Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kless, Andrew Hoyt

Titel

Infighting at the Front: Officers, Bureaucrats, and Politicians at War in German-Occupied Russian Poland, 1914-1915

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Infighting at the Front examines the first year of the First World War and the tumultuous building of an occupation from scratch. During the first weeks of the war, utter chaos reigned in the borderlands of the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The German army, adhering strictly to principles of military necessity, struggled to maintain order in a thin strip of war-ravaged, ethnically Polish territory seized from Russia. Faltering, the army requested the aid of Prussian bureaucrats, transferred to Reich service to form the Civil Administration for Russian Poland. Contradictory priorities between the army and these administrators led to incessant clashes over the conduct of the occupation. The understaffed administrators relied on independent Polish Citizens’ Committees and militias to maintain order, inadvertently allowing Polish nationalism to flourish, which perpetuated army paranoia of Russian and Polish spies, criminals, and franc-tireur operating among them. The army’s aggressive requisitioning of food from Russian Poland led to starvation conditions for nearly half of the three million Polish civilians in the occupation zone. The administrators called upon the American Rockefeller Foundation to intervene philanthropically, founding an International Commission for Relief in Poland. By April 1915, Germany’s occupation in Russian Poland was on the brink of collapse. Then, in August 1915, after the fortuitous Gorlice-Tarnów Offensive, everything stabilized. Despite Germany’s lack of credible pre-war aims, and any semblance of national cohesion, German bureaucrats created the occupation structures that would endure from fall of 1915 until the collapse of the German Reich in 1918. Through the lens of the German victory on the Eastern Front in March 1918 with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, historians have projected the motivations of Germany from the end of the war onto its beginnings and attributed a stronger position to the German army vis-a-vis the civilian government than actually existed. This dissertation reevaluates Germany’s first occupation of Poland by examining it from its origins in 1914, rather than retrospectively from its end. The argument of the dissertation is two-fold. First, Germany was unprepared for the tasks of occupation, including the allocation of requisite personnel and resources to maintain order in Russian Poland. Second, despite the organizational gridlock and lack of resources, the bureaucrats of the Civil Administration were able to lay down the foundations for what became a long-term occupation administration, adopted wholly into the General Government of Warsaw in August 1915. What was outlined in the first year of the war endured until the last and guided the remainder of Germany’s occupation of Poland.