You lose your country; you’re invaded and occupied, and times are tough, but is it really
your fault?
Well, you can probably find someone to blame it on, right?
And sometimes you go for that old European classic, Anti-Semitism.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the British made a daring naval raid on Ostend, hoping to blow a ship and
block the harbor to German naval traffic; they were only partially successful.
There was field action down in East Africa, logistical problems for the Americans in France,
and a new German dictatorship in Ukraine, designed to seize the harvest.
Romania signed the Treaty of Bucharest, and the Bonnet Rouge Trial continued in Paris.
That trial, of seven men who worked for Bonnet Rouge, a socialist and anarchist paper, who
were accused of aiding the enemy, came to an end this week.
On May 11th, Captain Mornet, the prosecutor, summed up for the state.
He claimed that M. Duval, a director of the paper, had been drawn into treason with Marx,
the Mannheim banker, and received money from Marx to work for an early peace between France
and Gian agent of the German government who had been also in contact with Joseph Caillaux,
former French PM, who we mentioned a few months ago, who was arrested for treason and still
awaits trial.
We saw last week the cooperation between Bonnet Rouge and a German produced French newspaper
in occupied territory, and two weeks ago how classified French military information was
passed along through the Bonnet Rouge offices.
On the 15th, Duval was sentenced to death after just half an hour’s deliberation.
The other accused - including a former head of the Secret Service under Interior Minister
Louis Malvy, also currently accused of treason, received sentences of from two to ten years
hard labor.
That wasn’t the only big trial this week.
The underground newspaper Libre Belgique had been printed and distributed in occupied Belgium
for three years now, seriously vexing the Germans, but at the end of January most of
its distributors, 61 of them, had been arrested.
They were tried May 15th, and sentenced to imprisonment for ten to twelve years.
However, the paper would soon appear again anyhow, and the next issue, number 143, was
produced almost single handedly by Abbé van den Hout, who printed 7,000 copies on a treadle
press and arranged re-printing in Antwerp.
Scheming, treason, rebellion, and mutiny were now popping up all over the place.
On the 17th, 150 Sinn Fein leaders were arrested in Ireland for plotting with Germany.
Next week, the British government will issue a statement exposing this.
(Chronology), “Intercepted documents in possession of the British government show
conclusively that negotiations between the Sinn Fein leaders and Germany had been virtually
continuous for three and a half years.
At first, the Irish Americans, with the help of Count Bernstorff in Washington and the
German Legation in Norway, were intermediaries for most of the discussions, but since America’s
entrance into the war, communication with the enemy tended to be more direct.
There were, moreover, numerous private wireless receiving stations in Ireland, which are mentioned
by Bernstorff in one of his messages to Berlin.”
Intercepted messages and letters show that Germany had been sending the rebels money
- 1,000 pounds for the defense of Roger Casement, for example - and three separate uprisings
had been planned - the Easter one of 1916 which we covered in a special episode, one
in February 1917 that broke down, and one now in May 1918.
For this last one, German munitions had been shipped by submarine to Cuxhaven at the beginning
of the month.
This rising was prevented, though, by the arrest of the leaders.
There was a mutiny in the heart of Austria-Hungary this week.
At Judenburg.
A mainly Slovene infantry platoon captured the barracks, looted the food stores, and
destroyed the telephone and telegraph lines.
They were saying, “Let us go home, comrades.
This is not only for us, but also for our friends on the fronts.
The war must be ended now, whoever is a Slovene, join us.
We are going home.
They should give us more to eat and end the war.
Up with the Bolsheviks, long live bread, down with the war!”
Long live bread; I think we can all agree with that.
The mutiny was suppressed and six Slovenes executed.
But mutinies were spreading; both a Serbian unit and a Ruthenian one within the Austrian
army would also soon mutiny.
Civilians were asserting themselves as well, even in occupied territories.
On the 11th came conflict at Kiev between German troops and supporters of the Rada - the
Parliament.
German General Max Hoffmann would write that the occupation of Ukraine by the Central Powers
was the strangest war he ever experienced.
It was largely fought by a handful of infantrymen on an armored train, going from station to
station and imprisoning the Bolsheviks from town to town.
And something important here - Anti-Semitism was fairly strong in parts of the country,
and the Judeo-Bolshevik stereotype was not only pretty commonly believed, but was a significant
factor in the Ukrainian Civil War, since many people believed Jews were the “natural allies”
of the Bolsheviks.
Tales of Bolshevik, and thus, Jewish, brutality, rape, and torture had spread like wildfire
over the spring, and when the Germans had taken Kiev back in early March, many people
engaged in retribution.
There were 172 cases of violence against Jews, including 22 murdered.
In April, White Russian soldiers and local peasants executed some 400 Jews.
This all, of course, had an impact on the occupying German and Austrian soldiers, who
were there to put down the Bolsheviks.
By now, they had orders to shoot just anyone who carried a weapon on the spot, and next
month after the Battle of Taganrog against Bolshevik troops, they shot all the prisoners.
It wasn’t just the regular troops, though.
Anti-Semitism spread among the German command, and Jews were seen as a security risk because
of their supposed Bolshevik and Menshevik leanings.
This is part of the “Brutalization Theory” that tries to explain the violence in postwar
Germany and the rise there of Anti-Semitism.
Many of the German troops now in Finland, the Baltics, and Ukraine would in fact radicalize
and join the right wing paramilitary Freikorps once back in Germany, would be part of the
street violence there, fighting both communists and the postwar republic, and would later
support the rise of the Nazis.
But that’s in the future, in the present they were fighting the Bolsheviks, and they
weren’t the only ones.
Far away, Colonel Gregori Semenov, in Eastern Siberia, headed west from the Manchurian border
to Lake Baikal to move against the Bolsheviks.
Semenov is a Cossack officer who had earlier raised part of a Mongol regiment for service
in Persia and Mesopotamia.
Since then they’ve tried to maintain some sort of order in Manchuria and will now fight
the Bolsheviks.
There was other action in the field this week, though without Bolsheviks.
In Eastern Anatolia, where the Armenians had retreated beyond the old 1877 border, but
if they thought their troubles were over, they were in for a surprise.
On May 11th, the peace conference with the Ottomans resumed, now at Batum instead of
Trabzon, and Vehip Pasha, commander of the Ottoman army, declared that the old peace
conditions were no longer acceptable, since the Armenians and Georgians had used armed
resistance to respond to earlier proposals.
The territory asked for then had now been conquered by military force, so Vehip had
new demands.
These included:
Occupation of new territory including Aleksandropol.
Transfer of control of the Aleksandropol-Julfa railway to the Ottomans, to transfer troops
to northern Persia.
The free use by the Ottomans of ALL Transcaucasian railways as long as war with Great Britain
continued.
On the night of May 14th, the Ottomans presented the Peace Conference with an ultimatum to
evacuate Aleksandropol within 24 hours and to withdraw to a line 40 km east of the city.
Without waiting for a reply, Ottoman troops began their advance on the town.
The Armenians hastily retreated toward Delijan, abandoning huge stores of supplies to the
enemy.
Once in Aleksandropol, the Ottomans now controlled the junction where the railway line from Sarikamis
and Kars joins the main Tiflis-Julfa line.
And the 199th week of the war ends, and with it the Bonnet Rouge trial as well the hopes
of an Irish Uprising this month.
There was a mutiny in Austria, unrest and Anti-Semitism in Ukraine, and action near
the Caucasus.
We’re really seeing it everywhere now, civilian opposition, army mutinies, working with the
enemy to end the war, even if that means by losing it.
I understand why those conspirators and mutineers were jailed or executed, but looking back
from 100 years later I can easily feel sympathy with many of them, for millions of people
were dead and it’s not over, and taking matters into your own hands to try and change
that, even at the risk of your own life, just shows that there was still some humanity left.
We want to thank Johannes Breit for helping us with the research about the German occupation
of Ukraine and the situation there.
If you want to learn more about Ireland in WW1 and the mentioned Easter Uprising, you
can click right here for our special episode.
Our Patreon supporter of the week is Gil Tayar.
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Don’t forget to subscribe, see you next week.