Terror in the Balkans (100 page)

lethargic life, they are very receptive to propaganda. Rumor propa-

ganda has a particularly strong effect on them. With their own ten-

dency to exaggerate, bad news and rumors are cultivated, blown out

of proportion and disseminated in fantastical forms. The only way

to combat this is through clear, simple, and insistent propaganda.127

The division also wanted the population to be granted the oppor-

tunity to listen to Wehrmacht reports and read placards in the Croa-

tian language, view weekly German fi lm newsreels, and have access to

simple maps displaying the situation on the eastern front. Furthermore,

specially appointed units should distribute both propaganda and food

to the poor from fi eld kitchens.128 In the Rogatica area, the Field Gen-

darmerie distributed provisions to the population, and reported that

it “soon enjoyed incredible trust in the eyes of the population . . . All

Glimmers of Sanity
185

were treated equally, be they Muslims, Pravoslavs or Catholics.”129 The

718th’s rank-and-fi le troops played their part in these efforts also. “The

sharp discipline and exemplary conduct of individual soldiers, and of

units as a whole, strengthens and maintains the trust and regard which

the German Wehrmacht enjoys,” the division declared.130

With Operation Kozara heralding a hardening of the German coun-

terinsurgency campaign in the NDH, then, the 718th Infantry Division’s

constructive engagement effort was now ahead of that of the campaign in

general. Indeed, it seems clear from a number of divisional reports that

General Fortner was actively seeking to promote hearts and minds mea-

sures not just within his division’s jurisdiction, but also to his superiors.

The irregular warfare that convulsed much of the NDH during the fi rst

eight months of 1942, like the Serbian national uprising before it, pitted

overstretched, often substandard German troops against an increasingly

adroit insurgent enemy. The troops had good reason to blame the highest

leadership levels of the Axis for this state of affairs. While the Nazi leader-

ship, including senior generals, had effectively allowed the Ustasha free

rein, its Italian counterparts had granted even freer and more murderous

rein to the Bosnian Chetniks. The chaos both groups had unleashed had

primarily benefi ted the Partisans, a group destined to eventually triumph

over its rivals, and one that in the meantime proved a growing source of

diffi culty for German troops on the ground. Pressured as they were, and

disposed to anti-Slavic ideology and harsh counterinsurgency doctrine, it

would have been little surprise if German troops had resorted to unbri-

dled terror as surely as their comrades had in Serbia in 1941.

Many indeed did. But there were differences with the Serbian situation

that led some German army units, if only for a limited period, to tem-

per their predilection for terror. That predilection was clearly on show

during these months, in the directives for the 718th Infantry Division’s

operations as well as more widely. But those directives, and the 718th, also

displayed restraint. The 718th’s was not an enlightened, comprehensive

campaign of constructive engagement. But from the start of 1942, the mea-

sures it practiced were less severe than the terrible extremes to which the

186
terror in the balk ans

Wehrmacht had gone in Serbia in autumn 1941. The populations of the

areas affected would certainly have appreciated the difference.

That a division might conduct itself more moderately was made more

likely by key differences between the situation in the NDH in 1942 and

the situation in Serbia the previous year. One, which German command-

ers stressed from the start, was that the NDH was an “allied” state. This,

of course, overlooked the fact that the Nedicŕegime in Serbia was sup-

posedly an ally also. But by fostering this perception among their units

more actively, some German commanders undoubtedly helped to dilute

the savagery with which their men might otherwise have conducted

themselves towards the population. A very grim corollary to this is the

fact that, whether because they had been murdered or incarcerated, or

had escaped to the Italian occupation zone or to the Partisans, there were

very few Jews on the ground for the Germans to kill.131

A second key difference was the situation in the fi eld. In Serbia in

autumn 1941 the Germans had been seeking desperately to regain ground

against an opponent who, in the western part of the country at least, had

threatened to overwhelm them. The fear this had engendered was one

of the factors, albeit only one, that had spurred them to such terrible

reprisals. But in the NDH in early 1942, neither Partisans nor Chetniks

constituted the same level of mortal threat. There was no cause yet, then,

for German troops to feel the degrees of fear and desperation that had

assailed their comrades in Serbia. This too was likely to make some Ger-

man army units conduct themselves somewhat less ferociously, at least

for a time.

Bosnia’s mountainous environment, meanwhile, was more remote

and impenetrable than much of the landscape of Serbia. This clearly

rendered the Germans’ task more arduous, particularly given their own

troops’ defi ciencies. But because the situation they faced was less directly

perilous than the one they had faced in Serbia, some German army units

were more likely to try employing more considered, imaginative solu-

tions to the challenge confronting them. Overall, the Germans did not

rely enough upon hunter group–size actions, or accordingly scale down

their reliance upon massive operations of annihilation—operations of a

sort far less certain to succeed amid such terrain. But some units did at

least try to handle the civilian population with more restraint. Among

Glimmers of Sanity
187

other things, the information they gained from a more responsive popu-

lace was bound to ease the herculean task of locating insurgent groups.

Finally, a more “enlightened” approach was further compelled by

the actions of the Ustasha. The Ustasha was the single greatest threat

to the NDH’s stability during the early months of 1942. Many German

units on the ground recognized, even if higher command levels did not,

that combating that threat, not to mention the rival mayhem perpetrated

by the Chetniks, was essential. This meant among other things that

the Germans must offer the threatened sections of the population less

coercion and more protection. Granted, the Wehrmacht’s condemna-

tion of the havoc the Ustasha was wreaking was partly motivated by the

Wehrmacht’s need to rationalize its own failure to maintain order. But

healthy skepticism should not blind one to the carnage and chaos the

Ustasha was infl icting in the NDH.

For all these reasons, German divisions were facing a situation that

called for more constructive, conciliatory forms of counterinsurgency

warfare.

Even so, German army units rose to the challenge in ways that were

fi tful and uneven, and fell well short of a truly comprehensive hearts

and minds campaign. Commanders were still clearly infl uenced by

the German army’s utilitarian, ideologically colored predilection for a

counterinsurgency campaign of maximum force and maximum terror.

Consequently neither the 718th Infantry Division nor its subordinate or

superior formations were subjecting the Wehrmacht’s traditionally bru-

tal way of operating to more fundamental questioning. And from Opera-

tion Kozara onward, higher-level commands again placed increasing

faith in maximum force and maximum terror. Underpinning much of

this conduct, probably, was the frustration felt by commanders whose

troops, due to higher-level dictates, were lacking in training, resources,

and numbers.

Yet the 718th Infantry Division, for one, still held to the more restrained

course it had started pursuing. It was left out of Operation Kozara, the

largest and bloodiest anti-Partisan operation of summer 1942. Instead,

it operated for much of the time in a region that, for a time at least, was

more pacifi ed than many other parts of the NDH. The 718th’s location,

and its now augmented order of battle, together reduced that pressure for

188
terror in the balk ans

immediate and dramatic results that bore down on divisions participat-

ing in those larger operations. This enabled the 718th to pursue a more

incremental, yet rather effective approach that combined constructive

engagement with smaller-scale hunter group operations.

The 718th Infantry Division was probably also infl uenced by the atti-

tudes of its commander, General Fortner. These attitudes, as with other

commanders, may well have been shaped by the general’s experiences

earlier in his life. In complete contrast to General Hinghofer, who had

directed the 342d Infantry Division’s murderous conduct in Serbia in

1941, Fortner spent his entire Great War serving on the western front, a

service cut short on his capture in 1916. Perhaps more importantly still,

Fortner was born not in Austria but in central western Germany.132 Nei-

ther aspect automatically imbued him with the character of a dove. But

it was General Hinghofer’s Austrian origins, and the lengthy duration

and particular character of the service he had undergone on the eastern

front during the Great War, which had distinguished him from his fel-

low divisional commanders in autumn 1941. And it was Hinghofer who,

of all of them, had been counterinsurgency warfare’s most savage prac-

titioner. That Fortner’s experience of the Great War had been markedly

different to Hinghofer’s may well help explain why he did not comport

himself as brutally.133

Moreover, Hinghofer’s Habsburg prejudice towards the Serbs is likely

to have been the decisive factor that set the predominantly German-born

troops of his division down a singularly ferocious path. Conversely, Fort-

ner’s non-Habsburg background may well have infl uenced his efforts to

rein in the predominantly Austrian-born troops of his division. Fortner

too, it seems, had no love for Serbs; after all, the 718th Infantry Division

had been particularly merciless towards the MihailovicĆhetniks dur-

ing its January 1942 operations. But the relative restraint which Fortner’s

division increasingly showed to all the region’s ethnic groups as the year

progressed was the mark of a commander who, unlike Hinghofer, was

able to place a check on his anti-Serb prejudice

But in autumn 1942 the 718th Infantry Division, like the German

forces across the NDH, would face steeper challenges. The ethnic com-

plexities within its jurisdiction became more labyrinthine, so much so

that any measure of constructive engagement was no longer enough to

Glimmers of Sanity
189

master them. And the Partisans themselves became an ever more formi-

dable adversary. Now, such commitment to hearts and minds measures

as the 718th had displayed would be tested to destruction—and this at a

time when the German army command in the NDH continued to radi-

calise its general effort against the Partisans ever more brutally.

c h a p t e r 9

The Morass

Attitudes Harden in the 718th Infantry Division

Constructive as some of the 718th Infantry Division’s counter-

insurgency measures of 1942 were, there was a limit to what they

could achieve as long as the failings in the division’s fi ghting power

remained. And of failings, irrespective of the division’s bolstered bat-

tle order, there were plenty. They would prove increasingly telling as

summer turned to autumn and the 718th faced a resurgent, burgeon-

ing Partisan movement across its jurisdiction. The frustration that

now increasingly gripped the division, and the welter of increasingly

severe directives emanating down to it from above, would harden its

conduct markedly.

Even though Operation S had showcased the success of the 718th

Infantry Division’s hearts and minds measures, its aftermath also pro-

duced more unsettling conclusions. The 718th reported that there had

been ongoing communication problems during the operation,1 and

that its pioneer company was severely stretched: “the mountainous

region of eastern Bosnia offers the enemy so many possibilities for sev-

ering roads, paths (and) railways, that one company is not enough to

get everything in order in the necessary time.”2

190

The Morass
191

The division also bemoaned its state of supply. Leaders of supply col-

umns had had no point of contact with the quartermaster during opera-

tions, and supplies had often arrived too late.3 The troops had frequently

had to seize hay and straw during an operation itself. This meant that no

payment was handed over to civilians, and no form made out. Clearly

the division preferred to requisition supplies from the population in an

orderly fashion, rather than plunder them. But what was happening was