Terror in the Balkans (15 page)

Party, rejected German attempts to appoint him head of government,

the NDH was set on a calamitous path. For the Axis then gave the job

to the Ustasha, and its leader, Ante Pavelic´. Favoring Pavelic´ for their

own calculating reasons, the Italians and Germans ignored the fact that

his movement enjoyed only limited support among ordinary Croats.

Exiled for years in Italy as Pavelic´ had been, the Italians regarded him

as indebted to them. In fact, Pavelic´ did not feel beholden to the Italians,

and believed the eventual, inevitable collapse of the Italian army would

give the Ustasha an even freer hand to pursue its ambitions. The Ger-

mans, meanwhile, realized they had underestimated the scale of Italian

ambitions in the Balkans, and were happy to use the NDH to keep them

in check. In addition, Hitler calculated that the Ustasha’s steadfast loy-

alty to the Reich would bring stability to the region.24

That calculation would soon prove particularly risible. For that sum-

mer, the Ustasha would go on to pursue a course that would spark a

catastrophic chain reaction across occupied Yugoslavia. The Ustasha,

extolling a fanatical brand of separatism, was resolved to remodel the

NDH as a “pure” Catholic Croatian state. This was despite the fact

that Croats comprised just over half its 6.5 million inhabitants. The

Ustasha’s commitment to this ideal was partly a response to the dis-

crimination to which interwar Yugoslavia’s Croat population had been

subjected by the Serb-dominated government in Belgrade. But the Usta-

sha’s worship of violence—an exploding bomb adorned the movement’s

symbol—presaged how it would seek to achieve that aim.25 The Usta-

sha’s Nazi-style racism ensured that any campaign for the NDH’s “eth-

nic purity” would target Jews, and Sinti and Roma, as well as Serbs.26

Calculation may well have played a role also; vicious campaigns against

all three groups could channel the Ustasha’s extreme nationalism away

from a premature, potentially damaging confrontation with the Ital-

ians. More simply, the Ustasha regime was militarily weak, and the

Ustasha movement, as a fringe group, enjoyed limited popular support;

terror, therefore, was an alternative means of controlling its ethnically

disparate population.27

Invasion and Occupation
79

The conditions of Axis occupation weakened the new state in other

ways also. It was underdeveloped agriculturally.28 South of the Italian–

German demarcation line, it was subjected to demeaning occupation

measures by an arrogant, exploitative Italian regime. More generally,

both Germans and Italians massively impaired the new state’s military,

diplomatic, and economic independence.29

Yet that same Axis occupation also enabled the Ustasha to pursue its

fanatical program free of outside interference. In particular, the puppet

government in Serbia, fi rmly under German control, would be powerless

to prevent any action the Ustasha took against the NDH’s ethnic Serbs.30

And the action it had in store for the NDH’s Jews would, of course, meet

with German approval.

Moreover, the Ustasha did enjoy the crucial support of the national-

istic, anti-Communist Catholic Church in Croatia, even though many

individual priests would in time come to abhor the Ustasha’s crimes.31

The Ustasha also benefi ted from the fact that in 1941 most Croats, after

centuries of foreign rule and two decades of internal discrimination,

supported the idea of an independent Croatia. Moreover, few among the

population yet appreciated the true extent of the new state’s subordina-

tion to the Axis.32

Granted this window of opportunity, the Ustasha moved quickly. Its

fi rst step, days after the NDH’s foundation, was to legislate to remove

from state employment all elements who did not support the ideal of a

“pure” Croatian state. This gave it the means to expel Jews, Serbs, and

Yugoslav-minded Croats from the state sector. It then stacked the gov-

ernment’s administrative offi ces with its own supporters, irrespective of

whether they were even qualifi ed. This would soon infect the workings

of the new state with crippling levels of corruption and incompetence.

But it also enabled the Ustasha to immediately assimilate the state appa-

ratus with its own party organization and initiate the next phase of its

ethnic program. By May, Nazi-style laws were increasingly excluding Jews

and Sinti and Roma from the social and economic life of the NDH. The

Serbs, much more numerous and potentially much more troublesome,

were at this early stage assaulted somewhat less overtly, but no less surely

for that.33 The regime’s measures, personifi ed by notices springing up

across the NDH proclaiming “No Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and dogs,”34

80
terror in the balk ans

foreshadowed the carnage the Ustasha would soon unleash. The effects

of that carnage would in turn ravage the country’s population and debili-

tate the Axis occupation over the following years. At the same time, rela-

tions between Germany, Italy, and the NDH would become affl icted by a

paralysis that would enfeeble all attempts to remedy this blight.

Germany’s own commitment to the occupation was overseen by Field

Marshal Wilhelm List, the Athens-based Wehrmacht Commander

Southeast. German troops on the ground were thinly spread. In the

NDH was stationed one occupation formation, the 718th Infantry Divi-

sion. In Serbia, under direct German occupation, the somewhat larger

German troop presence was headed by the Luftwaffe’s General Ludwig

von Schröder, whose title was Commander in Serbia. Schröder was to be

replaced in late July, following a fatal air crash, by fellow Luftwaffe gen-

eral Heinrich Danckelmann.35 Under Serbia Command’s direct charge

were the static units of occupation administration, divided among four

area commands (
Feldkommandanturen
) and smaller district commands

(
Kreiskommandanturen
) and local commands (
Ortskommandanturen
).

These were directly overseen by Serbia Command’s Administrative

Offi ce, headed by SS Lieutenant General Harald Turner. Turner’s brief

also extended to overseeing the collaborationist Serbian government.

Serbia Command also exercised direct control, via its Command Staff,

over four substandard territorial battalions, poorly equipped and com-

prising men from older age-groups.36 More impressive were the forces

provided by the SS and police—Einsatzgruppe Yugoslavia of the SD,

and later Reserve Police Battalion 64 from the heavily militarized Order

Police. These units, alongside the Wehrmacht’s own regular military

police and Secret Field Police, would be assigned a prominent role in

countering sabotage, insurgency, and other forms of subversion.37

But the single largest German troop commitment in Serbia, three

additional “700–number” infantry divisions—the 704th, 714th, and

717th—was one over which Serbia Command had only indirect control.

These, together with the 718th Infantry Division, were directly com-

manded by the army’s LXV Corps, headed by Lieutenant General Paul

Bader.38 The fact that the occupation divisions were not under Serbia

Invasion and Occupation
81

Command’s direct charge augured ill for the prospects of effective and

coordinated security.

Bader’s substandard formations were “Category Fifteen” divisions,

raised in spring 1941 specifi cally for occupation duties. Their com-

mands had been formed in the military districts of Dresden (the 704th),

Königsberg (the 714th), and Salzburg in the Eastern March (the 717th

and 718th). Correspondingly, the 704th and 714th’s infantry regiments

were drawn from the old Reich, the 717th’s from the Eastern March. Two

thirds of the 718th’s infantry strength had likewise been raised in the

Eastern March.39 In contrast with the three infantry regiments allocated

to a full-strength frontline infantry division, each occupation division

in Yugoslavia was allocated just two such regiments. The divisions pos-

sessed cycle, reconnaissance, engineer, and signals troops at company

strength only; by contrast, frontline infantry divisions commanded

entire battalions of such forces. Nor did the occupation divisions pos-

sess medium mortars or medium machine-gun companies, or antitank

or infantry-gun support. They did possess other forms of artillery, but,

unlike frontline divisions, they were allotted an artillery section of circa

three batteries, rather than a full regiment.40 Their mainly reservist

personnel hailed from older age-groups, and such training as they had

received was incomplete when they arrived in Yugoslavia.41

Between May 7 and 24, all four divisions were transported to their new

jurisdictions.42 Initially, they were assigned to guarding rail communica-

tions with Greece and Bulgaria. This was an important task, on which the

southern fl ank of Operation Barbarossa and the Axis position in southeast

Europe depended, but scarcely arduous in itself. Yet these divisions were

destined to provide the bulk of the German security forces in Yugoslavia

well into 1942—a task that would become infi nitely more arduous. They

embodied what was in fact an established approach within the German

military—a cut-price military occupation, employing second-rate com-

manders, the better to resource the army’s frontline formations.43

The fact that about half the personnel across the four divisions hailed

from the Eastern March would bring no particular benefi t. That Austrian-

born personnel were so numerous was due greatly to the logistical ease of

moving troops down to Yugoslavia from the proximate Eastern March.

Granted, senior Austrian-born offi cers would likely bring some regional

82
terror in the balk ans

expertise to their duties, something of which Hitler himself was con-

scious.44 Some Austrian offi cers were profi cient in mountain warfare, a

specialism that might serve them well in Yugoslavian terrain.45 But not

until 1943 would their units be resourced to anything like the extent

required for such a role. The ferocity with which many of them, and

their units, would soon be comporting themselves—partly in an attempt

to compensate for their many defects—would prove much more telling.

All these formations faced increasingly daunting conditions as 1941

wore on. By summer, they would bear the brunt of a Communist-led

uprising, sparked by the campaign of expulsion and killing the Usta-

sha inaugurated in early June, which threatened to engulf them entirely.

The danger the uprising posed grew most severe when the Communists

made common cause with a group towards whom, during the interwar

years, they had felt only hostility—Serbian nationalist irregular fi ghters,

or “Chetniks.”46 How the German army units on the spot reacted to this

threat reveals much about what motivated them.

The travails the 704th Infantry Division faced during 1941, and its

response, are the next chapter’s main focus.

c h a p t e r 5

Islands in an Insurgent Sea

The 704th Infantry Division in Serbia

Brigadier general heinrich borowski, the 704th Infantry

Division’s commander, was born in eastern Prussia in 1880 to

the family of a police inspector. He served as an offi cer in the 1st Field

Artillery Regiment during the Great War, fi rstly on the western front,

then on the eastern front from April 1915 onward. Aside from a month

serving under the German military administration in Warsaw in Sep-

tember 1915, he remained on the eastern front until January 1917. After

fi ghting on the western front in 1917 and 1918, he remained a career

offi cer throughout the interwar years, and commanded two artillery

regiments in succession from 1939 onward.1 It was a reasonably distin-

guished career. It was no preparation for the type of warfare he and his

troops would face in Yugoslavia.

For during summer 1941 the 704th Infantry Division would face lev-

els of resistance that threatened not only the Axis occupation structure,

but also the very survival of the division itself. The intense pressures

which the 704th’s offi cers and men faced on the ground, the mind-set

of the military institution to which they belonged, and the perceptions

of their own commander all played a part in determining how they

responded.

83

84
terror in the balk ans

Initially, the 704th and the other occupation divisions enjoyed rela-

tively benign circumstances in Yugoslavia. The great majority of the

704th’s troops, its main infantry force comprising the 724th and 734th

Infantry Regiments, had been born between 1908 and 1913.2 The divi-

sion described its equipment as “complete”, the makeup of its person-

nel “good.” Its sickness rate was just over 5 percent.3 As yet, there was

little sign of unrest. The 704th was especially well disposed towards the

region’s “friendly and obliging” Muslim population.4 In late May, after