Terror in the Balkans (102 page)

It is clear from the 718th’s comments that a fellow German army divi-

sion, General Stahl’s 714th Infantry, was much more open to the idea of

cooperating militarily with the Chetniks than General Fortner’s 718th

was.37 Given the relative restraint with which the 718th had been con-

ducting itself for much of 1942, it is unlikely that Fortner was averse to

arming Chetniks for anything other than pragmatic reasons. That said,

it is only consistent with this study’s approach to consider the possibility

that something in Fortner’s past might have instilled in him some hard-

ened ideological objection to arming the Chetniks.

Between 1914 and his capture by the British in 1916, Fortner served as

an infantry offi cer on the western front. This was perhaps a more brutal-

izing way to spend the Great War, even if it did only last two years rather

than the entire four, than the service with the Imperial German Army’s

air wing which Stahl had undergone. Further, Fortner was a reactivated

offi cer, reentering military service in 1935. During his service in the civil-

ian police during the 1920s and early to mid-1930s, he had risen to the

rank of colonel. The police service of the Weimar period, still more of

the fi rst two years of the Nazi dictatorship, rivalled the Reichswehr offi -

cer corps for authoritarian harshness.38 On the other hand, both Fortner

and Stahl hailed from central western Germany. This was not a birth-

place that would have suffused either of them with anti-Serb contempt as

extensively as an Austrian birthplace would have done.39

The Morass
197

More telling than any biographical nugget is the pragmatic tone

and considered wording, devoid of racist or ideological overtones, that

the 718th employed to argue against arming the Chetniks. More tell-

ing still is the growing commitment to more measured forms of coun-

terinsurgency that the 718th had been displaying throughout much of

1942. Clearly, this was a unit of which pragmatism was a more powerful

driver than National Socialist values. The most likely reason why the

718th’s divisional command recoiled from arming Chetniks during 1942,

then, is also the most likely reason why it was so merciless towards the

MihailovicĆhetniks in its operations at the year’s outset—not ideologi-

cal hatred, but a fi rm intent to stamp on any threat it perceived to the

region’s security and stability.

And in eastern Bosnia, the threat the Chetniks posed to security and

stability was particularly acute. For eastern Bosnia, unlike the regions

further west in which the 714th Infantry Division was operating, con-

tained a Muslim population that outnumbered the Serb population.40

Far from stabilizing the region, then, giving armed Chetniks a promi-

nent security role would have unleashed the Chetnik fox on the Muslim

hen coop with all the havoc that would have entailed. Perhaps even more

frightening were the possible consequences of an armed clash between

the Chetniks and the Muslim Legion on the 718th’s turf.

Conversely, the 714th had its own practical reason to be
open-minded

about arming the Chetniks. It was an especially hard-pressed formation

operating in the particularly ferocious Partisan cauldron of western Bos-

nia. Operation Fruška Mountains, which the 714th headed in August

1942, was only its single largest operational commitment in a particu-

larly unrelenting schedule that summer. A formation under considerably

more immediate pressure than the 718th at this time may have been con-

cerned to arm the Chetniks as a quick fi x to its own problems.

This, then, was the serpentine ethno-political backdrop to the 718th

Infantry Division’s fi nal operations of 1942.41

Meanwhile, over three months during spring and summer 1942, enduring

harrowing conditions along the way, the four thousand Partisans accom-

panying Tito had completed the two-hundred-mile trek to the Bosanska

198
terror in the balk ans

Krajina region of western Bosnia. By late September they had founded a

liberated area of approximately twenty thousand square miles, centered

on the town of Bihac´.42 After the loss of much liberated territory in Her-

zegovina, eastern Bosnia, Montenegro, and the Sandzak, this major new

base provided the Partisans with safety and several considerable advan-

tages. The region had long possessed a particularly strong Communist

organization. It was also adjacent to the similarly robust Communist

organization in Croatia. The Germans had greatly reduced their pres-

ence in Bosanska Krajina when they had transferred the 718th Infantry

Division to eastern Bosnia in late 1941. The region’s distance from the

Serbian border largely dispelled the danger that Chetniks from Serbia

might infi ltrate it. Finally, so slaughterous had been the Ustasha perse-

cutions that had taken place there in 1941 that Partisan combativeness

appealed to the region’s Bosnian Serb population much more than did

the Chetniks’ duplicitous waiting game.43

Above all, the new base enabled the Partisans to further consolidate

their organization and propaganda. They impressed Bosanska Krajina’s

Serb population with their military effectiveness, and its Muslim popu-

lation with their growing ability to protect it from Chetnik attacks. In

August 1942, the Partisans liberated the Croatian town of Livno and its

surrounding area. In doing so, they absorbed a large portion of the Croa-

tian population into the Partisan movement for the fi rst time. Even though

they had to withdraw in October, they were to return two months later.44

Moreover, the actions of the Ustasha and the Chetniks were boosting

Partisan support north as well as south of the River Sava. Tito therefore

felt emboldened to expand his borders northward, as well as in the south-

erly direction into which the Partisans had been expanding hitherto. By

October 1942 Tito would command ten times more experienced troops

than he had a year previously.45 By early November, the Partisan-liberated

area centered on Bosanska Krajina had joined with smaller enclaves to

form an area of about 250 kilometers long and forty to seventy kilometers

wide, largely in what was supposedly still the Italian occupation zone.46

The summer had revealed just how destabilizing the ethnic rivalries

within the NDH were becoming. By autumn, the Partisans were reap-

ing the rewards. Serbia Command remarked that “the extent of the

regions that need securing, in relation to the strength of available troops,

The Morass
199

gendarmerie, and police, makes any permanent occupation impossible.

This creates for the insurgents, especially in Croatia, the opportunity

to gather up escaped groups and form new ones.”47 Matters were made

worse by problems with the harvest, which in turn were exacerbated

by the scale of the requisitions which the Axis war economy was now

demanding: “if a lack of provisions sets in, large parts of the population

will go into the forests und exist on the fringes through robbery.”48 In

time, the inundation would be further driven by many young Croat men

anxious to escape conscription to the eastern front.49

The Partisans amassed the support of this multitude with the promise

not just of protection, but also of a patriotic people’s struggle that would

abolish the country’s destructive ethnic divisions. This process would

culminate, in November, in the formation of the Anti-Fascist Council

of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) in Bihac´. AVNOJ was

an assembly of representatives of most of the core Yugoslav lands, with

Communist and non-Communist fi gures at its head. It was intended to

further coordinate the liberation struggle on a national level. Moreover,

although Tito fell short of proclaiming it a government, AVNOJ was a

further development in the administration both of the liberated areas

and of the Partisan army. The region around Bihac´ became a showcase

liberated area, with NOOs extended to its territory and new military

commands and units founded also.50

By now, the NDH’s inability to master the security situation was

increasingly clear. A measure of its desperation was a directive issued

by the Directorate for Public Order and Security of the Ministry of the

Interior issued on 9 October 1942. This directive drew up—admittedly

limited—guidelines for negotiations between Chetniks groups and the

NDH civilian and military authorities.51 Indeed, the fact that numerous

Chetnik groups were willing to negotiate was a measure of their own

mounting anxiety at the Partisan threat.

October and November also saw fundamental changes to the NDH’s

military structure. Glaise prevailed upon Pavelic´ to approve the division

of the NDH north of the Italo-German demarcation line into a series of

defensive areas. Each would have both a German and a Croatian com-

mander, but the Croats were not to commence major operations on their

own initiative. German troops would guard those transport and economic

200
terror in the balk ans

installations deemed essential to the Reich. Glaise was also empowered,

unlike before, to provide the Croats with military advice even if he had

not been asked for it fi rst.52 Important also was Pavelic´’s sacking of his

Minister of Defense, Slavko Kvaternik, a fi gure whom many German offi -

cials reviled as corrupt, incompetent, and possibly defeatist.53

November 16, meanwhile, saw an end to the unsatisfactory situation

whereby a German general in Belgrade had had operational command of

German formations in the NDH. Lieutenant General Rudolf Lüters was

appointed Wehrmacht Commander in Croatia. Under him were all Ger-

man military forces in the NDH between the River Sava and the Italo-

German demarcation line—the 718th Infantry Division in eastern Bosnia,

the 714th to the west, the 187th Reserve Division in the area around Agram,

and a regiment stationed in Syrmia that had been transferred from the

717th Infantry Division in Serbia.54 On Glaise’s request to Pavelic´, Lüt-

ers also enjoyed extensive power over the deployment and organization

of Croatian army units, over Croatian military appointments, and over

Croatian military justice in cases dealing with actions that went against

Wehrmacht regulations.55 The Germans could now also take full oper-

ational command, whenever it was deemed necessary, of all Croatian

army units north of the demarcation line. As a cosmetic concession to

the Pavelicŕegime, Glaise and not Lüters would have formal command

of those units.56 But whilst all this made it harder for the Ustasha to com-

mit atrocities against the Bosnian Serbs, it could not halt those atrocities

completely. And Glaise’s rather belated call for more stringent measures to

rein in the Ustasha’s corruption as well as its brutality came to nothing.57

The 718th’s autumn operations demonstrated that the division, like the

Germans across the NDH, faced in the Partisans an increasingly acute

military threat—and this at a time when, following major Allied victo-

ries in North Africa, the threat of an Allied invasion of southeast Europe

made overcoming the Partisans an increasingly urgent task. The Ger-

mans’ response—including the 718th’s this time—showed little apprecia-

tion of the need for restraint.

By now, the highest German command levels were responding increas-

ingly ferociously to the burgeoning Partisan threat in both eastern and

The Morass
201

southeastern Europe. Hitler’s Directive No. 46, which the dictator issued

on August 18, made some nods to constructive engagement. But it also

directed that the troops execute reprisals even more severely than before,

and guard against any “misplaced confi dence” in the population. Simi-

larly, the Commando Order of October 18 declared that “only where the

struggle against the partisan nuisance was begun and carried out with

ruthless brutality have successes been achieved.”58 Glaise, together with

the Austrian-born Luftwaffe general Alexander Löhr, who succeeded

General Kuntze as Wehrmacht Commander Southeast in August 1942,

mooted the idea of trying to open some kind of dialogue with the Parti-

sans. But this suggestion found no support from Hitler. The Führer was

already vexed by the fact that, as he put it, too many prisoners were being

taken in counterinsurgency operations in the NDH already.59

But Hitler need not have worried, because Löhr, for one, generally

subscribed even more strongly than his predecessor to the virtues of

maximum terror and maximum concentrated force.60 In late October

he issued a Balkan-specifi c version of Hitler’s Commando Order, with

ruthless additions of his own. “All visible enemy groups are, under all

circumstances, to be exterminated to the last man,” Löhr decreed. “Only

when every rebel realises that he will not escape with his life under any

circumstances can the occupation troops expect to master the rebel

movement . . . I expect every commander to commit his entire person to