Terror in the Balkans (22 page)

effective weapon here is aerial attack. Up to now we have not had this. For

people raised in this land there are many opportunities for overcoming

weak units with underhand methods.”176 Tenth company concluded that

“only harsh measures, without regard for the population, will resurrect

the orderly conditions that will re-establish trust in the Wehrmacht.”177

Between September 6 and 12 1941, the SD reported, insurgents car-

ried out eighty-one attacks on transport, communication, and economic

installations, and no fewer than 175 attacks on the Serbian gendarmerie.

There were also eleven attacks on Wehrmacht personnel, resulting in

thirty men killed, fi fteen wounded, and eleven abducted.178 All this came

to a total of two hundred and sixty-seven attacks. Considering that Ser-

bia Command had recorded “only” one hundred and thirty-fi ve attacks

as recently as the fi nal week in August, this was a frightening escalation.

The 704th’s situation was summed up on September 19 by Lieutenant

Dollmann of the divisional staff: “We are facing a uniformly led organ-

isation strongly equipped with weapons and means of communication.

It benefi ts from the terrain, it has managed to compel the population to

support it. It is inevitably superior to the road-bound forces at our dis-

posal. Only the most ruthless deployment of armored and air force units,

against the suspect civilian population (as well as the insurgents), can

effect a dramatic change in the situation.”179

The quotes by Dollmann and the “lost companies” of the 724th Infan-

try Regiment indicate that, desperate as they were becoming, the 704th

Infantry Division’s offi cers were now emphatically eschewing mod-

eration. They were increasingly less inclined to distinguish between

innocent and guilty, and increasingly more inclined to view the entire

population as a threat. This hardening mind-set presaged the brutal

escalation of the German counteroffensive against the Serbian national

uprising that autumn.

During summer 1941, the 704th Infantry Division faced an increasingly

debilitating situation. It was condemned to ineffectiveness by a manpower

policy that vastly underprioritized the security of occupied areas gener-

ally, and of the occupied area in which the division itself was operating.

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
117

The 704th was already sinking into a more moribund condition before

the Serbian national uprising had even begun. Once the uprising was

under way, little time elapsed before the division felt in danger of being

overwhelmed. Impotence, fear, and frustration all combined to harden

the way it conducted itself. The ferocious escalation of the Wehrmacht’s

counterinsurgency campaign would only really gather pace during

autumn 1941, but the 704th’s example indicates that the process was

already beginning that summer.

Yet much of the groundwork for the divisions’ harsh reaction to their

circumstances had been laid decades before the Third Reich. The Ger-

man military had long idolized the swift use of maximum force to achieve

victory. So the fact that the 704th Infantry Division commanded little in

the way of either swiftness or force was likely to increase its propensity

to lash out in brutalized frustration at the dangers it was facing. Indeed

all divisional commanders in Serbia, together with their offi cers and

men, probably felt the mocking contrast between their current, wretched

situation and the decisive maneuver warfare that was the German mili-

tary’s meat and drink. General Stahl, commander of the 714th Infantry

Division, had experienced such warfare as recently as the French cam-

paign. His colleague General Hoffmann, commander of the 717th, had

experienced it in Poland in 1939. And all three divisional commanders,

Borowski included, were being prevented from experiencing it in the as

yet still successful campaign against the Soviet Union.180

The particularly brutal approach to counterinsurgency that the Ger-

man military had periodically displayed during earlier decades, and had

resurrected for the Polish campaign, can only have further augmented

the growing desire for an immensely harsh response to the uprising. It

should also be remembered that the occupation divisions became increas-

ingly involved, if not yet to the same extent as the
Kommandanturen
, in

the ever more vicious campaign against Serbia’s Jews and Communists.

Commanders who willingly involved their units in such a campaign, and

in so doing indicated their own anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik proclivi-

ties, were if anything even more likely to judge that the security situation

was one that demanded ferocious retaliation.

Yet though it may seem perverse to point out, the ruthless conduct of the

704th during these summer months needs placing in perspective. During

118
terror in the balk ans

the occupation’s initial months, the 704th Infantry Division treated most

of the general population—Jews and Communists excepted—with rea-

sonable restraint. Even when the division’s conduct did harden, the bru-

tality it dealt out had yet to become as severe as it would that autumn.

Moreover, even though the opponent the division faced was of southern

Slavic stock, anti-Slavism did not visibly suffuse the division’s conduct.

There are also signs that the 704th’s rank-and-fi le troops did not sub-

scribe to the tenets of National Socialist ideology or ruthless counterin-

surgency doctrine as thoroughly as they might have done. This speaks

of the limits to National Socialist indoctrination’s ability to brutalize the

German army’s ordinary soldiery.

Much of the lead for the 704th Infantry Division’s relatively restrained

behavior towards the general population came from LXV Corps. This

formation was very far from being a model of enlightenment. But it

did recognize, in contrast with Field Marshal von Weichs’ more brutal

strictures, that keeping the bulk of the population onside was impor-

tant. It directed its divisions accordingly, urging the kinds of restraint

that constituted “propaganda of deed” and complemented some of Sec-

tion S’s propaganda measures. Even so, given the pressures it faced as

the national uprising mushroomed, the 704th, like its fellow divisions,

might still have been expected to behave more ferociously than it did.

By September 1941 the German occupation troops in Serbia, facing an

unconventional and ruthless enemy, resembled islands in an insurgent

sea, beleaguered on all sides and facing the prospect of complete collapse

without the injection of powerful reinforcements. Such circumstances

might have been enough to shift the 704th’s brutality up several more

gears than they did. That they did not was probably due to particular

attitudes held by key offi cers within the 704th.181

But in autumn 1941, Wehrmacht brutality in Serbia escalated spec-

tacularly. This was an escalation to which Wehrmacht commanders, if

the 704th Infantry Division is any guide, were by now increasingly pre-

disposed. The results would be calamitous not just for Serbia’s Jews, but

also for the general population. And some commanders went to singu-

larly ferocious lengths to bring such results about. A particularly power-

ful example is the 342d Infantry Division.

c h a p t e r 6

Settling Accounts in Blood

The 342d Infantry Division in Serbia

Major general walter hinghofer, the 342d Infantry Divi-

sion’s commanding offi cer, was born to an ethnic German fam-

ily in Transylvania, in the easternmost part of the Habsburg Empire,

in 1884. His father was a senior bank inspector. Hinghofer fought as an

artillery offi cer on the eastern front throughout the entire length of the

Great War. He saw uninterrupted duty there for the duration of the fi ght-

ing from 1914 to 1917. During this period, among other things, he fought

in the massive 1915 offensive that took the armies of the Central powers

across Russian Poland and into the western Ukraine.1 He also served as

an offi cer in the Habsburg occupation forces in the Ukraine following

the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. During the interwar years Hinghofer dis-

tinguished himself considerably, holding a succession of garrison and

brigade commands before becoming an army administrator. In 1934 he

joined the Austrian Federal War Ministry. By September 1939 Hinghofer

was a brigadier general, serving in a number of staff roles before being

promoted again to major general and receiving command of the 342d

Infantry Division in July 1941.2

Hinghofer’s division arrived in Serbia in September 1941. The 342d,

later joined by the 113th Infantry Division, was to be the Germans’

main counterinsurgency strike force that autumn. It was to bolster the

119

120
terror in the balk ans

beleaguered German army units already on the ground, execute large

mobile operations against the insurgents themselves, and act as the

Wehrmacht’s main hatchet man in bringing terror to the Serbs. Of all the

infl uences to which Hinghofer was subjected during his earlier life, none

seem to have colored his conduct of the campaign more decisively than

his eastern front experience during the Great War and, perhaps most

decisively of all, his Austrian origins.

The most centrally important fi gure in the mushrooming ferocity of the

autumn security campaign was Lieutenant General Franz Boehme. On

September 19, Boehme was assigned the new title of Plenipotentiary

Commanding General in Serbia. This position enabled him, aided by the

command staff of the German XVIII Corps, to override the split that had

hitherto existed between LXV Corps and the Wehrmacht Commander in

Serbia.3 Boehme’s appointment was part of a new, radically harsh approach

to crushing the Serbian uprising. Offi cials such as General Danckelmann

had advocated a popular anti-Communist front with the Serbs, and sought

to distance Nedic´ from harsh German reprisals. But these men were now

sidelined or replaced by hard-liners deeply skeptical as to the potential

of Serbo-German cooperation. Danckelmann himself complained at his

treatment. But on October 10, on Boehme’s recommendation, Field Mar-

shal List sacked him for underestimating the danger posed by the uprising

and relying excessively on the Serbian gendarmerie to suppress it.4

Boehme and his methods arrived at a critical juncture for the Ger-

mans in Serbia. The national uprising surged that month as Mihailovic´’s

Chetniks joined forces with the Communist Partisans, and the towns

of Užice, Požega, Gornji Milanovac, and Cˇacˇak all fell within ten days

of one another. This effectively placed all Serbia west of the Belgrade-

Kraljevo line in the insurgents’ hands. Užice, with its bank and arms fac-

tory, was a particularly treasured prize. The Germans fell back to defend

the main urban centers and supply lines. Yet their ability to defend even

these was dangerously threatened.5

On some counts, Boehme pursued a joint approach with Nedic´. In line

with the Serbian leader’s wishes, he ordered the rearming of the Serbian

gendarmerie at the end of September. This measure would be vindicated

Settling Accounts in Blood
121

once the gendarmerie began giving a better account of itself as autumn

progressed. In late September, Boehme exploited the fi rm support for

the new government shown by the Pecánac Chetniks and the Zbor Move-

ment. He and Nedicágreed a joint role for the Serbian gendarmerie and

the Pecánac Chetniks in administering the region south of Belgrade and

east of the River Kolubara.6 Otherwise, however, Boehme fi rmly repaid

the faith in him shown by Field Marshal List—who remained deeply

wary of relying on the Serbs themselves to suppress a genuine national

uprising—by asserting German control over the counteroffensive.7

German reprisals now assumed terrifying dimensions. No longer

would they attempt to distinguish between guilty and innocent in the

way Nedic´ had originally persuaded General Danckelmann to agree to.

Boehme’s September 25 order, quoted at the outset of this study, is worth

repeating here. For it encapsulates Boehme’s expectations of his men and

his invocation of the decades-old anti-Serb hatred with which he sought

to inspire them:

Your objective is to be achieved in a land where, in 1914, streams of

German blood fl owed because of the treachery of the Serbs, men and

women. You are the avengers of those dead. A deterring example

must be established for all of Serbia, one that will have the heaviest

impact on the entire population. Anyone who carries out his duty

in a lenient manner will be called to account, regardless of rank or

position, and tried by a military court.8

The single order that, more than any other, translated this stance into

body counts was Boehme’s October 10 directive. This directive stipulated

that the troops were to shoot one hundred Serbian hostages for every Ger-

man killed in the insurgency, and fi fty for every German wounded.9 It thus