Terror in the Balkans (29 page)

power, which the Germans believed could provide substantial relief for

their own overstretched forces in the region.34 Another important under-

pinning of the Italo-German relationship in the Balkans, as elsewhere,

was personal and political. Hitler valued his strong personal relationship

with Mussolini, their shared worldview, and the Italian dictator’s loyalty

since enabling the Reich to annex Austria in 1938.35 Militarily, however,

the Germans could hardly have chosen more ineffectual allies.36 Rela-

tions were not helped when, over Loznica on January 23, an Italian com-

bat aircraft accidentally killed four German soldiers and one civilian, and

wounded twenty-three soldiers and civilians, despite German troops on

the ground frantically fi ring signal fl ares and waving Nazi fl ags.37

While the derision with which the Germans in Yugoslavia regarded

the Italians is distasteful and not altogether fair, then, it did refl ect real

military failings on the Italians’ part. Lieutenant Peter Geissler, a staff

offi cer with LXV Corps, provided a fl avor of such derision in a private

letter in 1941: “There’s a load of Italian soldiers milling around Belgrade.

Never did a people look so unsoldierly in uniform . . . You barely encoun-

ter any that don’t have their hands in their pockets and a cigarette in their

beak. Just as though they were civilians, the little squirts wear neither

belts nor side arms . . . Still, we shouldn’t talk about the spaghetti eaters

like that. They’re our allies after all.”38

In January 1942 General Mario Roatta exchanged his post of Italian

army chief of staff with General Ambrosio, and thus became the Ital-

ian Second Army’s new commander.39 Roatta tailored his army’s coun-

terinsurgency policy to his troops’ failings. It was not that the Italians

shied away from terror tactics where they deemed them useful. Indeed,

they brought with them a brutal tradition of their own from their colo-

nial campaigns in Libya and Abyssinia. Their suppression of the Mon-

tenegrin revolt of July 1941 was only marginally less ferocious than the

Standing Divided
155

German reprisal campaign in Serbia that year. But the Italians eventually

came to see that, against a Partisan adversary in the mountainous regions

of the NDH, brutal colonial-style methods had their limits. The terrain

was more arduous, and the enemy—even one as militarily weak as the

Partisans still were—too well equipped for the Italians’ own substandard

troops to take on. And the ruthless determination with which the Parti-

sans pursued their cause made them more impervious than Mihailovic´

to the pressure of mass reprisals.40

Instead of relying extensively on force and terror, then, the Italians

were much more likely than the Germans to cut deals with other groups

antagonistic to the Partisans. Above all, this meant cutting deals with

the Chetniks. The Italians were prepared to woo the Chetniks even to

the point of becoming complicit in interethnic killing;41 sometimes they

disarmed the Chetniks’ rivals in the Muslim militias the better to enable

the Chetniks to savage them also.

But there were immense practical failings, not to mention the moral

ones, to the Italians’ approach. Over time, the Italians’ mounting dif-

fi culties would lead them to rely ever more heavily on the Chetniks; by

February 1943, over twenty thousand Chetniks in the NDH had been

organized by the Italians into the Anti-Communist Volunteer Militia

(MVAC).42 The Italians, like the Germans, believed the Chetniks to be

better organized and better led than they actually were. Thus, when the

Italians disengaged from extensive areas of the NDH and left them to the

Chetniks, it was ultimately the Partisans who would occupy the result-

ing vacuum.43 But even if the Germans wanted to prevent the Italians

from pandering to the Chetniks—and their own stance on the matter

would itself prove increasingly ambivalent—they were powerless to do so

as long as their military dominance of the Italians in the Balkan theater

remained far less complete than it was in others.44

An even worse bane for the Germans was the Pavelicŕegime. In 1941, the

regime’s barbarism towards Serbs and other groups within the NDH’s

borders had created perfect conditions for the Serbian national uprising.

In 1942, similarly, Ustasha depravities would greatly fuel Partisan sup-

port across the NDH.

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terror in the balk ans

Again, however, Hitler approved of the Ustasha’s actions; the Ustashe,

he declared in August 1942, should be allowed to “rage themselves out.”45

Milovan Djilas wrote that “Hitler’s invasion unearthed the long pent-

up shadows of ages past and gave them a new dress, a new motivation:

neighbors who might have lived out their lives side by side were now all

of a sudden plundering and annihilating one another.”46 At various times

in 1941 and 1942, German administrators did manage to compel Pavelic´

to place limited checks on the Ustasha’s rampage. In April 1942, whether

as a fi g leaf or as a genuine acknowledgment that the Ustasha could not

annihilate NDH Serbdom entirely, Pavelicálso announced the forma-

tion of a Croatian orthodox church.47 And such was the spread of Par-

tisan territory by 1943 that the Ustasha’s opportunity for massacre and

cruelty became increasingly limited. But the damage was largely done,

and Partisan support vastly augmented as a result.48

The NDH’s image as a tool of the Axis, and the parlous state of its

economy, would in time erode its limited support amongst the Croatian

population also. This would render Croats increasingly susceptible to

the Partisan cause.49 For this, however, it is the Germans and Italians

who should shoulder most blame.

While the Germans did not formally annex Croatian territory, the

Italians did. This, and the arrogance with which they comported them-

selves—partly to compensate for their own military inadequacies—dis-

gruntled the population immensely. The Italians also introduced an

intrusive, widely resented policy of cultural “Italianization” within the

Governorate of Dalmatia. The Germans treated the Croats more tact-

fully, at least until Italy’s surrender to the Allies in 1943. They also took

responsibility for equipping the Croatian armed forces, mainly with cap-

tured Czech and French weapons. Sometimes they supplied the state

with food from German-occupied territory elsewhere. But they ensured

they got something in return; they, like the Italians, increasingly saw the

NDH as a reservoir of economic resources as the war went on.50

Because the NDH was offi cially a sovereign state, the Germans were

unable to control its economy as closely as they could Serbia’s. Serbia

suffered greater loss of food and labor to the Axis during the war, but

the NDH suffered also. By 1944 the Germans would be press-ganging

Croatian workers in their hundreds of thousands, and routinely ignoring

Standing Divided
157

pledges to maintain decent standards of treatment for them. They also

gained a monopoly, or at least a high priority, over the NDH’s oil and

minerals. Its bauxite mines, for instance, were leased to Germany for

the length of the war, and large amounts of plant were dismantled and

shipped back to the Reich. Heavy costs for the maintenance of occupa-

tion were imposed on the NDH also. To meet them, the Ustasha govern-

ment printed more money and infl ation spiraled.

The Italians infl icted similar woes on the NDH. Italian-controlled

areas of the NDH were actually a food defi cit region, so they were some-

times forced to import food. That aside, however, their exploitation of

the Croatian economy was perhaps even worse than that which the Ger-

mans infl icted.51 They exploited the interior to secure supply sources

and routes from inland Croatia and Bosnia. They also zealously procured

foodstuffs for their occupation troops and for Dalmatia’s Italian popula-

tion. The Croatian population was not only burdened by economic hard-

ship; it also succumbed to general war weariness, and grew increasingly

fearful of being tarred by association with the Ustasha’s crimes.52

When it came to actually combating Partisans, and Chetniks also,

the NDH felt the symptoms of its moribund condition on the front

line: in the Croatian army itself.53 The army could hardly hope for an

enthusiastic soldiery drawn from a population harboring at best only

marginal enthusiasm for the Ustasha regime. Croatian rank-and-fi le

soldiers suffered shortages in clothing, equipment, suitable arms, and

ammunition. Though benefi ting initially from the Yugoslav arms the

Germans sold to them, they later had to make do with poorer-quality

Czech, French, and Polish weaponry. They were also discriminated

against by their own government; when it came to allocating equipment

or duties, the Ustasha regime consistently favored its own militias.

Inevitably, there was deep antagonism between the two institutions.54

Croatian army troops also endured arrogant and abusive behavior from

the German commanders and NCOs with whom their units had to

operate. There was also a lack of well-trained offi cers—the Croatian

army’s offi cer corps consisted of elderly former Habsburg offi cers at

senior levels, of Ustashe with inadequate military experience,55 and of

Croats from the old Yugoslav offi cer corps whose Yugoslav connections

provoked their Ustasha colleagues’ intense distrust. All this, together

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terror in the balk ans

with the mounting impact of serial defeats over the next two years, led

to increasing Partisan infi ltration of the army, epidemic draft dodging,

and, in time, to the army’s disintegration.56

Yet in early 1942 General Bader, the new Commander in Serbia, whose

occupation divisions would become increasingly committed in the

NDH that year, still hoped the Croats would soon be able to assume

full responsibility for their own security.57 Meanwhile, conscious of his

own troops’ limitations, he sought alternative ways of achieving some

stability. Bader’s approach did not rely exclusively on terror. But such

constructive engagement as he did pursue was fi tful and uneven—hardly

helped by a lack of backing from the Armed Forces High Command—and

interspersed with sharp bursts of ruthlessness. That ruthlessness would

intensify as the year wore on; in October, for instance, Bader came close

to praising the 7th Waffen-SS Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen” for its

brutal “Balkan method” of burning down any village whose inhabitants

looked even slightly suspicious.58

And some of Bader’s more “constructive” notions were themselves

misguided. In early 1942, for instance, he advocated granting much of the

territory of eastern Bosnia to Chetniks under Mihailovic´’s representative

there, Colonel Jezdemir Dangic´. What was misguided was the notion

that such a Chetnik administration, even if one overseen by the Ger-

mans, could bring stability to the region. Senior German military and

diplomatic fi gures were horrifi ed at the prospect. They feared the effect

empowering Dangic´ might have upon the integrity of the NDH—with

which Dangicŕefused to cooperate—and upon eastern Bosnia’s stability

more generally. Bader’s arguments were not exactly strengthened by the

DangicĆhetniks’ poor military showing against the Partisans in April.

Ultimately, Hitler vetoed the whole idea. Dangic´, who had also cur-

ried the Italians’ favor, eventually outlived his usefulness to the Axis.

That month the Germans arrested him on a return visit to Serbia.59 The

fact that Bader had contemplated relying on Dangicśo much in the fi rst

place demonstrates not just the imprudence of the general’s approach

but also, in fairness, the diffi culties of achieving a workable state of secu-

rity in the NDH with the means that were available. Indeed, though the

Standing Divided
159

Armed Forces High Command forbade dealings with Chetniks on April

6, there were cases barely a fortnight later of meetings between individ-

ual German units and Chetnik groups.60

In any case, the Germans recognized that they would themselves need

to make at least some active contribution to the counterinsurgency cam-

paign in the NDH. But such was the paucity of their manpower that they

could not hope to resource the kind of sustained campaign that would

impose a suffi ciently permanent troop presence among the population.

Instead, they opted for periodic bouts of brutal offensive action, as and

when they judged them necessary, interspersed with Bader’s inadequate

hearts and minds initiatives. And Lieutenant General Walter Kuntze,

who replaced the ailing Field Marshal List at the end of October 1941 as

Wehrmacht Commander Southeast, would display little appetite for any

measure of constructive engagement.61 The German counterinsurgency

effort of 1942 would reach its gruesome apex during the summer months.

The Germans would have some success with small-scale hunter group