Terror in the Balkans (112 page)

Divisions respectively, who exercised particular severity. Meanwhile,

General Eglseer, commander of the 714th Infantry Division, stood apart

from other divisional commanders also, if not for his actual brutality

then certainly for the zeal with which he sought to harden and disci-

pline his men.

These offi cers stand apart from other divisional commanders whose

conduct this study has considered—General Borowski of the 704th

Infantry Division; from the 714th General Stahl; from the 717th General

Hoffmann (latterly of the 342d) and General Dippold; and from the 718th

General Fortner.

This second group of offi cers was not particularly “enlightened,”

whether by today’s standards or by those of seventy years ago. Some,

such as General Fortner, were indeed capable of considerable modera-

tion. But offi cers in this group were clearly capable of deeds that were

anything but moderate. The 704th, 714th, and 717th Infantry Divisions

in particular were unfailing in their obedience to General Boehme’s

orders for the ferocious suppression of the Serbian national uprising in

1941. Yet what distinguished the ruthlessness of these offi cers was that,

although it was in line with the directives of higher command, it did not

actually exceed them. Theirs was a “mainstream” ruthlessness, brutal as

it was, rather than ruthlessness of a more exceptional kind.

Conclusion
251

By contrast, the ruthlessness of radical commanders like Hinghofer,

Zellner, and Neidholt did indeed exceed those directives. Not the insti-

tutional harshness that permeated the offi cer corps, nor orders from

above, nor conditions on the ground, then, can fully explain why these

particular offi cers comported themselves thus.

Radical offi cers such as these also served in divisions fi ghting in the

antipartisan campaign in the Soviet Union. One case, again, is that of

the 221st Security Division, one of three such divisions that served in

the Army Group Center Rear Area during 1941. In late 1942, the 221st

was learning the virtues of greater restraint. But that was not only for

the future, but also for a later, more enlightened divisional commander,

Brigadier General Hubert Lendle. In 1941, the 221st was commanded

by Major General Johann Pfl ugbeil. An incident from the early days of

the invasion of the Soviet Union provides a telling insight into the par-

ticular strength of anti-Semitism that seems to have animated Pfl ugbeil’s

command. In late June 1941, the 221st’s divisional command turned a

blind eye when the Order Police battalion in its jurisdiction massacred

the Jewish population of the town of Bialystok. Two grisly distinctions

marked this atrocity out. Firstly, it preceded by several weeks the fi rst

mass shootings of Soviet Jews by the SS Einsatzgruppen, a key phase in

the unfolding of the Final Solution that year. Secondly, though equally

horrendous as those later killings in a moral sense, it lacked their cold

and clinical precision; instead, it was atavistic and savage.28

The 221st’s reaction to this massacre contrasts markedly with the atti-

tude of German army units towards the Einsatzgruppe shootings. Army

units allowed Einsatzgruppe shootings to take place in their jurisdictions.

Yet they were anxious to distance the army from the killings, and counter

any danger to their troops’ discipline by forbidding them to witness or

participate in the killings. But the 221st’s divisional command, headed by

Pfl ugbeil himself and operations offi cer Major Karl Haupt, appears to have

been completely unperturbed by the unbridled, sadistic massacre which

they and their troops witnessed. That these offi cers were apparently so

unruffl ed says much about the likely strength of their own anti-Semitism.29

A second case is the 203d Security Division. During summer and early

autumn 1942, under its commander Brigadier General Gottfried Barton,

the 203d operated in the southwestern portion of the Army Group Center

252
terror in the balk ans

Rear Area. It faced very similar fi ghting conditions to those of the 221st

Security Division, now commanded by the more restrained General Len-

dle, directly to the 203d’s southeast. But the directives the 203d issued for

the treatment of the population were more severe than the 221st’s at this

time. Moreover, severity seem to have permeated the division further down.

Its troops killed far more Partisans in excess of their own losses—largely

unarmed civilians, in other words—than did the troops of the 221st.30

Such examples indicate that the radical offi cers who made their presence

felt in Yugoslavia belonged to a wider group. It now remains to consider

the infl uences and experiences that made that decisive difference in bru-

talizing their mind-set beyond even the German army’s norms.

The fi rst question to consider is where an offi cer was born. In Yugosla-

via, it was offi cers born in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire whom the

forces of historical enmity were most likely to drive towards particularly

harsh conduct. Secondly, just as an offi cer’s geographical background

might shape him, so might his social background. Offi cers hailing from

the “new” middle-class circles to which both the German and Austro-

Hungarian offi cer corps were opening up before the Great War were

more likely to be susceptible to the prejudices upon which National

Socialist ideology would eventually build. Such prejudices could affect

their prosecution of counterinsurgency also. One of the most pivotal

phases in the process that shaped offi cers’ worldview was the Great War.

During its course, offi cers underwent experiences which could be both

varied and brutalizing.

And there is one fi nal respect in which an offi cer’s experiences earlier

in life may have hardened him particularly. Counterinsurgency warfare,

it should be remembered, was widely seen as a particularly thankless

and unglamorous form of soldiering. A German army offi cer would

likely have felt additionally frustrated by the fact that it emphatically was

not the kind of warfare that would have enabled him to demonstrate the

technocratic, operational prowess for which the German military was

renowned. His resentment at having instead been “dumped in a back-

water” would probably have been considerable.31 Those offi cers who, at

some time, had served in technocratic or elite branches of the army may

Conclusion
253

well have found the experience particularly galling, frustrating, and in

turn brutalizing.32

The radical offi cers featured in this particular study, it appears, were

not radicalized beyond the norm by their social class. On this score

there are no startling contrasts with their less extreme colleagues. There

is certainly every reason to suppose that offi cers’ middle-class origins

helped them to imbibe harsh ideological and military attitudes. Yet there

is nothing to suggest that those origins were what took radical offi cers

that decisive
further
step towards
extreme
ruthlessness.33 Similarly, most of the offi cers featured in this study, however ruthlessly they conducted

themselves, served at some time or other in technical or elite branches of

the particular army to which they belonged.

More decisive, perhaps, were the experiences offi cers underwent dur-

ing the Great War. Every European battlefront of the Great War infl u-

enced offi cers in ways that could mark them well into their lives. The

lengthier an offi cer’s service in a particular theater, the more deeply it

might mark him. But what seems yet more apparent among the individu-

als in this study is that, of all such theaters, it was the East that could

subject offi cers to a particularly potent combination of brutalizing expe-

riences. The reasons why this may have been so are numerous. In the

East, men underwent not only savage fi ghting—against frontline troops

or insurgents—and miserable environmental hardship. They also had

fi rsthand experience of groups who, under the Third Reich, would be

singled out for special contempt or hatred—Jews, Bolsheviks, and east-

ern Slavs. For these reasons, Eastern Europe during the Great War and

its immediate aftermath was arguably an especially potent incubator of

the ideological harshness National Socialism would come to exploit in

its military servants a quarter of a century later.34 One might expect, then,

that offi cers who served in the East during the Great War would behave

particularly ferociously, in certain circumstances, during World War II.

Among such circumstances were those that were encountered by offi cers

who found themselves waging a brutal, protracted, and often fruitless coun-

terinsurgency campaign, amid hostile terrain and a population of dubious

loyalties, with largely substandard units at their own disposal, against a

254
terror in the balk ans

resourceful, effective, and sometimes savagely ruthless opponent. Offi cers

ferocity was likely to be heightened if that opponent was both Slavic—even

if southern Slavs per se stood higher on the Nazi racial-ideological scale

than their eastern brethren—and Communist. All these conditions applied

to the Wehrmacht’s campaign in Yugoslavia during World War II.

It follows from this, then, that offi cers’ experience of the East during the

Great War was likely to increase the brutality with which they responded

to such conditions during World War II—even if they were serving in the

southeast during World War II, rather than in the East proper.

Thus, the exceptionally ruthless General Hinghofer spent a partic-

ularly lengthy, uninterrupted stretch of the Great War on the eastern

front; in this, he contrasted with his fellow divisional commanders in

the Serbia of 1941. In the NDH, more radical divisional commanders

such as Neidholt, Zellner, and Eglseer all spent signifi cant amounts of

time in the East during the Great War. The less radical commanders

operating alongside them—Fortner and Dippold—spent none. In the

Soviet Union, similarly, General Lendle of the 221st Security Division—

a relatively enlightened divisional commander who spent no time on the

eastern front during the Great War—was outdone for ruthlessness by his

predecessor in 1941, General Pfl ugbeil, and by his neighbor in 1942, Gen-

eral Barton. Both commanders, again, spent considerable time on the

eastern front between 1914 and 1918.35

It would be wrong, particularly given the small number of offi cers

considered here, to judge such matters sweepingly. Soldiers of the Cen-

tral powers were not always repelled and brutalized by their encounter

with the eastern front and its peoples. Even if they were, this did not

mean that offi cers who experienced the eastern front during the Great

War would inevitably conduct themselves particularly ferociously in the

confl agration of a quarter of a century later.36 By the same token, the bru-

talizing effect of lengthy service in the trenches of the western front, or

in another theater, should not be underestimated either. But the pattern

that emerges among the radical offi cers whom
this
study has examined

suggests that this group was particularly brutalized by its experience

of the eastern front. And the case of General Hinghofer suggests that

such experience could be even more brutalizing if it was of particularly

lengthy duration and exposed an offi cer to insurgency.

Conclusion
255

Yet, though one must again be cautious with a sample of this size, the

evidence appears most striking when considering the signifi cance of

where these offi cers were born. It was Austria-Hungary, not Germany,

that experienced years of fi rsthand confrontation with Serbia in the run-

up to the Great War. It was this confrontation that, in 1914, led directly

to war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and infused that confl ict

with particular animosity. Habsburg troops’ experience of Serbian

irregulars during 1914, the humiliating defeats in the fi eld at the hands

of the Serbian army, and the collective memory of the death march to

which Austro-Hungarian prisoners were subjected during the winter of

1915–1916 all served to exacerbate such bitterness. So too did the fact that

the exiled Serbian army remained a rallying point, for the rest of the war,

for disaffected southern Slavic soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army—

with all the peril to the Habsburg Empire’s stability that this posed. So

too, fi nally, did the Serbian army’s central role in the autumn 1918 Balkan

campaign that led directly to Austria-Hungary’s collapse.

Austrian-born offi cers, then, were likelier than their German col-

leagues to be animated by Serbophobia. Granted, the Great War did

not make it inevitable that this hate-fi lled instinct would one day fi nd

expression in such abominations as General Boehme’s 1941 reprisal cam-

paign. After all, the occupation regime to which the Austro-Hungarians