Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (46 page)

During the Second World War, these divisions of nationality, ethnicity, politics and religion were inflamed to such a degree that ‘Yugoslavs’ became just as willing to kill one another as to kill the foreign occupiers. Croats massacred Serbs in the name of Catholicism; Serbs torched Muslim villages in Bosnia and Hungarian villages in Vojvodina; monarchist Chetniks fought pitched battles against Communist Partisans. As if this were not complicated enough, militias often tried to pin the blame for their atrocities on each other. Muslim militiamen donned the uniforms of Serb Chetniks, Croat Ustashas dressed up as Muslims, and Chetniks pretended to be Serb Partisans. It was therefore not always straightforward to identify who was massacring whom.
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Presiding over the whole were the German, Italian and other occupiers of the country, who not only committed their own war crimes but also encouraged in-fighting between the different groups.

Out of this soup of violent rivalries there emerged two major opponents. The first of these were the Ustashas, a far-right political group that had been installed by the Italians as a puppet government in the new Independent State of Croatia during the war. The Ustashas were one of the most repugnant regimes on the continent. During the war they indulged in ethnic and religious cleansing on a scale surpassed only by the Nazis themselves. They were responsible for systematically murdering hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs, and forcing hundreds of thousands more to convert to Catholicism. Their most notorious prison camp, at Jasenovac, saw the murder of around 100,000 people, over half of whom were Serbs.
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The Ustashas were by no means the only collaborators in Yugoslavia – there were several Serbian, Slovenian and Montenegrin far-right groups and militias – but they were easily the most powerful.

Opposing the Ustashas was the second major force in Yugoslavia, and the one that was eventually victorious: the Communist Partisans. The Partisans had gradually outgrown all the other resistance movements, including Draža Mihailovi
’s royalist Chetniks, to become a huge fighting force with Allied backing. They were made up of men and women of every ethnic minority, but the majority were Serbs fleeing persecution. Later in the war large numbers of Chetniks – also Serbs – defected to the Partisans. This was partly out of a cynical desire to make sure they were on the winning side, but also because their urge to destroy the Croat Ustashas outweighed any political differences they might have with their fellow Serbs. Thus, the end of the war in Yugoslavia had a particularly ethnic flavour. While the Partisan leadership might have been focused on returning the state of Croatia to the Yugoslav fold, much of the rank and file had one overriding priority: vengeance upon Croats in general, and the Ustasha regime in particular.

The ‘Bleiburg Tragedy’

During the final six months of the war, German forces conducted an epic withdrawal from the whole of the Balkan peninsula. As they retreated through Yugoslavia in April 1945, they were joined by various local collaborationist groups, soldiers and militias. The intention of all these groups was to fight their way towards British-held territory in Austria and north-east Italy: after the bitter war they had just waged, they reasoned, the British were more likely than Tito’s troops to show them mercy when they surrendered.

As the Ustasha regime finally abandoned Zagreb on 6 May a measure of hysteria took hold of the civilian population. There are suggestions that the Ustashas deliberately spread panic in order to provoke a more general exodus. In any case, large numbers of refugees joined the fleeing troops, and some of them were apparently given guns – a fact that would make it very difficult in the coming days to separate the sheep from the goats.
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This vast crowd, numbering hundreds of thousands, trekked northwards through Slovenia towards the Austrian border. They were determined to reach Austria before they surrendered, and as a consequence continued to fight long after the war was over in the rest of Europe. The battle raged on until 15 May 1945, when the first Croatian units finally arrived on Austrian soil, at Bleiburg. Here they immediately attempted to hand themselves over to British forces. But the British refused to accept their surrender on the grounds that Allied policy stipulated that all Axis forces must surrender to those armies they had been fighting against. Despite the desperate campaign that they had just fought, the Ustashas and their hangers-on would be obliged to hand themselves over to the Partisans after all.

The events at Bleiburg have long been the subject of myth and controversy. In the years after the war Croatian émigrés claimed that the entire Croatian army arrived on Austrian soil, and that the British disarmed them and handed them back to the Partisans to be annihilated. Many maintained that this British ‘betrayal’ constituted a war crime, on the grounds that their refusal to protect them was a breach of the 1929 Geneva Convention. In reality, however, only a small proportion of Croatian troops and refugees ever made it to Austrian territory – perhaps 25,000 people: another 175,000 or so were spread out in columns some forty-five to sixty-five kilometres long. The British had little choice but to instruct them to give themselves up to the Partisans, because they had no facilities or supplies to accommodate such huge numbers of refugees in this remote part of Austria. And besides, they wanted to keep the area clear in case they themselves needed to conduct military operations against Tito’s Partisans, who had already invaded parts of Austria and north-east Italy and were threatening to annex them to Yugoslavia.
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Accusations of betrayal have also been directed at the way that the British treated those who did manage to surrender to them. A few days before the arrival of the Croats, a force of about 10,000 to 12,000 collaborationist Slovenian Home Guards (recently renamed the Slovene National Army) had reached Austria. The British disarmed them and put them in a camp near Viktring (Vetrinje), a small town just a few kilometres south-west of Klagenfurt, but they had no intention of keeping them – instead they planned to return them to Yugoslavia at the earliest opportunity. Realizing that the Slovenes would resist any attempt to send them back, the British pretended that they were transporting them to camps in Italy. Similar deceptions were employed against Cossacks captured in the region, whose officers were told they were being taken to a conference when in fact they were to be handed over to the Soviets. Such blatant dishonesty does nothing to endear the British to those who escaped or survived the massacres that were to follow. It merely adds weight to the body of evidence suggesting that the British knew exactly what lay in store for these prisoners.
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For those who were sent back across the Austrian border, or who were captured by Tito’s Partisans in the northernmost parts of Slovenia, an epic and often tragic ordeal lay ahead. A large proportion were marched along the Drava river towards Maribor, where the Partisans had set up transit camps. At first these marches were conducted in a fairly orderly and professional manner, but according to survivors they became more dangerous the further away they progressed from the safety of the Allied lines. The prisoners were given neither food nor water by their Partisan guards, and were often stripped of any valuable items such as pens, watches, wedding rings, boots or shoes. When gaps in the column inevitably opened up, those at the rear were ordered to run to catch up. To encourage them to move faster, those who lagged behind were often shot without warning.

In the 1960s the Croatian exile John Prcela gathered together scores of testimonies by those who had experienced the forced marches back into Yugoslavian territory, most of which agree on these details.
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The testimonies of German soldiers gathered by a German government commission in the 1960s provide further corroboration.
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Conditions on these ‘death marches’ were brutal in the extreme. As they trudged towards Maribor, Croatian soldiers and civilians alike were gunned down using any conceivable excuse. Those who tried to escape were, of course, considered fair game, but even stepping out of the column to relieve oneself could prove fatal. In villages along the way some local people had left food and water for them, but anyone who made a move to gather them might also receive a bullet. Running out of energy was not an option: one survivor, a man named Stankovic, tells the story of a fifty-year-old priest who was killed for no better reason than that he was too tired to walk any further.
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Sometimes people seemed to be singled out at random:

A Communist officer, usually a Serb, but sometimes a Slovene, would yell out suddenly, ‘Kill that fellow whose head is sticking out above all the rest of the bandits!’ Then another would cry, ‘Kill that little runt there!’ Someone else would order that anyone wearing a beard, or someone who had been stripped of his shirt, should be done away with.
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According to another eyewitness, ‘the Reds began to shoot whomever they happened to feel like shooting. In the beginning, they took individuals out of the formation and killed them in the nearby woods. Later, they fired directly into the prisoner column. This shooting was entirely indiscriminate.’
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However, while some Partisans undoubtedly indulged in indiscriminate murder, there was often much more method to these killings than met the eye. One of the reasons for searching their prisoners, apart from the obvious motive of stealing their valuables, was to ascertain which prisoners were officers or members of the Ustasha elite. Some men were foolish enough to keep papers or photographs on them. Those with more valuable items than the others were obviously of higher rank, and while many officers had dumped their uniforms before surrender, sometimes they could not bring themselves to part with decorations or rank insignia. One such was an Ustasha lieutenant named Mark Stojic, whose sister-in-law tied them to her leg in order to protect him. Unfortunately these came loose and fell into the road. They were spotted by some of the guards, who asked Stojic’s sister-in-law whom they belonged to. When she refused to answer, one of them smashed in her skull in full view of the rest of the column.
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Many survivors speak of small groups of men being led away into the forest and shot. Since almost all the testimonies come from the victims themselves we cannot be sure how Partisan officers chose who to include in these groups, but in many cases there did appear to be some rudimentary form of selection. One of the few contemporary accounts by a Partisan officer tells how his comrades chose fifty-four officers from amongst their prisoners to be taken out into the woods and murdered. ‘To verify what had happened I went up and found 54 bodies which some soldiers were then burying. I saw pools of blood and one corpse that had been knifed, but I reckon that the rest had been knifed also, for I only heard two or three revolver shots and there were 54 dead.’
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A prisoner named Franjo Krakaj tells how Ustasha soldiers were also singled out for special treatment. He himself was misidentified as an Ustasha leader, and immediately led off into the forest with a group of other similar men to be shot. He escaped when one of the others ran at the guards to distract them.

Krakaj’s story is interesting because he escaped from Partisan hands not once but four times. Each time he was obliged by hunger to give himself up once more. In the first instance he put his brush with death down to the sheer bad luck of falling into the hands of a particularly sadistic group of soldiers – it was not until he was almost executed a second time that he realized that wholesale killing was part of a wider Partisan policy. On this occasion he had his hands bound behind his back, and was loaded onto one of a number of trucks along with his fellow prisoners.

After a ride of about twenty minutes, we were unloaded like sacks of wheat at Maribor Island, which is upstream from the town. As we approached this place, we heard the staccato firing of a machine gun, along with single rifle shots from time to time. So we had no doubt now concerning our fate.

I landed on my feet when I was tossed out of the truck. Thus, I was able to take a good look at a scene of horror that could have inspired a twentieth-century Dante … What absorbed my interest were several mass graves which had been dug about three hundred yards apart. Since they were almost filled with bodies, I could not determine how deep they were. I judge that each of them contained perhaps three hundred corpses. On top of these masses of cadavers, I could discern movement; some of the victims were still alive! Out of these grisly holes came screams, ‘Brother, kill me! Shoot once more!’ I remember that cry being repeated several times. Also, there were unwounded men in the graves who were smothering as bodies were thrown on top of them. They were trying to make themselves heard too. Some intended victims were trying to get away into the woods and the Partisans were shooting at them.