Terror in the Balkans (84 page)

rmacht unless the troops could overcome their paucity on the ground

and establish a lasting, effective presence that protected collaborating

civilians against Communist strikes.84

Given the revolt’s speed and scale, and the view, widespread among

Serbs, that revolt against the occupiers was the only means of staying the

Ustasha’s bloodied hand, it is likely that farmers and rural communities

were cooperating more willingly with the Partisans than LXV Corps was

acknowledging. Nevertheless, given the Communists’ brutality towards

98
terror in the balk ans

reluctant and “suspect” elements during the Montenegrin revolt,85 LXV

Corps’ assertions of Partisan ruthlessness are unlikely to have been wide

of the mark. Whatever the reality, however, the scale of the uprising

alarmed the Germans in the extreme.

The Germans sought to counter the uprising at every level. At the high-

est level, they disbanded the Acímovicádministration. The administra-

tion had attempted to quell the uprising in mid-August by appealing to

the Serbian people to assist the authorities against the Communist Parti-

sans, and appealing to all rebels to return to their homes within eighteen

days. Both pleas proved fruitless. Moreover, there were indications that

Pecánac Chetniks had begun deserting to the rebels. On August 29 the

recently appointed Commander in Serbia, General Danckelman, had a

new Serbian government installed, under the anti-Communist strong-

man General Nedic´.86

Nedic´, Danckelmann hoped, would command high levels of respect

not only among the population generally, but more specifi cally among

those sections of the population, particularly former Yugoslav army

offi cers, who were attracted to the MihailovicĆhetniks. But although

Nedic´ held strongly anti-Communist and anti-Semitic views, he was no

straightforward quisling, and took some persuading to assume leader-

ship of the new government. He also managed to wring some conces-

sions out of the Germans. For instance, he was permitted to create a new

body, the Serbian State Guard, combining the Serbian gendarmerie with

several thousand Pecánac Chetniks—transferred to the gendarmerie as

auxiliaries—in a seventeen thousand-strong force. He also got General

Danckelmann to promise that reprisals would be directed only against

the guilty.87 As the uprising mushroomed, however, the Germans would

renege on this particular pledge. While Danckelmann himself may well

have been sincere when he made it, his room for maneuver was con-

strained by his superior in Athens, Field Marshal List. List, for his part,

was deeply skeptical as to the merits of engaging the Serbs.88

In the fi eld, LXV Corps urgently requested more mobile troops,

accompanied by interpreters, “who are to instruct the population that

the troops are there to protect the farmers and their property, and

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
99

therefore expect their help!”89 Such appeals were part of a wider Ger-

man propaganda effort during this period; extensive responsibility for

propaganda lay with Section S, a branch of the Wehrmacht propaganda

department of the Armed Forces High Command. Section S employed

newspapers, public speakers, and other propaganda methods to recruit

ethnic Germans as auxiliaries. It also oversaw production of propaganda

newspapers for Serbian readers.

The section sought to put a positive spin on conditions in the coun-

try, opining that, “if the current situation does seem somewhat tense,

experience leads one to believe that the Serbs will be profoundly sobered

when the sheer scale of the German victory in the East becomes clear.”90

And General Turner’s administrative offi ce, though scathing of German

propaganda’s initial efforts in Serbia, remained optimistic that popular

Communist support could be strangled at birth if the Germans cooper-

ated fully with the collaborationist regime. Turner’s offi ce thus gave the

Serbian Minister of the Interior “an opportunity to develop a truly effec-

tive counter-propaganda campaign. Leafl ets were distributed, represen-

tatives sent into the villages and so on. These actions had great success;

it can be claimed that the Serbian population in general has not been

swept up by the Communist wave.”91

But Turner, a particularly keen advocate of engagement with the collab-

orationist government, and Section S were being too optimistic. The SD,

reporting at the end of June, perceived a strong Communist propaganda

drive across Serbia: “well over half the population, particularly in Bel-

grade, has a Soviet-friendly attitude.”92 And Field Marshal List perceived

that the revolt was rapidly developing into a full-scale national uprising.93

In any case, if the population were to be receptive to Axis propaganda

then the Germans had to demonstrate that they could actually defeat the

uprising. Having more troops at its disposal, LXV Corps maintained,

would enable the occupation divisions to assemble truck-borne hunter

groups to take the fi ght to the rebels. As things stood, the divisions

lacked both trucks and men. Most of the available trucks, the Adminis-

trative Offi ce maintained in late July, were “mousetraps”; their need to

overload in order to transport suffi cient troop numbers made them sit-

ting targets. The 717th Infantry Division described the state of its trucks

as “wholly inadequate.”94

100
terror in the balk ans

In northwest Serbia, where the revolt was strongest, the Germans effec-

tively relinquished control of the villages and countryside—with its

craggy mountains, deep river valleys, and impenetrable forests—and

concentrated on holding principal towns and patrolling major road and

rail links. But in their fear of being overwhelmed they were already exact-

ing fi erce reprisals. LXV Corps frantically urged “more hunter groups,

bigger operations, brutal and vigorous action, burning of buildings and

villages from which Wehrmacht personnel are attacked, ruthless fi re in

combat, hanging of captured saboteurs.”95 One thousand Serbian citi-

zens had already fallen victim to reprisals by the end of August.96 Calls

from Hitler himself helped drive the killing; on July 24 Serbia Command

noted an order “from the Armed Forces High Command, issued via

Wehrmacht Command South-East, in which the Führer and Supreme

Commander of the Armed Forces voiced his expectation that the Com-

mander in Serbia will extinguish all trouble spots through brutal action

and the harshest reprisals.”97

Initially, the bulk of the executions was carried out by units of Einsatz-

gruppe Yugoslavia—which, with their small size, usually assigned the

actual shooting to men of the Serbian gendarmerie.98 The principal

victims were Communists and male Jews—the next step in that further

escalation in the process that would eventually see the Serbian Jews vir-

tually wiped from the land.99 In one such reprisal, one hundred Jews

and twenty-two Communists were executed in Belgrade on July 29, in

retaliation for an arson attack on German trucks by a sixteen-year-old

Jewish boy.100 In fact, much of the groundwork for a “targeted” reprisal

campaign had been set by the army leadership on the eve of the Balkan

campaign. On April 2 General Halder, chief of staff at the Army High

Command, had himself directed that the SS and police should seize

Jews and Communists in the newly-occupied territory as potential “dan-

gers to security.”101

Though there undoubtedly was an ideological motive for target-

ting Jews and Communists as reprisal victims, the Germans had other

motives also. Aside from the fact that Communist Partisans were

heading the national uprising, there was also a calculating reason for

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
101

directing reprisals at Jews and Communists. In early August, after Colo-

nel von Stockhausen, the area commandant in Užice, ordered eighty-one

Serbs executed in retaliation for the death of one German policeman,

the Serbian gendarmerie began refusing to shoot its own people.102 The

Germans feared, at least during the uprising’s early stage, that such

indiscriminate killing might fatally damage relations with the general

population—not to mention waste the lives of potentially useful inform-

ers. By contrast, directing reprisals at narrow sections of the population

was less likely to provoke damaging protest from the rest of it.103 Further-

more, as Section S opined, the Germans could still cow the general pop-

ulation anyway—for, by victimizing Jews and Communists, they could

also demonstrate their
capacity
for terror.104

And to assume that the German administration in Serbia saw Jews

and Communists as separate categories of enemy is to miss the point. In

Serbia, as in the Soviet Union, German policy
equated
Jews with Com-

munists. Indeed, the SS and police in Serbia judged that labelling Jews

as Communists was a convenient, indeed automatic way of justifying

their liquidation.105 And for the Wehrmacht, Section S sought to ingrain

the image of the Jew as the enemy among both German personnel and

pro-Axis Serbian groups. Its message was that, while the Communist

Partisans were the main perpetrators of unrest, it was the Jews who were

the puppet-masters of the Communist-led uprising.106

Indeed, the Wehrmacht was complicit from the start in seizing and

killing Jews and Communists, not to mention considerable numbers of

Sinti and Roma, and became more complicit over time. Einsatzgruppe

Yugoslavia cooperated especially closely with the administrative offi ce,

which, though headed by an SS general, was integral to Serbia Com-

mand. The Wehrmacht’s own Secret Field Police and Field Gendar-

merie, as well as Reserve Police Battalion 64, became directly involved

in the killings. German army personnel were given the task of handing

over “suspects”—earmarked reprisal victims in all but name—to any

one of these bodies. Within the 704th Infantry Division’s jurisdiction

during July, for instance, the 724th Infantry Regiment reported that it

had assisted the Secret Field Police and the Field Gendarmerie in seiz-

ing suspected Communists; thirteen were arrested, for example, on the

night of July 8.107

102
terror in the balk ans

Some army
Kommandanturen
were already participating in mass exe-

cutions themselves, as well as directing the SS and police to carry them

out.108 One instance involved the commander of one of the 704th’s regi-

ments. On July 18 Brigadier-General Adalbert Lontschar, commander of

the 724th Infantry Regiment, was fi red upon in his staff car, “Lasalle,”

in the woods near the village of Razna on a journey back from Valjevo.

Three shots went into the car from above, only one of them causing

any injury to its occupants. But because the densely wooded terrain

prevented the culprits from being seen, the local district command, in

cooperation with the SS and police and the Serbian gendarmerie, had

fi fty-two Jews, Communists, and other individuals shot. This was retali-

ation for an attack in which no one had actually been killed.109 And at

least one unit of the 724th was already bloodying its own hands sub-

stantially; an operation southwest of Užice on August 17 involving the

regiment’s fi rst company saw fi fteen Communists shot in combat and

twenty-three executed afterwards, “nineteen of whom were hanged at

the railway station in Uzici [
sic
] because they had been supplying ban-

dits in the Gradina (internment) camp with provisions.”110

On July 17, Einsatzgruppe personnel were distributed as “security

advisers” among the army’s four area commands. And on August 13,

LXV Corps instructed its battalion commanders to assemble mixed

hunter groups. These could incorporate personnel not only from the

German army, but also from the SS and police, as well as from the Ser-

bian gendarmerie. The establishment of such groups made it more likely

still that army personnel, this time from the occupation divisions rather

than the
Kommandanturen
, would become more extensively involved in

the killing of Jews and Communists.111

Nevertheless, establishing just how far the divisions’ troops were actu-

ally involved in such killing, whether in collusion with other agencies or

not, can be far from straightforward. For one thing, the division-level and

regional command-level sources for summer 1941 do not specify which

hunter groups mixed army and SS and police personnel. Presumably

many would indeed have had mixed personnel, simply because of the

important role the SS and police played in seizing suspects. Irrespective

of the groups’ composition, however, it is unclear just how far they were

actually targeting or killing Jews and Communists.

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103

This is apparent in a report of 10 October. Here LXV Corps recorded

that, between August 14 and September 26, all hunter groups across its