Terror in the Balkans (39 page)

most part abandoned, houses empty and ransacked—this is our opera-

tional area! Here the Bolshevik is at home . . . Croatia is much worse

even than Serbia—a complete cess pit . . . In Bosnia, the devil is abroad!

If we didn’t have any tanks or Stukas with us, then things really would

be grim. We’d’ve been done here a long time ago if it wasn’t for these

damned mountains.”105

In a letter the following month, Geissler described how hard hit he

was by comrades’ deaths in this war: “Today our mood’s well below par.

Our battalion’s fi rst company suffered an awful tragedy. Some soldiers

walked into a minefi eld, among them our best sergeant, who was due

to get his commission in the next few days.”106 Geissler was well aware

that he himself could be next. “The enemy, crafty fellow, sits mainly in

the trees, but can also conceal himself behind a bush,” he wrote in Sep-

tember. “You never know where to train your eyes. I like to experience

everything in life, but not a guerrilla war!”107

In another letter that month, Geissler described the Partisans’ silent

and unseen methods, and their predilection for night attack: “Every night

the enemy attacked with a Hurra (!!!) . . . You have to picture it, us in the

mountains, in the dark—unfortunately the moon is no longer shining—

the enemy slips in through the thick woods (!) until he’s about 25 meters

in front of us, throws hand grenades and then slips back.” His hatred of

the Partisans was further entrenched by what he saw the following morn-

ing: “This morning, on the strip of territory before our battle-line, we

discovered the corpses of a load of uniformed women! Just like in Rus-

sia.”108 Geissler’s revulsion at the thought of women fi ghting in the Par-

tisan ranks also emerges in a letter of October 4: “Yesterday we had our

second black day, we had to leave many dead and badly wounded on a

bridge. And when you consider that we suffered these losses at the hands

of a
female
Partisan company, it really makes you want to throw up.”109

That same letter also found Geissler in more refl ective mood, as he

mused over the character of the country in which he found himself.

“Our objective today was the most prettily situated town in the Bal-

kans—which naturally is in the hands of the Partisans. The countryside

here is the most romantic I’ve ever seen, apart from the Grossglockner

and Semmering.” But the reality of the Partisan war extinguished any

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terror in the balk ans

aesthetic pleasure to be gained from such surroundings. “We’ve got no

feel for such sentiments. These splendidly romantic wooded hills have

been thoroughly infested by the bandits.”110

From late November, and all through December, the Partisans

assailed Geissler’s unit unremittingly. The ever present fear of annihila-

tion seems to have intensifi ed in his mind. “We had a pretty black day

again today,” he wrote on November 27. “The tireless Partisans attacked

our positions in huge numbers across a thirty-kilometer front. Among

other things they took the town which we’d recaptured just before I went

on leave. The enemy wrecked everything in his path. Just like in Tobruk

we had to destroy our own weapons, supplies, ammunition, and accom-

modation. The enemy also wrecked important rail and military instal-

lations. Among other things we lost one of our company commanders.

Yes, these are going to be very hard nuts to crack. And that’s only the

start of what awaits us here this winter.”111 A fortnight later he wrote that

“today things were black, the Partisans surprised our battalion, there

were six dead, sixteen wounded, two missing and 28 dead horses! Natu-

rally this is again an enormous blow, of the sort we won’t be able to with-

stand much longer. If we don’t get German reinforcements soon then we

will all be in the shit.”112

Two days later, relief had still to arrive: “For two days . . . we’ve been

on alarm level 1. This means I have to keep my clothes on at night and a

weapon lying next to me. This time it really is damned serious. Accord-

ing to prisoner interrogations the enemy is going to try to retake Prijedor

before Christmas, something which, with a big attack, he should have no

trouble achieving, for 1) there are only staffs here, of hardly any combat

value, and 2) the enemy has already tried this with other places, and

successfully!”113

Throughout, Geissler’s psychological stability was further shaken by

his experience of Partisan atrocities. “On one of these photos,” he wrote

in May, “you can see my regimental commander talking with a Serbian

captain. He was explaining how the Partisans had slaughtered his wife

and son a few days before. Before it happened the son was forced to have

sex with his mother. Simply awful!”114 Such instances loomed large in

Geissler’s mind even when his unit had had the better of the fi ghting.

“Yesterday . . . the battalion exterminated 650 Partisans in combat,”

The Morass
211

he wrote on September 6. “The fi rst time any battalion in West Bosnia

achieved this! But we lost our best NCO, who the scum managed to cap-

ture. We found him that evening. They’d pulled his fi ngernails out while

he was still alive, chopped his fi ngers and his genitals off, sawed off a leg,

and then fi nally they shot him. I also told you a lieutenant had gone miss-

ing. The enemy had nailed him alive to a door and then tortured him

to death with a red-hot iron!”115 On December 22, fi nally, he wrote that

“today more of our comrades were sadly lost, falling into the hands of

the Partisans. The poor souls were stripped naked, bound and thrown

into a running mountain river. They died a horrible watery death. This

is how the enemy spares his ammunition! May the almighty one day let

justice be done and give our worthy people the decisive victory!”116

Geissler’s ghoulish account may have been a refl ection of his fevered

brain-state, or an attempt to justify his own brutal conduct, rather than

an accurate report. That said, Partisan units’ capacity for savagery

towards their prisoners is well attested to.117 But whether or not Geissler

was exaggerating, his recounting of such atrocities indicates that he was

slipping into a mind-frame that justifi ed committing all manner of bru-

tality in the fi ght against the Partisans.

Geissler’s unit was still precariously holding on by this time, but its

day-to-day losses were fearful as ever. Meanwhile, the impression that

German units were now tiny islands beleaguered by pandemic Partisan

savagery grew stronger in his mind. “We lose many of our best every day

. . . fi fteen again yesterday! That may not seem much relative to the whole

regiment, but it’s mounted up horribly over the past few days. This

evening the enemy tried to encircle Prijedor. They burned the villages

all around. Road bridges wrecked all around, road blocks laid down,

mines laid, rail track destroyed, a travelling hospital train attacked (!!).

All transport routes impassable! . . . That’s our situation in the ‘sunny’

south-east!”118

Finally, Geissler was surrounded by death throughout the whole

period. “Yesterday,” he wrote in August, “we advanced down a road,

where we came across bloody corpses in a ditch, wrapped in tablecloths

(men, women, children, murdered!) There must have been about a hun-

dred of them . . . Dreadful. Man becomes beast!”119 Which of the mani-

fold belligerent groupings in the 714th Infantry Division’s jurisdiction

212
terror in the balk ans

actually perpetrated this particular atrocity is unclear. It may even have

been another unit
from
the 714th. Irrespective of who the perpetrators

were, however, this extract displays yet another facet of the execrable

conditions in which Geissler found himself for a sustained period of sev-

eral months.

The brutalized, embittered way in which Geissler came to regard the

enemy is clear throughout these extracts. It is easy to imagine how such

a perspective could, in turn, brutalize a soldier’s behavior. It is also easy

to see how the behavior of the 718th’s troops could by now have been

similarly affected. Of course, the National Socialist indoctrination to

which they had already been subjected almost certainly eased the path to

barbarization. But the extreme and often perilous conditions the troops

were enduring would have profoundly hardened them nonetheless.

The third Jajce operation, which fi nally saw the Partisans properly

expelled from Jajce, was the hardest fought of all. It commenced at the

start of December.120 The Germans suffered fi fty-eight dead and ninety-

three wounded, the Croats twenty-three dead and 135 wounded. One

hundred and forty-nine Croats were also reported missing. The Parti-

sans, meanwhile, lost 431 dead and sixty wounded.121 By December 5

it was reported that the enemy had fi nally pulled out of Jajce and was

headed north.122 But the scale of Axis losses indicates just how hard-

pressed the division’s troops were by this time. Having retaken the town,

the vulnerability of the rest of its jurisdiction, particularly around Tuzla

and Zenica, thwarted the 718th’s attempt to pursue the Partisans and

complete their destruction.123 Other divisions, such as the 714th, faced a

similar situation by now.124

By the end of the year the 718th had gained no respite. Among other

things, the division’s intelligence section reported that the large Commu-

nist groups beyond its demarcation line continued to threaten its area’s

southwestern border. Their skill in propaganda, their practice of forced

recruitment, and what divisional command termed the “natural tendency

of some of the population to murder and plunder” were all aiding them.125

Even the changes to the NDH’s military structure, which had taken

place in October and November, failed to bring about a signifi cant

The Morass
213

change in Axis fortunes. In late November Croatia Command reported

that a reshuffl e in the NDH government had not affected internal policy,

and that Ustasha attacks continued to spawn chaos. The Partisan pres-

ence in Zone III had increased since the Italians had abandoned it.126

And Croatia Command now conceded that, compared with the mayhem

in those regions still “administered” by the NDH, the population of the

Communist-controlled areas actually enjoyed considerable stability.127

By December Croatia Command believed that 95 percent of the popula-

tion was supporting the Partisans’ communication network. It also noted

that the Partisans, by treating captured Croatian soldiers humanely, were

fueling mounting desertion from the Croatian army.128

The 718th Infantry Division’s experience during the fi nal four months

of 1942 shows that there were now ever greater limits to how far any unit

was prepared to pursue the kind of counterinsurgency campaign that

placed constructive engagement at its center. For one thing, it was no

longer just a question of whether the division should engage with the

population, but also of which groups to engage with, and how far. Con-

sidering the increasingly acute threat the Partisans now posed, and the

mayhem being dispensed not just by the Ustasha but, increasingly, by

the Muslim militias also, it might at fi rst have seemed that the obvious

partner for the 718th to woo was the Chetniks. But because the Chetniks

themselves rivaled and sometimes surpassed these other groups for bru-

tality, arming them was a course of action that, the division recognized,

was fraught with pitfalls of its own.

In such conditions, hearts and minds measures were likely to bring

tenuous benefi ts if any. The sense of frustration this was bound to fuel

was perhaps one reason why the 718th eschewed much of its earlier

restraint during the Jajce operations. Perhaps an even more immediate

reason was that the Partisans’ burgeoning fi ghting power would inevi-

tably lead to a furious engagement—a particularly daunting prospect for

an occupation division blighted by so many failings—from which mass

civilian deaths were likely to result.

By now, moreover, the effect that almost unremitting counterinsur-

gency warfare was having upon the troops was likely to barbarize their

214
terror in the balk ans

own behavior irrespective of any measures divisional and regimental

commands took to check it. And if divisional and regimental commands

were
not
seeking to check it, it is little wonder that the “Partisan” body

counts the Jajce operations yielded were so horribly disproportionate.

And the absence of any restraint by divisional and regimental com-

mands indicates the mounting obduracy, further fueled by directives

from higher command, which was by now coloring their own mind-set.

The 718th Infantry Division’s command had not been a model of

enlightened thinking during 1942. But for much of the year it had sought

to infuse its counterinsurgency campaign with a considerable degree of