Terror in the Balkans (26 page)

senior ones.96 Such professions did not belong to the traditional offi cer

recruitment circles of either army. But they did belong to the “reliable”

middle-class circles from which both armies were extensively recruiting

by the early twentieth century.

There were also elements of Hinghofer’s military career common with

those of Borowski, Hoffmann, and Stahl. All were continuing offi cers,

in the Reichswehr or Bundesheer, during the interwar years. Only Hoff-

mann saw any period of civilian employment. He left the army between

November 1932 and March 1935 to work as an offi cial in the area of youth

sport and physical training. He also experienced a spell of unemploy-

ment between October and December 1933.97 Further, all four men had

spent signifi cant periods serving with a specialist technical branch of

the army, a higher-level staff body, or both. In other words, all four had

pursued careers to that level of technical and professional specialization

that could limit offi cers’ wider social outlook and restrict their vision to

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perfecting their professional skills. Indeed, both Hoffmann and Hing-

hofer had gone even further; each had served in the war ministries of

their respective countries during the 1930s.98

Yet when it comes to where the four offi cers served during the Great

War, signifi cant differences do emerge. The impact the eastern front

could have upon an offi cer’s perceptions was considered in Chapter 2.

The fact that Hinghofer served there during the Great War did not in

itself distinguish him from his fellow divisional commanders in Serbia.

For one thing, Hoffmann himself spent considerable periods on the

eastern front during the Great War. After fi ghting in the initial battles

in East Prussia in August 1914, Hoffmann fought on more southerly sec-

tors of the eastern front for lengthy periods between 1915 and 1917. There

was a hiatus in 1916 when he was transferred west to fi ght in the Battle

of Verdun. He then served on the western front again throughout 1918.

Hoffmann’s own ideological convictions may have been particularly

strengthened by his experience during the march into the Baltic region

and the battle against the Bolsheviks there during 1919.99 Borowski

too served for signifi cant periods in the East, as well as on the western

front.100 Stahl interspersed homeland-based staff posts with active ser-

vice in military airships and observation balloons on a number of fronts,

the eastern front included.101But while Borowski’s and Hoffmann’s Great

War service records were less peripatetic than Stahl’s, all three men also

spent signifi cant, sometimes lengthy periods away from the eastern

front.102 Hinghofer, however, served entirely on the eastern front from

1914 through to 1918.103

An offi cer who had experienced the eastern front in this way, and for

this duration, had more time than many to imbibe that particular brew of

experiences—the region’s hostile environment, its peoples, the nature of

the fi ghting and of the opponents against whom it was being waged—that

could render him more susceptible to brutalizing infl uences later in life.

This is not to deny the brutalizing potency of other fronts, not least the

western. But it is to re-emphasize the brutalizing potency of the eastern

front. Of course, Serbia in 1941 was a different region, populated by a dif-

ferent people, to the eastern theater of the Great War. But in north-west

Serbia the 342d Infantry Division contended with a dangerous insur-

gency, an arduous environment, and a population whose reliability was

Settling Accounts in Blood
139

at best doubtful and at worst non-existent. Such conditions could brutal-

ize the view of any commander facing them. They were especially likely

to brutalize it if that commander had undergone experiences during the

Great War that made him highly susceptible to brutalization already.

Hinghofer may also have been particularly susceptible because, hav-

ing served in the Ukraine in 1918, he had already participated in an

occupation regime that prosecuted extremely harsh counterinsurgency

warfare. The Austro-Hungarian portion of the occupied Ukraine was

administered by the Eastern Army, formerly the Austro-Hungarian Sec-

ond Army. Both German and Austrian forces faced brutalizing condi-

tions in the Ukraine that year. They faced an elusive, resourceful, and

ruthless foe—no more ruthless than the Bolsheviks numbered among

their opponents. Such opponents were often indistinguishable from the

wider civilian population, and the Germans and Austrians had to com-

bat them across an area too vast for their own inadequate manpower to

master properly. Matters were made worse by the unsuitability of the

indigenous administrative personnel on whom the Central powers had

to rely, and by their own failure to develop a more coordinated occupa-

tion strategy.104

And the Austrian forces in the Ukraine were slower than the Germans

to develop an approach that sought to genuinely engage the population

instead of simply terrorize it. What may have particularly hardened the

Austrians’ own conduct was their need to stave off a domestic food situ-

ation even more desperate than Germany’s. Certainly their grain requi-

sitioning operation, and the pacifi cation measures that accompanied it,

were particularly brutal.105

Just how directly involved Hinghofer’s 11th Field Artillery Brigade

was in suppressing resistance is something that the sources that could be

accessed for this study do not reveal. At the very least, however, he would

have been acutely aware of the insurgency in the countryside, and the

danger it posed both to the Austrian occupation and to personnel such as

himself in particular. And if the insurgents could assassinate the German

military commander in the Ukraine, Field Marshal von Eichhorn, then no

German or Austrian offi cer was safe.106

Hinghofer and Hoffmann also differed on another score. Hoffmann’s

personal fi le shows him to have been a man who, in a manner all too

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uncommon among senior German army offi cers in Yugoslavia during

World War II, possessed an element of moral courage. The key event took

place after Hoffmann had been transferred from Yugoslavia to the Ukraine.

Here, in September 1943, the Wehrmacht’s Ukraine Command judged

Hoffmann as lacking the “necessary harshness for the war in the East.”

Ukraine Command reached this judgment when Hoffmann disobeyed

an order to decimate by fi ring squad a mutinous Turkic unit in German

service. The term “to decimate” was meant literally here, inspired by the

ancient Roman punishment of executing every tenth legionary in a unit

that had mutinied or deserted. Hoffmann refused to carry out the order

because, he maintained, he did not wish to impose the moral burden for

the killing upon his men. In particular, he did not wish to compel older

personnel to do the deed. The incident seems to have effectively fi nished

Hoffmann’s military career.107 He ended the war as commandant of a

POW camp.108

Courageous though Hoffmann’s stand was, it is important to keep it

in proportion. Hoffmann was anything but a dove in counterinsurgency

matters. Some of his active suggestions to Boehme were anything but

enlightened. For instance, on October 10, 1941, while still commanding

the 717th Infantry Division, he proposed a package of “Balkan-style”

measures to counter the “bandits.” His list included forced labor, house

burning, hostage-taking and reprisals, and the herding of “idle and loi-

tering” men into concentration camps. Most damningly of all, it was

under Hoffmann’s leadership that units of the 717th Infantry Division

committed killings into the thousands, albeit within the boundaries set

by General Boehme, in Kraljevo and Kragujevac. Kragujevac was the

work of one battalion, but at Kraljevo Hoffmann himself oversaw pro-

ceedings and praised his men fulsomely for their “enthusiastic fulfi lment

of what was demanded of them.”109

But Hoffmann’s conduct in the Ukraine does show that, at the very

least, he was less likely to actually surpass General Boehme’s calls for

vengeful terror in the way Hinghofer did. This does not amount to any-

thing remotely approaching moral exoneration for his actions in Yugo-

slavia. But the actions of the 342d under his command, abhorrent as

many of them were, fell within the boundaries of Boehme’s directives.

The 342d’s actions under Hinghofer’s command did not.

Settling Accounts in Blood
141

But perhaps the most decisive reason why General Hinghofer com-

bated the 1941 uprising even more truculently than his fellow divisional

commanders was that, of all them, he was the only Austrian.110 Thus,

even though Hinghofer himself did not actually serve in Serbia during

the Great War—something common to him and General Boehme—he

was more likely than his German-born colleagues to feel the decades-old

anti-Serb sentiment that Boehme exploited in the cause of crushing the

1941 uprising.111

Such are the source limitations that it is impossible to know how whole-

heartedly the 342d Infantry Division’s rank-and-fi le troops adhered to

Hinghofer’s pitiless approach. The fact that many were not Austrian

meant that they may not have felt such intense hatred towards the

Serbs.112 Indeed, some did fail to follow their commander’s directives as

enthusiastically as he would have wished. But the overall record is clear.

Of all the German army counterinsurgency divisions fi ghting in Serbia

during 1941, the 342d Infantry Division was the most ferocious by some

way. It behaved not just according to directives from above or to the

conditions it faced, but also according to its commander’s standpoint.

Hinghofer’s particular pattern of service during the Great War may well

have helped incubate his extreme obduracy. He was also Austrian-born,

and thus more likely than his German-born fellows to comport himself

viciously against the Serbs. This may also help explain why General

Borowski’s 704th Infantry Division did not comport itself as viciously as

it might have in summer 1941.

The behavior of Hoffmann, Borowski, and Stahl needs keeping fi rmly

in perspective. They had no compunction in unleashing their formations

upon the Serbian population in autumn 1941 with the full force of Gen-

eral Boehme’s directives. Indeed, there is no indication that any of them

saw fi t even to question those directives. And here it should be remem-

bered that, though it was rare in the extreme for offi cers to directly ques-

tion indiscriminately terroristic orders, it could and did happen. Two

examples demonstrate this.

In August 1941 the area commandant in Niš, Freiherr von Bothmer,

not only objected to indiscriminately shooting innocent Serbs en masse.

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terror in the balk ans

He also used moral and legal arguments when he refused to shoot Com-

munists in his custody against whom no wrongdoing had been proved.

Even though he acknowledged that they would probably be executed by

the SD, he refused to endorse even that action.113 Then in October the

district commandant in Kragujevac, Captain von Bischofshausen, pre-

vailed upon the fi rst battalion of the 724th Infantry Regiment to execute

reprisal victims from “Communist-infested” villages, rather than from

Kragujevac itself, because “not a single Wehrmacht member or ethnic

German has been wounded or shot there.”114 Bischofshausen does not

appear to have been acting out of a sense of morality here, though it is

possible he was disguising moral objections with pragmatic arguments

because he felt such arguments might be more likely to be heeded.115 Yet

whatever his motive, he was showing some grasp, however compromised

it may have been, of the need to make some distinction between “guilty”

and “innocent.”

That relatively junior offi cers saw fi t to question indiscriminate bru-

tality offi cially—whether on moral, legal, or pragmatic grounds—but

divisional commanders did not, suggests that those divisional com-

manders approved of such methods. After all, Borowski, Hoffmann, and

Stahl served in an institution whose leadership had chosen to revive a

profoundly harsh strain of counterinsurgency, and which had over the

years become suffused by ideological, careerist, and technocratic ruth-

lessness. The social backgrounds, Great War experiences, and broader

career paths of all three men were in many respects similarly conducive

to such attitudes. The troops they commanded comported themselves

with according ruthlessness in 1941, be it against Jews, Communists,

or—most devastatingly—the general population. The difference, how-

ever, is that Hinghofer’s 342d comported itself with a ruthlessness even

more extreme.

As it turned out, General Hoffmann’s 342d Infantry Division began tem-

pering its ferocity just as the Germans began landing serious blows upon