Terror in the Balkans (45 page)

ror and force, then, was a major reason why the Axis campaign against

the Partisans failed. It was not the most decisive reason; such were the

overarching weaknesses of the Axis occupation edifi ce in Yugoslavia

that, ultimately, no amount of restraint, moderation, or constructive

engagement by individual units would have brought more than a tem-

porary reprieve. Yet German army commanders’ terroristic proclivities

are still centrally important to this study’s primary concern. For this

study’s primary concern has been not with outcomes, but with motives:

why some German army units employed more constructive counterin-

surgency measures, others employed them less extensively or eschewed

them entirely, and others still employed terror and brutality on a scale

surpassing even higher command’s ruthless directives. It is to
that
cen-

tral question that this conclusion now turns.

The social and institutional environment of the offi cer corps of the

Imperial German Army, and of the Royal-Imperial Army of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire, already provided a bedrock of harshness before and

during the Great War. In some respects, particularly before 1914, this

environment was relatively benign. In other respects, it emphatically was

not. These respects were reinforced by the changing nature of warfare,

politics, and society in Germany and Austria during the decades leading

up to the Great War.

In the case of both offi cer corps, offi cer cadets were joining institu-

tions that were deeply conservative and sought to instill a correspond-

ing mentality among their personnel. But at the same time, both offi cer

corps needed to reach some sort of accommodation with the forces of

social and political change. Had they not done so, they would have failed

to attract that larger, more socially diverse intake of offi cers that was

essential to their viability. Yet by embarking on this course, they were

absorbing larger numbers of men from milieus increasingly susceptible

to new and radical social and political infl uences.

Conclusion
243

Foremost among these were Social Darwinism and its anti-Slavic and

anti-Semitic corollaries—sentiments that were already making their pres-

ence felt in both offi cer corps. The suppression of colonial revolts by the

German military saw Social Darwinism combine with terroristic counter-

insurgency doctrine to terrible effect. Add to all this the fact that both offi -

cer corps, presaging the rise of the “specialist in mass destruction” during

the interwar years, were increasingly preoccupied with the organizational

and technological dimensions of the new industrialized warfare. A picture

thus emerges of institutions whose personnel were increasingly suscep-

tible to radical ideology, intellectually unsuited to countering its malign

infl uence, and increasingly preoccupied with the devastating opportuni-

ties afforded by ominous trends in modern warfare.

But it would be wrong to exaggerate the strength of these phenomena

during the years before the Great War. Some were not unique to Ger-

many and Austria. Within the Habsburg offi cer corps in particular, offi -

cers were subjected to other infl uences that fostered open-mindedness

instead of diminishing it. And the same institutional conservatism that,

in many respects, eroded offi cers’ ability to withstand the strengthen-

ing currents of destructive ideology, in other respects protected them

against it. The stress both offi cer corps placed on good character, their

aversion to notions of unquestioning, zombifi ed obedience, and the

ongoing prevalence of traditional Christian values were all more benefi -

cial elements of such conservatism.

It was the Great War and its chaotic two-year aftermath that made

the violent radicalization of both offi cer corps, and their eventual amal-

gamation with National Socialism, much more likely. It was not just the

annihilative ferocity of so much of the fi ghting that played a part in this

process. So too did the squalor and hardship of conditions in the fi eld,

and the manner in which the merciless, all-encompassing “total” nature

of the Great War impressed itself upon offi cers and men.

And there were important respects in which the Great War was a

battle not just against the enemy’s armies, but against his culture also.

This element was particularly strengthened when offi cers and men came

into direct contact with ethnic groups who had long attracted disdain

or animosity in military and societal circles in Germany and Austria—

eastern Jews, eastern Slavs, and Serbs. As the war continued, moreover,

244
terror in the balk ans

many offi cers increasingly associated the fi rst two of these groups with

the emerging specter of Bolshevism. The odium with which offi cers

regarded Bolshevism was fueled by what they perceived as Bolshevism’s

danger to social and moral order and, more directly, to the discipline and

fi ghting power of their own troops. Meanwhile counterinsurgency war-

fare often, albeit not always, saw German and Austro-Hungarian troops

perpetrate acts of utilitarian and ideologically colored brutality.

The obduracy all these infl uences collectively strengthened was

further buttressed by the trauma of defeat, by the urge to blame it on

perceived enemies internal and external, by the violent aftershock that

followed defeat, and by the resolution to wage future wars in a more sin-

gle-mindedly ruthless as well as technically superior manner.

Yet even then, neither the German nor the Austrian offi cer corps was

fi rmly set on an irreversible path towards criminal complicity in the Nazi

regime. Granted, the Reichswehr offi cer corps of the 1920s and early

1930s was an exclusive, elitist institution, contemptuous of democracy

and set on restoring its prominence within a militarily resurgent Ger-

many. Granted also, the Bundesheer was instrumental in crushing the

Austrian political left and sustaining the Austrofascist dictatorship that

abolished democracy during the early 1930s. But none of this, in itself,

was synonymous with embracing Nazism. That particular endpoint was

the result of a series of further developments—military, political, and

diplomatic—that were in train throughout the 1930s.

Still further developments during the two years following the out-

break of war in 1939 cemented the process by which the two offi cer

corps, now merged into the single offi cer corps of the German army,

eventually became enmeshed in a war of conquest and annihilation in

National Socialism’s name. The moral degeneration that gathered pace

after the fall of Poland; the hubris following the fall of France; and the

ideologically, militarily, and economically determined readiness to wage

a war of unparalleled ferocity against the Soviet Union all contributed

to sealing the pact. And the invocation of much older enmities, enmi-

ties originating from before 1914 but radicalized during the Great War’s

course and aftermath, further ensured such a brutal endpoint. The ruth-

less, ideologically suffused mind-set that now characterized so much

of the senior offi cer corps ensured that the army’s counterinsurgency

Conclusion
245

doctrine in Eastern and south-eastern Europe would be shaped less by

relatively measured precedents such as the Germans’ 1918 counterinsur-

gency in the Ukraine, than by precedents that were much more ruthless.

It is clear, then, that the Wehrmacht’s higher command levels extolled

a brand of counterinsurgency in Eastern and south-eastern Europe that

was based primarily upon the pitiless exercise of terror. But it did not auto-

matically follow that all commanders in the fi eld would blindly adhere

to it. After all the Wehrmacht, like other Reich agencies, often issued

directives that were more guidelines for ruthless action, and thus open to

some interpretation, rather than specifi c orders. Even where directives

were more specifi c, commanders often had some freedom of action over

how radically they implemented them. Some commanders followed the

spirit of such directives closely. Others took ruthlessness to extremes.

Others still tempered their ruthlessness with some restraint. How Ger-

man army commanders and units behaved in the fi eld also depended

greatly upon the conditions in the fi eld which they experienced. It was

these that, along lines elucidated by the historian Jürgen Förster,22 could

create a bridge between the ideological beliefs that shaped the offi cers’

mind-set, and how they then went on to conduct themselves.

In Serbia, such were the fairly sedate conditions occupation units

faced during spring and early summer 1941 that they at fi rst exercised

considerable restraint. But there was no contradiction between this

apparently benign picture and the ruthless mind-set that had taken root

in the offi cer corps. For theirs was a selective restraint, one from which

only the majority Serbian population could hope to benefi t. There is

almost no evidence of offi cers or units refusing to participate in the inten-

sifying persecution of the country’s Jews during this period. Moreover,

even at this early stage, the moderation that occupation divisions exer-

cised towards the Serbs—a moderation to which “demonstrative” harsh-

ness towards, Jews, Communists, and Sinti and Roma was an essential

accompaniment—had its own limits. Yet moderation there was.

But once the Serbian national uprising was under way, restraint with-

ered and terror intensifi ed—not only against Serbia’s Jews, but against

the wider Serbian population also. Given that the escalating severity of

246
terror in the balk ans

German reprisal policy eventually helped to discourage Mihailovic´ from

involving his Chetnik forces in the uprising any further, it can be seen

that the policy in one sense possessed a terrible pragmatic logic—even

though a policy reliant upon terror, and not upon more insightful solu-

tions, could not hope to triumph in the long term. But the severity of

the measures was not just due to the fact that commanders possessed

a remarkably obdurate sense of “pragmatism.” It was also because of

their institutionally conditioned abhorrence of irregular warfare. More

immediately, it was because of the mounting frustration and desperation

felt by formations like the 704th Infantry Division and their substandard

units, facing a security situation that daily grew more alarming. Such

conduct was also apparent among German army anti-Partisan units in

the Soviet Union.23

Further, though the need to “obey orders” should not be ignored, it

should also be remembered that German army commanders, like Third

Reich operatives more generally, often enjoyed considerable freedom of

action when interpreting higher-level directives. Even where directives

were more stringent, it was possible for individual commanders to speak

out against them, or against the premise behind them. Despite this, not

one of the divisional commanders examined in this study chose, as the

national uprising escalated, to proceed with moderation. Instead, they

chose to implement them with all their inherent harshness. One, for rea-

sons of his own, behaved even more harshly. The Wehrmacht campaign

against the Serbian national uprising showcases the explosion of violence

that took place when decades of intensifying institutional harshness com-

bined with the pressures and dangers of the campaign on the ground.

From the beginning of 1942, when the main center of the Yugoslav

Partisan war shifted to the NDH, through to early 1943, German army

counterinsurgency commanders found themselves in markedly differ-

ent circumstances. During this period, in contrast to 1941, the Weh-

rmacht was not facing a desperate defensive situation. It spent much of

the period on the offensive, even though the offensive action it took var-

ied in scale and intensity. Their circumstances being less immediately

alarming than those they had faced in Serbia the previous year, the Ger-

mans deescalated their reprisal policy somewhat. The unworkability of

a policy that relied on an infi nite supply of reprisal victims drawn from a

Conclusion
247

fi nite population, not to mention the “allied” status of the NDH, made it

foolhardy to pursue such a policy there.

Even so, German formations remained overstretched, underresourced,

and pitted against an increasingly resourceful opponent amid extremely

arduous terrain. The Germans therefore still faced onerous diffi culties in

their struggle to defeat the Partisans. This struggle was made no easier by

the fact that their Italian and Croatian allies were unequal to the task. The

Germans’ solution again refl ected not just reality on the ground but also

the brutal, ideologically colored proclivities of their favored counterin-

surgency doctrine. The “solution” was to accord maximum violence just

as prominent a place in the NDH as it had been accorded in Serbia. The