag. In a creative reconstruction of the past, national memories suggest that the once war-weary soldiers were ready, willing and able to fight when it came to their own national cause. Indeed, independent military formations were an important aspect of the Eastern European experience of war. In the Polish case, the Austrian High Command already agreed to the establishment of ‘Polish legions’ in late August 1914, thus giving in to repeated Polish demands.17 Men not obliged to do Austrian military service were allowed to join. The legions consisted of Piłsudski’s rifle regiment (about 3,000 men) and two additional infantry regiments (eight batallions per 1,000 soldiers). They were allowed to choose their own uniforms and use Polish as the language of command – although this reflected the generally tolerant language policy and the respect for minority rights in the Austrian army.18 In 1910 Polish was the regimental language in 48 units and it was the official language in 10 units (in Galicia).19 However, the units were denied their own flags and high command. The organization of Polish Military Formations, 457–460; Jerzy Holzer/Jan Molenda: Polska w pierwszej wojnie światowej. Warszawa 1973, 188–208; Wacława Milewska/Janusz Tadeusz Nowak/Maria Zientura: Legiony Polskie 1914–1918. Zarys historii militarnej i politycznej. Kraków 1998. 18 See also István Deák: Der k. u. k. Offizier 1848–1918. Köln 1995, 75. All recruits had to learn a basic vocabulary of 80 commands in German to ensure communication in case of emergency. But generally speaking, the Cisleithanian army spoke German, the Hungarian army spoke Honvéd Hungarian, and the Croatian formations spoke (Domobrani) Croat. See Jens Boysen: Preußische Armee und polnische Minderheit: Royalistische Streitkräfte im Kontext der Nationalitätenfrage des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1815–1914. Marburg 2008, 388. Regiments were allowed to choose between one or more optional regimental languages, if at least 20  per cent of their soldiers spoke these languages as their mother tongue. See Deák, Der k. u. k. Offizier, 122–123. In 1914 there were only 142 monolingual regiments as opposed to 163 regiments with two languages, 24 with three languages, and a couple with four or five official languages of command. 19 Jan Rydel: W służbie cesarza i króla. Generałowie i admirałowie narodowości polskiej w siłach zbrojnych Austro-Węgier w latach 1868–1918. Kraków 2001, 82; Marian Zgórniak: Polacy w armii austro węgierskiej w czasie I wojny światowej, in: Studia i materiały do historii wojskowości 30 (1988), 227–246, 235. 17 Dudek,

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the Polish units was repeatedly re-structured over the war due to high casualties and the influx of new volunteers. There were three main brigades: the First Brigade under Józef Piłsudski, commander of the Polish legions; the Second Brigade under General Karol Trzaska-Durski (a former Habsburg army officer) and under Major Józef Haller from 1916 onwards; and a Third Brigade under Oberst Grzesiski from 1915 onwards. By the end of January 1917, the Polish legions boasted about 21 000 men, about 12 620 of whom were engaged in active battle duty.20 After the ‘Oath Crisis’ (kryzys przysięgowy) of July 1917, when Piłsudski and the First and Third Brigades refused to take an oath of loyalty to the German emperor,21 Piłsudski and some of the legionnaires were interned and the legions were restructured. About 3,000 soldiers and officers from the Russian part of Poland were interned (soldiers in Szczypiorno and Łomża, officers in Beniaminów). About 3,300 Galician legionnaires were returned to the AustroHungarian army and sent to the Italian front. About 1,100 former legionnaires who took the oath and were German or Russian citizens were recruited to the ‘Polish Wehrmacht’. This was a comparatively small formation under the German High Command, whose membership peaked at 2,700 men and officers in the autumn of 1917 following an energetic recruitment campaign. Until April 1918, this military formation served as a training corps for the ­future Polish army under German tutelage. It was only during the last weeks of battle that the Polish Wehrmacht was engaged in active combat. At this point the looming defeat of the Central Powers led to a sudden rise in Polish volunteers, who were interested in the military training and weapons that would come in handy in the reconstruction and defence of the future national state. By early November 1918, the Polish Wehrmacht comprised more than 9,000 men.22 In the meantime, the majority of Haller’s Second Brigade had taken the oath and had been sent to the Russian front as a Polish auxiliary corps in October 1917.23 It now comprised 7,500 soldiers and was still commanded by Haller. In protest at Brest-Litovsk, Haller’s Second Brigade deserted on 15 and 16 February 1918 and went over to the Russian side. 20 The

figures for 31. 1. 1917 are 21 066 legionnaires, with 1,037 officers and 5,496 horses. Six infantry regiments (538 officers and 9,109 men), two cavalry regiments (85 officers and 1,483 men), and one artillery regiment (66 officers and 1,339 men) were in battle in addition to auxiliary formations. See Dudek, Polish Military Formations, 59. 21 Another 2,000 legionnaires took leave to avoid having to make this decision. See Holzer/ Molenda: Polska w pierwszej wojnie światowej, 309–310. 22 Eligiusz Kozłowski: The ‘Polnische Wehrmacht’, 1916–1918, in: Béla K. Király/Nándor F. Dreisziger (eds.): East Central Europe and Society in World War I. Boulder 1985, 471– 485; Dudek, Polish Military Formations, 460–461. 23 Holzer/Molenda: Polska w pierwszej wojnie światowej, 309–331.

242   Julia Eichenberg The Polish memory of the struggle for independence cherishes the myth of volunteers for national independence. According to this myth, Polish soldiers in the imperial armies longed to switch allegiances and were happy to escape their fate as servants of the Central Powers. This myth, which corresponds to the storyline of C. K. Dezerterzy, is mostly linked to ‘Haller’s army’ (Błękitna Armia), after Haller himself deserted and joined the Polish army in France. It is claimed that 15 000 prisoners of war volunteered to serve in Haller’s army.24 Once they had been categorized as Polish, deserters were transferred to special prisoner-of-war camps. This transfer was usually based on a superficial assessment of name, place of birth, and similar criteria. From 1915 onwards, Poles who had served in the German army and were imprisoned in France were transferred to a special camp in Le Puy in the Haute-Loire region. The British High Command separated Poles, Alsatians and Danes – including some deserters – from German soldiers and transferred them to the prisonerof-war camp in Feltham. Feltham had been established to house POWs “of friendly races and origin”.25 In November 1917 more than 500 Poles were interned in Feltham and by July 1918 that number had increased to about 1,500. If we compare the narrative of the volunteering POWs with sources from Feltham, it becomes clear that the myth of Polish loyalties is simplified. At the time of their internment, some Polish POWs in the German army were astonished or even annoyed about being regarded as a potential ally by the French and British authorities. Several POWs wrote letters in protest at their internment at Feltham and demanded that they be transferred to a “German camp” or to their original place of internment, even though Feltham offered better living conditions.26 Still, in many cases, recruitment was successful. The French government, which was already recruiting Poles on French territory, applied to the British War Office for 500 Polish POWs to join the recently ­established Polish army in France. This wish was granted by the Interdepartmental Committee of Prisoners of War on condition that these POWs would volunteer to fight for the Allies.27 Ludyga-Laskowski: The Polish Army in France, in: FIDAC Review (June 1939), 3–6, 5. 20. 6. 1918. The National Archives, Kew (TNA), FO 383/433. 26 Copy of the letter of 1. 2. 1918 by Johann Pastuschke, Grenadier Regt. No. 10, III Komp., Prisoner of War No. 11171, Huette 127 Swiss Legation, German Division, 9, Carlton House Terrace, London S.V.1. attached to a letter by the Swiss Legation, Special Divisions, 20. 2. 1918 to the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. TNA, FO 383/433. Report of the complaints by the POWs Josef Wierawa (POW 2546), Karl Burza [no POW number] and Karl Wloschek (POW 2549). TNA, FO 383/433. 27 Minutes of the Meeting of the Interdepartmental Committee of Prisoners of War on 16. 8. 1918. TNA, FO 383/433. 24 Jan

25 Note,

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Shortly after the official establishment of the Polish Army in France in June 1917, the first units were formed, mainly as a result of French Poles volunteering.28 These units included the first Regiment des chasseurs, which was set up by POWs only. The Polish army in France numbered about 100 000 men in 1918. It was led by an officer corps comprising mainly American and French volunteers. Only a few officers had served in the imperial armies. The same was true of the non-commissioned officers.29 The Polish army was deployed as a unit under the French High Command from the spring of 1918 onwards, mainly on the Western Front. After the armistice, the Polish army remained in France until it was officially transferred via Germany to Poland in military trains accompanied by British and French officers.30 The contribution of the Polish army to the war in France eventually led to Poland’s recognition as an Allied state in the interwar period, even though Poland had not participated as a state in the war. To make things even more complicated, Polish military formations also existed on the Russian side, including the Puławski legion, which was very small and was dissolved in 1915. Established in 1916, the Polish Rifles Brigade comprised about 4,000 members. In early 1917 it was upgraded to the Polish Rifles Division and its membership increased to about 18 000 men, who fought mainly on the Galician Eastern Front. In the autumn of 1917 three Polish corps were founded within the Russian army and fought as White counterrevolutionary units. The numbers of volunteers rose significantly only when it was clear that the end of the war was approaching. There were about 24 000 soldiers in the First Corps when it was disbanded by the Germans in May 1918. The Second Corps comprised about 7,000 soldiers (4,000 engaged in active combat) and the Third Corps comprised about 2,250 soldiers when it was disbanded by the Austrians in June 1918. About 4,000 Poles fought with the Russian Red revolutionaries.31 The military formations linked to the Polish independence movement in the Polish Military Organisation (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, POW) founded in the autumn of 1914 by Józef Piłsudski played a more important role in Polish national memory. While it was closely linked to the Polish legions, this organisation was formally independent and apolitical and it pursued an underground struggle for independence in Russian Poland. Even before the oath Włoszczewski: Ochotnicy polscy w Armji francuskiej polegli w 1914 roku, in: ­ łękitny Weteran (1936), 1, 11. B 29 Twenty of their 72 officers had been trained in the French army, four in the Russian army, 46 in an Officers’ School in Niagara, USA, and the remaining 12 in the German army. 30 Ludyga-Laskowski: The Polish Army in France, 5–6. 31 Dudek: Polish Military Formations, 463–466. 28 Stefan

244   Julia Eichenberg crisis of 1917, many legionnaires joined the POW, as it was not subject to the Habsburg High Command.32 After the First World War, their members would play a central role in commemoration, alongside the Polish legionnaires, and they were closely associated with the Piłsudski leadership cult.33

Enduring war and continuing combat After the official end of the war on 11 November 1918, Eastern Europe found no peace.34 New states gradually emerged in the wake of the withdrawal of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, but the consolidation of central governments and a state-controlled monopoly on the use of force took time.35 In the absence of state control, fighting and violence continued and dominated the following years.36 The border wars represent the classical nation-building wars in Polish public commemoration and historiography. In these wars, Polish formations fought to defend their recently acquired independence, but also to realise their visions of the new Polish borders and territory. The border wars included wars and confrontations with all neighbouring countries: Ukraine, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, and, indirectly, with Germany in the Silesian Uprisings and in Poznań. Only the war with Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1921, however, posed a threat to Polish independence (if at all, since the Polish state had been guaranteed by international treaties).37 In the other cases, Polish Conze: Polnische Nation und Deutsche Politik. Köln 1958, 224–226. Hein: Der Piłsudski-Kult und seine Bedeutung für den polnischen Staat. Marburg 2002, 44–46. 34 Compare Gatrell, Peter: The War after the War, Conflicts 1919–1923, in: John Horne, Companion to World War I. Chichester 2010, 558–575; Jochen Böhler: Enduring Violence. The Post-War Struggles in East-Central Europe 1917–1921, in: Journal of Contemporary History 3 (2014, forthcoming). 35 On the events of November 1918 and the shift from world war to independence to the border wars in Poland, see Piotr Łossowski: Zerwane Pęta. Usunięcie okupantów z ziem polskich w listopadzie 1918 roku. Warszawa 1986. 36 Jörg Baberowski: Kriege in staatsfernen Räumen. Russland und die Sowjetunion 1905– 1950, in: Dietrich Beyrau/Michael Hochgeschwender/Dieter Langewiesche (eds.): Formen des Krieges. Paderborn 2007, 291–309; Piotr J. Wróbel: The Seeds of Violence. The Brutalization of an East European Region, 1917–1921, in: Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), 125–148. 37 Norman Davies: White Eagle, Red Star. The Polish–Soviet War 1919–1920 and the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’. London 2003; Bohdan Królikowski: Ułańskie lato. Od Krechowiec do Komarowa. Szkice do dziejów jazdy polskiej w latach 1917–1921. Lublin 2005; Agnieszka Knyt: The Year 1920. The War between Poland and Bolshevik Russia. Warszawa 2005. 32 Werner 33 Heidi

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motivations were not only defensive, but followed Poland’s territorial agenda in the post-war political vacuum. The Polish-Ukrainian war in particular revealed a strong presence of paramilitary units and excesses by these units against the civilian population and minorities. Violence on both sides increased due to suspicions of collaboration and conspiracies and a constant fear of guerrilla fighters and franc-tireurs. We see this especially in the battle for Lemberg, the fighting in Posen, and the Silesian Uprisings, and to a lesser degree in the conflicts with Czechoslovakia.38 The battles in Lemberg and Silesia were examples of how conflict fuelled nationalist violence in ethnically mixed regions.39 Rather than a regular professional national army, the Polish army during the border wars was a mixed bag of Polish soldiers and units from World War I and volunteers of all kinds. Most of the recruits to this army had been professional soldiers in the former partition armies. The higher ranks in the new Polish army were mainly assigned to former Austrian officers. The Poles in the German army had not had the same opportunities for advancement and thus tended to join the rank and file in the new Polish army. There were far less former Russian soldiers in the new army than representatives of the other two armies. 22 per cent of the new Polish officer corps comprised former legionnaires.40 Mick: Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt. Lemberg 1914–1947. Wiesbaden 2010; idem: „Wer verteidigte Lemberg?“ Totengedenken, Kriegsdeutungen und nationale Identität in einer multiethnischen Stadt, in: Dietrich Beyrau (ed.): Der Krieg in religiösen und nationalen Deutungen der Neuzeit. Tübingen 2001, 189–216; ­Marek Figura: Konflikt polsko-ukraiński w prasie Polski Zachodniej w latach 1918–1923. Poznań 2001; Michał Klimecki: Polsko-ukraińska wojna o Lwów i Galicję Wschodnią, 1918–1919. Warszawa 2000; Grzegorz Babiński: Pogranicze polsko-ukraińskie. Eticzność. Zróżnicowanie religijne. Tożsamość. Kraków 1997; Wiesław Lesiuk/Irena Sroka: Die oberschlesischen Aufstände in der Bewertung der letzten 75 Jahre aus polnischer Sicht, in: Via Silesia 3 (1996), 162–183; Kai Struve: Geschichte und Gedächtnis in Oberschlesien. Die polnischen Aufstände nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, in: idem (ed.): Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Studien zu einem nationalen Konflikt und seiner Erinnerung. Marburg 2003, 1–32; Edmund Spevack: Borderland Nationalism, Westward Migration, and Anti-Polish Aggression. The Case of the Grenzmark Posen-Westpreußen, 1919–1939, in: East European Quarterly 3 (1996), 301–330; Edward Długajczyk: Polska konspiracja wojskowa na Śląsku Cieszyńskim w latach 1919–1920. Katowice 2005; Leszek Kuberski/ Michał Lis: Rok 1918 w Polsce i w państwach sąsiednich. Osiemdziesięciolecie zakończenia I wojny światowej z perspektywy śląskiej. Opole 2002. 39 Tim Wilson: Frontiers of Violence. Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia 1918– 1922. Oxford/New York 2010; Alexander V. Prusin: Nationalizing a Borderland. War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920. Tuscaloosa 2005. 40 Jerzy J. Wiatr: The Soldier and the Nation. The Role of the Military in Polish Politics, 1918–1985. Boulder/London 1988, 21–22. 38 Christoph

246   Julia Eichenberg The official reorganization of the Polish forces into the Polish army started even before the declaration of the Polish state (in late October 1918) with Polish government calls for all former legionnaires and officers to be sworn in to the Polish army in Warsaw.41 Most military formations retained their former structure and command, changing in name only.42 Ranks were filled with volunteers, individual demobilised soldiers, and men who had been too young to serve during the war. For most of the period from 1918 to 1920, there was no functioning chain of command from Józef Piłsudski as the new head of state to the troops roaming the country. The demobilisation of the older soldiers and foreign Polish volunteers in March 1920 led to a genuine reorganisation. In the meantime, Polish formations fought what looked like a traditional state war. The aim of the Polish border wars was to secure and expand the territory of the new Polish state. But without a functioning chain of command, it is more accurate to describe the participating formations as paramilitaries, because although they represented the future core of a new army, they were not yet state-controlled. Their participation in violence against civilians and banditry underlined their paramilitary nature. The dynamics of civil war and national uprising mixed with the dynamics of a war of conquest, and the new social cleavage was secured by paramilitaries who were strangers to the regions and their communities. The soldiers of Haller’s army committed a significant number of atrocities against civilians in the eastern territories.43 They included Polish prisoners of war, deserters from the armies of the Central Powers, and volunteers of Polish origin from the United States, France and Great Britain. On their way to the East, they were joined by large numbers of Polish volunteers, who had either just left the German or Austrian army, or had not been mobilized during the First World War. It is likely that these paramilitaries experienced a culture shock similar to that described by Liulevicius in the case of German soldiers in the East. The threat of the unfamiliar may have provoked a surge of violence. Catholicism had a major influence on national self-perception, public opinion and cultural 41 Karol

Baczyński, “Pamiętniki względnie Wspomnienia o ruchu i pracy niepodległościowej mojej i młodzieży polskej we Lwowie w latach od r. 1885 do 1914, o służbie w legionach Polskich I wojsku polskim w latach 1914–1921 oraz pracy społecznej od r. 1924 do 1935” (17. 10. 1918), 159, Ossolineum Wrocław, 12925/III 1885–1939. 42 Rodowody i Symbolika Formacji Górnośląskich, 11 Pułk Piechoty established in November 1918 with former POW members filled its ranks with former legionnaires, Polish soldiers from the former 13 Austrian Schützenbataillons, and volunteers. See Wojciech B. Moś: Wojsko Polskie i Organizacje paramilitarne. Katowice 1997, 25–26. 43 Andrzej Kapiszewski: Controversial Reports on the Situation of Jews in Poland in the ­Aftermath of World War I, in: Studia Judaica 7 (2004), 257–304, 270, 276.

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life. Traditional nationalist concepts of ‘Polishness’ (polskość) either excluded religious minorities such as Jews, (Prussian) Protestants, and members of the (Ukrainian) Orthodox Church or rendered their participation in the national project problematic. The myth of coercion in the imperial armies and consent in the armed struggle for the national cause has overstressed the number of deserters of the former and volunteers for the latter. However, as recent research has shown, many more soldiers remained loyal to the imperial armies than public commemoration cares to remember.44 By the same token, while a surprisingly large number of men did volunteer to join paramilitary pre-state formations, enthusiasm for the war was by no means universal.45 As I mentioned above, many former soldiers of the imperial armies protested against being placed in prisoner-of-war camps the Allied powers had specifically designed for national minorities. Thus, the question of why soldiers continued fighting is even more relevant in the case of Eastern and East Central Europe. Why did Eastern European soldiers keep fighting, not just on the Eastern Front, but also on the other fronts to which they were sent by the imperial armies? The dichotomy of ­coercion and consent helps to simplify, but it does not suffice as a model to ­explain the fluidity of war experiences in Eastern Europe. In trying to explain the phenomenon, it is more useful to use a concept that represents a compromise between coercion and consent: the concept of endurance. More recently, scholars around John Horne (Dublin) and Alexander Watson (Oxford) have introduced a three-term model: acceptance, endurance and ­refusal.46 The second term is crucial to explaining the predominant war experience. It allows for an acknowledgment of the complexity of a conflict that 44 Historians

like Benjamin Ziemann had spoken of a high desertion rate among the Polish minority. Benjamin Ziemann: Soldaten, in: Gerhard Hirschfeld/Gerd Krumeich/Irina Renz (eds.): Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg. Paderborn 2003, 155–168, 163. However, this has been refuted by studies engaging specifically with Eastern Europe, for example Mark Cornwall: Morale and Patriotism in the Austro-Hungarian army, 1914–1918, in: John Horne (ed.): State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War. Cambridge 1997, 173–191; Szlanta, C.K. dezerterzy, 22–27; Dietrich Beyrau/Pavel P. Shcherbinin’: Alles für die Front. Russland im Krieg 1914–1922, in: Arnd Bauerkämper/Elise Julien (eds.): Durchhalten! Krieg und Gesellschaft im Vergleich 1914–1918. Göttingen 2010, 151–177, 160. 45 Especially when compared to other national case studies such as Ireland, where the recruitment of Irish soldiers among captured soldiers of the British army in German prisoner-of-war camps failed to all intents and purposes. 46 “Dans la Guerre (1914–1918): Accepter, Endurer, Refuser/Inside the War (1914–1918): Acceptance, Endurance, Refusal”, organised by the Centre de Recherche de l’Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, 7–9. 11. 2008; Watson, Enduring the Great War.

248   Julia Eichenberg defied predictions. ‘Endurance’ is used to describe the reactions of many people to a phenomenon that seemed to engulf their temporal and spatial horizons. In Watson’s and Horne’s understanding, the three terms do not describe a sequential development – from acceptance through endurance to refusal. Instead, all three strategies overlapped. Endurance of the war stemmed from the need to survive. Survival entailed a large measure of acceptance. Endurance also entailed a refusal of sorts – if only the refusal of the discourse of heroic acceptance or the failure to transform society in proportion to the sacrifices made in the war. Endurance emphasizes the various strategies, both individual and collective, that were required in a war that proved impossible to predict and equally impossible to avoid; it also underlines the moments of rupture when endurance was no longer possible. Although usually remembered as a conflict of attrition, the First World War was “above all, a contest of endurance.”47 Ordinary soldiers continued fighting for “fear of the consequences of an enemy invasion for their countries, and still more for their homes, families and loved ones”, a drive much stronger than the fear of punishment. Most importantly, the common soldier was much more prone to identifying with his fellow soldiers and comrades in arms than with the abstract concept of the nation.48 Endurance was not easy, and the will to stand by their families and fellow soldiers placed an additional burden on combatants. Soldiers helped themselves survive by using different mental coping strategies such as humour, songs, mockery, fatalism, irrational optimism, religion, or superstition. However, according to Watson, the immediate impact of the army leadership and junior officers on the morale of their troops was hugely significant for endurance. Future research on the First World War in Eastern Europe would do well to focus on the cultural history of the morale and endurance of soldiers in the imperial armies beyond classical national narratives. The concept of endurance is also helpful with regard to the transition from the First World War to the ‘post-war period’ after 1918, when peace did not reign in Eastern Europe. Instead, there was a wave of fighting and violence in what can be described as the ‘aftershocks’ of the Great War.49 Frequently, these post-war clashes drew on the men, experiences and weaponry of the First 47 Watson,

Enduring the Great War, 1. 56–60. 49 Julia Eichenberg/John Paul Newman: Aftershocks. Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War (Introduction), in: Contemporary European History 3 (2010), 183– 194. 48 Ibid.,

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World War. Many combatants engaged in these conflicts perceived them as a continuation of the war. The immediate withdrawal of the Russian army from the war dramatically altered the face of the Eastern Front, resulting in a chaotic scramble for the control of areas that were to become a crucial theatre in the subsequent civil war. The release of hundreds of thousands of AustroHungarian and German prisoners of war from Russian captivity at the end of 1917 as part of the Bolshevik withdrawal destabilised the Hohenzollern and Habsburg Empires. Over the course of 1918, these ‘returnees’ arrived back home, but many refused to re-enlist in the army, and some even joined armed bands in rural areas of Central Europe. The subsequent collapse of the European empires led to a power vacuum in which paramilitary violence proliferated. Does this continuance of violence prove that there was not only widespread consent to war and violence, but also a process of what has been called ‘brutalization’? Since the publication of his book on Germany, George Mosse’s ­argument regarding the impact of the war experience on German soldiers has been transformed into a general theory.50 The experience of the First World War has been pinpointed as the cause of paramilitary and political radicalization. Violence, it has been concluded, breeds violence. The post-war paramilitary violence seems to be a case in point. Of course, the war contributed to the spiralling of violence after the 1918 armistice. However, the story is not as straightforward as that. On the contrary: in many ways, the post-war conflicts contradict the theory of brutalization. The experience of war did not necessarily breed a group of brutalized men who could not refrain from fighting and killing. The continued violence cannot only be attributed to brutalized soldiers who turned into paramilitary perpetrators. Instead, it had more to do with the overall social, political and cultural changes introduced by the war. Thus the concept of endurance does not just reconcile the dichotomy of consent vs. coercion; it can also put the often over-simplified theory of brutalization into perspective and focus attention on shifting social paradigms. In so doing, it explains the extent to which the failure of a cultural demobilization and the failure to process the experience of violence and war in the immediate aftermath of World War I led to a continuance of violence. Violence after the end of the First World War marked a turn in the relations between civil society and military formations. The usual dichotomy between combatants and civilians was transcended. The relationship between civilian 50 George

1990.

L. Mosse: Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford

250   Julia Eichenberg and military life was re-negotiated after the First World War as new nation states emerged amidst continuing violence. Many combatants were veterans of the First World War. These veterans were physically trained to fight and psychologically inured to doing so. Handling weaponry was nothing new to them. Neither were the predominantly male companionship, the austerity of wartime life, or the experience and use of violence. However, the perception that most combatants at this time were veterans of the First World War is flawed. Formations filled their ranks with volunteers, many of whom had been too young to serve during the war, as well as demobilized soldiers. Unlike regular military units, paramilitary formations often accepted unconventional combatants, including women and children, thereby further dissolving the dichotomy between civilians and the military. Some of the male recruits were too young for normal military service. It was only after the demobilization of the older soldiers and the foreign Polish volunteers in March 1920 that there was a genuine reorganization of the Polish army.51 In the Polish commemoration of the war of independence, the myth that the entire young Polish male population had risen up to fight was cherished. However, the recruitment of volunteers was not as straightforward as Poland’s political and military leaders might have wished. While official statements claimed that there was a steady flow of volunteers, some military leaders contradicted those claims. Karol Baczyński, a lieutenant colonel of the infantry who fought in Lemberg complained that he “had to start putting together ­patrols to look for volunteers for the military among anybody aged between 20 and 40.”52 Instead of assembling troops of volunteers and putting them into action, Baczyński and his men had to go from door to door, forcing every able-bodied man into uniform so that they could join in the “defense of Lwów”.53 The numbers of volunteers differed in various regions. The recruitment of any available ‘volunteers’ to the national cause led to a decline in the quality of the paramilitary units. The ex-servicemen who served in them frequently complained about the lack of discipline. According to their critics, some units were little more than gangs of bandits formed by “local peasants, mostly veterEichenberg: The Dark Side of Independence. Religiously and Ethnically Motivated Violence in Poland and Ireland. 1918–1923, in: Contemporary European History 3 (2010), 231–248; Julia Eichenberg: Soldiers to Civilians, Civilians to Soldiers. Poland and Ireland after the First World War, in: Robert Gerwarth/John Horne (eds.): War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War. Oxford 2012, 182–197. 52 Baczyński, “Pamiętniki” (14. 11. 1918–20. 10. 1919), Ossolineum Wrocław, 12925/III 1885–1939. 53 Ibid. Lwów is the Polish name for Lemberg. 51 Julia

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ans of the Russian army who once fought with the communists [but are] now just anti-communist and anti-Semitic gangs, never disdaining armed robbery.”54 Discipline was also undermined by alcohol consumption and war weariness. These developments were conducive to outbursts of violence against civilians in a transitional period with little state control. This ‘dark side’ of the struggle for independence was difficult to reconcile with the idea of the heroic independence fighter, the embodiment of consent to struggle for the national cause.55 Violence also spiralled due to the impact of the First World War experience. However, this cannot simply be attributed to the brutalization of former soldiers. There were other factors: the violence that emerged after the Russian Revolution and the history of systemic anti-Semitism. Paramilitary perpetrators saw themselves as the basis of a future national army, defending the interests of their people against threatening foreign powers. They saw themselves as a parastatal, or even a pre-state army. This self-perception distinguished them from other paramilitary formations active in that period. At the same time, it seemed to legitimize their actions, both during an outbreak of violence and in the context of later commemoration.56 It is not my intention to downplay the impact of the First World War. On the contrary: the First World War in Central and Eastern Europe was far more than a mere prelude to regaining and securing independence in the border conflicts. The various war experiences of Poles proved essential to the consolidation of the new nation state. These experiences were highly formative for interwar politics, not just with regard to welfare policy and the question of minorities, but also with regard to the new Polish army and its military strategies. Because Poland was a strategic hotspot in Central Europe – the German invasion of Poland would later start the Second World War – the origins of Polish military and political consolidation are critical to our understanding of broader European history. The violence that broke out immediately after the First World War cannot be fully explained with reference to the brutalization of soldiers. Taking a broader view than George Mosse, Joshua Sanborn and Peter Gatrell have shown that beyond the soldiers’ experience of the war, it was the experience of migration and disorientation and the uprooting of entire societies that trig54 Andrzej

Brochocki, “Wspomnienia wojenne z 13-go pułku ułanów Wileńskich. Okres walk od Samoobrony Wileńskiej w 1918 r. do zawarcia rozejmu z Litwinami w 1920 roku”, Biblioteka Narodowa, Rps, akc 10312, 36–37. 55 Eichenberg, The Dark Side of Independence; Eichenberg, Soldiers to Civilians, Civilians to Soldiers. 56 Eichenberg, Soldiers to Civilians, Civilians to Soldiers, 197.

252   Julia Eichenberg gered a spiralling of violence that had a lasting impact on Eastern European societies and politics.57 As regards the soldiers, it was not a one-way process of brutalization, but rather the partial failure of military and cultural demobilization that favoured the continuation of violence.

Coming to terms with war and violence For Poland, the war brought huge human losses. It was also an immense psychological trauma. Since the nineteenth century, Polish nationalists, especially Adam Mickiewicz, had argued that Poland would regain her independence following a disagreement or even a war between the Partition Powers. When it came, this war brought total war to Polish territory and led to a fratricidal conflict, in which Poles, conscripts in the respective partition armies, had to face their compatriots in battle. This memory was not conducive to integrating a nation that had been divided for more than a century. On regaining independence in 1918, integration was the major problem faced by the Second Polish Republic. The population, institutions and traditions of the three formerly divided territories had to be united into one new entity. This proved to be even more difficult, because in 1918 there were six currencies in circulation, four languages of command were used in the army, three legal codes were in force, and several regions still had separate administrations. The broad range of uniforms in which Polish soldiers returned from the battlegrounds symbolized the overall confusion. Furthermore, in the context of unification, the memory of a war in which Poles had served in all kinds of uniforms was not welcome. The merits of the new national Polish army and their battles in the border wars were considered a much more appropriate subject of remembrance. In short, the new national narrative focused on Polish participation in the struggles for state sovereignty, which it regarded as a legitimate form of consent. Therefore, Polish commemoration focused on the achievement of national independence. Public memory effectively forgot the war experience, only remembering those aspects that could be integrated into the new national narrative. At the core of this narrative were the new Polish national army and the story of its successful campaigns in the post-war conflicts, the border wars. Sanborn: Unsettling the Empire. Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I, in: Journal of Modern History 2 (2005), 290–324; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 15–33; Eugene M. Kulischer: Europe on the Move. War and Population Changes, 1917–1947. New York 1948, 30–39.

57 Joshua

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These conflicts were and are still widely regarded as the independence wars of the independent Polish state, as nation-building wars. Even today, the narrative of the Polish army and its wars in the period from 1918 to 1923 are central to Polish national identity. It is only recently that historians have started to question this and integrate the years of the First World War into research and public commemoration.58 While national commemoration tried to impose one national narrative, the Eastern European participation in the war would be much better described by accepting and analysing a fluidity of war experiences. There was no one way of experiencing war and violence. I use the word ‘fluidity’ to describe how there were no clear dividing lines between different kinds of experience, no way of distinguishing between a civilian and a military experience, or between a military and a paramilitary experience. Even the distinction between victim and perpetrator was not always clear. It is important to grasp this fluidity and complexity to understand the challenge of coming to terms with war and violence in Eastern Europe. The commemoration of the war and the political and administrative attempts to deal with it ultimately cemented the narrative of the Polish war experience, focusing on the post-war conflicts and exaggerating military unity for the sake of national integration. Thus, it is more accurate to speak of a nation-building narrative than a nation-building army (or war). In this context, war experience became both an object and a weapon of discussion. The debate about participation in World War I shows the extent to which the apparently objective memory of the war is socially constructed. Many ‘Polish veterans’ who spent the war as recruits in the Russian army, officers in the Habsburg army, or soldiers fighting in the German army, argued that they had served the partition powers neither out of a sense of duty, nor for the sake of their careers. They claimed that their only motivation had been to support the Polish war of independence, to infiltrate these armies and thereby acquire military skills.59 At the same time, in the context of regaining national independence and the Piłsudski cult, the military impact of the Polish legions was greatly exaggerated.60 While they ultimately became the core of the discussion of historiography in Eichenberg, Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge, 7–9. On the ‘renaissance’ of the First World War in Poland, see among others Daniel ­Grinberg et al. (eds.): Lata Wielkiej Wojny. Dojrzewanie do niepodległości 1914–1918. Białystok 2007. The German Historical Institute in Warsaw, along with several Polish institutions picked up on the First World War in their current research projects in time for the centenary 2014–2018. 59 Eichenberg, Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge, 136–137. 60 Hein, Piłsudski-Kult. 58 See

254   Julia Eichenberg the new Polish army during the border wars, the legions began fighting alongside the Central Powers. The fact that the Polish Habsburg soldier Kania was the hero of a 2005 comedy series shows that Poland has become reconciled with the once shunned heritage represented by the veterans of the partition powers. Coming to terms with war and violence is a twofold process. It refers firstly to the immediate reaction of contemporaries to their first-hand experiences of war and violence. And, in a broader understanding of war experience, it refers to how contemporaries deal with experiences of military combat, forced migration, food scarcity and physical hardships that have been communicated to them. Secondly, coming to terms with war and violence also refers to the ­private, public and professional (historiographical) memory of fighting and atrocities. While the first form of coming to terms with war and violence appears to be closer to the actual event, in recent decades scholars have convincingly argued that all experience and understanding are influenced by existing attitudes and expectations and are therefore always constructed. These claims are based on Gadamer’s hermeneutic approach and Koselleck’s suggestion of a gap between the space of experience and the horizon of expectations.61 This is as true of the ‘immediate’ experience as it is of later commemoration, remembrance, and historical portrayal. Furthermore, as recent research on memory (Assmann) suggests, remembrance and commemoration do not just entail ­active remembering and passive forgetting, but also a very active form of forgetting and overwriting to install a dominant discourse.62 While it is known as the ‘Great War’ in Great Britain and France, the First World War has been called a “forgotten war” in Poland, because it seems to play a minor role in daily life and in academic research.63 As far as a history based on nation states is concerned, Poland did not even take part in this war, because it did not exist as a state at the time. For that reason, most literature on the First World War does not break down statistics to reveal the numbers of dead and wounded Poles. Polish historiography chose to neglect the Polish history of the First World War for the sake of a more national narrative. Polish 61 Hans-Georg Gadamer: Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Herme-

neutik. Tübingen 1975, 329–345, 337; Reinhart Koselleck: ‘Erfahrungsraum’ und ‘Erwartungshorizont’. Zwei historische Kategorien, in: idem: Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt am Main 1989, 349–375, 353, 361. 62 Aleida Assmann: Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit. Stuttgart 1999; idem: Von kollektiver Gewalt zu gemeinsamer Zukunft. Vier Modelle für den Umgang mit traumatischer Vergangenheit, in: Kerstin von Lingen (ed.): Kriegserfahrung und nationale Identität in Europa nach 1945. Erinnerung, Säuberungsprozesse und nationales Gedächtnis. Paderborn 2009, 42–52. 63 Traba, Zapomniana Wojna; Eichenberg, Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge.

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veterans of the Great War found themselves at the centre of a national conflict about the interpretation and commemoration of that war. In promoting their interpretation of the First World War, these veterans attempted to raise their own social status in symbolic and material terms. In the years of his Sanacja-Regime, a cult of Piłsudski and his Polish legions was established and cultivated as part of the political foundational myth.64 Interest in the First World War increased in this context as Piłsudski was regarded as “the builder of the fatherland”, who had foreseen Poland’s independence and seized it. However, this interest was limited to the Polish legions and, to a lesser extent, on other ‘national’ formations. Those who had fought within the imperial armies were called ‘zaborcy’, a pejorative term based on the word zabór, which denoted the three parts of partitioned Poland. It was a long time before an opening emerged for these soldiers in national commemoration: the aforementioned narrative of the deserting soldier who longed to join in the national cause. The myth of the prisoner of war as volunteer symbolically purged the indignity of millions of Polish men who had fought in foreign uniforms. Ironically, the fact that Piłsudski’s legions fought side by side with the Central Powers was ignored. The Piłsudski cult and the significant presence of former legionnaires in the military and political life of the Second Polish Republic reveal the extent to which German and Habsburg military formations shaped the new Polish state.65 The League of Polish Legionnaires (Związek legionistów Polskich) formed the political foundation and the recruitment pool for the regime, the ruling political party, the military, the media, etc.66 This rather conservative and nationalist veterans’ organization supported the belief that in Poland, war experience had led to a certain political radicalization among veterans. However, this ignores the original significance of most veterans’ associations. After the war, veterans felt the need to assemble and form veteran’s or64 Hein, Piłsudski-Kult. 65 Józef Piłsudski, the authoritarian

political and military leader of interwar Poland, was also linked to the achievements of the POW, the Sokół, and the Polish legions. Today, the latter tend to be regarded as a purely Polish formation and their actual military position alongside the Central Powers is ignored. The Second Polish Republic under Piłsudski defined itself as primarily anti-Russian and anti-Bolshevik rather than following the fierce anti-German line of Piłsudski’s political opponent Roman Dmowski. 66 While only nine per cent of the political and military elite comprised former legionnaires before 1926, that number rose to about 59  per cent between 1926 and 1939. In 1924, 21  per cent of the generals in the Polish army were former legionnaires. In 1932 this number increased to 74 per cent. The same was true – with varying nuances – of politics, media, etc. See Roman Wapiński: Problemy kszałtowania się elit politycznych II Rzeczypospolitej, in: Jerzy Leskiewicz (ed.): Społeczeństwo polskie XIX i XX wieku. Studia o grupach elitarnych. Warszawa 1982, 244.

256   Julia Eichenberg ganizations to join in commemoration and promote their material interests. The exact number of people who joined these organisations is still not known. The commitment of a significant number of veterans to questions of welfare legislation and social benefits shows that once demobilisation was complete, former combatants continued to fight for their rights, but they did so using democratic methods. Central European veterans also contributed to international associations to lobby for their monetary interests, secure their social standing, and protest against a new war. Two years after the end of the war, in 1920, the Fédération Interalliée des Anciens Combattants (FIDAC) was founded as an association of Allied ex-servicemen. While its principal concern was to maintain and develop the bonds formed between Allied servicemen in the First World War in the post-war period, FIDAC commemoration also sought to preserve the sense of community among the former Allied soldiers in the present and the future for political reasons. A second, competing veterans association Conférence Internationale des Associations de Mutilés et Anciens Combattants/International Conference of Organisations of Invalids and Ex-Servicemen (CIAMAC) took an international, conciliatory approach by including veterans of the former Central Powers. Polish veterans were among the most active promoters of these two organizations. Many Czechoslovak and Yugoslav veterans were also de­ dicated members. The discourse between the former combatants in both ­FIDAC and CIAMAC was based to a certain extent on a precise political agenda. In the context of growing tensions with Germany, Eastern European veterans increasingly stressed their own service for the Allies against the Central Powers in order to encourage the former Allies to maintain military alliances. Common antagonisms towards revisionist Germany were stressed, as was the acute danger posed by Russian Bolshevism, the spread of which had been allegedly prevented by the Poles.67 The international meetings provided a platform that the formerly divided veterans could use to construct a new national identity, not as veterans of the Habsburg, German, or Russian armies, but as veterans who, regardless of the colour of their uniform, had always been Polish at heart. If they had not joined the national military formations voluntarily, it was only because they had not been able to do so, forced, as they were, to serve the partition armies. Thus the national narrative of consent vs. coercion was born. The myth of the volunteering prisoners of war that underlined the narrative of coercion was used in a symbolic purge of the indignity 67 “And

the leader of the Soviet army expressly recognises that Poland, with its victory on the Vistula, saved Western Europe from the fire of Bolshevism.” In: Roman Górecki: La Pologne Nouvelle – New Poland, in: FIDAC Revue (July 1930), 7, 9–20, 13.

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of 1.5 million Polish men who had fought in foreign uniforms for the armies of the partition powers, Russia, Germany and Austria.68

Conclusions The dichotomy of consent and coercion does not do justice to the complexity of war experiences and it does not adequately explain how societies came to terms with war and violence. This is particularly true of Eastern Europe, which was subject to fluid war experiences. The process of coming to terms with war and violence was complicated in this region by a changing social framework. Firstly, the absence of a clear-cut ‘other’, an obvious and continuous enemy in Eastern Europe meant that a consent theory could only be socially constructed. By the same token, in the construction of a new national discourse the dichotomy of us vs. others was emphasised, laying the foundation for various conflicts with national minorities and neighbouring states. Secondly, the seamless transition to border conflicts, violence against minorities, and revolutionary violence blurred the boundaries between world war and civil war. The alleged caesura of 1918 was not a true caesura. This does not, however, support the thesis of a brutalisation of all veterans of the First World War. Most combatants were not forced to fight, nor were they ­eager combatants. They fought because they lived in a world where violence was part of the logical framework – even when the framework itself changed. They continued to fight because they were never successfully demobilized in military or in cultural terms. The fact that many First World War veterans later became active members of a civilian social movement dedicated to social reform and, to a certain extent, to pacifism and internationalism, proves that demobilisation was possible, but it had initially failed within the ‘shatter zones’ of the empires.69 When the difficult transition from World War I to the post-war conflicts inhibited a successful demobilization, soldiers continued fighting. They endured the violence around them and tried to cope by investing it with a meaning: national independence. In a national narrative based on the dichotomy between consent and coercion, all war experiences could be integrated into a memory of a national war at a time before an independent nation state had 68 Eichenberg,

Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge. Eichenberg/Newman, Aftershocks; Omer Bartov/Eric D. Weitz (eds.): Shatterzone of Empires. Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington 2013.

69 Compare

258   Julia Eichenberg come into existence. The consent vs. coercion dichotomy is, however, a socially constructed narrative. Closer analysis of the Eastern European war experience and the ways in which East Central European societies came to terms with war and violence – or failed to do so – will benefit from an examination of how soldiers and the civilian population endured the war and how they were militarily and culturally demobilized in its aftermath.

Philipp Ther

Pre-negotiated Violence: Ethnic Cleansing in the ‘Long’ First World War If one reassesses the history of the First World War in view of the legacy of violence it left behind, it is necessary to look beyond the years 1914–1918. The official timespan of the war is inadequate to understanding its pre-history and aftermath; these dates also indirectly reflect an occidental bias and a focus on a narrowly defined political history. In considering mass violence and the radicalization of nationalist thought, one should look back to 1912, when the First Balkan War broke out. Furthermore, the focus should extend to the early 1920s, when peace was finally established in the many borderlands of East Central Europe and in Southeastern Europe. Thus, one might speak of a ‘long’ World War I beyond the formal dates of 1914–1918. Although the fighting continued in large parts of Eastern Europe, violence and ethnic cleansing are not only an issue in Eastern European history. The concept of a homogeneous nation state originates in Western Europe; the radicalized versions of these concepts were influenced and sometimes proposed by Western European intellectuals and politicians, who also shaped the peace order that established ethnic cleansing as a means of international politics. Therefore, to understand the specific forms of violence in different parts of the continent, one needs to adopt a broader European perspective. The following article is ordered chronologically and deals with violence in a wider sense, including, for example, pre-negotiated state measures to change ethnic population structures by mass migration. This is an aspect of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that can be defined as the wholesale, violent and permanent removal of an ethnically defined group from its homeland. In contrast to genocide, a vision of an external homeland or nation state to which the targeted group can be driven operates where ethnic cleansing is concerned. This was absent in the case of the Armenian Genocide, which should be regarded as the first genocide in European history on account of this and other factors, such as the dolus specialis and the death toll. Most cases of ethnic cleansing between 1912 and the mid-1920s did not involve such radical victimization and were contractual. That means that two or more states agreed on the ­removal of certain population groups and concluded international treaties to regulate it. In that period ethnic cleansing was accepted and legalized as a means of international diplomacy and a way of strengthening nation states

260   Philipp Ther internally. In fact, these contractual population ‘exchanges’ or ‘transfers’ were more far-reaching than one-sided expulsions or other instances of mass violence. This in turn calls into question the theory that the First World War was a trigger and the long-term cause of communal inter-ethnic violence. As I will show in this article, cycles of violence in the narrow physical sense certainly occurred, which could only be interrupted in the early or mid-1920s. Yet the lasting legacy of this period was the legalization of violent means of conflict resolution in international politics, and hence violence exercised by states.

The Balkan Wars and their consequences The entire region of Southeastern Europe was involved in the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 in various constellations. In the First Balkan War in the autumn of 1912, the Ottoman Empire was defeated by the united forces of Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro, losing all its European territories with the exception of a small strip of land west of the capital Istanbul. Subsequently, the allied Balkan states could not agree on how to divide up the Ottoman inheritance. And so the Second Balkan War broke out in the summer of 1913. In that conflict the former allies defeated Bulgaria and Turkey recaptured territory stretching as far as Edirne (Adrianople). While the periods of actual fighting were quite brief, lasting no more than a month in each of the Balkan Wars, they marked a turning point in modern warfare. The rearmed forces, which comprised more than 750 000 soldiers, deliberately attacked civilian populations. The Carnegie Commission, which travelled to the affected areas towards the end of the Second Balkan War, observed the same terrible scenes along a number of fronts: “Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind.”1

1

The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect, with a new introduction and reflections on the present conflict by George F. Kennan. Washington 1993, 151. The Report can also be found online at Archive.org: Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan War (1914), at: http://www.archive.org/details/reportofinternat00inteuoft (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013). This citation refers to the conduct of the Serbian army in Kosovo, but similar reports were made on the Greek and Bulgarian armies. See ibid., 148–207 and the appendix with eyewitness accounts. More details and literature can be found in Philipp Ther: Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten. ‘Ethnische Säuberungen’ im modernen Europa. Göttingen 2011; see also the contribution by Mark Biondich to this volume; idem: The Balkans. Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878. Oxford 2011, 75–84.

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When the hostilities began, it was primarily Muslims who were hit by pillaging, rape, massacres, and other crimes. According to the French historian and expert on migration Alexandre Tourmakine, an estimated 200 000 Muslims lost their lives as a consequence of wilful violence, starvation, and epidemics, that is about five per cent of the entire Muslim population of 4.3 million people in the territories ‘liberated’ from Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria.2 The Carnegie Commission found evidence of systematic persecution: “The Muslim population endured during the early weeks of the war a period of lawless vengeance and unmeasured suffering. In many districts the Muslim villages were systematically burned.”3 As in the Turkish Wars of 1876–1878, the ‘vengeance’ mentioned here was triggered less by grievances suffered under Ottoman rule as it was by a deep-rooted contempt for Turks, which stemmed from religious and orientalist prejudice. The violence often only ­escalated after the enemy had been defeated and was defenceless and humiliated. In the Second Balkan War, the Christian Balkan states fought each other as violently as they had previously fought the Ottoman Empire. Immediately after each invasion, there was pillaging, rioting, and in some places, massacres. This was partly due to the nationalist mobilization of some of the civilian population. When, for example, the Bulgarian army moved into Western Thrace, the Greek population in many cities took up arms. It was consistent with military logic to keep this danger behind the front in check by means of violence or deportations. Indeed, the logic of violence also prevailed in visions of the post-war order. At negotiations in London after the First Balkan War in the winter of 1912/1913, the British government repeatedly referred to “ethnological arguments” for determining which country the disputed territories should go to. Even before the war the conflicting parties had armed themselves with population statistics. In 1910 the Ottoman Empire had conducted a general census, following the European model, to count the population down to the humblest souls in the remotest villages.4 The eight-figure population counts show that even newborn babies were identified by nationality. The Greek government responded to the Ottoman Empire’s demographic campaign by ordering diplomatic missions and orthodox dioceses to carry out a census of the Greek See Alexandre Tourmakine: Les migrations des populations musulmanes balkaniques en Anatolie 1876–1913. Istanbul 1995, 77. 3 See Kennan, The Other Balkan Wars, 72. 4 Kemal Karpat: The Ottoman Adoption of Statistics from the West in the 19th Century, in: idem: Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History. Selected Articles and Essays. Leiden 2002, 132–145. 2

262   Philipp Ther minority in the period from 1910 to 1912. While this war of statistics preceded the actual military conflict, it was also part of it. Having put the populations of their respective enemies to flight, the conflicting parties could support their claims to disputed territories on ‘ethnological’ grounds. As would later occur in the twentieth century, there were now incidents of execution, mutilation, and rape, and occasionally violation of corpses.5 The goal of this symbolic violence was to intimidate the remaining members of minorities and compel them to flee. Furthermore, the perpetrators of such excesses could vaunt themselves within their own group. When the actual fighting ceased, it was followed by the systematic discrimination of minorities by means of special taxes, expropriation, and the dismissal of employees and agricultural workers. Muslims in particular lost their livelihoods in this way. The scale of the refugee problem during the Balkan Wars was as unprecedented as the number of civilian victims. Muslims were usually the first to take flight, often before the armies invaded. By the autumn of 1913, over 150 000 Muslims had arrived in Saloniki alone. In Thrace, along the BulgarianTurkish front, roughly 50 000 Bulgarians and the same number of Turks fled into exile. During the Second Balkan War, roughly 80 000 Bulgarians and 100 000 Greeks took flight. Yet the population shifts after the two Balkan Wars were even more extensive than the refugee movements on the various fronts of the conflict. About 240 000 Muslims were shipped to Asia Minor; a further 40 000 travelled overland via Kavalla. Greece supported this exile, even allowing Turkish ships to dock. In total, the Ottoman Empire had absorbed 413 000 Southeastern European Muslims by 1914. A further wave of migration moved towards Greece. By the spring of 1914, roughly 170 000 Greeks had fled from Asia Minor and Bulgaria; Bulgaria registered 150 000 refugees in the same period. These figures add up to a total of at least 890 000 individuals who were forced to permanently leave their homes as a consequence of the two Balkan Wars.6 The connection between ethnic cleansing and the collapse of empires can hardly explain the situation in Southeastern Eur­ope.7 These huge scale population shifts took place in the context of wars between aggressive nation states, while the drastically reduced Ottoman Empire was yet to become one. The composition of the population in Southeastern Europe and Asia Minor had See Kennan, The Other Balkan Wars, 148–149. See Ther, Die dunkle Seite, 74; Yannis G. Mourelos: The 1914 Persecutions and the First Attempt at an Exchange of Minorities Between Greece and Turkey, in: Balkan Studies 2 (1985), 389–413, 389, 391. 7 See for example Rogers Brubaker: Nationalism Reframed. Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge 1996. 5 6

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changed fundamentally. In the Greek part of Macedonia, only about a quarter of the pre-war Muslim population remained; in parts of Thrace an ethnic border already existed. Not only flight and expulsion but also settlement measures played a major role in the homogenization of this large area. Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey took advantage of the refugees’ plight to populate their newly gained territories with their own nationals. The Greek government was the most active in this respect, even calling Greeks from the Russian Black Sea coast back to their supposed homeland. Unlike the era of nation state formation after 1878, population policy was now centrally controlled and extensively enforced in all countries. The arrival of refugees from the Balkan Wars led to new expulsions in many regions. A well-documented example is that of Eastern Thrace, where the Greek population had participated in the pillaging of the Turkish quarters of towns and neighbouring villages along the Marmara coast in 1912/1913.8 The local population was already outraged when thousands of bitter refugees arrived from the Balkans, sparking riots against the local Greeks, who escaped to the refuge of a few isolated towns. These local troubles show that the distinction between victims and perpetrators is blurred where ethnic cleansing is concerned. Incited by their government, the Muslim exiles of the Balkan Wars themselves became initiators of expulsion. The situation was similar in northern Greece, where a further 50 000 Muslims were driven out to the Ottoman Empire over the course of 1914. In western Asia Minor, too, a new dynamic set in in 1914. Despite fierce protests from the Ottoman Empire, the major European powers decided to cede the Aegean islands close to the mainland to Greece.9 This intensified Turkish fears that Greece would soon expand towards Asia Minor following the ‘Megali Idea’ (aimed a Greater Greece on both sides of the Aegean Sea, including Constantinople).10 In response to the annexation of the Aegean islands near the coast, the Ottoman government initiated the deliberate settlement of Turks in the provinces (vilayets) of Izmir and Aydin. In this way, they aimed to achieve two goals: to put an end to the continuing refugee crisis and to defend the new border in demographic terms. As previously in Eastern Thrace, the settlement of refugees went hand in hand with further expulsions. Elisabeth Kontogiorgi: Forced Migration, Repatriation, Exodus. The Case of GanosChora and Myriophyto-Peristasis Orthodox Communities in Eastern Thrace, in: Balkan Studies 1 (1994), 15–45, 22.   9 See ibid., 20–21. 10 See Mourelos, The 1914 Persecutions, 396–398.   8 See

264   Philipp Ther According to Greek estimates, 100 000 people were forced to leave Asia Minor in 1914 alone.11 This was the inevitable consequence of the enforcement of an order of nation states in Southeastern Europe, which was finally resolved at the peace conferences of London and Bucharest. Although the numbers of minorities in all Southeastern European states had increased sharply as a consequence of the Balkan Wars, protecting them was only of secondary or tertiary importance at the peace conferences. The goal of securing lasting peace eventually convinced Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire to enter into negotiations. In September 1913, the two states signed the Treaty of Constantinople, which is often seen to have set a precedent for contractual agreements on ethnic cleansing.12 But this view does not stand up to closer scrutiny. In formal terms, it is true that Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire agreed on an ‘exchange’ of minorities. But this was confined to a 15-kilometer stretch of land along the new border, from which the respective minorities had fled over the course of the war of 1913. No other more extensive population movements were arranged. At the same time, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire agreed on comprehensive rights for minorities. Their property was declared inviolable; religious institutions were assigned special protection and became legal entities; the Muslims in the Bulgarian-won territories were even permitted to retain their Ottoman citizenship. In return, the Ottoman Empire committed to quickly ‘pacifying’ the Muslims in western Thrace, who still made up the majority in the region around Dedeağaç (after the agreement of Neuilly Alexandropolis), thereby confirming their status as a minority in Bulgaria. The Young Turkish government granted freedom of religion and education to the Bulgarian minority.13 The protection of minorities was, at that time, discussed and resolved in far more depth than it had been at previous international peace conferences, including the Berlin Congress. This shows that at regional level, compromise in favour of minorities was possible, contradicting the lingering stereotype of violent Balkan states. The crucial factor in this agreement was that the two losers of the Balkan Wars were involved in the negotiations. Both sides renounced any regional imperialist demands and henceforth refrained from encouraging the irredentist tendencies of their respective external minorities. 11 See

ibid., 405. for example Holm Sundhaussen: Bevölkerungsverschiebungen in Südosteuropa seit der Nationalstaatswerdung (19./20. Jahrhundert), in: Comparativ 1 (1996), 25–40, 35. 13 While somewhat nationalist in tone, a precise account is provided by Georgi Markow: Bulgarien auf der Friedenskonferenz in Konstantinopel (August–September 1913), in: Bulgarian Historical Review 4 (1990), 66–76, 73–75. 12 See

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Half a year after the Treaty of Constantinople was concluded, Greece and the Ottoman Empire entered into negotiations over a “population exchange”.14 The Greek side was initially concerned with improving the treatment of refugees and confining the emigration of the respective minorities to Thrace and Macedonia. The Turkish side, however, extended the scope of negotiations to include western Asia Minor and Epirus. The Greek Prime Minister Venizelos acquiesced, insisting only that emigration be voluntary. In June 1914 both sides formed a four-man commission to come up with concrete proposals for four specific points: voluntariness; a balanced ‘exchange’; compensation for abandoned property; and the possibility of return, which Greece was interested in with an eye to future expansion. Since agreement was basically reached on the principle of voluntariness, Greece withdrew its demand for numerical balance. A generous solution was found to the question of abandoned property. Those affected by the population exchange and even those who had fled previously were conceded the right to compensation for property they were forced to leave behind. All contentious issues were to be resolved by a mixed commission with the participation of Switzerland. Despite the tense relations between Greece and the Ottoman Empire, the negotiations went remarkably smoothly. The goal of creating homogeneous nation states was obviously one that the two sides shared and so they were able to come to a swift agreement. The only points that remained in dispute were some details of the ‘population exchange’ and the unspoken question of whether in the future, ethnically consolidated borders should run directly along the Aegean coast or further inland, as the Greek nationalists envisaged. But the outbreak of the First World War put an end to negotiations over the treaty. The rational manner in which the negotiations of 1914 were held is striking. Even if an impassive approach is still a key requirement of diplomacy, the momentum that these negotiations gained, combined with the population utopias that inspired them, resulted in an escalation of ethnic cleansing. While the initial Greek-Turkish consultations dealt only with Thrace and manage­ ably-sized population groups, the talks some months later concerned about half of Greece and western Asia Minor. They concerned the fate of far more than a million people. These were not refugees, but for the most part native residents. The 1914 negotiations were not, therefore, the confirmation of a status quo due to war, but a forward-looking measure.

details of these negotiations, see Mourelos, The 1914 Persecutions; Harry Psomiades: Fridjof Nansen and the Greek Refugee Problem, in: Deltio Kentrou Mikrasiatikon Spoudon 18 (2009), 287–346, 308–311.

14 For

266   Philipp Ther This pattern was repeated in the negotiations at Lausanne, Yalta and Potsdam. As soon as a population exchange or transfer was agreed on in principle, the matter reached a new dimension in diplomatic negotiations. One might speak of a rationalist or modern European dynamic, which has little in common with hate, revenge, or other emotions that are often put forward to explain ethnic cleansing. Unlike under the later Treaty of Lausanne, however, the minorities were not completely driven out of the affected areas after the Balkan Wars. Just under half of the resident Muslim population remained in Serbia, while more than half of all resident Muslims stayed in Bulgaria and Greece. The percentage was even higher in Romania. This shows that the states in question, despite an undeniable aversion to minorities, were not striving for the total homogenization of their populations. The respective governments were satisfied for the time being if the titular nation held the reins of power throughout the national territory. Thus a regional imperialism prevailed, which did not yet completely rule out ethnic differences. This imperialist element was missing in the Ottoman Empire, where the government had written off the territories lost in 1912/1913. Instead, the urge to consolidate Asia Minor as a bulwark of Turkishness was even stronger. In the case of the Turks, the utopia of ethnic purity was born of a defensive stance, which generated internal aggression.

Deportations during the First World War The First World War brought about huge changes on all these levels and beyond Southeastern Europe. International diplomacy was, for the time being, put on ice. Thus the flow of refugees in conflict zones such as western Asia Minor was slowed down, since ‘population exchanges’ could no longer be arranged. The organized resettlement of refugees came to a standstill. But minorities were now faced with severe persecution in other parts of Europe, too. All resources were mobilized for war, leading to a renewed radicalization of nationalist thought. The omnipotence of the military was coupled with fears of losing power and the assumption that certain sections of the population would support the enemy or prevent supplies from reaching the frontline. This paranoia was especially marked in the weakest continental empires: the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Population groups that made no territorial claims – and were in no position to do so – such as Russia’s Jews and the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia, bore the brunt of it. The Russian military leadership ordered that about one million Jews and Germans be driven from the west of the empire, even though they were hardly mobi-

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lized by modern national movements. In some regions, such as western Lithuania, Courland, and Volhynia, deportations were enforced across the board.15 It should be noted, however, that these were preventative rather than conclusive deportations. In the Ottoman Empire, it was mostly Armenians and Greeks who were threatened with deportation. At the same time, Greeks fled in droves across the Aegean Sea in order to avoid conscription.16 In the eastern half of Anatolia, the situation was more explosive. Firstly, because Armenians were fighting in the Russian army and secondly, because Armenian nationalists were demanding the establishment of an autonomous Armenian state, thereby intensifying Turkish fears of secession. In order to prevent another defeat like that experienced in the Balkan Wars, the Young Turk government ordered the deportation of all Armenians close to the eastern Anatolian front. Armenians were also displaced from cities further afield, but not to their potential external homeland of Russian Armenia. Those in power were aware that the deportees had only a small chance of surviving the long march across the Anatolian highlands to the Syrian coast. Furthermore, they did nothing to prevent the Armenians being pillaged by the local Turkish and especially Kurdish populations, but actually encouraged it.17 Within the German army’s direct sphere of control, there was no ethnic cleansing on a mass scale. Yet in the army’s leadership, in the circle around Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, and in the provincial administrations there were concrete suggestions for mass expulsions from Poland. A “border rampart” inhabited by German settlers was to extend up to the Russian partition.18 After the collapse of the tsarist empire in 1917, these plans gained a new relevance and were extended to the occupied territory in eastern Poland the deportations during the First World War, see Eric Lohr: Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I. Cambridge 2003. Almost one million Poles were also hit by evacuation and deportation. 16 Pentzopoulos suggests that 481 000 Greeks were deported, but this figure is most prob­ ably exaggerated. See Dimitri Pentzopoulos: The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and its Impact upon Greece. London 2002. 17 Uğur Ümit Üngör: Paramilitary Violence in the Former Ottoman Empire, in: Robert Gerwarth/John Horne (eds.): War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War. Oxford 2012, 164–185, 167–175. 18 Immanuel Geis: Der deutsch-polnische Grenzstreifen, 1914–1918. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Lübeck 1960; Martin Broszat: Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik. München 1963, 183; Hermann Graml: Flucht und Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ostdeutschland und Osteuropa. Ein Blick auf historische Zusammenhänge, in: Dierk Hoffmann/Michael Schwartz (eds.): Geglückte Integration? Spezifika und Vergleichbarkeiten der Vertriebenen-Eingliederung in der SBZ/DDR. München 1999, 21–32, 23. 15 On

268   Philipp Ther and the Baltic regions (the area called Ober Ost). Just a year later, the German Empire was forced to surrender and all these projects were put on ice. But since National Socialist policy on the Warthegau and West Prussia was based on these plans, their long-term effects should not be underestimated.19 Unlike the Central Powers, the French army did not nurture any colonial fantasies in Europe, partly because the French, together with the British, were fighting almost exclusively on home territory. But the influential Alsatian government advisor Abbé Émile Wetterlé promoted the policy of ‘selection’ (triage) among the population in Alsace and Lorraine after these territories had been regained.20 He, like most of French society, could not accept coexistence with the Germans. Thus the First World War resulted in concrete plans for ethnic cleansing in several countries and, in two cases, their application. Even far from all fronts, attitudes had become more radical. In 1915 the Swiss ethnologist Georges Montandon defended the idea of a ‘great transplantation’ of minorities in Europe in a pamphlet on Frontières nationales: Détermination objective de la condition primordiales nécessaire à l’obtention d’une paix durable.21 Thinking ahead to a post-war order in Europe, Montandon envisaged an exchange of minorities between states as well as one-sided ‘transfers’. The German-Jewish journalist Siegfried Lichtenstädter also stressed the necessity of population shifts for securing peace.22 Here we can see the influence of colonial attitudes, which were also brought to bear in the case of Southeastern Europe. Population shifts were always proposed for areas that were perceived to be outside one’s own ‘civilization’.

Wolf: Ideologie und Herrschaftsrationalität. Nationalsozialistische Germanisierungspolitik in Westpolen. Hamburg 2012, 47–90. 20 See David Allen Harvey: Lost Children or Enemy Aliens? Classifying the Population of Alsace after the First World War, in: Journal of Contemporary History 4 (1999), 537–554, 539; Christiane Kohser-Spohn: Die Vertreibung der ‘Altdeutschen’ aus dem Elsass 1918– 1920, in: Jerzy Kochanowski/Maike Sach (eds.): Die ‘Volksdeutschen’ in Polen, Frankreich, Ungarn und der Tschechoslowakei. Mythos und Realität. Osnabrück 2006, 79–94. 21 See Georges Montandon: Frontières nationals. Détermination objective de la condition primordiales nécessaire à l´obtention d´une paix durable. Lausanne 1915. The essay is reproduced in: Ferdinand Seibt et al. (eds.): Mit unbestechlichem Blick… Studien von Hans Lemberg zur Geschichte der böhmischen Länder und der Tschechoslowakei. Festgabe zu seinem 65. Geburtstag. München 1998, 377–396. 22 Lichtenstädter first wrote (1898) about the Ottoman Empire. A 1917 publication of his bore the broad title “Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch”. On Lichtenstädter (who often used the pseudonym E. M. Efendi), see Mihran Dabag: National-koloniale Konstruktionen in politischen Entwürfen des Deutschen Reiches um 1900, in: idem et al. (eds.): Kolonialismus. Kolonialdiskurs und Genozid. Paderborn 2004, 19–66, 62. 19 Gerhard

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Post-war migrations The flow of refugees in Europe did not abate with the end of the First World War. On the contrary: civil war in Russia, post-war conflicts, and the new order of nation states in Europe all led to an increase in refugees. The collapse of the tsarist Empire and the Russian Revolution resulted in the hitherto largest refugee movement in European history. In addition to the roughly six million war refugees and evacuees, by 1922 about two million Russians had fled the civil war, most of them abroad. About 250 000 Muslims tried to escape the Armenian-Azerbaijani war in the Caucasus.23 The turmoil of revolution also led to the exodus of more than one million Poles living in Russia.24 While nation states were on the whole willing to accept co-ethnic refugees, minorities such as eastern Jews were anything but welcome. By the early 1920s, 600 000 Germans had left the former Prussian partition zone of Poland. Under the Treaty of Trianon, 425 000 Hungarians emigrated from Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, and Croatia.25 To be sure, these migrations were different from the ethnic cleansing in Southeastern Europe under way at the same time, but they were not voluntary. The emigrating members of the (former) imperial nations saw no future for themselves within the new nation states. It might come as a surprise – and it reinforces our plea for Europeanization – that the most efficient policy towards an unwanted minority in the imme­ diate aftermath of the First World War was implemented not in Central and Eastern Europe, but in Western Europe. From 1871 onwards about 200 000 Germans had migrated from the Reich to the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine. By 1918 many of them had been living there for decades; they had raised their families there and were barely distinguishable from the ‘natural’ born citizens. Gatrell: War, Population Displacement and State Formation in the Russian Borderlands, 1914–1924, in: Nick Baron/Peter Gatrell (eds.): Homelands. War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia 1918–1924. London 2004, 10–34, 13, 26. On the Muslim refugees from the Caucasus, see Onur Yıldırım: Diplomacy and Displacement. Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934. New York 2006, 89. 24 The number of individuals officially repatriated in Poland reached 1 265 000 by 1925. See Konrad Zielinski: Population Displacement and Citizenship in Poland, 1918–1924, in: Nick Baron/Peter Gatrell (eds.): Homelands. War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia 1918–1924. London 2004, 98–118, 105. 25 On the German emigration, see Joachim Rogall: Die Deutschen im Posener Land und Mittelpolen. Berlin 1998, 130; Antoni Czubiński: Wielkopolska w latach 1918–1939. Poznań 2000, 80. On Hungary, see István Mócsy: The Effects of World War I. The Uprooted: Hungarian Refugees and Their Impact on Hungary’s Domestic Politics, 1918–1921. New York 1983, 12. See also the overview in Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 155–169. 23 Peter

270   Philipp Ther The French policy of épuration aimed to cleanse the country of all the legacies of German rule, including these former immigrants. Under the armistice agreement of November 1918, German members of the military were required to leave Alsace within two weeks. They were followed by administrative officials, teachers, and public figures. Like the emigrants from the former Prussian Partition, these people mostly left of their own accord. When the French took over, however, they organized migration. Emigrants were required to report to the authorities, who confiscated their property and limited the amount of cash and luggage they took with them to 2,000  Reichsmarks and 30 kilograms respectively. Thus this ‘voluntary’ option resembled ethnic cleansing both in its enforcement and in the professional and material consequences it had for the emigrants. As the following letter of December 1918 from an ‘old Alsatian’ to the French high commissioner shows, arbitrary deportations also took place: For about eight days now, male as well as female persons, officials and tradesmen have been deported out of the country. These people are in general granted a period of 24 hours to order their affairs. It goes without saying that this is not enough time! How incredibly hard this measure hits families! Men, some of whom have already reached an advanced age, are torn from the bosom of their families and driven out to rundown Germany, where they no longer have any home or place of refuge, where they are strangers without any income.26

On their departure and before crossing the bridge over the Rhine at Kehl, locals often hurled abuse at the refugees and sometimes even spat or threw stones at them.27 The high commissioner’s response to this petition is not known, but the authorities forged ahead with the swift épuration of Alsace. They proceeded by way of two main mechanisms: ascertaining nationality and issuing identification papers. The aim of the ‘selection commissions’ (commissions du triage) was to single out enemies and potential traitors, to secure the national loyalty of the population, and to make Alsace French. In view of the population statistics, selection was a major logistical challenge. Towards the end of the war, about two million people lived in Alsace. Although a plebiscite in 1918 would certainly have resulted in a clear majority for France, the new rulers refused to accept subjective professions of national loyalty. The government then took the matter of the Alsatians’ nationality into its own hands with a decree of 14  December  1918, which distinguished between four main groups. Residents with two French or Alsatian parents fell 26 My

thanks go to Christiane Kohser-Spohn for making this document available. It is held at the Archives départementales du Bas-Rhin, FCGR, Volume 1/121/AL 899. 27 See Carolyn Grohmann: From Lothringen to Lorraine. Expulsion and Voluntary Repatriation, in: Diplomacy and Statecraft 3 (2005), 571–587, 578.

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under category A, whereby only those whose forebears had lived in the region before 1871 counted as Alsatians. Residents with one Alsatian parent fell under category B. Category C comprised foreigners who were not of German or Austrian descent, while category D applied to residents with German or Austrian backgrounds (Altdeutsche) and their children. The members of the four groups were issued with symbolically decorated identity papers according to their category, which they needed to travel abroad and within France, to vote, and to maintain a position of employment. The 1 082 650 members of category A received identity papers with a tricolore red, white, and blue stripe. The 183 500 members of category B had to make do with just the red stripe. The 55 050 category C papers were marked by two blue stripes, and the 513 800 category D documents had no stripes at all and put their holders at a considerable disadvantage.28 The latter group was sold French francs at an exchange rate of 1.25 Reichsmarks rather than the rate of 75  Pfennigs available to others. Moreover, their freedom of movement was restricted and, not infrequently, they lost their jobs. In addition to this discriminatory categorization based on origins, the government set up ‘selection commissions’ (commissions du triage), each made up of two representatives of the French army and local notables who were considered trustworthy Frenchmen. In January 1919, the French President Geor­ ges Clemenceau gave the commissions the following instruction: “Whenever the presence of Germans seems pernicious to the public tranquility, you should not hesitate to remove this danger”.29 In concrete terms, he was referring to deportations over the Rhine. Over the course of the year 1919, about 150 000 people whom the French state classified as German were forced to leave Alsace and Lorraine.30 Many people were also interned and a quarter of the population was subjected to the discrimination mentioned above. Christiane Kohser-Spohn has summarized this French policy as one of “purifier, centraliser, assimiler”. As in later cases of ethnic cleansing, material and political interests within the region played a role. By denouncing your neighbour or colleague as German, you could gain access to his property. But since denunciations were difficult to verify and many innocent parties were wrongly identified, the French government abandoned the commissions in October 1919. This marked France’s return to the rule of law after a period of arbitrariness; two thirds of the members of category D were able to stay in France. these categories and statistics, see Harvey, Lost Children, 548. 544. 30 Ibid., 550. 28 On

29 Ibid.,

272   Philipp Ther Nevertheless, the selection that took place in Alsace set negative standards for the rest of Europe. French nationality was not determined by personal ­allegiance but by the authorities’ classification. Nobody could elude the state system of registration and powers of definition. The extent to which the state involved society in its selection was also unprecedented. Although the government viewed the work of the commissions as problematic in hindsight and in some cases even revised it, the deported had no chance of returning.31

The protection and reduction of minorities in the ­Paris Peace Treaties France also took a tough stand on minorities at international level after 1918. In the Paris Peace Treaties, the Clemenceau government tried to restrict the recognition of minorities as far as possible. But the reports of pogroms in Odessa, Lemberg, Pińsk, and countless other Eastern European cities worked against this.32 Pressure grew to combine the goal of a European nation-state order with an international ruling on the protection of minorities. All newly founded or expanded nation states in East Central Europe and Southeastern Europe were required to commit to protecting their minorities. According to Carole Fink, ‘the little Versailles’ affected 25 million people living in 12 European nation states, from the Gulf of Finland to the Aegean Sea.33 The affected countries rejected these collective special rights on principle, perceiving them as discriminatory in favour of the Western European nation states and as an intrusion on their sovereignty. Eric Weitz has put forward the provocative theory that the deportation and protection of minorities were interrelated from the outset and cannot be conthe enduringly relevant study by Swiss historian Karl-Heinz Rothenberger: Die elsasslothringische Heimat- und Autonomiebewegung zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen. Frankfurt am Main 1976. 32 On western reports on the pogroms, see Carole Fink: Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938. Cambridge 2004, 133–264; Piotr J. Wróbel: Polacy, Żydzi i odbudowa Polski na stronach The New York Timesa w 1918 i 1919 roku, in: Jolanta Żyndul (ed.): Rozdział wspólnej historii. Studia z dziejów Żydów w Polsce. Warszawa 2001, 181–198. On Polish-Jewish relations in Congress Poland, see Konrad Zieliński: Stosunki polsko-żydowskie na ziemiach Królestwa ­Polskiego w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej. Lublin 2005. 33 Fink, Defending the Rights, 237–264. The treaties on the protection of minorities with Poland, the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania are printed in: Harold William Vazeille Temperley (ed.): A History of the Peace Conference at Paris. Volume 5: Economic Reconstruction and Protection of Minorities. London 1969, 432–470. On the previous negotiations, see ibid., 112–149. 31 See

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sidered independently of one another. Moreover, in the Paris Peace Treaties he sees a shift towards deportation that culminated in the Treaty of Lausanne.34 Certain details obstruct these theories: while the Treaties of St Germain and Trianon called for the protection of minorities, the Treaty of Neuilly – the second in the series of Paris Peace Treaties – aimed to put an end to the existence of minorities. There is, then, no clear chronology towards ‘deportation’. Furthermore, it is questionable whether the Treaty of Lausanne, which revised the Sèvres agreements, can be bracketed together with the Paris Peace Treaties. Nevertheless, in broad terms, Weitz’s theory is convincing. The rulings concerning minorities were officially supplementary agreements to the treaties on the international recognition of Poland and all other nation states formed or expanded in 1918/1919. Thus, where diplomacy was concerned, the protection of minorities was not as important as the recognition of nation states and their borders. Moreover, the victorious powers did not agree on sanctions against the violation of minorities’ rights. Since the members of minorities were not recognized as subjects under international law, they could not directly lodge complaints with the League of Nations – a body that supposedly guaranteed the protection of minorities – but only with the aid of a member of the League of Nations. Furthermore, as time progressed (though not in the sequence of the Paris Peace Treaties), there was a stronger tendency towards resettlement. In the case of East Central Europe, this is demonstrated by the 1922 Geneva Convention on eastern Silesia. Although the German-Polish agreements extended the rights of minorities in divided Upper Silesia, their main consequence was a process of national homogenization on both sides of the new border. The option right legalized and facilitated the migration on each side of around 200 000 individuals who had voted against Germany or Poland in the 1921 plebiscite. By contrast, the protests of the German minority against their oppression in Poland were to little avail. The Hungarians, Albanians, and Lithuanians who protested in Geneva against the treatment of their minorities in Czechoslovakia, Romania, what was to become Yugoslavia, and Poland, found themselves in a similar situation. In her comprehensive study, Carole Fink comes to the conclusion that the League of Nations was inherently biased in favour of the and protection ran together”, Eric D. Weitz: From the Vienna to the Paris System. International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions, in: American Historical Review 113 (2008), 1313– 1343, 1313.

34 “Deportation

274   Philipp Ther new nation states.35 The League of Nations – and the later UN – was an amalgamation of nation states whose goal was the national homogenization of their respective populations. Correspondingly, its support for minorities was at best half-hearted. This is clear as early as the Treaty of Neuilly, which Bulgaria concluded in November 1919 with the victorious powers and a total of 16 signatory states. At first glance, it reads like any other treaty with the losers of the First World War. Bulgaria was required to cede territories, including its access to the Aegean in Thrace, drastically reduce its army, and pay reparations. Like all other states of East Central and Southeastern Europe, Bulgaria was subject to the protection of minorities, which a separate section of the treaty dealt with in a noteworthy eight articles. But it’s here, of all places, that we also find the first internationally sanctioned ruling on the deliberate reduction of minorities. In the second par­ agraph of article 56 it is stated that: “Bulgaria commits to recognizing the ­provisions considered expedient by the allied and associated main powers concerning the mutual and voluntary emigration of individuals belonging to racial minorities.”36 This referred to the ‘convention on reciprocal emigration’, which Greece and Bulgaria signed on the same day as the Treaty of Neuilly – an agreement concerning the respective “ethnic, religious and linguistic” minorities of the two states in their neighbouring country.37 As the title suggests, the principle of reciprocity was to apply; emigration was to be voluntary and the property of the ‘emigrants’ was to be protected. An international commission was to ­supervise the course of the resettlement and compensation for abandoned property. The social circumstances in the two affected countries were very different. The land settled by the Bulgarian-speaking population stretched as far as the Aegean; in Saloniki and other cities there was a Bulgarian intelligentsia. While the Greek diaspora hardly threatened the dominion of the Bulgarian state, the Greek government feared the formation of a Bulgarian irredenta. For this reason, Greece was far more interested in eliminating its minority than Bulgaria. Moreover, Venizelos wanted to use the Greek minority returning from Bulgaria to Hellenize northern Greece. Recent research has questioned whether these minorities had a pronounced sense of national awareness at all or whether per35 Fink,

Defending the Rights, 292. A History, 317. The term ‘racial minorities’ implies an absolute and unalterable concept of nationality and national minorities. 37 A facsimile of the agreement can be found in André Wurfbain: L’échange Gréco-Bulgare des Minorités Ethniques. Lausanne 1930. Greece tried to extend the ‘solution’ by convincing Serbia to accede to the Convention of Neuilly. 36 Temperley,

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haps other forms of geographical and social identification predominated.38 Simply describing oneself as Bulgarian or Greek was problematic in some areas and for many individuals. But it was precisely this state of affairs that the two nation states wanted to change by establishing ethnic and cultural homogeneity – and thus unambiguous loyalty – on their respective territories. Greece, Bulgaria, and the international commission originally planned to complete ‘voluntary and reciprocal emigration’ within two years.39 However, as recent Greek and Bulgarian publications have shown, in this first phase, few members of the respective minorities opted for emigration. The Greek emissaries’ propaganda did nothing to change this. By June 1923, 197 Greek and 166 Bulgarian families had officially applied to emigrate to the neighbouring country.40 ‘Voluntary’ emigration turned out to be a fiction, since nobody actually wanted to leave their homeland. The term of the contract and the activity of the mixed commission were nevertheless extended several times, as the League of Nations and Greece held doggedly to their vision. The constellation changed with the arrival of Greek refugees from Asia Minor. The Greek government channelled them to northern Macedonia and Thrace in order to demographically secure the country’s northern border, destroying the local political and social balance. The refugees, most of whom were utterly impoverished on arrival, demanded housing, jobs, and farmland. The native population responded dismissively, often even chasing away the refugees, who in turn began to eye the minority’s houses and property with envy. There were local riots; private households were forced to accommodate refugees and land was divided up. Consequently, members of the Bulgarian minority began increasingly to move across the border. Then the whole scenario was repeated on the other side. The arriving refugees exerted pressure on the local Greek minority and disturbances erupted in several places. Attitudes towards the Turkish minority also changed for the worse. It would be wrong, however, to attribute this priTeodora Dragostinova: Navigating Nationality in the Emigration of Minorities between Bulgaria and Greece, 1919–1941, in: East European Politics and Society 2 (2009), 185–212. 39 On the process of resettlement, see Stelios Nestor: Greek Macedonia and the Convention of Neuilly, in: Balkan Studies 3 (1962), 169–184, 180, 175. 40 On these figures, see Dragostinova, Navigating Nationality, 193. See also Ιάκωβος Δ. Μιχαηλίδης: Μετακινήσεις Σλαβοφώνων Πληθυσμών, 1912–1930: Ο Πόλεμος των Στατιστικών [Iakōbos D. Michaēlidēs: Metakinēseis Slavophōnōn Plēthysmōn, 1912–1930: O polemos tōn Statistikōn]. Athína 2003. My thanks go to Jannis Panagiotidis for making this book available and translating excerpts. On the actual migrations, see especially 135– 164. See also Elisabeth Kontogiorgi: Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia. The Forced Resettlement of Refugees, 1922–1930. New York 2006. 38 See

276   Philipp Ther marily to local conflicts, individual agents, or a regional tradition of violence. A comparison of different regions in northern Greece shows that state policy on population was the decisive factor. There was far less minority emigration in the border regions of western Macedonia next to Serbia than there was further east, because the pro-Serbian Greek government did less to encourage refugee settlement there.41 This shows once again that state violence had longterm consequences beyond communal inter-ethnic violence, which as a rule abated after a certain period of time. The League of Nations responded to the conflicts along the Greek-Bulgar­ ian border by sending a commission to the area in 1925. The commission came to the conclusion that the Macedonian Question could only be solved in strict accordance with the Treaty of Neuilly. In future, emigration was to take priority over the protection of minorities.42 Thus, forced to acknowledge the failure of voluntary emigration, the League of Nations legalized forced migrations at international level. Under these circumstances, the principle of reciprocity could no longer be upheld. By the time emigration was phased out in 1931, the Treaty of Neuilly had affected nearly 102 000 Bulgarians and 53 000 Greeks. In most cases, they did not receive compensation for abandoned property. While cattle breeders from the mountain regions were at least able to drive their cattle herds over the border under cover of darkness, farmers, salespeople, and traders were usually left with nothing. In Greece, the extreme strain on the national budget after the Treaty of Lausanne meant that the Neuilly migrants were not afforded compensation as planned. Bulgaria also lacked the means to help the refugees after the First World War. Deprivation and embitterment prevailed on both sides of the border. On the Bulgarian side there was also a desire for revenge (which came when Bulgaria occupied parts of northern Greece in the period from 1941 to 1944). Moreover, the Treaty of Neuilly limited the rights of the remaining minorities. The roughly 160 000 Slavophonoi in Greece were now recognized only as a linguistic, not as a national minority.43 Despite the tremendous difficulties encountered when enforcing the Treaty of Neuilly, contemporaries viewed it positively. Lord Curzon, then British foreign minister, judged the “exchange of minorities” to have been a success and of “great significance for future peace in the Balkans.”44 While the Dutch podemographic border protection, see Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange, 208. was the Rumboldt Commission, named after its chairman. See Nestor, Greek Macedonia, 181. On the preceding incidents, see also Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange, 85. 43 See chapter eight in Michaēlidēs, Metakinēseis Slavophōnōn, 219–242. 44 Citation from an internal statement by Curzon in Matthew Frank: Expelling the Germans. British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context. Oxford 2007, 19. 41 On 42 It

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litical scientist André Wurfbain, the first academic to write a book about the application of the Convention of Neuilly, underlined the fact that the arrangement “did not do much credit to the history of the civilized world”, he also saw in it an “innovation” of international policy. In the mid-1920s, the League of Nations changed the liberal character of the Convention of Neuilly, making de facto forced migration out of what had officially been voluntary. Although the number of people forced to leave their homelands was relatively small in proportion to the population as a whole and the still remaining minorities, it was nevertheless a case of organized and compulsory ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.

The Treaty of Lausanne The Treaty of Neuilly and its positive reception paved the way for the Treaty of Lausanne. No sooner had Greece achieved its military goals in Macedonia and Thrace than it opened up a new front in Asia Minor. In May 1919, with the support of the British, Greek troops landed in Smyrna. To the outside world, Greece legitimized its expansion through the claim of a strong Greek minority in Asia Minor and the mission to restore public order. In fact, Venizelos envisaged not only a considerably larger but also a broadly homogenized Greater Greece. In 1919 he told The Times in London about his wish for a “wholesale and mutual transfer of populations” with Turkey – following a border that was advantageous to Greece, of course.45 The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which reduced Turkey to a small part of Anatolia in line with Britain’s wishes, included a passage on minority emigration similar to that in the Treaty of Neuilly. Paragraph 143 of the Treaty of Sèvres provided for the “mutual and voluntary emigration” of the respective minorities along the new border. But Greece and Turkey were unable to agree on a convention analogous to the supplementary agreements of Neuilly – providing some grounds for the new war. In 1921, again with British approval, the Greek army marched into inner Anatolia, leaving a trail of destruction.46 This war – a colonial war in terms of its objectives and how it was conducted – provoked strong resistance. Kemal in Frank, Expelling the Germans, 19. the archival collection (already used by Norman Naimark: Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe. Cambridge 2001) “The Armenian Genocide in the U.S. Archives”, 1915–1918 (henceforth AGUSA), microfiche 337, page A6 (this particular file is a war diary).

45 Cited 46 See

278   Philipp Ther Pasha, later Atatürk, mobilized Anatolia’s Turkish population, especially the refugees from western Asia Minor. In August 1921 he defeated the Greek army 70 kilometers from Ankara. Not only the Greek troops but also nearly all Christian civilians fled the counterattack. While they feared the same fate as the Armenians in 1915, the army’s scorched earth policy on its retreat left them with little alternative but to flee.47 Kemal Pasha and the new Turkish leadership had never made any secret of their contempt for the Treaty of Sèvres and the protection of minorities it stipulated. The latter ran counter to their plans in the conflict over western Asia Minor and Kemal Pasha’s basic convictions. As a pupil at the French grammar school in Saloniki, he had been brought up to be an admirer of centralist and homogeneous republics. Lieutenant Merrill of the US Army, who had been sent to observe the situation, gained the following impression of Turkish attitudes to minorities: “Their slogan is ‘Turkey for the Turks’. They consider that all their troubles during the past 40 years can be attributed to the propaganda spread by the Christian minorities and that their only solution is to remove these minorities.”48 When the Turkish troops moved into Smyrna (Izmir) in September 1922, hundreds of thousands of refugees had got there before them. The invasion was accompanied by rioting; women were raped; there were killings in broad daylight; and the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Chrysostomos was lynched.49 For the most part, paramilitary units were responsible for these atrocities. As in the previous Balkan Wars, they had been given free rein. This physical and symbolic violence was intended to convey the message to the Greeks that they had no future in Smyrna.50 The great fire of Smyrna, which destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarter, only made matters worse. Now, not only the refugees from the inland were homeless, but also the Christian population of the city. Hundreds of thousands of people waited for ships to take them away, as the Muslim refugees had done ten years previously in Saloniki. Now, however, foreign media spread the news of the disaster. In view of the dramatic plight of the refugees, the international community of states resolved to intervene. The main powers sent ships to transport the refugees to Greece, and the Allied high commissioner in occupied Istanbul tried to sound out whether the Turkish government would agree to a popula47 See

the same file, pages A7, B9 and D12. microfiche 337, page D6. 49 On the rapes and forced prostitution, see the report of another soldier of the US marines in AGUSA, microfiche 47, entry of 4. 3. 1923, 4. 50 Many of the units engaged in these atrocities had previously been active in persecuting the Armenians. See Üngör, Paramilitary Violence, 175. 48 AGUSA,

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tion exchange.51 Atatürk finally agreed to an immediate armistice and a peace conference under the direction of the main powers. The Lausanne Conference could be viewed as a continuation of the bilateral Greek-Turkish negotiations of 1914, with the crucial difference that it was led by the great powers and followed the example of the Treaties of Neuilly and Sèvres.52 Both Paris Peace Treaties contained rulings on the mass emigration of minorities. In objective terms, in 1923 Greece gained what it had been demanding since 1919 and had almost achieved with the Treaty of Sèvres: an ethnically consolidated eastern border. It just ran along a different line from the one envisaged by Venizelos and his successors. In Western literature, the Smyrna fire is often taken as grounds on which to accuse Turkey or ‘the Turks’ of ‘inventing’ ethnic cleansing.53 But from the records of the negotiations, it clearly emerges that it was Lord Curzon who suggested an “exchange of populations” and introduced this term. At a different point, the British foreign minister spoke about the need “to unmix the populations of the Near East” (note the generalizing use of the plural). The head of the Turkish delegation in Lausanne, İsmet Pasha, seemed surprised that this point was included on the agenda.54 The Greek chief negotiator – Venizelos had been assigned this role on account of his experience of the disaster in Asia Minor – wanted to push through at least a voluntary exchange, thereby reiterating his position at the Turkish-Greek negotiations of 1914. At the crucial meeting of the ‘Territorial und Military Commission’ on 1 December 1922, however, Curzon remained insistent that the transfer must be based on compulsion.55 But the debate went on to take an interesting course, with Curzon later accusing the Turkish party of a one-sided expulsion of minorities and distancing himself from the idea of population exchange. “For his own part”, notes the record of the next meeting 14 days later, “he [Curzon] deeply regretted that the solution now being worked out should be the compulsory exchange of populations – a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world [will] pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come.”56 This statement has found its way into countless publications, where it Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange, 58. Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs 1922–1923: Records of Proceedings and Draft Terms of Peace. London 1923, 115. 53 According to the Greek literature and Naimark, the Turks insisted on a compulsory exchange in Lausanne. 54 Lausanne Conference, Records of Proceedings, 118; Yıldırım, Diplomacy, 61, 68. Yıldırım emphasises the Greek-Turkish consensus on this issue, ibid., 39. 55 See Lausanne Conference, Records of Proceedings, 120. 56 Ibid., 212. 51 See 52 See

280   Philipp Ther appears to retrieve the honour of the British chief negotiator, the League of Nations.57 But, as I showed above, it was Curzon who stood up for a compulsory exchange of populations at the decisive moment in Lausanne. The British experience in the colonies played a role in this. Curzon, who had held the office of Viceroy of India for six years from 1899, ordered the partition of Bengal in 1905 into mainly Muslim and Hindu regions.58 A better known case in Europe is the border in eastern Galicia, which Curzon introduced as British foreign minister in July 1920 to end the Polish-Soviet War.59 Despite being unfamiliar with local circumstances, he proposed an almost dead-straight dividing line, which predetermined the 1945 border-line between Poland and the Soviet Union. Typically, the ‘straight line solution’ was only applied to regions that were considered backward. Partition brought with it a division of political sovereignty along ethnically defined boundary lines; under the Treaty of Neuilly this was linked to mass migrations on both sides. By using the formula of population exchange, a bilateral arrangement was proposed that was just and feasible. Throughout the winter months of 1922/1923, the entire debate was characterized by a technocratic tendency, which, again, can only be explained by a lack of knowledge of the local circumstances. The League of Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees Fridtjof Nansen declared that he was optimistic that the ‘exchanged’ Greeks and Turks would be tilling the land in the spring. To this end, he and Curzon pushed for an “immediate and efficient exchange”.60 The fact that growing cotton in Macedonia requires different knowledge and qualifications from raisin-farming near Izmir, for example, did not occur to the chief negotiators. The signatory states and powers claimed the Treaty of Lausanne represented “true pacification”.61 They attempted to morally exonerate themselves even further by stating that it merely confirmed a mass exodus. In fact, the treaty’s resolutions broadened the arena of ethnic cleansing. While the Greek-Turkish War had only been fought in western Asia Minor, the treaty affected regions far removed from the fighting, such as areas along the Black Sea coast and in the Anatolian highlands. Only western Thrace and Istanbul were spared an for example Wikipedia.de: Vertrag von Lausanne, at: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Vertrag_von_Lausanne (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013); Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 55. 58 On the partition of Bengal, see the source documentation by Nityapriya Ghosh/Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay: Partition of Bengal. Significant Signposts, 1905–1911. Kalkātā 2005. 59 On the Curzon Line in East Galicia, see Norman Davies: God’s Playground. A History of Poland. Volume 2: 1795 to the Present. New York 1982, 504. 60 Lausanne Conference, Records of Proceedings, 115. 61 Ibid., 14. 57 See

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‘exchange of populations’. A total of roughly 700 000 lost their homeland after the Treaty of Lausanne was concluded, about as many as had been displaced prior to it by deportation and flight. According to official statistics, 1 221 000 Greeks and 355 000 Turks were affected by Lausanne. When news of the outcome of the conference spread in Greece and Turkey, the affected minorities responded with protests and demonstrations.62 As tense as the situation was locally, very few appeared to be willing to leave their homes and belongings. But resistance was to no avail since the compulsory nature of the migration was laid down in the Treaty of Lausanne. Although the treaty was primarily intended to help the refugees, it did not improve the humanitarian situation. The newspaper Foreign Affairs described their circumstances on arrival in Greece thus: “the refugees […] maintained a fox-like existence in tents, wooden barracks, shelters of twigs, or of turf, even in caves.”63 While there are no reliable statistics on the casualties of the Turkish-Greek War, official Greek records note a death toll among refugees of 75 000 from malnutrition and disease.64 Relations with the native population, moreover, were extremely tense. Years after they had arrived, refugees were still beaten and chased away from land they wanted to cultivate. One Greek politician even suggested identifying them by yellow armbands.65 These internal hostilities are often overlooked as historiography has tended to concentrate on the international aspect of the respective conflicts. Greece remained dependent on international aid supplies and subsidies for years to come; the damage to Turkey’s national economy was also substantial. So how did the Conference of Lausanne soon come to be viewed as a success, despite the unresolved refugee problem? The explanation can partly be found by reading the contemporary Western press. Here we see that Curzon distanced himself in formal terms from the mass expulsions, but highlighted the peace that could have been attained.66 Moreover, in a lengthy speech held in parliament in the autumn of 1923, he listed the advantages the treaty had brought for England: free access to the Black Sea and greater kudos for the British as chief negotiators. He did not mention the Greek refugees or any ­aspect of the entire humanitarian and economic crisis. The allegedly peaceKontogiorgi, Population Exchange, 64; Yıldırım, Diplomacy, 79; see statistics on the uprooted population after the treaty, ibid, 3. 63 Cited in Yıldırım, Diplomacy, 55. 64 Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange, 73. 65 On this, see ibid., 187. On the other incidents, see ibid., 174–175, 182. 66 See Curzon’s review of the Treaty of Lausanne, George N. Curzon: Our Foreign Policy. Lord Curzon’s Speech, in: The Times, 6. 10. 1923, 16. 62 See

282   Philipp Ther giving effect of the Treaty of Lausanne took on mythical proportions when Greece and Turkey concluded a treaty of friendship in 1930. A consensus in defense of Lausanne even formed in the affected countries. Although Greece complained about the fate of its own refugees, all political camps approved of the homogenization of northern Greece. In Turkey, Lausanne was associated with the founding of the republic and rose to become a positive reference point in history.

Conclusions From 1912 onwards there was an escalation of violence in East Central and Southeastern Europe that could only be halted in the mid-1920s. There were also cycles of violence in parts of Macedonia and western Asia Minor. In a chain of events, the flight and removal of populations caused population ­displacements in the areas to which they moved. Yet it would be difficult to ­reconstruct a stringent chronology up to the Second World War. Regions that had been devastated by war and ethnic cleansing were stabilized when the ­regional imperialism of the nation states was exhausted. The situation was ­different in East Central Europe, where the nation-state order created by the Paris Peace Treaties was contested once more in the late 1930s. The main line of continuity was not in the sphere of communal or interethnic violence, but it becomes apparent if violence is understood in a broader sense. The lasting and poisonous legacy of the ‘long World War I’ was the legalization of violent means of conflict resolution in international politics, and hence, violence carried out by states. Ethnic cleansing and other violent means of homogenization became accepted as a last resort of internal and international politics. The other legacy was the massive geographic and demographic widening of such politics and their application after the respective wars had been formally ended. While in 1912 and 1913 ethnic cleansing affected only zones where fighting took place, for example, in Macedonia, the removal of minorities decided upon in the Paris Peace Treaties occurred on a much larger scale. The Treaty of Lausanne affected two entire states: Turkey and Greece. An escalation in terms of the numbers of those affected can also be observed. At least 890 000 people permanently lost their homelands as a consequence of the Balkan Wars. The number of people deported during the First World War (including Jews and Russians driven from the Russian Empire and later Poles) exceeded the one million mark. In these cases, however, it is important to note that the deportations were not planned as a permanent measure. By contrast, where the Central and East Anatolian Armenians were con-

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cerned, a ‘final solution’ was intended. In the light of this fact and the death toll, it should be regarded as a case of genocide. In other conflict zones, for example, the Aegean or northern Greece, the First World War led to a reduction in migratory movements. There was, then, no linear increase in refugees or pre-negotiated ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing was more closely linked to the nation-state order imposed after the war than the war itself. Combined, the épuration in Alsace, the Treaty of Neuilly, and the Treaty of Lausanne affected two million people. In all three cases, population policy was brutally implemented, placing victims ­under immediate pressure to leave their homeland. If we consider cases of indirect pressure, when people saw no future for themselves in their respective countries of residence (Germans in Poland and Hungarians in all neighbouring countries), the number of those affected in East Central Europe rises by a further one million. All these figures are conservative estimates based only on official influx records. A total of 2.8 million people were affected by ethnic cleansing in the narrow sense. If one adds the genocide of the Armen­ ians, deportations from the Russian Empire motivated by nationalism, and the ­migration of Germans and Hungarians in response to the formation or ex­ pansion of nation states to the equation, the figure rises to over six million refugees. Geographic expansion was less a consequence of the prior war than of diplomatic consultations: since ethnic cleansing was mostly planned and premeditated, rational negotiations did not stop ethnic cleansing, but actually caused it to escalate. Secondly, an increasing tendency towards totality in ­ethnic cleansing can be observed. While in Alsace only about a third of the respective minorities had to leave their homeland, the Treaty of Lausanne ­provided for a population exchange across the board. Every member of the minority was to be taken into account. It became increasingly difficult for ­individuals to evade the authorities responsible for selection by, for example, changing nationality. Here, too, strategic considerations rather than irrational feelings of hatred were the primary cause. The clause on voluntariness originally included in the Treaty of Neuilly, which had unintentionally checked the emigration of minorities, was amended and finally omitted entirely in Lausanne. Accordingly, at international level priorities shifted between the protection and the elimination of minorities. It is characteristic of the time that the two approaches were not even regarded as contradictory. The ‘voluntary emigration’ in the Treaties of Neuilly and Sèvres was part of the chapter on the protection of minorities. The dynamic which made compulsion out of voluntariness influenced the application of individual treaties as well as developments from agreement to agreement.

284   Philipp Ther Ultimately, the great powers and the nation states involved dropped the principle of reciprocity. In each of the cases analysed here, there was a considerable imbalance in migrant movements. In Neuilly, the ratio of Bulgarian to Greek emigrants stood at nearly two to one; in Lausanne the proportion of Greeks to Turks (or Christians to Muslims, as the treaty put it) was three to one.67 Nonetheless, the great powers and the states involved continued to speak of ‘mutual emigration’, of an ‘exchange of populations’, and lastly even of ‘unmixing’. Despite the ambiguity of these technocratic terms, they succeeded in promoting acceptance of the compulsory measures they referred to. On the one hand, these contractual arrangements saved the refugees from an even worse fate during forced migration. But, on the other hand, the ­enshrinement of strategies of ethnic cleansing promoted their legitimacy at national and international level. The idea of rational and final solutions, the utopia of their feasibility, and the chimera of peace-making remained the legacy of the Treaties of Neuilly and Lausanne or, in other words, the disastrous burden they passed on. That also means that further research needs to concentrate on state violence and its implementation at local level. Popular or communal violence may have been overrated in recent years. The key development of the decade after 1912 was the institutionalization of violence against minorities in single states and at international level.

also the numbers in Detlef Brandes/Holm Sundhaussen/Stefan Troebst (eds.): Lexikon der Vertreibungen. Deportation, Zwangsaussiedlung und ethnische Säuberung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Wien 2010, 273, 387–388.

67 See

Dietrich Beyrau

The Long Shadow of the Revolution: Violence in War and Peace in the Soviet Union I. Violence as a historical theme Until about a decade ago, when people wrote about violence, it was usually done indirectly, by writing about ideas that lead to violence, about political or social contexts (especially those of the dictatorships of the twentieth century), or about attempts by observers and analysts (criminologists, psychologists) to explain the phenomenon. The concept of violence was also broadened to con­ sider structural violence, that is, constraints coming from institutions and ­social contexts. Such subjects were sometimes described in a positive light as social disciplining or even a ‘civilizatory process.’ According to this perspec­ tive, violence was omnipresent, ranging from threats of sanctioning to exem­ plary punishment for deviant behavior.1 However, violence as a physical act has not been examined until recently. Sociologist Trutz von Trotha wrote apodictically on the subject: the key to vio­ lence lies solely within the forms of violence and is not to be found outside of it, in its conditions. And according to ethnologist Georg Elwert: “Most actors endeavor to formulate a motive for the actions as their purpose after the fact, even if the actions themselves were erratic.”2 However, there are limits to the description and analysis of violence. Overly elaborate descriptions of physical violence may be accused of indulgence in a pornography of violence. Further­ more, even accounts that claim to offer an authentic illustration of events (in­ cluding violent ones) are in fact always sifted through the filter of memory, which is always selective, and through their rendering in the medium of lan­ Wilhelm Heitmeyer/John Hagan (eds.): Internationales Handbuch der Gewaltforschung. Wiesbaden 2002; On acts of physical violence, see Jörg Baberowski: Gewalt verstehen, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen 1 (2012), at: http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/ site/40208820/default.aspx (last accessed on 4. 9. 2013); for a recent study on violence as a reference point in political communication, see Heinz-Gerhard Haupt: Gewalt und Politik im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen 2012. 2 Trutz von Trotha: Zur Soziologie der Gewalt, in: idem (ed.): Soziologie der Gewalt, Op­ laden/Wiesbaden 1997, 9–56, 20; Georg Elwert: Gewalt als inszenierte Plötzlichkeit, in: Jan Koehler/Sonja Heyer (eds.): Anthropologie der Gewalt. Chancen und Grenzen der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Berlin 1998, 1–7, 3. 1

286   Dietrich Beyrau guage or imagery. Thus it makes a difference who is talking about the violence – whether they are functionaries, chekists, police, soldiers, or criminals (that is, actors involved in producing violence, either directly or indirectly). It makes a difference whether violence is reflected in statistics (which are always subject to interpretation), whether it can be recognized through bloodstains on interrogation records, or whether victims share their memories of the vio­ lence that they themselves experienced or witnessed. Violence remains – like any experience, as Elwert correctly emphasizes – an erratic, dark area, which we can approach but hardly ever understand completely. One could focus on a lexical list of the virtually infinite forms and varieties of violence, or on the forces that drive violence in a perpetrator (particularly of interest, perhaps, for biographical research). However, even when looking at desk murderers (who are the initiators of violence in most cases of interest to historians), such ap­ proaches are hardly sufficient to describe violence adequately. If the subject is violence in a certain age or a certain country, then questions again arise as to the context, the origins, the forms and instruments, and the mental (and physical) disposition of the perpetrators as well as their victims. For historians, critical treatment of the sources, which are generally written and – more rarely – oral, is even more crucial than ever.3 Regarding forms of violence, in the history of the Soviet Union up to the death of Joseph Stalin, the following periods can roughly be distinguished: the civil war was characterized by the coexistence of local, para-governmental, and, to some extent, state violence, as well as by the coexistence of both open and already closed zones where violence was carried out. During the next per­ iod, starting in the mid-1920s, all means of force were essentially monopo­ lized in the hands of the state and party, and communications about coercion and violence were ritualized in a particular way and organized to be in line with those in power. Violence had meanwhile become invisible to large por­ tions of the general public. It was carried out in remote, generally inaccessible camp zones and prisons. The Second World War – from a Soviet perspective, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ – intensified the forms of violence and coercion. It created new types of violent zones and exposed a segment of the Soviet popu­ lation to the consequences of genocidal warfare at the hands of the Germans. At the same time, the Soviet administration subjected the people to total mo­ bilization and showed little consideration for human life.

3

Martin Sabrow/Norbert Frei (eds.): Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945. Göttingen 2012.

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II. The civil war and conditioning to violence An examination of the major accounts of the history of the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century reveals that they are – whether explic­ itly or implicitly – structured by the question of the causes of terror and vio­ lence under Vladimir Il’ich Lenin and Joseph Stalin. The literature tends to address the consequences of the terror and violence – such as the disappear­ ance and murder of people, the size of the Gulag population, etc. – rather than describing the acts of violence themselves. However, accounts based chiefly on written and oral statements by contemporary witnesses and vic­ tims deal with the experiences of violence in differing degrees of detail.4 In Gerd Koenen’s Utopie der Säuberung, obsessions that vaguely have something to do with Marxism are linked to seemingly never-ending acts of violence.5 And Jörg Baberowski’s Verbrannte Erde is another attempt to describe the history of the Soviet Union from the perspective of violence and terror. In it, the role of ‘great men’ – Lenin and Stalin – is given due recognition. Babe­ rowski considers their malice in the context of a traditional culture of vio­ lence.6 The older literature that is more focused on social structures and dy­ namics offers the following explanations, which are to be taken with a grain of salt: traditions of autocratic government in Russia; the masses entering politics with largely pre-modern, plebeian – or as Theodore von Laue once put it – ‘nativistic’ notions of politics; dispositions of violence in the revolu­ tionary tradition of the intelligentsia and the workers’ movement; or a form of modernization in which backwardness, delayed modernization, and vio­ lence are linked.7 Baberowski and other authors also refer to the continuities Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. An Experiment in Literary Investigation. 3 Volumes. New York 1973–78; Robert Conquest: The Great Terror. A Reas­ sessment. London 1990; Roy Medvedev: Let History Judge. The Origins and Consequenc­ es of Stalinism. Oxford 1989; Bernhard H. Bayerlein: “Der Verräter, Stalin, bist Du!” Vom Ende der linken Solidarität. Berlin 2008. 5 Gerd Koenen: Utopie der Säuberung. Was war der Kommunismus? Berlin 1998. 6 Jörg Baberowski: Verbrannte Erde. Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt. München 2012; see also reviews and commentaries in Osteuropa 4 (2012), 81–140. 7 Richard Pipes: Russia under the Old Regime. 2nd edition. London/New York 1995; idem: U.S.–Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente. Boulder 1981; Theodore H. von Laue: Die Revolution von außen als erste Phase der russischen Revolution 1917, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 4 (1956), 138–158; Stephen P. Frank/Mark D. Steinberg (eds.): ­Cultures in Flux. Lower Class Values, Practices and Resistances in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton 1994; Булдаков В.П.: Красная смута. Природа и последствия революцион­ ного насилия [V. P. Buldakov: Krasnaia smuta. Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasiliia]. Moskva 1997; Павлюченков С.А.: Военный коммунизм в России. Власть и массы [S. A. Pavliuchenkov: Voennyi kommunizm v Rossii. Vlast’ i massy]. Moskva 1997; 4

288   Dietrich Beyrau between the First World War, the Russian Civil War, and the subsequent ­catastrophes up to Stalin’s death.8 The collapse of state authority by late 1916 can be seen as the decisive shift leading to increasingly pervasive acts of violence on virtually all sides. Peas­ ant violence and vigilantism, which before the war filled the space of the lacking state institutions on the ground, probably played only a secondary role in this. Rather, the civil war was characterized by the juxtaposition of, on the one hand, organized violence by institutions and armed detachments of both the Bolsheviks and the White Army that claimed to administer state authority, and on the other hand, mostly local, sporadically active agents of violence (village communities, irregular troops, partisans, groups of desert­ ers, and criminal gangs). The actions and campaigns of these local groups were either defensive in nature, especially in the case of the village communi­ ties, or the aim was plunder, whether for survival or for criminal motives. Excesses were always possible, in particular in cases of revenge. The actions of military formations acting on state authority also varied between semiregular contributions, plundering, and excesses of all kinds, generally brought about by punitive or retributive actions. But during the civil war some central elements of Stalinism could already be identified, especially on the Bolshevik side: organized violence and state terror, coercive measures of all kinds, re­ placement of the market by organized (and nonfunctioning) distribution sys­ tems, excessive extension of who was defined as the enemy, and conspiracy theories, as well as the beginnings of systematic surveillance to control the

Яров С.В.: Горожанин как политик. Революция, военный коммунизм и НЭП глазами петроградцев [S. V. Iarov: Gorozhanin kak politik. Revoliutsiia, voennyi kommunizm i NEP glazami petrogradtsev]. Sankt-Peterburg 1999; Mark D. Steinberg: Proletarian Imag­ ination. Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925. London/Ithaca 2002; Alain Besancon: The Intellectual Origins of Leninism. Oxford 1981; Anna Geifman: Thou shalt kill. Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia 1894–1917. Princeton 1993; Будницкий О. В.: Терроризм в российском освободительном движении. Идеология, этика, психоло­ гия (вторая половина XIX–начало XX в.) [O. V. Budnitskii: Terrorizm v rossiiskom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii. Ideologiia, etika i psikhologiia (vtoraia polovina XIX–nachalo XX v.)]. Moskva 2000; Theodore H. von Laue: Why Lenin, Why Stalin? A Reappraisal of the Russian Revolution, 1900–1930. Philadelphia/New York 1964; Cyril Edwin Black (ed.): The Transformation of Russian Society. Aspects of Social Change since 1861. Cambridge 1960; Barrington Moore: Terror and Progress in the USSR. Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship. New York 1954; Manfred Hildermeier: Geschichte der Sowjetunion 1917–1991. Entstehung und Niedergang des ersten sozialistischen Staates. München 1998. 8 See also, for example, Peter Holquist: Making War, Forging Revolution. Russia’s Continu­ um of Crisis, 1914–1921. Cambridge 2002.

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population and more and more new attempts to discipline and indoctrinate party comrades.9

Consequences of the popular revolution The Bolsheviks viewed themselves as the heirs and executors of a popular revolution – a revolution that not only was bound to fail due to its contradic­ tions, but also unleashed an enormous capacity for destruction and violence. In the factories and the villages, violence was at first used only to set an exam­ ple, for example when engineers or directors were publicly humiliated on wheelbarrows, or when farmers plundered and destroyed estates or plowed under ostensibly unused manor lands. Lacking power to impose state sanc­ tions, the village communities increasingly resorted to vigilantism.10 More ­serious were acts of violence and excesses on the part of sailors, soldiers, and deserters. Especially in the winter of 1917/18, murders of officers and alcohol excesses became more frequent, as did confiscations and plundering of all kinds at the front and in the garrisons. Trench and garrison Bolshevism was “nourished on class hatred,” and it targeted members of the upper classes (or what those ‘lower’ judged as such), i.e. officers, landowners, merchants, and also clerics.11 This diffuse rage against a world of enemies was fueled by the Bolsheviks and their agitators in 1917. The osmotic relationship between pub­ lic rage and Bolshevik violence was observed by bourgeois contemporaries with alienation, horror, and sometimes even pure hatred. Thus the historian Juri V. Got’e recorded in his diary that the Bolsheviks had “taken over every­ where, relying on ignorant and dissipated soldiers; a touching marriage of Pu­ gachevshchina12 and the most advanced ideas.” Everyone who was culturally P. Koenker/William G. Rosenberg/Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.): Party, State, and Soci­ ety in the Russian Civil War. Explorations in Social History. Bloomington/Indianapolis 1989; Stefan Plaggenborg: Gewalt und Militanz in Sowjetrussland 1917–1930, in: Jahr­ bücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 3 (1996), 409–430; Тепляков А.Г.: “Непроницаемые недра.” ВЧК-ОГПУ в Сибири 1918–1929 гг. [A. G. Tepliakov: “Nepronitsaemye nedra.” VChK-OGPU v Sibiri 1918–1929 gg.]. Moskva 2007. 10 Трошина Т.И.: Крестьянские ‘самосуды’ в революционную эпоху. Актуализация коллективного опыта (на материалах северных губерний Европейской России) [T. I. Troshina: Krest’ianskie ‘samosudy’ v revoliutsionnuiu epokhu. Aktualizatsiia kollektiv­ nogo opyta (na materialakh severnykh gubernii Evropeiskoi Rossii], in: Российская История [Rossiiskaia Istoriia] 2 (2012), 193–201. 11 Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov: The Russian Revolution, 1917. A Personal Record. Ox­ ford/New York 1955, 541; Koenen, Utopie der Säuberung, 49–50; Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta, 47–53, 96–97, 122, 136–37. 12 This is a reference to Pugachev’s Rebellion, an uprising of peasants and Cossacks led by Emelian Pugachev from 1773 to 1775, a Russian variant of the Jacquerie.   9 Diane

290   Dietrich Beyrau higher than the ‘ignorant masses’ was an ‘enemy of the people.’13 Author Ivan Bunin made no secret of his disgust for the ‘faces’ of the revolutionary rabble in his diary of 1918: Again there are demonstrations, banners, posters, music; one goes one way, one goes an­ other, and a hundred people yell: ‘Stand up, rise up, working people!’ Their voices are hol­ low, primitive. The women have Chuvash and Mordvinian faces; and the men have criminal features that make them look like a matched set. Some seem to have come right from Sa­ khalin. The Romans used to brand the faces of their prisoners with the words: ‘Cave furem’ [‘Beware the Madman!’]. But these Russian faces need nothing; they show it all without any branding.14

Maxim Gorky wrote of an ‘animal anarchism’ that the Bolsheviks exploited for themselves.15 And Nikolai Vasil’evich Krylenko, who was deputy commissar of justice starting in 1922 and became people’s commissar and prosecutor general of Soviet Russia in 1931, was considered “revolutionary vengeance incarnate.”16 The excessive violence was all-pervasive, and, especially during the winter of 1917/18, popular riots and excesses can hardly be distinguished from Bol­ shevik class struggle. A typical example took place in spring 1918 during the occupation of Kiev by Bolshevik forces from eastern Ukraine. Popular rage was manifested in orgies of alcohol and violence and “rule established by means of the bayonet” (shtykokratiya). The commander of the Bolshevik forc­ es “issued orders to ‘annihilate without mercy all officers and junkers, haida­ maks, monarchists, and all enemies of the revolution found in Kiev.’”17 The persisting popular rage was also demonstrated by the resolution of a club of railroaders from Tambov: on the occasion of Lenin’s death in January 1924,

Emmons (ed.): Time of Troubles. The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e: Mos­ cow, July 8, 1917 to July 23, 1922. Princeton 1988, 78, 35; Аскольдов С. А.: Из глубины. Сборник статей о русской революции [S. A. Askol’dov: Iz glubiny. Sbornik statei o russkoi revoliutsii]. Paris 1967; Maxim Gorky: Untimely Thoughts. Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918. New Haven 1995. References to Novaia Zhizn (New Life): 21. 4./4. 5. 1917; 30. 5./17. 6. 1917; 7. 12./20. 12. 1917; 11. 12. 1917/3. 1. 1918; Isaac Steinberg: Gewalt und Terror in der Revolution. Oktoberrevolution oder Bolsche­ wismus. Berlin 1931, 8, 33–35. 14 Ivan Bunin: Cursed Days. A Diary of Revolution. Chicago 1998, 58–59. 15 Gorky, Untimely Thoughts, 96; according to note 75 on page 269: “Literally, ‘zoological anarchism.’” ‘Zoological’ was a favorite epithet of Gorky’s when he spoke of the animal manifestations of human nature. Pravda writers reacted with particular bitterness to ‘ani­ mal anarchism.’ 16 Eugene Lyons: Assignment in Utopia. London/New York 1937, 116. 17 Richard Pipes: The Formation of the Soviet Union. 3rd edition. Cambridge 1997, 126; Волков С. В.: Красный террор глазами очевидцев [S. V. Volkov: Krasnyi terror glazami ochevidtsev]. Moskva 2009, 22. 13 Terence

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they blamed all Social Revolutionaries for his death and called for those ar­ rested on such charges to be shot.18 During the civil war, violent acts could be observed on all sides, including shooting, hanging, public abuse, and torture, all the way to downright ‘slaugh­ tering’ of the enemy and massacres. On the Bolshevik side there were instanc­ es of ‘surgical’ operations to execute population policies, such as the deporta­ tion of Don Cossacks in 1919 and Kuban Cossacks in 1920 (actions which were later aborted). After the troops of Petr Nikolaevich Wrangel retreated, the Bolsheviks massacred White Army officers, transforming the Crimea into an “all-Russian cemetery.”19 Although some of the Bolshevik violence was not directed against particular groups, such as the collateral damage in their cam­ paigns across the former empire and the widespread crime, gangs, and pillag­ ing by the regular troops, many of the acts of violence revealed social, ethnic, and political definitions of the enemy. It was not by chance that the Bolsheviks continued to gain the sympathies of the peasants once these had been liber­ ated from the White Army. The pogroms of the Cossacks – the White and even the Red – targeted mostly the Jews, and workers had good reason to be most afraid of the White Army. And the ‘bourgeoisie’ had to fear violence, coercive measures, and humiliation from the Bolsheviks.20 As heirs to and part of the People’s Revolution, with its demands for peace, land, equality, and Soviet power, the Bolsheviks often understood Soviet pow­ er as an institution of social revenge. The result was political disempower­ ment, disenfranchisement, and degradation of the ruling and propertied classes, who soon found themselves classed as lishentsy, literally those ‘de­ prived,’ i.e. stripped of their voting rights and social privileges, until the ‘Sta­ lin’ constitution was adopted in 1936. This example shows how the People’s Revolution was taken up by the Bolsheviks and transformed to reflect their sense of class struggle, socialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Their missionary claim to know the historical laws and the proper strategy for their implementation made them unable to compromise. Lenin and his followers understood politics (in Carl Schmitt’s sense) exclusively as a battle arena and 18 Кошелева Л.П./Тепцов Н.В. (eds.): Смерть Ленина. Народная молва в спецдонесениях

ОГПУ [L. P. Kosheleva/N.V. Teptsov (eds.): Smert’ Lenina. Narodnaia molva v spetsdo­ neseniiakh OGPU], in: Неизвестная Россия. ХХ век [Neizvestnaia Rossiia. XX vek]. Moskva 1993, 9–26, 13. 19 Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm, 219–225; Holquist, Making War, 166–205. 20 Sergej P. Melgunov: The Red Terror in Russia. London 1925; Литвин Алексей Л.: Красный и белый террор в России, 1918–1922 гг. [Aleksei L. Litvin: Krasnyi i belyi ter­ ror v Rossii, 1918–1922 gg.]. Kazan’ 1995; Koenen, Utopie, 63–94; Baberowski, Verbrannte Erde, 33–80.

292   Dietrich Beyrau as a war against enemies from within and without. Peace was nothing but the continuation of the war using other means.21 Even before the war, Lenin’s policies in emigrant circles had already become limited to constant polemics and defining more and more groups of people as the enemy, a behavior that continued during the war and in 1917. Shortly ­after Lenin arrived in Petrograd on 3 April 1917, a social democrat remarked that his watchword had become “schism” and he thus “raised the banner of civil war.”22 By October, Lenin was able to continue these policies using force from a position of power. It was a matter of fighting not only the ‘class ene­ mies,’ but also the rival leftist parties and ultimately – as was already the case prior to 1914 – all kinds of dissenters within the party itself. Although violent force was used against class enemies and leftist rivals in the civil war, dissent­ ers within the party initially faced only stigmatization.

Defining the enemy Even before October 1917, the Bolsheviks were already a relatively coherent, militant party that manifested what Lenin had dreamt of in 1902: “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and are under their almost constant fire.”23 But the party had grown from roughly 30 000 members in early 1917 to more than 200 000 in mid-1917, and then to about 520 000 members in 1922. Since the civil war, it could be ­described as a militarized combat unit facing a world of enemies. Toward the end of the civil war about one third of party members in Moscow, more than 40 per cent in Ukraine, and more than half in Belorussia were active in armed detachments (military, Cheka, and special troops). In addition, another one in three party members worked in the various administrations. The party had thus changed from a militant combat unit into a party of apparatchiks.24 Re­ placement of personnel and institutional specialization transformed the party over the next few years into a multifunctional organization: a party of fullKennedy: Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School, in: Telos 1 (1987), 37–66; Olaf Rose: Carl von Clausewitz. Wirkungsgeschichte seines Werkes in Russland und der Sow­ jetunion, 1836–1991. München 1995, 95–126; James Ryan: Lenin’s Terror. The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence. London 2012. 22 Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 287. 23 V. I. Lenin: What is to be Done? [1902], in: Henry M. Christman (ed.): Essential Works of Lenin. “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings. New York 1966, 53–176, 57. 24 Statistics on the deployment of party comrades 1922, Russian State Archive of Socio-Po­ litical History (RGASPI), f. 17 op. 34 d. 167, l, 97–100.

21 Ellen

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time officials, who in the course of time had spread out into all branches of the administration, economy, and the cultural sphere, and a party of the masses that recruited according to relatively strict selection criteria and was periodi­ cally ‘purged.’ The party of the masses functioned as a sounding board and amplifier for decisions that had been made elsewhere. But it also served as a mobilization reserve, for example, in the collectivization process starting in 1929. The party not only fought against class enemies and political adversaries; it also used military, police, and even administrative means to harass even those segments of the population for whom it claimed to be fighting. The (invisible) enemy was hidden in the structures (in Bolshevik jargon): in the petty-bour­ geois tendencies of workers and sailors, in the trade unionism (trade union narrow-mindedness) of the proletariat, and in the smallholdings of peasants. Lenin didn’t want to give in to the demands of the insurgent sailors of Kron­ shtadt for a Soviet democracy because he thought that would pave the way for petty-bourgeois notions and would inevitably lead to a victory for the coun­ terrevolution.25 Instead of dialogue, the administration turned to oppression and surveillance. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage (VChK, or Cheka) and later the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) had already started building up a quickly mush­ rooming system of informers and observation during the civil war, starting in the cities. Its task was to gather information about the sentiments and behav­ ior of the people, to identify critics, enemies, and conspiracies, and then to render them harmless. In 1922 the Cheka already had about 60 000 ‘secret agents’ (seksoty) working for it; in 1935 the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) had 27 650 ‘residents,’ each of whom worked with ten to a maximum of twenty informers. By that time the surveillance had also been expanded to the rural population.26 In the Bolshevik view, the peasants were in any case an incarnation of the petty bourgeoisie, striving for property and the reproduction of capitalism at a lower level. Since it was not possible to combat the peasantry as a whole, the food-supply dictatorship that was established in 1918 focused on the kulaks, the wealthy peasant farmers. Anyone refusing to relinquish their surpluses was threatened with at least ten years imprisonment. On top of that, they were I. Lenin: Report on the Political Work of the Central Committee of the R.C.P. (B.), 8  March  1921, in: Yuri Sdobnikov (ed.): Lenin, Collected Works. Volume 32: Decem­ ber 1920–August 1921. Moskva 1973, 170–191, 183–185. 26 Тепляков А. Г.: Машина террора. ОГПУ-НКВД Сибири в 1929–1941 гг. [A. G. Tepliakov: Mashina terrora. OGPU-NKVD Sibiri v 1929–1941 gg.]. Moskva 2008, 130, 144. 25 V.

294   Dietrich Beyrau supposed to be declared enemies of the people.27 Food detachments (prodotryady) were organized starting in the summer of 1918, recruited at first among workers. Often enough they plundered and staged “bacchanalia of violence” instead of requisitioning according to class criteria. Here even Lenin’s appeals did not help much.28 The food-supply dictatorship became established overtly in Ukraine, where Committees of Poor Peasants (komnezamy) – which existed in Russia only for a short time in 1918 – set up a kind of Bolshevik (requisi­ tion) dictatorship over the villages that lasted into the 1920s.29 The kulaks, along with the NEPmen (the retailers and wholesalers, and the few entrepreneurs in the time of the New Economic Policy, NEP), were the main pariahs in Soviet propaganda. Stalin viewed the collectivization and the high grain quotas (1932–1933) of farmers and kolkhozy, and the famine that came with them, as war; albeit a war waged by the kulaks against Soviet power. In a letter to Sholokhov, Stalin insisted That fact that the sabotage [i.e. the alleged refusal to fulfill the quota] was quiet and overtly innocent (without blood) – that fact does not change the position that the respected tillers of the soil in essence conducted a ‘quiet’ war against Soviet power. A war to starve us out (voinu na izmor), comrade Sholokhov.30

The aggressor thus declared that the victims were aggressors. Elements of class struggle were still found in the apparatuses of power until Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov, head of the NKVD from 1936 to November  1938, was re­ 27 Декрет

ВЦИК и СНК о чрезвычайных полномочиях народного комиссара по продовольствию13 мая 1918 г. [Dekret VTsIK i SNK o chrezvychainykh polnomochiiakh narodnogo komissara po prodovol’stviiu 13 maia  1918  g.], in: Декреты Советской власти [Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti]. Volume 2. Moskva 1959, 261–264; Обращению к питерским рабочим об организации продовольственных отрядов 21  мая  1918 г. [Obrashcheniiu k piterskim rabochim ob organizatsii prodovol’stvennykh otriadov 21 maia 1918 g.], in: Декреты Советской власти [Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti]. Volume 2. Moskva 1959, 298–301. 28 V. I. Lenin: Speech, 20  June  1918, in: Clemens Dutt (ed.): Lenin’s Collected Works. 4th English edition. Moskva 1972, 448–449; Частные письма эпохи Гражданской войны. По материалам военной цензуры [Chastnye pis’ma epokhi grazhdanskoi voiny. Po ma­ terialam voennoi tsenzury], in: Неизвестная Россия [Neizvestnaia Rossiia]. Volume 2. Moskva 1992, 200–250, 214–216; Donald J. Raleigh: Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, Poli­ tics, Society and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922. Princeton 2002, 329–332; Нарский Игорь: Жизнь в катастрофе. Будни населения Урала в 1917–1922 гг. [Igor’ Narskii: Zhizn’ v katastrofe. Budni naseleniia Urala v 1917–1922 gg.]. Moskva 2001, 326. 29 Bohdan Krawchenko: Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine. Basingstoke/London 1985, 60–64. 30 Шолохов и Сталин. Переписка начала 30-х годов [Sholokhov i Stalin. Perepiska nach­ ala 30-kh godov], in: Вопросы истории [Voprosy Istorii] 3 (1994), 3–25, 22, cited in Sheila Fitzpatrick: Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford/New York 1994, 75.

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placed. Following the pattern of conspiracy theories, these elements were ex­ panded without limit in the form of the ‘objective’ agent, i.e. those who posed a danger without consciously realizing it. Ezhov’s successor, Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria, did not get rid of this criteri­ on of class struggle, but other population groups, such as ethnic minorities and smaller ethnicities, who were suspected of collaborating with the enemy had meanwhile become quantitatively more significant for the political or­ gans. Looking at the sum of the social classes and groups who were declared to be internal enemies of the Soviet Union between October 1917 and Sta­ lin’s death, virtually no social strata were spared from coming under general suspicion, either temporarily or long-term, being marked as a conscious or ‘unconscious’ enemy, and being subjected to stigmatization and/or repres­ sion. The spectrum ranged from class enemies (aristocracy, bourgeoisie, clerics) to the bourgeois specialists – sometimes privileged, sometimes stig­ matized – and from kulaks to ethnic minorities and ethnicities that were charged with treason or collaboration before and during the Second World War. Starting in the 1930s, the state appeared as a monopolistic employer that mercilessly subjected its employees to disciplinary campaigns accompanied by repressive measures. Thus even average citizens were branded as saboteurs and enemies.31 This served to criminalize large segments of the population, subjecting them to variously severe penalties, including forced labor with or without incarceration, banishment, and camp internment. ‘Workers and peas­ ants,’ supposedly the basis of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ made up one of the largest contingents of the population in the camps and areas of banish­ ment, after kulaks and ethnic minorities.32 The general criminalization starting in the 1930s of average people who were usually not involved in politics created a close link between administra­ tive coercion and violence. This violence was carried out by a wide range of institutions, first and foremost the OGPU and later the NKVD, as well as the camp administrations (which had their own system of justice by the 1940s), the regular justice system, and the changing special organs of the judiciary, Beyrau: Feindbilder und Gewalt. Zu Konstitutionsmerkmalen der sowjetischen Gesellschaft, in: Reinhard Johler et al. (eds.): Zwischen Krieg und Frieden. Die Konstruk­ tion des Feindes. Tübingen 2009, 113–137. 32 John Arch Getty/Gabor T. Rittersporn/V. N. Zemskov: Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years. A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence, in: American Historical Review 4 (1993), 1017–1049; Stephan Merl: Das System der Zwangsarbeit und die Opferzahl im Stalinismus, in: Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 5/6 (1995), 277–305. 31 Dietrich

296   Dietrich Beyrau the three- and two-person tribunals (troiki and dvoiki) or ‘special commis­ sions’ (osobye soveshchania; OSO). The differences between free and forced labor diminished and almost disappeared entirely as a result of the repressive, miserable conditions, especially during the war.

The fetish of monolithism No doctrine prohibited the Bolsheviks from entering into coalitions or mak­ ing political compromises with the Mensheviks or social revolutionaries. And in fact they did compromise on occasion when necessary so that the party could to stay in power, such as their cooperation with the ‘bourgeois special­ ists,’ including former officers, during the transition to the New Economic Policy in 1921–1922. But the Bolsheviks proved to be unyielding in the ques­ tion of power. Their power monopoly continued to generate new resistance and new enemies, who were then eliminated either through propaganda means, administrative coercion, or force. The supposed necessity of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in a ‘pettybourgeois’ country also shaped the inner constitution of the party, which manifested itself in 1921 in the ban on factions within the party and the ‘fetish of party unity.’33 This form of internal disciplining can be understood as a creative development of the class struggle paradigm, but it had little to do with Marxist doctrine. The monopoly on the use of force that the party fought for in the civil war was anchored as an extension of the hegemony. Now it was asserted in almost all areas: economy, trade, culture, and administration. In­ creasingly, the monopoly on power and authority was limited only for reasons of expediency, as defined by the party oligarchy. There were no institutional counterweights. Furthermore, the civil war had made force and coercion – such as forced labor in the army – a commonplace way of accomplishing po­ litical goals. The monopoly on force that the Bolsheviks acquired as a militant, missionary party, tended towards nearly limitless violence. The cycle of vio­ lence was interrupted during the civil war by their victory over the Whites and over the sailors of Kronshtadt, and by their precarious successes in the many peasant riots, but most importantly by the exhaustion of the resources needed to commit this violence. Some contemporaries hoped that after their victory the Bolsheviks would see themselves as a stabilizing authority of law and order and would abandon

Z. Foster: History of the Three Internationals. The World Socialist and Commu­ nist Movements from 1848 to the Present. New York 1955, 177.

33 William

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their furor of violence in the name of class struggle.34 They underestimated how rigid the civil war had made the Bolsheviks and their successors. Sub­ stantial parts of the party understood the NEP more as a strategic withdrawal than as a compromise with existing circumstances in Russia. After a short period of recovery in which to acquire further power resources, on Stalin’s initiative the party once again took the offensive. Despite all the changes to and simplification of the doctrines of Marxism, the framework of action through which political decisions were fought out remained an ideology (here understood as a more or less consistent ensemble of perceptual patterns, interpretations of reality, and codes of behavior). The transformation of society based on the Bolsheviks’ ideas of socialism deter­ mined their discourse and their actions in the 1920s – and it ended in bound­ less violence. This was the matter of industrialization at the expense of the rural sector and consumerism, along with class struggle and building up a socialist society with state-owned industry and the far-reaching nationalization of trade. The peas­ antry functioned as an “internal colony,” as some theories of socialist accumula­ tion had foreseen. The farmers forced into kolkhozy were not only exploited, they were also limited in their freedom of movement. This was the ‘extra-eco­ nomic coercion.’ In popular jargon it was referred to as the ‘second serfdom’ (vtoroe krepostnoe pravo). The Russian abbreviation VKP was iden­tical to that of the communist party (Vsesoyuznaya Kommunisticheskaya Partiya). However, because of their ideological objectives, the party did not merely rely on force, but also used propaganda to try to convince the kolkhozniki (and even more the urban population) how lucky they were. As during the civil war, substantial resources were invested in agitation and propaganda, the ­impact of which has remained extremely disputed.35 Even more remarkable were the campaigns in the early 1930s to ‘reforge’ (perekovka) members of the bourgeois intelligentsia, as well as camp inmates. The earlier notion of reso­ cializing criminals through labor had become a far more far-reaching, almost mystical faith in the transformation of both class-alien and class-conform prisoners through the ‘redeeming’ effect of forced labor. Elaborate means were used to propagate this message in the camps. The maxim of many camp news­ Schlögel: Jenseits des Großen Oktober. Berlin 1988, 96–105; Dietrich Beyrau: Intelli­ genz und Dissens. Die russischen Bildungsschichten in der Sowjetunion 1917–1985. Göt­ tingen 1993, 35–39. 35 Hubertus Gaßner et al. (eds.): Agitation zum Glück. Sowjetische Kunst der Stalinzeit. Bre­ men 1994; Victoria E. Bonnell: Iconography of Power. Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley 1997, 100–135; Jan Plamper: The Stalin Cult. A Study of the Alchemy of Power. New Haven/London 2012.

34 Karl

298   Dietrich Beyrau papers was: “Labor in the USSR is a matter of honor, glory, courage and hero­ ism,” a slogan that has been attributed to Stalin. These ideas were taken up again starting in the 1940s, but in a more moderate form, combining culture and propaganda. Solzhenitsyn referred to it as the most difficult thing for the prisoners to bear, to have to “chirp” and “make a pretense of participation in public affairs.”36

The language of violence – violent language The high estimation of the value and function of ‘freed’ labor as a central ele­ ment of human ‘reproduction’ was an important aspect of Marxist thought and the workers’ movement in Europe.37 But the belief in the transformative strength of forced labor indicates the intellectual gyrations, the mental con­ tortions, and mimicry that was needed in order to varnish reality, as the process was later described.38 Language and its mystifications were evidently credited with performative force. In view of the often unsatisfactory reading skills of many soldiers and peasants, the Bolsheviks had from the outset ­given great weight to language in the form of agitation and propaganda. Enormous resources were invested during the civil war for propaganda, instruction, and indoctrination of the Red Army soldiers and the general population.39 The significance of language, understood as propaganda, was reinforced in 1921 yet again by the commissar of enlightenment, who emphasized that the word is a weapon: “[A]s the revolutionary power cannot permit that everyone be able to obtain possession of revolvers and machine guns, […] likewise the Алла Юрьевна: Пресса ГУЛАГа, 1918–1955 [Alla Iur’evna Gorcheva: Pressa GU­ LAGa, 1918–1955]. Moskva 1996, 51: “труд в СССР есть дело чести, дело славы, дело доблести и геройства” [“trud v SSSR est’ delo chesti, delo slavy, delo doblesti i geroist­ va”]; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Gulag Archipelago. Volume 2 (part 3). New York 1975, 103; Steven A. Barnes: Death and Redemption. The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society. Princeton/Oxford 2011. 37 Dieter Langewiesche: Die Arbeitswelt in den Zukunftsentwürfen des Weimarer Kultur­ sozialismus, in: Albrecht Lehmann (ed.): Studien zur Arbeiterkultur. Münster 1984, 41– 58; Jürgen Kocka (ed.): Work in a Modern Society. The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective. New York/Oxford 2010. 38 Joachim Klein: Belomorkanal. Literatur und Propaganda in der Stalinzeit, in: Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 5/6 (1995), 53–98; Dariusz Tolczyk: See no Evil. Literary CoverUp and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience. New Haven/London 1999; Svetlana Boym: “Banality of Evil,” Mimicry, and the Soviet Subject. Varlam Shalamov and Hannah Arendt, in: Slavic Review 2 (2008), 342–363. 39 Roger Pethybridge: The Spread of the Russian Revolution. Essays on 1917. London 1972, 111–140; Mark von Hagen: Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship. The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930. Ithaca/London 1990, 89–113. 36 Горчева

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government cannot permit the freedom of printed propaganda.”40 Words, language, and slogans were not only supposed to disarm the enemy, they also served one’s own motivation and self-mobilization. Speeches and conduct in public were influenced by ideas and their semantics, which sometimes also determined actions. This was true at least for party activists and full-time functionaries, who were also economically dependent on the party appara­ tus. Rhetoric about the enemy, conspiracy theories, the fetishization of mon­ olithic party unity, and invoking the almost transcendental party line, all served to create a self-contained, hermetic system of communication. Public speeches and behavior were characterized by ‘compelling’ language and ­militant and threatening slogans that implicitly incited violence, which activ­ ists and functionaries were hard put to avoid. Party membership was made into what Foucault called a panoptic prison, whose rules were increasingly determined by Stalin, both within the party oligarchy and among the general public.41 Lenin, the Thunderer […] was […] not an orator of the consummate, rounded phrase, or of the luminous image, or of absorbing pathos, or of the pointed witticism, but an orator of enormous impact and power, breaking down complicated systems into the simplest and most generally accessible elements, and hammering, hammering, hammering them into the heads of his audience until he took them captive.42

There could hardly be a better description for Lenin’s charismatic effect on his supporters than this one by the Menshevik Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov. Stalin’s speeches and his History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU): Short Course, which he canonized, defined the party as a unit en­ gaged in an enormous battle with internal dissidents and external enemies, actively working for the ‘correct’ party line, which always established itself through struggle. The system of this tautological argumentation and sugges­ tive, liturgical language was both rigid and flexible.43 In any case it captivated the next generation of party members, who were often not highly educated. Eimermacher: Die sowjetische Literaturpolitik 1917–1922. Von der Vielfalt zur Bol­ schewisierung der Literatur. Analyse und Dokumente. 2nd edition. Bochum 1994, 192. 41 Lorenz Erren: Der Ursprung einiger Besonderheiten der sowjetischen Parteiöffentlichkeit. Der stalinistische Untertan und die ‘Selbstkritik’ in den dreißiger Jahren, in: Gábor T. Rit­ tersporn/Malte Rolf/Jan C. Behrends (eds.): Sphären von Öffentlichkeit in Gesellschaften sowjetischen Typs. Public Spheres in Soviet-Type Societies. Frankfurt am Main 2003, 131–163; Tadzio Schilling: Mächtige Signale. Informelle Kommunikation und Herrschaft an Stalins Hof, 1927–1940, in: Journal of Modern European History 3 (2012), 320–340. 42 Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 291, 280. 43 “The characteristic feature of this ideology, which pre-eminently reflected the interests of the governing stratum of a totalitarian state, was its combination of extreme rigidity and extreme flexibility.” Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism. The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown. New York/London 2005, 881. 40 Karl

300   Dietrich Beyrau This gave the party leadership great power, for their decisions under Stalin were imbued with the higher glory of being a historical task.44 Its compelling character was intensified by the fact that ‘the Party,’ that is, Stalin and those around him in the 1930s and 1940s, formed an opaque, sacralized arcane sphere, while the party comrades were supposed to share their innermost thoughts, that is, they had to be absolutely transparent. This configuration allowed all forms of coercion and violence against ene­ mies, yet demanded of party members that they constantly profess themselves to be ‘conscious’ fighters for what was the momentary party line, including the coercive measures and the violence that was practiced against enemies and comrades alike. As early as 1917, Sukhanov observed that during Lenin’s speeches his supporters demonstrated the unity of their ranks in every situa­ tion. They wanted to “demonstrate their solidarity and their isolation from the others, the infidels.”45 The rituals of criticism and self-criticism that had be­ come established since the 1920s, the coerced profession of support in the face of periodic purges in the party, and the appeals for vigilance were all forms of fear-filled self-disciplining and self-conditioning. The ritual of criticism and self-criticism, initially meant to compensate for the lack of pluralism in the party’s politics, had been transformed over the years into a public ritual of indignity and humiliation. By the late 1920s, criti­ cism and self-criticism must be understood as a ‘discourse’ of conditioning to conformity. It was fear-filled when one was ordered to the ‘professing support’ front, even in cases of ‘soul-searching.’46 After all, it had been clear since the mid-1920s that dissenters and defectors would be stigmatized and expelled from the party; later they also had to face other coercive measures up to and including death. It is not necessary to believe in the existence of a specifically non-liberal inclination in Russian culture in order to emphasize the impact of these semantics and internalized codes of behavior – among both Russian and non-Russian comrades. The simultaneous existence of both enthusiasm – es­ pecially among young party members in the 1930s – and fear is very reminis­ cent of the behavior of hostages in a situation of threatening violence.47 Михаил: Писатель Сталин [Mikhail Vaiskopf: Pisatel’ Stalin]. Moskva 2001. The Russian Revolution, 286. 46 For an opposing point of view, see Jochen Hellbeck/Igal Halfin: Rethinking the Stalinist Subject. Stephan Kotkin’s “Magnetic Mountain” and the State of Soviet Historical Studies, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 3 (1996), 456–463; Lorenz Erren: Selbstkritik und Schuldbekenntnis. Kommunikation und Herrschaft unter Stalin, 1917–1953. München 2008. 47 Reinhard Müller (ed.): Die Säuberung. Moskau 1936: Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversammlung. Reinbek 1991. 44 Вайскопф 45 Sukhanov,

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Valerii Ivanovich Mezhlauk, who was active within the scope of the Council of People’s Commissars, captured the situation of criticism and self-criticism in a caricature of Lev Borisovich Kamenev denouncing himself at the ‘Con­ gress of the Victors’ in 1934. Interpreting Kamenev’s word choice literally, he illustrated the self-criticism by letting Kamenev disembowel and emasculate himself before committing hara-kiri.48 Of course there were objections in the country and within the party itself. Domestically objections were silenced, and abroad the band of so-called ren­ egades grew, starting at the time of the Great Terror and increasing steadily after the Hitler-Stalin Pact.49 Even within Stalin’s circle, drawings evidently circulated showing him as an old-regime gendarme trampling on the ‘party democracy’ and letting the party languish behind bars.50 This was not only symbolic, as confirmed by the often bloodstained inter­ rogation records that have been made public, in which the heads of the inves­ tigation (sledovateli) employed their long-practiced methods of mental ‘decom­ position’ (razlozhenie) and physical torture.51 From a letter of 13 January 1940 to Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov written by Vsevolod E. Meyerhold, a mentally ‘decomposed’ and physically tortured theater director: Immediately after my arrest I was cast into the deepest depression by the obsessive thought, ‘This is what I deserve.’ The government thought, so I began to convince myself, that the sentence I had received […] was not sufficient […] for my sins […] and that I must under­ go yet another punishment, that which the NKVD was carrying out now. ‘This is what I deserve!’ I repeated to myself and I split into two individuals. The first started searching for the ‘crimes’ of the second, and when they could not be found, he began to invent them. The interrogator proved an effective and experienced assistant and, working closely together, we began our composition. When my fantasy started running out, the interrogators took over […] they prepared and revised the depositions […]. Constantly the interrogator repeated, threateningly, ‘If you won’t write (invent, in other words?!) then we shall beat you again, leaving your head and your right arm untouched but reducing the rest to a hacked, bleeding and shapeless body.’ So I signed everything.52 Vatlin/Larisa Malashenko (eds.): Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution. Bol­ shevik Self-portraits. New Haven 2006, 163–164, 193. 49 Афанасьев А. В. (ed.): Они не молчали [A. V. Afanas’ev (ed.): Oni ne molchali]. Moskva 1991; Michael Rohrwasser: Der Stalinismus und die Renegaten. Die Literatur der Exkom­ munisten. Stuttgart 1991; Mark-Christian von Busse: Faszination und Desillusionierung. Sta­ linismusbilder von sympathisierenden und abtrünnigen Intellektuellen. Pfaffenhofen 2000. 50 Vatlin/Malashenko, Piggy Foxy, 101–102, 135–36. 51 Medvedev, Let History Judge, 485–498; Institut für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (ed.): Schauprozesse unter Stalin 1932–1952. Zustandekommen, Hintergründe, Opfer. Berlin 1990; Fred Schrader: Der Moskauer Prozess 1936. Zur Sozialgeschichte eines politischen Feindbildes. Frankfurt am Main/New York 1995. 52 Шенталинский Виталий Александрович: Рабы свободы в литературных архивах КГБ [Vitalii Aleksandrovich Shentalinskii: Raby svobody v literaturnykh arkhivakh KGB]. Moskva 1995, 59–60; Vitaly Shentalinsky: The KGB’s Literary Archive. London 1997, 53.

48 Alexander

302   Dietrich Beyrau As apparent in the letter, the techniques of mental decomposition and physical torture were at play here, ending in a state suggestive of split personalities. It is obvious that these administrative orgies of violence opened the flood­ gates for expressions of megalomania, violent fantasies, and sadistic drives.53 These rituals of public criticism and self-criticism in the party and the public staging of political and even intellectual debates reached their peak in the 1930s and again after the Second World War – that is, not coincidentally dur­ ing periods of particular violence and coercion directed against large seg­ ments of the ‘working’ population, as well as periods of terror within the party.54 Whatever Stalin’s calculus of power was – whether it meant ‘cadre replace­ ment’ to secure a closed sphere of communication with rules he determined, thus fortifying his dictatorship at all costs; whether it meant eliminating po­ tential fifth columns, his fear of elections and kulaks; or his pleasure in vio­ lence – terror against the party and the functional elite in the administration and the military took the form of semantics, rituals, and suggestions of devi­ ance, infiltration, conspiracy, and treason. 55 In order to fight against all these dangers, comrades were told, the monolithic unity of the party – whether as a combat order or an army – was essential. The party comrades had maneu­ vered themselves into a trap.56 There was also Stalin’s language in internal correspondence with his closer circle. Here it was about calculations regarding power politics, about strategies to implement his narrower administrative policy goals, about praise and hu­ miliation of his paladins, and not least about the virtually mechanical signing of almost four hundred proscription lists of tens of thousands to be executed. An aphoristic comment on actual procedures reveals the bureaucratic cruelty: Albats: KGB. State within a State: The Secret Police and its Hold on Russia’s Past, Present and Future. London 1995, 116–130; Tepliakov, Mashina terrora, 465–593. 54 Alexei Kojevnikov: Rituals of Stalinist Culture at Work. Science and the Games of Intra­ party Democracy circa 1948, in: Russian Review 1 (1998), 25–52; Ethan Pollok: Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. Princeton/Oxford 2006. 55 Медушевский А. Н.: Сталинизм как модель социального конструирования. К завершению научно-издательского проекта [A. N. Medushevskii: Stalinizm kak model’ sotsial’nogo konstruirovaniia. K zaversheniiu nauchno-izdatel’skogo proekta], in: Рос­ сийская История [Rossiiskaia Istoriia] 6 (2010), 3–29; Oleg Khlevniuk: The Reasons for the ‘Great Terror’: The Foreign-Political Aspect, in: S. Pons/A. Romano (eds.): Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914–1945. Milano 2000, 159–169; John Arch Getty: “Excesses are not permitted.” Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s, in: Russian Review 1 (2002), 113–138; Wendy Goldman: Stalinist Terror and Democracy. The 1937 Union Campaign, in: The American Historical Review 5 (2005), 1427–1453; Baberowski, Ver­ brannte Erde, 30, 218. 56 This contrasts with Bayerlein, “Der Verräter, Stalin, bist Du!”. 53 Yevgenia

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in a letter to Molotov, Stalin complained about insufficient supplies of meat and other foodstuffs. He demanded that the problem, which he viewed as sabotage, be made public and that those responsible be turned over to the OGPU, which after a week was to “announce that all these scoundrels will be executed by firing squad. They should all be shot.”57 On 25 September 1930, there was in fact an announcement that 48 ‘wreckers’ who had been responsi­ ble for supplying the workers with food had been executed. The following aphorism soon circulated in public: “Now the Kremlin has acted to solve the meat shortage by slaughtering forty-eight professors.”58 Another example from 1930 concerned the disappearance of copper and silver coins from the public sphere. As a reflex it was blamed on the ‘wrecking’ activities of the bourgeois economists. Stalin also held the People’s Commissar for Finances Nikolai Pav­ lovich Bryukhanov responsible for placing too much trust in bourgeois spe­ cialists. As for the punishment, a cartoon by Mezhlauk showed Bryukhanov hanging by his testicles, with Stalin commenting: “To the members of the P[olit]B[uro]: For all the sins, past and present, hang Bryukhanov by the balls. If the balls hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they do not hold, drown him in the river. I[osif] St[alin].”59 Bryukhanov was executed in 1938 in the course of the Great Terror. Stalin’s instructions and his correspondence with those closest to him dis­ play a crude mixture of Machiavellianism, obsession with detail, reprimands, and threats. He constantly ‘declared war’ on problems (and implicitly on those responsible), especially with respect to grain collection, using what he referred to as the Ural-Siberian method. Conspiracy theories and identifying enemies were standard tropes for enforcing ideological goals.60

57 Письма

И. В. Сталина В. М. Молотову, 1925–1936 гг. [Pis’ma I. V. Stalina V. M. Molo­ tovu, 1925–1936 gg.]. Moskva 1996, 216–218; in English: Lars T. Lih/Oleg V. Naumov/Oleg V. Khlevniuk (eds.): Joseph Stalin. Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936. New Haven 1995, 43. 58 Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 358. 59 Vatlin/Malashenko, Piggy Foxy, 135, 164; Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 364–365. 60 See especially Pis’ma I. V. Stalina V. M. Molotovu 1925–1936 gg.; Хлевнюк О.В. et al. (eds.): Сталин и Каганович. Переписка, 1931–1936 гг. [O. V. Khlevniuk et al. (eds.): Stalin i Kaganovich. Perepiska, 1931–1936 gg.]. Moskva 2001; on the Ural-Siberian meth­ od in the run-up to collectivization, see Dietrich Beyrau: Petrograd, 25. Oktober 1917. München 2001, 111; Невежин В.А.: Застольные речи Сталина. Документы и мате­ риалы [V. A. Nevezhin: Zastol’nye rechi Stalina. Dokumenty i materialy]. Moskva/SanktPeterburg 2003.

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Stalinist social Darwinism This does not, however, explain the violence towards and mass murder of former kulaks, ethnic minorities, criminals, antisocial elements, and so forth within the scope of the Great Terror in 1937/38. The reasons for this violence are even more complex than the terror against party and functionary elites. These groups were merely listed in quotas and statistics, and local authorities could actively make their own suggestions about what actions to take, though the central powers of course had to approve before they were implemented.61 In these cases a social Darwinism came to bear that was rarely openly ac­ knowledged and was highly unsystematic. Society was to be ‘purged’ of dis­ ruptive and potentially harmful elements.62 In the party there were frequent comments loudly justifying mass murder as a necessary component of class struggle or accepting it as inevitable and a matter of course. Such remarks could be heard in 1918.63 Stalin’s interpretation of the so-called Nemchinov table (1928), which defined parts of the peasantry as superfluous and unpro­ ductive eaters, also suggested a similar attitude.64 “Russians, especially com­ munists, were inclined to cite higher figures through a sort of perverse pride in bigness; if it called for Bolshevik firmness to let a million die, it obviously called for three times as much firmness to kill off three million.”65 Even ‘small’ party activists were familiar with the notion of class struggle as an extermina­ tion struggle. In his youth, historian Petr A. Zaionchkovskii, who later gained prominence while keeping his distance from Marxism-Leninism, was regard­ ed as having radical views in favor of the extermination of kulaks as a class.66 Similar thoughts can be found in the diary of Stepan Podlubny, son of a Ukrainian kulak, who tried in vain to be a good communist. He commented on his mother’s stories about cannibalism during the famine of 1932/1933 in Ukraine as follows: Binner/Bernd Bonwetsch/Marc Junge: Massenmord und Lagerhaft. Die andere Ge­ schichte des Großen Terrors. Berlin 2009; idem (eds.): Stalinismus in der sowjetischen Provinz. Die Massenaktion aufgrund des operativen Befehls No. 00447. Berlin 2010. 62 David R. Shearer: Crime and Social Disorder in Stalin’s Russia, in: Cahiers du Monde Russe 1/2 (1998), 119–148. 63 Koenen, Utopie der Säuberung, 63–65; Baberowski, Verbrannte Erde, 63. 64 J. Stalin: On the Grain Front (May 28, 1928), in: idem: Problems of Leninism. Peking 1976, 278–293. 65 Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 574–575. 66 Мироненко С. В./Эммонс Т./Захарова Л. Г. (eds.): Петр Андреевич Зайончковский. Сборник статей и воспоминаний к столетию историка [S. V. Mironenko/T. Emmons/L. G. Zakharova (eds.): Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii. Sbornik statei i vospominanii k stoletiiu istorika]. Moskva 2008, 137, 141. 61 Rolf

The Long Shadow of the Revolution   305 All in all, what’s happening is awful. I don’t know why, but I don’t feel sympathy for this. It has to be this way, because then it will be easier to remake the peasants’ smallholder psy­ chology into the proletarian psychology that we need. And those who die of hunger, let them die. If they can’t defend themselves against death from starvation, it means that they are weak-willed, and what can they give to society?67

III. The Great War and its zones of violence Violence during the civil war was public. When it did not actually take place on the streets and squares, it was publicly announced. To be sure, there were prisons and camps on both sides. Sometimes people were tortured. The pris­ ons were as a rule overcrowded and the prisoners suffered from epidemics, especially typhoid fever. Reports by the Cheka from the Siberian prisons men­ tioned many forms of violence, ranging from beatings, torture, and simulated executions to murders and – to save ammunition – strangulation. A letter written by a party member about a prison in the Altai settlement complained that prisoners were put into a dark doghouse, where a person couldn’t stretch out on the ground, but would be jammed in there for several days, for six to seven days, and the entire time they’d give him neither bread nor water. The prisoners would fall ill, their eyes bulging out of their sockets, the face turning blue […]. When freed from the dark doghouse the prisoners would literally be mentally incompetent; they’d confess to crimes that they never committed.68

Once the civil war ended, the violence was not actually hidden, but it was mostly seen and felt in isolated spaces – camps and prisons. A particularly notorious zone of violence in the 1920s was the Solovetsky Islands. Until the period of the Great Terror, violence was more or less openly displayed, pre­ sented in show trials, campaigns, and depictions of the crimes of the enemies of the people and the announcement of their prison or death penalties. The various ‘actions’ started in 1937 against former kulaks, criminals, anti-social elements, and members of ethnic minorities were carried out mostly in secret. These were largely administrative police measures. Within the NKVD they were presented as part of the struggle against fascism and an anti-Soviet un­ derground, and thus commended and honored.69 Podlubny: Secrets of a Class Enemy, in: Jochen Hellbeck (ed.): Revolution on My Mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin. Cambridge 2006, 165–222, 205, citing ‘People’s Ar­ chive’ Documentation Centre, Moscow (TsDNA), f. 30, op. 1, ed. 13 (4. 2. 1933, 14. 8. 1933). 68 Tepliakov, Nepronitsaemye nedra, 148. 69 Копачев С. А.: Большой террор и его жертвы в зеркале советской пропаганды 1937– 1938 годов [S. A. Kopachev: Bol’shoi terror i ego zhertvy v zerkale sovetskoi propagandy 1937–1938 godov], in: Российская История [Rossiiskaia Istoriia] 2 (2011), 117–124. 67 Stepan

306   Dietrich Beyrau When the banishment and camp zones were expanded, with their infra­ structure, mining, and canal projects, as well as founding new cities, closed zones of coercive force and violence arose. At the lowest technological level, techniques and organizational forms of ‘free’ labor were established in the 1930s in the form of work quotas, collective work organization of the bri­ gades, and socialist competition. Not until the late 1940s did technology also play a role.70 On the other hand, threatening and violent situations developed when political prisoners, prisoners doing time for minor offenses (bytoviki), and perpetrators of more serious crimes ranging from theft to murderer were all placed together in the facilities. Criminals who refused to work, as well as those who served as assistants in the camp administration, harassed the other prisoners and preyed on them, together with the guards and administration.71 Political control and infiltration could be observed in an extensive system of informers and the “stabbing of informers.”72 The camp leaders viewed themselves increasingly as a special breed of man­ ager. From this perspective they were interested in maintaining their work­ force – the ‘labor fund’ (trudfond). Administrative coercion in the camp through the ‘food weapon,’ that is, distribution of food by work brigades ac­ cording to whether quotas had been fulfilled, was often accompanied by at times uncontrolled violence.73 The proportion of the working population in the Soviet Union that con­ sisted of camp inmates has been estimated at almost five per cent for the pe­ riod of the war.74 Due to the large numbers of prisoners placed in and later Gestwa: Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus. Sowjetische Technikund Umweltgeschichte, 1948–1967. München 2010, 402–406, 409–411. 71 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Gulag Archipelago. Volume 1 (part 2). New York 1973, 489–532, 533–564; Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Großbauten, 416–422. 72 Achim Siegel: Die Dynamik des Terrors im Stalinismus. Ein strukturtheoretischer Erklä­ rungsversuch. Pfaffenweiler 1992, 143. 73 For an overview of the camp system, see Иванова Галина Михайловна: ГУЛАГ в системе тоталитарного государства [Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova: GULAG v sisteme totalitar­ nogo gosudarstva]. Moskva 1997; Nicolas Werth: A State against Its People, in: Stéphane Courtois et al. (eds.): The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cam­ bridge 1999, chapters 11–12, 203–231; Anne Applebaum: Gulag. A History. New York 2003; Paul Gregory (ed.): The Economics of Forced Labor. The Soviet Gulag. Stanford 2003; Oleg V. Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag. From Collectivization to the Great Terror. New Haven/London 2004; Lynn Viola: The Unknown Gulag. The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements. Oxford 2007. 74 Edwin Bacon: The Gulag at War. Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives. London 1994, 125; Steven Rosefield: Stalinism in Post-Communist Perspective. New Evi­ dence on Killings, Forced Labor and Economic Growth in the 1930s, in: Europe-Asia Stud­ ies 6 (1996), 959–987; Stephen Wheatcroft: The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Re­ pression and Mass Killings, 1930–1945, in: Europe-Asia Studies 8 (1996), 1319–1353. 70 Klaus

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released from the work colonies in particular, the situation of being utterly at someone’s mercy certainly was known to and had a considerable influence on large segments of the population. On top of that there were countless charges and convictions involving everyday offenses, against which the state, as the monopolistic employer, took legal action. Because of the intensified labor laws of 1940, in the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic alone there were more than one million people convicted each year up to 1945, more than 50 per cent of whom had to serve prison time.75 Moreover, even in ‘normal’ years, that is, 1934–1936 and in the 1940s, there were between 100 000 and 200 000 arrests by extrajudicial institutions annually. Not until the late 1940s did the numbers decrease from 80 000 to 20 000.76

Open zones of violence: the fronts from 1941 onwards For several generations of Soviet citizens, the revolution, the civil war, Stalin’s Terror, and the Great Patriotic War form a continuum of experiences of vio­ lence. The civil war and the Great Patriotic War are generally presented even today as a period of heroic trial, but in fact they were a continuum of disas­ ters for a majority of the population, especially at the peripheries of the em­ pire.77 When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, violence once again be­ came visible in public. This applied first and foremost to the shifting fronts. Under German (and Romanian) occupation, new closed zones of violence (Gewalträume) emerged, with their camps, ghettos, and extermination sites, as well as semi-open zones, including the innumerable execution sites, and open zones in countless burned-down villages and ‘dead areas.’ 78 On the В.П.: Государственный террор в советской России, 1923–1953 гг. (Источники и их интерпретация) [V. P. Popov: Gosudarstvennyi terror v sovetskoi Rossii, 1923–1953 gg. (Istochniki i ikh interpretatsiia), in: Отечественные Aрхивы [Otechestvennye Ar­ chivy] 2 (1992), 20–31; In English: V. P. Popov: State Terror in Soviet Russia, 1923–1953. Sources and their Interpretation, in: Russian Politics and Law 3 (1994), 79–101; see also Getty/Rittersporn/Zemskov, Victims of the Soviet Penal System, 34. 76 Мозохин О. Б.: Право на репрессии. Внесудебные полномочия органов государ­ ственной безопасности: Статистические сведения о деятельности ВЧК-ОГПУНКВД-МГБ СССР, 1918–1953 [O. B. Mozokhin: Pravo na repressii. Vnesudebnye polno­ mochiia organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti: Statisticheskie svedeniia o deiatel’nosti VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB SSSR, 1918–1953]. Moskva 2006, 250–350. 77 Dietrich Beyrau: Schlachtfeld der Diktatoren. Osteuropa im Schatten von Hitler und Sta­ lin. Göttingen 2000; Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Lon­ don 2011. 78 See for example Michaela Christ: Die Dynamik des Tötens. Die Ermordung der Juden in Berditschew. Frankfurt am Main 2011. 75 Попов

308   Dietrich Beyrau S­ oviet side, camps and banishment zones continued to exist and were even expanded starting in 1944. With their view of history as a series of struggles between opposing forces, the Soviets assumed that future wars against imperialism were inevitable. Al­ though they rejected Erich Ludendorff ’s theory of total war, claiming it was imperialistic, the concept of declaring Soviet Russia a ‘war camp’ was basically just a revolutionary version of total war. This form of war integrated – as de­ veloped further in discussions by politicians and the military – the total mobi­ lization of one’s own population with the advantages of a state-controlled economy. Although the revolutionary element later became more statist, it could still be made out in the propaganda for a ‘socialist offensive.’ After the civil war there was much – often controversial – debate in many committees about a ‘uniform military doctrine’ that would be appropriate for the Soviet Union. The ‘strategy of exhaustion’ gleaned from the experiences of the First World War was replaced, under the influence of revolution and the civil war, by an active strategy of rapid annihilatory strikes, if possible on enemy territo­ ry.79 The revolution would be exported by the conventional cadre army tech­ nologically upgraded and prepared to face major battles and maneuvers; yet this by no means ruled out a partisan war. 80 On the Bolshevik side it had been used in the civil war on the territory of the White Army. In Central Asia, Mikhail Vasil’evich Frunze, a theorist of the ‘uniform military doctrine’ who had been deployed on many fronts, developed a practice of combating parti­ sans that was based on partisan tactics. He had built up mobile, often local commandos to fight the anti-communist guerrillas (basmachi) in Central Asia, harassing the anti-communist ‘gangs’ from many different outposts. Par­ tisans, like all armed forces, had to subordinate themselves to the political control of the party.81 During the Second World War it was the NKVD and В. А.: Синдром наступательной войны. Советская пропаганда в преддве­ рии “священных боев”, 1939–1941 гг. [V. A. Nevezhin: Sindrom nastupatel’noi voiny. Sovetskaia propaganda v preddverii “sviashchennykh boev”, 1939–1941 gg.]. Moskva 1997; Olga Nikonova: Der Kult des Heldenmutes ist für den Sieg notwendig. Sowjetisches Militär und Erfahrungen des Ersten Weltkrieges, in: Carl Horst et al. (eds.): Kriegsnieder­ lagen. Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen. Berlin 2004‚ 185–199; Минц М. М.: ‘Стратегия сокрушения’. Стратегическая и военно-техническая концепции будущей войны в структуре советской военной доктрины 1930-х–начала 1940-х годов [M. M. Mints: ‘Strategiia sokrusheniia’. Strategicheskaia i voenno-tekhnicheskaia kontseptsii budushchei voiny v strukture sovetskoi voennoi doktriny 1930-kh–nachala 1940-kh godov], in: Российская История [Rossiiskaia Istoriia] 3 (2010), 3–18. 80 Rose, Carl von Clausewitz, 128–174; Richard W. Harrison: The Russian Way of War. Op­ erational Art, 1904–1940. Lawrence 2001, 123–146. 81 Alexander Marshall: Turkfront. Frunze and the Development of Soviet Counter-Insur­ gency in Central Asia, in: Tom Everett-Heath (ed.): Central Asia. Aspects of Transition. 79 Невежин

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after 1943 the NKGB that politically controlled the actions of the partisans and the population in the occupied territories. This was the specifically com­ munist aspect of the ‘uniform’ military doctrine. It signified the political lead­ ership of the armed forces ‘from the top’ and the anchoring of the political control and direction through the Political Administration (PUR), which had been established within the armed forces as of 1918. As in the civil war, dis­ trust of the commanders and soldiers was reflected in the establishment of political commissars in the headquarters and political leaders (politruki) in the troops. It is no coincidence that this took place during the Great Terror (1937–1940) and in the period of constant retreats (1941–1942) during World War II. Here, they drew on the experiences of the civil war, when the Red Army had to be literally driven into battle.82 In the years of the civil war, the demands were directed toward party mem­ bers and the ‘proletariat.’ During the ‘Great Patriotic War’ the leadership ex­ pected the total mobilization of the population at large, which had previously been sufficiently ‘purged’ and prepared for war. Since the third Five-Year Plan (starting in 1938), all resources were redirected into the munitions industry, labor laws were intensified, and the standard quotas to be delivered by the kolkhozy were increased. Once the Germans invaded, it became a matter of defending “every inch of Soviet soil,” and fighting “to the last drop of blood.”83 These demands were not merely meant figuratively, as the practices of Soviet warfare show. Commanders at the western and northwestern fronts, who were held responsible for the defeats in the summer of 1941, had to pay with their lives. Relatives of commanders and political workers who had been taken prisoner were threatened with punishment as well. The families of soldiers who were prisoners of war had to reckon with losing their government bene­ fits. Soldiers who had escaped the siege (rather than fighting to the last drop of blood) were put in penal units. Since – at least from the perspective of the leadership – the soldiers’ will to combat left a lot to be desired, barrier detach­ ments were set up in individual areas at the front, as had also been done in the civil war. They were to detain retreating troops and press for them to join the London/New York 2003, 5–29; Vanessa Voisin: L’épuration de guerre en URSS, à partir de l’exemple de la région de Kalinine, 1941–1943. PhD, Paris 2011, 169–172. 82 Timothy J. Colton: Commissars, Commanders and Civilian Authority. The Structure of Soviet Military Politics. Cambridge 1979; Dietrich Beyrau: Brutalization. The Case of ­Soviet Russia, in: Journal of Contemporary History 3 (2014, forthcoming). 83 Joseph V. Stalin: Radio address of July 3, 1941, in: idem: On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union. Moskva 1946, 9–17, 14; see also Document 3: Joseph Stalin’s July 3, 1941, radio address, in: Alexey Vinogradov/Albert Pleysier (eds.): Unlocked Memories. Young Russians under German Rule. Lanham 2011, 100–115, 113.

310   Dietrich Beyrau offensive. With command no. 227 of 28 July 1942 – “not one step back” – they were deployed along the entire front.84 The military tribunals served as an ad­ ditional repressive institution; they introduced roughly one million criminal proceedings during the war, and handed down a total of 157 000 death penal­ ties.85 The mobilization of the entire population was also apparent in the numbers of Soviet soldiers who were killed at the front or missing in action in com­ parison with the German soldiers. Whereas the German losses were about three million, which represented more than half of all Wehrmacht losses, on the Soviet side there were up to eight million casualties from a total number of 32 to 34 million people mobilized as soldiers during the war.86 The high losses on the Soviet side were not only due to the Soviets’ having been taken by surprise when the Germans invaded; equally important were strategic errors, both defensive and offensive, and tactics that were carried out without regard for their own losses. Until the end of the war, Soviet losses were almost always higher than German losses, even though the Soviet forces were quantitatively and technologically superior by the time the Germans were defeated at the Battle of Kursk (July  1943) and after the Army Group Center collapsed (June 1944).87 The civilian population was also subject to the total mobilization. Discipli­ nary regulations at places of employment were intensified, and infringements were treated as desertion. During the war, courts convicted about one million people of violating work discipline and sentenced hundreds of thousands to incarceration in camps.88 The evacuation of thousands of enterprises along Владимир: Штрафбаты и заградотряды Красной Армии [Vladimir Daines: Shtrafbaty i zagradotriady Krasnoi Armii]. Moskva 2008, 12–173. 85 Joachim Hofmann: Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941–1945. Planung, Ausführung, Doku­ mentation. 8th edition. München 2001, 88–107; Соколов Б. В.: Цена победы. Великая Отечественная: неизвестное об известном [B. V. Sokolov: Tsena pobedy. Velikaia Otechestvennaia: Neizvestnoe ob izvestnom]. Moskva 1991, 11–17. 86 Rüdiger Overmans: Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. München 1999, 266, 276; for different figures regarding the Soviets, see Максудов Сергей: О фронтовых потерях Советской Армии в годы Второй мировой войны [Sergei Maksudov: O fron­ tovykh poteriakh Sovetskoi Armii v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny], in: Свободная Мысль [Svobodnaia Mysl’] 10 (1993), 117–119; Кривошеев Г. Ф. et al.: Великая Отечественная без грифа секретности. Книга потерь [G. F. Krivosheev et al.: Velikaia Otechestvennaia bez grifa sekretnosti. Kniga poter’]. Moskva 2009; see the critical review of the latter text by Jan Foitzik, in: The International Newsletter of Communist Studies 25 (2012), 196–199. 87 Мерцалов А. Н./Мерцалова Л. А.: Г. К. Жуков. Новое прочтение или старый миф [A. N. Mertsalov/L. A. Mertsalova: G. K. Zhukov. Novoe prochtenie ili staryi mif]. Moskva 1994. 88 Bernd Bonwetsch: Triumph im Elend, in: Ulrich Herbert/Axel Schildt (eds.): Kriegsende 1945 in Europa. Essen 1997, 52–88, 57. 84 Дайнес

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with their machine parks and their management and specialist personnel, as well as the removal of livestock, were all part of the total mobilization, which showed no regard for the needs of the remaining population. The evacuated residents were also left to their own resources if they were not important for the party or the economy.89 The material conditions of the Soviet side were likely not much better than under German occupation, especially in the coun­ tryside. Total demands on the soldiers (and the general population) could also be identified toward the end of the war in the ‘filtering’ of returning Soviet pris­ oners of war and forced workers. Of the POWs and civilians who returned by March 1946, 58  per cent were released to their former place of residence, 19 per cent were conscripted into the army, and more than 20 per cent were sent in special contingents to the NKVD and other government agencies, that is, they generally had to perform forced labor.90 The widespread mistrust of POWs and forced ‘eastern workers’ (Ostarbeiter) was due on the one hand to the purging frenzy of Stalin’s regime, but on the other hand also had to do in this case with the many Soviet volunteers that helped the Nazis at the Eastern front, the Vlasov Army (ROA), and other detachments that directly or indi­ rectly worked for the Germans – in most cases to avoid starvation.91 The population in the occupied territories was also generally eyed with ­suspicion. Some party members and partisans had already been subjected to questioning during the German occupation. The purges were resumed repeat­ edly even years after the war. The honorary title (zvanie) of ‘communist’ in the occupied territories was available only to those who had shown their engage­ Bonwetsch: Der ‘Große Vaterländische Krieg.’ Vom deutschen Einfall bis zum sow­ jetischen Sieg, 1941–1945, in: Gottfried Schramm (ed.): Handbuch der Geschichte Russ­ lands. Volume 3 (Book 2). Stuttgart 1992, 910–1008; John Barber/Mark Harrison (eds.): The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945. A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. London/New York 1991; Rebecca Manley: To the Tashkent Station. Evacu­ ation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War. Ithaca/London 2009. 90 Полян Павел М.: Жертвы двух диктатур. Жизнь, труд, унижения и смерть советских военнопленных и остарбайтеров на чужбине и на родине [Pavel M. Polian: Zhertvy dvukh diktatur. Zhizn’, trud, unizheniia i smert’ sovetskikh voennnoplennykh i ostarbait­ erov na chuzhbine i na rodine]. Moskva 2002, 529. 91 Amir Weiner: Making Sense of War. The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton 2001, 16–17, 35–37; Семиряга Михаил Иванович: Коллабора­ ционизм. Природа, типология и проявления в годы второй мировой войны [Mikhail Ivanovich Semiriaga: Kollaboratsionizm. Priroda, tipologiia i proiavleniia v gody vtoroi mirovoi voiny]. Moskva 2000, 414–551; Christoph Dieckmann et al. (eds.): Formen der ‘Kollaboration’ im östlichen Europa 1939–1945. Göttingen 2003; Ковалев Б.Н.: Нацист­ ская оккупация и коллаборационизм в России, 1941–1944 [B. N. Kovalev: Natsistskaia okkupatsiia i kollaboratsionizm v Rossii, 1941–1944]. Moskva 2004. 89 Bernd

312   Dietrich Beyrau ment in the resistance without consideration for their own family, who had broken with compromised relatives if necessary, and who could document their active resistance. ‘Sins,’ that is, the ‘wrong’ background, a prison sen­ tence, or other offenses before and in the early days of the war, could be best atoned for through heroic deeds as a partisan or soldier. No consideration was shown for the special situation of the Jews. Mere survival in the ghettos, con­ centration camps, or prisoner camps did not suffice for (Jewish and non-Jew­ ish) party comrades. Of course under these circumstances groups formed to arrange the necessary verification and documents, but this required consider­ able cunning in view of the frequent checks. Until the end of the Soviet ­Union, identification documents still asked about activities and conduct during the German or Romanian occupation.92

Open zones of violence: occupied territories and partisans In his radio address of 3 July 1941, Stalin also called upon the people to par­ ticipate in the partisan war. “In the occupied regions conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all his accomplices. They must be hounded and annihilated at every step, and all their measures frustrated.”93 In this case as well, strategies from the civil war were taken up again, but here a directed underground struggle was to be waged instead of the more spontaneous, lo­ calized guerrilla war (partizanshchina) waged ‘from the bottom up.’ However, it was not primarily the Soviet partisans who created the ‘unbearable condi­ tions’ in the occupied zones. Rather, it was the genocidal warfare of the Ger­ mans, which by far surpassed the internalized total warfare of the Soviets in terms of violence and cruelty. On top of that, the urban population was deci­ mated by systematic policies to starve the people out.94 The victims of the various ‘operations’ to allegedly or really combat the partisans were not in fact primarily the partisans, but the civilians in the villages instead. Here is just one scene from the reminiscences of a German soldier: There were partisans in a village in Russia. So it was clear that we would have to level the village entirely, without regard for the casualties. We had one guy […] Brosiske, a Berliner – he led everyone he saw in the village around to the back of the building and shot them in the back of the neck. And the guy was only twenty or nineteen and a half. We were told to shoot one in ten of the men in the village. ‘Oh, what is the sense of that? One in ten? It’s Making Sense of War, 95–125; Voisin, L’épuration de guerre, 163–248, 435–461. On the Great Patriotic War, 9–17, 15; Document 3, in: Vinogradov/Pleysier, Un­ locked Memories, 114. 94 Christian Gerlach: Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschaft- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944. Hamburg 1999. 92 Weiner, 93 Stalin,

The Long Shadow of the Revolution   313 clear,’ said my buddies, ‘that the whole village has to be annihilated.’ So we filled beer bottles with gasoline and put them on the table, and as we went out we casually threw hand gre­ nades back in after us. Everything immediately went up in flames – thatched roofs. Women, children, we shot down everything; only very few of them were partisans.95

It was especially the brutality of German occupation policies that made the partisans in the occupied territories become a real danger for the logistics of German warfare, but also (although this was certainly of secondary impor­ tance to them) for the local population.96 On top of that, in the areas occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian detachments all confronted one another. They wanted to position themselves for the time after the war and – as in the case of the Ukrainian-Polish conflicts – lay down their territorial claims through ethnic cleansing.97 Open zones of violence thus quickly developed in the occupied territories, and the resulting destruc­ tion, acts of violence, and mass murders – especially those committed by the Germans – eclipsed the experiences of the civil war.98 Even though the exter­ mination and starvation actions of the Nazi occupiers affected everyone, the Soviet partisans banked on the polarization of the population. With their ac­ tions (all kinds of sabotage, ‘rail war,’ murder of collaborators and German soldiers, intimidation of villagers) they accepted the fact that excessively bru­ tal counterstrikes by the occupiers would follow.99 The apparently very precise aims of the Soviets – destruction of the infrastructure and supplies, which were essential for the enemy, and control of the population through the parti­ Neitzel/Harald Welzer: Soldaten. Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben. Frankfurt am Main 2012, 124–125; on the treatment of children and young adults, see also Olga Kucherenko: Little Soldiers. How Soviet Children Went to War 1941–1945. Ox­ ford 2011, 224. 96 Bogdan Musial: Sowjetische Partisanen. Mythos und Wirklichkeit. Paderborn 2009. 97 For a summary, see Alfred Rieber: Civil Wars in the Soviet Union, in: Kritika. Explora­ tions in Russian and Eurasian History 1 (2003), 129–162; Bernhard Chiari (ed.): Die pol­ nische Heimatarmee. Geschichte und Mythos der Armia Krajowa seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. München 2003, 531–616. 98 However, this has nothing to do with the fact that these regions were beyond state con­ trol, which is one of the main theses of Jörg Baberowski: Kriege in staatsfernen Räumen. Russland und die Sowjetunion, in: Dietrich Beyrau/Michael Hochgeschwender/Dieter Langewiesche (eds.): Formen des Krieges von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Paderborn 2007, 291–309; see Alex J. Kay: A “War in a Region beyond State Control”? The GermanSoviet War, 1941–1944, in: War in History 1 (2011), 109–122. 99 Voisin, L’épuration de guerre, 145–160; Гогун Александр: Сталинские коммандос. Украинские партизанские формирования. Малоизученные страницы истории, 1941–1944 [Aleksandr Gogun: Stalinskie kommandos. Ukrainskie partizanskie formiro­ vaniia. Maloizuchennye stranitsy istorii, 1941–1944]. Moskva 2008, 179–259. For a com­ parison of communist and bourgeois resistance, see Beyrau, Schlachtfeld der Diktatoren, 92–97. 95 Sönke

314   Dietrich Beyrau sans (and agents of the NKVD and later the NKGB) – served only to create a state of fear and mistrust in the population, turning the struggle into a war in which everyone was fighting everyone else. At best they accelerated defection to the stronger battalions on the Soviet side of the front starting in 1943. This did not correspond to the Soviet myth of the ‘war of the entire nation.’100 When Soviet historiography claims that about one quarter of all villages in Belorussia were destroyed by the occupiers, the punitive and requisition ­actions on the part of the Soviets are obviously being disregarded. Here, too, atrocities, attacks, and criminal gangs were the rule rather than the exception. A particularly extreme example is the unit of a commander named Oleksii Fedorov. According to reports, he stylized himself into an ‘avenger of the peo­ ple’ and moved, murdering and plundering, through western Ukraine, whose inhabitants were suspected in any case of ‘bourgeois’ Ukrainian nationalism. Police, elders (starosta), and mayors who resisted the partisans were often ­tortured before being executed.101 However, the political authorities were less interested in killing collaborators than in using them as informers and spies. When the Soviet groups were too obviously demoralized, they were punished or disbanded. The real chaos of the period of occupation and war in the western territo­ ries of the USSR did not come back into public discourse until the post-Soviet period. Here is an example of how memory culture has brought complex con­ flicts back to light: in Belarus, the village of Chatyn has become a symbol of the extermination terror of the German occupiers.102 It is sometimes specu­ lated that the village might have been selected because its name is similar to Katyn, where more than 20 000 Polish officers were murdered by the NKVD. The village of Chatyn was destroyed by a penal battalion of the particularly notorious Oskar Dirlewanger SS special unit. The battalion was made up largely of Ukrainian and Belorussian soldiers. In contrast, Kuropaty, a ceme­ tery of Stalin mass murders prior to the war, became a memorial site after 1989. It countered the Soviet-Belorussian myth of the ‘Partisan Republic of the war of the entire nation, see for example, Пономаренко Пантелеймон Кондратьевич: Всенародная борьба в тылу немецко-фашистских захватчиков 1941–1944 [Panteleimon Kondrat’evich Ponomarenko: Vsenarodnaia bor’ba v tylu nemetsko-fashist­ kikh zakhvatchikov 1941–1944]. Moskva 1986; Musial, Sowjetische Partisanen, 351– 378. 101 Гогун Александр/Кентий Анатолий (eds.): Красные партизаны Украины 1941–1944 [Aleksandr Gogun/Anatolii Kentii (eds.): Krasnye partizany Ukrainy 1941–1944]. Kiev 2006, 123. 102 Dean Martin: Collaboration in the Holocaust. Crimes of Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–1944. New York/London 2000, 131. 100 On

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Belorussia.’ Both locations, Chatyn and Kuropaty, are remembered as sites and symbols of the subjugation of the Belorussian population.103

IV. Conclusions What is particular to the violence in the Russian empire or the Soviet Union from 1917 until Stalin’s death? In the relevant literature, one sometimes finds hypotheses that attempt to explain the events after 1917/1918 with reference to the anti-Jewish pogroms and the specific tradition of violence in Russian peasant culture or in the revolutionary movement. Reference to the brutaliza­ tion of society as a result of the First World War would seem even more obvi­ ous; these are assumptions that have been controversially discussed for dec­ ades.104 In Russia’s case we could point not only to the experiences at the front, which were often enough very gruesome, but also the rioting, in par­ ticular against Jews, as proof of this. However, it was the population at the peripheries of the empire that was mostly affected by the riots and deprivation under the occupation conditions and in the areas under military control. The actual spiral of violence began turning with the collapse of state authorities starting in 1917, the disbanding of the old army in 1917/1918, and the estab­ lishment of armed formations of civil war opponents.105 When focusing on the decades following the civil war, what becomes imme­ diately apparent are the chameleon-like changes in the motivations, the course of action, the practices, and the goals of the violence, as well as the changing perpetrators and groups of victims. In contrast to Nazi Germany, this is not a matter of a cumulative radicalization, but instead a sometimes erratic fluctua­ tion between restrictions and release. These different manifestations of vio­ lence can only be partially explained by the social context or the main policies of Lenin and Stalin. The civil war was characterized by the spread of open zones of violence from the military fronts to the interior of the country, the 103 Ушакин Сергей: В поисках места между Сталиным и Гитлером. О постколониальных

историях социализма [Sergei Ushakin: V poiskakh mesta mezhdu Stalinym i Gitlerom. O postkolonial’nykh istoriiakh sotsializma], in: Ab Imperio 1 (2011), 209–233; on the ‘divided’ historical cultures, see Wilfried Jilge (ed.): Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuro­ pas 1 (2006), Themenschwerpunkt: Gespaltene Geschichtskulturen? Zweiter Weltkrieg und kollektive Erinnerungskulturen in der Ukraine; Elazar Barkan et al. (eds.): Shared History. Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet Occupied Poland 1939–1941. Leip­ zig 2008. 104 Dirk Schumann: Europa, der Erste Weltkrieg und die Nachkriegszeit. Eine Kontinuität der Gewalt?, in: Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), 23–43. 105 For more details, see Beyrau, Brutalization.

316   Dietrich Beyrau collapse of state authorities and the new beginnings of state-building, and the juxtaposition of organized and local, more or less spontaneous violence. Or­ ganized and local violence was accompanied by ‘collateral damage’ and, even more so, by crime, which also became established in institutions such as the VChK, as well as by epidemics and famines. Because of the greater stability of the Bolshevik territory, elements of state-building can be identified, which ab­ sorbed violence and coercion as their constitutive features. The visions of Lenin, Stalin, and their supporters aimed to transform soci­ ety, a process that was to be carried out by a new kind of party that viewed itself as a combat unit, an order, and also as an army. It saw using force against a ‘petty bourgeois’ society as the only way to realize its goals. The ideology of a heroic struggle, the definitions of the enemy, and the ‘hardened’ self-disci­ pline of the party constantly generated violence against itself and especially against others. Through the propagandistic and heroicizing lens of the Soviet Union, the extreme experiences of the Second World War were stylized into the ‘Great Patriotic War.’ This served to shift the orientations of society. In place of revolutionary and missionary militancy, the ‘front generation’ devel­ oped not only a patriotism that was sometimes just as militant, but in particu­ lar also expectations and hopes for a ‘normal’ everyday life.106 The process of gradually moving past the experience of ever-present totalitarian and warlike violence was long and arduous. After Stalin’s death it was apparent first in the change from a revolutionary to an evolutionary understanding of socialism and in the official acknowledgment of civilian and ‘petty-bourgeois’ consumer expectations.107

106 Синявская

Е. С.: 1941–1945 г. Фронтовое поколение: Историко-психологическое исследование [E. S. Siniavskaia: 1941–1945 g. Frontovoe pokolenie: Istoriko-psikholog­ icheskoe issledovanie]. Moskva 1995; Elena Zubkova: Russia after the War. Hopes, Illu­ sions, Disappointments 1945–1957. Armonk 1998. 107 Dietrich Beyrau: Das sowjetische Modell. Über Fiktionen zu den Realitäten, in: Peter Hübner et al. (eds.): Arbeiter im Staatssozialismus. Ideologischer Anspruch und soziale Wirklichkeit. Köln 2005, 47–70.

Commentary

Jörn Leonhard

Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War – A Commentary from a Comparative Perspective The First World War was much more than what happened on the Western front between Germany, France and Britain. Nevertheless, the focus on these three countries, on the Western front, and on its spaces of experience and its places of memory, still dominates the public perception of the First World War today. The following remarks can be no more than an attempt to structure some symptomatic observations from a comparative perspective. They examine and compare three different perspectives: historiography, the experiences of time and space, and Western and Eastern Europe.

Historiography: three particularities The particularities of Eastern European experiences during the First World War have, for a long time, been absent from European historiography or have only been discussed with regard to national or regional case studies without being properly integrated into a European panorama of the war. This has to do with a very suggestive image that seemed to sum up the war experiences of the East as the legitimate war against autocratic and repressive multi-ethnic empires, which had been prisons for unfree peoples, ended with the collapse of these empires and the emergence of new nation states. Empires were thus contrasted with a model of democratic, liberal, and parliamentarian nation states in the West. This contrast did not only derive from historians’ analyses. It often reflected invented narratives and myths of the post-1918 period, which functioned to legitimize the new nation states in Eastern Europe by distancing them from the former empires. There is also a problem of retrospective causality, if not teleology. In the case of Eastern Europe, the primary and abiding focus has been on the supposed unity of the epoch between 1914 and 1945, which has been compared to a second Thirty Years’ War in Europe. Thus the First World War is typically interpreted in the light of the Second World War. There is often a tendency to view the First World War as a mere prelude to 1939/1941 and to regard the Second World War as an almost natural consequence of the First World War.

320   Jörn Leonhard This perspective results in a focus on long-term developments and ‘big’ pro­ cesses such as ‘radicalization’ or ‘brutalization’, terms that underline the supposed continuities in that epoch. A third and influential feature of the historiography of World War I is the attempt to identify certain models of nation-building with historical spaces from Western to Eastern Europe. Building on Theodor Schieder’s model, which differentiated between civic and revolutionary nation-building in France, Britain, and the United States,1 unions between hitherto independent territories in Germany and Italy, and secessionist nation-state building in the East, the First World War seemed to accelerate secessionist nation-state building in the East. Robert Gildea’s concept of the shift from West to East as a transition from “barricades” to “borders”, from class and participation conflicts to ethnic conflicts,2 is merely a reformulation of Schieder’s argument. However, more recent studies on the First World War and the pre-war decades demonstrate that these models, for all their value, are in fact too simple to grasp the complex realities in Europe. East-West comparisons have helped to overcome the compartmentalization of ideal models of Western European nation states and Eastern European empires. In fact, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Tsarist Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and also the British Empire were already nationalizing empires in transition prior to 1914, but this process became even more visible during the war. At the same time, there was hardly any nation state before 1914 that did not aim to be an imperializing nation state, deriving its legitimacy from imperial possessions and aspirations. This was true not only of France, Germany, and Italy, but also of smaller states such as Belgium. Furthermore, the First World War demonstrated that there was no European demarcation line between class conflicts in the West and ethnic conflicts in the East – these conflict constellations were far from static. Social conflicts became ethnicized, and socio-economic, political, and ethnic markers often overlapped and thus reinforced each other. That was not just an Eastern European particularity, as the example of Ireland during and after the war shows.

Experiences of time and space The war had both a temporal and a spatial dimension. Historical time can refer to the question of continuity/discontinuity, but also to different timelines Theodor Schieder: Typologie und Erscheinungsformen des Nationalstaats in Europa, in: Historische Zeitschrift 202 (1966), 58–81. 2 Robert Gildea: Barricades and Borders. Europe 1800–1914. London 1987, 95–98. 1

Legacies of Violence   321

and layers of time. The case studies presented in this volume directly or indirectly query the supposed continuities between 1914 and 1945. The notion of a long-term continuity of war experience and violence, of an unbroken chain of brutalization and radicalization, is used as a possible explanation for the Second World War and the Holocaust, but there are also strong arguments made against the alleged unity of this epoch. Instead of interpreting the First World War as the beginning of a violent age of ideological extremes, one can also regard it as the completion of the long nineteenth century – in the same way Alexis de Tocqueville saw the French Revolution less in the light of the following century, thereby rejecting the notion of a bourgeois revolution, but focused more on the revolution as the culmination of earlier processes, such as administrative centralization under the ancien régime. The First World War was in fact a dual watershed between two centuries. Empires and nation states, the concepts of state sovereignty and territoriality, the ideal of restricted wars through limited violence as opposed to the potential combination of revolution and war in civil wars, the differentiation between civilian and military spheres, between combatants and noncombatants – all of this belonged to the nineteenth century’s legacy, as did the ideal of parliaments, constitutions, and means of political and social participation. Many of these institutions and premises had already been questioned during the nineteenth-century wars on the periphery – the American Civil War was a totalizing war in that it questioned the boundaries between the military and the home front, and totalized warfare also ushered in the new concept of an unconditional surrender – but it was the First World War that introduced a new quality of warfare, new war states, and new languages of loyalty, which led to entangled fronts at home and abroad. The First World War marked a fundamental crisis of liberal legacies by ­classifying enemy aliens and by suspending civil society and parliamentarian ­regimes. Yet the crisis of liberal constitutionalism had already been under way even before 1914, and ideological counter-models had already been shaped. For these processes, the First World War was less a cause than a catalyst. They were accelerated and radicalized during the war; new instruments and new actors emerged, but the crisis of participation and mass politics pre-dated August 1914 in most European societies. Whether we approach Eastern Europe’s First World War from the longue durée perspective, from meso-time or narrated time, the difficulty of defining chronological containers such as pre-war, wartime, and post-war in Eastern Europe reflects the particular war experiences in Eastern Europe that transcend the traditional chronology of the war between the summer of 1914 and the autumn of 1918. Instead of the ‘classical’ chronologies of 1914–1918 or

322   Jörn Leonhard 1914–1945, a focus on the period between 1908 and 1912 – the crisis over the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina or the Balkan Wars – and 1923 – the Treaty of Lausanne, which represented the first violent revision of a post-war peace treaty by Turkey – makes much more sense for Eastern Europe. That leads to the question of space. There was no such thing as the East. Rather, one has to differentiate between distinct territorial spaces of experience – occupation regimes in Poland and Serbia, territorial gains and losses subject to frequently changing definitions, and shifting military fronts and hinterlands – against the background of a war characterized by movements, breakthroughs, and rapid advances, as seen, for example, in the summer of 1915, in the summer of 1916, and again from the summer of 1917 onwards. But concepts of imagined spaces, of colonial fantasies and utopias, were equally important. These were an integral part of the war, as Friedrich Naumann’s book on Mitteleuropa proves.3 Political, social, and cultural mapping made geo­ graphy a weapon in itself, and imagined spaces generated their own diverse realities, as the occupation regimes in Ober Ost and Serbia demonstrate. These ranged from the ever-present hysteria in the face of supposed spies and hostile civilians to the colonial perception of ethnic and religious otherness, often mixed with racial connotations of superiority and barbarism, and the anticipated ideal of a colonial-military rule over vast territories in the East in order to solve the problems of the German war state in the West. Although there were particular features of space as part of the war experience in the East, West and East were far from isolated war zones. As the war went on, they became ever more interrelated: it was the myth of the victory at Tannenberg in the East that allowed Hindenburg and Ludendorff to assume their dominant roles as leaders after 1916. The summer of that year saw the entanglement of the battles of Verdun and Somme, with the Brussilov offensive leading to a military crisis among the Central Powers. And in 1917/18 the actual end of the war against Russia and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk allowed a last reconfiguration of military resources from the East to the West and strengthened German commanders’ belief in a similar victory in the West. Without this entanglement between East and West, further intensified by the potential of Bolshevik revolutions in Western European societies, the traumatic shock of the sudden defeat in the West in October 1918, but also the following political interpretations including the stab-in-the-back-legend, are difficult to understand. What distinguished the war in the East from that in the West was not only movement as opposed to military stalemate, but more generally the absence of 3

Friedrich Naumann: Mitteleuropa. Berlin 1915.

Legacies of Violence   323

fixed borders instead of moving boundaries and frontiers. This explains the relative fluidity of war experiences that were characterized by soldiers’ and civilians’ endurance, a concept that offers an alternative to the ideal type models of coercion or consent. As the example of Lemberg demonstrates, continuously changing constellations and occupation regimes not only generated millions of refugees, but also led to the erosion of traditional state structures and the disappearance of state institutions. In many regions, the state monopoly on violence was broken, allowing other institutions and actors to take over responsibilities at local and regional levels. Instead of imperial bureaucrats and military officers, local and regional warlords took control. Often, a political and military vacuum was created, which contributed to the criminalization of daily life and gave the concept of endurance a particular salience in Eastern Europe. Another fundamental consequence of the fluidity of space and territoriality was a variety of wars and cultures of violence in which the boundaries between the military and civilians, between combatants and non-combatants became ever more permeable. Unlike the ‘Grande Guerre’ in France or the ‘Great War’ from the British perspective, Eastern European war experiences were characterized by state wars, border wars, liberation wars, revolutionary and civil wars, warlordism, and small wars within a greater war. Accordingly, different cultures of violence developed there. State-organized violence was strengthened through the infrastructures, technologies, and resources of modern warfare. This was no longer an ad hoc improvization, but followed rational planning and often notions of social engineering. Mass deportations of supposed enemy aliens, ethnic cleansing, and systematic genocide as in the case of the Armenians demonstrated the extent to which older problems of multi-ethnic societies came to be regarded as deadly threats during the war, which seemed to necessitate and legitimize even the most radical measures. But violence went far beyond this level of rational planning from above – it combined with local initiatives and constellations and included local and regional groups of demobilized soldiers, deserters, or refugees, thus becoming less and less controllable. The war of movement allowed occupation regimes to imagine what to do with ‘empty’ space. Hence the war became an instrument, an ‘enabling space’ with which to transform occupation into intervention and colonial rule. The war fuelled specialists’ belief in the use of techniques and infrastructures of the war state, for instance with regard to transport, mobilization, classification, and communication. Yet at the same time, the occupation regimes were challenged by many problems and disillusions. The German experience in Ober Ost was not only one of successful war colonialism; it combined triumph and

324   Jörn Leonhard horror, the utopia of rational planning, and disillusionment due to limited resources. Many occupiers became helpless invaders, and violence often served as a compensatory response in these contexts. When imperial structures were increasingly eroded after 1916 and collapsed in the course of 1918, it was unclear for a long time what would fill the vacuum. Instead of stable nation states able to deal with the legacy of the war and their imperial pasts, there evolved a particular zone of multiplied borderlands, of shatter zones, with specific memories of small wars and violence that transcended the ‘Great War’ in the West. The concept of “bloodlands” may offer a suggestive narrative, but it may also essentialize violence by associating it with a particular space without actually explaining it.4

West and East: comparing the universalism and ­particularism of war experiences If one takes Western and Eastern war experiences together, a number of common features have emerged in recent research. Three areas in particular may be mentioned here. Firstly, the deconstruction of the so-called ‘war enthusiasms’ of August 1914 is obvious not only for Western European society, but also for multiethnic empires, where there were very different responses to the outbreak of the war in cities and in the hinterland, and in different social milieus. As in France, Britain, and Germany, truce policies were soon eroded here in the face of a war that was not over by Christmas 1914. The war also led to a general crisis of traditional state structures and political systems. The suspension of the liberal state, of civil rights and parliamentarian as well as constitutional rules was a common feature – but in Britain and France as well as in the United States parliaments came back, and military victory renewed the legitimacy of democratic regimes. In all the war societies, new actors, social constellations, and definitions of participation developed, whereas traditional monarchs became more and more reduced to an existence in the shadow of the war. These new actors, institutions, and concepts included war industrial boards, trade unions, war socialism, and charismatic war leaders who challenged traditional political elites, as the examples of Clemenceau in France and Lloyd George in Britain demonstrate. Yet while both of them had a parliamentarian and civil background, in Central and Eastern Europe it was military leaders that tended to assume political roles. 4

Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin. London 2010.

Legacies of Violence   325

Secondly, another common feature lay in the war as a new chapter in the history of state- and nation-building, not just in the sense of defining borders after the war. The war became a test of both state efficiency and individual loyalty. It led to multiple crises in the economy of loyalties and changing languages of loyalty; monarchical, dynastic, and religious languages of loyalty were challenged by the long war, distribution crises, and the reality of mass conscript armies. The result was a dual dimension of enemies; ever more ­radical measures taken against supposed enemy aliens were a consequence of particular war nationalisms and regimes of mistrust. Typologies of belonging and the marking and classifying of political and ideological opponents and ethnic and religious minorities were features that prevailed in all war societies. Liberal pasts did not immunize against the Manichaeism of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Whenever notions of colonial rule dominated and war and civil war overlapped, violence became radicalized as the examples of Ireland and India in the British context prove. However, in the Eastern European regions, the regimes of mistrust and war nationalism were specific. Fuelled by occupation, moving frontiers, refugees, and the erosion of traditional imperial state structures, the model of ethnic homogeneity as a condition of stability fell on very fertile ground. Combined with new infrastructures, technologies of war, and eroding state structures, this contributed to particular cultures of violence. Thirdly, European societies entered the war as media societies, and the communication of war through censorship, propaganda, and the particular languages of war became essential factors of warfare itself. In order to achieve the successful mobilization of all resources, military and socio-economic, persuasion and control had to be combined. However, in contrast to Western Euro­ pean societies, Eastern Europe never generated a suggestive language of the First World War that could have turned into a stable point of collective reference. There were and still are no Eastern equivalents of the war’s lieux de mémoire, be it in terms of battles such as Verdun and the Somme, or with regard to figurations such as the French ‘poilu’, the British ‘Tommy’, the American ‘doughboy’, and the German ‘Frontkämpfer’. Competing narratives were not specific to Eastern European post-war societies. Indian or Dominion soldiers fighting for Britain or African and Asian soldiers fighting for France had their own testimonies of the war, and these voices have been overshadowed for a long time. However, the reality of post-imperial shatter zones, of unstable new nation states confronted with precarious legitimacies and large ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe, created a particular context for competing narratives; it invented myths and excluded memories. The question of who counted as an accepted veteran in these societies – if he had fought under imperial command and not in one of the national legions – illustrates this challenge well.

326   Jörn Leonhard If historians take the task of overcoming the many compartmentalizations in Eastern and Western contexts seriously, it will not be enough to merely rely on a thick description of isolated national or regional histories of the First World War. This may well lead to a kind of learned atomization, fuelled also by some extremes of the cultural turn in history. Instead, the search for fitting tertia comparationis as starting points for meaningful and precise comparisons and entangled experiences between West and East deserves greater attention. This approach offers a major heuristic advantage: it allows for multiple perspectives at a greater distance from the objects of research, and it leads to questions that have never been asked before.

List of Contributors Dietrich Beyrau is Professor Emeritus of Eastern European History at the University of Tübingen, specialising in the history of war, violence and totalitarian regimes. Recent major publications include: Schlachtfeld der Diktatoren. Osteuropa im Schatten Hitlers und Stalins (Göttingen 2000); Petrograd Oktober 1917. Die russische Revolution und der Aufstieg des Kommunismus (München 2001); and “Approximation of a Comparison. Stalinism, National Socialism and their Intellectual Servants”, in: Jerzy W. Borejsza/Klaus Ziemer (eds.), Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes in Europe. Legacies and Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York/Oxford 2006). Mark Biondich is Adjunct Research Professor at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, teaching courses on the history of twentieth-century Southeastern Europe and the post-communist transition in that region. He is the author of two books: The Balkans. Revolution, War and Political Violence since 1878 (Oxford 2011); and Stjepan Radić, the Croat Peasant Party and the Politics of Mass Mobilization, 1904–1928 (Toronto 2000), as well as several articles on the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia. He is currently working on a history of Croatian fascism from 1929 to 1945. Jochen Böhler is a research associate at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, teaching courses on the history of twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe focussed on the First World War, the interwar period, and the Second World War. Recent major publications include: “Enduring Violence. The Post-War Struggles in East-Central Europe 1917–1921”, in: Journal of Contemporary History 3 (2014, forthcoming); The Einsatzgruppen and Mass Murder in Poland, 1939 (Lanham 2014, co-edited with Jürgen Matthäus and Klaus-Michael Mallmann); Race, Genocide, and Holocaust, in: Thomas W. Zeiler/Daniel M. Du Bois (eds.), A Companion to World War II, Volume 2 (Malden/Oxford 2013), 666–684. Włodzimierz Borodziej is Professor of Modern History at the History Department of Warsaw University and co-director of the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena. He is editor-in-chief of Polskie Dokumenty Dyplomatyczne, a series of edited Polish foreign policy documents published by the Polish Institute for International Affairs since 2005. He is also chairman of the Academic Com-

328   List of Contributors mittee of the House of European History in Brussels. Recent major publications include: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (Madison 2006); „Schleichwege“. Inoffizielle Begegnungen sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989 (Köln/Weimar/Wien 2010, co-edited with Jerzy Kochanowski and Joachim von Puttkamer); and Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert (München 2010). Julia Eichenberg is a research associate at the History Department at Humboldt University, Berlin. Her main publications include the co-edited special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European History 3 (2010) entitled “Aftershocks. Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War”, and her book Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge. Polnische Veteranen des Ersten Weltkriegs und ihre internationalen Kontakte, 1918–1939 (München 2011), as well as several articles on Polish veterans and paramilitary violence in Poland and Ireland in the aftermath of the First World War. Her volume on The Great War and Veterans Internationalism (co-edited with John Paul Newman) will be published in November 2013. Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at University College ­Dublin and director of the Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Bismarck Myth (Oxford, 2005) and a biography of Reinhard Heydrich (Yale, 2011) and has also published widely in international journals such as The Journal of Modern History, Past & Present, Geschichte & Gesellschaft, and Vingtième Siècle. He is the editor of eight books, including most recently, Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge 2011, with Donald Bloxham), and War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford 2012, with John Horne). He is also the general editor of a new monograph series, The Greater War, due to be published by Oxford University Press during the centenary of the First World War. Maciej Górny is Assistant Professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His publications include: The Nation Should Come First. Marxism and Historiography in East Central Europe (Frankfurt am Main 2013); and Między Marksem a Palackým. Historiografia w komunistycznej Czechosłowacji (Warszawa 2001). He is also co-editor of two volumes of Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945). Texts and Commentaries (Budapest/New York 2006–2014). Jonathan E. Gumz is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham. Recent major publications include: The Resurrection and Collapse

List of Contributors   329

of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge 2009); and “Reframing the Historical Problematic of Insurgency. How the Professional Military Literature Created a New History and Missed the Past”, in: Journal of Strategic Studies 4 (2009), 553–588. Stephan Lehnstaedt is a research associate at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. Recent major publications include: Okkupation im Osten. Besatzer­ alltag in Warschau und Minsk, 1939–1944 (München 2010); Geschichte und Gesetzesauslegung. Zu Kontinuität und Wandel des bundesdeutschen Wiedergut­ machungsdiskurses am Beispiel der Ghettorenten (Osnabrück 2011); ­Arbeit in den nationalsozialistischen Ghettos (Osnabrück 2013, co-edited with Jürgen Hensel). Jörn Leonhard is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Freiburg. He was a Director of the School of History at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) from 2007 to 2012. In 2012/2013 he was a visiting fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is currently completing a general history of the First World War (scheduled for 2014). His major publications include: Liberalismus. Zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters (München 2001); Bellizismus und Nation. Kriegsdeutung und Nationsbestimmung in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten 1750–1914 (München 2008); Empires und Nationalstaaten im 19. Jahrhundert (2nd edition. Göttingen 2010, with Ulrike von Hirsch­hausen). Robert L. Nelson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Windsor. Recent major publications include: German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge 2011). He is editor of the volume Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 Through the Present (New York 2009) and is currently working on a project on the roots of German colonialism in Eastern Europe from the 1880s to its culmination in 1945. For a preliminary version of that story, see Robert L. Nelson: “From Manitoba to the Memel. Max Sering, Inner Colonization and the German East”, in: Social History 4 (2010), 439–457. Joachim von Puttkamer is Professor of Eastern European History at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and co-director (together with Włodzimierz Borodziej) of the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena. Recent major publications include: Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (München 2010); „Schleichwege“. Inoffizielle Begegnungen sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und

330   List of Contributors 1989 (Köln/Weimar/Wien 2010, co-edited with Włodzimierz Borodziej and Jerzy Kochanowski); and Schulalltag und nationale Integration in Ungarn. Slowaken, Rumänen und Siebenbürger Sachsen in der Auseinandersetzung mit der ungarischen Staatsidee, 1867–1914 (München 2003). Philipp Ther is Professor of Eastern European History at the Institute for East European History at the University of Vienna. His major publications include: Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten. „Ethnische Säuberungen“ im modernen Europa (Göttingen 2011); In der Mitte der Gesellschaft. Operntheater in Zen­ traleuropa 1815–1914 (Wien/München 2006); and the edited volume Kulturpolitik und Theater. Die kontinentalen Imperien in Europa im Vergleich (Wien 2012). Piotr J. Wróbel is Associate Professor of History and holder of the Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish History at the University of Toronto. His previous academic itinerary as a lecturer or visiting fellow took him to the University of Warsaw, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan State University at East Lansing, the University of California at Davis, the Institute of European History Mainz, Humboldt University in Berlin, and the Institute for PolishJewish Studies in Oxford. He has published a Historical Dictionary of Poland, 1945–1996 (Westport 1998) and co-edited the volumes Nation and History. Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Toronto 2006) and The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy (Athens, Ohio 2010).

Index Abdülhamid II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire  37–38 Adler, Victor  227 Alexander II, Emperor of Russia  169, 176 Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress Consort of Russia  183 Arendt, Hannah  176 Assmann, Aleida  254 Baar von Baarenfels, Eduard  211, 213 Baberowski, Jörg  79, 287 Bacsó, Béla  221 Baczyński, Karol  250 Balkelis, Tomas  61 Ballinger, Pamela  28–29 Bartucz, Lajos  161 Bauer, Otto  227 Bergson, Henri  131–132 Beria, Lavrentii Pavlovich  295 Beseler, Hans Hartwig von  82, 96, 101, 103, 107 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von  119, 267 Bing, Ignaz  225 Bismarck, Otto von  114–116 Boas, Franz  152 Bobrinskii, Grigorii  182 Bogusławski, Edward  152 Bonaparte, Napoleon  2, 57 Bonch-Bruevich, Mikhail Dmitrievich  64 Bonne, Georg  162 Brandes, George  186 Broca, Paul  159 Brosiske, a Berliner  312 Brown, Kate  27, 50 Brubaker, Rogers  31 Bryukhanov, Nikolai Pavlovich  303 Buber, Martin  195 Bunin, Ivan  290 Burian, Karl  229 Buschan, Georg  135, 163 Case, Holly  21 Cassese, Antonio  72 Cazals, Rémy  237 Classen, Karl  147

Clemenceau, Georges  271, 324 Cohen, Israel  197 Conrad von Hötzendorf, Franz Graf  108 Cserny, József  220 Curschmann, Fritz  122 Curzon, George  276, 279–281 Cvijić, Jovan  150 Czekanowski, Jan  153–155 Czernin von und zu Chudenitz, Ottokar (Theobald Otto Maria) Graf  123–124 Danilov, Yuri  56 Darré, Walther  125 Deniker, Joseph  144, 151, 160 Denikin, Anton Ivanovich  199 Diner, Dan  60 Dirlewanger, Oskar  314 Dragostinova, Theodora  27–28, 50 Dronchilov, Krum  158 Durkheim, Émile  131 Eichenberg, Julia  26 Eickstedt, Egon von  138–139 Eisner, Kurt  220 Eklund, Artur  148 Elwert, Georg  285–286 Engelstein, Laura  82 Epp, Franz Ritter von  211 Erzberger, Matthias  221 Evans, Andrew D.  140, 142, 164 Ezhov, Nikolai Ivanovich  294–295 Fedorov, Oleksii  314 Ferdinand, King of Romania  19 Figes, Orlando  81, 204 Fink, Carole  272–273 Fischer, Eugen  119, 133–134 Fischer-Defoy, Werner  164 Foch, Ferdinand  85, 147 Foucault, Michel  299 Frank, Hans  125 Frank, Liborius  76 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria  13, 47 Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria  16–17, 34 Fridman, Naftal M.  179

332   Index Frunze, Mikhail Vasilíevich  308 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  254 Galili, Ziva  18 Gatrell, Peter  79, 81, 251 Gayl, Wilhelm von  121 Geiss, Immanuel  119 Gentile, Emilio  228 Gildea, Robert  320 Głąbiński, Stanisław  145 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur Comte de  134 Gömbös, Gyula  211 Göring, Hermann  228 Goodhard, Arthur Lemann  62 Goremykin, Ivan  183 Gorky, Maxim  290 Got’e, Juri V.  289 Graf, Daniel William  64 Grant, Madison  165 Greim, Robert Ritter von  228 Groener, Wilhelm  83–84 Grohmann, Josef  166 Grzesiski, Oberst  241 Günther, Hans F. K.  146–147, 150 Gumz, Jonathan E.  123 Haberlandt, Arthur  138 Haller, Józef  241–242, 246 Hauptmann, Gerhart  131–132 Healy, Maureen  15 Hejjas, István  211 Herrmann, Antal  161 Heydrich, Reinhard  228 Himmler, Heinrich  117 Hindenburg, Paul von  97, 99, 107, 147, 322 Hirszfeld, Hanna  138 Hirszfeld, Ludwik  138 Hitler, Adolf  125–126, 169, 228 Höß, Rudolf  220 Holquist, Peter  64–65, 81 Hoover, Herbert  60 Horne, John  82, 247–248 Horthy, Miklós  200, 211, 220–221, 223, 228 Hrushevskyi, Mykhailo  157 Hugenberg, Alfred  116, 119 Hull, Isabel  73 Ianushkevich, Nikolai Nikolaevich  55, 78

Ishirkov, Anastas  158 Ismail, Naci  118 Ivanov, Nikolai  184 Jaxa-Bykowski, Ludwik  154 Joffre, Joseph  147 Kalafatis, Chrysostomos  278 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst  228 Kamenev, Lev Borisovich  301 Karl, Emperor of Austria  16, 18, 223 Kennan, George  9 Keup, Erich  121 Killinger, Manfred von  214 Knapp, Friedrich  115 Koenen, Gerd  287 Kohser-Spohn, Christiane  271 Konitza, Faik  38 Koselleck, Reinhart  254 Kossinna, Gustaf  152 Kozma, Miklós  213, 220 Kramář, Karel  14, 18 Kramer, Alan  82 Krauss, Alfred  223–224 Krausz, Jakob  224–225 Krylenko, Nikolai Vasilíevich  290 Kun, Béla  200–201, 220–221 Kyrle, Georg  137 Laue, Theodore von  287 Le Bon, Gustave  213 Lebzelter, Viktor  137–139, 166 Lenhossék, Mihály  159–161 Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich  19, 84, 287, 290– 294, 299–300, 315–316 Lenz, Fritz  145–146 Leonhard, Jörn  10 Lichtenstädter, Siegfried  268 Liulevicius, Vejas G.  83, 85, 114, 122, 236, 246 Lloyd George, David  147, 324 Locke, John  120 Lohr, Eric  64, 123 Ludendorff, Erich  95–98, 107–108, 112– 113, 121–122, 147, 188, 228, 308, 322 Lueger, Karl  226 Luschan, Felix von  138–140, 158 Luxemburg, Rosa  224 Luzatti, Luigi  186

Index   333 Majewski, Janusz  235 Makhno, Nestor Ivanovich  58 Mann, Thomas  131 Martens, Fedor  73 Martin, Rudolf  134, 136, 138–140, 155, 164 Marx, Karl  10, 221 Mazower, Mark  13 Mehmed V., Sultan of the Ottoman Empire  39 Mendel, Gregor  133 Merrill, Aaron Stanton  278 Meyer, Konrad  125 Meyerhold, Vsevolod E.  301 Mezhlauk, Valerii Ivanovich  301, 303 Mickiewicz, Adam  252 Miklaszewski, Walenty  151 Miliukov, Pavel Nikolaevich  18 Młynarski, Feliks  190 Mogilner, Marina  156 Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich  301, 303 Mommsen, Wolfgang J.  131 Montandon, Georges  268 Mosse, George  210, 249, 251 Mussolini, Benito  228 Mydlarski, Jan  138 Nagy, Lajos Sarsi  159 Naimark, Norman  113, 124 Nansen, Fridtjof  280 Naumann, Friedrich  322 Newman, John Paul  26 Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia  17, 34, 183, 192 Nicholas Nicholaevich, Grand Duke of ­Russia  55, 182, 184 Oberhummer, Eugen  135, 163 Olmer, Paula  208 Osztenburg, Gyula  211 Pabst, Waldemar  224 Paikert, Alajos  158–159 Panov, Todor  157 Pasha, Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk  277– 279 Pasha, Mehmet Ali  38 Pasha, Mustafa İsmet  279 Penck, Albrecht  134

Peter I, Emperor of Russia  159 Pfeifer, Otto  142 Piłsudski, Józef  240–241, 243–244, 246, 253, 255 Pöch, Hella  137, 142–143 Pöch, Rudolf  135–137, 140–141, 143, 160, 162, 166 Podlubny, Stepan  304 Prilutski, Noah  190 Princip, Gavrilo  47 Promitzer, Christian  158 Prónay, Pál  211, 221–222, 228 Prusin, Alexander Victor  30–31, 50 Rathenau, Walther  215, 221 Ratzel, Friedrich  115 Rauter, Hanns Albin  211, 213, 227–228 Reimann, Aribert  9 Ringbom, Lars  148 Römer, Beppo  211 Roßbach, Gerhard  211 Roth, Joseph  209 Rothziegel, Leo  227 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  237 Rudnytskii, Stepan  143–146, 149, 151, 154 Rutherford, Phillip T.  126 Salomon, Ernst von  215–216 Sammartino, Annemarie  85 Sanborn, Joshua  58, 251 Schieder, Theodor  320 Schmitt, Carl  291 Schmoller, Gustav  114–115 Schönerer, Georg Ritter von  226 Schwerin, Friedrich von  116, 119, 121 Seherr-Thoß, Ernst Graf von  105 Sering, Max  114–117, 119–121, 123, 125 Sikorskii, Ivan Alekseevich  156–157 Skobelev, Matvej  18 Snyder, Timothy  126 Somogyi, Béla  221 Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich  221, 286–288, 294–295, 297–304, 307, 311–312, 314–316 Stambolov, Stefan  157 Starhemberg, Ernst Rüdiger von  211, 214, 216, 219–220, 227–229 Steidle, Richard  227 Steiner, Robert  94 Stünzner, Otto  148 Stolypin, Petr Arkadíevich  123

334   Index Stupperich, Robert  121 Sukhanov, Nikolai Nikolaevich  299–300 Sunderland, Willard  123 Suominen, Yrjö Kaarlo  155 Szálasi, Ferenc  228 Szlanta, Piotr  235 Talko-Hryncewicz, Julian  135, 152 Teleki, Pál  158 Thaler, Peter  27 Theweleit, Klaus  85 Tiedemann, Christoph von  115 Tocqueville, Alexis de  321 Tourmakine, Alexandre  261 Trotha, Trutz von  285 Trzaska-Durski, Karol  241 Tsenov, Gancho  163 Üngör, Ugor Ümit  118 Valéry, Paul  9 Venizelos, Eleftherios  265, 274, 277, 279 Virchow, Rudolf  147, 164

Vovk, Khvedir  144 Wargelin, Cliff  123 Watson, Alexander  247–248 Weeks, Theodore R.  1 Weitz, Eric  272–273 Weninger, Josef  137, 143 Westerhoff, Christian  92 Wetterlé, Émile  268 Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany  18 Wilser, Ludwig  147, 152 Wilson, Woodrow  147, 230 Winkler, Heinrich  160 Wrangel, Petr Nikolaevich  291 Wrzosek, Adam  137 Wurfbain, André  277 Young, Hubert E. W.  45 Zaionchkovskii, Petr A.  304 Ziemann, Benjamin  210 Županić, Niko  134–135, 150–151, 156