599. The First World War: Downfall of the Habsburgs (Part 6)

Summary

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The Rest Is History – Episode 599

The First World War: Downfall of the Habsburgs (Part 6)

Hosts: Tom Holland, Dominic Sandbrook
Date: September 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this gripping installment of their First World War series, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook turn their attention to the eastern arena of conflict, focusing on the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the harrowing siege and fall of the fortress-city of Przemyśl (pronounced "Psheh-mishl"). Through vivid storytelling and rich historical detail, the hosts unravel the catastrophic consequences of the Habsburgs’ military failures—highlighting the ethnic diversity, brutality visited on civilians (with a particular emphasis on the Jewish community), and the emergence of patterns that would haunt Eastern Europe through the 20th century.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction: The Hell of the Eastern Front

[02:05–04:24]

• Tom Holland opens with a visceral excerpt describing life in combat, setting a tone of bleakness:

  "You taste the battle, a peculiar, sour yet bland taste that settles in your mouth, and you feel it because all your nerves and muscles contract…" [02:55, Tom Holland reading]

• The hosts pay tribute to the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger regiment—a striking symbol of Austro-Hungarian martial pride now battered by war.

2. The Multi-Ethnic Powder Keg of Galicia

[04:29–08:43]

• Dominic sets the geographic stage: Galicia, crammed between modern Poland and Ukraine, home to Poles, Ukrainians (then “Ruthenians”), and Jews.
• Przemyśl’s significance: A key military stronghold (30-mile defensive ring, strategic rail junction), symbolizing Habsburg prestige—“the Verdun of Austria-Hungary.” [08:40, Tom Holland]

3. Chaos and Collapse: Austro-Hungarian Disintegration

[09:35–13:05]

• Troop mobilization is plagued by administrative chaos; a key anecdote involves a station master’s nervous breakdown, reversing train signals, and suicide—underscoring systemic failure.
• Language barriers among troops create confusion and deadly friendly fire incidents due to disparate uniforms and ethnicities.
• The army’s composition is a “mosaic of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, whatever—not a winning formula under the pressure of total war.” [09:37, Dominic Sandbrook]

4. The First Russian Onslaught: The Siege Begins

[13:05–15:04]

• Russian forces build up swiftly; tens of thousands of refugees and wounded begin flooding westward, signaling disaster.
• A vivid description:

  "A man shoves his head out of the train and screams in Polish, ‘Oh, you poor, poor people. A great power is coming towards you. They will murder you.’" [14:12, Dominic Sandbrook]

5. The Austro-Hungarian Army in Retreat—Personal Tragedy & National Catastrophe

[15:04–18:41]

• General Conrad von Hötzendorf’s failed leadership, motivated as much by personal affairs as strategy, leads to military collapse.
• The death of his son Herbert deeply fractures Conrad; he weeps privately and is described as “a broken man.” [16:52, Dominic Sandbrook]
• Disastrous casualty figures: 100,000 prisoners, 250,000 killed or wounded; army retreats as “a horde of zombies…typhus or cholera…leaving this trail of dying horrors.” [19:00, Dominic Sandbrook]

6. The First Siege of Przemyśl – Valor and Desperation

[20:06–28:55]

• The garrison is a patchwork of reserve troops and civilian professionals (businessmen, academics) “the worst people in the world” to defend an empire, they joke. [20:55, Dominic Sandbrook]
• Austrian forces impressively repel the Russian onslaught, aided by legendary defenses by Hungarian lawyers-cum-commanders, but only temporarily.
• Relief is short-lived; the Russians regroup for another siege.

7. Civilian Plight – Chaos, Panic, and Refugees

[27:52–29:23]

• As the second siege looms, a chaotic civilian evacuation unfolds:

  "A woman finally gets in the train carriage with her three children... she looks around, can see only two children... her youngest son is still on the platform, weeping." [28:36, Dominic Sandbrook]

• Trains are insufficient; panic and misery pervade.

8. The Pogroms and Ethnic Cleansing—Galicia as “Bloodlands”

[32:35–41:57]

• Tom introduces a harrowing eyewitness account of a Russian pogrom against Jews in Denbitsa:

  “[The Cossacks] threw themselves on the defenseless women. Those who defended themselves were stabbed and trampled to death… The synagogue street was set alight…” [32:41, Tom Holland]

• Russian occupation brings forced Russification and the targeted destruction of Polish and Ukrainian identity.
• Jews suffer extreme violence, mass deportations, and state-sanctioned pogroms:

  “Russia is comfortably the most anti-Semitic country in Europe at this point…” [35:39, Dominic Sandbrook]

• By spring 1915, mass deportations of Jews eastwards begin, foreshadowing 20th-century horrors.

9. Siege Ordeals: Bombings, Famine, and Christmas Truce

[41:57–43:34]

• The city suffers one of the earliest aerial bombings of civilians; supply lines fail and hunger spreads.
• A poignant Christmas Eve:

  “The Russians belying their reputation, left bread and sausages in no man’s land with cards wishing them a happy Christmas… ‘We break this holy wafer with you, your comrades, outside the Siedliske forts.’” [42:26, Dominic Sandbrook]

10. The Carpathian Campaign—Austro-Hungarian Forces Shattered

[43:34–46:21]

• Conrad orders a desperate winter offensive to relieve Przemyśl; soldiers with shoes “made of paper” suffer horribly in blizzards.
• “The Carpathian front consumed men at an alarming rate. …The sky stretched boundlessly, mercilessly over the death and suffering…” [45:48, Holland reading Kaiserjäger memoir]

11. The Final Fall of Przemyśl

[46:21–50:05]

• After months of starvation, failed breakouts, and mass death, General Kuzmanek surrenders; city is destroyed before capitulation.
• “People said it was like the Day of Judgment, pillars of fire and black smoke everywhere...” [48:52, Sandbrook]
• 120,000 defenders are marched into captivity; many die en route or in appalling POW camps, some in conditions “worse than the gulags under Stalin.” [50:05, Sandbrook]

12. Empire Unraveling—Aftermath and Ominous Parallels

[50:05–59:14]

• Catastrophe for Habsburg legitimacy:

  “Franz Josef wept for two days... [it] had become a symbol of decay.” [50:36, Sandbrook]

• The region’s food supply is lost; refugees flood Vienna and Budapest, fueling ethnic tension.
• Germans become de facto masters—Austro-Hungarian decline is now irreversible.
• A chilling prelude: Mass deportations, statelessness, starvation, Russification—a “shadow” of horrors to come in the Second World War.

  “This is what happens when the Empire collapses. In Przemysl, there’s fighting between Poles and Ukrainians, Bolsheviks, Nazis; tens of thousands murdered… this only scratches the horror to come.” [58:28, Sandbrook]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the futility and disorder of the Habsburg war effort:

  “Almost a million men had marched north against the Russians, and fewer than two thirds of them return.” [19:00, Sandbrook]

• On the ethnic kaleidoscope and its consequences:

  “Diversity is not the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s strength at all. It’s something we often celebrate, but … less good if you have to defend a frontier.” [21:58, Holland]

• On the catastrophic toll:

  “The Carpathian front consumed men at an alarming rate. …It wore them down like a hammer, day in and day out.” [45:48, Kaiserjäger memoir read by Holland]

• On the civilian experience and ethnic cleansing:

  “This is not from a record of 1940… It is from the autumn of 1914, an eyewitness account of the Russian occupation of Denbitsa.” [32:35, Holland] “If you’re a Jewish villager in Galicia and you hear the Russians are coming, you are terrified.” [37:19, Sandbrook]

• Foreshadowing the horrors of WWII:

  “If you’re Galician, these began in the 1910s.” [58:28, Sandbrook]

• On the collapse of order:

  “The glue that held [the lands] together is going very, very rapidly. That, of course, has profound implications for what happens after the war, whether the Central Powers win or lose.” [58:08, Holland]

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Battlefield Experiences & Tyrolean Kaiserjäger: 02:05–04:29
• Galicia: Ethnic Makeup & Fortress City: 04:29–08:43
• Austro-Hungarian Army Disorganization: 09:35–13:05
• First Russian Advance & Siege Begins: 13:05–15:04
• Conrad’s Personal Tragedy: 16:44–18:41
• Zombie Army in Retreat: 19:00–20:06
• First Siege Gunfight & Relief: 20:06–28:55
• Civilian Exodus & Refugee Disaster: 27:52–29:23
• Pogroms & Ethnic Cleansing: 32:35–41:57
• Aerial Bombing & Christmas Truce: 41:57–43:34
• Carpathian Campaign: 43:34–46:21
• Fall of Przemyśl: 46:21–50:05
• Aftermath, Russification, Jewish Deportations: 50:05–59:14
• Collapse of Empire & Dark Foreshadowing: 58:08–59:55

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Language & Tone

• Consistently engaging, evocative, and darkly humorous, the hosts balance scholarly depth with vivid, conversational storytelling.
• Gallows humor and irreverence toward military leadership punctuate the bleakness.

  “If you want a heroic defense of a fortress against Russian hordes, academics, businessmen and middling state officials… those are exactly the people I turn to.” [20:55, Holland]

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Summary

This episode lays bare the Habsburg Empire's unraveling as experienced on the Eastern Front: multi-ethnic turmoil, military calamity, and the origins of the “bloodlands.” The epic, tragic siege of Przemyśl embodies the larger collapse, the suffering of ordinary people—especially Jews—and the seeds of brutal ethnic violence that would scar the next three decades. Through powerful firsthand accounts and wry observation, Tom and Dominic provide an urgent history of a forgotten front—one with chilling relevance to the cataclysms of the modern age.

Transcript

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Thank you for listening to the Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club that is thereestishistory.com.

[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

Until he has experienced all the intricacies of war with his own eyes, his own body and his own soul, no man can ever truly imagine it. Marching through sand and marshland, through fathomless swampy forests, in the searing heat, with no water in his stomach, groaning in hunger. And then suddenly, as you were plodding along so tired and bruised and battered, the scene comes alive before you. The first shots are barking in your ears, and the roaring and howling of the shells is getting nearer and nearer to one side. You hear the crackling of machine gun fire. You taste the battle, a peculiar, sour yet bland taste that settles in your mouth, and you feel it because all your nerves and muscles contract and your brain can think of one thing and one thing only. You have to act so. That is from the thrillingly titled Kaiser Jaeger Persevere, the heroic Death of the 2nd Regiment of the Tyrolean Kaiser Jaeger in the days of September 1914. It was published in the late 1930s and is quoted in Nick Lloyd's new book on on the Eastern Front. And Dominic, you have written, we've always had a soft spot for the Tyrolean Kaiser Jaeger, an elite regiment, the imperial hunters, with lovely sky blue uniforms and feathered hats. Now I've never had a soft spot for the Tyrolean Kaiser Yeager because I've never even heard of them. But as I said in the previous episode, we're, you know, we are now on your home territory. This is a part of the world, you know, like the back of your hand. You've roamed the mountains, you've plunged into the depths of the forests. You speak all the languages. This is your home territory. So tell us what's going on here? Who are the Tyrolean Kaiser Yaeger? What is it with their lovely sky blue uniforms and their feathered hats? What's going on? Is it the hell of war or what? I imagine it is, probably because everything in this series seems to be about the hell of war.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But surprise us, it is the hell of war, Tom. And actually, Tom, you're being falsely modest because you, even before we did the rest is history used to talk to me about the 2nd Regiment in particular the Tyrolean Gaza. They. Your, they're your favorite regiments of your favorite Austro Hungarian unit. And don't deny I am hiding my.

[Tom Holland]

Light under a bushel here, but only so that you will blaze all the more brightly. That's good generosity.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think it's the feathered hats that that do it for us, isn't it? So actually, yes, the Tyrolean Ka had a terrible time in the September 1914. What happens to them is just one aspect of a wider story. So we began this series more than a year ago with Franz Ferdinand and his assassination in Sarajevo. And we're ending this part of our great sweep through the First World War by talking about the beginning of the end of Austria Hungary, the destruction of its army and the fraying of the bonds that held the empire together. So last time we talked about how the Austrians sought to wreak revenge on Serbia and it became a humiliating route for them. And the bloke in charge, General Potioric, the master of security in Sarajevo, ended up being fired just before Christmas and.

[Tom Holland]

Presumably after that, there are no feathers left in the hats of the Tyrolean Kaiser Jaeger.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Not at all. And today we're turning to the arena in which they saw combat, which is the eastern borderlands of Poland and Ukraine. It's the area that Timothy Snyder calls Europe's bloodlands in the 20th century. And at the center of this episode is the story of one city which is called Przemysl.

[Tom Holland]

What's it called?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's called Przemysl. So this was the most formidable fortress of the Austro Hungarian Empire. And it became the struggle for this fortress, became the longest siege of the war. And I have to be honest with the listeners, the reason I know about this is because I read a brilliant book called the Fortress by the historian Alexander Watson. So just a massive shout out to this book the Fortress, because so much of what follows is dependent upon it. It's a story that's not just a riveting story in of itself, but it captures the collapse of the Austro Hungarian Empire, an empire with centuries of history, the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe and the agony of the Jews of Poland and Ukraine, which begins really here. So to give a sense of where we are, I'm sure you'll, this will immediately help you out, Tom, when I tell you that we're in the Kingdom of Galicia and Loria.

[Tom Holland]

Brilliant.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of course we are. So today, Eastern Poland, that's where Przemysl is, very close to the Ukrainian border. Now at the time this was Austria's most northeastern province. It was a crown land, so called, governed from Vienna and the province of Galicia had two big cities. One is a place then called Lemberg, but which we know as Lviv, and the other is Krakow. Now in southeastern Poland, the area had a very diverse population, so at 45% each Polish and what was then called Ruthenian, what we would now call Ukrainian, and That leaves about 10% which those people were Jewish. And the third biggest city in Galicia was this place, Przemysl. I love hearing you say that. And today it's just a few miles in from the Polish border with Ukraine.

[Tom Holland]

What's it called now? Still called that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's still called Przemysl, that's the Polish name. And it was given an award by Volodymyr Zelensky a couple of years ago for taking so many refugees, so many Ukrainian refugees. But back then in 1914, in most respects it was just your classic sleepy middle European city. So it's got a castle and its cathedral, it's got loads of churches, it's got synagogues and it's got tons of coffee houses. And there were about 50,000 people who lived there. About half of them were Catholics and were Polish, about a third were Jewish and the rest were what were then called kind of Greek Catholics, which is to say they were Ukrainians.

[Tom Holland]

So they're Orthodox, but they accept the supremacy of the papacy. Is that right?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly right, exactly right, yeah. But there was also a garrison of about 10,000 men for a couple of reasons. First of all, because was an important railway junction and it guarded the Carpathian Mountain passes into Hungary. So if you look at a map of Austria Hungary in the northeast there's the great sweep of the Carpathian Mountains, but they're not the border. There's a bit of Austria Hungary that's on the other side of the Carpathians and this is Galicia. So this is where this is. And the second reason why there's this garrison is that since the early 1870s Przemysl had been designated as a fortress city. So it was designated as the cornerstone of Austria Hungary's eastern defenses.

[Tom Holland]

So it's kind of the. The Verdun of Austro Hungary.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is Verdun, exactly. A citadel that, that becomes an emblem of sort of national defense, national security.

[Tom Holland]

And kind of a salient.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, salient, I guess. Osgiliath Tom for. For Gondor, I guess. So by 1914 they've built this huge fortress and it's a chain of 17 major and 18 minor forts arranged in a 30 mile ring around the city and two lines of trenches so it looks pretty impregnable. And inside this, this ring there's a huge military base of seven barracks with a rail yard with warehouses with ammunition magazines. All of this cost the Austro Hungarians hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds in today's money. And Cherusl has become this huge symbol of imperial prestige. And the Austrians are very, very proud of it.

[Tom Holland]

Well, it sounds as if they should be. Sounds brilliant.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, it's the equivalent of having like a really fancy aircraft carrier today or something of that ilk. So to the war. In August 1914, tens of thousands of troops passed through this city heading east to the far border of Galicia to defend it against the Russians. And as we said in the last episode, they are a very complicated mosaic of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, whatever. Not a winning formula under the pressure of total war. And of course the man who's commanding them is this bloke, Conrad von Hutzendorf, who has basically started a world war in order to impress his mistress, Gina von Rhininghouse and to get to marry her. Now, Conrad, as we said in the last episode when we talked about the complete disaster of the war against Serbia, he is a great believer in attacking spirit. Even though the Austrians have fewer divisions than the Russians, they have 34, the Russians have 53. He thinks that's fine. We can easily you know, film and vigor. We'll wipe the floor with the Russians. So he's developed this insanely ambitious plan to basically envelop the Russians in southern Poland. But right from the start, as is the way with the Austro Hungarian military operations, there are some small teething troubles. So first of all, he says, well, I'll need 11,000 trains to send all these men east. The train network can only produce 2,000 trains, so that's nowhere near enough. These trains travel at only 10 miles an hour and they stop for six hours every day so the troops can have lunch before they even fire a shot. There are warning signs. So at one point they're all. All these troops are going east. And the station master, a place called Pod Borgia, which is in eastern Silesia, has a nervous breakdown under the stress of so many people on the network. He reverses all the signals the wrong way. The trains will go backwards. And then he shoots himself.

[Tom Holland]

You know what?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They should have had a monkey attack the signalman. Jack the signalman.

[Tom Holland]

They should have had a monkey.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He, one of history's top monkeys because he never made a mistake, paid in beer, ran the South African railways for years. Yeah, he was brilliant.

[Tom Holland]

And for those who may have missed that episode would like to hear it again. It's episode 420, History's Greatest Monkeys. And I wasn't actually expecting them to turn up in the middle of the First World War, but you never know.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, one of them fought in the First World War, Corporal Jackie. Great to have him back on the show. Anyway, back to the Eastern front. Eventually they get off the trains and they set off. Now, eastern Galicia is a very poor, very rural part of the Empire. There actually aren't many railways and the roads are shocking. And most Hapsburg soldiers, when they get there, they say, God, this is awful. This. This is very hot and it's dusty and it's very alien and what are we doing here? They won a couple of early victories against the Russians, actually, which we won't go into, but by the end of August, things are starting to go wrong. The language difficulty is such a massive issue for them, they can't actually understand what each other are saying. So the orders are getting muddled. Some units literally are marching in these vast circles, going round and round, or they lose touch with their supplies or whatever. And because of the language difficulty, there are innumerable instances, and this is not funny, of friendly fire. So, you know, a load of Croats will bump into a load of Czechs and they'll start shooting at each Other, because they think the others are Russians or Germans and Hungarians or whatever. So all this chaos is unfolding.

[Tom Holland]

So, Dominic, can I just ask, they don't all have a standard uniform then, do they have. Do the different units have different uniforms?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, of course, different, yeah. They're not all got feathered hats like the Tyrolean Kaiser Yeager with their sky blue uniforms.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. So there is scope for complication there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There's definite scope for complications. Now, meanwhile, far to the east, the Russians are building up their forces, and soon they outnumber the Austrians almost 2 to 1. Now, back in Przemysl, people have no idea what's. The troops have been and gone, and people have no idea what's happening at the front. And then in late August, the first trains of wounded start to arrive in the city. And a woman who was serving hot drinks to the wounded at the station later described the spectacle. She said, I saw shot through lungs and heart, terrible stomach wounds, blood, vomit, feces, but not a single groan. Just apathy. Then on 30 August, for the first time, they hear. You call it the crump. I call it the dull thud of guns in the east. So the front is clearly coming closer. Then an extraordinary scene. A train comes through Przemysl carrying Russian prisoners. And as it rolls through the station, a man shoves his head out of the window of the train and he screams out in Polish, oh, you poor, poor people. A great power is coming towards you. They will murder you. God, it really.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, it really is like a.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Kind of horror film, isn't it?

[Tom Holland]

The zombies are approaching.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, exactly. So next come a whole load of trains from lviv. Lviv is 60 miles away in the east, on the eastern frontier of the Empire. And these trains are packed not with wounded men, but with civilian refugees. So it's now clear that something out east has gone horribly, horribly wrong. And actually, when these refugees shout out at the trains and they say Lviv is in chaos, the mayor or the officials have fled. The banks have shut down, the streets, the parks are full of wounded soldiers, there's no food. Law and order are broken down completely. It is a bit of a zombie film. And then there are no more trains. It's as though communications with Lviv have completely gone down because Galicia's capital, Lviv, has fallen to the Russians.

[Tom Holland]

Hello?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Hello, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Exactly like that. It is like that. It is like that. I wonder what was going on there at first, and then I thought, no, that's great acting. It is brilliant. So what has gone wrong out east. What has gone wrong is this, that Conrad has thrown 600,000 men into action, but not enough, and they don't have enough good guns. And the Russians have completely steamrolled at them. So Lviv had fallen on 3 September, occupied by General Alexei Brusilov's 8th Russian Army. And that's just the beginning. Further north, the Russians are absolutely battering the Austrians at a place called Rava Ruska. And so by the 9th of September, the Austrians are facing total and utter disintegration. And the next day, the 10th General Conrad drove out himself to the front line with the Archduke Karl, the heir to the Austrian throne. So they went to a place called Grodeck. This was very unusual for Conrad because usually he's behind the lines. And he was absolutely horrified by what he found. The total chaos. And one thing above all, in Grodeck, there were six bodies hanging in the main square, two of them accused of betraying Austrians to the enemy and the others for robbing the dead and the wounded on the battlefield. So very sort of a very kind of haunting scene. Conrad goes up to the highest ridge to survey the battlefield and even he can, with his optimism, can see that the Russians are about to break through. So the following night, the 11th, he gives the order to fall back behind the river San, which is one of the rivers in South Eastern Poland. And the next day the Austrians began to retreat. And the same day, you know, perfect timing, the clouds open, the rain starts coming down. Tom, the heavens are weeping for the.

[Tom Holland]

Habsburg Empire and presumably for Conrad's relationship with Gina. She's not going to be impressed by this at all, is she?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, the news actually gets much worse for Conrad. Five days after he'd given the order to retreat, his adjutant came into his office looking very, very stricken. And Conrad said, what? More bad news in the front? Really? And the adjutant said, it's actually a personal matter for you, sir, concerning your son. And Conrad said, oh, no, please tell me he's not badly wounded. And the adjutant said, no, it's worse than that. So Conrad's youngest and his favorite son, who was called Herbert, was a lieutenant in the dragoons and he had been killed at Ravaruska. And Conrad says to the adjutant, can you leave me a minute? And for an hour he wept and then he washed his face and he straightened his uniform and he went back to work as though nothing had happened. But everybody said that after this he was basically a broken man, a kind of withdrawn and broken man, but he doesn't Lose his job. He carries on running the Austrian army.

[Tom Holland]

And even before that, he'd been melancholy, hadn't he? Because there was that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That war. War. War. Yeah, exactly.

[Tom Holland]

His misery must be even greater.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. He doesn't lose his job. He carries on making decisions, which, unfortunately, is disastrous for the Austrian cause.

[Tom Holland]

Do you think anyone could have stabilized the situation?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They must be up against it. I was thinking about this, actually, when I was doing the notes, because, you know, I'm quite Austrophile.

[Tom Holland]

You are? Yeah. Which is why I've been surprised by these two episodes. Because they haven't come out of it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well. No, And I. And I think. See, I don't blame the Austrians for starting the First World War. I think any serious power, faced with the murder of their heir, clearly with the connivance of a country that's basically trying to destabilize them, you know, the United States, France, whoever, they're always going to respond, however the irresponsibility is to respond, when basically you don't have the capacity to beat anybody. The Austrians couldn't even beat Serbia. The lack of seriousness of Conrad and the other generals basically, in starting all.

[Tom Holland]

This, I mean, ignoring Russia is mad, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Totally. It was ridiculous. And you can say, well, it's a result of their tunnel vision or their paranoia or their fear of, you know, disintegration or whatever, but even so, to just be in such a massive spasm of panic that you basically, you know, press the suicide button is. Is insane. Because actually, just the. I mean, I was going to talk about this anyway, but this is a perfect link. Look at what happened to their army. Almost a million men had marched north against the Russians, and fewer than two thirds of them return. 100,000 of them are taken prisoner, 250,000 killed or wounded. And as they return, you know, you made the zombie apocalypse analogy. The Austro Hungarian army that marches back to Przemysl is just an absolute horde of zombies stumbling through the dust. They've all got typhus or cholera. Some of the regiments have lost all their officers, more than half their men. They've all got diarrhea. They haven't washed for weeks. They're in shock, they're humiliated. And in the dust behind them, they're leaving this trail of dying horrors, horses and dead men. So they get back to this city and then Conrad says, right, we will withdraw. We'll go back into the Carpathian Mountains. However, we have to stop the Russians from following us. Because if the Russians get into these mountains and they secure the passes and they Go down the other side, they'll be into the Hungarian plain, they'll be heading straight for Budapest. And then it's kind of game over for the Austrian Empire and that would.

[Tom Holland]

Then be game over for Germany as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Do you think Germany fighting on alone for a cause in which its main ally started the war is now out? Hard to see how that, I mean, that could be the end of the First World War. I think very plausibly Conrad says, right, we have to stop them. And the place that we stop them is obviously this citadel Zhimichl, which we have built for this purpose. So I'm Gonna leave behind 130,000 men, orders to hold the fortress at all costs. Now these are not crack units. These are the dregs that he's leaving behind. They're the reserves. They're men in their late 30s and early 40s. Most of them are Hungarian, Polish or Ukrainian peasants. But their officers, Tom, they're the worst people in the world. And I quote academics, businessmen and middling state officials.

[Tom Holland]

I don't know if you want a heroic defense of a fortress against Russian hordes. Those are exactly the people I turn to.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

When I look at Britain's academics, I see men of high end resolution and will. Anyway, yeah, so this is who's going to defend the Austrian Empire. So in the next few days they make their preparations. Here's an interesting sign of the disintegration of the Empire. They say, we're going to clear all the villages around the perimeter. Now the people who live in these villages are Ukrainian peasants. And they basically say to these guys, you've got to clear out. They tell them at bayonet point, you've got to clear out. If you don't clear out, we're going to blow up your village or burn it to the ground. And actually by this point the soldiers are blaming those peasants for their own defeat. They say, these Ukrainians are no good, they're traitors. They've been helping the Russians with flags. They've been sending smoke signals to the Russians. This I think is not true, but it's a sign of how I guess we've said before, diversity is not the Austro Hungarian Empire's strength at all. It's something that we often celebrate in the Austro Hungarian Empire. When people write these sorts of.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, it's brilliant if you're in a cafe debating psychology or economics, but it's less good if you have to defend a frontier.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Correct. On the 17th of September, the first Cossacks appeared on the horizon. This was the Advance Guard of General Brusilov's 3rd Russian Army. Brusilov is the outstanding Russian General of the war. He has yet another absolutely colossal moustache.

[Tom Holland]

But does he have breathing problems?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, he breathes superbly. He's got wonderful breath.

[Tom Holland]

So that's what sets him above the crowd.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Correct. He's a cavalryman. He's half Polish, actually. Brusilov. I didn't know that. Anyway, so he orders his field guns to start pummeling the city. And when I say pummeling, I mean they fired about 45,000 shells in four days, which is obviously terrifying if you're a civilian. It was even worse for the people in these forts because they're very claustrophobic, these forts. People in these kind of low tunnels and chambers. Alexander Watson quotes A guy called 2nd Lt. Bruno Prokaska, who said it was like we were being pounded by a colossal battering ram. He said, we wish we were outside, actually in the trenches. Death would be easier in the open air than in this cramped, suffocating box. But actually in the trenches, it's even worse. The shells are kind of raining down on these guys. He tells the story of an entire platoon which was destroyed by just two shells. The officers collapsed and shot. He fainted in shock, seeing what had happened to the men. One minute the men are all standing there, the next minute the men have been blown into bits. And the bits are hanging from the trees all around them. So really hideous.

[Tom Holland]

Bloody shreds of flesh, intestine and brain parts.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes. Yeah. I decided not to read that out, but you read it out, which is nice.

[Tom Holland]

It's a hell of war, Dominic. And it's. It's good to bring. Bring it home to people now.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You're right. And this terrible shell shock. So again, another story from the book the Fortress. There's a guy who's a corporal. He's in his 30s. He's the veteran of many battles, so he is brave. He's dragged into the garrison hospital. He's shouting, I want to go home. And then he took all his clothes off. He tore up his underwear.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, my God.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He started singing hymns and then attacked the orderlies.

[Tom Holland]

So he's like the Governor of the bank of England in 1974.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. No, it wasn't the Governor of the bank of England. It was the head of the Civil Service. Head of the Civil Service, William Armstrong. Yeah. Completely acceptable behavior in Ted Heath's Britain, but not in First World War. Austria, Hungary. Anyway, actually, when the Russians launched their ground attack, they didn't get anywhere. They couldn't break through the trenches. The Austrians did very well. They put up a very plucky fight. Some of these forts that they defended, they became kind of legendary. There's a fort called I Won and the defense there, I was mean about academics but the defense was led by somebody called Dr. Istvan Bielek who was a Budapest lawyer and he led this sort of helm's deep style defense of this fort against the, the Crimean regiment, kind of hand to hand fighting until they can be relieved by more Hungarian troops. So that's kind of good news for the Austrians. And then they hear tremendous news from the north because as we heard last time, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the crack detectives have driven the Russians out of East Prussia at Tannenberg and at the Masurian Lakes. And now they're moving south towards, towards Warsaw. So the Russians have to lift this siege and they move all their troops north to face the Germans. So for the people of Bzmysl this is brilliant News. And on the 9th of October they are relieved by the Austrian field army which has returned from licking its wounds. So after a month the siege appears to be over. And you could ask, well so what does it matter? In his book the Fortress, Alexander Watson says it absolutely does matter because if the Russians had taken the fortress then they would never have had a better chance to strike into the heart of the Habsburg Empire, get to Budapest, knock Austria Hungary out of the war. The war genuinely could have been over by Christmas. But because they didn't take it, because these blokes, lawyers and whatnot held out, the Russians have missed their best opportunity to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. Conclusion. However, as we've said before, fortunes change ridiculously quickly on the Eastern front. So by late October, so after barely a month, the pendulum has swung again. The Russians have just won two victories that nobody's ever heard of, that we talked about last time, Tom. The Battle of the Vistula and then the Battle of Woods. So now the Russians are heading towards Krakow and they're actually not that far from the German border. These are by the way, are massive engagements. A million people fought in these battles.

[Tom Holland]

Insane, isn't it that nobody's ever heard of them. I mean I'm sure they have in Russia, but not here.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So now the Russians are back and now yet again the Austrians have to retreat. Now at this point some of the officers in the fortress said, come on, we held out once but we cannot handle a second siege. We've run out. We don't have the supplies we don't have. And actually, since we've given the army time to rebuild anyway, what's the point? Point? Why don't we evacuate the city, evacuate the garrison, blow up the forts and cut our losses. The problem is that the success of that first siege was the only victory for the Austrians worth celebrating in the early days of the war. So it's become completely bound up with Conrad's personal prestige. His only chance of basically building up his reputation is to hold on to. And he, if he, if he'd written it off, possibly he would have been sacked then. And then it's goodbye marrying Gina. So he says, right, I want you to prepare for another siege. I'm sure you'll do brilliantly. You know, you were heroic and successful last time, sure you will be again. The next day, however, the garrison told you should write your farewell letters to your families. Not a good sign, is it, which I don't think inspires much confidence. That same day, which is the 3rd of November, posters go up across the city telling all the civilians to get out again.

[Tom Holland]

That's not a good sign.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No. And the police literally go door to door saying, if you haven't packed, you know, get to the station, come on, just grab your essentials.

[Tom Holland]

Well, it's lucky that the Austrian railway service is performing heroically in these early months of the war then, isn't it? Because surely they've laid on loads of trains and there won't be a mad crush trying to get on the trains.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No. Well, no. So total pandemonium. Not enough trains. They have to leave behind 3,30,000 people. And in his book Catastrophe, Max Hastings tells an awful story about this woman who fights her way into this carriage with her three children. She finally gets in the place in the carriage, train starts pulling out. She breathes a sigh of relief. She looks around, she can see only two children. Just out the window on the platform, she can see the youngest child, her three year old son, standing there weeping in terror.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, no.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

All the time the Russians are coming. And by the 8th of November, they have encircled the fortress once again. And now, to quote Alexander Watson, darkness descended over the conquered land.

[Tom Holland]

So, Dominic, huge tension. Can this great Austrian fortress withstand a second siege? Will they be able to hold out or will the Russians break through? And you mentioned how there are large numbers of Jews in this landscape and you've intimated that things don't turn out well for them. So we'll hear about them too. So come back after the break.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

We're on our way, Uber on our way. Download the app today. This episode is brought to you by by the Folio Society.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Now. Thomas, you know, in the Middle Ages, it could take you years if you're a monk. To create a manuscript, you'd have to copy it out word by word. And then after all that, the margins would be ready and you'd put all kind of decorative elements and all kinds of guilt and stuff in the margins and it would look fantastic.

[Tom Holland]

So it might take often years to finish, but the finished product would then last for centuries. And that is pretty much what the Folio Society does today. Only, of course, with slightly less parchment and fewer quills.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, the Folio Society takes some of the greatest works ever written. Things like George Orwell's 1984, or the quests in JRR Tolkien or Frank Herbert's Dune. And their team of editors and designers and artisans. They craft books that are so beautiful, they're like works of art in their own right.

[Tom Holland]

So each one is carefully designed with slip cases, award winning illustrations, and covers that honor the stories inside. It doesn't just protect them.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So if, like me and like Tom, you think that a book should look as good as it reads, then the Folio Society very much speaks your language.

[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

Around 8 o' clock in the morning, the Cossacks arrived in Denbitsa. The Jews who had already survived the initial agonies were gathered in the synagogues with their wives and children. The Cossacks plunged into the Jewish houses with their horses and weapons, and what was not screwed down was smashed and flung onto the open street. Like wild beasts. They threw themselves on the defenseless women. Those who defended themselves were stabbed and trampled to death. Spirited women plunged through windows, badly injuring themselves. But they too were not left alone by the monsters. And many died in the synagogue square in agonies of pain. Then the synagogue street was set alight, and after a short while, a whole row of houses stood ablaze. So this is not from a record of 1940 or 1942. It is from the autumn of 1914, and it is an eyewitness account of the Russian occupation of the town of Denbitsa, which was then in Galicia. And, Dominic, we've talked a lot about armies, about battles, about all of that fluttering of flags, the piping of flutes, the fluttering of feathers in Tyrolean caps. But what we haven't talked about is what all this means for ordinary civilians. And I'm guessing nothing good, Nothing good at all.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No. And it's actually a chance to talk about war aims and what people are wanting from the war. So the Russians have come west with the, by far, I think, the most radical, transformational agenda of any major combatant. As soon as they got into Galicia, their new governor of the occupied territory, who was called Count Georgy Bobrinsky, made this clear right away. When he got into Lviv, he gathered all the local bigwigs and the bishops and he made a speech and he said, the lands of Eastern Galicia are an eternal part of a single great Russia. In these lands, the true population was always Russian. Thus the administration of this land should be based on Russian principles. We'll introduce the Russian language, Russian law and the Russian system. Definite resonances. Yeah. Now, this was very bad news for the Poles, the people who dominated the political and economic life of the towns of Galicia. It was extremely bad news for the Ukrainians because they were told, you don't exist. Your church, your Greek Catholic Church, your Ukrainian language, your separate Ukrainian, or as people would have said then Ruthenian identity, all of these things, which interestingly had been not just tolerated, but often encouraged by the Austro Hungarians as a counterweight to the Poles. All of these things will now be erased. From now on, you are Russian, whether you like it or not. Now, if it's bad for them, it is unbelievably bad for the third ethnic group in Galicia, which are the Jews. Austria, Hungary was not exactly a paradise for Jews because we talked before when we did the rise of Nazism about the influence of Vienna's mayor, Karl Luger, on Hitler, this kind of populist, anti Semitic mayor.

[Tom Holland]

But isn't part of that because there is a resentment of Jews in Vienna, say, who've done incredibly well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes. So Freud, Mahler, massive cultural figures. Jews are very prominent in the empire's high culture. There's clearly a place for them in a multinational empire like the Habsburg Empire. And they're very loyal to the dynasty. So Franz Joseph had lifted a lot of the existing punitive laws against Jews. Franz Joseph had made a pilgrimage, effectively to Jerusalem. He made a point of meeting Jewish leaders. So there is, you know, there's clearly Austria. Hungary is a relatively warm and welcoming home for if you're an Eastern European Jew. The Russian Empire takes a very different approach to religious diversity. Russia is comfortably the most anti Semitic country in Europe at this point. It's here in 1903. And it's no accident that conspiracy theorists faked the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I think the interesting thing about Russian anti Semitism is that it's obviously partly rooted in history, but it's also a very modern phenomenon. And a lot of historians say the reason it becomes so intense is that Russia is changing so much in the late 19th century. Economic change, industrialization, urbanization, a lot of people are losing out and the Jews become scapegoats. So from the 1880s in Russia, the harshest anti Semitic laws in Europe, and then a wave upon wave of pogroms. So Kyiv in 1881, Kishinev, very famously in 1903, Odessa in 1905, hundreds of people killed.

[Tom Holland]

And this is why there are kind of waves of emigration out there coming to Britain and then even more to the United States.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. So if you're, you know, a Jewish villager or a townsman or whatever in 1914 in Galicia, and you hear the Russians are coming, you are terrified. And people have a particular dread of the Cossacks. You open this half by doing a reading about the Cossacks, because the Cossacks see themselves as the defenders of Russian imperialism and Russian Orthodoxy. And they have a blood soaked reputation. They have been the shock troops in a lot of these pogroms. And as we've heard, they completely live up to this horrendous billing. As soon as they crossed the frontier, there were stories about them attacking Jewish villages, looting shops, killing people, raping people, all of this. And the very worst pogrom was in Lviv at the end of September. It's a common story in the First World War that there'll be a rumor goes around, oh, our troops are being attacked by partisans or whatever. So this is what happened in Lviv. And there the Cossacks were given permission. Their commander said, okay, the gloves are off, you can go and punish people, do what you like. And they ran amok. They slaughtered almost 50 people and they rounded up 300 people for deportation to the East. It's not yet genocidal. I think that would be a massive overstatement. However, the direction of travel, I would say is pretty ominous. A lot of the Russian commanders are obsessively anti Semitic. The chief of staff is a guy called General Yanushkevich is. Even by Russian standards, he's a pathological anti Semite. And so there's no effort made to moderate the violence at all. In fact, officers will have Jewish people black, they'll blackmail them, they'll loot their shops and houses, they have them whipped in the streets, hanged and so on. And then in the spring of 1915, the Russians begin mass deportations, huge deportations of Jews to camps in the East. So this is the shadow that is hanging. This is the threat that awaits the people of Przemysl in the turn of 1914 into 1915. Of course, the Russians haven't taken the city yet. They have learned their lesson from the first siege. They're not going to do this kind of frontal attack. They're going to starve the defenders out. Now, the guy commanding the fortress, this man called General Kusmanek, who is a policeman's son from Transylvania, he was an archive man, Tom. He was a desk officer who'd worked in the Austrian war, war archive.

[Tom Holland]

So we have laughed at the idea of academics and lawyers manning the defenses, but actually they're coming out of this tremendously well, aren't they?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It was a cheap shot, but irresistible, but maybe cheap nonetheless. So this bloke does very well. He says, you know, we're gonna. He runs the city very smoothly under the circumstances. He sets up soup kitchens for people who haven't got any food. He Gets nuns to cook hundreds of meals for them a day. However, he's really up against it because the conditions are. It's your classic kind of siege conditions. So piles of unburied excrement in the streets, disease rampant, drains overflowing, nothing to eat. All of this kind of thing. You know, the stuff you would see in sieges going back to antiquity. But there are some new elements. So at the beginning of December, the 1st of December, people look up, they hear something in the sky above the city, and they see a plane and. And people come out actually to stare at it, to watch it, and then they see these little gray balls falling out of the plane. And somebody suddenly realizes what they are and shouts, they're bombs. And they have people running in panic and whatnot. And this is one of the first instances in history of the aerial bombing of civilians. So in all, The Russians launched 300 bombing raids on Przemysl. They were hoping, I think, to hit the bridges.

[Tom Holland]

But they don't, do they?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, they miss. I mean, it's just throwing a ball out of a plane. I mean, it's never going to land where you think it's going to land. However, you know, it's not comedy. A dozen people were killed, two dozen people were injured. There's a story, I think it's an Alexander Watson's account of a girl. She had half her head cleaved off by shrapnel and had to be rushed twitching to hospital. But the bombings, as always in history, the bombings terrify and appall people. But they don't SAP their will to resist because people think, well, the Russians are barbarians, they're monsters. To do this, you know, we can never give in to them. So Christmas comes, and the city is still under siege. In Eastern Europe, the big day is Christmas Eve. The defenders tried to put up trees and they were given special food. But it's all a bit sad. Alexander Watson quotes this guy, Lieutenant Stanislaw Gaak, and he says in his diary, I couldn't stop thinking about my wife and children. The day was really difficult. Even getting through, it was so hard. He gathers his kind of platoon or whatever to celebrate the holy day, and everybody starts crying. And then he had dinner with his fellow officers and they tried to light candles and sing carols, but again, they all start crying. Mostofsky, Stumpf, the captain, all quietly cried. And this is the one moment in the story, actually, where the Russians, belying their reputation, behaved, I think, very well. Because when Austrian patrols went out of the city that day, they Found little parcels of bread and sausages and sugar in no man's land with cards wishing them a happy Christmas.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, that is nice.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And Alexander Watson quotes a lovely example. Gallant knights, at so great a holiday as Christmas Eve, we wish you and your families the best and wish you return healthy to your nearest and dearest. We shall not disturb you on Christmas Day as you eat your supper and talk of your loved ones. As a mark of our fraternal greetings, we. We break this holy wafer with you, your comrades, outside the Siedliske forts. I mean, that's quite sweet in a way, isn't it? Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

So another Christmas truce on the Eastern Front, as well as one on the Western Front.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. And as on the west, in the Western Front, as soon as it's over, things get very dark indeed. Once we're into January, they've run out of food inside the fort. They basically start eating all their horses.

[Tom Holland]

But they haven't got onto the rats yet.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They haven't got onto the rats, no. It's not quite the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War, but unless something drastically changes, Shimishl is doomed. But you know what? General Conrad is, is waiting in the wings for another crack. He hasn't given up, so he's going to come to the rescue. If there's one man you want to come to the rescue, yeah, it's this man with an unbroken track record of.

[Tom Holland]

Catastrophic failure, Gandalf the White of the Eastern Front.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So his men have been holed up in the Carpathian Mountains. They've been camping in heavy snow and driving rain. They've all got frostbites and hypothermia. Another commander might say, I'll let them rest a bit and thaw out before throwing them back into the fray. But Conrad, as we know, is a born optimist. So on the 23rd of January, he says, Right, I want 175,000 men to go down out of the mountains, retake the mountain passes from the Russians, get down into Galicia, relieve the city. By any standards, this is a big abandoned, big ask, as people say. And actually what happens next is the Carpathian campaign. Now again, this is one of those things that I think in the English speaking world, most people have no idea this ever happened.

[Tom Holland]

I put my hand up, I plead guilty.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's one of the most horrific campaigns of the whole war. So hundreds of thousands of Austria Hungarians trying to fight their way out of these mountains. They're in snow blizzards. The temperatures are below minus 20 degrees Celsius. They don't have winter gear. I mean, we talk about people having the wrong shoes. Tom, a lot of them have got shoes made of paper. Would you wear a paper shoe in a snow blizzard?

[Tom Holland]

No, I wouldn't. I did wear a pair of trainers that came to pieces when I walked up Mount Helvellyn in the Lake District.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

All right, so you know exactly what they've been through.

[Tom Holland]

And there was kind of sleet blowing in, and we ran into a squad of the SAS who told me off, said to. Oh, yeah, they said, you're an idiot. Look at your shoes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, no.

[Tom Holland]

Which makes me ask, why. Why is their kit not better? Because surely if anyone is used to Alpine conditions, it's the Austrians.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's a Tyrolean. Yeah. Their shoes have rotted. They've rotted. And their supply networks have failed. And, you know, haven't they got kind.

[Tom Holland]

Of nice ski gear?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They have not. They have not. Well, I. I'll give you the proof of this. After two weeks, they've lost two thirds of their strength. Some of them have been killed, some of them have died of disease, but loads of them have actually frozen to death in their sleep. And now, we began with your favorite regiment, didn't we? The Tyrolet and Kaiser Yeager.

[Tom Holland]

The guys with the feathers.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They've been involved in this. Cause they're freezing to death. I mean, you'd think they'd be used to this in the Tyrrell, but no. And I mentioned Nick Lloyd's book on the Eastern Front. He quotes one of their memoirs. And would you like to read it, Tom, since you love them so much?

[Tom Holland]

The scene was suffused with three colors. The ashen white of the endless fields of snow. The grave black of the endless mountain forests. The blood red of the flames of battle. The sky stretched boundlessly, mercilessly over the death and suffering of hundreds and thousands of soldiers. The Carpathian front consumed men at an alarming rate. It wore them down like a hammer, day in and day out, week after week, blow after blow, coming down on them with unceasing vigor. So that is the worst ski holiday of all time, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is a terrible skiing holiday. And actually, the blokes who are dying are not just from the Tyrol. They're not just Austrians, they're Hungarians, they're Czechs, they're poor Poles, their Croats, whatever. And as every day passes, their faith in the army and their loyalty to the Empire and to the monarchy is just leeching away. Of course it is. Because they have been, as they see it, betrayed by their own commanders. For a cause that seems to them baffling. Now, meanwhile, back at the fortress, the people there are freezing too. They don't have winter uniforms, they've only got their summer gear. They are these sort of ghostly shrunken figures. They're finishing off the horses now, they're having to dilute their flour with birchwood. They're collapsing every day with starvation. 25,000 men are in the hospital with hunger and exposure, and the Russians are just pounding them the whole time with their heavy guns. So by mid March, Conrad finally has to accept defeat. He sends a message to the fortress and he says, you know, we're not coming, basically, you're doomed. But then he says, very like Hitler at Stalingrad or something, Imperial honor demands that you don't surrender, you should go down fighting. And actually this bloke, General Kmanik, the archivist, says, fine. And he actually cobbles together some assault troops and says, right, we'll do one last breakout. This is a disaster. They get lost in the snow, the Russians basically unleash a storm of gunfire at them and they have to fall back into the fortress. So on 21 March, Kuzmanik convenes his senior officers and they all agree there's no point going on like it's all over, it's been months and we're not going to be relieved. But they decide to go out literally with a bang. They want to destroy everything of value before they surrender and make sure that the Russians march into a ruined city. So overnight they empty their guns at the Russian lines. Sort of thunder of the guns people said, was so intense that nobody could sleep. And then at six o' clock the next morning, the series of enormous explosions ripped through these forts. Like people said it was like volcanoes erupting around the city. Huge great clouds of smoke and rubble raining down. And then they blow up the bridges over the River San. People said it was like the Day of Judgment, kind of pillars of fire and black smoke everywhere and the earth torn open and all of this. And at breakfast, Kuzmanyu sent a message to the Russians. He said, I surrender the open city and await your command with no conditions. And then at 9 o', clock, the Russians marched into the center of this city. Now, what happened to the defenders? It's an interesting story. 120,000 men, masses taken prisoner. And these were just some of two million Austro Hungarians. Two million million prisoners of war. Yeah, Mind boggling. Two million people.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, so large that the numbers just cease to have any meaning, right?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. You can't Imagine. What does it look like? You don't, you can't even get your head around it. Now officers, by and large were well treated. Remember when we did Peter the Great in the Great Northern War, what happened to the Swedes? Yes, it's actually the same story. Yeah, the officers tend to be well treated. So Kuzmanik ended up under house arrest in Kiev. But the men, different story. They were driven with whips by Cossacks to the railway stations and then packed into cattle trucks to go to camps in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. By the time they got there, many were dead from starvation or cold or whatever. And in the camps, many thousands more died of malaria or typhus or dysentery. And the very worst fate awaited Germans and Hungarians, they were singled out. A lot of them were sent to work on this railway line that was being built from Murmansk in the north and that was transporting military supplies from Arctic convoys from Britain.

[Tom Holland]

Okay, so this is again a kind of prefiguring of the Second World War.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly, it is. And they worked in the most horrendous conditions. So they didn't even get to sleep in kind of huts. They had to bury into the snow, like sort of carve out burrows in the snow to sleep. If they faltered, they were whipped, if they fell ill, they were denied food and basically, you know, you're finished. And some historians say the conditions in this Murmansk railway were even worse in sort of 1915, 1916 or whatever than in the gulags under Stalin. It was kind of that.

[Tom Holland]

And how many survive and what happens to them?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, thousands died. I don't think there's exact figures. So with all these casualty figures, there's no precise number. I mean, some people ended up going home. So the most famous prisoners of wars to go back home were people called the Czech Legion. So they ended up, I mean they basically, they became a factor in the Russian civil war, fighting their way on these armored trains east because the only way they could get back to Czechoslovakia, the newly created Czechoslovakia, was to go east all the way through Russia and then round the world. And they ended up, you know, being a kind of big faction in the Russian Civil War, which is bonkers. But let's go back to the fall of the citadel. The news of Shear Mishl's fall was front page news across the empire. Total shock. Franz Josef wept for two days because he knew that this was catastrophic for the image of the Austro Hungarian monarchy. They'd pinned all their hopes on this place. It was their pride and joy. And now it had become a symbol of decay. So this is a war that they started. They've lost just in three months, the first three months of 1915, they've lost 800,000 men. They're running out of officers. And what is worse, when they lose Galicia in the northeast, a lot of their food came from these kind of farmlands. So this is very bad news for the city people in Budapest and Vienna who depend upon the food supply from the East. And what is more, hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them Jewish, now flood into the sort of heart of the empire. And as they. They are very unpopular in other parts of the empire, in Vienna and Budapest, but also in the small towns and villages in which they settle. So there are all kinds of ethnic tensions piled on top of the existing ethnic tensions within Austria, Hungary. And so as early as 1915, you can see the sort of sense of order breaking down. And the Austrians allies the Germans, and at this point start saying, well, they're finished. They're done. So the German liaison officer at the Habsburg military headquarters wrote to Berlin, and he said, this empire is so rotten and so decayed, it can no longer be helped. Even if we win the war, this empire is not going to last.

[Tom Holland]

And what about Conrad? And how does Gina take it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Conrad is still going. I mean, Conrad stays in office for another couple of years, I think, unbelievably. And what Gina makes of all this?

[Tom Holland]

Not impressed, I imagine.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Probably not impressed. But I think there's lots of censorship, of course, so she probably doesn't know what's going on. Conrad. Interesting. You know who Conrad blames for all this?

[Tom Holland]

The Jews?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, he blames the Germans.

[Tom Holland]

Germans, okay. That's original.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He says they. They could have given us more help. I mean, I think he's being a tiny bit ungrateful because the Germans do give them. The Germans basically torch their own empire to help the Austrians destroy their own. Yeah. Monarchy. So I think he's being a little bit.

[Tom Holland]

War, war, war.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's what he said. So what do you care about General Conrad von Hudsendorf? Now, meanwhile, I mentioned the circling vultures last time, and I think I might use the same metaphor this time. Well, I have in the notes. Yeah. So a month after the fall of this fortress, which, of course is news around the world, the Italians sign a deal, secret deal to join the Entente. And in return, they will get large swathes of Austria, Hungary, especially along the Adriatic of Istria Dalmatia. And a month after that, Italy finally enters the war against Austria, Hungary and if you thought the Carpathian front was bad, the Italian front.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, mad. Absolutely mad. Blowing the tops off mountains. I've seen. I've walked through a great tunnel that the Italians dug out at the side of a mountain, and I'm assuming that the Austrians did the same. And it's all absolutely for nothing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The two worst armies in history just killing. Yeah, some amazing stories in this book. The White War, the one that sticks in my mind is a whole load of Italians, like thousands of Italians advancing up this sort of limestone scree mountain. And the Austrians at the top, machine guns shouting down, saying, please stop coming. Like, we will kill you all. Just go back. Don't stop, don't come. And the Italians keep going. And the Austrians just say, well, okay. And they. And they kill them all.

[Tom Holland]

Well, you keep saying it's a terrible story. I mean, we've already had terrible stories, but there are so many more to come.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So let's just end with the. The city. A chance to say it again, one more time. So a month after the city fell, Nicholas II turned up. He went first to Lviv, and then he went to this fortress. And he toured the defenses. And all the people had been told, hang out Russian flags from your windows. And all the schools had been told about the D Day. And the children instructed on how to welcome their new emperor. Nicholas, of course, is as sort of banal and pooterish as ever. He said he's found it very interesting and very picturesque. But this trip really mattered because the authorities used it as a spur for Russification. Nicholas used the opportunity to issue a proclamation. There is no Galicia. There is rather a great Russia to the Carpathians. The people of Przemysl were told, you must adopt Russian time, Russian customs, Russian festivals. The shops must have signs in Cyrillic. Polishness must be eliminated. Polish elites deported and Ukrainian identity erased completely. Ukrainian schools must now teach in Russian.

[Tom Holland]

And what about the Jews?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, they pay the heaviest price of all. Since January, the Russians have been deporting Jews eastwards. But in Shemishul, they go further than anywhere else. This is the most obvious example of deportation in the entire War. In 10 days, they rounded up 17,000 people and transported them east.

[Tom Holland]

And why are they doing that?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They don't want these lands to have any Jews in them. They want to corral the Jews.

[Tom Holland]

Is that for kind of ideological reasons or because they see the Jews as Austro Hungarian sympathizers who can't be won over?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Both. They don't like Jews anyway. But they know that the Jews are loyal to the Habsburg Empire, and they want to get rid for that reason. But to stress that first point, they don't like Jews anyway. And many of these, they come with antisemitism as part of their intellectual repertoire. So by May, there is not a single Jewish person left in this city.

[Tom Holland]

What happens to the Jews who are deported?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Some of them, I think, do get home, because there are definitely Jews in przemyshel by the 1930s, though not after the 1940s. So some of them must have got back. I don't actually know exactly how they did that. But the irony of all this, it was all for nothing. It really was all for nothing, because less than two weeks after the Tsar's visit, the Germans, under August von Mackensen, and again a bloke with the wrong name, launched a massive offensive in Poland, smashed. The Russians, scattered their armies. The Germans went deep into occupied Galicia. And on the 2nd of June, the Germans in turn march into Shemisl. One of their commanders afterwards said, the joy of the liberated people was indescribable. Wherever we went, German soldiers were embraced and decorated with flowers and then. And handed gifts. And then he adds the killer line. I didn't see any Austrian soldiers. And that tells a wider story. On paper, the Austrians are back and they've got their city back, but it's actually the Germans who've done it, and the Germans who are the real masters now. And the prestige and the legitimacy of the Habsburg Empire will never, ever be rebuilt.

[Tom Holland]

And so that means that all these various lands, with all their different peoples, their different languages, their different customs, that essentially the glue that had held the together is going very, very rapidly. And that, of course, has profound implications for what happens after the war, whether the Central Powers win or lose.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Completely. I completely agree. So in this story, you've seen a lot of elements of things we associate with the Second World War. Racial ideology, deportations, ethnic cleansing, pogroms and stuff. If you're Galician, these began in the 1910s. But as you say, since there is no rebuilding the multicultural society before the war, that means now the gloves are off and there's going to be a very, very bitter fight to see who controls it. So this is what happens when the Empire collapses. In Przemysl and its environs, there's fighting between Poles and Ukrainians. Then it's caught up in the Polish Bolshevik war. Then it's occupied by the Nazis and tens of thousands of its Jewish population murdered. And this is only kind of scratched the surface of all the horror that lies ahead.

[Tom Holland]

Okay, so There are better places to live in the 20th century, basically pretty much anywhere.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, I mean that's why Timothy Snyder calls this area the Bloodlands. I think basically you want to live anywhere but here. Maybe not the Congo.

[Tom Holland]

So that's a very cheery note, Dominic, on which to end this series. But you know, we are talking about the world going up in flames, aren't we? This is, we began this series by saying this is the, the great catastrophe, certainly for Europe. But you could also say for, I mean it is authentically a world war. And I think this series has, has given a, a flavor of why it's so terrible. And of course there is so much slaughter and misery and horror still to come.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

God, you're really selling it well.

[Tom Holland]

But having said that, having said that, we are going to be back this year with a little more First World War action and we're going to be back for our Christmas special. We will be looking at the story of the festive truce on the Western front, asking whether it happened, to what extent the story is true. So a little touch of light and.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Actually when we do come back to the First World War, hopefully next year, I mean there's so much to look forward to, Tom. Zeppelins, Gallipoli, the sinking of the Lusitania, the, the arrival of the Italians, the wars fighting women, lots of fun things. And as always, members of the Rest is history club will be able to get those episodes early, won't they? Why not sign up [e-mail] ready for.

[Tom Holland]

Next year bed down. But next week something completely different. Because Dominic, we will be leaving your backyard, the mountains and bogs and plains of Eastern Europe and heading to Chatham High Street. Long promised, long awaited, finally to be delivered. And I know the excitement has been building for that. But if you want to listen to it, that's fine. But also if you'd like to see it because we've done it on location, you can see Chatham High street in all its beauty and glory.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, you should watch it on YouTube because I have to say when we did a filming day at Chatham High Street, I think I probably haven't laughed as much as that. Not always for good reasons, since I was about 12. So definitely do watch it, I think.

[Tom Holland]

Unmissable. So we will see you then.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Bye bye. Bye bye. Hey, it's Anthony Scaramucci from the Rest Is Politics Us. If you're looking for something to play next, Katty K and I just launched a new miniseries about Ronald Reagan. We're digging into the real Reagan story the Rise, the Dream drama how his world has been turned upside down in the age of Trump. We trace his rise from Hollywood to the White House, from his role in ending the Cold War to reviving the economy. And we also confront those scandals, Iran Contra, his assassination attempt and his failure around the AIDS epidemic. Just search the rest Politics Us Wherever you get your podcast. Here's a clip from the series. Ronald Reagan knew how to go big and go boy. He truly was the great communicator. Together we're going to do what has to be done. He regrounded the GOP and conservative principles, free markets, small government, and an unshakable faith in American exceptionalism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Ronald Reagan shook the country. People keep looking to government for the answer, and government's the problem.

[Tom Holland]

President Reagan was was shot in the chest by a gunman outside the Washington Hotel.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

We did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages. Uncomfortable as it is to admit, the 40th president inadvertently prepared the ground for the 45th. It's not Reagan's party anymore. Donald Trump destroyed Ronald Reagan.

[Tom Holland]

I thought he was great.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

His style, his attitude.

[Tom Holland]

But not great on trade.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Will we be the party of conservatism or will we follow the the siren song of populism? Only one man has the proven experience we need. Together we'll make America great again. Thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed that clip. To hear the full series, just search the rest is Politics US.