The Forgotten Front: The Eastern Theatre of World War 1, 1914-1915. Gerhard P. Gross, Editor. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2018.

In early 2021, a Bloomberg article lamenting the death of military history at American universities went viral on academic Twitter.[1] The article alleged that U.S. history faculty are at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to the idea of offering courses on war, politics, and diplomacy, which they regard as overly focused on the actions of powerful white men. Twitterstorians engaged in military history quickly came to their discipline’s defense, criticizing the article’s author for narrowly (mis)characterizing military history as the study of battles and weapons.

The English-language publication of The Forgotten Front: The Eastern Theatre of World War 1, 1914-1915 suggests that military history is not only alive and well but also integral to historians’ understanding of the first world war. Moreover, it showcases the breadth and depth of military history in its coverage of topics such as military strategy, national identity, and collective memory. Originally published in German in 2006, this edited volume resulted from the Forty-Sixth International Conference for Military History, sponsored by the Germany Military History Research Office (MFGA) and held at the German Historical Museum in 2004, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the war.

The book’s contents are arranged into three parts, which reflect the main themes of the conference. The first chapter provides context for these three parts by exploring the influence of geopolitics on German military plans for a two-front war. Part 1 includes four chapters that examine operations on the Eastern Front during 1914-1915. Part 2 contains nine chapters—as many as Parts 1 and 3 combined—that analyze how experiences of the Eastern Front impacted the concepts of the self and the enemy among the war’s participants. Part 3 comprises five chapters on efforts to represent and commemorate the war, both during the conflict and in the subsequent nine decades. The conclusion uses evidence provided in the preceding chapters to evaluate continuities between World War I and World War II.

The first and most obvious sense is that the collective memory of the war, at least in the English, French, and German-speaking worlds, is dominated by the trench warfare, artillery barrages, and gas attacks that defined the Western Front.

The Eastern Front as Forgotten

As the book’s title suggests, the Eastern Front of World War I has been forgotten, in multiple senses. The first and most obvious sense is that the collective memory of the war, at least in the English, French, and German-speaking worlds, is dominated by the trench warfare, artillery barrages, and gas attacks that defined the Western Front. This popular association of the war with the Western Front is due in no small part to the abundance of memoirs, novels, poems, and paintings produced by that front’s combatants in attempts to communicate the unique horrors of total war. Examples of such works include Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and Otto Dix’s Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas (1924).

The second meaning of forgotten refers to the contemporary attitude of the German High Command, which regarded the Eastern Front as the secondary front, for two reasons. The Schlieffen plan for a two-front war dictated that Germany attack and defeat France first, then focus on defeating Russia. Additionally, for Germany, the war in the east was a coalition war, in which it would ostensibly have the assistance of its ally, Austria-Hungary.[2]

Although the Eastern Front was not a secondary front for Russia, the events of the war were soon overshadowed by the revolutions of 1917 and the civil war from 1918-1921, which is the third way in which the Eastern Front has been forgotten. Fourth and finally, for both the residents and historians of the area that the Eastern Front encompassed, the horrors of World War II eclipsed those of World War I.

The Peculiarities of the War in the East

The research presented in this volume demonstrates that the historiographical focus on the Western Front has produced a lopsided and inaccurate assessment of the defining features of World War I. Taken together, the chapters in this book highlight those aspects of the conflict that were unique to the Eastern Front and indicative of modern warfare.

…the vastness of the eastern theater of war intimidated German military planners, who were worried about overextending their supply lines à la Napoleon.

In contrast to the Western Front, the Eastern Front was a vast area of military operations. Hew Strachan notes that the vastness of the eastern theater of war intimidated German military planners, who were worried about overextending their supply lines à la Napoleon. They believed that the Western Front, due to both its proximity to the German border and its extensive network of railroads, offered more operational possibilities, which explains why Germany struck first to the west, even though the greater threat allegedly lay to its east.[3]

…although Germany was able halt the Russian steamroller, it was never able to defeat it decisively.

The notion that Russia constituted the greatest threat, not only to Germany but to Europe, will surprise many readers, because most scholarship on the Western Front casts Germany in the role of juggernaut. The trope of the Russian steamroller appears throughout this volume. It was invoked by German military leaders to refer to Russia’s seemingly inexhaustible resources, in terms of land and manpower, as well as to the slow yet determined movement of Russian forces on the attack. As several authors concede, although Germany was able halt the Russian steamroller, it was never able to defeat it decisively. Gerhard P. Gross attributes the illusive nature of German victory in the east to the German High Command’s refusal to designate the Eastern Front as the Schwerpunkt (focus of main effort).[4] Even though outcomes on the Western Front had led to a stalemate as early as November 1914, German military offensives in the east in the first two years of the war were confined to the objectives of liberating East Prussia and propping up Austria-Hungary.

Despite its inability to knock Russia out of the war militarily, Germany remained confident of its superiority vis à vis Russia. Peter Hoeres notes that Germans and Austrians shared a hierarchical attitude toward other nationalities that regarded the British and the French as equals but Slavs as inferior; among the various Slavic ethnicities, Russians ranked the lowest.[5] The experiences of German soldiers serving in the east seemed to confirm the truth of this attitude: Their accounts of the war described Russia as an unimaginable world characterized by extreme primitivism, violence, and disease.[6] In their respective chapters, Eva Horn, Igor Narskij, and Hans-Erich Volkmann partly attribute the soldiers’ horrified impressions of Russia and Russians to the distinctive conditions of the Eastern Front. The scorched-earth policy employed by Russian armies created a desolate, unearthly landscape; mobile warfare, with its use of cavalry attacks and bayonet charges, contributed to the brutalization of the soldiers; and the difficulties of supplying German troops owing to the distance and the climate brought about starvation.[7]

German soldiers’ depictions of Russia’s western borderlands as premodern and rife with poverty, filth, and epidemics bolstered German colonial ambitions. Even though German propaganda proclaimed the war as a defense of European culture against Russian barbarism, German war aims included the annexation of Russian territory and a crusade to civilize the peoples of the east. Unlike the Western Front, inhabited by the nation-states of Great Britain and France, the Eastern Front was, to German eyes, a tabula rasa or a land without people, for Germany to administer as it saw fit. Convinced that the multiethnic, primarily Slavic, population of Ober Ost—the area under the direct control of Hindenburg and Ludendorff—lacked the discipline or ambition to modernize or rule itself. German officials turned the region into a colony; they implemented borders and a passport system, requisitioned food and labor, exploited raw materials, Germanized the indigenous languages and cultures, and encouraged ethnic Germans to resettle there.[8]

The Question of Continuity

It would be historically inaccurate to say that the Wehrmacht was continuing the work of Ober Ost.

Germany’s othering of its Russian adversary, particularly as unhygienic, and its annexationist and resettlement plans with regard to eastern lands invite comparisons between German policy in 1914-1918 and in 1941-1945. Most contributions to this volume at least touch on this theme, but the book’s conclusion addresses it directly. Nearly all the authors, including Rüdiger Bergien who wrote the conclusion, argue against the existence of continuities between the Eastern Fronts of World War I and World War II. The sticking point concerns causality: Even though Bergien admits the appearance of continuities between the two wars in perceptions of the enemy, the use of terror, and occupational policies, historians cannot prove that German experiences of the first world war determined Nazi behavior in the second.[9] Or, as Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius puts it, the parallels between the two campaigns do not constitute continuities because they were not stages of the same evolutionary process.[10] It would be historically inaccurate to say that the Wehrmacht was continuing the work of Ober Ost.

The traditional focus on the Western Front completely obscures these similarities between German mentalities and conduct in both world wars, a subject that deserves further scholarly attention. This book illuminates additional new avenues for research on the war, especially whether the atrocities committed by armies on both fronts had experiential or ideological origins. The publication of this volume in English encourages Western scholars of the war to reconsider its distinguishing characteristics.

Colleen M. Moore is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University. She is currently completing a book on the Russian peasant home front during World War I.

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Header Image: Hand-drawn bird's eye view map of the Eastern Front of World War I, circa 1917. (Wikimedia Commons).

Notes:

[1] Max Hastings, “American Universities Declare War on Military History,” Bloomberg, January 31, 2021, Opinion, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-31/max-hastings-u-s-universities-declare-war-on-military-history.

[2] Gerhard P. Gross, ed., The Forgotten Front: The Eastern Theater of World War I, 1914-1915, trans. Janice W. Ancker (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2018), 2.

[3] Gross, The Forgotten Front, 16-17.

[4] Gross, The Forgotten Front, 42.

[5] Gross, The Forgotten Front, 144.

[6] Gross, The Forgotten Front, 170.

[7] Gross, The Forgotten Front, 164, 194, 218.

[8] Gross, The Forgotten Front, 249-56.

[9] Gross, The Forgotten Front, 356-7.

[10] Gross, The Forgotten Front, 259.