Terror in the Balkans (5 page)

Josef himself demanded it, and the vast majority of Habsburg offi cers

practiced it.

Conrad himself was an avowed Social Darwinist—a worldview that sig-

nifi cant numbers of offi cers seem, at least at fi rst sight, to have shared.40

But Conrad’s brand of Social Darwinism thought in terms of strong

and weak states rather than strong and weak races. He believed that the

Habsburg Empire, were it to survive, must reinvigorate itself with a pro-

active, aggressive foreign policy against its principal foreign enemies.

These enemies, in Conrad’s view, were Italy—despite the fact that Italy

and Austria-Hungary were offi cially in alliance—and of course Serbia.

Such a policy, Conrad argued, would strengthen the monarchy not just

against external enemies, but also against the corrosive effects of ethnic

nationalism within the empire. He accordingly promoted it with tireless

energy. The historian Holger Herwig writes:

A glance at Conrad’s outpourings during the seven years before 1914

provides insight into his fertile mind. In 1907 Conrad demanded

war against “Austria’s congenital foes” Italy and Serbia; the next

year versus Russia, Serbia, and Italy. In 1909 he counselled military

action against Serbia and Montenegro; in 1910 against Italy; and in

1911 versus Italy, Serbia, and Montenegro. The year 1912 saw con-

centration on the struggle against Russia and Serbia. The next year

was especially productive, with military studies readied for con-

fl icts with Albania, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, and even Russian

Poland. The fi nal six months of peace in 1914 saw renewed plans ver-

sus Montenegro, Romania, Russia, and Serbia. Each of these years

also brought contingency plans against numerous combinations of

the above-named powers.41

Even though Conrad’s Social Darwinism was national rather than

biological in character, then, the resulting policy was profoundly belli-

cose. Such a policy could only be credible, of course, with an army capa-

ble of executing it. Conrad tried to get round the lack of resources the

Before the Great War
23

army’s fi nancial straitjacket imposed, by making the bulk of the army’s

combat manpower—the infantry—as tough and offensive-minded as

possible. Extreme infantry training ensured that Conrad’s Social Dar-

winism impacted directly upon the army’s soldiers, as well as upon the

foreign and military policy for they were intended to promote. The war

games of Conrad’s revamped infantry maneuvers awarded the greatest

number of points to those units that advanced farthest and seized the

greatest number of objectives. This ignored the fact that the revolution-

ary development of defensive fi repower would, come actual war, render

such rapid advances impossible. The maneuvers also took the cultiva-

tion of strength and the purging of weakness to drastic lengths; so enor-

mous were the distances soldiers were now expected to march that some

died from heat exhaustion.42 The hardening psychological effect upon

the offi cers who underwent and survived this ordeal was likely to make

itself felt in future years.

But even the Social Darwinism of Conrad’s harsh training regime and

the transformation in military spirit it was designed to generate were not

omnipotent within the Habsburg offi ce corps. They came up against

the entrenched “aristocratic conservatism” that still characterized army

culture. Many senior offi cers, at least, shared the mutaphobic stance of

the emperor and the inspector general of the army, and this hindered

Conrad’s “fresh, radical” approach.43 The impact of Conrad’s Social

Darwinism may also have been limited because even many of the offi cers

who were infl uenced by it may have viewed it not so much as a radical

departure, than as a rebranded justifi cation of imperial expansion and

the old hierarchical system.44

Social Darwinism within the German offi cer corps enjoyed a much

more lethal outlet—Germany’s colonial wars against “inferior” peoples

in Africa and Asia. The worst example was the Germans’ particularly

savage suppression of the Herero Rebellion in German Southwest Africa

in 1904–1905.45 The extent to which German soldiers’ experience of colo-

nial campaigns further brutalized the imperial German military mind-

set should not be overstated. The number of troops serving in these

campaigns was self-selecting and very small;46 among other things, it

24
terror in the balk ans

included none of the German-born offi cers featured in this study. But the

army’s conduct of colonial campaigns was not a fringe issue; it fi gured

prominently, for example, in the 1907 elections for the German parlia-

ment. Defenders of the army’s conduct depicted it as a national security

issue, and so embedded was military culture in middle-class German

circles that politicians from many points of the political spectrum sup-

ported the troops unreservedly.47

Such clamorous approval could only strengthen the German mili-

tary’s hard-line stance on colonial suppression. But such a stance had a

strong base within the German military already. For the ferocity of Ger-

man colonial warfare was not just a product of Social Darwinist racism.

These were wars in which the Germans were fi ghting not conventional

troops, but armed irregulars. The revulsion with which the Imperial

German Army regarded such opponents surpassed that exhibited by

any other regular army during the decades before 1914. Identifying how

durably the army’s abhorrence affected the German military mind-set

is important to understanding what shaped its conduct of counterinsur-

gency during World War II. This is an ideal point at which to consider

how such abhorrence came about.48

The waging of ruthless counterinsurgency colonial warfare, suffused

by racist thinking, was far from unique to the German military during

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Armies of all the major

European colonial powers, and of the United States, waged successive

counterinsurgency campaigns during the decades before 1914, usually

against indigenous peoples resisting imperial rule. Such campaigns usu-

ally demanded the type of fi ghting, amid the kinds of conditions, for

which conventional troops were not traditionally prepared. The conven-

tional troops ordered to contend with all this were liable to lash out ruth-

lessly against civilians. This might be out of hatred and distrust, desire to

somehow compensate for their own shortcomings, pressure from above

for results, or brutalizing fear and frustration. The troops’ brutality was

also fueled—barring exceptions such as the British campaign against the

white Boers in southern Africa between 1899 and 1902—by the racism of

the period. Put simply, white soldiers who had imbibed racist attitudes

Before the Great War
25

found it easier to kill noncombatants of a darker skin color, and their

commanders usually stood ready to encourage them.

Yet the early decades of the twentieth century brought signs that some

armies, at least, were beginning to appreciate the benefi ts of hearts-and-

minds measures to counterinsurgency. Behind this was a dawning real-

ization that active support, or at least passive cooperation, could make

mounting a successful counterinsurgency campaign considerably easier.

It might even be crucial to that campaign’s success. Measured treatment

of insurgent deserters and prisoners, widespread use of propaganda,

and, perhaps most importantly, social and economic measures of practi-

cal benefi t to the population all rendered valuable service in this cause.49

But the German military—some saner heads aside—largely failed to

properly appreciate this approach. The corrosive infl uence of its own

particularly harsh counterinsurgency history proved too strong. In

Clausewitz, the doyen of Prussian military thinkers, the German mili-

tary had a particularly strong proponent of the view that encircling and

destroying an insurgent adversary was far preferable to a drawn-out,

costly “passive” security policy that focused entirely on guarding vital

installations and supply routes in occupied territory.50 But perhaps the

development that hardened the German military’s attitude most pro-

foundly was its experience of francs-tireurs—irregular French fi ghters

or, directly translated, “free-shooters”51—during the Franco-Prussian

War of 1870–1871.

During this confl ict—the culminating point of Prussia’s unifi cation

with other German states—the armies of Prussia and its German allies

developed a strong “franc-tireur psychosis.” This was caused by fre-

quent, often ruthless attacks by armed civilians upon German soldiers

in occupied France. Most of the penalties the Germans exacted were

less severe than they might have been—heavy fi nes and destruction of

property, rather than mass shootings. But hostage-taking and hostage-

shooting did take place, and rare as they were, they set a precedent.52

For the Prussian military establishment heading the German forces

detested with special vehemence any disruption of what it perceived to

be the “proper” waging of war—the employment of mobile, technical,

and tactical superiority, by coordinated and uniformed fi eld armies in

open combat, with the aim of vanquishing the enemy’s forces in a swift

26
terror in the balk ans

battle of annihilation. Of course, the Prussians’ fondness for such war-

fare was founded on the belief that they themselves were the unrivaled

masters of it.53

But the particular aversion to irregular warfare which the German

military developed during the Franco-Prussian War and after was also

due to its own limitations. It relied upon the concentration of maximum

force, underpinned by superior tactics and technology, without properly

appreciating those other elements so often essential to concluding a war

successfully. For instance, though the Germans defeated the French fi eld

armies in 1870, it was diplomacy that brought the Franco-Prussian War

to an end the following year. In downplaying the importance not just of

diplomacy, but also of factors such as logistical planning, intelligence,

coordination with civilian agencies, and—in the case of counterinsur-

gency—suffi cient cooperation from the occupied population, the Ger-

man military was narrow-minded to the point of myopia. Its excessive

reliance, instead, upon a battle of annihilation employing concentrated

maximum force therefore meant that it was actually less well equipped

for counterinsurgency than it might have been. The diffi culties it then

encountered would in turn harden its conduct even further—this time

out of frustrated ambition and a desire to compensate for its failure.54

Finally, once the German military eventually managed, through

extreme exertion and force, to bring a counterinsurgency campaign

to a successful albeit brutal conclusion, such a “victory” could fur-

ther entrench its view that “success comes only through terror.”55 It

did not help that German civilian-political agencies lacked the power

granted their counterparts in other countries to check the military’s

more brutish inclinations.56 Particularly during the Great War, more-

over, the Germans would defend their actions ever more fi ercely, citing

the paramountcy of “military necessity” in the face of the international

criticism and humanitarian lawmaking ranged against them.57 The

Austro-Hungarians tended to support the German stance, albeit for

different reasons. The Habsburg military associated irregular warfare

with internal revolutionary warfare—something that appalled it to the

utmost after violent insurrection had almost brought about the empire’s

downfall in 1848.58

Before the Great War
27

By the eve of the Great War, then, the two offi cer corps were undergo-

ing signifi cant and in part disturbing changes. They were more socially

diverse, but also more susceptible to pernicious ideology, and more pre-

occupied with mastering the technical dimensions of warfare than they

had been forty years previously. A further incubator of ruthlessness for

the German military was the combating of a particularly despised form

of warfare in its colonial campaigns.

But there remained a serious limit to how far these forces were trans-

forming offi cers’ attitudes before 1914. Though unsettling traits were

emerging within both offi cer corps, the sum effect as yet fell very far

short of a prototype National Socialist worldview. Quite apart from any-

thing else, both offi cer corps also subscribed to more benign values. For

instance, though many offi cers’ conservatism may not have opened them

up to a more broad-minded worldview, the traditional Christian beliefs

so often intrinsic to such conservatism might help counter, or at least

temper, more radical infl uences. While the military schooling to which

German offi cers were subjected imbibed an array of malignant tenden-