Terror in the Balkans (23 page)

authorized and systematized levels of bloodletting that Wehrmacht com-

mands might hitherto have considered wild if understandable excesses.10

Milovan Djilas, one of Tito’s lieutenants, recalls how the scale of killing

that followed sent a collective shudder through the population:

It was believed at the time that some 5,000 were executed in Kra-

gujevac, and 1,700 in Kraljevo. These fi gures grew with time—by

122
terror in the balk ans

the thousands in both places—though the actual fi gures have never

been confi rmed.
Borba
11 wrote of this but we spoke of it reluctantly,

feeling the deathly horror that had seized Serbia. What “reason” did

the Germans have for undertaking measures which were then so

unthinkable? Was it retaliation, the killing of one hundred Serbs for

every dead German, which they proclaimed during the very fi rst days

of the occupation? Was it the destruction of Serbia’s centers—towns

known for their national consciousness and Communist infl uence?

. . . Certainly the Nazis found suffi cient justifi cation for crushing the

will to resist in a people whom Hitler considered the most politically

creative and thus the most dangerous in the Balkans.12

Moreover, though the Armed Forces High Command had itself autho-

rized the 1:100 hostage policy in a decree of September 16,13 Boehme

went further. He targeted the bulk of hostage-shootings at Serbian Jews,

whom Wehrmacht propaganda already depicted as puppet-masters of

the Communist-led uprising. It was not necessarily fanatical ideology

that led Boehme to issue his decree—though anti-Semitic and anti-

Bolshevik sentiments certainly would have eased the task of issuing it

for him. Rather, his actions were determined by his calculation that tar-

geting Jews together with Sinti and Roma, could impress the rest of the

population with an object lesson in German terror.14 Whilst Boehme was

not departing radically here from the lethally discriminatory measures

which German units had already been enacting in Serbia, he was cer-

tainly
escalating
them radically.

Boehme fi rst executed his policy in response to the killing of a group

of German soldiers at Topola on October 4. To buttress the policy,

Boehme manipulated the details of the attack: when claims that the dead

soldiers had been mutilated beforehand were disproved by autopsy, he

covered this fi nding up. Suppressing the facts also enabled Boehme to

use the image of cruelly mutilated German soldiers to discourage his

troops from surrendering.15

It was those Jews and Sinti and Roma who were already interned whom

Boehme selected as the principal victims of this intensifi ed reprisal cam-

paign. As they had already been interned en masse, shooting them not

only was easier, but would also free up space for the large numbers of

Settling Accounts in Blood
123

genuine rebel suspects whom the Germans would seize as autumn went

on. Boehme reckoned with the approval of the Nedicádministration and

of the SS and police. He also reckoned that the latter’s approval would

improve the Wehrmacht’s general cooperation with it.16

Furthermore, as the number of reprisal victims began to spiral, Ger-

man army units were now ordered to ease the practical burden on the

SS and police by shooting increasing numbers of reprisal victims them-

selves. The worst racially targeted reprisal which army units infl icted

was the work of the third battalion of the 433d Infantry Regiment. This

unit had been temporarily loaned from the 164th Infantry Division to

support the 704th Infantry Division. On 27 October, the battalion shot

twenty-two hundred Jews and Sinti and Roma in retaliation for the death

of ten German soldiers and the wounding of a further twenty-four in the

surrounded town of Valjevo.17 The “700-number” occupation divisions

themselves participated less extensively in such killings, but partici-

pate they did; on October 1, for instance, the fi rst battalion of the 724th

Infantry Regiment, also subordinate to the 704th Infantry Division,

shot sixty-six Jews and Communists.18 On October 14, meanwhile, the

717th Infantry Division specifi cally noted its receipt of General Boehme’s

instructions to seize “Communists, nationalists, democrats, and Jews

. . . as hostages.”19

The killing of Serbian Sinti and Roma in 1941, vicious as it was, was not

wholesale.20 But the killing of Serbian Jews—deadliest of all the Reich’s

racial enemies in the Nazi world-view—was emphatically wholesale. By

the end of the year the entire adult male Jewish population of Serbia had

been put to death; the interned women and children would be extermi-

nated in SS-run camps the following year as that organization’s Reich

Security Main Offi ce fi nally relieved the Wehrmacht of overall responsi-

bility for the campaign against the Serbian Jews.21

From a grisly productionist viewpoint, the extermination of Serbia’s

male Jews meant that demand for targeted reprisal victims was begin-

ning to outstrip supply. Thus, towards the end of 1941, members of the

general Serb population would begin to perish in their thousands also.

On the whole, the “regular” occupation divisions seem to have killed

Jews in large numbers somewhat sporadically that autumn. This doe

not, of course, absolve them of any condemnation for the still substantial

124
terror in the balk ans

part they played in the extermination of the Serbian Jews. But to grasp

the full, devastating extent of the divisions’ actions in Serbia in 1941, it is

necessary to move from the horrors they visited upon the Serbian Jews,

to the horrors they infl icted upon the wider population. It was here that

the 342d Infantry Division, more so even than the 700-number divisions,

truly came into its own.

The 342d Infantry Division’s personnel originated partly from the Twelfth

Military District, based around Koblenz in the old Reich, and partly from

the Seventeenth Military District around Linz in the Eastern March.22 It

was one of eight Category Fourteen divisions raised that month. These

divisions were not among the German army’s fi nest formations. Though

they comprised the standard three regiments—the 697th, 698th, and

699th Infantry Regiments in the 342d’s case—each regiment comprised

twelve companies instead of the usual fourteen. Indeed, according to the

division’s order of battle for September 28, the 698th possessed only

eleven companies.23 They were also fi tted with reduced scales of equip-

ment, and their rank-and-fi le combat troops fell into the twenty-seven to

thirty-two age range. But next to the seven-hundred-number occupation

divisions already in Serbia, a Category Fourteen division like the 342d

was a fairly strong and effective fi ghting force. Among other things, it pos-

sessed an artillery regiment and an antitank company.24

In military terms, the operations the 342d executed that autumn ini-

tially brought mixed results at best. But they eventually helped the Weh-

rmacht to crush the uprising in Serbia and expel its remnants westward.

Though the Partisans would eventually fi nd refuge and regroup within

the borders of the NDH, the Germans’ efforts at least dissipated the

immediate danger the Serbian national uprising had posed.

But the 342d Infantry Division is important to this study not so much

for its uneven military achievements as for the grisly conduct that accom-

panied them. Of all the German army divisions on the ground that

autumn, the 342d was the one that would convert General Boehme’s

commandments into the most sanguinary practice.

And this was not just because of the scale of operations which it

executed. No German army division on Serbian soil exercised restraint

Settling Accounts in Blood
125

during these months. All carried out terrible reprisals on an enormous

scale. But while other divisions followed Boehme’s directives, the 342d

surpassed them. In its conduct echoed decades-old historical enmities.

The enmity that echoed loudest was the one between Austria-Hungary

and Serbia.

The 342d commenced its fi rst mobile operation in late September,

cleansing the Macˇva region, a six-hundred-square-kilometer area west of

Šabac between the Rivers Drina and Sava.25 Advancing into the region

from the north enabled the 342d and its forces to form up in Syrmia, an

area yet to be affected by the uprising.26 As well as being a major cen-

ter of rebel strength, the Germans had an economic motive for targeting

the Drina-Sava region—it would enable them to seize valuable agricul-

tural resources from the insurgents. General Boehme’s quartermaster’s

section extolled this resource grab as being for the economic good of

the homeland and the occupation troops. It would encompass all the

region’s livestock, horses, grain, and feed.27 Three thousand ethnic Ger-

mans from Syrmia and the Banat in northern Yugoslavia were employed

to seize this prize once the fi ghting was over.28

In cleansing the town of Šabac, which the 342d carried out between

September 24 and 27, the division was loaned the second battalion of

the 750th Infantry Regiment and a company of Reserve Police Battalion

64.29 For the operation in the wider region, which took place between

September 28 and October 9, the 342d could also count on air recon-

naissance and, if they were needed urgently, a limited number of Stuka

dive-bombers.30 Yet the operation was a diffi cult prospect nonetheless.

One reason why the region was such a preeminent rebel center was that

the Partisans and Chetniks there, numbering anything between two

thousand and ten thousand by German estimates, had been cooperat-

ing in joint operations for some time. They were also well organized,

well equipped in part, and extensively supported by the population.

That all this heightened the challenge for the 342d may help explain why

Boehme’s orders for the operation were exceptionally harsh.31

And exceptionally harsh they were. The SD reported that the entire

area between Šabac and Bogatic was to be evacuated. Its menfolk would

126
terror in the balk ans

be brought into concentration camps, to be screened by the SD with the

help of the Serbian police. Its women and children were to be driven

from their homes, “onto Mount Cer, south-west of Šabac, there to be

left to their fate.”32 The operation’s general tenor was encapsulated in

an order from Boehme himself: “The population . . . between the Drina

and Sava has attached itself to the uprising. Women and children are

running messages and maintaining the bandits’ basis of supply . . . [The

area] is to be cleansed by exterminating any bands that appear, so as to

deny the bandits the area’s supply in the long term.”33 The most noxious

passage in Boehme’s order conveyed the general’s intention that “ruth-

less measures will set a terrifying example which will, in a short space

of time, resonate across all Serbia.”34 Boehme was equally obdurate over

the specifi cs: “any person involved in the fi ghting in any way is to be

seen as a guerrilla and handled accordingly. Any settlement from which

German soldiers are fi red upon, or in the vicinity of which weapons and

munitions are found, is to be burned down.”35 He further added on Sep-

tember 23 that “the shooting of captured and condemned irregulars is to

be presented to the population as an exemplary spectacle.”36

But the 342d was not going to allow Boehme to overshadow it. An

order it issued on September 25 was even more ruthless. Hinghofer him-

self, not the operations section, departed from the usual practice by issu-

ing the order directly. He defi ned even more sweepingly which sorts of

person constituted an irregular, and what they could expect. “Anyone

who raises a weapon against the occupier
or
supports corresponding

resistance,” he declared,

is an irregular. Accordingly,
every member
of a rebellious band

against whom the division fi ghts is to be treated as an
irregular
. The

juridical punishment
of a member of a rebellious band is to be car-

ried out . . .
with execution in every case
. . . Our opponents should

be regarded by us without exception as irregulars . . . Only (those)

who do not oppose us
in any way
are to be excepted.37

Two days later Hinghofer explicitly extended the target group even fur-

ther. He stipulated that “Serbian offi cials, police, and gendarmerie are to

be disarmed, held as a separate group of prisoners, and then shot.”38 In

Settling Accounts in Blood
127

other words, members of the collaborationist Serbian government and

administration were to be regarded with no less suspicion, and treated

with no less ferocity, than other civilians. Simply to encounter them in

the “bandit-infested” region was to condemn them. Then, on September

29, the division declared that mere suspicion was suffi cient grounds for