as it lacked expected volunteers for the German cause. After peace in the East was assured by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany and Austria-Hungary started a policy of creating a "Mitteleuropa" ("Central Europe") and on November 5, 1917, declared that a puppet state Kingdom of Poland might be created. Battlefields Much of the heavy fighting on the war's Eastern Front took place on the territory of the former Polish state. In 1914 Russian forces advanced very close to Kraków before being beaten back. The next spring, heavy fighting occurred around Gorlice and Przemyśl, to the east of Kraków in Galicia. In 1915 Polish territories were looted and abandoned by the retreating Imperial Russian army, trying to emulate the scorched earth policy of 1812; the Russians also evicted and deported hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants suspected of collaborating with the enemy. By the end of 1915, the Germans had occupied the entire Russian sector, including Warsaw. In 1916 another Russian offensive in Galicia exacerbated the already desperate situation of civilians in the war zone; about 1 million Polish refugees fled eastward behind Russian lines during the war. Although the Russian offensive of 1916 caught the Germans and Austrians by surprise, poor communications and logistics prevented the Russians from taking full advantage of their situation. 450,000 Poles died and around one million were wounded while fighting in the Austrian, Russian, and German armies, which by 1916 included close to 2 million Polish soldiers. Several hundred thousand Polish civilians were moved to labor camps in Germany, and 800,000 were deported by the Russians from Congress Poland to the East. The scorched-earth retreat strategies of both sides left much of the war zone uninhabitable. Total deaths from 1914–18, military and civilian, within the 1919–1939 borders, were estimated at 1,128,000. Around 1,800,000 buildings and half of the bridges had been destroyed. Production output fell to 20% of its level before the war and Polish industry suffered the loss of an estimated 73 billion French francs. The British Director of Relief summarized the situation in Poland as following: The lack of food caused widespread malnutrition, which combined with disease often brought by soldiers returning from the front, drove up the mortality rate of the local population. Famine conditions affected a significant area of eastern Poland. Military formations Recovery of statehood In 1917 two separate events decisively changed the character of the war and set it