Peter Pastor: Capture and Captivity, Hungarian Prisoners of War in Siberia címmel jelent meg az Egyesült Államokban 2012 júliusában Pastor Peter Graydon Tunstallal közösen, az első világháborúról szóló kötetében a szerkesztő tanulmánya, amelyet most közreadunk.
Essays on World War I
Edited by Peter Pastor and Graydon A. Tunstall
Columbia University Press, New York, 2012.
pp.111-129.
Peter Pastor: “Capture and Captivity, Hungarian Prisoners of War in Siberia.”
Over forty years ago Jack J. Roth published his edited book, World War I: A Turning Point in Modern History. Among the contributors were Gordon Craig, Carl J Friedrich, Charles Hirschfeld, and Hans Kohn. Kohn, an erstwhile German POW in Russia, noted that the war “was the starting point of the first worldwide revolution.”
Gordon Craig entitled his essay “The Revolution in War and Diplomacy.” He stated that “Conventional assumptions about strategy and tactics were repeatedly shattered by the appearance of new weapons, or combinations of weapons or techniques of combat….It started that Technisierung of war which engrosses so much of the energies and resources of modern nations.…” Craig also stressed another revolutionary aspect of World War I, as “the first total war in history…in which the distinction between soldier and civilian broke down, a development that was partially due to the expansion of warfare made possible by the technological innovations already mentioned.” Thus the war was to be won “not by military means alone, but by the effective mobilization of the total resources of the nation….every mature citizen became an active participant in the war effort.”[1]
What Craig failed to note was that for the first time the prisoner of war also became the active participant―if reluctantly―in the war effort of the state that captured him.
Article 6 of chapter 2 of the Annex to the 1907 Hague Convention that came into force in January 1910 became moot with total war. In this article stipulations were made stating that rank and file POW labor tasks “shall not be excessive and shall have no connection with the operations of the war.”[2] In total war, however, everything connected to the operations of the war. The consequence of total war for the prisoners of war in Siberia was that they became forced laborers of the Russian state. They had to endure harsh living conditions, exhaustive work, disease, and deprivations. Many did not survive the hardship and died.
Combat in World War I started on schemes devised by the planners; these included the concept of nation at arms, a practice that was first used by the French revolutionaries. The war plans that were predicated on movement were responsible for what historians came to call “the war of illusions.” One of these was the short war illusion. The huge armies on the offensive were expected to capture a massive number of enemy troops, but since the war was expected to be short no serious preparations were made for long term housing of prisoners of war, who in accordance to the Hague Convention were expected to be sent home once the hostilities were over. Thus, for example, in 1914 in Somorja (Somorin) near Pozsony (Pressburg, Bratislava), Hungary, tens of thousands of rank and file Russian POWs were camped on the Danube shore in the open air. Only when winter came, and the war was still not over, did the authorities start the construction of barracks.[3]
Russia was equally unprepared to handle and place in camps the large number of captured troops of the Central Powers.[4] These became POWs as the result of the Russian offensives on the eastern front. According to several estimates, there were 57, 178 officers and 2,330,000 other rank prisoners in Russian camps; of these 411,000 died in captivity, or 17.75 percent of the total. Of the captives, the Austro-Hungarians represented the largest number―54,146 officers, and 2,057,000 other rank prisoners.[5] In terms of the nationality make-up of the POWs from the Dual Monarchy, 31 percent were Hungarians, 30 percent German Austrians, 7 percent Romanians, 5 percent Poles, 3 percent Czecho-Slovaks, 3 percent South Slavs, 2.5 percent Jewish, and 0.5 percent Italian. Of all the POWs in Russia, the Hungarians, or Magyars, represented the largest contingent, more that 25 percent, roughly 500,000 to 600,000 men.[6]
Most of POWs from the Central Powers were captured during the first three years of the war. By September 1914 in the wake of the first Russian offensive, 100,000 Austro-Hungarians and Germans were captured at the front; by January 14 there were 250,000, and by January 14, 1916, over one million were in captivity. The maximum was reached by mid 1917.[7] A large number of Austro-Hungarians were captured in March 1915 when, following six months of encirclement, the Galician fortress of Przemyśl (Prömsel) surrendered. Nine generals, 93 staff officers, 2,500 officers and 117,000 other rank, became prisoners, 20 percent of whom had the scurvy.[8] During the brutal Carpathian Winter War between January and April 1915 which was conducted in the defense of the Hungarian Great Plain, 180,000 Austro-Hungarian troops became prisoners of war. Another 100,000 were captured during the unsuccessful Austro-Hungarian Black and Yellow Offensive of August-October 1915, and 300,000 to 380,000 during the Brusilov Offensive.[9]
The horrors of the fighting in Przemyśl were aptly described by the thirty-year-old Hungarian poet, Géza Gyóni, who as a soldier partook in the defense of the fortress and became a POW. In his seven-stanza poem of “For Just One Night” he heaped scorn on those who were responsible for the war. Gyóni wrote: “Send them along for just one bloody night―/Your zealous heroes spoiling for a fight./For just one bloody night:/Their former boasts within our memories ring/As rendering shells of shrapnel scream and sing,/As mists of strangling poison slowly rise,/And leaden swallows swoop across the skies.” In his third stanza he went on to castigate the war profiteers while describing the horrors of Przemyśl: “Send them along for just one bloody night―/The money-sucking leech, the parasite./For just one bloody night:/ When shell-volcanoes’ fire the mud upheaves/And flings torn bodies eddying like leaves./To crumbling earth the crisping corpses tresh,/Mere blacken’d heaps of bones instead of flesh.”[10]
Gyóni’s poetic description of the horrors of war in Pzemyśl indicates that at the moment of capture, the prisoners of war were suffering not only from scurvy, but also from trauma, which in World War I came to be called “shell shock “ and which, according to George L. Mosse, “was one of the most widespread battlefield injuries.”[11] This injury is called now posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is a response to experiencing or witnessing a series of deathly events or serious bodily injuries by soldiers in war. The disorder may exhibit its symptoms weeks or months later.[12] It has been estimated that half of the veterans of World War I suffered from serious psychological disorders,[13] first of all from shell shock. Had there been a psychological examination at the time of their capture or in the camps, many of the POWs would have been diagnosed with that syndrome, which went untreated, with the captives carrying the psychological wound with them to the camps. The apathy and listlessness symptomatic of the barbed wire disease associated with camp life, therefore, could have been for most, the recurrence of the traumas that were first experienced on the battlefield.[14] A Red Cross official with a military background in charge of the repatriation of POWs from Siberia noted in his memoirs that “ ‘Apathy’ was the most horrible illness of Siberia…This apathy had an impact on the organs and attitudes. The man whose psyche was impacted by it became depressed, avoided human contact and there was no need for further shock for him to go insane. The POW dictionary gave an apt term to this terrible and formerly unknown psychological paralysis. It named it “Plenitis” which derives from the world “voennoplenni” ( POW).[15] The author, however, failed to connect the dots when he did not trace the “Plenitis” back to the battlefield experience of the captives.
Such an experience was present in the Carpathian Winter War. The situation for the troops there was horrible. The Russians attacked the Carpathian passes so that no Austro-Hungarian relief could arrive from that direction to lift the siege of Przemyśl. With the fall of the fortress in the middle of March 1915, the renewed battles were fought by the Austro-Hungarian Army in order to block the Russian Army from swooping down to the Great Plain of Hungary. The general appointed in January 1915 to command the army group in the Southern Carpathians, General Sándor Szurmay, wrote the following in his memoirs: “One example from the sea of battle episodes: The Forty-fourth Kaposvár Regiment which for days repulsed one Russian infantry brigade after the other on Ceremha [Ceremhovo], was reduced to three hundred men who were so exhausted that the troops refused to set a camp fire so that they could warm their hands stiffened by the cold.”[16] What General Szurmay failed to acknowledge is that these man were not only physically exhausted, but psychologically as well, and their lethargy was the symptom of shell shock.
A lesser officer in the Carpathians, the future Stalinist dictator of Hungary, the reserve officer Cadet Sergeant Mátyás Rákosi recalled a similar situation. Rákosi was in a mobile reserve regiment assigned to the army group of General Szurmay. In his memoirs he wrote:
The weather turned cloudy, there was a cold northern wind, and by evening the soldiers were thoroughly chilled and when they brought dinner most did not eat it or did not even try to get it. This was the sign of complete exhaustion. The soldier who refuses to eat indicates that nothing matters anymore. At night the cold increased and by the morning a lot of the soldiers were pulled out from under the snow half frozen….
The troops suffered enormously. The kind of dugouts which developed in trench warfare were unknown in the Carpathians, and if there were some, these were often dug into packed snow. Our beautiful horses from the Bácska…died in the Carpathians within four or five days, in part because they were not used to the mountains, to the military feed, and to the cold of minus 20-30 degrees Centigrade that they spent in the open air. (The troops thus exclaimed that “if the horses can’t take it how could we?”).”[17]
Rákosi also recalled that his officer comrades with the snow and cold in mind sang a song that was in a popular melodrama about Russian exiles in Siberia which was a theatrical sensation in Budapest before the outbreak of the war. “Siberia waits for us, and the snow is already falling.” Rákosi noted that since some soldiers in the regiment had already been captured and made prisoners of war, “becoming captive under these conditions did not appear that frightening.”[18] Rákosi’s experience was not unique and a historian of the Carpathian theater recently stated that “entire battalions surrendered to the enemy to escape the inhuman conditions.”[19]
This attitude of welcoming possible capture was not unique to Rákosi and his comrades in arms. In fact it became widespread.[20] For example, another Hungarian reserve officer remembered that during the Brusilov offensive in the summer of 1916 in northern Bukovina, he used the opportunity to “fall” into captivity.[21]
Ferenc Münnich, who was the Commander of the Budapest police from 1946-1949, the organizer of the state police, and during the Kádár regime was minister of defense, deputy prime minister and chairman of the council of ministers, at various times, recalled that it was in November 1915 that he was captured by the Russians near Tarnopol. He was a lieutenant in the reserves and during a Russian offensive near the Stripa River the enemy encircled his company, already reduced from over 200 to 90 men. “The men were tired and hungry….One night I succeeded in establishing telephone contact with the regimental command….I reported that we are encircled, cut off from the reserves, and running out of ammunition. They did not promise reinforcement but ordered us to keep fighting to the last drop of blood….At dawn the Russian attack continued. They stormed our trenches with hand grenades, and we heard their shouts of hurrah. We reached our last drop of blood and surrendered.”[22]
Welcoming and submitting to capture was also a reality for the Russian soldier. Rákosi mentions that “A Russian patrol of ten to twelve men surrendered without a shot as they did not even notice that they had reached our lines, there having been no shot fired at them and during the night the wind having blown snow over our positions, thus blending them in with the surroundings. The captives…told us that soon there would be a Russian attack against us and asked us to transport them to the rear as quickly as possible, otherwise they would be with their own troops again.[23] Clearly the Russians wanted to escape the war as much as the Hungarians.
General Szurmay describes how a mounted Hungarian hussar with sword drawn escorted 200 unarmed Russian POWs on the march towards the Nowy Sacz (Neu Sandez) train station. Of course in his post-war memoirs the good general implied that no 200, not even two or three Hungarian soldiers, would have allowed themselves to be escorted in a similar fashion, like a flock of sheep.[24] This kind of bragging indicates that even after the war Szurmay, with all the evidence at his disposal, refused to recognize the truth that the dispirited Austro-Hungarian troops did not, and could not, behave differently from their Russian counterparts.[25] Under the circumstances, the Russian captives were unable to fend for themselves. They allowed themselves to be escorted by few guards and offered no resistance, because they too may had experienced shell shock.
On the western front, as Neill Ferguson describes, the British army rule stated that there had to be one or two escorts for every ten prisoners of war taken to the rear. Often no prisoners were taken because too many guards would have been siphoned off from the front duties.[26] Using Ferguson’s description of the western front, where surrendering to the enemy often meant death moments after capture, Alon Rachamimov argues that even in the east, “Seen from below, captivity never appears to have been a matter of personal choice.”[27] In fact, as indicated above, on the Russian front the boundary between choice and duress was often blurred.
The captured POWs were sent to central assembly camps in Darnitsa, near Kiev, and Ugrishkaia and Kuzhukhovo near Moscow. At these camps the prisoners of war were registered, and sorted according to nationality.
The captured German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers were shipped to Siberia, where housing was available in the barracks of the garrison towns from which the Russian troops were evacuated to the front. The Slav prisoners were kept in the European part of Russia.[28] This segregation of prisoners also indicated a differentiation of treatment, contradicting the spirit of the 1907 Hague Convention on POWs which called for the universal treatment of those captured on the battlefield.[29] According to the Hague convention differentiation should have been only along rank, separating the officer from the rank and file, so that the officers could be exempt from work as stipulated by the treaty.
In his recent work on Austro-Hungarian POWs in Russia, Rachamimov suggested that nationality was less significant a practice for segregation than rank.[30] Yet there is contemporary evidence and even a recent study indicating that nationality mattered. For example, a Polish POW officer from the Austro-Hungarian Army, Roman Dyboski recalled that in 1916, when the Austrian Sister of Charity member Countess Pauline Stubenberg-Pállfy visited Kazan,[31] he warned the visitor not “to put too much credence on the tendentiously rosy information she was receiving from the Czech prisoners’ chaplain as to the state of the prisoners.”[32] Dyboski also wrote that according to his experience, in the second half of 1916 “they had divided the German prisoners from the Slavs, giving the latter better quarters….”[33]
In a recent article it was suggested that in the hierarchy of nationalities the Turks were faring the worst (about 50,000 officers and other rank prisoners) and this was evident even during the POW transport to Siberia. The Ottoman captives were transported in sealed teplushki. These were cattle (box) cars with wooden bunks stacked one above the other in two rows, with a stove in the middle. In the winter the stove did not provide enough heat. As a consequence of these conditions, in the winter of 1915 for example, of the 800 Ottoman POWs shipped to the Priamur district of Siberia, only 200 survived the transport.[34] In another incident during the same season, in Samara, Russian guards discovered on a railway siding two boarded up teplushki, and when these were opened, 68 Ottoman prisoners of war were discovered of whom only eight were still breathing.[35]
Since the Russians did not expect such a large influx of prisoners of war, there was overcrowding in the camps for enlisted men. Cholera, typhoid fever and typhus were the cause of death for most of the 300,000 deceased other rank prisoners of war. Among these was the poet Géza Gyoni, who died in Krasnoiarsk in 1917.
The conscious effort by the tsarist government to differentiate among the nationalities, coupled with traditional dislikes brought from the homelands, made nationalism the primary ideology of the camps. These generally housed 2,000 to 10,000 inmates, although in Siberia some camps had as many as 30,000 prisoners. The government began to use POW workers as early as September 1914. The increasing labor shortage soon forced the authorities to utilize cheap captive labor in most industries, including railway construction and mining. By 1916–1917, POWs constituted 20–25 percent of the industrial work force. Beginning in March 1915 POWs were also used in agriculture.
Although many POWs looked at work as escape from the camps, thus from starvation and disease, labor conditions in fields excluding agriculture employed 60 percent of the POWs in Siberia, Turkistan, and on the Murmansk railway were worse than camp life. As labor needs increased, many of the POWs were shipped to provide labor in factories in the European part of Russia.[36] Along a 1,700 km long Murman railway line POWs were used to build the tracks under the harshest conditions. Of the 80,000 POW forced laborers about 25,000-28,000 died in scurvy, cholera, typhoid fever and typhus by the end of 1916.[37] Along with the POWs, punitive battalions of Uzbeghs and Kazakhs also worked on the line. These were shipped to forced labor following the uprisings in Central Asia.[38]
Dyboski wrote: “…Russia was the one monarchy, of all those warring against each other after 1914, where prisoners experienced the worst fate and the best.” He went on to write that “the situation of prisoners in many part of Russia was reminiscent of Dante’s inferno, and that in the hell created by Dante the Gubernia of Viatka was indeed the ninth. The hecatombs of prisoners used to build …the Murmansk railroad on the north are also eloquent examples. Likewise, the notorious Tocki camp in Orenburg Gubernia, where as early as in 1915 the representatives of the American Red Cross found 1,200 unburied bodies of prisoners who had perished in typhus.”[39]
While for the rank and file life in the Siberian camps was harsh, there were always some exceptions. For example, Imre Nagy, who in 1956 became the communist prime minister of the revolutionary government, and consequently was executed for it, life in the rank and file camp was tolerable. POWs who were identified as members of the intelligentsia, were not forced to do work. Nagy, who on July 16, 1916, was wounded and captured in the Brusilov offensive, reached the largest east Siberian camp, Berezovka, in November 1916. Nagy, who had not finished his high school studies yet, identified himself in the assembly camp as a high school graduate and university student, and therefore he was assigned to the intelligentsia barrack for volunteer high school graduate ensigns, cadet reserve officers, and other POWs with some university education. These people were exempt form daily labor.[40] Their camp experience approximated the life of the POW officers, who were camped separately from rank and file prisoners.
They were not required to work, and since the majority of the officers were civilians in uniform they tried to pass their time doing what they had done in civilian life. The educators tried to learn Russian and other languages; others engaged in athletic activities, did team sports, published newspapers and journals, and set up discussion circles. Inmates set up orchestras, choruses and theater programs.[41] In Berezovka, where Nagy was, one could find a theater and other entertainment.[42] About the theater, such as the one in the Khabarovsk camp, Dyboski wrote, “In true Shakespearean style, the feminine roles were played by young and good-looking lads. The sets, which were truly brilliant, and the costumes were the work of the prisoners themselves. I shall never forget a remarkable performance of La Belle Helene, for which the sets and costumes were designed by a specialist in the history of Greek art.”[43]
Ferenc Münnich recalled that in Tomsk: “To break the monotony of camp life, we organized a theater company and the roles of women were played by young cadets. They were made up so well, that the Russian guards went on stage to check if we had smuggled in some women without permission. Among some older officers these female impersonators inspired interesting illusions, and after the show they competed for the favor of the impersonators with flower bouquets and walked on the camp grounds arm in arm with the prima donnas. It was an entertaining sight.”[44] His tale is significant not only because of the artistry of the impersonators, but also because from the middle of 1915, POWs were forbidden to keep contact with the locals. The reaction of the guards indicated that this rule, as so many in Russia, was often disregarded.
In November 1915 the Sibirsky Listok (Siberian Page) reported that in some Siberian cities certain ladies were imprisoned for their unpatriotic behavior. This implied that POW officers could find contacts with easy women or perhaps prostitutes. The following month it was also reported that the Holy Synod permitted the marriage of Russian women to POWs.[45]
Homosexuality was also an issue. Münnich recalled that in the Omsk camp he and his fellow Hungarian officers got to know some Turkish officers who were teaching them the Turkish language. “They were genial, in fact appeared too genial, but slowly we realized that there were many among them who were abnormal, and we were afraid of losing our innocence. We asked the Russian commanders to separate them from us. Therefore they put us on the train and we traveled further south.” In Tomsk these new arrivals were allowed to go to town. “Our Cossack guard escorted us to the market and to the stores…and they helped us with everything. Furthermore when we got in touch with the weaker and prettier sex, they helped us in a way so that our fraternization would have no barriers.”[46]
In contrast to Münnich, the director of the theater in Tomsk, József Baróti, who was the stage manager of the Szeged Theater in Hungary before the war, did not find the sight of parading male divas that entertaining. Consequently his theater group was the only one in Russia that put emphasis on the performance of dramas instead of musicals and comedies alone. These had few or no female roles. Baróti’s aim was to reduce the cult of female impersonators as he considered the practice dangerous and lacking artistic sensibility.[47]
A recent article by Alon Rachamimov may provide an understanding for Baróti’s motives as he writes: “POW theatrical performances possessed both disruptive and normalizing potential. The Plennytheater [POW Theater] was more than a ‘safe space’ that reaffirmed upper- and middle class heterosexual masculinity. It simultaneously created powerful undercurrents that sanctioned forms of homoerotic relations and transgender identifications, especially as some POW memoirists called “the cult of the female impersonator.” Clearly Baróti recognized this and aimed to shut out the “disruptive” potential of the theater.
Rachamimov also proposes that “The theatrical activities of German-speaking POWs in Russia during World War I reflected the acute sense of masculine disempowerment experienced by the prisoners….Some of the men experienced capture by the enemy as a metaphoric castration and as a precipitous loss of status in the social and gender hierarchy.”
Rachamimov bases this interpretation on the POW memoirs where, he claims, so much attention was given to the moment of capture. This as a “narrative device….solicits understanding from the readers while dealing with the shame, fear, honor, and personal accountability. The sense of falling into enemy hands came across powerfully in POW correspondence (which was diligently copied during the war by the censors), and even more so in the hundreds of memoirs that were written by POW officers and published in Central Europe during the interwar years.”[48]
What the author fails to consider, however, is the possibility that the POW officer’s account could have been colored by expected postwar career considerations. This kind of attitude is reflected in Rákosi’s recollection when he describes that following capture and the forced march to the Russian rear, he met his battalion commander “with whom a sharp debate started whether those Russians who captured him at his headquarters, which was two kilometers behind our lines, were the same as the ones who captured us first, or in fact he was captured by others before we were. For him this was important issue for official reasons at home.”[49] This episode indicates that professional officers who were captured still had to think about how their superiors at home would judge their behavior and how that would affect their military careers following repatriation. Thus, the feeling of shame may have been generated by practical, rather than cultural considerations.
While it cannot be ignored that professional officers felt shame and humiliation for being captured, earlier discussion of the moments of capture, however, indicate that this feeling was not universal, at least not among the Hungarian reserve officers. And while in the Austro-Hungarian Army the German speaking professional officers outnumbered the reserve officers, among the Hungarians speakers. for example, the ratio was almost two to one in favor of the reserve.[50] This also means that there were more Hungarian reserve officers―middle class civilians in uniform―in the POW camps than professionals. Yet the theater was as popular among the Hungarians feeling no humiliation as it was among the German speakers for whom, according to Rachamimov, capture was an equivalent of castration.
The theater of officer camps was just one part of the artistic life but an important one. As a POW poet and playwright of comedies recalled, “If there would not have been some artificial medicine, laughter, good cheer, which distracted our attention from our hopeless present and bleak future, perhaps many fewer people would have returned to the homeland, to their homes and families.”[51]
Since the officers were not allowed to engage in productive labor they, therefore, tried to occupy themselves with other artistic and intellectual pursuits. This included the organization of orchestras, amateur painters held art classes for their comrades, camp publications appeared covering camp life, but also literature and poetry, lectures and language classes.[52] Ernő Fogarasi, who was captured in Przemyśl in 1915, recalled that in the Pyeshchanka camp near Chita “We had a theater cabaret, and the Hungarian POW Theater; we had a newspaper, the Hadur (The Warlord), we had an illustrated art journal Magyar Sziget (Hungarian Island ), and a serious scientific lecture series, the Lyceum.[53]
In the rank and file camps the POWs, who, unlike the officers, did not receive monthly salaries, were more involved in crafts that they were able to sell to the local population. During the Russian revolution and Civil War, when the officers no longer received stipends, the officers also applied the crafts they brought to, or mastered in, the camps supporting themselves by trading with the indigenous population.[54] A POW officer in Krasnoiarsk later characterized the camp as a “virtual factory town.”[55]
Rachamimov also saw humiliation as an aspect of POW life in the letters of the POWs sent home. The motives of the writers in sending these letters, however, may have been different from the one assumed by Rachamimov. Rákosi in his memoirs describes censorship in the trenches which had an impact on the tone of the letters: “the military mail was functioning very slowly, which in part was due to censorship. The task of censoring our letters in our company was left to a senior non-commissioned officer, who also knew Serb and German. If letters arrived from home with complaints or if the soldier wrote home letter with complaints, he was ordered to see the company commander who read out loud the offending lines of the letter. The soldier was then told to warn his relatives not to complain and if it was the soldier who complained, he was called to the carpet for writing home letters of despair.”[56] From this description it is clear that soldiers and officers were indoctrinated to write rosy letters if they wanted their loved ones to receive them. This was even more so after capture. The POW had to assume that his letter would be read by the Austro-Hungarian military authorities; therefore, it would make sense to write the kind of letter in which he would declare his loyalty and insist that he had no choice and “had fallen” into captivity under circumstances beyond his control.
The POW also had to face the censorship of the Russian authorities. Hungarian POWs just as others, were allowed to send postcards home, but these had to be written in German, French, or Russian, as the Russian censors also wanted to know the contents of these cards. These prerequisites were signals for the POWs to choose their words well. A letter from home could take as much as 221 days[57] and the letters to home might not have arrived at all, especially if they were negative in contents. Added to the problem was the fact that the Russian censors also worked at a snail’s pace and at the time of the conclusion of the war, 11,000,000 undelivered cards were found in the offices of the Central Censorship Bureau.[58]
An example of a POW letter that did not pass the censor was found in the files of the reports of the Military Censor Committee of Omsk a researcher. In the letter written home, the writer complained that “It is difficult to live in the sea of snow, in the realm of the frost. (Here everything freezes up: eggs, milk, and meat are brought from the market in one sack.) In spite of the hellish cold, the stoves are not fired up. In order to warm up, one would have to move around, but for that type of activity one needs more food, and that we lack, and we sit all day long in our long overcoats, that is those who have such a piece of clothing. In the morning we receive hot water, for lunch we get the same though it has the smell of meat, evening hot water again.”[59]
The nationality card played by the Russians had increased ethnic friction among the POWs. When in the middle of 1916 Russia started to back the organization of the Czecho-Slovak POWs into a legion to be used against the Central Powers, national animosities were exacerbated. Following the March 1917 revolution in Russia, the Provisional Government continued this policy. Following the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviet government’s decree of December 17 announced the equality of all POWs with the Russian workers. The law gave them the right to organize, political and cultural rights, as well as commensurate salaries with the Russian workers.[60]
The peace negotiations between the Bolshevik government and the Central Powers also started that month in Brest-Litovsk. On March 15, 1918, the peace treaty was signed, which brought the legitimacy of the legion in doubt. On the same day, however, Lenin acquiesced to Allied demands that the Czechoslovak Legion would be shipped via Vladivostok to the French front for combat. By then the legion numbered about 46,000 men.[61] The Austro-Hungarian POWs number in Siberia, on the other hand, due to repatriation, was down to about 240,000, the majority Hungarians. [62] Many of them joined the Red Guard for the same reason that the Czechs joined the legion—to get out of the camps and to get out of Russia.
Along the Trans-Siberian Railway the two nationalities represented two hostile camps. The first clash between them took place on May 15, 1918. In Cheliabinsk, a serious incident took place when a projectile was thrown from a train of Austro-Hungarian POWs that injured a soldier of the Sixth Czecho-Slovak Regiment. The train was halted, the POWs were ordered to disembark, and a Hungarian POW accused of being the culprit was summarily executed. The local Soviet, dominated by the Hungarian Internationalists, then went on to disarm and arrest some of the Czech troops. Their armed comrades, in turn, arrested the Red Guards at the station, liberated their compatriots and helped themselves to arms. Though the dispute was finally settled, the news of the incident led Commissar of War Leon Trotsky to order the disarming of the legion, which the legionnaires refused to do.[63] The consequence was that the already brewing conflict between the Russian communists and their Russian enemies in Siberia turned into a country-wide civil war, with the Czechoslovak Legion of 61,000 on the side of the Whites and an estimated 100,000 Hungarians with the Reds. Thus, within the Russian Civil War there was another civil war going on in Siberia, a civil war between the nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who possessed different visions of the postwar world.
In the total war that World War I was, the prisoners of war in Russia were forced under adverse conditions to engage in the work of the home front to support the war front of the enemy. When the home front collapsed, the revolutionary governments called on some of the selfsame captives to support their cause with the force of arms. Both of these practices indicate that World War I was indeed a turning point of history.
[1] Jack C. Roth, World War I: A Turning Point in Modern History (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1967), pp. 11-12, 25.
[2] The Avalon Project at Yale Law School, “Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 2007,” www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hague04.htm(külső hivatkozás)
[3] Antal Józsa, Háború, hadifogság, forradalom. Magyar internacionalista hadifoglyok az 1917-es oroszországi forradalmakban.[War, Military Captivity, Revolution. Hungarian Internationalist Prisoners of War in the Russian Revolutions of 1917] (Budapest: Akadémia Kiadó, 1970), p. 105.
[4] Baja, Hadifogly magyarok története, 2:40.
[5] Alon Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War. Captivity on the Eastern Front (New York: Berg, 2002), pp. 39-40. An earlier Hungarian source puts the number of Austro-Hungarian POWs at 1,673,000. See Benedek Baja et al., Hadifogoly Magyarok Története [History of Hungarian Prisoners of War] (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1930), 1:75.
[6] Józsa, Hadifogság, p 102 and Katalin Petrák, Magyarok a Szovjetunióban, 1922-1945 [Hungarians in the Soviet Union, 1922-1945] (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 2000), p. 22, n. 12.
[7] Józsa, Hadifogság, p. 98.
[8] Ibid., p. 39.
[9] Rachamimov, POWs, p. 38; and Baja et al., Hadifogoly Magyarok Története, 1:74.
[10] Géza Gyóni, “For Just One Night,” in The Lost Voices of World War I, ed. Tim Cross (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 349–350.
[11] George L. Mosse, “Shell-shock as a Social Disease,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 101.
[12] Ferenc Erős, “Trauma and történelem” [Trauma and History], in Trauma és történelem (Budapest: Jószöveg Műhely, 2007), 21.
[13] Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14-18, Understanding the Great War (New York : Hill and Wang: 2003), 24.
[14] Thomas N. Dikel, Brian Engdahl, and Raina Eberly, “PTSD in Former Prisoners of War: Prewar, Wartime, and Postwar Factors,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 18, no. 1 (February 2005): 69 and 74.
[15] Géza Tarczali Dell’Adami, Megváltás Szibériából [Redemption from Siberia] (Budapest: Stephaneum Nyomda, 1925), pp. 63–64.
[16] Sándor Szurmay, A magyar katona a Kárpátokban [The Hungarian Soldier in the Carpathians] (Budapest : N.R.G.-COM, 2005), p 74.
[17] Mátyás Rákosi, Visszaemlékezések 1892-1925 [Memoirs, 1892–1925] (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 2002), pp. 195-196, 200, and 208.
[18] Ibid., p. 202.
[19] Graydon A. Tunstall, Blood on the Snow.The Carpathian Winter War of 1915 (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 2010), p. 155.
[20] Baja et al., Hadifogoly magyarok története, 1:75. The authors rationalize this phenomenon as the consequence of “soldiers from divisive nationalities who surrendered to the enemy without a struggle to the end.”
[21] György Milei and Katalin Petrák, eds., Tanúságtevők. Visszaemlékezések a magyarországi munkásmozgalom történetéből. Magyarok a Nagy Oktober győzelméért 1917-1921 [Witnesses. Recollections about the History of the Hungarian Labor Movement. Hungarians for the Victory of the Great October, 1917-1921] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1977), 272.
[22] Máté Eszes, ed., Vörös magyarok. Emlékiratok az orosz forradalmak és polgárháború korából [Red Hungarians. Memoirs from the Era of the Russian Revolutions and Civil War] (Budapest: Zrinyi, 1987), p. 39.
[23] Rákosi, Visszaemlékezések, p. 208.
[24] Szurmay, A magyar katona, p. 114.
[25] Alon Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War. Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p 50. Rachamimov writes, “The burden of marches was alleviated at times what seems to have been lax vigilance on the part of the Russian guards (except when guards were Cossacks).”
[26] Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 199), p. 372.
[27] Rachamimov, POWs, p. 46, also on p. 59.
[28] Baja, Hadifogoly magyarok története, 2:40-41
[29] In Germany a similar process was taking place, where Russian POWs were used for labor first, thus a “hierarchy of prisoners of war had been established.” See Heather Jones “The Final Logic of Sacrifice? Violence in Prisoner of War Labor Companies in 1918,” The Historian 68, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 772.
[30] Rachamimov, POWs, p. 96; and Peter Gatrell, Russias First World War. A Social and Economic History (New York: Pearson, 205), p. 185.
[31] For the 1916 inspection tour of Austro-Hungarian nurses, see “ Alon Rachamimov, “’Female Generals’ and ‘Siberian Angels’: Aristocratic Nurses and the Austro-Hungarian POW Relief ,” in Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe, ed. Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 23-46. In his article no detail is given about Countess Stubenberg-Pállfy’s activities.
[32] Roman Dyboski, Seven Years in Russia and Siberia, 1914-1921 (Cheshire, CT: Cherry Hill Books, 1922), p. 36.
[33] Ibid., p. 37.
[34] Yücel Yanikdag, “Ottoman Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914-1922,” Journal of Contemporary History 34, no 1 (1999): 71.
[35] Ibid., p. 72.
[36] Samuel R. Willamson, Jr. and Peter Pastor, eds. Peter Pastor, Essays on World War I: Origins and Prisoners of War (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1983), p. 150
[37] Józsa, Háború, p. 129.
[38] Peter Gatrell, “Prisoners of War on the Eastern Front during World War I, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 3 (2005): p. 561.
[39] Dyboski, Seven Years, p. 32.
[40] János Rainer, Nagy Imre. Politikai életrajz, vol. 1, 1896-1953 (Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 1996), pp. 35-36.
[41] Rákosi, Visszaemlékezések, p. 238.
[42] Ibid., p. 36.
[43] Dyboski, Seven Years, p. 64.
[44] Eszes, ed., Vörös magyarok, p. 45.
[45] Anna Vándor, “Zsirai Miklós és a tobolszki fogság” [Miklós Zsirai and the Captivity in Tobolsk], Magyar Nyelv, no. 3 (1999); 374, www.c3hu/~magyarnyelv/99-3/vandor.htm
[46] Ibid., 42-43.
[47] “Szinészkatonák, fogolyprimadonnák. Front-és hadifogolyszinházak az első világháborúban” [Soldiering actors, prisoner of war prima donnas. Front and Prisoner of War Theaters in World War I], http://www.oszmi.hu/vfron.htm(külső hivatkozás)
[48] Alon Rachamimov, “The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914-1920,” American Historical Review 111, no. 2 9April 2006): 363-365.
[49] Rákosi, Visszaemlékezések, 209.
[50] See Table 1 in Józsa, Hadifogság, p. 25.
[51] Ernő Fogarasi, Humor a hó alatt…A szibériai hadifogság derüs órái madártávlatból [Humor under the Snow….The cheerful hours of the Siberian Military Captivity―From a Bird’s Eye View] (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa, 1937), 5.
[52] Tihamér Novotny, Első Világháborús katonaemlékek antropológiai és mővészetszociológiai vizsgálata [The Anthropological and Art Historical Examination of Military Memories of World War I] (Budapest: Múzsák Közmővelődési Kiadó, 1987), 153.
[53] Fogarasi, Humor a hó alatt, 52.
[54] Novotny, Első Világháborús katonaemlékek, 143 and 156.
[55] Ernő Rónai, Krasznojárszk (Nagyvárad: Franklin Nyomda, 1938), 151.
[56] Rákosi, Visszaemlékezések, p. 198.
[57] Vándor, “Zsirai Miklós,”p. 368.
[58] Józsa, Háború, p. 107.
[59] Vándor, “Zsirai Miklós,” p. 369. A WW I joke, still popular in Hungary, aptly reflected the problem of Russian military censorship: Mr. Cohn’s son was drafted into the wartime Austro-Hungarian Army. His father instructs him that in case he gets captured on the eastern front and things go well in the camp, he should write about his good fortunes with blue ink. In case things go badly, in order to get through the censors, his praise should be written with red ink. That way his father would know the truth. After his son was captured and taken to Siberia, Mr. Cohn received a postcard from his POW son. He wrote in blue ink, “things are going well; we have everything we need except for red ink.”
[60] Ligeti Károly, Vállogatott írások [Selected Writings], ed. Jenö Györkei (Budapest: Zrinyi, 1957), p.5.
[61] Josef Kalvoda, “Czech and Slovak Prisoners of War in Russia during War and Revolution,” in Essays on World War I, ed. Williamson and Pastor, p. 225.
[62] Józsa, Háború, p. 416.
[63] Joseph Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslovakia (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1986), pp. 327-334.
