Terror in the Balkans (16 page)

releasing hostages it had been holding to help ensure the population’s

good behavior, it detected a further improvement in the popular mood.5

So relaxed was the atmosphere that in early June the 704th permitted its

personnel to bring reliable civilians along to assist on hunting expedi-

tions. They were forbidden to carry weapons, but this suggests German

troops had been so at ease with the locals that they had been entrusting

them with weapons before.6 Indeed, the division warned its troops that

“social or private relations with the natives may not develop from rela-

tions formed in the course of hunting expeditions. Necessary arrange-

ments (for the expeditions) may not be discussed in private homes.”7

All across Serbia, the Germans were in reasonably sanguine mood

that spring. Serbia Command’s intelligence section observed that the

population “acknowledged German order and the disciplined behav-

iour of Wehrmacht personnel.” It also noted the population’s relief that

it had not been left at the mercy of the Hungarians,8 for the particularly

brutish behavior of many of the Habsburg Army’s Hungarian troops had

marked Serbs’ collective memory of the last war. Hunger, always likely

to turn a subjugated people against its occupiers, was being headed

off by food transports laden with fl our and sugar. The work of Serbia

Command’s intelligence section in building up favorable German- and

Serbian-language newspapers was just one way in which the Germans

sought to exploit this favorable climate.9

It helped, of course, that German troops were not yet mishandling the

population.10 Immediately after the invasion, divisional and higher com-

mands ordered the troops to behave correctly and refrain from plunder.

The Army High Command declared on April 21 that “requisitions are to

be restricted to what is absolutely necessary, and it is essential that they

be carried out by offi cers in exchange for payment or an IOU note . . .

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
85

Anyone who, in the course of service, maliciously or willingly damages

the population’s property will be punished for plunder in accordance

with Article 132 of the Military Penal Code.”11 Both command levels also

wanted to impress the population with German discipline, the better to

dispose the population towards the Germans and win its cooperation.12

Such a spectacle apparently belies German counterinsurgency’s sin-

gularly ferocious image. Yet it was not the France of 1914 providing inspi-

ration here, but the France of 1940. During the campaign in the West that

year, and the military occupation that followed, the German army gener-

ally treated civilians with considerable restraint.13 The contrast with its

conduct in Poland was startling. Some of the contrast was due to com-

manders’ concerns for their troops’ discipline. Much of it was due to the

fact that, in Nazi terms, the French were not an inferior race like the Poles.

And while the Serbs, as southern Slavs, sat lower on the Nazi racial scale

than the French, they sat higher than the Poles. The Germans in Serbia

also had a simpler reason to suppress terroristic urges: they had yet to

face meaningful resistance. Even offi cers schooled in German counter-

insurgency doctrine were unlikely to rain terror on civilians without fi rst

feeling “provoked.” They were even less likely to do so when, in contrast

to 1914, their superiors were not inciting them.

There was a sinister exception to this picture, one that presaged a cam-

paign of racial mass killing soon to unfold across all Serbia. This campaign

would coagulate with similarly murderous “initiatives” across Axis-occu-

pied Europe that summer and autumn. Together, they would culminate

in the emergence of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” of the “problem” of Euro-

pean Jewry.14 This was a process which, in Serbia, would become closely

intertwined with the Wehrmacht’s counter-insurgency campaign.

From the occupation’s start, Wehrmacht authorities were instru-

mental in marking out and discriminating against Serbia’s twenty-three

thousand Jews.15 The fi rst steps were piecemeal. But within weeks, the

measures being enacted—including dismissal from public and private

operations, transfer of goods and property to “Aryan” ownership, ghet-

toization, forced labor, and the wearing of the yellow star—were being

implemented much more systematically.16 The Wehrmacht inaugurated

86
terror in the balk ans

such measures because they satisfi ed not just its anti-Semitic proclivities,

but also its practical needs. For instance, seizing Jewish property freed up

accommodation for its own troops.17 All branches of the German occu-

pation regime were complicit in these acts. But it was the Wehrmacht

Commander in Serbia who not only approved and oversaw all of them,

but who also, within weeks of the occupation commencing, had put them

on that much more systematic footing.18 The historian Walter Manos-

chek writes that “in registering the Jews, marking them out with yellow

armbands bearing the inscription ‘Jew,’ imposing special taxes on them,

‘Aryanizing,’ imposing trust companies on Jewish fi rms, excluding them

from public life and driving them from society, the German occupiers

had concluded the fi rst phase of robbing the Jews in Serbia of their rights

and possessions.”19 On May 30, Serbia Command issued a proclamation

authorizing similar treatment for Serbia’s Sinti and Roma.20

In the 704th’s jurisdiction, anti-Semitic measures affected not only

Serbian Jews, but also several hundred Jewish refugees, mostly from

Austria, who were interned in the town of Šabac. In July these Jews

were set to work in the area command headquarters, the local hospital,

and German offi cers’ private quarters.21 It was the
Kommandanturen
,

rather than the occupation divisions, that had direct responsibility for

enacting the relevant measures. In the 704th’s jurisdiction in late May,

for instance, the town commandant in Valjevo forbade the troops to visit

the town’s Jewish dentist, and announced that “all Jews in Valjevo and

its environs have been instructed by the mayor and the local authorities

to wear a yellow armband from 1 June onward.”22

A letter from Corporal Gerhard Reichert of the 11th Infantry Divi-

sion conveyed the wretchedness to which the Serbian Jews were already

being reduced. He described how “all the Jews have been penned up. In

the towns they’ve even put aside quarters for them, which they’re abso-

lutely forbidden to leave. The roads heading out have been blocked off

with a tangle of wire, and a guard stands before it. I wouldn’t want to be

a Jew.”23 Not every soldier followed anti-Semitic dictates as completely

as they might have done: in late June, Serbia Command’s operations

section complained that some troops, housed in formerly Jewish homes

earmarked for their accommodation, were still allowing Jews to stay in

them.24 But the corrosive effect of years of anti-Semitic indoctrination of

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
87

German soldiers is easy to imagine. Corporal Ludwig Bauer of Supply

Battalion 563 demonstrated it when he wrote that “yesterday there was

a raid on the Jews where we were; they were all hauled off to the edge of

the town. It was really interesting to see what specimens they are. Truly

the scum of humanity.”25 The Wehrmacht reinforced the effect by sub-

jecting its troops to ongoing anti-Semitic propaganda; the 704th Infantry

Division’s troops, for instance, were provided with cinema showings of

the anti-Semitic propaganda fi lm
Jud Süss
.26

And though the 704th Infantry Division, and the other German occupa-

tion divisions operating on Serbian soil, were not directly involved in this

fi rst wave of discriminatory measures, they nevertheless helped to facili-

tate it—simply by allowing the
Kommandanturen
to enact such measures

without hindrance or comment. And the 704th’s example indicates that

the divisions were also seeing to it that their own troops were being condi-

tioned to approve of such measures. This in turn would help provide the

psychological preconditions for the occupation divisions’ direct involve-

ment in a later, more terrible phase of the persecution of the Serbian Jews.

It was this phase, a shift from discrminatory measures to scapegoating Jews

for insurgent attacks and victimizing them in mass reprisals, that would

become so closely intertwined with the Wehrmacht’s security campaign.

And even this early on the 704th Infantry Division, like the German

occupiers generally, could be heavy-handed towards the wider Serbian

population also. The 704th’s divisional command declared early in June

“that interference by the population or attacks on Wehrmacht personnel

or property (must) be punished on the spot with suitably just but harsh

measures.”27 A divisional order of a fortnight later urged the “punish-

ment,” by what means it did not specify, of civilians caught with radios.28

As long as Serbia remained largely quiescent, the troops were not going

to interpret such imprecise exhortations as a blank check for brutality.

But they might do so were resistance to fl are up.

And though insurgent attacks on German personnel were very rare dur-

ing the occupation’s opening weeks, the Germans’ reaction to such cases

was an ominous straw in the wind. On April 18, the day after Yugoslavia’s

capitulation, the Waffen-SS Division “Das Reich” executed thirty-six

88
terror in the balk ans

Serbs in retaliation for the shooting of one of its own men. The shooting

of a German offi cer in the village of Donji Dobric´ three days later brought

the village’s complete destruction and a fi erce directive from Field Mar-

shal von Weichs, commander of the Second Army. Weichs ordered that,

wherever an armed band appeared, men from that area capable of bear-

ing arms were to be seized and shot, and their corpses hanged for public

display, unless they could prove they had no connection with the “ban-

dits.” Hostages were to be seized in advance. Then on May 19, Weichs

stipulated that in the future one hundred Serbs should be shot for every

German soldier who “came to harm” in any Serb attack. As yet, German

units in the fi eld chose not to go that far. But Weichs’ 1:100 order would

soon prove to be the most ominous straw in the wind of all.29

And Weichs’ use of the term
bandit
is instructive; only in summer

1942 would
Reichsführer
-SS Heinrich Himmler himself order the term

to replace
partisan
in offi cial communication.30 Although the term was

frequently being employed by German commands before this date,

Weichs and the German army formations serving in Yugoslavia were

particularly quick to employ it. It is not only likely that, as with Himmler

in 1942, they were seeking to dehumanize the insurgents in their men’s

eyes. It is also likely that the region’s long history of banditry was infl u-

encing their perception of the enemy they were facing.

By the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union the 704th’s unease was

increasing, as sightings of “bandit” groups grew more frequent. June 20,

two days before the invasion, brought reports that irregulars were caus-

ing unrest and unsettling the population east of the main Valjevo-Užice

road.31 Some attacks, such as those around the towns of Kacˇan and Kos-

jeric´, were the work of civilian marauders.32 Their mere presence stirred

the German military’s traditional abhorrence of armed civilians. Around

the same time LXV Corps urged its divisions to form
Jagdkommandos
,

well-equipped and highly mobile “hunter groups.” Such units were

designed to carry out reconnaissance patrols or larger “hunting expe-

ditions” to locate, pursue, and annihilate irregular groups.33 Forming

viable hunter groups from the paltry forces available would prove dif-

fi cult in the extreme. But this was what was now expected.

In fact, the potential danger to security was even more serious. So

rapidly had the Yugoslav army collapsed that many of its troops had

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
89

never even been taken prisoner; instead they had simply gone home. In

areas where Yugoslav army units had dissolved themselves thus, vast

quantities of small arms remained unaccounted for and ripe for seizure

by would-be irregulars.34 Before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the

irregular fi ghters—as distinct from outright bandits or marauders—who

were most at large in Yugoslavia were known as Chetniks.

Chetniks had had a centuries-old involvement in the region’s confl icts

right up to the Great War. By 1918 they enjoyed status as a leading patriotic

group, and considerable political infl uence. By World War II, however, the

movement had fragmented. Initial Chetnik attacks on the Axis occupation

regime were the work of uncoordinated individual bands. But there were

two larger Chetnik groups of note. The fi rst was a stridently pro-Axis group,