A megélhetés új útjai: háborús bűnügyek a hátországban, 1914–1918
New Paths to Livelihood: Wartime Crime in the Hinterland, 1914–1918

Summary/Abstract: 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.

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