The outbreak of World War I brought profound social and economic transformations to the home front. Women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, the middle class suffered a loss of prestige and faced mounting financial hardship, while the working class gained greater social significance. The conversion of the economy into a war economy and the increasing state control over the distribution of food and raw materials further intensified these shifts. Amid everyday shortages and uncertainty, crime began to flourish. Although most offences were committed in the capital and in larger provincial towns, rural areas were not immune either.The war also reshaped the social composition of crime. With the majority of men conscripted, a “vacuum” emerged within the criminal underworld, soon filled by women, children, and prisoners of war. The proportion of female offenders more than doubled during these years: while women accounted for 15.8% of all criminals in 1913, the figure rose to 24% in 1914, 30% in 1915, and 43.5% by 1917. This dramatic change was driven by the absence of family breadwinners and the necessity for women to engage in paid labour – often in occupations unfamiliar to them before the war.This study examines specific types of crime characteristic of the wartime period and shaped by the conditions of total war. It explores their social background, while contextualizing and re-evaluating both perpetrators and victims within the transformed moral and economic landscape of the hinterland. Although no entirely new categories of crime emerged, certain offences became far more widespread, such as incitement and crimes against authority. Economic offences also changed in nature: profiteering and smuggling proliferated, and opportunities for large-scale financial fraud multiplied, typically to the detriment of the state. Yet illicit gain was not limited to so-called ‘war profiteers’: looting supply trains bound for the front became a source of income for members of the lower social strata.The military uniform itself became an instrument of deception. Swindlers posing as officers’ orderlies or comrades of captured soldiers approached the families of enlisted men, appealing to comradeship to obtain loans or offering to deliver packages and money faster than the field post or the Red Cross. Such ‘innocent’ cases, however, represented only the tip of the iceberg among crimes connected to the military institution. Returning soldiers who were unable to support themselves, often suffering from physical injuries or psychological trauma, also resorted to fraud. In the postwar years, a distinct group of offenders emerged from among veterans afflicted by post-traumatic stress and depression, many of whom sought solace in alcohol.

Hundreds of thousands Hungarian soldiers were taken as prisoners of war on the Russian front in the course of the First World War. They spent significantly more time in captivity than prisoners in French or Italian camps because in many cases their release, hampered both by the Russian civil war and the unconsolidated Russian-Hungarian diplomatic relations, did not take place until the mid-1920s. During the years spent in lagers of Siberia and Turkestan, the pris- oners’ priority was maintaining physical and mental health, since their physical condition was their only assurance that they would ever make it home to their loved ones. Maintaining health was dependent on the climate, as well as on the accommodation, clothing and nutrition provided for the prisoners ‒ although none of the latter was readily available for them. Tens of thousands succumbed to various epidemics or to extreme weather conditions. The physical challenges were further aggravated by their uncertainty about the time of their release and the prolonged period away from home which led to psychological illness and captivity neurosis.Based on archival sources found in the Austrian State Archives (Haus­, Hof­ und Staatsarchiv) in Vienna (Kriegsgefangenen­Fürsorge 1915‒1921, Rote­Kreuz Mission 1917‒1921), as well as prisoner of war memoirs, diaries and correspondence, the present study examines the soldiers’ responses to the challenges of captivity, survival strategies of individuals and groups, and the support provided by international aid organisations.

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