Assessment
Historians of the Habsburg Empire, as well as espionage historians such as CIA's Allen Dulles and Soviet General Mikhail Milstein, agree in calling Redl an arch-traitor. Redl's treason is thought to have contributed to the defeats Austria-Hungary suffered in the early months of World War I, since the plans for the attack on Serbia were quite complete and could not easily have been changed in the time between Redl's suicide and the onset of the war.
In the end it may have come down to the nature of the Austrian state itself, an anachronistic idea, rather than a fatherland. In the political post-mortem one Hungarian newspaper noted that "the Redl affair cannot be seen as a private matter. Redl is not an individual but a system. Whilst soldiers elsewhere are taught to love their homelands, lack of patriotism is held to be the greatest military virtue in this unfortunate monarchy. With us military education culminates in all national feeling being driven out of our soldiers... In the Redl affair this spirit has had its revenge. The Austrian and the Hungarian soldiers possess no fatherland; they only have a war lord."
Read more about this topic: Alfred Redl
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