599. The First World War: Downfall of the Habsburgs (Part 6)

29:21Things like George Orwell's 1984 or the quests in J.R.R. Tolkien or Frank Herbert's Dune. And their team of editors and designers and artisans, they craft books that are so beautiful. They're like works of art in their own right. So each one is carefully designed with slip cases, award winning illustrations and covers that honour the stories inside. It doesn't just protect them. So if like me and like Tom, you think that a book should look as good as it reads, then the Folio Society very much speaks your language. Explore the world's most loved stories in the most beautiful form only at foliosociety.com.

30:06That is foliosociety.com.

30:14Around eight o 'clock in the morning, the Cossacks arrived in Dembitsa. The Jews, who had already survived the initial agonies, were gathered in the synagogues with their wives and children. The Cossacks plunged into the Jewish houses with their horses and weapons, and what was not screwed down was smashed and flung onto the open street. like wild beasts they threw themselves on the defenseless women those who defended themselves were stabbed and trampled to death spirited women plunged through windows badly injuring themselves but they too were not left alone by the monsters and many died in the synagogue square in agonies of pain then the synagogue street was set alight and after a short while a whole row of houses stood ablaze so this is not from a record of 1940 or 1942 uh it is from the autumn of 1914 and it is an eyewitness account of the russian occupation of the town of dembitza which was then in galicia and um dominic we've talked a lot about armies about battles about all of that fluttering of flags, the piping of flutes, the fluttering of feathers in Tyralean caps.

31:27But what we haven't talked about is what all this means for ordinary civilians. And I'm guessing nothing good. Nothing good at all. No, and it's actually a chance to talk about war aims and what people are wanting from the war. So the Russians have come west with by far, I think, the most radical transformational agenda of any major combatant. As soon as they got into Galicia, their new governor of the occupied territory, who was called Count Georgi Bobrinsky, made this clear right away. When he got into Lviv, he gathered all the local bigwigs and the bishops, and he made a speech. And he said, the lands of eastern Galicia are an eternal part of a single great Russia.

32:07In these lands, the true population was always Russian. Thus, the administration of this land should be based on Russian principles. will introduce the Russian language, Russian law, and the Russian system. Definite resonances. Now, this was very bad news for the Poles, the people who dominated the political and economic life of the towns of Galicia. It was extremely bad news for the Ukrainians, because they were told, you don't exist. Your church, your Greek Catholic church, your Ukrainian language, your separate Ukrainian, or as people would have said then, Ruthenian identity, all of these things which interestingly had been not just tolerated but often encouraged by the Austro-Hungarians as a counterweight to the Poles all of these things will now be erased from now on you are Russian whether you like it or not now if it's bad for them it is unbelievably bad for the third ethnic group in Galicia which are the Jews Austria-Hungary was not exactly a paradise for Jews?

33:05Because we talked before when we did the rise of Nazism about the influence of Vienna's mayor, Karl Luger, on Hitler, this kind of populist anti-Semitic mayor. But isn't part of that because there is a resentment of Jews in Vienna, say, who have done incredibly well? Yes. So Freud, Mahler. Massive cultural figures. Jews are very prominent in the empire's high culture. There's clearly a place for them in a multinational empire like the Habsburg Empire. And they're very loyal to the dynasty. So Franz Joseph had lifted a lot of the existing punitive laws against Jews. Franz Joseph had made a pilgrimage, effectively, to Jerusalem.

33:43He made a point of meeting Jewish leaders. So there is, you know, there's clearly, Austria-Hungary is a relatively warm and welcoming home if you're an Eastern European Jew. The Russian Empire takes a very different approach to religious diversity. Russia is comfortably the most anti-Semitic country in Europe at this point. It's here in 1903, and it's no accident that conspiracy theorists faked the protocols of the elders of Zion. I think the interesting thing about Russian anti-Semitism is that it's obviously partly rooted in history, but it's also a very modern phenomenon. A lot of historians say the reason it becomes so intense is that Russia is changing so much in the late 19th century Economic change, industrialization, urbanization.

34:29A lot of people are losing out and their Jews become scapegoats. So from the 1880s in Russia, the harshest anti-Semitic laws in Europe. And then a wave upon wave of pogroms. So Kiev in 1881, Kishinev very famously in 1903, Odessa in 1905. Hundreds of people killed. And this is why there are kind of waves of emigration, aren't there, coming to Britain and then even more to the United States. Exactly. So if you're a Jewish villager or a townsman or whatever in 1914 in Galicia, and you hear the Russians are coming, you are terrified. And people have a particular dread of the Cossacks. You open this half by doing a reading about the Cossacks, because the Cossacks see themselves as the defenders of Russian imperialism and Russian orthodoxy.

35:18And they have a blood-soaked reputation. They have been the shock troops in a lot of these pogroms. And as we've heard, they completely live up to this horrendous billing. As soon as they crossed the frontier, there were stories about them attacking Jewish villages, looting shops, killing people, raping people, all of this. And the very worst pogrom was in Lviv at the end of September. It's a common story in the First World War that there'll be a rumor goes around, oh, our troops are being attacked by partisans or whatever. So this is what happened in Lviv. And there the Cossacks were given permission.

35:50Their commander said, okay, the gloves are off. You can go and punish people. Do what you like. And they ran amok. They slaughtered almost 50 people, and they rounded up 300 people for deportation to the east. It's not yet genocidal. I think that would be a massive overstatement. However, the direction of travel, I would say, is pretty ominous. A lot of the Russian commanders are obsessively anti-Semitic. The chief of staff, who's a guy called General Yanushkiewicz, is even by Russian standards, he's a pathological anti-Semite. And so there's no effort made to moderate the violence at all. In fact, officers will have Jewish people blackmail them.

36:31They'll loot their shops and houses. They have them whipped in the streets, hanged, and so on. And then in the spring of 1915, the Russians begin mass deportations, huge deportations of Jews to camps in the east. So this is the shadow that is hanging. This is the threat that awaits the people of Chemishul at the turn of 1914 into 1915. Of course, the Russians haven't taken the city yet. They have learned their lesson from the first seats. They're not going to do this kind of frontal attack. They're going to starve the defenders out. Now, the guy commanding the fortress is a man called General Kusmanek, who is a policeman's son from Transylvania.

37:10He was an archive man, Tom. He was a desk officer who had worked in the Austrian War Archive. So we have laughed at the idea of academics and lawyers manning the defences, but actually they're coming out of this tremendously well, aren't they? It was a cheap shot, but irresistible, but maybe cheap nonetheless. So this bloke does very well. He says, you know, we're going to, he runs the city very smoothly. Under the circumstances, he sets up soup kitchens for people who haven't got any food. He gets nuns to cook hundreds of meals for them a day. however he's really up against it because the conditions are your classic kind of siege conditions so piles of unburied excrement in the streets disease rampant drains overflowing nothing to eat all of this kind of thing you know the stuff you would see in sieges going back to antiquity but there are some new elements so at the beginning of december the first of december people look up they hear something in the sky above the city and they see a plane and people come out actually to stare at it to watch it and then they see these little gray balls um falling out of the plane and somebody suddenly said realizes what they are and shouts they're bombs and they're people running in panic and whatnot and this is one of the first instances in history of the aerial bombing of civilians so in all the russians launched 300 bombing raids on shimishul they were hoping i think to hit the bridges but they don't do they no they miss i mean just throwing a ball out of a plane.

38:37I mean, it's never going to land where you think it's going to land. However, you know, it's not comedy. A dozen people were killed. Two dozen people were injured. There's a story, I think it's in Alexander Watson's account, of a girl, she had half her head cleaved off by shrapnel and had to be rushed, twitching to hospital. But the bombings, as always in history, the bombings terrify and appall people, but they don't sap their will to resist because people think, well, the Russians are barbarians. They're monsters to do this. you know we can never give into them so christmas comes and the city is still under siege um in eastern europe the big day is christmas eve the defenders tried to put up trees and they were given special food but it's all a bit sad alexander watson quotes this guy lieutenant staniswav gaychak and he says in his diary i couldn't stop thinking about my wife and children the day was really difficult even getting through it was so hard he gathers his kind of platoon or whatever to celebrate the holy day and everybody starts crying and then he had dinner with his fellow officers and they tried to light candles and sing carols but again they all start crying mostovsky stump the captain all quietly cried and this is the one moment in the story actually where the russians belying their reputation behaved i think very well because when austrian patrols went out of the city that day they found little parcels of bread and sausages and sugar in no man's land with cards wishing them a happy christmas oh that is nice and alexander watson quotes a lovely example gallant knights at so great a holiday as christmas eve we wish you and your family is the best wish you you return healthy to your nearest and dearest we shall not disturb you on christmas day as you eat your supper and talk of your loved ones as a mark of our fraternal greetings we break this holy wafer with you your comrades outside the Siedliska forts.

40:25I mean, that's quite sweet in a way, isn't it? Yeah. So another Christmas truce on the eastern front as well as one on the western front. Yeah. And as on the western front, as soon as it's over, things get very dark indeed. Once we're into January, they've run out of food inside the fort. They basically start eating all their horses. But they haven't got onto the rats yet. They haven't got onto the rats. No, it's not quite the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. But unless something drastically changes, Shemishul is doomed. But you know what? General Conrad is waiting in the wings for another crack.

40:57He hasn't given up. So he's going to come to the rescue. And if there's one man you want to come to the rescue, it's this man with an unbroken track record of catastrophic failure. The Gandalf the White of the Eastern Front. So his men have been holed up in the Carpathian Mountains. They've been camping in heavy snow and driving rain. They've all got frostbite and hypothermia. another commander might say i'll let them rest a bit and thaw out before throwing them back into the fray but comrade as we know is a born optimist and so on the 23rd of january he says right i want 175 000 men to go down out the mountains retake the mountain passes from the russians get down into galicia relieve the city by any standards this is a big a big ask yeah people say and actually what happens next is the carpathian campaign now again this is one of those things that i think in the English-speaking world, most people have no idea this ever happened.

41:51I put my hand up. I plead guilty. It's one of the most horrific campaigns of the whole war. So hundreds of thousands of Austro-Hungarians are trying to fight their way out to these mountains. They're in snow blizzards. The temperatures are below minus 20 degrees Celsius. They don't have winter gear. I mean, we talk about people having the wrong shoes, Tom. A lot of them have got shoes made of paper. Would you wear a paper shoe in a snow blizzard? No, I wouldn't. I did wear a pair of trainers that came to pieces when I walked up Mount Helvellyn in the Lake District. All right. So you know exactly what they've been through.

42:27And there was kind of sleet blowing in, and we ran into a squad of the SAS who told me off. They told you? Yeah, they said, you're an idiot. Look at your shoes. Oh, no. Which makes me ask, why is their kit not better? Because surely if anyone is used to alpine conditions, it's the Austrians. It's a Tiroligan Kaiser Jäger. Their shoes have rotted. They've rotted and their supply networks have failed. Haven't they got kind of nice ski gear? They have not. They have not. Well, I'll give you the proof of this. After two weeks, they've lost two-thirds of their strength. Some of them have been killed.

43:02Some of them have died of disease. But loads of them have actually frozen to death in their sleep. Now, we began with your favorite regiment, didn't we? The Tyrell and Kaiser Jaeger. The guys with the feathers. They've been involved in this because they're freezing to death. I mean, you'd think they'd be used to this in the Tyrell, but no. and I mentioned Nick Lloyd's book on the Eastern Front he quotes one of their memoirs and would you like to read it Tom since you love them so much the scene was suffused with three colours the ashen white of the endless fields of snow the grave black of the endless mountain forests the blood red of the flames of battle the sky stretched boundlessly mercilessly over the death and suffering of hundreds and thousands of soldiers the Carpathian Front consumed men at an alarming rate It wore them down like a hammer day in and day out, week after week, blow after blow, coming down on them with unceasing vigor.

43:54So that is the worst ski holiday of all time, isn't it? It is a terrible skiing holiday. And actually, the blokes who are dying are not just from the Tyrol. They're not just Austrians. They are Hungarians. They're Czechs. They're Poles. They're Croats, whatever. And as every day passes, their faith in the army and their loyalty to the empire and to the monarchy is just leeching away. Of course it is, because they have been, as they say, betrayed by their own commanders for a cause that seems to them baffling. Now, meanwhile, back at the fortress, the people there are freezing too. They don't have winter uniforms.

44:29They've only got their summer gear. They are these sort of ghostly, shrunken figures. They're finishing off the horses now. They're having to dilute their flower with birch wood. They're collapsing every day with starvation. 25 ,000 men are in the hospital with hunger and exposure, and the Russians are just pounding them the whole time with their heavy guns. So by mid-March, Conrad finally has to accept defeat, and he sends a message to the fortress, and he says, you know, we're not coming. Basically, you're doomed. But then he says, very like Hitler or Stalingrad or something, imperial honor demands that you don't surrender.

45:08You should go down fighting. And actually, this bloke, General Kuzmarnik, the archivist, says, fine. And he actually cobbles together some assault troops and says, right, we'll do one last breakout. This is a disaster. They get lost in the snow. The Russians basically unleash a storm of gunfire at them, and they have to fall back into the fortress. So on the 21st of March, Kuzmarnik convenes his senior officers, and they all agree. There's no point going on. It's all over. It's been months, and we're not going to be relieved. But they decide to go out literally with a bang. They want to destroy everything of value before they surrender and make sure that the Russians march into a ruined city.

45:45So overnight, they empty their guns at the Russian lines. The sort of thunder of the guns, people said, was so intense that nobody could sleep. And then at six o 'clock the next morning, a series of enormous explosions ripped through these forts. People said it was like volcanoes erupting around the city, huge, great clouds of smoke and rubble raining down. and then they blew up the bridges over the river san people said it was like the day of judgment kind of pillars of fire and black smoke everywhere and the earth torn open and all of this and at breakfast um kuzmanek sent a message to the russians he said i surrender the open city and await your command with no conditions and then at nine o 'clock the russians marched into the center of this city now what happened to the defenders it's an interesting story 120 ,000 men, masses, taken prisoner.

46:37And these were just some of 2 million Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. Yeah, mind-boggling. 2 million people. I mean, so large that the numbers just cease to have any meaning. Right, exactly. You can't imagine what does it look like. You can't even get your head around it. Now, officers, by and large, were well-treated. Remember when we did Peter the Great in the Great Northern War, what happened to the Swedes? It's actually the same story. The officers tend to be well-treated. So Kuzmanek ended up under house arrest in Kiev. But the men, different story. They were driven with whips by Cossacks to the railway stations and then packed into cattle trucks to go to camps in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

47:16By the time they got there, many were dead from starvation or cold or whatever. And in the camps, many thousands more died of malaria or typhus or dysentery. And the very worst fate awaited Germans and Hungarians. They were singled out. A lot of them were sent to work on this railway line that was being built from Murmansk in the north. And that was transporting military supplies from Arctic convoys from Britain. Okay, so this is again a kind of prefiguring of the Second World War. Exactly it is. And they worked in the most horrendous conditions. So they didn't even get to sleep in kind of huts.

47:50They had to bury into the snow, sort of carve out burrows in the snow to sleep. If they faltered, they were whipped. If they fell ill, they were denied food. and basically, you know, you're finished. And some historians say the conditions in this Murmansk railway were even worse in sort of 1915, 1916 or whatever than in the gulags under Stalin. It was kind of that bad. And how many survived? And what happens to them? Well, thousands died. I don't think there's exact figures. So with all these casualty figures, there's no precise number. I mean, some people ended up going home. So the most famous prisoners of wars to go back home were people called the Czech Legion.

48:24So they ended up, I mean, they basically, they became a factor in the Russian Civil War, fighting their way on these armored trains east because the only way they could get back to Czechoslovakia, the newly created Czechoslovakia, was to go east all the way through Russia and then round the world. And they ended up being a kind of big faction in the Russian Civil War, which is bonkers. But let's go back to the fall of the citadel. The news of Shemishul's fall was front page news across the empire. Total shock. Franz Josef wept for two days because he knew that this was catastrophic for the image of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

49:01They'd pinned all their hopes on this place. It was their pride and joy, and now it had become a symbol of decay. So this is a war that they started. They've lost just in three months, the first three months of 1915, they've lost 800 ,000 men. They're running out of officers. And what is worse, when they lose Galicia in the northeast, a lot of their food came from these kind of farmlands. So this is very bad news for the city people in Budapest and Vienna who depend upon the food supply from the east. And what is more, hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them Jewish, now flood into the sort of heart of the empire.

49:44And they are very unpopular in other parts of the empire, in Vienna and Budapest, but also in the small towns and villages in which they settle. So there are all kinds of ethnic tensions piled on top of the existing ethnic tensions within Austria-Hungary. And so as early as 1915, you can see the sort of sense of order breaking down. And the Austrians' allies, the Germans, at this point start saying, well, they're finished. They're done. So the German liaison officer at the Habsburg military headquarters wrote to Berlin and he said, this empire is so rotten and so decayed it can no longer be helped you know even if we win the war this empire is not going to last and what about conrad and and how does gina take it conrad is still going i mean conrad stays in office for another couple of years i think unbelievably and what gina makes of all this not impressed i imagine probably not impressed but i think there's lots of censorship of course so she probably doesn't know what's going on conrad interesting you know who conrad blames for all this the jews no blames the germans germans Okay, that's original.

50:48He says they could have given us more help. I mean, I think he's being a tiny bit ungrateful because the Germans basically torched their own empire to help the Austrians destroy their own monarchy. So I think he's being a little bit ungrateful. War, war, war. That's what he said. It's all you care about, General Conrad von Hutzendorf. Now, meanwhile, I mentioned the circling vultures last time, and I think I might use the same metaphor this time while I have in the notes. Yeah. So a month after the fall of this fortress, which of course is news around the world, the Italians sign a deal, a secret deal, to join the Entente.

51:25And in return, they will get large swathes of Austria-Hungary, especially along the Adriatic, Istria, Dalmatia. And a month after that, Italy finally enters the war against Austria-Hungary. And if you thought the Carpathian front was bad, the Italian front. Oh, mad. Absolutely mad. blowing the tops off mountains i've seen i've walked through a great tunnel that the italians dug out at the side of a mountain and i'm assuming that the austrians did the same and it's all absolutely for nothing the two worst armies in history just killing yeah it's amazing stories in this book the white war the one that all sticks in my mind is a whole load of italians like thousands of italians advancing up this sort of limestone scree mountain and the austrians at the top of the machine gun shouting down saying, please stop coming.

52:15Like we will kill you all. Just go back. Don't stop. Don't come. And the Italians keep going and the Austrians just say, well, okay. And they, and they kill them all. Well, you keep saying it's a terrible story. I mean, we've already had terrible stories, but there are so many more to come. So let's just end with the city. Shemishul. A chance to say it again, one more time. So a month after the city fell, Nicholas II turned up. He went first to Lviv and then he went to this fortress and he toured the defenses. And all the people had been told, hang out Russian flags from your windows. And all the schools had been told to mark the day.

52:48And the children instructed on how to welcome their new emperor. Nicholas, of course, is as sort of banal and puterish as ever. He said he's found it very interesting and very picturesque. But this trip really mattered because the authorities used it as a spur for Russification. Nicholas used the opportunity to issue a proclamation. There is no galicia there is rather a great russia to the carpathians the people of premishul were told you must adopt russian time russian customs russian festivals the shops must have signs in cyrillic polishness must be eliminated polish elites deported and ukrainian identity erased completely ukrainian schools must now teach in russian and what about the jews well they pay the heaviest price of all.

53:37Since January, the Russians have been deporting Jews eastwards, but in Shemishul they go further than anywhere else. This is the most obvious example of deportation in the entire war. In 10 days, they rounded up 17 ,000 people and transported them east. And why are they doing that? They don't want these lands to have any Jews in them. They want to corral the Jews. Is that for kind of ideological reasons or because they see the Jews as Austro-Hungarian sympathizers who can't be won over? Both. They don't like Jews anyway, but they know that the Jews are loyal to the Habsburg Empire and they want to get rid for that reason.

54:14But to stress that first point, they don't like Jews anyway. And many of these, they come with anti-Semitism as part of their intellectual repertoire. So by May, there is not a single Jewish person left in this city. And what happens to the Jews who are deported? Some of them, I think, do get home because there are definitely Jews in Przemysl by the 1930s, though not after the 1940s. So some of them must have got back. I don't actually know exactly how they did that. But the irony of all this, it was all for nothing. It really was all for nothing because less than two weeks after the Tsar's visit, the Germans under August von Mackensen, and again a bloke with the wrong name, launched a massive offensive in Poland, smashed the Russians, scattered their armies.

55:04The Germans went deep into occupied Galicia. And on the 2nd of June, the Germans in turn march into Chemischl. One of their commanders afterwards said, the joy of the liberated people was indescribable. Wherever we went, German soldiers were embraced and decorated with flowers and then unhanded gifts. And then he adds the killer line, I didn't see any Austrian soldiers. And that tells a wider story. On paper, the Austrians are back and they've got their city back, but it's actually the Germans who've done it and the Germans who are the real masters now. And the prestige and the legitimacy of the Habsburg Empire will never, ever be rebuilt.

55:44And so that means that all these various lands with all their different peoples, their different languages, their different customs, that essentially the glue that had held them together is going very, very rapidly. And that, of course, has profound implications for what happens after the war, whether the central powers win or lose. Completely. I completely agree. So in this story, you've seen a lot of elements of things we associate with the Second World War, racial ideology, deportations, ethnic cleansing, pogroms and stuff. If you're Galician, these began in the 1910s. But as you say, since there is no rebuilding the multicultural society before the war, that means now the gloves are off and there's going to be a very, very bitter fight to see who controls it.

56:30So this is what happens when the empire collapses in Pshemishul and its environs. There's fighting between Poles and Ukrainians. Then it's caught up in the Polish-Bolshevik war. Then it's occupied by the Nazis and tens of thousands of its Jewish population murdered. And this is only kind of scratched the surface of all the horror that lies ahead. Okay, so there are better places to live in the 20th century, basically. Pretty much anywhere. Yeah. I mean, that's why Timothy Snyder calls this area the bloodlands. I think basically you want to live anywhere but here, maybe not the Congo. So that's a very cheery note, Dominic, on which to end this series.

57:04But we are talking about the world going up in flames, aren't we? Yeah. We began this series by saying this is the great catastrophe, certainly for Europe. But you could also say for, but I mean, it is authentically a world war. And I think this series has given a flavor of why it's so terrible. And of course, there is so much slaughter and misery and horror still to come. Gosh, you're really selling it. Well, but having said that, having said that, we are going to be back this year with a little more First World War action. And we're going to be back for our Christmas special. we will be looking at the story of the festive truce on the Western front, asking whether it happened, to what extent the story is true.

57:49So a little touch of light. And actually, when we do come back to the First World War, hopefully next year, I mean, there's so much to look forward to. You're telling them, Zeppelins, Gallipoli, the sinking of the Lusitania, the arrival of the Italians, the wars fighting women, lots of fun things. And as always, members of the Restless History Club will be able to get those episodes early, won't they? Of course they will. Why not sign up now? At the rest of history.com. Ready for next year. Bed down. But next week, something completely different. Because, Dominic, we will be leaving your backyard, the mountains and bogs and plains of Eastern Europe, and heading to Chatham High Street.

58:30Long promised, long awaited, finally to be delivered. And I know the excitement has been building for that. But if you want to listen to it, that's fine. But also, if you'd like to see it, because we've done it on location, you can see Chatham High Street in all its beauty and glory. Yeah, you should watch it on YouTube, because I have to say, when we did our filming day at Chatham High Street, I think I probably haven't laughed as much as that. Not always for good reasons, since I was about 12. So definitely do watch it. I think unmissable. So we'll see you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

59:09you