Seite - 205 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The War Economy Dominates Everyday Life 205 listed, as were weapons, bridge constructions, locomotives, automobiles, pulleys, freight and passenger trains, opera glasses, saltpetre, glycerine or bran. In a second prohibited list there appeared skins, twines, furs, armatures, wrenches, oxygen, aspirin, strychnine, barbitone and many, many other things. However, the Orientation Aid stated that the ban on export and transit was only of limited duration and would be repealed to the extent that ‘the first major requirements of the armed force are covered and wartime events allow for it’. The War Surveillance Office was also responsible for compliance with these provisions. Hungary, as mentioned above, did not recognise the jurisdiction of the War Surveillance Office for the Hungarian half of the Empire, though, so its ac- tivity in the framework of the Monarchy’s economic measures remained limited to the Austrian half of the Empire. As a result, however, a central authority for the war econ- omy lapsed. Hungary insisted on establishing its own control agencies and engaging in discussions with the Austrian half of the Empire at the Customs and Trade Conference, an instrument created by the Compromise of 1867.482 At the outbreak of war, the import, export and transit bans were gradually brought into effect, initially vis-à-vis Serbia and then against Russia and the Entente powers. As a result, the exchange of goods abruptly collapsed. Within the Triple Alliance no plans had been made for the movement of goods in the event of a war. There were not even agreements between Austria-Hungary and the German Empire that would have ensured the exchange of goods. Suddenly, everything proceeded only internally. Raw materials and foodstuffs that had been obtained from other countries before the war failed to materialise, since they naturally also had export bans placed on them. Urgently required goods could only be obtained via neutral countries, above all Swit- zerland and Italy. Trieste played a role, above all as a forwarding port and accumulated for months on end the coffee supplies of the Dual Monarchy, for example. Neither in terms of its location nor its facilities, however, was it in a position to serve as the central collecting point. Raw materials that had already been bought and loaded but were still in Hamburg or Bremen could suddenly no longer be forwarded to Austria. The Ger- man Empire, which was made to feel the British blockade earlier and more strongly than Austria-Hungary, asserted its own personal requirements. Conversely, German firms could not initially obtain wood, skins or crude oil from the Habsburg Monarchy. This in itself grotesque state of affairs was only ended on 24 September 1914 with the signing of an agreement on the handling of bilateral exports.483 An immediate consequence of this agreement was the establishment of so-called ‘central offices’ for a range of strategic goods : a central office for wool, one for metal, later one for oils and fats, a central office for fodder, a brewing central office, a wartime coffee central office, a central office for malt, one for molasses, etc. It was intended that they carry out the uniformly controlled management of the individual group of goods, from the natural resource to the finished product, and above all guarantee the requirements of the army.