I'm Indy Neidell and this is 'Out of The Trenches' where I sit here in the Chair
of Wisdom and answer your questions about the First World War
Havard Graudo from Patreon writes:
'How did they manage to keep the soldiers from not deserting en masse, but in the
millions go over the top just to be slaughtered?
I cannot see the motivation they used: Honour? Freedom? King and Kaiser?Fatherland?
God? Justice? Thanks for an excellent show that just gets better and better!
Well, you're welcome, glad you liked it. Well, You pretty much answered your own question.
There really wasn't only one motivation why soldiers are willing to fight for
their country, there were many. To understand the Great War better,
you have to think back a hundred years and imagine being one of those men
living in their times. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century,
you had a culture in some ways hugely different from ours today. The country,
the fatherland, the motherland was a more
tangible concept particularly early 20th century than it is today.
It was home, it was your family, your pride, your future, your past. The nation
was portrayed as your family, the men and women who shared a common culture and a
common heritage had to stick together almost in a form of selfless altruism,
and war was a widely accepted way of defending those principles in times of
turmoil like the Great War. Fighting and dying for those principles was widely understood.
Sometimes for freedom, sometimes for family and sometimes it was King or Kaiser.
Soldiers of course did not want to die but to accept death as a
possibility, when victory and the security of everything that was dear to
you back home was on the line.
That was a different thing but that mindset was different when victory was
out of reach or the generals or officers plainly ordered suicidal charges, you can
see that well in the later stages of the war, you had mutinies in France where
soldiers had the feeling they were needlessly throwing their lives away;
You had open revolt and revolution in Russia where soldiers felt like they
were herded like cattle to the slaughter;
You had revolution in Germany as sailors who did not want to sacrifice their lives in
a suicidal sea battle just to make a last stand.
As long as victory was possible and as long as soldiers had the feeling that
their service was for the greater good,
they were willing or let's say, they agreed to do their part,
I think it is fair to say that nearly all of them hated war, they hated
fighting and killing just like we do in general today, but they were born in a
different time: A time when the horrors and sacrifices of war were more accepted
as a means to an end - a time of duty.
I guess you'd say
Joe Scaife from Patreon writes:'Hi Indy and team thanks for this excellent show.'
Nice to hear 'How were executions for crimes such as desertion organized,
I can't imagine any soldier would want to be part of a firing squad
executing fellow soldiers, especially since the sentencing often seems so harsh
Was being made part of a firing squad seen as a punishment, or was it a
job soldiers signed up for willingly? You could pretty safely say that most of the
soldiers that had to be part of a firing squad
did not want to be part of a firing squad, did not want to shoot their fellow
comrades. For generals or officers it was easier to make an example and to punish
cowardice in the face of the enemy, but one of the soldiers that had to carry
out those orders, shooting someone for running away from the horrors, they would
sometimes rather run away from themselves.
Shell-shocked soldiers have crazed with fear, young boy is not even, say, 16 years
old that should not have been soldiers in the first place and you have to shoot them
Officers rightly feared that the squad's would not fire,
they often chose soldiers from their base camps, sometimes wounded men that
were unfit for the front but were still able to fire a rifle. In extreme cases,
they would give out rum to make them drunk or tell them that not all rifles
were loaded with real bullets,
so it was impossible to know which one killed the condemned man.
Victor Sylvester, who would later become a world-famous musician and dancer, is one
of the few who wrote down his firing squad experience. 'Mortified by the sight
of the poor wretch tugging at his bonds, twelve of us, on the order raised our rifles unsteadily.
Some of the men, unable to face their ordeal, had got themselves
drunk overnight. They could not have aimed straight if they tried, and,
contrary to popular belief,
all twelve rifles were loaded. The condemned man had also been plied with whiskey
during the night, but he had remained sober through fear.
The tears were rolling down my cheeks as he went on attempting to free himself
from the rope attaching him to the chair. I aimed blindly and when the gunsmoke had cleared away
we were further horrified to see that, although wounded, the intended victim was still alive.
An officer in charge stepped forward to put the finishing touch with a revolver held
to the poor man's temple. By the time I had taken part in four more executions;
like the other executioners,
I was screaming in my sleep and physically ill every day.'
That is a quote from the 'Monocled Mutineer', check it out.
Ohad Hoffman writes: 'Hello Indy and the Great War crew,
I'm a fan of your show and I find it very interesting and enlightening.
I would very much appreciate it if you would answer my question for the out of
the trenches segment.' I'm going to. 'What was the Jewish involvement during the
war? since the Jews were spread all over Europe, was their conflict between
different Jewish communities based on their country?
Could you shed some light on the Jewish struggle against the Ottoman Empire
during the war in modern day Israel?
Thanks, keep on the good work.'
We don't have the exact number of
how many Jewish people fought in the war but estimates go as high as 1.5 million
fighting for their respective nations.
Now, around 400000-500000 of those served in the Russian army,
although they were not exceptionally popular there at high command. The
Russian government feared that the Jews of Eastern Europe would ally with the
Germans since they often had cultural ties and Yiddish was similar to the
German language too, many were deported from western regions to be resettled further east.
Anti-semitism became stronger during the war as there were many jews that were
well-known figures in the Bolshevik movement.
Now of course anti-semitism in Europe didn't start with Hitler and was well
established before this war, especially in cultural hot spots like Vienna.
As the war started, the old question of Jewish loyalty rose up again and
politicians and intellectuals openly argued about whether or not they could
trust the Jewish community in their nations to fight for their nation.
Now, in 1916, the German High Command wanted to investigate the popular rumour
that only a small number of Jews served in the German army and most of those
only in the rear. With pressure from anti-semitic politicians,
they implemented the Judenzählung - the Jewish census, which would ideally prove their
claims but the results were never published. Today we know that they
discovered an over-proportionate amount of German Jews in the German army and
many of them at the frontlines.
Many Jews wanted exactly that to disprove false rumours of disloyalty and
that they were proud to serve in the German army and for the German nation.
On a side note, many Jews who had that sense of pride for Germany during the
Great War were unable to believe the warnings during the rise of Adolf Hitler
to power. Many face the threats from Hitler and the Nazis with the belief
that their service in the Great War should have proven their loyalty, and
that kept many ex-soldiers from leaving Germany before it was too late.
But back to the First World War. In the Ottoman Empire, you had the Jewish and
Zionist settlements in southern Syria and northern Palestine which
were often financially supported by American Jews. As the war broke out,
many foreigners, many that had only recently immigrated actually, were deported or
pressed into service in the Ottoman army.
The Jewish communities established an
espionage network, the Nili, that passed on information to the British and
secretly cooperated with Sir Mark Sykes, who established the Zion new corps and the Jewish Legion.
Eventually they were exposed by the Ottomans and most of the newly members
were executed, which might have led to a similar fate for the Jewish people as
for the Armenians, if the German command under Erich von Falkenhayn had not intervened
BIG, BIG topic, we will do, at least one whole special (episode) on this soon.
If you'd like to see how the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire began,
you can click here for our episode about that.
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See you next time.