Russian crimes against Ukraine in World War I that anticipated the Holocaust

The great emperors and kings of Europe entered the First World War with the idea of ​​fulfilling their dreams of expansion and came out of it, some with half their empires in their hands and others with nothing. The first impulse of Tsar Nicholas II was to invade central Europe to revive the idea of ​​a Greater Russia that would reach the Carpathians, a project that also gives Putin butterflies, but when his armies had only started, to the height of a small town without significance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire inhabited by Poles, Ukrainians and Jews, they realized that they were heading towards disaster. In ‘La Fortaleza’ ( Desperta Ferro Ediciones ), British historian Alexander Watson dissects every hour and every sigh of a siege that unexpectedly changed the course of the Great War and, with it, of the 20th century. If this fortress hadn’t withstood the Russian onslaught so long, World War I might have ended in 1915 with Russia dominating central and eastern Europe. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the Russian Revolution would never have taken place and totalitarianisms would have taken time to shake the continent. This heroic resistance prevented the rapid collapse of Austro-Hungary, whose foundations hung by a thread, but it did not rid the world of other horrors. The plan of Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of the Army General Staff, was vastly outmatched on the Eastern Front by the numerically superior and more experienced Russian enemy. The Austrian was forced to order the complete withdrawal of his troops towards the Biała and Dunajec rivers 140 km west of Przemyśl. To the garrison of this city he ordered something as simple and at the same time difficult as “to stay on their feet and… resist at all costs.” Related News standard Yes Since the 18th century: Russia’s historical anomaly that Putin wants to reverse with blood and wars Israel Viana Since he came to power in 2000, the Russian president has been trying to make the Federation return to being the superpower it had been , continuously, from the creation of the Empire by Peter the Great in 1721 until the breakup of the USSR in 1991 Przemyśl, situated on high ground between the border of Western and Eastern Christendom, was the main eastern stronghold of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The first point to attack on the border and also an important nerve center for railway connections throughout the empire. In the autumn of 1914, the Austro-Hungarian army took refuge there behind with the Tsar’s troops hot on their heels. Defeated, sick and out of control soldiers fortified themselves in a city walled to the teeth with several rings of fortifications. Everything against The garrison of Przemyśl was made up of middle-aged men from almost all corners of Europe, including Austrians, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs, Italians, Poles and Ukrainians (hundreds of these were arrested and executed for fear of that they opened the gates from within), as was characteristic of Habsburg armies. Some were veteran soldiers, but a great many were inexperienced reservists and physically “overweight fat,” in the words of one of their officers. As Alexander Watson relates, the fate of at least two empires depended on these puny heroes. As if they had little against them, Przemyśl’s outdated fortifications and weaponry put the Russians within a few weeks of collapsing the Austro-Hungarians. There was nothing in the city that sounded like an impregnable obstacle to the euphoric Russian army, which on paper was the most powerful in the world. A story that today, with Russia militarily exhausted in the Ukraine against an enemy that also seemed defenseless, seems all too familiar. Ruins of one of the city’s fortresses in 1915. ABC The Tsar not only wanted to crush the remnants of the Habsburg army, but also that Przemyśl was a crucial part of his plans to take over Poland and the current territories of Western Ukraine, populations he considered of Russian property. A sweet at the door of a school that was revealed, thanks to the good work of the Habsburg army, poorly equipped and with a reputation for incompetence, a lethal trap for the Russians during six months of siege. The famous general Alexei Brusilov understood the importance of the fortress-city in blocking the way to central Europe and ordered his best troops to launch an assault from three directions. The enemy troops reached the walls of the fortress, but could not enter due to resistance bordering on suicidal. The Russians tried it first with weapons, but faced with their inability to sink their teeth into the fortress, they resorted to hunger as a weapon to sink the morale of the population. The garrison had to sacrifice thousands of horses to put something in their mouths, while the 30,000 citizens caught in the crossfire had to console themselves with the crumbs. Finally, the icing on the cake came through aerial bombardments, earning the questionable honor of being one of the first cities in history to suffer these attacks. With temperatures as low as -22°C, the Austro-Hungarian army suffered nearly 700,000 casualties trying to rescue the city. Without needing to do anything else, the cholera and typhus epidemics did the rest in the city. Morale sank to such an extent that, at the beginning of March, one in eight members of the garrison was hospitalized and as many others had already taken to their heels. Realizing that the city could fall at any moment, Conrad ordered several desperate offensives across the Carpathians. With temperatures down to -22°C, the Austro-Hungarian army suffered nearly 700,000 casualties trying to rescue the city. A sacrifice that was useless, like the heroic and disastrous departure of the garrison in a last vain attempt to break the encirclement. The fall of the fortress occurred, as Watson narrates brilliantly and with drops of humor in ‘The Fortress’, on March 22, 1915. That morning the explosions shook the city and destroyed the belt of forts, the gunpowder stores and, in the center, its bridges. The garrison capitulated and the Russian army took possession of Przemyśl or, more accurately, its smoking ruins. So many months of fighting, however, put a damper on Russian ambitions to collapse the Austro-Hungarian Empire fast enough to save their own empire. World War I was, in the end, literally the grave of the Romanovs before that of the Habsburgs. Przemyśl changed the course of the contest. Photograph of the Russian Army in the surroundings of the city in 1916. But beyond its military importance, the ordeal of Przemyśl was a terrible prediction of the violence that was to come to Central and Eastern Europe with the totalitarianisms of the following decades. Watson, Professor of History at Goldsmiths (University of London) and a specialist in European conflicts of the early 20th century, focuses in his three hundred page essay on the little-explored connection between later anti-Semitism and the ethnic cleansing and famines that followed. around Przemyśl with Russia as the protagonist. While besieging Przemyśl, the Russians set in motion a plan to end the multiculturalism of the conquered territory, stripping the Poles of their rights, eradicating Ukrainian culture by its roots, and turning everything into one great steppe of what is still called Great Russia today. . Only the purely Russian could inhabit this area. The Jews, like other later tyrants in this very region, had no place in the Czar’s plans. More than 100,000 Jews were expropriated from their land and forcibly expelled to the east. Inside the city, anti-Semitism was also unleashed against Jewish merchants accused of speculating on scarce food. MORE INFORMATION noticia No Putin’s cruel historical lie with which he justifies his war against the West noticia Yes From the 18th century: Russia’s historical anomaly that Putin wants to reverse with blood and wars The other way of reading ‘The Fortress’ is from the present, as a way of explaining the current invasion of Ukraine as part of Russian imperialism. Vladimir Putin’s war is not so much an open wound after the breakup of the Soviet Union as a repeat of Tsar Nicholas II’s failed attempt in 1914-15 to reclaim all Ukrainian-inhabited land for Russia. This can be seen in the multiple similarities between the speech of the Russian president, where he presents the Ukrainians and their culture subservient to Great Russia, and that of the now extinct Romanovs.