Terror in the Balkans (2 page)

that, it hoped, would transform them into willing executors of the “Nazi”

way of war. It was also deeply complicit in the campaign the SS and

police waged across Europe to “cleanse” the occupied territories of the

Reich’s “ideological enemies.” In the course of that campaign, the army

leadership became implicated among other things in that succession of

murderous initiatives from which emerged the Nazis’ “Final Solution” to

the “problem” of European Jewry.

What all this entailed when it came to counterinsurgency was that the

troops were expected to single out, victimize, and kill Jews, Commu-

nists, and Sinti and Roma, as scapegoats or reprisal victims for insurgent

attacks. The German army leadership sought to propagandize its troops

into believing that such groups were a “security threat.” From summer

1941, as the Final Solution accelerated across occupied Europe, the same

rationale was used to justify SS executions of tens of thousands of Jews

and Sinti and Roma in the army’s jurisdiction.

More generally, the troops themselves were expected to translate into

practice the National Socialist belief that terror was the answer to any

unrest that arose in occupied territory. This approach was considerably

less evident in German-occupied Western Europe for much of the war.

6
terror in the balk ans

But the Slavic regions of southeastern and Eastern Europe were a different

matter. The particularly harsh occupation policy which the Nazi regime

practiced in these regions made resistance more likely from the outset.

The often impenetrable terrain of forest, swamp, and mountain that cov-

ered much of them was an ideal environment for the development of resis-

tance by armed irregular bands. Once resistance had developed, the “racial

backwardness” of the Slavic population whom the Germans believed were

providing the insurgents with shelter and supply made it even more likely

that the population would suffer ferocious German retaliation. And in the

German military, the Nazi approach to counterinsurgency in south-east-

ern and Eastern Europe found an especially fertile seedbed.

The result was a plethora of directives and measures that were often

brutal in the extreme. They encompassed immensely disproportionate

reprisal shootings, mass destruction of villages, and the ravaging of vast

areas in large-scale mobile operations unleashed less against insurgents

than against the civilian population whom the German army believed,

rightly or wrongly, was aiding and abetting them. Moreover, after-action

reports by German army counterinsurgency units recorded countless

operations in which “enemy” death tolls dwarfed both German death

tolls and the amounts of enemy weaponry counted. These are clear signs

that grievous numbers of noncombatants had perished in these actions.

Such death tolls could to some extent be intentionally or unintentionally

overinfl ated.13 Yet there can be no serious doubt that slaughter of civilians

took place on a frequently eye-watering scale. Moreover, some command-

ers, for reasons of their own, spurred their troops to levels of destruction

and carnage even greater than higher command expected of them.

Yet, its brutal nature notwithstanding, the counterinsurgency which

the German army prosecuted in these regions did display a saner, more

restrained side. As the war dragged on and turned ever more emphati-

cally against Germany, many army offi cers increasingly realized that

they could not rely solely on terror if they wanted to keep their East-

ern and south-eastern European territories in line. For one thing, they

recognized that, though large-scale mobile operations had their place,

no viable long-term counterinsurgency strategy could do without small,

well-armed mobile patrols and small-scale garrisons stationed amongst

the population susceptible to insurgent infl uence. More fundamentally

Introduction
7

still, they saw the need to balance terror, perhaps even supplant it, with

more measured policies that actually offered the population something

concrete in return for its assistance. Consequently, for instance, they

might urge leniency towards insurgent deserters, or redistribution of

farmland amongst the occupied rural population. Complementing such

initiatives was the army’s intermittently effective propaganda machine.

These more constructive efforts were never enough to shift decisively

the direction of German counterinsurgency warfare in Eastern and

south-eastern Europe. Often, all they succeeded in doing was to con-

fuse the troops with mixed messages. And many offi cers likely went to

such effort not because they were more moral than their colleagues, even

though some were, but because they were more sensible. That they went

to such effort at all, however, reminds the historian to regard the German

army’s motives and actions with a nuanced eye.

Yet this too is to understate the complexities this study examines. For

it investigates what drove counterinsurgency not at higher command lev-

els, but among units in the fi eld. Historians have produced a compelling

picture of high-level army culpability in Nazi crimes. But the question of

how far, and why, the bulk of German army personnel actually partici-

pated in such outrages remains far from resolved.14

This study examines the motivations not of ordinary soldiers, some-

thing for which sources are often scant,15 but of divisional commanders.

In the German army as in others, the division was a pivotally important

command level. As the smallest combined arms formation capable of

independent operations, it was the basic unit of the German army. The

division was also the interface between the orders of higher command

and units in the fi eld; it fi ltered the high-level orders that directed the

counterinsurgency campaign, and conveyed them, together with orders

of its own, to its regiments and other units.

The main source base the middle level generated, the offi cial paperwork

of divisions and their subordinate units, is rich and extensive, even though

problems of reliability and completeness accompany it.16 The main types

of German army divisional record utilized here are drawn from the divi-

sions’ operational fi les (Ia), quartermaster’s fi les (Ib), and intelligence fi les

8
terror in the balk ans

(Ic). These fi les provide an extensive picture of a division’s counterinsur-

gency effort. Operational fi les contain orders and reports on both general

security matters and particular counterinsurgency operations. The divi-

sional quartermaster was responsible for gathering reports generated by

various divisional subsections, including the divisional court, the military

police, and offi ces responsible for transport and supply. Intelligence fi les

detail matters relating to the mood of the population, and to the provision

of propaganda and leisure activities to the troops. When it came to assess-

ing the population’s mood, the intelligence section relied extensively upon

information gathered from native informers. Intelligence section fi les also

contain reports on insurgent groups and activities from civilian informers,

and transcripts of interviews with captured insurgents or insurgent desert-

ers; these constituted a source of information on the size, composition, and

activities of insurgent forces within a particular division’s jurisdiction.17

The orders and reports contained within these fi les together illuminate

the immediate circumstances and wider contexts that shaped offi cers’

motivations and conduct. Division-level sources rarely, if ever, state offi cers’

ideological motivations explicitly. However, a considerable amount can be

inferred from what offi cers did, even more so when such sources are used

in combination with the types of biographical source this study utilizes.

Before turning to those biographical sources, one further point about

divisional records needs making. Divisional records, consisting as they

do of sources produced by offi cers rather than rank-and-fi le soldiers,

provide a much fuller picture of what motivated divisional commanders

than of what motivated the ordinary troops. Yet they do convey some

idea, through such sources as discipline reports and after-action body

counts, of how those soldiers were behaving. It is important to recognize

the contribution the records make on this score, and not only because

soldiers’ behavior is a meaningful focus in its own right. It is impor-

tant also because how divisional commanders responded to the troops’

behavior, or failed to respond, sheds further light on the mind-set of

those commanders themselves.

The available biographical sources relating to German army divi-

sional commanders in Yugoslavia generally reveal more about motivation

than do equivalent sources for the German army divisional command-

ers who served in other theaters during World War II. The reason for

Introduction
9

this is that disproportionate numbers of army personnel who served in

Yugoslavia were not actually German in origin, but Austrian. And in the

shape of the records of the Austro-Hungarian Royal-Imperial Army of

the Great War, there exists a source base that illuminates the personal

experiences many senior Austrian offi cers underwent at a formative time

in their lives. Equivalent records for the Imperial German Army were

largely destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.18

The Royal-Imperial Army records combine with other source types

that provide biographical information on both German and Austrian offi -

cers. These include Great War regimental histories; the seven volumes

of
Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg
, the Austrian offi cial history of the

Great War published during the 1930s, which detail the movements and

actions of Austro-Hungarian units between 1914 and 1918;19 and offi cers’

personnel fi les. These list birthplace, birth date, social background, and

service record. They were produced by the Imperial German Army, by

the Royal-Imperial Army, by their successor armies during the interwar

years, and by the German army under the Third Reich.20

Divisional command was not simply a conduit for “the word from on

high.” It often fashioned the way in which higher-level directives were

implemented, in ways that could be far from uniform. Given that the

mind-set of divisional commanders could be shaped by a multitude of

infl uences, this is not surprising.

The condition of an occupation division was determined by the state

of its troops’ supply, training, and equipment; by the terrain it was forced

to negotiate; by the striking power, ruthlessness, and elusiveness of the

insurgents it faced; and, fi nally, by its relationship with the occupied

population with whom its troops interacted daily. It was this relation-

ship that was perhaps the most important factor of all, as well as the most

complex. For it was the population, caught as it was between both sides,

whose active and effective cooperation—whether in providing man-

power, food, accommodation, or information—was vital to either side’s

success. And in a region as riven by inter-ethnic confl ict as Yugoslavia

during World War II, relations between occupier and occupied were

complicated even further.

10
terror in the balk ans

Different divisions were affected by all these phenomena in different

ways at different times. While one division, for instance, might lead a

humdrum existence in a stagnant occupation backwater, another might

be thrown into savage, relentless, and exhausting mobile counterinsur-

gency operations. Most divisions would experience both states, and

other states besides, during their time in the fi eld, and this was bound to

affect how their offi cers and men behaved.

Moreover, different divisional commanders might view their situa-

tion, and the myriad factors that determined it, in different ways. The

formative life infl uences that could shape commanders’ attitudes and

behavior were more varied than just uniformly strong National Social-

ist belief. Finally, the style of command within the Third Reich, from

Hitler downwards, was more open-ended than one might expect. This

meant that counterinsurgency directives often resembled not so much

clear-cut orders as general guidelines for action. Many such guidelines

sought to foster a resourceful, ruthless mentality, combining harshness

and initiative, among the troops to whom they were issued. In this way

they embodied the National Socialist “leadership principle.”21 But some

were suffi ciently open-ended for units on the ground to implement them

in ways that could be restrained
or
ruthless.

The importance of all these infl uences, together with the institutional

command framework within which they operated, is investigated in the

chapters that follow. Chapters 1 to 3 examine how, over decades, succes-