Shackled to a Corpse The First World War

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

The Eastern Front was the conflict at the heart of the First World War.

A struggle which devastated the lives of Eastern Europe's peoples,

as old scores were settled, new hatreds forged.

A harbinger of the Second World War.

There has never been such a war as this,

waged with such bestial fury.

This was a racial war, between Teuton and Slav,

between the Germans and Austro-Hungarians on one side,

and Russia and her Slav ally, Serbia, on the other.

Caught between the clashing giants were Poles,

Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Croatians, Jews.

Without statehood or voice, with no means of defence.

It was also a war of alliances stretched to breaking point.

Germany, hands full on the Western Front,

looked to Austria-Hungary to bear the brunt of a Russian attack.

But Austria-Hungary's empire was crumbling and weak.

Theirs was a partnership with different agendas, many enemies.

Germany's eastern flank bordered directly onto Russia,

down what is now Poland.

To Austria-Hungary's south lay her dreaded enemy, Serbia.

Around them, a ring of neutrals, as yet undecided which side to join.

Russian troops are blessed before leaving for the war.

One officer presented his men with a historic opportunity.

Hey, brothers, our eternal enemy, Germany,

is trying to enslave Russia, our country,

which has long suffocated under Germany's dead weight.

The time has come to end their Teutonic rule.

Not everyone saw the conflict in such epic terms.

Russian conscript Vasily Mishnin

left to fight the Germans filled with dread.

A shiver ran through my whole body.

The third whistle.

Everybody breaks down.

I kiss my Nurya for the last time, and all my family kiss me.

Nurya shouts, "Why are you crying, the Vasyusha?

"You said you weren't going to cry."

The challenge to this war

on the backward side of Europe was logistics.

There were vast distances to cover, from the Urals to the Alps,

with desperate problems of communications and supply.

On 17th August 1914, the Russian 1st Army

seized the initiative and invaded Germany.

This would be a mobile war, and some units went in hard from the start.

Russian cavalry officer Vladimir Littauer

had already crossed the border, scouting ahead.

We started while it was still dark.

Around seven o'clock in the morning,

our squadron reached the objective for the day - a large German farm.

The scene on the German side of the border was frightening.

For miles, farms, haystacks and barns were burning.

Like every army under the sun, we looted and destroyed,

and later hated to admit it.

The scope for atrocity was greatest where places suddenly changed hands.

Where soldiers lived off the land.

Where you weren't sure who the enemy was.

EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE

Littauer's regiment was fired on

at the village of Santopen in East Prussia.

The Russians blamed locals for directing the attack

from the church tower.

Groten completely lost his temper and shouted,

"They are all spies, shoot them!

MACHINE GUN FIRE

In a moment, they were all dead.

Horror stories spread,

as 12-year-old German Piete Kuhr recorded in her diary.

Whole columns of East Prussian refugees came through our town.

Many are crying.

There are mothers with tiny children.

They say Russians tie German women who stay behind to trees,

set up wooden crosses in front of them,

and nail their little children to them.

When the kiddies have died before their mothers' eyes,

the Russians mutilate the women and kill them.

The German Army fell back 100 miles.

Two men took over Germany's defence in the east.

General Paul von Hindenburg, brought out of retirement,

and General Erich Ludendorff,

poached from the offensive in the west.

They would, in time, become more powerful than the Kaiser.

The Germans planned to hit the Russian 2nd Army in these woods,

near the East Prussian town of Tannenberg

where, 500 years before,

a Polish army had defeated a force of Teutons.

The stakes were high, Germany fighting to defend her native soil.

Julius Boldt's regiment was whisked from Western to Eastern Front.

After a 60 hour train ride,

a quick march for nearly four hours straight to the battlefield.

I had my baptism of fire.

Oddly enough, it left me completely cold.

In a flash I thought of home, gave one glance to heaven,

and then straight into the line of fire.

When the injured scream, your heart clams up.

There's almost nothing left of this hospitable town.

What's left of the buildings is either still burning or in ruins.

Charred corpses lie in the streets.

Tannenberg stopped the Russians in their tracks

and made up for the lack of German victory in the west.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff were seen as saviours of the nation,

as schoolgirl Piete wrote.

Paul von Hindenburg is mighty big and strong.

He has a square head with a moustache and many wrinkles on his face.

The people here in the east worship him.

Germany needed heroes.

The battle entered pan-German mythology -

payback for the Russian invasion,

final revenge for that ancient defeat.

This massive monument was completed in 1927,

a rallying symbol for Germany's ambitious right.

A few years later,

Hindenburg showed Adolf Hitler the site of Germany's historic triumph.

Today, the monument lies in ruins,

blown up by the Russians after the Second World War,

last blow in the saga of Slav-Teuton clashes at Tannenberg.

Poland, January 1915.

The Russians were firmly dug in.

The Germans were now on the offensive, trying to dislodge them.

The village of Bolimow in the front line.

The Germans turned to technology

to give them the edge over the Russians.

Bolimow would be the test bed for an experimental weapon.

Francis Smolinski, a civilian, raised the alarm.

I got up, went outside,

and then I saw this something which looked like smoke.

I ran back home, shouting, "Fire! Fire!"

Behind the Russian lines, General Basil Gourko

got snippets of information that didn't add up.

Hundreds mysteriously killed,

trenches full of corpses that might not be dead.

Bodies in a state of collapse with little sign of life

were lying in the wood.

What was the reason for this unusual occurrence?

Had some of those already buried in a state of coma

and not dead at all?

From this church tower,

German observers watched the first major use of chemical warfare ever.

The Germans fired 18,000 tear gas shells onto the Russians.

The conventional wisdom is that the wind was blowing the wrong way

and it was too cold for the gas to work.

The Russians withstood the attack.

But there were victims, as General Gourko heard,

and Francis Smolinski saw.

They were carried, crowded onto wagons, some lying on top of others.

Those who could, walked.

Their faces were pale blue.

They had foam at their mouths.

Three months later, Ypres on the Western Front,

wrongly earned the morbid distinction

of being the site for the first gas attack.

Bolimow went unreported, never investigated.

Meanwhile, Germany's main ally, Austria-Hungary,

was fighting for survival.

The Russians had invaded

and were now besieging the fortress city of Przemysl.

If it fell, so might Hungary herself.

The Russians sat outside for six months, lobbing shells, waiting.

Inside, 300 Austro-Hungarians a day were dying of starvation.

Przemysl was a microcosm of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself,

a crucible of ethnic frictions.

Orders of the day had to be issued in 15 languages.

Austrian patriots cheek by jowl with Russian sympathisers.

Questions of race, questions of loyalty,

fears of the enemy within.

There was execution after execution.

The Austrians are hanging people by the dozen now.

Innocent ones, too.

March, 1915.

Nikolai Myaskovsky was one of the Russians

preparing for the final assault.

EXPLOSIONS

Instead of the total shoot-out we expected

there were only a few shots of shrapnel,

and then we reached the fort quite easily.

The Austro-Hungarian garrison had fallen apart.

Przemysl surrendered to the Russians without a fight.

The first Russian train crosses the river San.

British Observer Bernard Pares

quickly realised how divided the Austro-Hungarians were.

The troops, instead of being all Hungarians,

were of various nationalities.

The conditions of defence led to brawls,

and in the end open disobedience of orders.

Austro-Hungarian prisoners were paraded through Moscow.

A German official said, referring to Austria-Hungary,

that his country was now "shackled to a corpse".

Russians bury the German dead after yet another battle.

While great armies tore at one another's throats

on the Eastern Front,

a circle of small nations watched, like vultures.

Waiting to see which side to join.

Forget liberal ideals and high principles.

The question was, who would offer them the most?

And who would win this war?

These smaller nations - Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania -

also had scores to settle, lands they wanted back.

The price of any alliance would be high.

Marie, Queen of Romania, at her post-war coronation.

British-born as Princess of Edinburgh,

Marie had effectively led Romania

as Britain's loyal ally in the First World War.

She kneels before her husband, King Ferdinand.

But behind closed doors Marie called the shots.

She was instrumental in brokering the critical deal.

Marie had written to the Russian Tsar - cousin Nicky -

and to the British King - cousin George -

putting Romania's entry in the First World War out to tender.

Being neutral, I get news from all sides.

Each tries to persuade us that defeat for them is impossible.

Promises and threats being dangled over our heads.

The Romanian government, prodded by Marie,

fixed the price for entry on the Allied side -

Transylvania, the Banat, and Bukovina.

She added for George V's benefit...

These geographical explanations must be Chinese to you,

but the places can be found on a map.

Her Prussian-born husband, Ferdinand,

rather fancied joining Germany,

but by August 1916 the Allies agreed Romania's terms in full.

In Rome, Italy's leaders had already cashed in.

Instead of joining the Central Powers,

in line with pre-war treaties, Italy initially declared neutrality.

But in October 1914 Prime Minister Salandra

said Italy must act for her own national good.

He called this policy "Sacro Egoismo" -

sacred self-interest.

In practice, it meant joining the side of the highest bidder.

Few Italians wanted to fight.

But the Allies offered a chunk of Austria-Hungary,

part of the Dalmatian coast, and threw in a few islands.

So, without consulting parliament, Salandra accepted,

landing his people with one of the harshest fronts in the entire war.

Italy's border with Austria-Hungary

zigzagged for 375 miles into Europe's highest peaks.

The Austro-Hungarians had the advantage,

holding the high ground along the entire front.

It was brutal terrain.

Italian Alpine troops inch up to the front line.

An officer beats out a rhythm

for men hauling a field gun up the slope.

In May, 1915,

Italian troops seized the mountain village of Cortina d'Ampezzo.

In front of them, the vast Lagazuoi mountain.

By sunrise, the Italians had climbed its sheer rock face

to a narrow ledge.

They were now fighting a vertical war.

Above them, the Austro-Hungarians had fewer men,

but showed a tenacity they lacked elsewhere.

Austrian Colonel Viktor Schemfil

watched his men attack the Italians below.

They threw several hand grenades on the ridge,

which was about 100 metres below them.

Judging by the screams of the wounded

and from the fact that the machine gun

hasn't fired a single shot all day, we must have been successful.

But the Italians clung on, two miles above sea level.

Each side burrowed into the mountains

and spent the next two years trying to dislodge the other.

15 men slept in this cave carved out of the rock.

Both sides worked 24-hour shifts, digging tunnels,

trying to reach the enemy's position and blast the mountain under them.

EXPLOSION

Some went mad listening for the sound of enemy drills.

My nerves are shot to pieces. I've got to calm down.

I've now been in the front line four months,

amid constant fear and torment.

Avalanches became another hazard of war.

Sometimes triggered by shellfire.

Austrian Eugenio Mich was caught in one

that wiped out nine barrack huts, killing 272.

I stayed squashed under the debris of the beds.

For the first quarter of an hour

I could feel 50 or so men moving around me,

and then, one by one, they fell silent and died.

Italy's frontier with Austria-Hungary

levelled out along the Isonzo river.

Italy's first attack failed, with heavy loss of life,

but General Luigi Cadorna

bloody-mindedly ordered another, and another.

Eleven battles in all, at a cost of 300,000 lives.

They never reached their main objective, the Port of Trieste.

Giuseppe Cordano served in the Julian Alps in a trench system

just 15 metres below the Austrian positions.

Between the two trenches it's a cataclysm.

The dead are scattered everywhere half buried,

haversacks, rifles, rags of clothing and human body parts.

A couple of grenades fall in the middle of the dyke

where some soldiers are sheltering,

and everything is thrown up in the air.

Rocks fly and fall with furious destruction.

Laments and screams for help can be heard everywhere,

but how can one move?

How can one help them?

I'm astride the crest, and I carry on, metre by metre,

ducking my head under shrapnel fire.

Ten metres in front of me Zani from Vicenza is hit in the head,

screams and falls down the precipice.

I watch his body tumbling down.

He was a good lad.

I keep going,

for ever asking myself when my time will come.

In the winter of 1914, Germany's high command

told the Kaiser they'd decided to launch the major offensive

of 1915 against the Russians.

The Generals ruled out total victory,

but a decisive blow might force the Russians to sue for peace.

Germany moved eight divisions from the Western Front

to the Eastern to try to break through the Russians at Gorlitse

in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains.

Now German fought alongside Austrian.

Austrian Mathias Migschitz sensed the change of mood.

It sounds wonderful to hear German troops speaking.

Everyone is sure of victory, conscious of their might.

You hear no melancholy talk, no bleak forecasts.

Florence Farmborough, a British nurse with the Russian Red Cross,

travelled with her camera along the Eastern Front.

Her nursing team went by horse cart to Gorlitse.

They had no idea a third of a million Germans and Austrians

were massing to attack the town.

We have already chosen our hospital.

It is a well-built house, with several nice, airy rooms.

We are surrounded by the copy Carpathians.

I love watching them at night,

when the mountains lie mysteriously quiet and passive.

Then the wounded started to arrive.

They came in their hundreds from all directions,

some able to walk, others crawling,

dragging themselves along the ground.

As the Germans got near, Florence's team was ordered to evacuate.

And the wounded?

They shouted to us when they saw us leaving,

called out to us in piteous language to stop.

We had to wrench our skirts from their clinging hands.

Caught by surprise and low on shells, the Russians retreated.

Infantryman Myaskovsky wrote to his friend,

the composer Sergei Prokofiev.

My dearest Serezhenka,

We are in a state of unstoppable, panicked retreat.

Our troops are melting away like snow.

Only 600-700 survived

out of a 3,000-strong regiment in one day alone.

The Russian army fled, but not towards the negotiating table.

They scorched the earth.

Vasily Mishnin retreated through the village of Dombrovo.

The locals received us well, but in the evening,

when the Cossacks arrived and began to drive them out with cruelty,

then there were tears and grief and cursing of the war.

The Russians were looking for scapegoats,

and the Jews of Eastern Europe fitted the bill.

They didn't look Russian, and their language, Yiddish,

sounded suspiciously like German.

In 1914, there were 4 million Jews in the Russian Empire.

Battered by pogroms and denied rights

allowed the Tsar's other minorities,

Jews were forced to live in specified areas,

known as the Pale of Settlement.

And, even though 650,000 Jews served in the army,

many Russian officers and men saw Jews as dirty, half human creatures.

1st April, 1915.

The Russkies make fun of the Jews,

saying they can munch their matzos for now,

but when Passover's finished they'll sort them out.

Send them to Siberia.

Helena Yablonska lived at number 20 Franciszek Street

in the heart of old Przemysl.

A third of the town's population were Jews.

They'd been safe enough there under the Austro-Hungarians,

but now Helena watched the Russians root them out

within days of taking over.

Tuesday, 30th of March.

Jews are treated with no mercy.

They cut the beard and sideburns off the old rabbi from Bircza

then strapped him to a horse and dragged him away.

They beat his wife.

Jews are not allowed to own any shops.

Saturday, 17th April.

The Cossacks waited until the Jews went off to pray,

then set upon them with whips.

Taking them from synagogues, streets and doorsteps.

Many hundreds of Jews.

What'll they do with them?

Some of the older, weaker ones, couldn't keep up and were whipped.

The round-up will go on until they've caught the lot.

Such lamenting and despair.

Some hide in cellars, but the Russians will find them.

No-one knows how many Jews were killed in Eastern Europe

during the First World War.

600,000 were uprooted, of whom 200,000 never returned home.

After their experiences under the Russians,

many Jews looked to the Germans for better treatment.

German officers entered the main Jewish street of Mlawa,

north of Warsaw.

The Germans tried to win the support of Jews in Eastern Europe

by promising them liberation from the Russian yoke.

Meanwhile, the assimilated Jews of Germany

showed their patriotism by joining up.

Emma and Fritz Schlesinger see their friend, Ludwig Bornstein,

off to the front - one of 100,000 Jews who fought for the Kaiser.

German-Jewish soldiers mark Hanukkah,

the Festival of lights, in 1916.

12,000 were killed in the war.

Nearly 30,000 received decorations.

But, while Jews were tolerated within the German army,

many soldiers despised them.

Ernst Nopper passed columns of refugees,

forced out of their homes by the Russians, and now returning.

I couldn't bear to watch as a Polish family struggled on foot,

while the entire lazy Jewish population travelled on carts.

I hold a Jew off and gave his arse a good kicking,

before making the three Poles with all their baggage

climb up onto the cart.

I let everyone know that I would have all the Jews shot

if they didn't let the Poles continue on their journey.

The breakthrough continued through the summer.

This was the greatest victory of the Central Powers in the war,

seizing present-day Poland, Lithuania,

parts of Belarus and the Ukraine.

As the Germans advanced, they entered a world half destroyed.

German troops convert Russian railway lines

to the narrower German gauge.

Rebuilding the communication system became a key task,

rich in symbolic meaning.

Germany aimed to recast Poland as an independent state,

but under her wing.

Advancing troops saw themselves

as bringing civilising order and discipline.

That which seemed for ever lost

was created anew by the German battalions of Kultur

the German spirit blows through the poor land

and new life rises up out of the ruins.

But that's not how it worked out, however keen the Germans were

to present a caring image to their newsreel audiences.

American woman Laura de Turczynowicz lived in the occupied town

of Suwalki, near the Lithuanian border.

To her, the rebuilt railways and roads

weren't bridges between cultures.

They were Germany's means of whipping war booty back home.

Furniture was carted daily to East Prussia.

The woods were cut down, every agricultural implement taken,

every woman outraged.

All Poland was to be emptied and carted away,

beaten into the bargain, and made to pay such terrible contributions.

Faced with a chronic labour shortage

and with little love for Slav or Russian,

the German Army began transporting men to the west for forced labour.

The American Red Cross distributes food aid

to starving Polish peasants.

Reluctance to feed conquered populations,

the German Army became increasingly obsessed with cataloguing them.

Everyone over ten was to be documented,

and nearly 2 million photo passes were pursued.

The Germans also began to view the East as a place of disease

and started large-scale disinfecting programs.

On 17th October 1915 the German field medical commander

ordered all railway crossings on the eastern border be sealed off.

Everyone crossing the frontier had to be deloused

before setting foot on German soil.

Winter 1915.

The racial war of Teutonic versus Slav neared its peak.

German and Austro-Hungarian forces moved south to destroy Serbia.

This would win control of the Balkans,

final revenge for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

And they had a new ally -

Bulgaria, tempted by Germany's military muscle

and certain this was the winning side.

The bait dangled before Bulgarian leader Ferdinand

was the promise of vast swathes of Serbia.

Born in Vienna, Ferdinand had few sympathies for his Slav neighbours.

The purpose of my life is the destruction of Serbia.

On 6th October 1915

a joint German Austro-Hungarian force invaded Serbia,

taking the capital in just two days.

The Bulgarian Army then entered from the south-east.

The Serbs' only way out of their country was into Albania,

but that lay across treacherous mountain ranges.

As their enemies claws closed around them

the Serbian Army slipped away,

and the people fled with them.

Serbian photographer Rista Marjanovic

documented his nation's exodus.

One of the refugees was 12-year-old Katarina Costic.

We spent the nights in the open beside a fire,

which would scorch one side of your body while the other froze.

One morning, a woman refugee woke up and happily announced

that she'd had something soft beneath her head that night.

To our horror, the soft thing turned out to be a human corpse.

One soldier threw away his rifle

to carry an old woman who had collapsed.

She gestured towards the sound of the enemy closing in

and handed him back his weapon.

They halted here, on the Field of Blackbirds, in Kosovo.

The Serb nation drew breath

while its leaders met in the town of Prizren.

The choices were grim.

Battle it out, surrender,

or survive to fight another day.

Journalist Gordon Gordon-Smith watched the debate

inside the town seminary.

The final councils did not last long.

On November 24th the supreme resolution was taken.

The King, army and Government would refuse to treat with the enemy

and would leave for Albania.

Hundreds of thousands of troops and civilians

set off into the mountains.

Their plan - to reach the Mediterranean and sail to safety.

This epic retreat shaped modern Serbian self perception,

taking its place in national myth

alongside the 1389 defeat by the Turks

on the same Field of Blackbirds.

Still an open wind today.

A Serbian film, directed by a veteran of the march,

reconstructed its agony.

The further we went, the worse it got.

You didn't hear the usual -

men swearing, officers yelling orders.

This huge funeral possession

of the state of Serbia endured the pain in silence.

Who tramped behind me? Who in front?

Where was my company?

All too soon, we fell apart.

Now it was every man for himself.

We staggered up mountains then clambered down,

avoiding quagmires from which the hands reached out

of poor people who'd got stuck.

We stumbled, running out of strength, but could not turn back.

We had to move on.

The survivors gathered on the island of Corfu.

Exhaustion, starvation and disease continued to take their toll.

Half the army, over 200,000 men, had died on the march.

No-one knows how many civilians.

But Serbia's death rate was the highest of the First World War.

There was no question who was winning the titanic struggle

of Teuton versus Slav.

The Central Powers were now the masters of the Eastern Front.

Columns of Russian prisoners became a familiar sight.

The street was full of them, thousands,

driven along like dogs, taunted, beaten if they fell down,

kicked until they either got up or lay still for ever.

Kaiser Wilhelm even suggested that 90,000 Russian prisoners

be driven on to a barren peninsula along the Baltic shore

and starved to death.

The German and Austro-Hungarian high commands meet in the Tyrol.

But behind the mutual congratulation,

the partnership is rotten to the core.

Practising his handshake, Archduke Frederick,

the Austrian Commander in Chief,

waits to meet one of the world's most powerful men -

the German Kaiser.

War has exposed their differences, not bound them closer.

Germany thought the Austro-Hungarian Empire a shambles.

She wondered whether to take the whole lot into the German Reich.

Austria-Hungary found Germany arrogant and domineering.

The Austrian Chief of Staff, on the left,

called the Germans "our secret enemies".

In time, the Austrians would even send

secret peace feelers to the Allies.

But they could never break away from Germany.

It was alliances on both sides that would keep the war going.

In the next episode of the First World War,

the horrors of Verdun and the Somme,

as both sides try to break the deadlock on the Western Front.