Terror in the Balkans (4 page)

portended ominous changes. During the late nineteenth and early twen-

tieth centuries, technical and industrial change made it possible for

major powers to recruit, equip, and supply mass conscript-based armies.

The scale of warfare that the Europe-wide emergence of mass armies

presaged required a hitherto unparalleled degree of technical prowess

and operational planning. This was also an era in which the revolution

in defensive fi repower, advances in communication, and the advent of

airpower on the battlefi eld were transforming warfare fundamentally.18

Before the Great War
17

In the new reality these converging elements created, it was incum-

bent upon the ambitious young offi cer to gain expertise not just in a tra-

ditional branch of the army, but also, eventually, in one of the cutting-edge

fi elds of military planning and technology. The most sought-after route

was to qualify as a staff offi cer. This presented the ambitious young offi -

cer with the perfect opportunity to master the entire technical, organi-

zational, and operational foundation upon which the new warfare was

based. Only the very ablest offi cers—many of whom, in the case of the

German and Austro-Hungarian offi cer corps, would eventually fi ll the

Wehrmacht’s senior-most positions—were granted such an opportunity.

But many other future Wehrmacht offi cers were at least able to pursue

their ambitions further by transferring to one of the rapidly develop-

ing technology-oriented branches of their respective armies—airships,

machine-gunnery, or battlefi eld communications, for instance—before,

during, or after the Great War.19

The emergence of the technically minded military planner would cul-

minate during the interwar years in the advent of the “specialist in mass

destruction.” This was a badge the Reichswehr offi cer corps would come

to sport with particular pride. But even before the outbreak of the Great

War, offi cers’ increasing professional specialization could bring baleful

implications. For it encouraged ambitious young offi cers with new pro-

fessional preoccupations to work and think in a way more specialized,

focused, and intensive than ever before. This discouraged out-of-the-

box thinking on military matters. And, more importantly for this study,

such narrowness could further deprive an offi cer of the opportunity to

develop societal awareness, political maturity, and general openness to

the world.20 Though increasing professional specialization did not make

such an outcome inevitable, it did make it more likely.

All the more likely given some of the still more disturbing develop-

ments that were now in train. Whether in Wilhelm II’s Germany or in

the Austro-Hungarian Empire, brutal worldviews were already emerging

across wider society. And such was the level of social and political illit-

eracy that affl icted both offi cer corps that a great many offi cers, though

not yet automatic prey to such worldviews, were morally and intellectu-

ally ill-equipped to resist them as fully as they might have done.

18
terror in the balk ans

One of the most infl uential ideas of the age across Europe, and quite

possibly the most noxious, was Social Darwinism. Social Darwinists

believed that the struggle between the “superior” and the “inferior,” and

the extinction or subjugation of the weak in favor of the strong, were the

natural order of things not just in the animal kingdom, but in human

affairs also. During the 1880s, those who believed it was the Germans

themselves who, by dint of their cultural, scientifi c, and military achieve-

ments, occupied the foremost position among all the “races” of human-

ity, merged into the Pan-German movement.

Pan-Germans in Germany itself clustered around the Pan-German

League, and in German-speaking Austria around the Greater German

People’s Party (GDVP). Both groups drew support from particular

middle-class circles. For the Pan-German League it was teachers, civil

servants, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who saw themselves

as pillars of social authority and custodians of German culture. For the

GDVP it was right-wing university students, and artisans and shopkeep-

ers who felt threatened by technological change.21

As the German and Austro-Hungarian offi cer corps expanded, offi -

cers who hailed from such backgrounds became much more numerous.

If they did indeed subscribe to Pan-German sentiment, they could not

necessarily expect a particularly warm reception in the traditional-

istic climate of either offi cer corps. But this did not mean they would

encounter particular hostility either. For this same climate itself con-

tained elements common with Pan-Germanism. One such element was

anti-Semitism.

From the 1870s onward, the “science” of Social Darwinism lent Europe’s

long-established tradition of anti-Semitism an even more sinister, bio-

logically founded aspect. For Pan-Germans it provided a warped basis

for the equally warped view that Jews, as non-Germans, should be pre-

vented from “polluting,” and thus weakening, the “purity” that was the

foundation of the German people’s strength. Pan-Germans within the

Austro-Hungarian Empire in particular regarded Jews as a spiritual,

economic, and biological menace. This view became more buttressed

and widespread as thousands of eastern Jews were driven to live in

Before the Great War
19

the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly in Vienna, by murderous

pogroms in Tsarist Russia.22

Nevertheless, even if there was considerable latent anti-Semitism

within the Habsburg offi cer corps, there was little active anti-Semitism.

This was probably due in no small part to the greater open-mindedness

that service across such an ethnically diverse realm afforded. Emperor

Franz Josef hugely appreciated the loyalty of all his subjects, Gentile and

non-Gentile. Jews were disproportionately prominent, thanks probably

to their superior education levels, amongst the army’s reserve offi cers.

There were also considerable numbers of Jewish career offi cers.23

But by the eve of the Great War, the Royal-Imperial Army was no

longer quite as comfortable a home for Jews as it had been. General

Conrad, the chief of the army high command, and Archduke Franz Fer-

dinand, who as well as heir to the throne was also inspector general of

the army, were both self-declared anti-Semites. There was also a glass

ceiling, with higher-ranking offi cers and staff offi cers counting very

few Jews among their number.24 But it would be wrong to exaggerate

the extent to which anti-Semitism was beginning to pervade the offi cer

corps in its entirety.25 The still relatively benign experience of Jewish

soldiers within the Austro-Hungarian army of the Great War would

vindicate this view.

North of the border, however, the picture was less benign already.

“Anti-Semitism,” asserts the historian Martin Kitchen, “was one of the

fundamental creeds of the German Offi cer Corps.”26 As Jews could not

be barred by law, they were barred instead on grounds of “character.”

Jews from a commercial background, for instance, could be excluded for

their “undesirable” bourgeois social origins. Typical were the remarks

of one German offi cer in 1911. Responding to Jewish demands for equal

treatment in the army, he expressed astonishment at the notion that “the

salvation of the Fatherland depended on our accepting a few dozen use-

less Isidores, Manasses, and Abrahams as confessing Semites in our

Offi cer Corps.”27 Reprehensible as they are, such remarks indicate old-

school economic and religious anti-Semitism, not the more venomous,

biologically based brand espoused by the Pan-Germans. But such old-

school anti-Semitism was widespread and entrenched, and would form a

bedrock for that more vicious strain later on.

20
terror in the balk ans

Also widespread across society, and likewise insinuating itself into both

offi cer corps, was anti-Slavism. The pre–Great War anti-Slavism of the

imperial German offi cer corps was particularly directed against “the

East.” This is not surprising; it was founded both in centuries-old Rus-

sophobia, common to the West generally, and in notions of Germany’s

“moral mission” to civilize its backward, inferior eastern neighbors.28

Such notions had grown stronger since the demise of the independent

Kingdom of Poland and the infl ux of millions of Poles into the eastern

provinces of Prussia itself.29 Anti-Slavism grew stronger still in reaction

to the expansionist pan-Slavic ideology that increasingly animated the

foreign policy of Tsarist Russia, particularly over the Balkans, in the

years up to 1914.30

In the German offi cer corps, anti-Slavic views went to the top. In

February 1913 Hellmuth von Moltke, chief of the German General Staff,

opined to his Austro-Hungarian opposite number, Conrad, that any

future war would be “a struggle between Slavs and Teutons” for the

preservation of “Germanic culture.”31 Conrad dismissed talk of a race

war, reminding Moltke that Slavs comprised 47 percent of the Habsburg

Empire’s population.32 But six months on Moltke remained stuck in the

same groove, asserting to Conrad that the European war would come

“sooner or later,” and that it would be “primarily a struggle between

Germans and Slavs.”33

Yet though the Pan-Germans were strongly anti-Slavic, there were

other educated bourgeois German circles, circles from which ever more

offi cers were now being drawn, that harbored a different attitude. This

attitude, condescending though it was, did acknowledge Russia’s contri-

bution to the cultural and intellectual life of Europe. At any rate, it was

an attitude certainly more favorable than Moltke’s stance.34 True, new

offi cers harboring such sentiments may well have found them stifl ed fol-

lowing their admission into the offi cer corps. But this did not mean they

were going to automatically convert to Moltke’s strident anti-Slavism.

The extent of such anti-Slavism within the German offi cer corps as a

whole, then, should not be overstated.

General Conrad, for his part, was not best-placed to rebuke his Ger-

man counterpart for anti-Slavism. When he recalled his tour of duty fi ght-

ing Slavic irregulars in Habsburg-occupied Bosnia between 1878 and

Before the Great War
21

1882, he railed against their “cruelty,” “bestiality,” and “bloodlust.”35 By

the early twentieth century, growing numbers of ethnic Germans within

the Habsburg Empire would have sympathized. This was down partly

to the advent of biologically based racism during the 1870s and 1880s. It

was also down partly, especially after universal suffrage was introduced

in 1907, to Pan-Germanism’s swelling political mobilization in the face

of what many Austrians perceived as “Slav encroachment and Jewish

emancipation.”36 But probably the most powerful source of burgeoning

anti-Slavism within the empire, and ultimately the most cataclysmic, was

the empire’s confrontation with Serbia.

During the decade before the Great War, Serbia became a signifi cant

Balkan power and an increasingly anti-Habsburg one. In particular, the

Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 enabled it to expand its territory considerably.

Consequently, pan-Slavists in both Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian

Empire regarded one another with growing interest. Eventually, the

idea of unifying Serbia with the southern Slavic peoples of the empire—

something that would, of course, be fatal to the empire’s future—began

taking root.37 Unsurprisingly, those years saw Austrian journalists

take an increasingly bellicose line against Serbia; Leopold Mandl, for

instance, wrote of the “Austro-phobic putrefaction in the nation” that

was the foundation of Serbian foreign policy, and warned that Serbia’s

goal was “the liberation and reunifi cation of all lands that are inhabited

by Serbs”—including those within the Habsburg Empire itself.38 In

1908, Austria-Hungary almost went to war with Serbia, and Serbia’s ally

Russia, over the surprise Habsburg annexation of Bosnia. And just as

some offi cers saw the apparently imminent confl agration as a conven-

tional battle between states, others viewed it as a battle between superior

Germans and inferior Slavs.39

Yet while fear of Serbia and Russia as hostile states was strong, racial

contempt for Slavs in the “modern” biological sense did not affect the

army’s outlook or policy, or its offi cers’ behavior. Indeed, as Conrad

indicated in his exchanges with Moltke, generic anti-Slavism was hardly

a viable policy for an empire that encompassed such a voluminous num-

ber of Slavs itself—not least among the rank and fi le of its own army.

So numerous were the army’s Slavic troops that the need for a tolerant,

understanding attitude on the part of the army’s predominantly German

22
terror in the balk ans

offi cer corps was clearly a given. Army doctrine encouraged it, Franz