Terror in the Balkans (27 page)

the Serbian national uprising. By late October, Serbia Command was

reporting that German mobile operations against the insurgents were

helping to relieve the pressure elsewhere. Rebels and population had

Settling Accounts in Blood
143

been surprised by the ferocity of the German operations and the repri-

sals that accompanied them.116 The SD opined that, though there was

no room for complacency, the number of rebel attacks had fallen. It also

asserted that Boehme’s 1:100 order had created “clear guidelines” for the

practice of reprisals.117

The most serious blow of all was Operation Užice. This operation,

involving the 342d together with the temporarily assigned 113th Infantry

Division and parts of the 714th, commenced on November 25, a fortnight

after the 342d’s divisional command had changed hands, and concluded

on December 4.118 The divisional order for the operation conveyed the

moderation, albeit moderation blended with harshness, that the 342d

had begun to practice under General Hoffmann:

a) Any burning down (of dwellings) is strictly prohibited and pun-

ishable. It is applicable only if arms and ammunition are found or

if fi re is levelled from houses.

b) To be shot to death are all men carrying arms, using them or

concealing them, women and children (sic), however, only if they

actively participate in the fi ghting. In any case children are to be

spared.

c) All Chetniks and Communists who surrender are to be made

prisoners and are to be disarmed.119

But Operation Užice’s greater importance was military: while the Ger-

mans failed to encircle and annihilate the Partisans, they infl icted serious

losses and drove Tito’s staff southward into Italian-occupied Sandzak.

Yet Operation Užice was successful partly because of wider forces.

For one thing the German reprisals, abhorrent as they were, were from

September helping to drive a wedge between the Chetniks and the Parti-

sans. Mihailovic´’s already lukewarm commitment to the national uprising

thus dwindled further. He was already disheartened by the fact that the

Serbian gendarmerie, many of whom had some sympathy with his move-

ment, had been a prime target for the Communists from the uprising’s

earliest days. He also perceived that the Germans’ intransigence towards

the Nedic´ government made it much harder for his own movement to ben-

efi t from its earlier contact and communication with that government.120

144
terror in the balk ans

Haunted by the memory of Serbia’s trauma during the Great War, the

reprisals led Mihailovic´ to conclude that continuing to resist the Ger-

mans openly would precipitate Serbia’s “national suicide.”121 The repri-

sals’ severity would eventually diminish in effect as the war continued.

Indeed, the number of hostages needed to feed them was already begin-

ning to render them unworkable. But they had immense shock effect in

autumn 1941.122 As Milovan Djilas wrote:

The tragedy gave to Nedic´ “convincing proof” that the Serbs would

be biologically exterminated if they were not submissive and loyal,

and to the Chetniks “proof” that the Partisans were prematurely

provoking the Germans and thus causing the decimation of Serbs

and the destruction of Serbian culture . . . If there was treason, and I

hold that there was, it justifi ed itself with biological survival.123

But the Germans failed to fully recognize that Operation Užice also suc-

ceeded for political reasons. For one thing, it was not just fi erce German

reprisals that had driven Mihailovic´ to sever his links with the Partisans,

but the man’s increasing confi dence also. Mihailovic´ felt increasingly

assured of the active support of the British, and the royal government-

in-exile. He fi rst obtained British material aid in November 1941. The

government-in-exile, which was almost identical to the Simovicádmin-

istration the March 1941 coup had propelled into power, and which was

almost entirely composed of Serbs, backed Mihailovic´ to the hilt. In

January 1942, it would appoint him Minister for War. By contrast, the

Partisans found themselves extensively frozen out by the British in late

1941, and scolded by Moscow for lacking the constructive coalition men-

tality necessary for wartime alliances.124

But probably the most important reason for the Chetnik–Partisan split

was that the two movements’ aims fundamentally confl icted. The Chet-

niks’ program went well beyond the agenda of the government-in-exile;

they sought not only to restore the old monarchical system, but also to

extend Serbian power within Yugoslavia. The most grandiose form this

ambition would take was a plan for a “Great Serbia.” The blueprint for

Great Serbia was proposed in a memorandum produced on June 30, 1941,

by Stevan Moljevicóf the Chetniks’ Central National Committee. Great

Settling Accounts in Blood
145

Serbia would incorporate Bosnia and much of Croatia into a greatly

enlarged Serbia, which would then dominate postwar Yugoslavia even

more emphatically than before.125

The Partisans, by contrast, sought a revolution against the old order

and the foundation of a new state based on the principles of Communism

and Yugoslavism. Moreover, the Partisans had loudly declared their

intent by using the liberated area around Užice as a laboratory for revolu-

tionary measures. NOOs had been rapidly established, for instance, tax

and land records burned, and women deployed in the Partisans’ ranks.

More ominously, the Partisans had eliminated local politicians who had

criticized them.126 All this, of course, rendered impossible anything but

the most short-term cooperation between Partisans and Chetniks.

What had united the two movements in 1941, then, was far less impor-

tant than what divided them. This, more than anything else, guaranteed

their split that autumn and their deadly antagonism over the following

years. By late October, amid halfhearted and soon-to-be-abandoned

attempts by Tito and Mihailovic´ to stave off armed confrontation, Parti-

san and Chetnik units were openly fi ghting one another.

There were now opportunities for the Axis to co-opt the MihailovicĆhetniks, if only temporarily.127 Some of Mihailovic´’s forces did come to an arrangement with the Nedicŕegime. The two parties shared common anti-Communist ground, and many of their leading fi gures were

connected by strong personal links. At the end of November, though

there was no formal agreement between the Mihailovic´ movement and

the Nedic´ government, many of Mihailovic´’s commanders aligned their

men with Nedic´’s “legal” Chetnik formations in exchange for offi cial

protection.128 This agreement, and the Mihailovic´’s Chetniks’ relative

quiescence more generally, would ensure that occupied Serbia, at least,

remained comparatively peaceful for the rest of the war.

But the Germans, though their distrust of Mihailovic´ was under-

standable, missed an opportunity for an active temporary alliance

against the Partisans. They believed Mihailovic´ was cooperating with

Nedic´ to play the general and themselves off against one another, and

that any approach Mihailovic´ might make to them would be made out of

sheer military necessity.129 Mihailovic´ did indeed approach the Germans

in November 1941, following one of his failed meetings with Tito. He

146
terror in the balk ans

requested guns and ammunition in return for his help in “(purging) the

Serbian area once and for all of the Communist bands.”130 But the Ger-

mans rebuffed him, demanded his unconditional surrender, and then

narrowly failed to capture him when they overran his headquarters at

Ravna Gora in early December.131

Spurned by the Germans, Mihailovic´’s forces within Serbia would

now restrict their actions to low-key subversion and sabotage against

the occupation. Ostensibly this was so they could await the time when,

their strength and organization suffi ciently developed, they could rise

up in tandem with an Allied invasion. But their closeness to Nedic´ was

embroiling them in a double game, one that would increasingly turn

them into de facto collaborators rather than freedom fi ghters. The impli-

cations for their movement, and for Yugoslavia, would be immense.

But in November 1941, the Chetnik–Partisan split offered Boehme one

major opportunity. Free now to turn his fi re entirely against the Parti-

sans, he shortened his front by concentrating his forces on selected areas.

The Partisans, recklessly overconfi dent following the revolt’s early suc-

cesses, had already played into his hands. They had declared the area

around Užice a “free zone” and visibly concentrated their forces there.

This, of course, made it much easier for Boehme to target them in a con-

ventional kind of operation. The operation also succeeded for mundane

practical reasons: the stripping of the fi elds during harvesttime deprived

the Partisans of a major source of cover.132

Though the Partisans were not destroyed outright during Operation

Užice, they came close. According to German reports, two thousand

Partisans were killed during the operation. And the reports’ claim that

2,723 guns were recovered from the Partisan dead indicates that this

time it was armed fi ghters, not defenseless civilians, who had perished

in great numbers.133 The remnant of Tito’s force had to fl ee for its very

existence. It seems the 342d Infantry Division only failed to press its

pursuit of them for fear of antagonizing the Italians with a probe into

their territory. This was probably the closest the Germans ever came to

killing or capturing Tito.134 They would come to rue this lost opportu-

nity at length. Yet for now, the Communist Partisan movement had been

dealt a fearful blow. Tito himself even offered to resign on December 7,

although the offer was rejected.135 His main force now comprised only

Settling Accounts in Blood
147

two thousand fi ghters in the fi eld,136 for whom the only hope of survival

lay in fl eeing Serbia for the mountains of the NDH.

General Boehme departed with the staff of XVIII Corps for the east-

ern front on December 6. His successor, General Bader—who assumed

the title Commander in Serbia rather than Plenipotentiary Commanding

General—was aware that the insurgency had not been crushed conclu-

sively. He feared that the spring thaw could bring new unrest, particu-

larly given the amount of weapons and munitions still in Serb hands. But

for now, in the aftermath of Operation Užice and amid further successful

mopping-up operations, Bader surveyed a situation far less perilous than

that of three months earlier. He felt suffi ciently confi dent, on December

22, to replace Boehme’s now unworkable 1:100 reprisal directive with

one that instead stipulated that “only” fi fty Serbs should be shot for

every German soldier killed.137

The Wehrmacht’s defeat of the Serbian national uprising of 1941 trum-

peted its readiness to employ terror to the utmost. German documents

record that, between August 1 and December 5, the Germans killed

eleven thousand insurgents in combat and executed nearly twenty-

two thousand reprisal victims, at a cost to themselves of fewer than six

hundred killed or wounded.138 But such was the attitude of at least one

particular divisional commander, and the life experiences and life infl u-

ences that had shaped him, that he demonstrated his own ferocity even

more emphatically than his fellows demonstrated theirs.

During 1942, however, a rather different picture would emerge from

the German army occupation divisions operating in the NDH.

c h a p t e r 7

Standing Divided

The Independent State of Croatia, 1942

At first sight, the prognosis for the Partisans in the NDH at

the dawn of 1942 did not look promising.1 Not only had the Axis

expelled them from Serbia. In the NDH, they remained too strongly

associated with the Serbian struggle for them to be yet able to extend

their appeal to the NDH’s Croat and Muslim populations. And such

was Chetnik strength in parts of the NDH, particularly eastern Bosnia,

that the Partisans also faced a serious challenge for control of the NDH’s

remaining Serbian population.

Yet the NDH offered the Partisans potentially fertile territory. In

the NDH’s Croatian regions, they benefi ted from a strong Communist

organization of long standing. They would also benefi t, in time, from a

particular groundswell of support from the oppressed Croatian popula-

tion of Italian-occupied Dalmatia.2 And in Bosnia, the Partisans stood

to benefi t from a particular combination of rugged terrain, strong Com-

munist organization, and considerable potential support.

In 1931, Bosnia’s diverse population of Muslims, Orthodox Serbs,

and (predominantly Croat) Catholics stood at just over 2.3 million; this

was an increase of almost half a million in just ten years.3 The increase

was due to the rapid expansion of that constituency from which the