Conrad Von Hetzendorf: The General Who Demanded War on Serbia 25 Times in a Year
Since January 1913 until June 1914 (i.e. before the Sarajevo assassination ) he formally demanded 25 times permission to attack Serbia and thus confirm the monarchy as a superpower, in order to prevent the disintegration of Monarchy [...]
Count Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf (1852-1925), Chief of the General Staff of the Austro-Hungarian Army at the outbreak of the First World War. Seen here with his Chief of Staff, General Muller. Date: circa 1914
In time when (on the occasion of the 100th anniversary since WWI ended) we face almost daily attempts to reinterpret and revision the role of Serbia in the outbreak of the Great War, all in order to push aside well established facts of who and what for the war started, it is Her majesty history that reminds us of Chief of staff of the Austro-Hungarian army, who was obsessed with the idea that the Austro-Hungarian empire can be preserved only if it attacks and conquers Serbia .
Relations between Serbia and Austro-Hungary were tense from the moment when the Congress of Berlin granted the black – Yellow empire the right to perform the occupation of Serbian land of Bosnia and Herzegovina ( 1878). , but only since the beginning of the 20th century we can speak of very bad relations between the two countries, which were on the brink of war, and often ‘spiced up’ with threats and war mobilizations.
The situation rapidly deteriorated after the Monarchy annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina ( 1908-1909 ), but also after the unhidden attitude, the Monarchy had: when it comes to Balkans and Serbs it won’t finish with Bosnia. The first military recruitment for war on Serbia Austria-Hungary performed in spring 1909, and another one in winter 1912, April 1913. and again in the fall.
Conrad von Hetzendorf: “Austria should make war on Serbia!” The general who formally demanded 25 times permission to attack Serbia in a year
Credits for this demonstration of force go to Chief of Staff of Austro-Hungarian army Conrad von Hetzendorf (General Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf ( 1852-1925). Since January 1913 until June 1914 (ie before the Sarajevo assassination ) he formally demanded 25 times permission to attack Serbia and thus confirm the monarchy as a superpower, in order to prevent the disintegration of Monarchy.Fon Hetzendorf was a favourite officer of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; he personally promoted him to Chief of staff. Conrad regularly proposed so-called ‘ preventative ‘ or surprise wars directed against the supposed enemies of the Austro – Hungarian monarchy, rarely Italy and permanently Serbia. To get the idea of what kind of man the Chief of Staff General Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf was, let’s take a look where it’s been evidenced and described – Rebecca West and her book ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’.
”Conrad was a man without reason and grace, who saw himself as a great soldier and statesman, so he considered he’s capable of making plans for the country’s foreign policy. Konrad was obsessed with the idea that it must preserve Austria-Hungary by taking offensive action against Serbia“, Rebecca West writes.
Some other history books suggest that Chief of Staff of the Austrian army Conrad von Hötzendorf had a strange emotional relationship he was hoping to get regularized by returning to Austria as a war hero. But the new book “Sleepwalkers,” by Christopher Clark, a very elaborated account of prewar history, tells the whole story:
“It started with a dinner party in 1907. Conrad was seated next to someone’s wife. He was at that time about 55 years old. His wife had died in 1905, resulting in severe depression. Apparently, he enjoyed the conversation, because a week later he presented himself at the lady ’s home and announced that he intended to marry her. She replied that she had seven commitments — e.g., a husband and six children. He said if she didn’t give him hope, if she refused him utterly, he would resign his job and retire from public life and never be seen again.
They compromised. She would continue as she was but consider a change if things changed in the future. In fact, they did start an affair sometime later. He wanted her to divorce, however and thought that returning as a war hero might regularize this situation, in some way, so a divorce would be socially acceptable. “
But there’s more about it – the 3000 letters he wrote to the woman! After his death in 1915 at age 73, and completely unbeknown to his lover, some 3000 letters addressed to her were found in his apartment. Some were 60 pages long; sometimes he wrote several times a day. The author of “Sleepwalkers” says they were ”repetitive, obsessive claims of adoration forever, over and over, with emphasis on his depression and despair and dependency on her for any relief from all this.” Repetitive and obsessive also were Conrad’s continual calls for war against Serbia. Conrad called for preventive war against Serbia 25 times in 1913 alone. Emperor Josef fired him for this strange obsession during 1911, because he constantly badgered the foreign minister Aehrenthal about making war on Serbia. He was very proud of never deviating and always started his letters with the claim that he never changed his mind — Austria should make war on Serbia!
Amazingly, the Emperor rehired him after 18 months!! Austria must have had a severe shortage of trained people: the foreign minister Count Berchtold served only reluctantly.
In the first memorandum addressed to the Emperor Franz Jozef in 1907. (seven years before the WW I) Fon Hetzendorf wrote, that
“We have to take advantage of the first opportunity to attack before this most vulnerable opponent (Serbia) get enough arms which could result in the disintegration of the Monarchy.”
Only this sentence is sufficient counter-argument to those willing to (ab)use the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in order to distort history. Because he called for the destruction of Serbia, rising Slavic state, almost a full decade before the Sarajevo assassination. He was obsessed with Serbia.
After the first memorandum ( 1907). within the next seven years, Austro-Hungarian Chief of General Staff ’s obsession with Serbia has grown into a mania. He wrote again and again and urged the emperor to attack Serbia. In the Memorandum dated 28. October in 1912. Fon Hetzendorf proposes that Serbia
“must lose its independence and has to be forced to hand over her fate to the Habsburgs. That’s the core of the Austrian solution for the Balkans.”
According to Fon Hetzendorf, Serbia should have been fragmented into Raška area (or Sandžak as Ottomans called it) and western Serbia that should belong to Austria; Nis and Pirot area to Bulgaria; and eastern parts of Serbia – between the Morava and Timok rivers – to Romania.
What’s amazing is the number of documents Fon Hetzendorf sent to the King, crown prince and the Austro-Hungarian government, which – without exception – were calling for an attack and destruction of Serbia.
Such behaviour of the first man in the Austro-Hungarian Army was in line with a long-standing policy of the Austrian Military party, informal and interest-based society which consisted of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff of the Army, the Christian Social Party, the radical wing of the Roman Catholic Church and the clique around Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
All this indicates that Fon Hetzendorf was much more of the Chief of Staff: he was a warmonger and one of the most responsible people for Europe and the world sliding into the Great War.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Author’s note and UpdateThe following article was first published in September 2014 at the outset of the air campaign “against the ISIS”. In recent developments Russia has officially joined the campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS). What are the implications?Amply documented but rarely mentioned in news reports, the ISIS is a creation of US intelligence, recruited, trained and financed by the US and its allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Israel and Jordan. What this means is that the ISIS terrorists are the foot soldiers of the Western alliance. While America claims to be targeting the ISIS, in reality it is protecting the ISIS. The air campaign is intent upon ...
Lest anyone be tempted to believe that President Trump and other U.S. interventionists are intervening in Venezuela because of some purported concern for the Venezuelan people, let’s examine just a few examples that will bring a dose of reality to the situation. This latest intervention is nothing more than another interventionist power play, one intended to replace one dictatorial regime with another.Egypt comes to mind. It is ruled by one of the most brutal and tyrannical military dictatorships in the world. The U.S. government loves it, supports it, and partners with it. There is no concern for the Egyptian citizenry, ...
‘Radni logor Jasenovac’ (‘Jasenovac Labour Camp’), the latest work by Croatian author Igor Vukic on the Croatian World War II concentration camp Jasenovac, published by Naklada Pavicic this year, seems like it is inspired by the publications of established Holocaust deniers.Instead of studying all the available archival records, testimonies and other publications, Vukic avoids confronting the totality of known information on the Jasenovac concentration camp system, and instead cherry-picks and publishes only carefully selected data which supports his ideologically-motivated agenda – the fabrication that Jasenovac was merely a labour camp where no mass murders took place.The argumentation and evidence cited ...
It is now clear that on 14 April 2018, the three Governments of U.S., UK, and France, fired over a hundred missiles against Syria, on no more 'justification' than staged videos that had been done by those regimes' own proxy boots-on-the-ground fighters in Syria, who are trying to overthrow Syria's existing, non-sectarian Government and replace it by a Sharia-law regime that would be selected by agents of Saudi Arabia's ruling family. In other words: the fighters whom the U.S., UK, and France, had been arming and training, had themselves created this pretext of a faked 'gas attack' having been perpetrated ...
The concept of a “Greater Israel” according to the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, is a Jewish State stretching “’From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.’Rabbi Fischmann, of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, stated to the UN Special Committee on 9th July 1947 that:The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon’”, wrote Michel Chossudovsky. (1)Thus “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” Herzl’s detailed thesis was written in 1904.Quoted in the same article is Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya on The Yinon Plan (1982) “ … a continuation of ...
My work documenting how the law was lost began about a quarter of a century ago. A close friend and distinguished attorney, Dean Booth, first brought to my attention the erosion of the legal principles on which rests the rule of law in the United States. My columns on the subject got the attention of an educational institution that invited me to give a lecture on the subject. Subsequently, I was invited to give a lecture on “How The Law Was Lost” at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York City.The work coalesced into a book, The Tyranny Of ...
Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a 35-year-old Mexican national, was shot to death by police in Pasco, Washington last Tuesday as he was backing away from officers with his hands up. A video of the shooting clearly corroborates claims by Zambrano-Montes’s family that he was killed “execution-style.”Police claimed that Zambrano-Montes, who had lived in the city for ten years and worked as an orchard picker, may have been “armed with a rock” before he was shot multiple times. Protests erupted over the weekend, with more than a thousand demonstrating in Washington state on Saturday against the killing.The United States has invaded, bombed, and ...
The North Macedonian House of Representatives unanimously approved on Monday for their country to accept the NATO Accession Protocol, taking the former Yugoslav Republic a step closer towards accession into NATO which is expected to be completed and finalized in the spring. North Macedonia’s rapid accession into NATO is only possible because of the Prespa Agreement signed between Athens and Skopje in June 2018, bringing an end to the name dispute between the two countries that emerged in 1991 with the breakup of Yugoslavia.The Prespa Agreement, named after a lake that traverses the borders of Greece, North Macedonia and Albania, defined ...
Russian literature fans will recall a moving spectacle from Dostoevsky’s novel “The House of the Dead”. As political prisoners are marched off under guard to Siberia, village folk are handing them food and other provisions that they will need on their long journey. The poor villagers are probably scraping the bottom of their own barrel in order to show Christian Orthodox compassion to those unfortunates. The allegedly nasty czarist guards do nothing to thwart these poignant expressions of humanity. Chances are (and Dostoevsky strongly suggests it) that they themselves feel considerable sympathy for their pitiful charges. Now, fast forward.Albeit depicted ...
One way to understand the effect of 9/11, in most general terms, is to see that it allowed the agenda developed in the 1990s by neoconservatives—-often called simply “neocons”—to be implemented. There is agreement on this point across the political spectrum. From the right, for example, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke say that 9/11 allowed the “preexisting ideological agenda” of the neoconservatives to be “taken off the shelf . . . and relabeled as the response to terror.”1 Stephen Sniegoski, writing from the left, says that “it was only the traumatic effects of the 9/11 terrorism that enabled the agenda ...
IntroductionThe aim of this article is to shed new light on the question of how the configuration of post-war Central and South-East Europe was shaped during WWII by the USSR through its relations with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (the CPY). Relationships between the CPY and the Soviet Union in 1941−1945 depended on the concrete military situation in Europe, and on the diplomatic relationships between the Soviet Union and the other members of the anti-fascist Alliance. For that reason, the Soviet Union and the CPY were cooperating in two directions during WWII. The concrete military situation in the battleground of ...
“I can still see it very clearly, I have not forgotten,” says Títos Patríkios. “The Athens police firing on the crowd from the roof of the parliament in Syntagma Square. The young men and women lying in pools of blood, everyone rushing down the stairs in total shock, total panic.”And then came the defining moment: the recklessness of youth, the passion of belief in a justice burning bright: “I jumped up on the fountain in the middle of the square, the one that is still there, and I began to shout: “Comrades, don’t disperse! Victory will be ours! Don’t leave. ...
This Remembrance Day will doubtless see strenuous efforts by some to justify the fruitless bloodbath that was the First World War. Revisionist commentators have long attempted to rehabilitate the conflict as necessary and just, but the arguments do not stand up. It does no service to the memory of the dead to allow any illusions in the justice or necessity of war, particularly so when the precedents will be used to argue for the next ‘necessary’ conflict. From the causes of the war, to its prosecution and its results, here are the counter-arguments to ten common pro-war ploys.1. The war ...
On 4 April 2019, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO, marked the 70th anniversary of its existence with a conference attended by the foreign ministers of member nations in Washington DC. This will be complemented by a meeting of the heads of state of member nations in London next December.Coinciding with the anniversary event on 4 April, peace activists and concerned scholars in several countries conducted a variety of events to draw attention to, and further document, the many war crimes and other atrocities committed by NATO (sometimes by deploying its associate and crony terrorist armies – ISIS, ...
The reason why the U.S. Government must be prosecuted for its war-crimes against Iraq is that they are so horrific and there are so many of them, and international law crumbles until they become prosecuted and severely punished for what they did. We therefore now have internationally a lawless world (or “World Order”) in which “Might makes right,” and in which there is really no effective international law, at all. This is merely gangster “law,” ruling on an international level. It is what Hitler and his Axis of fascist imperialists had imposed upon the world until the Allies — U.S. ...
With criminal corporate monopoly media masking the US created prosecutable genocide ongoing in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan by focusing attention on Russia, fantasized as a dangerous enemy needing military confrontation, it might be a good time to review past US planned, facilitated and at times perpetrated genocidal crimes in Russia. History in context kind of puts to rest all the hype about evil Russia seeking to expand when it already is the largest country in the world spanning nine time zones with only half the population of the US to fill it.In 1900, Russia and America ...
Or Yugoslavia’s for that matter. The level of western cynicism on “territorial integrity” is far greater than you probably know. The Kosovo-Crimea discrepancy is just the tip of the icebergEarlier this month Obama gave an earful to Putin (from a G7 meeting held 2,000 kilometres away from Moscow) complaining that this day and age you just can’t go around violating the “territorial integrity” and “sovereignty” of other countries:“Does he continue to wreck his country’s economy and continue Russia’s isolation in pursuit of a wrong-headed desire to recreate the glories of the Soviet empire? Or does he recognize that Russia’s greatness does not ...
The Balkans has always been cursed by a recurring theme: that each entity within it can, at some point, become greater and more consuming in territory than the next neighbour. Each nation has, and in some instances continues, to nurse dreams of enlargement, pecking away at borders and assuming that few will notice.Strategies of expansion tend to have one problem: they are hard to evaluate in the way of conventional agreement, contract or conspiracy. For decades, historians of various shades would attribute to Imperial Germany a conscious, global goal of conquest, mistaking the plans of contingent invasion with actual policy.In ...
On April 7, two U.S. Navy battle ships USS Porter (DDG-78) and USS Ross launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at al-Shayrat military airfield in Syria’s Homs province from the Eastern Mediterranean. The U.S. strikes particularly targeted the main landing strip, aircraft, radio locators, air defense system and fuel stations.The strike was approved by U.S. President Donald Trump, who said that the Syrian Air Force used affiliated al-Shayrat air base to prepare chemical attack on the city of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib. “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and ...
