Absolute Destruction

Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany

Isabel V. Hull

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801467080
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia alemana

In a book that is at once a major contribution to modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, Isabel V. Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as the only guarantee of the nation's security. So deeply embedded were the assumptions and procedures of this distinctively German military culture that the Army, in its drive to annihilate the enemy military, did not shrink from the utter destruction of civilian property and lives. Carried to its extreme, the logic of "military necessity" found real security only in extremities of destruction, in the "silence of the graveyard."Hull begins with a dramatic account, based on fresh archival work, of the German Army's slide from administrative murder to genocide in German Southwest Africa (1904–7). The author then moves back to 1870 and the war that inaugurated the Imperial era in German history, and analyzes the genesis and nature of this specifically German military culture and its operations in colonial warfare. In the First World War the routines perfected in the colonies were visited upon European populations. Hull focuses on one set of cases (Belgium and northern France) in which the transition to total destruction was checked (if barely) and on another (Armenia) in which "military necessity" caused Germany to accept its ally's genocidal policies even after these became militarily counterproductive. She then turns to the Endkampf (1918), the German General Staff's plan to achieve victory in the Great War even if the homeland were destroyed in the process—a seemingly insane campaign that completes the logic of this deeply institutionalized set of military routines and practices. Hull concludes by speculating on the role of this distinctive military culture in National Socialism's military and racial policies. Absolute Destruction has serious implications for the nature of warmaking in any modern power. At its heart is a warning about the blindness of bureaucratic routines, especially when those bureaucracies command the instruments of mass death.

PART III

THE FIRST WORLD WAR

World War I presented the German army and its military culture with their greatest opportunity and greatest crisis. The civil-military split that had allowed military culture to reinforce itself now also set the parameters of war conduct. In the near absence of political oversight and coordination, and locked into endless combat by reciprocal Allied intransigence that matched its own, the German army waged a hopeless war in pursuit of a pure, military victory of annihilation, unleashing instead the destructive micro-logics implicit in its military culture. Gratuitous violence multiplied, consuming soldiers and civilians alike, to the very brink of Germany’s own self-destruction.

In part 3 we shall analyze that process. I do not offer (yet another) narrative of the war. Instead, I identify those events, decisions, or actions in which the workings of military culture seem to have been especially determining. The purpose is to demonstrate, as briefly as possible, patterns that the reader will already recognize, even as they are taken to extremes.

As in part 2, we begin with the political-strategic vacuum that military-cultural practices filled. In this section we ask whether the Kaiserreich was coherent enough to have war aims that actually guided war conduct, or whether its very incoherence opened the door for the spiraling habits of pure force. We must also grapple with the widespread view that the war became radicalized because of its length, a process that would happen in any war and to any belligerent(s). There is some truth to this observation, especially on the home front. The German variant of this view claims that radicalization occurred first under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, after August 1916. That is why chapter 9 examines the pattern of extremes in war operations before then: in the “Belgian atrocities” of 1914 and in operations under the leadership of Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn from September 1914 to August 1916. We shall see that even Falkenhayn, who tried to escape the compulsions of military culture, nonetheless fell victim to them.

The occupied territories give us the opportunity to test whether European warfare offered significantly greater protections to enemy civilians than colonial warfare did to Africans or Chinese. As we explore the kinds of instrumentalization civilians suffered and the limits to them, we must also ask whether eastern Europeans were treated worse than western Europeans. Did the occupation in the east run along more ideological lines (which prepared the ground for the policies of the Third Reich, as one recent work has suggested)? The occupation of northern France will be of special interest for this reason. Finally, in chapter 11 the German response to the Armenian genocide provides the most stunning example of how unlimited the use of “military necessity” regarding noncombatants had become as early as 1915.

The final chapter returns to operations and to the period of generally acknowledged radicalization under Ludendorff and Hindenburg. The virtual collapse of civilian government in this period permitted them to override limits (political, legal, and economic) to which Falkenhayn had reluctantly submitted. The logic of limitless violence now proliferated in the Belgian deportations, the Hindenburg program, unrestricted submarine warfare, and the destruction of northern France in 1917. The apogee of pure, violent means was reached in the decision to seek a military victory (Siegfrieden) by a last, all-or-nothing offensive in March 1918. When this final reprise of military-cultural precepts failed, the Supreme Command, unable to learn from defeat or to relinquish the chimera of military victory, repeated the tactic over and over until Germany was so weakened that the Allies could begin the final attacks of the war in the summer and fall of 1918. Now, in the ultimate display of violent solipsism, the military leaders, denying defeat, called for Germany to lay waste to occupied western Europe and risk destroying itself in a hopeless Endkampf (final battle) inside Germany.

9

Waging War, 1914–1916

Risk, Extremes, and Limits

Strategic Vacuum

Germany’s conduct in the First World War is often explained as the result of policy. Its goal of continental hegemony and world (not just European) power status unleashed a bitter war of unfettered imperialism, which took on the characteristics of wars of “pacification” in the occupied zones.1 This interpretation has the merit of simplicity. It explains Germany’s expansionist war aims—the frankly imperialist peace treaties Germany forced on Russia (Brest-Litovsk) and Romania (Bucharest), and its tenacious grip on Belgium and Longwy-Briey in Lorraine, which made a negotiated settlement impossible. It explains the remarkable agreement among civilian government leaders, important interest groups (owners of heavy industries, Prussian agrarians), bourgeois ideologues (Pan-Germans, patriotic professors, and pundits), the third Supreme Command (OHL) under Ludendorff and Hindenburg, and the navy on winning a pure victory of force regardless of sacrifices. It is logical to assume that war conduct this repetitively destructive to self and others should have followed from policy, as it is logical to assume that Lothar v. Trotha’s order for genocide should have preceded its realization in practice. But Germany’s prosecution of World War I was much more like its bungled efforts in SWA than conventional logic recognizes. For the same radical split between the military and the political spheres that produced Germany’s peculiar military culture made policy in the sense of coordinated strategy impossible. The absence of policy created a vacuum that the standard operating procedures and assumptions of the military filled; they then developed further according to their own narrow logic inside the vortex of a long war that nobody had foreseen.

Chancellor Theobald v. Bethmann Hollweg had risked war in July 1914 hoping that either Russia would back down and lose credibility as a Great Power, or that Britain and/or France would decline to support their partner during the latest Balkan crisis.2 Either way, the Entente would dissolve, freeing Germany from its “encirclement” and greatly increasing its relative power, since it could henceforth weigh in against each of the former partners separately, instead of facing their combined strength. This was world power on the cheap. It opened pleasing vistas of continental economic expansion that would lead—who knew exactly how?—to that Wilhelminian place in the sun. But neither Bethmann’s risk in 1914 nor Germany’s Weltpolitik of the preceding two decades had been framed in accord with military planning or with Germany’s actual strength. Germany, a continental power lacking Britain’s enormous financial resources, had prematurely challenged the world’s greatest naval power while possessing neither a finished (nor experienced) navy of its own, nor the economic basis to win a naval race without allies. Bethmann saw these limits to the naval gamble and shifted German priorities to the Continent.3 Despite increased military spending just before the war, however, the armies of Germany and its ally, Austria-Hungary, were smaller than those of France and Russia, and inadequate even for the demands of Germany’s only war plan, the Schlieffen Plan.4 Although Bethmann, like Bülow before him, was aware of the Schlieffen Plan, he conducted foreign policy in 1914 without regard to it and without consulting military or naval leaders, just as the General Staff and the navy had developed their war plans without consulting the chancellors or even each other.

When the Entente powers refused to behave as Bethmann had hoped, genuine military danger developed and the chancellor in late July lost control of policy to the military experts in the General Staff. Their calculations were not political but military, and their decisions and requirements precipitated the world war.5 Thus it happened that Germany entered war without war aims. The military’s goal was complete military victory. Until 1916, the General Staff had few or no territorial aims.6 Thereafter, the second OHL, under Erich v. Falkenhayn (modestly), and the third OHL (grandiosely) championed annexations. Falkenhayn advocated keeping control over Belgium “for military reasons,” that is, to prevent Belgium from becoming an enemy staging point in a future war. Ludendorff and Hindenburg began their annexationism with similar military worries, arguing that a border strip detached from Russian Poland would prevent Russian armies from penetrating East Prussia as they had in 1914. But they soon developed fantastically broad territorial ambitions stretching from Antwerp and northern France to the Ukraine. These aims were largely derivative, however; Ludendorff and Hindenburg had taken them from Pan-Germans, leaders of heavy industry, and Prussian agrarians who had developed them after the war had already begun, after Germany’s early, heady victories in the west in 1914 and in the east the following year. In his memoirs Ludendorff insisted that the Supreme Command had not fought to achieve specific territorial goals.7 Ludendorff lied about many things, but careful scrutiny of his and Hindenburg’s actions in 1917 and 1918 bears out his disclaimer.8 Ludendorff used annexationism as a means to achieve military victory, not the reverse. After years of war, heavy losses, a...