Terror in the Balkans (110 page)

240
terror in the balk ans

Together, all these factors prevented the Germans from destroying

the Partisan movement before early 1943. By then, even though the Ger-

mans were now committing greater air and land forces to the task, the

Partisans had grown too strong, militarily and organizationally, for them

to be defeated conclusively by those forces.

The Germans, reinforced on the ground and in the air, were still able to

land blows on the Partisans in the months following the White opera-

tions. The fact that the Partisans increasingly resembled a regular army

in form, size, and organization certainly refl ected their growing strength.

But it also made them a more visible target, particularly for air attack. In

May 1943’s Operation Black, a revised version of the postponed Opera-

tion White III, the Germans even came close to destroying Tito’s main

Partisan force. Yet even if they had succeeded, so benefi cial was the

NDH’s chaotic state to the Partisan cause, and so incomplete the Ger-

mans’ ability to station suffi cient troops on the ground permanently,

that the Partisans might well have been able to reconstitute themselves

anyway. In any case, close as they came, the Germans did not suc-

ceed.12 This was partly because, even by this stage, they failed to accord

destroying the Partisan movement the proper importance, and sought

instead to defeat decisively both Partisans and MihailovicĆhetniks dur-

ing the operation.13

Operation Black also saw German brutality towards civilians

reach new heights of ferocity.14 In addition, General Löhr successfully

demanded that the region in which the White operations had taken place

be taken out of the NDH and designated a German operational area.

This enabled Himmler to build up the German police presence within

the region, and call upon ethnic German manpower to fi ll the ranks of

the Police and Waffen-SS. Himmler increased his power further in June

1943, when the entire NDH was declared a “bandit area.”15

The Axis in general remained riven by dissension. The Croatian army

continued to hemorrhage its personnel and weapons—both of which

went over to the Partisans in increasingly large quantities—and the NDH

its support. Within German–Italian relations, trust had broken down

entirely; the Germans even concealed their plans for Operation Black

Conclusion
241

from the Italians.16 But Italy’s capitulation to the Allies in summer 1943,

far from unifying the Germans and the NDH, merely removed a buffer

between them and set them at loggerheads even more.

The Germans exploited the NDH’s economic resources ever more

rapaciously. They antagonized the Pavelicŕegime by bypassing it in the

decision-making process, recruiting Croats into the Wehrmacht and

Waffen-SS en masse and, at the end of 1943, embarking on full-scale col-

laboration with the MihailovicĆhetniks. Given the Chetniks’ manifest

indiscipline, incompetence, and military bankruptcy, this new alliance

exemplifi ed the increasing desperation of German efforts against the

Partisans. The Pavelicŕegime also feared that German sponsorship of

the NDH Muslims, which peaked when Himmler handed over Muslim-

dominated northeast Croatia for the Muslim troops of the Waffen-SS

Handschar Division to occupy, would prompt them to secede from the

state. Relations hit a new low when the Prinz Eugen Division massacred

two thousand Croats in early 1944.17

The Ustasha, meanwhile, entirely lost what remained of its grip, par-

ticularly after the loss of eastern Bosnia to the Partisans in October 1943.

It violently reescalated its anti-Serb policy, yet also secretly negotiated

with both the Partisans and the Allies. Yet when the Germans learned

of the negotiations, it led merely to a reshuffl e of the NDH leadership

rather than the abolition of the regime itself. Hitler, disillusioned with

the NDH at last, wanted it absorbed into the Reich or turned into a pro-

tectorate. But the increasingly precarious situation at the front precluded

such radical surgery.18

It was also in 1943 that the western Allies, frustrated at Mihailovic´’s

inaction and his real or de facto collaboration with the Axis, formally

switched their support to the Partisans.19 Following Italy’s fall, this sup-

port comprised not just material aid but also Allied airpower operating

from southern Italian airfi elds. The Partisans were also well placed to

seize vast quantities of abandoned Italian military equipment and hith-

erto Italian-controlled territory.20 Thus were they able to expand and

consolidate their territory, repel the Germans’ ever more desperate offen-

sives, and eventually take the offensive themselves. In early summer 1944,

following earlier aborted attempts, they recommenced their advance into

Serbia, linking up with the Red Army now advancing on the Balkans

242
terror in the balk ans

following the destruction of Germany’s front in the East. This was yet

another blow in a sequence that would eventually culminate in the loss

of all Yugoslavia to Tito’s Partisans and the Red Army.21

German army commanders’ excessive reliance upon bludgeoning ter-

ror and force, then, was a major reason why the Axis campaign against

the Partisans failed. It was not the most decisive reason; such were the

overarching weaknesses of the Axis occupation edifi ce in Yugoslavia

that, ultimately, no amount of restraint, moderation, or constructive

engagement by individual units would have brought more than a tem-

porary reprieve. Yet German army commanders’ terroristic proclivities

are still centrally important to this study’s primary concern. For this

study’s primary concern has been not with outcomes, but with motives:

why some German army units employed more constructive counterin-

surgency measures, others employed them less extensively or eschewed

them entirely, and others still employed terror and brutality on a scale

surpassing even higher command’s ruthless directives. It is to
that
cen-

tral question that this conclusion now turns.

The social and institutional environment of the offi cer corps of the

Imperial German Army, and of the Royal-Imperial Army of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire, already provided a bedrock of harshness before and

during the Great War. In some respects, particularly before 1914, this

environment was relatively benign. In other respects, it emphatically was

not. These respects were reinforced by the changing nature of warfare,

politics, and society in Germany and Austria during the decades leading

up to the Great War.

In the case of both offi cer corps, offi cer cadets were joining institu-

tions that were deeply conservative and sought to instill a correspond-

ing mentality among their personnel. But at the same time, both offi cer

corps needed to reach some sort of accommodation with the forces of

social and political change. Had they not done so, they would have failed

to attract that larger, more socially diverse intake of offi cers that was

essential to their viability. Yet by embarking on this course, they were

absorbing larger numbers of men from milieus increasingly susceptible

to new and radical social and political infl uences.

Conclusion
243

Foremost among these were Social Darwinism and its anti-Slavic and

anti-Semitic corollaries—sentiments that were already making their pres-

ence felt in both offi cer corps. The suppression of colonial revolts by the

German military saw Social Darwinism combine with terroristic counter-

insurgency doctrine to terrible effect. Add to all this the fact that both offi -

cer corps, presaging the rise of the “specialist in mass destruction” during

the interwar years, were increasingly preoccupied with the organizational

and technological dimensions of the new industrialized warfare. A picture

thus emerges of institutions whose personnel were increasingly suscep-

tible to radical ideology, intellectually unsuited to countering its malign

infl uence, and increasingly preoccupied with the devastating opportuni-

ties afforded by ominous trends in modern warfare.

But it would be wrong to exaggerate the strength of these phenomena

during the years before the Great War. Some were not unique to Ger-

many and Austria. Within the Habsburg offi cer corps in particular, offi -

cers were subjected to other infl uences that fostered open-mindedness

instead of diminishing it. And the same institutional conservatism that,

in many respects, eroded offi cers’ ability to withstand the strengthen-

ing currents of destructive ideology, in other respects protected them

against it. The stress both offi cer corps placed on good character, their

aversion to notions of unquestioning, zombifi ed obedience, and the

ongoing prevalence of traditional Christian values were all more benefi -

cial elements of such conservatism.

It was the Great War and its chaotic two-year aftermath that made

the violent radicalization of both offi cer corps, and their eventual amal-

gamation with National Socialism, much more likely. It was not just the

annihilative ferocity of so much of the fi ghting that played a part in this

process. So too did the squalor and hardship of conditions in the fi eld,

and the manner in which the merciless, all-encompassing “total” nature

of the Great War impressed itself upon offi cers and men.

And there were important respects in which the Great War was a

battle not just against the enemy’s armies, but against his culture also.

This element was particularly strengthened when offi cers and men came

into direct contact with ethnic groups who had long attracted disdain

or animosity in military and societal circles in Germany and Austria—

eastern Jews, eastern Slavs, and Serbs. As the war continued, moreover,

244
terror in the balk ans

many offi cers increasingly associated the fi rst two of these groups with

the emerging specter of Bolshevism. The odium with which offi cers

regarded Bolshevism was fueled by what they perceived as Bolshevism’s

danger to social and moral order and, more directly, to the discipline and

fi ghting power of their own troops. Meanwhile counterinsurgency war-

fare often, albeit not always, saw German and Austro-Hungarian troops

perpetrate acts of utilitarian and ideologically colored brutality.

The obduracy all these infl uences collectively strengthened was

further buttressed by the trauma of defeat, by the urge to blame it on

perceived enemies internal and external, by the violent aftershock that

followed defeat, and by the resolution to wage future wars in a more sin-

gle-mindedly ruthless as well as technically superior manner.

Yet even then, neither the German nor the Austrian offi cer corps was

fi rmly set on an irreversible path towards criminal complicity in the Nazi

regime. Granted, the Reichswehr offi cer corps of the 1920s and early

1930s was an exclusive, elitist institution, contemptuous of democracy

and set on restoring its prominence within a militarily resurgent Ger-

many. Granted also, the Bundesheer was instrumental in crushing the

Austrian political left and sustaining the Austrofascist dictatorship that

abolished democracy during the early 1930s. But none of this, in itself,

was synonymous with embracing Nazism. That particular endpoint was

the result of a series of further developments—military, political, and

diplomatic—that were in train throughout the 1930s.

Still further developments during the two years following the out-

break of war in 1939 cemented the process by which the two offi cer

corps, now merged into the single offi cer corps of the German army,

eventually became enmeshed in a war of conquest and annihilation in

National Socialism’s name. The moral degeneration that gathered pace

after the fall of Poland; the hubris following the fall of France; and the

ideologically, militarily, and economically determined readiness to wage

a war of unparalleled ferocity against the Soviet Union all contributed

to sealing the pact. And the invocation of much older enmities, enmi-

ties originating from before 1914 but radicalized during the Great War’s

course and aftermath, further ensured such a brutal endpoint. The ruth-

less, ideologically suffused mind-set that now characterized so much

of the senior offi cer corps ensured that the army’s counterinsurgency

Conclusion
245

doctrine in Eastern and south-eastern Europe would be shaped less by

relatively measured precedents such as the Germans’ 1918 counterinsur-

gency in the Ukraine, than by precedents that were much more ruthless.

It is clear, then, that the Wehrmacht’s higher command levels extolled

a brand of counterinsurgency in Eastern and south-eastern Europe that

was based primarily upon the pitiless exercise of terror. But it did not auto-

matically follow that all commanders in the fi eld would blindly adhere

to it. After all the Wehrmacht, like other Reich agencies, often issued