Terror in the Balkans (68 page)

Before turning to those biographical sources, one further point about

divisional records needs making. Divisional records, consisting as they

do of sources produced by offi cers rather than rank-and-fi le soldiers,

provide a much fuller picture of what motivated divisional commanders

than of what motivated the ordinary troops. Yet they do convey some

idea, through such sources as discipline reports and after-action body

counts, of how those soldiers were behaving. It is important to recognize

the contribution the records make on this score, and not only because

soldiers’ behavior is a meaningful focus in its own right. It is impor-

tant also because how divisional commanders responded to the troops’

behavior, or failed to respond, sheds further light on the mind-set of

those commanders themselves.

The available biographical sources relating to German army divi-

sional commanders in Yugoslavia generally reveal more about motivation

than do equivalent sources for the German army divisional command-

ers who served in other theaters during World War II. The reason for

Introduction
9

this is that disproportionate numbers of army personnel who served in

Yugoslavia were not actually German in origin, but Austrian. And in the

shape of the records of the Austro-Hungarian Royal-Imperial Army of

the Great War, there exists a source base that illuminates the personal

experiences many senior Austrian offi cers underwent at a formative time

in their lives. Equivalent records for the Imperial German Army were

largely destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.18

The Royal-Imperial Army records combine with other source types

that provide biographical information on both German and Austrian offi -

cers. These include Great War regimental histories; the seven volumes

of
Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg
, the Austrian offi cial history of the

Great War published during the 1930s, which detail the movements and

actions of Austro-Hungarian units between 1914 and 1918;19 and offi cers’

personnel fi les. These list birthplace, birth date, social background, and

service record. They were produced by the Imperial German Army, by

the Royal-Imperial Army, by their successor armies during the interwar

years, and by the German army under the Third Reich.20

Divisional command was not simply a conduit for “the word from on

high.” It often fashioned the way in which higher-level directives were

implemented, in ways that could be far from uniform. Given that the

mind-set of divisional commanders could be shaped by a multitude of

infl uences, this is not surprising.

The condition of an occupation division was determined by the state

of its troops’ supply, training, and equipment; by the terrain it was forced

to negotiate; by the striking power, ruthlessness, and elusiveness of the

insurgents it faced; and, fi nally, by its relationship with the occupied

population with whom its troops interacted daily. It was this relation-

ship that was perhaps the most important factor of all, as well as the most

complex. For it was the population, caught as it was between both sides,

whose active and effective cooperation—whether in providing man-

power, food, accommodation, or information—was vital to either side’s

success. And in a region as riven by inter-ethnic confl ict as Yugoslavia

during World War II, relations between occupier and occupied were

complicated even further.

10
terror in the balk ans

Different divisions were affected by all these phenomena in different

ways at different times. While one division, for instance, might lead a

humdrum existence in a stagnant occupation backwater, another might

be thrown into savage, relentless, and exhausting mobile counterinsur-

gency operations. Most divisions would experience both states, and

other states besides, during their time in the fi eld, and this was bound to

affect how their offi cers and men behaved.

Moreover, different divisional commanders might view their situa-

tion, and the myriad factors that determined it, in different ways. The

formative life infl uences that could shape commanders’ attitudes and

behavior were more varied than just uniformly strong National Social-

ist belief. Finally, the style of command within the Third Reich, from

Hitler downwards, was more open-ended than one might expect. This

meant that counterinsurgency directives often resembled not so much

clear-cut orders as general guidelines for action. Many such guidelines

sought to foster a resourceful, ruthless mentality, combining harshness

and initiative, among the troops to whom they were issued. In this way

they embodied the National Socialist “leadership principle.”21 But some

were suffi ciently open-ended for units on the ground to implement them

in ways that could be restrained
or
ruthless.

The importance of all these infl uences, together with the institutional

command framework within which they operated, is investigated in the

chapters that follow. Chapters 1 to 3 examine how, over decades, succes-

sive developments shaped the mind-set of the military institutions which

encompassed the commanders who are this study’s concern. Some of

these developments were connected to that particular theater of war, the

Balkans, on which this study focuses. Others had wider historical ori-

gins. All had potential to affect the attitudes and behavior of the senior

German army offi cers who would serve in that particular theater during

World War II.

This sets the scene for the study’s core, in Chapters 4 to 10. These

chapters do not provide a comprehensive treatment of the German army’s

counterinsurgency campaign in Yugoslavia. Rather, by providing case

studies of four different divisions between spring 1941 and early 1943,22

they investigate how a range of middle-level commanders and their units

behaved on the ground in different parts of Yugoslavia, and why. They

Introduction
11

also, particularly in Chapters 4 and 7, illuminate the background devel-

opments that shaped the conduct of all sides in the confl ict during this

period, from the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia onward.

One fi nal point needs making here. On the surface, the years between

1914 and 1945 were a time in which Europe experienced a twenty-year

peace, however uneasy, sandwiched between two uniquely destruc-

tive wars. But there is another way of viewing these years; a prominent

adherent of this school is Eric Hobsbawm, who asserts, “Looking back

on the thirty-one years from the assassination of the Austrian Archduke

in Sarajevo to the unconditional surrender of Japan, they must be seen as

an era of havoc comparable to the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth

century in German History.”23 World War II can thus be seen to have

brought the destructive culmination of the bitter national and, even more

importantly, ideological rivalries that were fi rst acted out so calamitously

during this thirty-year period’s opening stages. How far this view accu-

rately encapsulates the period in its entirety is a question over which his-

torians will continue to deliberate. This study contributes to answering

that question, by investigating how the mind-set of a particular group of

offi cers evolved throughout the period, and how those offi cers went on

to behave during its cataclysmic fi nal years.

c h a p t e r 1

Before the Great War

Changes in the Offi cer Corps

The men who comprised the offi cer corps of the army that

served under the Third Reich did not share a common heritage.

During the years following the German Empire’s founding in 1871, the

needs of an expanded army—unifying the armies of the kingdoms of

Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg—compelled the German

offi cer corps to dilute its social exclusivity and accept growing numbers

of entrants from across the spectrum of the German middle classes.

This process accelerated with the continental arms race that preceded

the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Following the Great War, such

was the diminished size of the post-1918 Reichswehr that the leadership

of the new army was able to restore much of its earlier social exclusivity.

But in 1935, Hitler declared the Versailles disarmament clauses dead

and announced the Reichswehr’s replacement with a vastly enlarged,

conscript-based
Heer
, together with a new air force and an expanded

navy. Now the offi cer corps’ social base grew once more. Then, from

1938 onward, ethnic Germans outwith the Reich’s borders swelled the

offi cer corps even further. The biggest intake came from the German-

speaking lands of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany’s erst-

while ally during the Great War. Of these, the biggest intake of all came

from the post-1918 Republic of Austria.

12

Before the Great War
13

The nine generals who are this study’s main focus all commanded

German army divisions that fought insurgents in Axis-occupied Yugo-

slavia. All were born between 1880 and 1890, either in the German Reich

or in the German-speaking parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. All,

Reich Germans and German-speaking Austrians alike, belonged to

institutions that, during the fi rst years of the twentieth century, were

being challenged by powerful forces of social and political change. The

forces themselves, and the mix of resistance and accommodation with

which the two offi cer corps responded to them, would increasingly infl u-

ence the offi cer corps’ character and the attitudes of young men embark-

ing upon service within them. Some of the effects were benefi cent; rather

more would prove pernicious. Nevertheless, new offi cers were in no sense

already set on an ineluctable path towards National Socialist–style war-

fare during this period; it was the events of later years that would ensure

that particular outcome. But important seeds were planted nonetheless.1

The arch-conservatives who headed the imperial German offi cer corps,

whether the general staff or the senior-most fi eld commanders, recog-

nized that a necessarily large, technically profi cient Imperial German

Army necessitated a large, technically profi cient offi cer corps. It would

need to be an offi cer corps whose members were drawn not just from the

centuries-old bastions of service to the Prussian state—the families of

Junker aristocrats and landowners, of Protestant clerics, of senior civil

servants, and of offi cers themselves—but from a much wider middle-

class social spectrum.2

But with expansion came risk. The offi cer corps saw itself as a bul-

wark against disruptive and dangerous social change. Traditionally aloof

from mainstream society, it had long distrusted the bourgeois middle

class, albeit nothing like as intensely as it feared Germany’s emerging

industrial working class.3 Though the army leadership could counte-

nance a necessarily expanded offi cer corps, then, it sought to minimize

the dangers of social dilution by drawing its offi cer candidates from what

it regarded as the “desired circles” of middle-class German society. The

new emperor, Wilhelm II, elaborated on the concept of “desired circles”

in 1890: “In addition to the sons of noble families of the country, and

14
terror in the balk ans

the sons of my loyal offi cers and civil servants, who according to old

tradition constitute the main pillars of the offi cer corps, I see the future

standard-bearers of my army in the sons of those honorable bourgeois

families in which love for the king and fatherland and respect for the

military and Christian morals are cultivated and handed down.”4

Southeast of the German Reich lay the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian

Empire. Here, Magyars and ethnic German Austrians administered a

polyglot empire whose population also comprised Poles, Ruthenes,

Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Rumanians, Croats, Albanians, Serbs, and

Jews. There were three separate armies under the Emperor’s command—

home armies for the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the monarchy,

and a more powerful joint army. It was the joint army, properly titled the

Royal-Imperial Army, that, in the years before the empire’s collapse in

1918, was principal home to all the Austrian-born offi cers in this study.

Like the German offi cer corps, the Royal-Imperial Army’s offi cer

corps was deeply conservative by tradition, socially selective—though

the majority of its personnel came from the families of offi cers, NCOs, or

offi cials, rather than from traditional aristocratic families—and anxious

to remain separate from civil society.5 But like the German offi cer corps,

it needed to reach some sort of accommodation with the imperatives of

change during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most

pressingly, it needed to try and remedy a serious, ongoing shortage of

offi cers in an army that, due to the empire’s relative economic backward-