Terror in the Balkans (13 page)

a restructuring of the high command system. Out went the old War Minis-

try; in came two new bodies, the Army High Command (
Oberkommando

des Heeres
or OKH), which from June 1941 would be concerned primarily

with coordinating the war against the Soviet Union, and the Armed Forces

High Command (
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
or OKW). The OKW

was effectively Hitler’s personal military offi ce, and would from 1941 be

responsible for coordinating the war across the rest of Europe. Hitler’s

inner military circle now consisted largely of careerists, sycophants, or at

best offi cers who, able though they were, refrained from criticizing Hit-

ler’s decisions openly. He now pursued his foreign policy program ever

more recklessly. In March 1939, he seized the remaining Czech lands of

Bohemia and Moravia. Hitler’s next move, against Poland, led directly to

war, the dictator wrongly calculating that Britain and France would be

deterred from intervening by the cynically utilitarian Nazi-Soviet Pact of

August 1939. But while the Germans took one month to vanquish Poland,

Britain and France were powerless to intervene.

Bridging Two Hells
67

Many army offi cers, particularly those originating from eastern Prus-

sia, were eager to settle accounts with Poland.41 Yet triumphant in the

fi eld though the army was, the invasion also exposed the moral degen-

eration that by now affl icted its leadership and, increasingly, its offi cer

corps more widely. Hitler’s speech to his highest commanders on August

22 had set the tone for the way the Polish campaign was to be waged:

“Close your hearts to pity. Proceed brutally. Eighty million people must

have what is theirs by right. Their existence must be secured. The stron-

ger has the right. (Exercise the) greatest harshness.”42

Now, after years of growing accommodation with the Nazi regime and

burgeoning enthusiasm for its military and ideological policies, the army

largely stood by as Nazi murder squads—the
Einsatzgruppen
of the SS-

run Security Service (SD)—fanned out behind the advancing troops to

“cleanse” Polish territory of “dangerous elements.” The Einsatzgrup-

pen were charged with rounding up and liquidating all Poles who might

conceivably threaten the German occupation’s stability. They netted

political fi gures, the intelligentsia, former army offi cers, and many Jews.

Several thousand individuals, in a portent of far greater slaughter later in

the war, were shot en masse.43

In failing to protest effectively at these killings, the offi cer corps of the

German army crossed a further moral line. In turn, they emboldened

the SS to cross lines even more bestial in the future. A number of army

offi cers did object, but few used moral arguments.44 Most other protest-

ing offi cers, whether because they were not morally affronted in the fi rst

place or because they perceived that appeals to morality would simply

be ignored, objected more mildly on “pragmatic” grounds instead: their

fear for the discipline of army troops in the vicinity of the killings or their

concern at the damage that might be wrought on the army’s “good name”

were it to be tainted by association with them. And no protesting offi cer

received any backing whatsoever from the supine head of the army, Gen-

eral von Brauchitsch.

Many offi cers, meanwhile, did not protest at all. Moreover, whether

because their own anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic beliefs were infl uencing

them, because their scruples were diluted by careerism, or because they

68
terror in the balk ans

obsessed over needing to preemptively crush any potential opposition

to German occupation, they were liberally bloodying their own hands

in the name of “security”—sometimes, indeed, in co-operation with the

SS. Any civilian resistance posed to the German invasion of Poland—

and of civilian resistance in Poland, in contrast to Belgium and France

in 1914, there was plenty—was answered with massively disproportion-

ate reprisals.

German interwar military doctrine, besotted as it was with mobile,

technical, and tactical superiority at the front line, had in fact paid

relatively little attention to counterinsurgency. But in Poland in 1939,

the German army’s leadership chose to resurrect that singularly harsh

counterinsurgency doctrine that had led German soldiers to commit

brutal acts of suppression such as those in German Southwest Africa

in 1904–1905 and Belgium and northern France in 1914. That the army

leadership acted thus was not simply because German generals were pre-

programmed to counter irregular warfare with terror. After all, the Ger-

mans’ relatively balanced counterinsurgency campaign in the Ukraine in

1918 had demonstrated that they were not thus preprogrammed.

But the senior German offi cer corps of 1939 was harder and more

radical than its predecessor of 1918. It was also enmeshed, for the greater

part willingly, in a criminally brutal regime, and extensively shared that

regime’s ideological contempt for “Slavic races.” And brutal counterin-

surgency conduct of the Belgium 1914 variety dovetailed perfectly with

the Nazis’ steadfast belief that terror and suppression were the only sure

means of keeping an occupied population in line—particularly if both

parties regarded that population as racially inferior.45 Such sentiments

would go on to underpin the German army’s counterinsurgency cam-

paigns in both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The campaign in the West of spring 1940 radicalized virtually all ele-

ments of the National Socialist regime. The Wehrmacht achieved in six

weeks what the Kaiserheer had failed to achieve in four years—the con-

clusive defeat of France herself, and the apparent prospect of imminent

peace with Britain. The stunning victory, and the euphoric accolade that

followed it, combined to infuse Hitler and the Nazi regime with immense

hubris. Consequently, when Britain refused to make peace, they believed

it well within their capabilities to compel Britain to the negotiating table

Bridging Two Hells
69

by defeating her last potential ally on mainland Europe. This potential

ally, the small matter of the Nazi-Soviet Pact notwithstanding, was the

Soviet Union. Invading the Soviet Union sooner or later had always been

a long-standing aim of Hitler’s; he believed that the German people’s

long-term future could only be secured by annihilating the mortal dan-

ger the Soviet Union’s “Jew-Bolshevik” leadership posed and seizing the

country’s economic wealth and vast rural spaces. But the aim of sapping

Britain’s will to resist by defeating the Soviet Union sooner rather than

later certainly infl uenced the timing of his decision to invade.46

The army leadership’s complicity in the invasion of the Soviet Union,

code-named Operation Barbarossa, is the most resonant statement of

how far it had by now debased itself, and the army, in the name of National

Socialism. Hitler and the leading power blocs of the Third Reich did not

regard the attack on the Soviet Union as an ordinary invasion. They con-

ceived it instead as a “war of extermination,” one aimed at destroying an

entire nation, plundering its resources, annihilating its “Jew-Bolshevik”

leadership class, and decimating and enslaving its population. It was a

war the army’s leadership and senior offi cer corps broadly supported.

By now, they were even more heavily under the infl uence of Hitler and

National Socialism, enthused at the opportunity to provide the ultimate

demonstration of their army’s fi ghting prowess, and animated by anti-

Semitism, by anti-Slavism and, perhaps above all, by anti-Bolshevism.

While this fi nal motive may have been muted by short-term exigencies

such as the Reichswehr’s erstwhile clandestine collaboration with the Red

Army, it was now established as a major driving force.47 Typical of many

generals’ views on the eve of the invasion were those of General Erich

Hoepner, commander of the Fourth Panzer Group. “The war against the

Soviet Union,” he wrote early in May 1941, “is an essential component of

the German people’s struggle for existence. It is the old struggle of the

Germans against the Slavs, the defense of European culture against the

Muscovite-Asiatic fl ood, and the repulsion of Judeo-Bolshevism.”48

The war of extermination against the Soviet Union was also a war

into which, through saturation propaganda and ruthless directives,

the generals would endeavor to embed their troops.49 The Barbarossa

Decree, issued by the Armed Forces High Command a month before

the invasion on May 19 1941, declared that “Bolshevism is the mortal

70
terror in the balk ans

enemy of the National Socialist German people. It is against this sub-

versive world-view and its carriers that Germany is fi ghting. This battle

demands ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators,

irregulars, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total eradication of any active

or passive resistance.”50

Ultimately, the hubris that shaped the pitiless conception of the invasion

of the Soviet Union, and indeed the decision to invade in the fi rst place,

would be the Nazi regime’s undoing. It would lead it, in its planning

of Barbarossa, to fatally underestimate the Soviet Union’s capabilities

and fatally overestimate Germany’s own. But in spring 1941, it was the

culmination of a series of developments which had seen the leadership

of the German army become increasingly radicalized and brutalized,

increasingly intertwined with the Nazi regime, and increasingly set on

a course that would implicate it in the regime’s worst deeds. It was a

process to which many if not most of the army’s senior offi cer corps,

including those offi cers who are this study’s concern, had become party

sooner or later.

From the years before 1914, through the Great War and the interwar

years, and up to 1941, the forces that eventually brought the army’s senior

offi cer corps to this threshold had been many and varied. By 1941, a suc-

cession of developments had ensured that senior offi cers were now tech-

nocratic, ruthlessly utilitarian, and ideologically hardened to an extent

that would have been barely conceivable, if at all, to their late-nineteenth

century predecessors. The merging of the two armies in 1938 and their

assimilation into the Nazi state had accelerated the process. Senior offi -

cers now belonged to a body that, as a whole, stood ready to wage a

singularly brutal form of warfare in the service of National Socialism.

Just how far each individual offi cer was prepared to go in the service of

that cause would be determined by the infl uences and experiences that

had shaped him over the course of his life. But the strength of convic-

tion now animating the senior offi cer corps as a whole would manifest

itself with brutal clarity in the campaign the Wehrmacht would conduct

in Yugoslavia that year, just as surely as it would in the Wehrmacht’s

campaign against the Soviet Union.

Bridging Two Hells
71

Yet neither the collective mind-set nor the personal attitudes to which

offi cers subscribed fully explain how those offi cers actually went on to

behave. Yugoslavia’s topography, the political conditions under which

the German occupation regime would operate, and the conditions on

the ground in which German army units would fi nd themselves all

helped shape the circumstances that would in turn determine how offi -

cers’ attitudes translated into action. The interplay of all these forces,

and the behavior that resulted, are the concern of the book’s remaining

chapters. The very next chapter outlines the topographical, political,

and military backdrop of the Wehrmacht’s invasion and occupation of

Yugoslavia in 1941.

c h a p t e r 4

Invasion and Occupation

Yugoslavia, 1941

In march 1941, the impending drive into the Soviet Union was

delayed by events in a different quarter. The Reich’s hapless ally, Italy,

had sought to extend its infl uence in the Balkans since 1939. But so defi -

cient was the Italian army that even the fi rst step, the seizure of Albania

in 1939, had gone far from smoothly. Less smoothly still went the course

of Italy’s next attempted venture, the conquest of Greece.1 Italy’s ongo-

ing failure to subdue the Greeks raised the ominous prospect of Britain

propping Greece up and threatening Germany’s southeastern fl ank in

the run-up to Barbarossa. This threat needed neutralizing before Bar-

barossa was launched. Thus began preparations to divert German forces

southward into an attack on Greece.

But on March 27, 1941, matters became vastly more complicated. That

day, the broadly pro-Axis government of Yugoslavia—the erstwhile

Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—was toppled in a coup

orchestrated by Serbian offi cers of the Yugoslav air force. The offi cers

were hostile to the Axis, and believed that excessive Croat infl uence