World War I in Central and Eastern Europe

Politics, Conflict and Military Experience

Judith Devlin, John Paul Newman, Maria Falina, Judith Devlin, John Paul Newman, Maria Falina

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780755602261
• eBook ISBN: 9781838609924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the English language World War I has largely been analysed and understood through the lens of the Western Front. This book addresses this imbalance by examining the war in Eastern and Central Europe. The historiography of the war in the West has increasingly focused on the experience of ordinary soldiers and civilians, the relationships between them and the impact of war at the time and subsequently. This book takes up these themes and, engaging with the approaches and conclusions of historians of the Western front, examines wartime experiences and the memory of war in the East. Analysing soldiers' letters and diaries to discover the nature and impact of displacement and refugee status on memory, this volume offers a basis for comparison between experiences in these two areas. It also provides material for intra-regional comparisons that are still missing from the current research. Was the war in the East wholly 'other'? Were soldiers in this region as alienated as those in the West? Did they see themselves as citizens and was there continuity between their pre-war or civilian and military identities? And if, in the Eastern context, these identities were fundamentally challenged, was it the experience of war itself or its consequences (in the shape of imprisonment and displacement, and changing borders) that mattered most? How did soldiers and citizens in this region experience and react to the traumas and upheavals of war and with what consequences for the post-war era? In seeking to answer these questions and others, this volume significantly adds to our understanding of World War I as experienced in Central and Eastern Europe.

PART I

NEW FRONTIERS OF WAR:
STATE TREATMENT OF
NON-COMBATANTS

CHAPTER 1

THE FAILED QUEST FOR TOTAL
SURVEILLANCE:
THE INTERNAL SECURITY
SERVICE IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
DURING WORLD WAR I

Mark Lewis

Depending on whether one takes a long-term or short-term view, many reasons explain the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918. From a longer perspective, the prewar struggles to create a more representative parliamentary system across all regions of the empire, to modernise regions that were economically lagging behind the empire's industrial cores and to resolve nationality conflicts rank high on the list.¹ Short-term causes include the military's decision to go to war in 1914,² the expansion of the war into multiple fronts,³ and the inability to manage domestic food shortages and price inflation⁴ during the war. Furthermore, individual loyalty, and in some cases, communal loyalty to an imperial Staatsidee disintegrated during the war.⁵ Labour unions and wild-cat strikers shut down industry and called for peace, and exiled politicians representing certain sectors of Czech, Polish and South Slavic societies successfully lobbied the Entente for their own states.⁶

But what about the police, which after the 1848–9 revolutions was still charged with ‘providing for peace, order and security through observation, prevention, repression and discovery, with legal means’?⁷ Anton Walitschek, describing the police's bureaucratic organisation and legal structure, claims that the police in Austria repeatedly saved the state, including in 1918.⁸ Was this true? One way to answer the question would be to examine interactions between police and local populations on the local level throughout the empire, a task too broad for this chapter. Another approach is to investigate the state police, or the political police, explicitly devoted to protecting the security of the state, and, after the Ausgleich of 1867, two states.

Did the political police, which was vastly expanded during World War I, have any role in the collapse of the empire? Shortly before the war, high police officials joined with military intelligence officers to create a new, extensive counter-espionage system, which investigated, arrested, and/or interned people considered to be security risks or ‘politically suspicious,’ categories which could include potential spies but also nationalist activists and everyday persons who criticised some aspect of the monarchy, even privately. In the eyes of the police, the system successfully protected the empire's interior from acts of sabotage, and police and military intelligence intended to preserve the system for use after the war. Yet this system was not able to protect the Dual Monarchy's structure and prevent its dissolution. One could argue that the other long- and short-term causes overwhelmed the capacity of the police, or the problems could not have been addressed by any police institution, and therefore the police's role in the collapse was irrelevant. Still the police were well-aware of the power of strike movements, the attraction of Bolshevism and the deep influence of physical hunger on the population. The political police's problem was that they believed surveillance and detention could maintain the social order, when in reality, centrifugal tendencies and counter-imperial movements could not be bottled up or locked away.

The political police's intent to preserve the old system might therefore share one similarity with the Habsburg military's absolutist-bureaucratic mentality in occupied Serbia, as described by Jonathan Gumz.⁹ Gumz argues the Habsburg military hated all forms of national politics because they had caused the revolutions of 1848–9, and officers' emphasis on harsh ‘legality’ (under martial law) persisted during World War I. In order to suppress all forms of nationalist politics, not just Serbian national identity per se, the Habsburg military's intelligence bureau established a political police network in occupied Serbia to suppress networks of intellectuals and gymnastic organisations, as well as partisan fighters. Yet the civilian political police had a different cultural mentality: they were somewhat more careful in their investigations, were not as ruthless (they did not demand court-martial executions as a matter of course) and had more experience dealing with the civilian population, as they knew their own locales and maintained local relationships.¹⁰ They were not committed to the practices of the Rechtsstaat – as they still interned people with little or no evidence of actual crimes committed – but they did not jump to conclusions about cabals and conspiracies as readily as military officers did, especially in later stages of the war.¹¹ Like military intelligence, they were anti-nationalist, pro-monarchical and anti-revolutionary, but their mentality was investigative-bureaucratic. Their strategy, a cultural practice dating from the nineteenth century, was to establish the facts and circumstances of crime through an investigation (Erhebung). The political police's investigative mentality differed from the regular criminal police mentality in that it concentrated on two additional aspects: the suspect's attitude toward the state and/or political culture (Gesinnung), and the person's reputation (Leumund).

The Austro–Hungarian political police also differed from imperial Russian and Bolshevik surveillance, which according to Peter Holquist, wanted to manage populations to construct what they thought and believed, not simply monitor them to gauge their support for the government and the war effort, or to prevent uprisings.¹² The Austro-Hungarian system, which historically emphasised the values of public order and security, was more traditional, as it was primarily devoted to suss out enemies and threats, and pre-emptively arrest and detain them – rather than re-engineer their worldviews. While the empire used other means to build social solidarity during the war (exhibitions, film propaganda, donation drives, ‘re-education’ for soldiers who might have been ‘infected’ with Bolshevism while on the Eastern Front), political police files from the Austrian half of the Empire and from Croatia do not suggest that the police intended to construct ‘the new man.’ Still, the police probably wanted to prevent the spread of the ‘new woman,’ as police suspicions were heightened by the presence of women travelling alone, living independently, or not following the mores of ‘sexual propriety.’¹³

A New Security System: The Defensive Kundschaftdienst

Austria was a European innovator in the creation of a Higher State Police, a residence registration system and the implementation of enlightened social policy in which the centralising state supervised its officials and reported on the mood of the people. Johann Anton, Graf von Pergen, created the Higher State Police in the 1780s and expanded the residence registration system. During the Metternich era, Police Minister Count Sedlnitzky expanded the system, creating networks of confidential informers to watch secret nationalist organisations in the Habsburg's Italian lands and in partitioned Poland, as well as suppress the spread of German nationalism and republicanism by using censorship, arrests, restrictions on university enrollments and travel bans.¹⁴ Though some aspects of the system were dismantled after 1848–9, the Habsburg Empire, Austria's First Republic and the Austro-fascist Corporate State all maintained a central office that kept files on politically suspicious people. Based inside the Vienna Police Directorate (Polizei Direktion), it was founded in 1856 and called the Central Office for State Police Affairs (Zentralstelle für staatspolizeiliche Angelegenheiten); later it went through various name changes. In the late nineteenth century, it compiled information about constitutionalist and suffrage movements, worker strikes, nationalist movements and the explosive conflicts and riots in response to the Badeni language decrees of 1897.¹⁵

Around 1913, in response to Italian irredentism, the Pan-Slav movement and greater Serbian nationalism, political policing underwent an important transformation: the political bureau of the Vienna Polizei Direktion began co-operating with military intelligence to combine domestic surveillance with counter-espionage. Major Maxmilian Ronge, a K.u.K. General Staff officer in charge of the military intelligence office (the Evidenzbüro); Edmund von Gayer, chief of the state police; and Johannes Schober, a police official in charge of the espionage department in the state police, established this collaboration. Together they uncovered some major spies working for imperial Russia, including Ronge's former boss, Alfred Redl.¹⁶

In May 1914, before the outbreak of the ‘Great War,’ the Austro–Hungarian military's intelligence bureau, the Vienna Police Directorate and the Hungarian border police formed a new type of domestic counter-intelligence system to track alleged spies and suspicious persons. Ronge wanted to create this system to counter Russian espionage in the Dual Monarchy, which had grown rapidly since 1906. Since 1910, provincial governments in Austria had instructed police to keep closer watch on bridges and military installations and report suspicious activity to the military, but they had no imperial-wide system to track convicted and potential spies. Additionally, officials believed that it was too easy for a convicted spy, who had been expelled from one province of the empire, to move to another.¹⁷ The new system, called the Defensive Kundschaftdienst, was supposed to permit quick responses to find and arrest wanted persons, and enable rapid communication between State Police officials, in charge of state security, and military intelligence, which engaged in active espionage abroad. Austria–Hungary, a dual monarchy of more than 60 million persons, was already divided into four basic administrative areas: Austria, Hungary, Bosnia and the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia. The authorities established four Central Offices (Zentralstellen) for these areas, in Vienna, Budapest, Sarajevo and Zagreb, respectively. They collected files on all known and suspected spies, indexed the files, answered inquiries about suspects from lower-level police departments and sent out regular bulletins of wanted persons.¹⁸ Each Central Office was the main point of contact with a particular military intelligence bureau (Evidenzbüro), the military's espionage branch. Beneath the four Central Offices were Main Offices (Hauptstellen), responsible for directing investigations and sending in reports and descriptions of suspects to the Central Offices.¹⁹ They were supposed to have investigative independence from the Central Offices, though sometimes the latter issued urgent warnings about certain persons or told the Main Offices' police to pursue certain cases. The Main Offices were generally stationed in existing Police Directorates (higher police authorities in major cities) or in border police stations (the system in Hungary). The Zagreb Central Bureau, called Središnja Defenzivna Dojavna Služba (SDDS), operated independently of Budapest and had four Hauptstellen under it.²⁰ The system in Bosnia took a few years to develop and initially used military intelligence bureaus as the Main Offices.²¹

The essence of the system was to create a ‘reservoir of data’²² in the Central Offices that could be shared across the entire network. Main Offices would supervise the civilian population, as well as watch suspicious persons in foreign countries on the Dual Monarchy's borders.²³ During World War I, the system was integrated with mail censors and existing police forces, which used their own detectives and officers to investigate cases. Investigations sometimes started from a warning issued by a censor, through a confidential informant working for the police, through a notification from military intelligence, or from a member of the public, who reported when a neighbour was doing something suspicious.

This system opened the door to more aggressive authoritarian policing in domestic society, in areas far from the fronts. People were investigated, expelled, interned, and sometimes tried and sentenced to hard labour due to their alleged actions, national identifications or political views. The police were able to conduct these investigations and intern people with a free hand because civil liberties were suspended in the Austrian half of the empire under the Kaiser's decree of 25 July 1914, which declared a state of emergency under the 1869 law, ‘Suspension der Grundrechte und den Ausnahmezustand.’²⁴ In many of these cases, there was no evidence of espionage at all; people were simply imprisoned because they were ‘politically unreliable’ or considered security risks. These were subjective judgments. Local police and even police in some of the Hauptstellen had no training in espionage investigations, although a training course was discussed several times during the war.²⁵

Who Was Targeted?

The Austrian police, like other European and South American police forces, had tried to create new collaborative ventures in the 1880s–90s to combat anarchism and anarchist attacks, but the Austro–Hungarian system during World War I marks a change. Political policing had fewer legal limits, targeted more types of activities and beliefs and affected more groups. The number of police agencies and the production of bureaucratic records increased, but the greater impact was on how people were actually treated. Although the system was not as extreme as later variants (a secret police that used torture, such as the Nazi Gestapo, or a state police that relied heavily on regular civilian informants, as the Stasi used in the German Democratic Republic), the system did not offer many routes for appeal or freedom. Few cases in which a person petitioned for release from detention were successful.²⁶ Very few people had lawyers, possibly because people were too poor during the war to hire counsel, or they did not come from a social class where legal representation was an option. Interestingly, people did not necessarily see themselves as confronting a ‘political police’ or a ‘secret police,’ since they were typically arrested and interned by local police in non-front zones. Furthermore, various police directorates ran into problems of money, personnel and communications that prevented them from becoming an all-powerful force. They were just one social force, along with military service (for soldiers) and deportation (for civilians in front areas) that uprooted people and could wreck their lives.

A portion of the cases targeted ‘disloyal’ nationalities believed to be secessionists or irredentists, such as Serbs, Croats (who were pro-Yugoslav), Czechs, Ruthenians and Galician Poles. Due to incomplete police files in some Central Offices, it may not be possible to present an exact number of how many people were investigated on the basis of nationality and how many were interned or prosecuted.²⁷ St...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I New Frontiers of War: State Treatment of Non-Combatants
• Part II Soldiers and Veterans: Experience, Understanding and Memory
• Conclusion Wartime Experiences and Ensuing Transformations
• Notes
• Selected Further Reading