Mass executions by the Austro-Hungarian War Judiciary, photo

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From: Der Weltkrieg in seiner rauhen Wirklichkeit, Munich 1926, p. 416

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War crimes

The Austro-Hungarian army committed various types of war crimes, ranging from the use of illegal warfare agents and inhuman treatment of prisoners of war to brutality towards civilians. Villages and towns were burnt to the ground, hostages were taken and shot, there was forcible deportation, internment, forced labour, mass executions, rape and pillaging. The Habsburg military courts also sentenced tens of thousands of people to death. It only took a careless comment, a spurious suspicion or a denunciation for an innocent civilian to end up on the gallows.

Chapter

War against the Local Population

The armies of the belligerent powers often viewed the population that still lived near the frontlines as an unwanted nuisance. The increasing nervousness and intensified ‘Russophile’ image of the enemy in the wake of the commencment of hostilities thus took its toll on the civilian population on the Eastern Front, too. There were several orders that decreed ‘ruthless actions’ towards ‘suspects and possible traitors’. Whoever was not ‘massacred and without mercy’ on the spot faced a policy of rigorous deportation.
Chapter

The war crimes of the Habsburg army. Between soldateska and court martial.

Driven by resentment and suspicions of spying, the Habsburg army persecuted parts of its own population as the ‘enemy within’. Yet many thousands of civilians fell victim to the soldiers’ acts of atrocity during the military invasion, too. Besides the war crimes of the marauding troops, the Habsburg military courts also distinguished themselves with an inglorious ‘efficiency’.