Terror in the Balkans (18 page)

Hitler also valued what he regarded as the Ustasha regime’s steadfast

loyalty to Germany. This was a score on which it contrasted with some

other collaborationist regimes, such as the democratic government in

occupied Denmark. Finally, as the war in general became ever more

protracted, Ribbentrop was increasingly loath to present Hitler with

any bad news. He thus concealed from the Führer the full extent of the

mayhem the Ustasha’s campaign was spawning.65 Nor were the two men

whom Hitler had appointed to directly deal with the Pavelicŕegime best

suited to challenging it effectively.

Hitler had installed Lieutenant General Edmund Glaise von Hor-

stenau, a former Austro-Hungarian offi cer, as German General in

Agram, charged with representing Wehrmacht interests to the Ustasha

government.66 Glaise was in fact very critical of the NDH government,

but there were limits to how far he was prepared to act against it. For one

thing, he recognized the benefi ts the foundation of the new state had

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
95

brought to many of his former colleagues from the old Royal and Impe-

rial Army. He was also united with the Croats against the policies of the

Italians. In particular, Glaise failed to argue for stronger action, such as

replacing the Pavelicŕegime with a fully empowered Wehrmacht mili-

tary commander. This was partly for fear that his own position as Ger-

man General in Agram might become superfl uous were Hitler to accept

such a recommendation, and partly for fear that he might be sacked

were Hitler to reject it. This was something that Glaise, whose private

fi nances were deeply problematic, was especially anxious to avoid. Nor,

as time went by, did Glaise harbor any desire to be appointed military

commander himself. For he sought to remain suffi ciently disassociated

from the proliferating war crimes that would, over time, be committed

by German troops in the NDH. From 1943 onward, as the tide of war

turned against Germany, this concern assumed pressing signifi cance.67

The failure of Siegfried Kasche, the German Foreign Ministry’s rep-

resentative in Agram, to challenge the Ustasha effectively is more eas-

ily explained. A thuggish SA man, Kasche instinctively approved of the

Ustasha’s aims and methods and could usually be relied upon to defend

the regime at every turn. Glaise recorded that Kasche had once described

Croatia as “the purest paradise.”68 As this quotation suggests, Kasche

was also somewhat short on gray matter; the main reason he got the job

of Foreign Ministry representative was that, like many of Ribbentrop’s

appointees, he was a useful check on the SS. This was an organization

Kasche hated, understandably enough, because it had tried to murder

him in the Night of the Long Knives.69

Though the Communists did not start the Serb revolt, they seized

its reins as best they could. And it was indeed the Communists, not

Mihailovic´’s Chetniks, who were best-placed to do this. The cadres

that spearheaded Communist efforts to coordinate and control the

revolt had ample experience of subterfuge; as Turner’s Administrative

Offi ce recorded on 23 July, “as soon as the German invasion of Russia

was announced on the radio, a large portion of the known Communist

functionaries in Belgrade disappeared into the countryside. The police

action which was immediately ordered was therefore only able to capture

96
terror in the balk ans

a fraction of them.”70 Students, workers, and artisans comprised the bulk

of Communist support in Serbia. Throwing open the Partisan movement

to non-Communists, a step the Yugoslav Communists took on August

10, enabled the revolt to take wing even more emphatically.71 By now

the Communists claimed twenty-one Partisan detachments, with eight

thousand members, in Serbia alone.72 An important component of the

Partisans’ fi ghting power at this point was the combat-seasoned Spanish

Civil War veterans who gravitated to their cause.73

The Communists organized their Partisan units into companies, bat-

talions, and larger detachments, with political commissars attached to

units of company size and above. In September, they formed the fi rst

NOOs in the areas the Partisans had liberated. The largest and most

prominent such area was centered on Užice in northwest Serbia. The

NOOs were tasked with mobilizing troops and supplies from villages

and towns. This made it possible to supply the Partisans, at least much

of the time, through orderly requisition and taxation rather than plun-

der. The NOOs in the “Užice Republic” also redistributed abandoned

and sequestered land and property, together with land and property

from accused collaborators. By such means, the Partisans not only built

vital support among the local peasantry—in addition to the many peas-

ants among the thousands of destitutes and NDH refugees who poured

into the region—but also began laying the foundations for revolutionary

change. The power of the NOOs in wartime Yugoslavia would eventu-

ally extend to managing local agriculture, performing judicial functions,

and organizing education.74

The MihailovicĆhetniks appealed largely to rural Serbs, former

Yugoslav army soldiers seeking to avoid a POW camp, and ethnic Serbs

who were either fl eeing or had been expelled from the NDH.75 But they

faced obstacles to widening their appeal further. In particular, their lack

of a cadre system, or of a proper track record of political activism, pre-

vented them from spreading propaganda anything like as effectively as

the Communists. Instead, they relied more on simple verbal propaganda

and supportive BBC broadcasts.76 Mihailovicálso had immense diffi culty

controlling “his” Chetnik units, compromising a great deal with his com-

manders in the fi eld and granting them extensive autonomy.77 The move-

ment’s military potential was similarly limited. Its forces were divided

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
97

into small, loosely organized detachments, with a combined operative

strength in autumn 1941 of fi ve to ten thousand fi ghters, but as late as

November only a fraction were capable of engaging in combat.78 More-

over, the MihailovicĆhetniks as a whole suffered, as did the Partisans

initially, from chronic shortages of suitable weaponry.79

Until early August the Communists directed the revolt at the collabo-

rationist Acímovic´ government, particularly its gendarmerie, rather than

at the Germans.80 Selecting softer targets inevitably brought the Parti-

sans greater success, and helped the revolt to mushroom rapidly into a

national uprising.81 Initially the forces the Germans themselves commit-

ted to combating the rebels directly comprised Einsatzgruppe Yugosla-

via and Reserve Police Battalion 64. Wehrmacht troops themselves were

only used occasionally.

By early August, however, this was changing. This was not least

because, following an attack on a tank on the Valjevo-Užice road in the

704th Infantry Division’s jurisdiction, German army troops were them-

selves now being targeted.82 The Partisans switched tactics in this way

in an effort to gain better-quality weapons, greater recognition from the

population, and more fuel for the revolt.83

LXV Corps’ summer communiqués convey how rapidly the uprising

spread. By early August, it reported, Communist bands were “terror-

izing” farmers and “robbing” communities, attacking Serbian gendar-

merie stations, and fi ring on lone military vehicles. In the last ten days

of August alone, Serbia Command recorded 135 attacks, whether on

railways, telephone lines, road bridges, industrial installations, gendar-

merie stations and other public offi ces, or Wehrmacht personnel. Most

of the agricultural population, according to Serbia Command, were not

actually siding with the “bandits.” But nor would they embrace the Weh-

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