Page - 578 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

578 How is a War Financed ? to the Innsbruck Governor’s office ‘with the current price inflation no longer in a po- sition to invest their savings in war bonds, since they by necessity have needed them to finance their livelihoods, which have anyway been subject to the harshest privations’.1347 Here, no letters complaining about the flagging willingness to subscribe were of help. It also made no difference denouncing members of the Social Democrat movement, who in response to the sixth bond had announced that they did not wish to again vote in favour of the bond subscriptions in the municipal councils.1348 It was also to no avail that under Emperor Karl, a veritable flood of subscriptions rained down on the heads of those who worked to promote the bonds. Directors, general managers, executive heads of imperial councils and hundreds of other directors, proxy directors, school head teach- ers, chairmen, editors and lawyers were made Knights of the Order of Franz Joseph by the dozen. Many hundreds more were awarded the Golden Merit Cross with crown, the Golden Merit Cross (without crown), and the War Cross for Civil Merits 2nd, 3rd and 4th class. They had something to be pleased about. The Raging of the Banknote Presses Until the seventh bond, demands were made to make money fluid for victory in the war ; then, in connection with the eighth and final bond in June 1918, the words ‘final victory’ were also mentioned, although, in fact, the purpose of the final loan was more to help finance the transition to peace. Whoever had been able to had not only subscribed to bonds, but had also reacted to the countless pleas for donations that had resulted from the increasing poverty. The income from these was not used to finance the war, but here and there to alleviate one of the impacts of the war. Money was collected for members of the army who had been blinded, the school for one-armed invalids, the families of those who had been con- scripted, the Red Cross Society, an initiative to feed the unemployed, for the refugees from Galicia and Bukovina, help to relieve the hardship of the needy Jews of Galicia who had been affected by the events of the war, the widow and orphan fund of the entire armed force, the Austro-Hungarian prisoners in enemy countries, the initiative to procure prosthetic limbs, the War Welfare Office, the invalid funds and dozens of others. These were joined by the war lotteries, numerous sales exhibitions and charity bazaars. The many different pleas were in fact impossible to ignore. One initiative with a rather more commercial orientation was cinema days, in which a modest sum was donated from the price of the entrance tickets for one charitable institution or another. Establishments of a widely varying nature used similar tactics in their attempt to escape enforced closure, due not to the fact that the amusement they offered was not consid- ered appropriate for the public, but rather due to a lack of money.