Austro-Hungarians retake Lviv

On 22 June 1915 troops of the Austro-Hungarian Second Army under General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli entered Lviv, the capital of Austrian Galicia. In the morning his corps stormed the defences on the western approaches to the city, and at noon the last Russian units left it, heading east. So ended the occupation that had begun on 3 September 1914 and lasted 293 days. For the Central Powers it was one of their greatest successes in the east since the beginning of the war, and for the city’s inhabitants the end of ten months of Russian rule.

The final assault

Five days earlier the armies of General August von Mackensen had come up against the last Russian line of defence on the Wereszyca and near Magierów. On the night of 19–20 June that line fell, and General Aleksei Brusilov’s Russian Eighth Army fell back to the belt of field redoubts that surrounded Lviv on the north-west, west and south-west. On 20 June the Russian commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, ordered all superfluous military equipment to be removed from the city and a retreat to be prepared.

The assault began at dawn on 22 June. At 5 a.m. the Viennese rifle regiments No. 1 and No. 24, at the cost of heavy losses, took the redoubt at Rzęsna Polska (PL). At about 9 a.m. the Viennese 43rd Rifle Division took Brzuchowice, at 10.30 a.m. regiments of the 29th Infantry Division took the redoubt at Skniłów, and soon afterwards the Kassa Infantry Regiment No. 34 broke into the fortifications on Łysa Góra. North of the city the Russians had abandoned the hills at Żółkiew during the night, and at dawn the German Beskiden Corps took their positions at Kulików. The defenders of Lviv were threatened with encirclement from the north. Brusilov ordered Lviv to be abandoned. According to the Austrian official history, he gave the order on the morning of 22 June. Some Russian authors wrote that it was as early as the evening of 21 June.

The Russians leave

The Russians had been preparing to leave for several weeks. From mid-May, after the defeat at Gorlice, they had been removing offices and stores, and with them went the Galician Russophiles, who had tied themselves to the new authorities during the occupation. On 19 June the Russian authorities took with them hostages who were to answer for calm in the city. According to the memoirs of one of them, the Lviv historian Józef Białynia Chołodecki, the train into the interior of Russia left with 37 hostages: 12 Poles, 10 Ruthenians and 15 Jews. Among those deported was Tadeusz Rutowski (PL), who throughout the occupation had run the city council and defended the inhabitants against the occupier. He returned to Lviv only in February 1917.

At about 9 a.m. on 22 June a Russian officer accompanied by a Cossack climbed the tower of the town hall and took down the Russian flag. At the same time flags disappeared from other buildings. Smoke from the night’s fires hung over the city. In the surrounding villages the retreating troops burned buildings so as to leave the enemy no shelter.

Austro-Hungarian troops enter

According to the Austrian official history, shortly after noon the first Austro-Hungarian cavalry patrols rode into Lviv from the west. At the same time the last Russians were leaving the city to the east. The patrols were followed by the infantry of the XIX Corps, which was to move straight on, onto the road to Bóbrka, after the retreating enemy. At about 4 p.m. Böhm-Ermolli arrived in the city with his staff. The inhabitants greeted the soldiers joyfully. With them returned an authority that most of the people of Lviv regarded as their own, and the hope of an end to requisitions, arrests and Russification.

Poles, Ukrainians and Jews

Before the war Lviv had more than 200,000 inhabitants. According to the 1910 census, about half were Roman Catholics, mostly Poles, more than a quarter Jews, and just under a fifth Greek Catholics, mostly Ukrainians. Each of these groups lived through the occupation differently and received its end differently.

For the Poles, who made up the majority of the inhabitants and ran the city, the recovery of Lviv meant the return of Galician autonomy, under which they had their own self-government, schools and university. Only a few months later the city honoured Rutowski by naming a street after him. The Ukrainian national movement, which under Russian rule had been combated as an “Austrian invention”, breathed a sigh of relief, although its most important spiritual leader, the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, was still in exile in Russia. The Jewish population, which had lived through the pogrom of September 1914 and the Russian restrictions, also welcomed the return of the Austrians with relief.

The end of the occupation did not, however, mean the end of repression. According to the Austrian official history, Emperor Franz Joseph expressly forbade the “formal prosecution” of people who had collaborated with the Russians. According to some Polish accounts, the Austrian military authorities quickly began arresting people suspected of sympathising with Russia, often on the strength of denunciations, and field courts handed down death sentences. The repression fell above all on the Ruthenian Russophiles, but not only on them. On top of this came wartime requisitions of food, clothing and metals. For many inhabitants the joy of liberation soon faded.

A field marshal’s baton

The news of the recovery of Lviv spread throughout the monarchy. According to the Austrian official history, the moral impression it made exceeded even the military significance of the victory. It revived hope of a happy end to the war even among those whose loyalty to the monarchy was beginning to waver. In Romania and Greece the supporters of neutrality grew stronger, and Bulgaria resumed talks on joining the Central Powers.

The victors received their rewards. Mackensen, who had led the whole offensive since the breakthrough at Gorlice, was made a field marshal by Emperor Wilhelm II. Most sources give 22 June as the date of the appointment, but the 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica gives 20 June. The Austro-Hungarian Chief of the General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, was promoted to colonel general in those days.

The war did not end at Lviv. According to the Austrian official history, Franz Joseph, in conversation with Conrad, foresaw that Russia did not yet intend to admit defeat. On the evening of 22 June orders were already issued for a further advance. Mackensen’s troops were to turn north, between the Bug and the Vistula, while the Second Army and the German-Austrian South Army were to pursue the Russians eastwards, beyond the Gniła Lipa and the Złota Lipa.