Terror in the Balkans (14 page)

had caused the former government to cozy up to Hitler and Mussolini.2

Their disgruntlement was partly a symptom of deeper confl icts that had

beset the country since its inception at the end of the Great War. Those

same confl icts would be catastrophically magnifi ed during the Axis

72

Invasion and Occupation
73

occupation of World War II, and would critically infl uence that occupa-

tion in nearly all its aspects.

The 1921 census records that Serbs—the kingdom’s largest ethnic

group—Croats, and Slovenes comprised nearly ten million of its twelve

million inhabitants. The rest comprised ethnic Germans, Magyars, Mace-

donians, Albanians, Romanians, Turks, and others. The fault lines were

religious as well as ethnic; fi ve and a half million Yugoslavs, including

most Serbs, practiced the Orthodox faith, while the Croats comprised the

majority of the country’s 4.7 million Catholics. There were also 1.3 million

Muslims, including Turks and Albanians as well as Bosnian Muslims.3

Nineteenth-century nationalism, the centuries-old divide-and-rule

tactics of Ottoman and Habsburg rulers, and other cultural, economic,

and political forces had generated much mutual resentment between

these groups. While the desire for a genuinely harmonious, united south-

ern Slavic state was strong and widespread, then, achieving it in practice

was a much greater challenge. An evenhanded, reasonably decentralized

constitution might yet have enabled the new kingdom to achieve it.4 But

instead, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was conceived

in a hurry, partly for fear that delay might lead to Bolshevik revolution,

as a centralized unitary state.

And it was the Serbs, on account of their military, political, and inter-

national clout, who acquired much the greater portion of power within

the new state. This could only increase irredentist and separatist tenden-

cies among other ethnic groups, particularly the Croats and Macedo-

nians. It also hindered efforts to tackle the country’s manifold economic

problems.5 In 1928, a sequence of events including political assassina-

tions, allegations of governmental corruption, and the diminution of

parliament’s prestige in the nation’s eyes led King Alexander to conclude

that the country’s problems could not be solved by conventional political

means. The following year he dissolved parliament, established a royal

dictatorship, and—ostensibly so as to promote the unitary state and

supersede all ethnic divisions—renamed the country Yugoslavia.

“Yugoslavism” as a principle held that not one of the kingdom’s eth-

nic groups should excessively dominate the others. But Yugoslav society

remained polarized, all the more so as the global economic crisis assailed

it and agricultural prices tumbled during the early 1930s.6 Many Croats

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terror in the balk ans

believed that Alexander’s particular brand of Yugoslavism was merely

cover for a subtler imposition of Serb-oriented centralism.7 One effect

of Yugoslavia’s polarization, born also of widespread anti-Communism

and disdain for “irresolute” liberal democracy, was the emergence of two

far-right movements in the country. The Zbor Movement was robustly

“Great Serbian” in outlook, seeking to further entrench Serb dominance.

In complete contrast, the Croatian Ustasha, whose principal leadership

was forced to operate from exile in Italy, was fervently, violently sepa-

ratist. In 1934, in cahoots with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary

Organization, it assassinated King Alexander himself. This shocking

event seems, with hindsight, to portend the slaughterous mushrooming

of Yugoslavia’s ethnic strife during World War II.

Yet that fate was still not inescapable. With the murdered monarch’s

son, Peter, still in his minority, Alexander’s cousin Prince Paul became

regent. Real power, however, lay with the prime minister, Milan Stoja-

dinovic´. But Stojadinovic´’s successor from February 1939, Dragisa Cvet-

kovic´, sought to build on previous attempts at compromise between the

centralizing and separatist forces by which Yugoslav society was riven.8

In August 1939, on the back of extensive support in Serbia, he granted

the Croats extensive autonomy. To an extent this dug the country out of

one hole of ethnic confl ict into another, for many ethnic Serbs within the

newly formed provinces of Croatia now lost their own autonomy. And

many Croats, increasingly desirous of a separate nation, regarded their

new self-governing powers as being too little, too late.9 These conun-

drums, however, might yet have been resolved.

But the following month, war broke out; though Yugoslavia did not

declare itself for either side, it mobilized its army as a precaution and held

its breath. This, together with a sudden vacuum in Yugoslavia’s political

leadership caused by the death or retirement of many leading statesmen,

put prospects of further political progress on hold.10

Externally, meanwhile, Yugoslavia had become unsettlingly dependent

on Nazi Germany. The Yugoslav government’s bitter opposition to Com-

munism was bound to palliate any accommodation it might reach with

the Nazi regime.11 As it was, by 1934 Yugoslavia’s acute economic vulner-

ability had drawn it into a restrictive trade agreement with Germany. The

League of Nations’ failure to condemn Italian collusion in the murder of

Invasion and Occupation
75

King Alexander had eroded the Yugoslav government’s faith in the West-

ern powers; further accommodation with Berlin seemed the only alterna-

tive offering a measure of security. When Italy invaded Albania in 1939,

Italian encroachment on Yugoslav territory seemed sure to follow; this

too drew the country closer into Germany’s orbit. Germany’s supremacy

on the European continent following its triumphs of 1939–1940 placed

Yugoslavia even more fi rmly in its shadow. All this, of course, suited the

Germans enormously; it seemed to assure them a large economic base

and help safeguard their southern fl ank in advance of Barbarossa. Ger-

man interests in the region were further advanced when, on March 25,

1941, Yugoslavia joined Germany’s Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan.12

For the Germans, then, the 27 March coup was the rudest jolt imagin-

able. Prince Paul was obliged to leave the country, and Peter, still in his

minority, assumed the throne. The new prime minister, Dušan Simovic´,

pledged to maintain good relations with Germany and meet Yugoslavia’s

obligations under the Tripartite Pact. Yet the coup had been accompa-

nied by demonstrations against the pact, isolated excesses against Ger-

man institutions and individuals, and other unsettling incidents. The

Germans suspected the coup had been orchestrated from London.

Certainly the British, though they could have done little if anything to

support the coup practically, saw it as an emphatic slap in the face for

Hitler’s Balkan policy.13

Hitler, enraged at the Yugoslavs’ “betrayal,” fearing for Germany’s

international prestige, anxious to extinguish all uncertainty in the Bal-

kan theater before Barbarossa, and ignoring Simovic´’s protestations of

continued support, vowed to smash Yugoslavia as a military power. Also

driving his decision was that long-standing Serbophobic mind-frame

peculiar to many Austrians during the earlier decades of the twentieth

century. Hitler now resolved on a simultaneous onslaught against Yugo-

slavia as well as Greece.14 The invasion of Yugoslavia, launched on April

6, was intended not just to defeat the country militarily, but also to break

its spirit of resistance through maximum, terrorizing force.

There was no greater contrast than that between the Serbs’ pugna-

cious defense against the Royal and Imperial Army in 1914, and the

76
terror in the balk ans

half-mobilized, ill-equipped Yugoslav army’s almost instant collapse in

the face of the German Second and Twelfth Armies, supported by the

First Panzer Group and forces from Italy and the Axis satellite of Hungary,

in 1941. Dissident Croatian units in the north refused to fi ght, and indeed

some Croatian units sank to fi ghting soldiers of other ethnic groups in

the Yugoslav army instead. Simovic´ fl ed Belgrade upon its devastating

bombardment by the Luftwaffe, and on April 11 a separate Croatian state

was declared. Yugoslavia itself surrendered on April 18, two days before

Greece. Those Yugoslav forces that did not surrender simply disbanded

and went home, or—like the forces fi ghting around Belgrade—retreated

into the mountains.15

If Yugoslavia was worth conquering, it was also worth securing. As

well as helping to facilitate a secure southern fl ank for Barbarossa, occu-

pying Yugoslavia provided direct access to the Agram-Belgrade-Niš

railway line—the main land route supplying the Axis in Greece, and

the main link with Germany’s ally Bulgaria. It also provided unbroken

access to the River Danube, a major supply line for oil from another Bal-

kan ally, Rumania.16

Yet Yugoslavia’s geography, as a succession of invaders throughout

history had discovered, challenged any occupier. Its mountains were of

medium-range height but their fi ssures, caverns, and general topography

were similar to those of higher mountains. They were also diffi cult to

penetrate, particularly in harsh winter conditions.17 All this, of course,

made them a potential haven for irregular resistance.

Because Yugoslavia had never fi gured in Hitler’s long-term plans, he

committed minimal German forces to its occupation and left most of the

burden to the Italians, the Axis satellites of Bulgaria and Hungary, or

collaborationist native administrations.18 Italy, in fulfi llment of its ambi-

tions in the region, was allowed to acquire the most territory. It annexed

Western Slovenia and the Dalmatian coast, installing a quisling govern-

ment in Montenegro and adding Serbian Kosovo to its Albanian posses-

sion. Yet Italy, despite its great power pretensions in the Balkans, had

been as surprised as the Germans by the turn of events. Indeed, its terri-

torial claims in Yugoslavia were little more than a hastily conceived grab

bag.19 With its defective, overburdened armed forces, Italy’s defi ciencies

as an occupying power soon became apparent.

Invasion and Occupation
77

With King Peter and most of his cabinet ministers having fl ed to Lon-

don, Serbia was initially governed by the puppet Acímovicádministra-

tion. From August 29 onward, however, it would be administered by

a German-controlled regime headed by former Yugoslav army general

Milan Nedic´. Of all the regions of occupied Yugoslavia, it was Serbia

that would be saddled with the lowliest position. The fact that most

noteworthy Serbian conservatives had fl ed the country would have

impaired any collaborationist Serbian government from the start. As it

was, the contempt in which Hitler held the Serbs, and the calculation

that suffused the Reich leadership’s perception of Balkan power politics,

combined to reduce Serbia, in Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Rib-

bentrop’s words, “to the smallest limits to prevent . . . conspiracies and

intrigues.”20 Thus was the country truncated to an unviable rump state.

Yet as the historian Matteo Milazzo, considering the paucity of German

occupation troops in Serbia, points out, “what Germany was attempt-

ing . . . was the imposition of a Carthaginian peace on Yugoslavia’s Serb

population which it lacked the strength to enforce.”21

Disastrous as this state of affairs would soon prove, more disastrous still

were the arrangements for governing Croatia. A coastal strip of Croatian

territory, renamed the Governorate of Dalmatia and designated Zone

I in operational parlance, was to be administered directly by General

Vittorio Ambrosio’s Italian Second Army. The rest, offi cially, was to

comprise the Independent State of Croatia, or NDH.22 The NDH was

itself divided into three areas. In Zone II, a demilitarized buffer between

Italian territory and the rest of the NDH, the NDH was to enjoy civilian

administrative power only. Within a strip further inland, Zone III, it was

to enjoy military power. Northeast of Zone III was another demarcation

line, beyond which lay the German sphere of infl uence.

The Germans’ motives in agreeing to this carve-up were twofold. The

fi rst motivation was to give the Croats a power base that would advan-

tage them at the Serbs’ expense—a divide-and-rule ploy the Germans

had already employed with the Czechs and Slovaks. The second was

to place a check on the Italians’ territorial designs. This would help

ensure that much of the region’s valuable economic resources would be

78
terror in the balk ans

controlled by either the Germans themselves or their smaller, more mal-

leable allies—Bulgaria, Hungary, and the NDH itself.23

But from the moment Vladko Macěk, leader of the Croatian Peasants’