Terror in the Balkans (49 page)

US National Archives and Records Administration, College

Park, MD

NDH

Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia)

NFA

Neue Feldakten (New Battlefi eld Files)

NHT

Nuremberg Hostage Trial

NOO

Narodno Oslobodilacki Odbor (people’s liberation committee)

OKH

Oberkommando des Heeres (Army High Command)

OKW

Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command)

P-Zug

Panzerzug (armored train)

Sch.-Div.

Schützen-Division (rifl e division)

Notes

i n t r o d u c t i o n

1. Throughout this study, the term
Wehrmacht
denotes the German armed forces generally, or at least more than one of the three armed services. It is frequently used in

reference to German occupation of the Balkans because several senior Wehrmacht

commanders who served in the region hailed from the air force (
Luftwaffe
) rather than the army (
Heer
). The term
Wehrmacht
is not used in this study to denote the army specifi cally, as is often the case in other studies.

2. While guerrillas seek simply to overthrow the established order, partisans see them-

selves as an adjunct to regular forces seeking to reestablish independent govern-

ment. This is the meaning of the term as used in the title of this study, and applies to the main insurgent groups who were active in Yugoslavia during World War Two. In

the study’s text, however, the term is normally used with a capital
P.
This denotes the Yugoslav Communist Partisans, who took the term
Partisan
as the title of their movement as well as a general descriptive label. The term is occasionally used in the

text with a small
p
where the partisan movement in the Soviet Union is referred to.

The term
insurgent
is used in the text to denote irregular fi ghters generally, be they guerrillas, partisans or Partisans in the specifi c Yugoslav context.

3. Fred Singleton,
Twentieth-Century Yugoslavia
(London: Macmillan, 1976), 86.

4. Generals’ ranks are translated into their World War II U.S. Army and British army

equivalents at fi rst mention, then simply as “general” thereafter. The translations (in order of rank) are as follows:

General =
Generaloberst

Lieutenant General =
General der Infanterie/General der Artillerie/General der

Gebirgsjäger
(mountain troops)

269

270
Notes to Pages 2–7

Major General =
Generalleutnant

Brigadier General =
Generalmajor

5. Walter Manoschek, “The Extermination of the Jews in Serbia” in
National Socialist
Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies
, ed.

Ulrich Herbert (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), 170.

6. See Geoffrey Best,
Humanity in Warfare
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); Stephen C. Neff,
War and the Law of Nations: A General History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

7. See, for instance, Edward B. Westermann,
Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing

Racial War in the East
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); Philip W.

Blood,
Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe
(Wash-

ington, DC: Potomac, 2006).

8. On the historiography from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s, see the introduction in

Theo J. Schulte,
The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia
(Oxford:

Berg, 1989).

9. For a historiographical overview up to the 2000s, see Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R.

Überschär, eds.,
Hitler’s War in the East 1941–1945: A Critical Assessment
(Oxford: Berg, 2000). Recent overview works, with further pointers to secondary literature,

include Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds.,
Die Wehrmacht: Mythos

und Realität
(Hamburg: Oldenbourg, 1999); Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds.,

War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941–1944
(New York:

Berghahn, 2000); Christian Hartmann et al., eds.,
Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Bilanz

einer Debatte
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005); Ben Shepherd, “The Clean Wehrmacht, The War of Extermination, and Beyond,”
Historical Journal
52 (2009): 455–473.

10. Klaus Schmider,
Partisanenkrieg in Jugoslawien 1941–1944
(Hamburg: E. S. Mittler, 2002), 547.

11. The fourth condition, that of being commanded by a superior responsible for his

subordinates, was met. Aubrey C. Dixon, and Otto Heilbrunn,
Communist Guer-

rilla Warfare
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1954), 85.

12. Klaus Schmider, “Der jugoslawische Kriegsschauplatz,” in
Das Deutsche Reich und der
Zweite Weltkrieg, Band 8. Die Ostfront, 1943/44: Der Krieg im Osten und an den Nebenfronten
, ed. Karl-Heinz Frieser et al. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2007), 1072.

13. Ben Shepherd, “German Army Security Units in Russia, 1941–1943: A Case Study”

(PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2000), 7–10. See also Chapter 6.

14. On the need for a nuanced approach to the offi cer corps and the Wehrmacht gener-

ally, see Rolf-Dieter Müller, “Die Wehrmacht—Historische Last und Verantwortung:

Die Historiographie im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Vergangenheitsbewäl-

tigung,” in
Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität
, ed. Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-

Erich Volkmann (Hamburg: Oldenbourg, 1999), 3–35; Christian Hartmann,

“Verbrecherischer Krieg—verbrecherische Wehrmacht? Überlegungen zur Struk-

tur des deutschen Ostheeres 1941–1944,”
Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte
52

(2004): 1–75.

Notes to Pages 7–10
271

15. Though for rank-and-fi le studies of great merit, see for example Omer Bartov,
The
Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985); Omer Bartov,
Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in

the Third Reich
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Christoph Rass,
Men-schenmaterial: Deutsche Soldaten an der Ostfront
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003);

Christoph Rass, “The Social Profi le of the German Army’s Combat Units, 1939–

1945,” in
Germany and the Second World War, Volume 9, Part 1. German Wartime

Society 1939–1945: Politicization, Disintegration, and the Struggle for Survival
, Ralf Blank et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 671–768. On source-related

problems that studies of the motivations of NCOs and rank-and-fi le soldiers should

consider, see Shepherd, “German Army Security Units in Russia, 1941–1943: A Case

Study” 7–10.

16. In particular, the picture becomes less reliable and complete further down the com-

mand chain, especially at battalion and company level. On the source-related issues

regarding German army divisional fi les, see Shepherd, “German Army Security

Units in Russia, 1941–1943: A Case Study,” 27–31. Two recent division-level stud-

ies of particular prominence are Hermann Frank Meyer,
Blutiges Edelweiss: Die 1.

Gebirgs-Division im Zweiten Weltkrieg
(Berlin: Links, 2008); Christian Hartmann,
Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg: Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42
(Munich:

Oldenbourg, 2009).

17. For more detail, see Shepherd, “German Army Security Units in Russia, 1941–1943:

A Case Study,” 7–10.

18. Records of the royal armies of Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg, which belonged

to the Imperial German Army, have survived, but the central records in Potsdam,

containing the records of the much more predominant Prussian units, were for the

most part destroyed.

19. Edmund Glaise von Horstenau et al.,
Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg
, vols. 1–7

(Vienna: Verlag der Militärwissenschaftlichen Mitteilungen, 1930–1938).

20. See also Appendix A.

21. On the leadership principle, see Ian Kershaw,
The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and
Perspectives of Interpretation
, 4th ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 2000), chap. 4.

On the nature of rear area security directives as guidelines rather than clear orders,

see Hannes Heer, “The Logic of the War of Extermination. The Wehrmacht and

the Counter-Insurgency War,” in
War of Extermination: The German Military

in World War II 1941–1944
, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (New York:

Berghahn, 2000), 99–103. Heer arguably overstates the degree to which “leadership

principle”–type directives brutalized the Wehrmacht counterinsurgency campaign,

but his observations as to
how
they worked are illuminating.

22. A fl awed and dated, but nevertheless useful, introductory English-language overview of German counterinsurgency warfare in Yugoslavia between these dates is

Paul N. Hehn,
The German Struggle against Yugoslav Guerrillas in World War II:

German Counter-Insurgency in Yugoslavia 1941–1943
(New York: Columbia Univer-

sity Press, 1979).

272
Notes to Pages 11–14

23. Eric Hobsbawm,
Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991
(London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 52.

1. befor e the gr e at wa r

1. On the social composition of the German army offi cer corps under the Third

Reich, see Bernhard R. Kroener, “Strukturelle Veränderungen in der Militärischen

Gesellschaft des Dritten Reiches,” in
Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung
,

ed. Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft,

1994), 267–296; Bernhard R. Kroener, “Generationserfahrungen und Elitenwan-

del: Strukturveränderungen im deutschen Offi zierkorps 1933–1945,” in
Eliten in

Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert: Strukturen und Bezie-

hungen, Band 1
, ed. Rainer Hudemann and Georges-Henri Soutou (Munich: Old-

enbourg, 1994), 219–233; Bernhard R. Kroener, “The Manpower Resources of the

Third Reich in the Area of Confl ict between Wehrmacht, Bureaucracy, and War

Economy, 1939–1942,” in
Germany and the Second World War, Volume 5. Organiza-

tion and Mobilization of the German Sphere of Power. Part 1: Wartime Administration, Economy, and Manpower Resources 1939–1941
, Bernhard R. Kroener et al.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 787–1154; Bernhard R. Kroener, “Man-

agement of Human Resources, Deployment of the Population, and Manning the

Armed Forces in the Second Half of the War (1942–1944),” in
Germany and the

Second World War, Volume 5. Organization and Mobilization in the German Sphere

of Power. Part 2: Wartime Administration, Economy, and Manpower Resources

1941–1944/5
, Bernhard R. Kroener et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 918–942.

2. On the social exclusivity of the German offi cer corps during this period, see Karl

Demeter,
The German Offi cer Corps in Society and State, 1650–1945
(London: Wei-

denfeld and Nicolson, 1965), 1–73; Martin Kitchen,
The German Offi cer Corps,

1890–1914
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Detlef Bald,
Der deutsche Offi zier:
Sozial- und Bildungsgeschichte des deutschen Offi zierkorps im 20. Jahrhundert

(Munich: Bernard und Graefe, 1995), 38–100; Johannes Hürter,
Hitlers Heerführer:

Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42
(Munich:

Oldenbourg, 2006), 23–33.

3. On the offi cer corps’ attitude towards the working class, see Kitchen,
The German
Offi cer Corps, 1890–1914,
chap. 7.

4. Hürter,
Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42
, 27.

5. István Deák,
Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg

Offi cer Corps 1848–1918
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 86–88; Gunther E.

Rothenburg,
The Army of Francis Joseph
(Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press,

1998), 132, 145–146; Günther Kronenbitter,
“Krieg im Frieden”: Die Führung der K.

u. K. Armee und die Großmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906–1914
(Munich: Old-

enbourg, 2003), 26–33; Jonathan Gumz,
The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in

Notes to Pages 14–17
273

Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13–16, 30–34.

6. Rothenburg, The
Army of Francis Joseph
, 105–110, 125–127; Kronenbitter,
“Krieg
im Frieden”: Die Führung der K. u. K. Armee und die Großmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906–1914
521–531.

7. Rothenburg, The
Army of Francis Joseph
, 118; Deák,
Beyond Nationalism: A Social
and Political History of the Habsburg Offi cer Corps 1848–1918,
86–88.

8. Deák,
Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Offi cer
Corps 1848–1918,
90.

9. Ibid., 94–95; Kronenbitter,
“Krieg im Frieden”: Die Führung der K. u. K. Armee und
die Großmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906–1914
, 44–45; Kitchen, The
German
Offi cer Corps
, 1890–1914, 24; Hürter,
Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42,
47.