A World at Arms (103 page)

In Europe only Poland and the western portions of the U.S.S.R. were more drastically and violently affected by the deaths and destruction of war than Yugoslavia. Upon the German invasion in 1941, large portions in the north were directly annexed to Germany. There the people supposed to be of Germanic ancestry were to be re-Germanized and most of the rest driven out. Some of the expelled Slovenes were settled in Croatia or other parts of occupied Yugoslavia; many perished as a result.
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Italy annexed large portions of Yugoslav territory both in the north and along the Adriatic coast, while Hungary was awarded a substantial piece of land in the north and Bulgaria in the south. Furthermore, the pre-World War I state of Montenegro was revived, now under Italian control, and Italian-dominated Albania was substantially expanded as well. The rest of the country was divided between a nominally independent state of Croatia and a Serbia under German military administration with a puppet government of its own.

In Croatia, which was supposedly under Italian influence but in practice divided into a German and an Italian zone of occupation, the extreme Croatian nationalists, the Ustasha of Ante Pavelic, were put in charge. A small and violent group of fanatics, they were determined to expel or exterminate all Serbs, Muslims, and Jews in the area under their control. With no discernible administrative skills, the new masters of Croatia quickly plunged the area into bloody chaos, tried to playoff the Germans and Italians against each other, and enormously heightened the already bitter feuds between all segments of the population.

In German-occupied Serbia, the major economic aim of the Germans, the exploitation of the Bor copper mines, was attained, but all else quickly sank into an administrative chaos of German civilian, military, and police agencies and plenipotentiaries which rivalled the confusion in Croatia. Led by an unusually fanatic group of military officials of various sorts, and encouraged by the OKW, which complained that far too few prisoners and others were being shot,
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the German forces stationed in Serbia soon strove to set new records of brutality. Those shot were usually the innocent bystanders,
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and also Jews who were systematically killed off by the military. It did not take long for the population to realize that, in a situation of indiscriminate slaughter, the resisters had a better chance of survival than the acquiescent.

The result in both Italian and German controlled areas was a steadily escalating growth of resistance to the occupiers. This began in 1941 with former officers and soldiers of the Yugoslav army who had avoided capture and came to be led by General Draja Mihailovic. Known as Cetniks and operating at least nominally under the command of the Yugoslav government-in-exile, these forces recruited increasing numbers of men.
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Though engaging in some sabotage, the Cetnik movement was essentially designed to rally resistance forces for an uprising against the Germans in connection with and in support of an Allied landing. Until that time, the limited resources available to the resistance and the likelihood of bloody retaliation against the civilian population were adduced as arguments for limiting rather than increasing incidents.

The British began helping Mihailovic with supplies and a liaison mission in September 1941.
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Their signals intelligence showed that the Germans wanted to crush a movement which, whatever its limitations, did carry out some acts of resistance. The same intelligence, however, also showed that Mihailovic was in touch with the Italians, and that there was in effect a truce between the Italians and the Cetniks and occasionally cooperation between Mihailovic and the Germans, as the Cetniks increasingly concentrated on a civil war with another resistance force, Tito’s partisans, in a struggle for control of post-war Yugoslavia.
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Influenced in part by Communist agents in the British SOE headquarters in Cairo who deliberately distorted information from occupied Yugoslavia, the British in February 1943 began to turn to Tito, and between May and September of that year shifted their support to the partisans, though contacts with Mihailovic remained.
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What the British did not know was that Tito was trying hard to work out a truce with the Germans.

Like other Communist resistance leaders in Europe, Josip Broz, known as Tito, had waited until the German invasion of the Soviet Union to initiate activity against the occupation. An exceptionally gifted leader, Tito rallied to himself elements from different nationalities in Yugoslavia, not only the Serbs as Mihailovic tended to do, and took action against the occupiers regardless of the retaliation the latter might visit on the civilian population. The atrocities of the Ustasha in Croatia, which at times were too much even for the SS,
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provided a rich opportunity for recruitment. The partisan forces grew steadily and soon clashed with the Cetniks even as more and more of the population turned to the partisans.

There was thus a brutal civil war in the country simultaneously with fighting against the occupation authorities and endless massacres by the latter. From time to time, the Cetniks tried to arrange a truce with the
Italians-and were often successful in this–while Tito tried hard but failed to work out a truce with the Germans. He was especially interested in such an accommodation because he feared, as the Cetniks hoped for, a landing by the Western Allies. His offer to stand aside so that the Germans could beat off an invasion was discouraged by Moscow and rejected by Hitler.
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The Germans learned of the contacts their Italian ally had with Mihailovic, and the Italians, unlike the British, found out about Tito’s dealings with the Germans.
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Needless to say, this hardly improved relations between the Axis partners, but until the Italian surrender of September, 1943, they had to work together as best they could. They watched the Cetniks and partisans fight each other, trying unsuccessfully to crush both themselves, and ravaging the country and its people in an endless orgy of violence.
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With ever greater supplies from the Western Powers and some aid from the Soviet Union, Tito’s forces came to control much of the country.
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As the Germans retreated in late 1944, the partisans became the heirs of pre-war Yugoslavia. In the last weeks of war and the immediate post-war period, they crushed both the forces of Mihailovic and the remnants of the Croatian army. A devastated and blood–soaked country was under entirely new leadership. But that leadership had established itself by military effort before and during the arrival of the Red Army, not in its wake, and this differentiation from the new regimes in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria came to have major repercussions in later years.

Albania had been administered by Italy since early 1939. The southern portion had been temporarily occupied by the Greek army after it repulsed the Italian invasion in the winter of 1940–41. With the defeat of Yugoslavia, large portions of that country, and most especially the Kossovo area with its large Muslim population, were annexed to predominantly Muslim Albania. Little changed under Italian rule, but the collapse of Italy’s administration with the surrender of September 1943 opened the way to new developments. The Germans, primarily in hopes of influencing Turkey, tried to create an independent client state but with little success.
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Both Communist and nationalist insurgents began to harass the German occupation forces and, as these withdrew in late 1944, the former seized control of the country. Their leader, Enver Hoxha, dominated the country until his death in 1986.

The German invasion of Greece in April 1941 led to its defeat and occupation. A part was turned over to Bulgaria–which promptly inaugurated a program of expelling Greeks and settling Bulgarians there
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and
a portion of the northwest was annexed to Albania. The bulk of Greece was placed under Italian occupation though the northeast, including the port city of Salonika; most of Crete, several of the Aegean Islands, and a tip of land southeast of Athens came under German occupation. After the Italian surrender, the previously Italian-controlled area, which included Athens, came under German occupation.

A series of collaborationist regimes ran the country for the Italians and Germans while the latter established their usual plethora of agencies to compete with each other for influence. The critical impact on the people of the country came from three aspects of the years of occupation. In the first place, the Axis looting of the country and the disruption of its foreign trade produced a runaway inflation in which the currency was made worthless by the endless printing of money to pay for “occupation costs,” money which the Germans used to strip the country like locusts. This in turn was both a cause and a symptom of famine which struck hard, especially in the winter of 1941–42, causing over 200,000 deaths, and which was only minimally alleviated by food imports paid for by the United States and allowed through the blockade by the British.
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The second aspect of the occupation period was the German murder of most of the country’s Jewish population. The largest number lived in Salonika, and from that German-controlled city over 45,000 were deported to Auschwitz in the first half of 1943. The Jews in the rest of Greece were protected first by the Italians and, after the Italian surrender of September 1943, to a considerable extent by other Greeks so that about half the remaining 12,000 Jews in Greece survived.

The third facet of the war years, and one which would cast its shadow over Greek politics for the balance of the century, was the bitter conflict over resistance to the occupation. King George II and many of the ministers left the country in April, 1941, but they never made any significant effort to organize a resistance movement, either at the time or later in the war. The assumption was that they would sit out the war and return with the British victors at its end. Perhaps the King’s identification with the dictatorship of Metaxas made any other course very difficult, but there is no evidence of his ever trying. The effect was that most of what resistance there came to be was organized by the Greek Communist Party, although it never provided more than a small percentage of the organization and membership of the main resistance structure, known by the initials of its Greek name as EAM, or its armed units, known as ELAS. A small separate resistance force under the former republican Colonel Napoleon Zervas, known as EDES, turned monarchist as it became clear that the British would provide arms to a monarchist organization. Both forces opposed the occupation, though ELAS
much more effectively, but they also fought each other in the hopes of inheriting control of the country after liberation.
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Efforts to unite all resistance forces inside Greece failed, while the Greek politicians and the tiny Greek military units in Egypt during the war squabbled with each other. The evacuation of the German forces in late 1944 was not substantially hindered by the resistance which rather looked to the future. British troops in Athens in December 1944 became involved in the contest for control of the country, with Churchill-who came to the city in person–insisting on a monarchical restoration, at least under a regency. In the immediately ensuing struggle, the royalists won out, rehabilitated most of the collaborators, and began a systematic persecution of the ELAS resistance. The latter had failed in their first bid for power, had shown many Greeks their true colors by the murder of some 4000 hostages,
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and bided their time for a new round of civil war.

If the internal Greek conflict between parts of the resistance as well as between the largest resistance organization and the government-in-exile set the stage for a civil war which raged in Greece overtly or covertly for decades, the roles of Britain and the Soviet Union in the Greek drama closely followed their division of the Balkans into spheres of interest. The most recent study of the issue shows as clearly as is possible before the opening of Soviet archives that during 1944 and again in early 1945 Moscow used its influence with the Greek Communists to restrain the latter, and hoped to utilize this policy to assure British agreement to the steps the Soviet Union was taking to establish a Communist dictatorship in Romania.
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For the people of Greece, on whom the war had imposed terrible hardships, the victory of the Allies meant not peace but more swords.

GERMAN-OCCUPIED EUROPE: THE EAST

No country was affected more dramatically by World War II than Poland. In 1939, huge portions of the country were annexed to Germany, and the population in these areas was subjected to a “racial” screening which cost those deemed to be Polish their homes and their possessions. In their eagerness to Germanize their new domains, the Nazi Party leaders in the area combined ruthless expulsions for some with an anomalously “generous” policy of classifying as Germans as many people as they dared.
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In the rest of German-occupied Poland, German policy aimed
at maximum economic exploitation of the material and human resources after the killing of the intellectual, political, and religious leadership. The long-term aim was clearly two-fold: in the coming years, the surviving Poles would work hard at minimal incomes for the Germans, serving as a reservoir of cheap labor. As German settlers became available, they would be driven out or exterminated.
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The medical experiments in concentration camps aiming at the development of methods of mass sterilization may well have been designed for application to the Poles, among others. By the time any such techniques were available, one large segment of the country’s population (about 10 percent) would already have vanished: the Jews.

Though there were local massacres of Jews as well as other measures of persecution in the first two years of German occupation, the mass murder program got under way in the summer of 1941, as the German invasion of the Soviet Union brought the German army and the killing squads attached to it into the part of Poland assigned to the Soviet Union under the 1939 Nazi-Soviet partition agreements. Subsequently, German-occupied Poland became the locale for the construction of special extermination centers, facilities devoted to the systematic killing of Polish Jews and of Jews transported from all over Europe and, when the Germans could reach them as on the island of Rhodes, from outside Europe as well. Over three million Polish Jews were killed, most of them in these installations. A few were aided by their Polish fellow–victims of German occupation, with most of the survivors hounded out of the country by pogroms in post-war Poland. The killing centers themselves, insofar as they remain, and the memorials erected at their sites, will stand for centuries as monuments to what the Germans once called their cultural mission in Eastern Europe. The resistance and defiance of the victims was dramatically symbolized by the final despairing uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943. Ignored by the Polish population next door, and crushed ruthlessly by the Germans, the first urban revolt in German-occupied Europe became a point of reference for the post-war world.