Terror in the Balkans (67 page)

Wehrmacht’s damning record. A picture has emerged of a senior army

offi cer corps that was complicit in the Nazi regime’s crimes primarily

because complicity suited both its professional ambitions and its ideo-

logical convictions.9

It is in relation to those ideological convictions that Boehme’s order

is signifi cant for a second reason. For it is a particularly telling reminder

that the origins of those convictions lie further back in history. Many

of the reasons why the German army came to support the Nazi regime

stemmed from the situation in which the German military found itself

after the Great War of 1914 to 1918. During this aftermath, the defeated

German army of the old imperial regime, the Kaiserheer, was reduced

from a millions-strong body to a defense force one hundred thousand

strong, the Reichswehr. The Nazis’ pledge, in the years that followed,

to tear up the treaty and commit Germany to full-scale rearmament was

a pledge Reichswehr offi cers would fi nd increasingly enticing. It pro-

vided them, after all, with an opportunity to pursue their professional

ambitions, something which the weak democratic regime governing

Germany between 1918 and 1933 clearly could not provide. But there

were additional reasons, rooted further back in history, why the army

was ready to behave so pitilessly in implementing the Nazi agenda. Gen-

eral Boehme’s order alludes to one such reason. The decades-old hatred

of the Serbs that it invoked was one of the historic enmities whose toxic

4
terror in the balk ans

effect upon the German army’s conduct during World War II is a major

concern of this study.

Just how brutally the German army behaved during World War II, and

why, are vast, labyrinthine questions. But the counterinsurgency cam-

paign in Yugoslavia, the particular focus of this study, provides revealing

insights into those enmities and how they affected soldiers’ behavior.

As a force that reacted with excessive harshness when confronted with

irregular armed resistance, the German army fi nds ample company

throughout history. Occupation troops have often been inadequately

trained and equipped, and have often lacked the numbers needed to

administer occupied territory effectively. They can thus easily become

brutalized by the fear and frustration they feel at being stationed deep

within an unfamiliar country, facing an unseen and often highly mobile

enemy ready to employ ruthless and underhand methods against them,

encountering a civilian population of at best suspect reliability, and often

living and fi ghting amid the kind of impenetrable terrain that is a haven for

irregular fi ghters and a topographical nightmare for the forces facing them.

In fact, the Communist Partisans who would prove the Germans’

most implacable adversary in occupied Yugoslavia often fought in the

manner of a conventional army. This mode of fi ghting found growing

favor with the Partisan movement as the war progressed, as its burgeon-

ing size and strength increasingly emboldened it, and required it, to

fi ght in the open.10 Even so, the Partisans and other insurgent groups

in wartime Yugoslavia employed irregular methods for much of the

time. The irregular combatants the Germans faced in Yugoslavia during

World War II frequently fl outed two of the criteria of lawful combat-

ant status laid down in the 1907 Hague Convention: they were often not

readily identifi able, and often did not carry arms openly. The Yugoslav

Partisans also regularly fl outed a third criterion: their maltreatment and

murder of German prisoners, and particularly of native collaborators,

frequently defi ed all notions of internationally acceptable conduct.11

By the outbreak of World War II, international law made allowances

for occupying forces facing irregular opponents. Article 50 of the Hague

Convention had no issue with seizing hostages to ensure an occupied

Introduction
5

population’s good behavior. Such hostage-taking was widespread prac-

tice during the interwar years. The convention approved reprisals as

long as they were against civilians who had actually resisted in some way.

But it was silent on whether reprisals should take lethal form, or whether

they should restrict themselves to measures such as fi nancial penalties or

confi scation of property. In any case, the German generals convicted in

the “Hostage Trial” at Nuremberg after World War II were not impris-

oned for killing civilians per se—something in which servicemen on both

sides had of course been copiously active, particularly in the air war.

Rather, the generals were imprisoned specifi cally for conducting repri-

sals on occupied territory so indiscriminately and disproportionately.12

The German army’s counterinsurgency campaign in Yugoslavia—a

campaign waged under commanders from both air force and army—was

as brutal as it was not just because of the conditions it faced. This, after

all, was an army whose leadership, due to its ideological sympathies and

careerist calculation, had hitched its wagon to the Nazi star. It sought to

instill within its troops’ minds and actions a set of beliefs and attitudes

that, it hoped, would transform them into willing executors of the “Nazi”

way of war. It was also deeply complicit in the campaign the SS and

police waged across Europe to “cleanse” the occupied territories of the

Reich’s “ideological enemies.” In the course of that campaign, the army

leadership became implicated among other things in that succession of

murderous initiatives from which emerged the Nazis’ “Final Solution” to

the “problem” of European Jewry.

What all this entailed when it came to counterinsurgency was that the

troops were expected to single out, victimize, and kill Jews, Commu-

nists, and Sinti and Roma, as scapegoats or reprisal victims for insurgent

attacks. The German army leadership sought to propagandize its troops

into believing that such groups were a “security threat.” From summer

1941, as the Final Solution accelerated across occupied Europe, the same

rationale was used to justify SS executions of tens of thousands of Jews

and Sinti and Roma in the army’s jurisdiction.

More generally, the troops themselves were expected to translate into

practice the National Socialist belief that terror was the answer to any

unrest that arose in occupied territory. This approach was considerably

less evident in German-occupied Western Europe for much of the war.

6
terror in the balk ans

But the Slavic regions of southeastern and Eastern Europe were a different

matter. The particularly harsh occupation policy which the Nazi regime

practiced in these regions made resistance more likely from the outset.

The often impenetrable terrain of forest, swamp, and mountain that cov-

ered much of them was an ideal environment for the development of resis-

tance by armed irregular bands. Once resistance had developed, the “racial

backwardness” of the Slavic population whom the Germans believed were

providing the insurgents with shelter and supply made it even more likely

that the population would suffer ferocious German retaliation. And in the

German military, the Nazi approach to counterinsurgency in south-east-

ern and Eastern Europe found an especially fertile seedbed.

The result was a plethora of directives and measures that were often

brutal in the extreme. They encompassed immensely disproportionate

reprisal shootings, mass destruction of villages, and the ravaging of vast

areas in large-scale mobile operations unleashed less against insurgents

than against the civilian population whom the German army believed,

rightly or wrongly, was aiding and abetting them. Moreover, after-action

reports by German army counterinsurgency units recorded countless

operations in which “enemy” death tolls dwarfed both German death

tolls and the amounts of enemy weaponry counted. These are clear signs

that grievous numbers of noncombatants had perished in these actions.

Such death tolls could to some extent be intentionally or unintentionally

overinfl ated.13 Yet there can be no serious doubt that slaughter of civilians

took place on a frequently eye-watering scale. Moreover, some command-

ers, for reasons of their own, spurred their troops to levels of destruction

and carnage even greater than higher command expected of them.

Yet, its brutal nature notwithstanding, the counterinsurgency which

the German army prosecuted in these regions did display a saner, more

restrained side. As the war dragged on and turned ever more emphati-

cally against Germany, many army offi cers increasingly realized that

they could not rely solely on terror if they wanted to keep their East-

ern and south-eastern European territories in line. For one thing, they

recognized that, though large-scale mobile operations had their place,

no viable long-term counterinsurgency strategy could do without small,

well-armed mobile patrols and small-scale garrisons stationed amongst

the population susceptible to insurgent infl uence. More fundamentally

Introduction
7

still, they saw the need to balance terror, perhaps even supplant it, with

more measured policies that actually offered the population something

concrete in return for its assistance. Consequently, for instance, they

might urge leniency towards insurgent deserters, or redistribution of

farmland amongst the occupied rural population. Complementing such

initiatives was the army’s intermittently effective propaganda machine.

These more constructive efforts were never enough to shift decisively

the direction of German counterinsurgency warfare in Eastern and

south-eastern Europe. Often, all they succeeded in doing was to con-

fuse the troops with mixed messages. And many offi cers likely went to

such effort not because they were more moral than their colleagues, even

though some were, but because they were more sensible. That they went

to such effort at all, however, reminds the historian to regard the German

army’s motives and actions with a nuanced eye.

Yet this too is to understate the complexities this study examines. For

it investigates what drove counterinsurgency not at higher command lev-

els, but among units in the fi eld. Historians have produced a compelling

picture of high-level army culpability in Nazi crimes. But the question of

how far, and why, the bulk of German army personnel actually partici-

pated in such outrages remains far from resolved.14

This study examines the motivations not of ordinary soldiers, some-

thing for which sources are often scant,15 but of divisional commanders.

In the German army as in others, the division was a pivotally important

command level. As the smallest combined arms formation capable of

independent operations, it was the basic unit of the German army. The

division was also the interface between the orders of higher command

and units in the fi eld; it fi ltered the high-level orders that directed the

counterinsurgency campaign, and conveyed them, together with orders

of its own, to its regiments and other units.

The main source base the middle level generated, the offi cial paperwork

of divisions and their subordinate units, is rich and extensive, even though

problems of reliability and completeness accompany it.16 The main types

of German army divisional record utilized here are drawn from the divi-

sions’ operational fi les (Ia), quartermaster’s fi les (Ib), and intelligence fi les

8
terror in the balk ans

(Ic). These fi les provide an extensive picture of a division’s counterinsur-

gency effort. Operational fi les contain orders and reports on both general

security matters and particular counterinsurgency operations. The divi-

sional quartermaster was responsible for gathering reports generated by

various divisional subsections, including the divisional court, the military

police, and offi ces responsible for transport and supply. Intelligence fi les

detail matters relating to the mood of the population, and to the provision

of propaganda and leisure activities to the troops. When it came to assess-

ing the population’s mood, the intelligence section relied extensively upon

information gathered from native informers. Intelligence section fi les also

contain reports on insurgent groups and activities from civilian informers,

and transcripts of interviews with captured insurgents or insurgent desert-

ers; these constituted a source of information on the size, composition, and

activities of insurgent forces within a particular division’s jurisdiction.17

The orders and reports contained within these fi les together illuminate

the immediate circumstances and wider contexts that shaped offi cers’

motivations and conduct. Division-level sources rarely, if ever, state offi cers’

ideological motivations explicitly. However, a considerable amount can be

inferred from what offi cers did, even more so when such sources are used

in combination with the types of biographical source this study utilizes.