Authored by Petrit Latifi

There exists quite a lot of Serbian litterature on Austro-Hungarian atrocities against Serbians of Sabac. What some Serbian authors however ignore or refuse to mention is how Serbian civilians, even pregnant women, would treacherously fire at Austro-Hungarian troops from behind and murder them. They would also mutilate soldiers. Some Serbian civilians would also fire at first aid stations and wounded carriers. In the publication “Tapfere Krieger – stolze Heimat Der Bezirk Kufstein und der Erste Weltkrieg” from 2014 we can read the testimony of an Austro-Hungarian trooper:

“Our people were repeatedly fired upon from a factory in Schabatz, and we burned the factory down. A lieutenant, out of humanity, ordered the release of a pregnant woman he had taken prisoner. No sooner was she released than the woman pulled out a revolver and shot the lieutenant in the back. The Serbian troops particularly like to fire on our first aid stations and wounded carriers.”

“The inhabitants of Serbisch-Schabatz and the surrounding villages shot at our troops, mostly from behind, especially at officers and small detachments. Even after Schabatz had been in our possession for 24 hours, passing soldiers were still shot at.”

“The bodies of mutilated soldiers from our army were repeatedly found near Serbisch-Schabatz, including a lieutenant with his stomach slashed open, a soldier with gouged-out eyes and uniform buttons pressed into their sockets, and a soldier hanging from a tree with his head and arms missing.”

The war against Serbia was intended from the outset as an act of punishment and retribution, and thus took on a more brutal tone from the very beginning. The Austrians and Hungarians who marched into this odious Balkan country on August 12 had been reading about the Serbs’ general malice and treachery in their local newspapers for years and therefore trusted no man, woman, or child.

Furthermore, Infantry General Lothar von Hortstein, notorious for the brutality of his actions, distributed a pamphlet entitled “Directives for Behavior toward the Population in Serbia” to the troops. It urged absolute mercilessness in dealing with the enemy:

“The war takes us into enemy territory inhabited by a population filled with fanatical hatred of us, into a country where assassination, as the catastrophe in Sayarevo shows, is permitted even among the higher classes, where it is celebrated as heroism. In the face of such a population, any humanity and softness are highly inappropriate, indeed downright destructive, because these considerations, otherwise occasionally possible in war, here seriously endanger the safety of our own troops. […] “

Reference

Tapfere Krieger – stolze Heimat Der Bezirk Kufstein und der Erste Weltkrieg, 2014. https://www.google.se/books/edition/Tapfere_Krieger_stolze_Heimat/goGCBQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0