Terror in the Balkans (19 page)

lacked both trucks and men. Most of the available trucks, the Adminis-

trative Offi ce maintained in late July, were “mousetraps”; their need to

overload in order to transport suffi cient troop numbers made them sit-

ting targets. The 717th Infantry Division described the state of its trucks

as “wholly inadequate.”94

100
terror in the balk ans

In northwest Serbia, where the revolt was strongest, the Germans effec-

tively relinquished control of the villages and countryside—with its

craggy mountains, deep river valleys, and impenetrable forests—and

concentrated on holding principal towns and patrolling major road and

rail links. But in their fear of being overwhelmed they were already exact-

ing fi erce reprisals. LXV Corps frantically urged “more hunter groups,

bigger operations, brutal and vigorous action, burning of buildings and

villages from which Wehrmacht personnel are attacked, ruthless fi re in

combat, hanging of captured saboteurs.”95 One thousand Serbian citi-

zens had already fallen victim to reprisals by the end of August.96 Calls

from Hitler himself helped drive the killing; on July 24 Serbia Command

noted an order “from the Armed Forces High Command, issued via

Wehrmacht Command South-East, in which the Führer and Supreme

Commander of the Armed Forces voiced his expectation that the Com-

mander in Serbia will extinguish all trouble spots through brutal action

and the harshest reprisals.”97

Initially, the bulk of the executions was carried out by units of Einsatz-

gruppe Yugoslavia—which, with their small size, usually assigned the

actual shooting to men of the Serbian gendarmerie.98 The principal

victims were Communists and male Jews—the next step in that further

escalation in the process that would eventually see the Serbian Jews vir-

tually wiped from the land.99 In one such reprisal, one hundred Jews

and twenty-two Communists were executed in Belgrade on July 29, in

retaliation for an arson attack on German trucks by a sixteen-year-old

Jewish boy.100 In fact, much of the groundwork for a “targeted” reprisal

campaign had been set by the army leadership on the eve of the Balkan

campaign. On April 2 General Halder, chief of staff at the Army High

Command, had himself directed that the SS and police should seize

Jews and Communists in the newly-occupied territory as potential “dan-

gers to security.”101

Though there undoubtedly was an ideological motive for target-

ting Jews and Communists as reprisal victims, the Germans had other

motives also. Aside from the fact that Communist Partisans were

heading the national uprising, there was also a calculating reason for

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
101

directing reprisals at Jews and Communists. In early August, after Colo-

nel von Stockhausen, the area commandant in Užice, ordered eighty-one

Serbs executed in retaliation for the death of one German policeman,

the Serbian gendarmerie began refusing to shoot its own people.102 The

Germans feared, at least during the uprising’s early stage, that such

indiscriminate killing might fatally damage relations with the general

population—not to mention waste the lives of potentially useful inform-

ers. By contrast, directing reprisals at narrow sections of the population

was less likely to provoke damaging protest from the rest of it.103 Further-

more, as Section S opined, the Germans could still cow the general pop-

ulation anyway—for, by victimizing Jews and Communists, they could

also demonstrate their
capacity
for terror.104

And to assume that the German administration in Serbia saw Jews

and Communists as separate categories of enemy is to miss the point. In

Serbia, as in the Soviet Union, German policy
equated
Jews with Com-

munists. Indeed, the SS and police in Serbia judged that labelling Jews

as Communists was a convenient, indeed automatic way of justifying

their liquidation.105 And for the Wehrmacht, Section S sought to ingrain

the image of the Jew as the enemy among both German personnel and

pro-Axis Serbian groups. Its message was that, while the Communist

Partisans were the main perpetrators of unrest, it was the Jews who were

the puppet-masters of the Communist-led uprising.106

Indeed, the Wehrmacht was complicit from the start in seizing and

killing Jews and Communists, not to mention considerable numbers of

Sinti and Roma, and became more complicit over time. Einsatzgruppe

Yugoslavia cooperated especially closely with the administrative offi ce,

which, though headed by an SS general, was integral to Serbia Com-

mand. The Wehrmacht’s own Secret Field Police and Field Gendar-

merie, as well as Reserve Police Battalion 64, became directly involved

in the killings. German army personnel were given the task of handing

over “suspects”—earmarked reprisal victims in all but name—to any

one of these bodies. Within the 704th Infantry Division’s jurisdiction

during July, for instance, the 724th Infantry Regiment reported that it

had assisted the Secret Field Police and the Field Gendarmerie in seiz-

ing suspected Communists; thirteen were arrested, for example, on the

night of July 8.107

102
terror in the balk ans

Some army
Kommandanturen
were already participating in mass exe-

cutions themselves, as well as directing the SS and police to carry them

out.108 One instance involved the commander of one of the 704th’s regi-

ments. On July 18 Brigadier-General Adalbert Lontschar, commander of

the 724th Infantry Regiment, was fi red upon in his staff car, “Lasalle,”

in the woods near the village of Razna on a journey back from Valjevo.

Three shots went into the car from above, only one of them causing

any injury to its occupants. But because the densely wooded terrain

prevented the culprits from being seen, the local district command, in

cooperation with the SS and police and the Serbian gendarmerie, had

fi fty-two Jews, Communists, and other individuals shot. This was retali-

ation for an attack in which no one had actually been killed.109 And at

least one unit of the 724th was already bloodying its own hands sub-

stantially; an operation southwest of Užice on August 17 involving the

regiment’s fi rst company saw fi fteen Communists shot in combat and

twenty-three executed afterwards, “nineteen of whom were hanged at

the railway station in Uzici [
sic
] because they had been supplying ban-

dits in the Gradina (internment) camp with provisions.”110

On July 17, Einsatzgruppe personnel were distributed as “security

advisers” among the army’s four area commands. And on August 13,

LXV Corps instructed its battalion commanders to assemble mixed

hunter groups. These could incorporate personnel not only from the

German army, but also from the SS and police, as well as from the Ser-

bian gendarmerie. The establishment of such groups made it more likely

still that army personnel, this time from the occupation divisions rather

than the
Kommandanturen
, would become more extensively involved in

the killing of Jews and Communists.111

Nevertheless, establishing just how far the divisions’ troops were actu-

ally involved in such killing, whether in collusion with other agencies or

not, can be far from straightforward. For one thing, the division-level and

regional command-level sources for summer 1941 do not specify which

hunter groups mixed army and SS and police personnel. Presumably

many would indeed have had mixed personnel, simply because of the

important role the SS and police played in seizing suspects. Irrespective

of the groups’ composition, however, it is unclear just how far they were

actually targeting or killing Jews and Communists.

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
103

This is apparent in a report of 10 October. Here LXV Corps recorded

that, between August 14 and September 26, all hunter groups across its

subordinate divisions had between them shot thirty-three Communists

and arrested another twenty-nine. These Communists, one assumes,

were unarmed civilians rather than actual insurgents, because LXV

Corps recorded the ninety-three insurgents its hunter groups had report-

edly killed under the separate category of “bandits.” LXV Corps also

distinguished between Communists and “suspects” more generally; the

hunter groups, it reported, had arrested one hundred and thirty-eight

such persons. 112

It is distinctly possible that Jews were being mixed in with any or all of

these categories. The particularly strong suspicion arises that the hunter

groups, in line with the practice of the SS and police in Serbia, were

using the term “Communist” as a covering label for Jews.113 Indeed, this

consideration arouses a more general suspicion as to the racial identity

of a great many of the “Communists” who were being killed during the

summer months.

However, the majority of killing operations which divisional troops

carried out—the majority of these, in turn, being the work of those same

hunter groups on whom LXV Corps compiled its October 10 report—

were smaller than those in which the
Kommandanturen
were involved.

This was due, if nothing else, to the easier access to interned Jews and

Communists which town- and city-based
Kommandanturen
possessed.

Some examples of large-scale reprisals involving the
Kommandanturen

have been cited already. A further example is the actions of the area com-

mand in Belgrade during August and September. Over the course of these

two months, the area command cooperated with the SS and police in a

sequence of major raids on suspect Communists, Communist leaders, and

Communist Party offi ces. On September 29, the day after one such raid,

an “attack” on German soldiers in Belgrade—the report makes no men-

tion of whether any German soldier had actually died as a result—brought

the execution of one hundred and fi fty Communists in reprisal.114

Yet by October, the Serbian national uprising having mushroomed

alarmingly and German attitudes having hardened further, divisional

troops were themselves more extensively involved in the seizing and kill-

ing of increasingly large numbers of Jews and Communists.115 Those

104
terror in the balk ans

summer Wehrmacht decrees that had victimized such groups, directed

army units to collude ever more extensively with the SS and police, and

already bloodied the hands of some units among both the
Kommandan-

turen
and the occupation divisions, helped lay the groundwork for this

later murderous escalation.

More generally, meanwhile, the 704th Infantry Division, like its fellow

divisions, strove ever more desperately to stave off the occupation edi-

fi ce’s collapse. The division had help from Reserve Police Battalion 64,

which dispatched a car-borne company to Užice in July.116 But it faced

a thankless task nonetheless. The insurgents were infi ltrating and co-

opting the population with ease. In late July, for example, Reserve Police

Battalion 64 committed a company to no fewer than eleven seek-locate-

destroy missions that, launched as they were on the basis of imprecise

tip-offs from locals, proved an utter waste of time. The insurgents were

invariably able to slip away, and the battalion was certain that civilians

had forewarned them.117 A little later, a battalion of the 724th Infantry

Regiment judged that the insurgents “possess an excellent and far-reach-

ing information service which works very rapidly and reliably . . . its

timely warnings always make it possible (for the insurgents) to escape

encirclement.”118

Co-opting the population so easily also enabled the Partisans to move

undetected within it. LXV Corps reported that a band of Communists

had attacked a town by disguising themselves as farmers in order to

smuggle their weapons through the marketplace.119 The Germans’ own

efforts in intelligence-gathering were limited among other things by the

paltry Luftwaffe forces available. There were no operative units in the

Yugoslav theater, so Wehrmacht Command Southeast was reduced to

imploring the High Command to transfer a Luftwaffe training school to

Serbia, even if it was equipped only with primitive machines.120

The insurgents also targeted pro-Axis collaborators with ease. So

reported the 724th Infantry Regiment on August 20: “the district head-

man of Gucˇa appeared today in the regimental offi ce . . . He had been

a prisoner of war, and would rather be one again than remain district

headman in Gucˇa if the Wehrmacht were not there. He claims that the

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
105

Serbian gendarmerie commands no respect and is in no fi t state to pro-

tect the place. He also claims that there are a large number of Commu-

nists in Gucˇa itself, and that there are numerous mayors who sympathize

with the bandits.”121 More anguished still was the cry for help from the

collaborator Danilac Kostic´: “I ask the German Wehrmacht and German