Terror in the Balkans (80 page)

the face of the German Second and Twelfth Armies, supported by the

First Panzer Group and forces from Italy and the Axis satellite of Hungary,

in 1941. Dissident Croatian units in the north refused to fi ght, and indeed

some Croatian units sank to fi ghting soldiers of other ethnic groups in

the Yugoslav army instead. Simovic´ fl ed Belgrade upon its devastating

bombardment by the Luftwaffe, and on April 11 a separate Croatian state

was declared. Yugoslavia itself surrendered on April 18, two days before

Greece. Those Yugoslav forces that did not surrender simply disbanded

and went home, or—like the forces fi ghting around Belgrade—retreated

into the mountains.15

If Yugoslavia was worth conquering, it was also worth securing. As

well as helping to facilitate a secure southern fl ank for Barbarossa, occu-

pying Yugoslavia provided direct access to the Agram-Belgrade-Niš

railway line—the main land route supplying the Axis in Greece, and

the main link with Germany’s ally Bulgaria. It also provided unbroken

access to the River Danube, a major supply line for oil from another Bal-

kan ally, Rumania.16

Yet Yugoslavia’s geography, as a succession of invaders throughout

history had discovered, challenged any occupier. Its mountains were of

medium-range height but their fi ssures, caverns, and general topography

were similar to those of higher mountains. They were also diffi cult to

penetrate, particularly in harsh winter conditions.17 All this, of course,

made them a potential haven for irregular resistance.

Because Yugoslavia had never fi gured in Hitler’s long-term plans, he

committed minimal German forces to its occupation and left most of the

burden to the Italians, the Axis satellites of Bulgaria and Hungary, or

collaborationist native administrations.18 Italy, in fulfi llment of its ambi-

tions in the region, was allowed to acquire the most territory. It annexed

Western Slovenia and the Dalmatian coast, installing a quisling govern-

ment in Montenegro and adding Serbian Kosovo to its Albanian posses-

sion. Yet Italy, despite its great power pretensions in the Balkans, had

been as surprised as the Germans by the turn of events. Indeed, its terri-

torial claims in Yugoslavia were little more than a hastily conceived grab

bag.19 With its defective, overburdened armed forces, Italy’s defi ciencies

as an occupying power soon became apparent.

Invasion and Occupation
77

With King Peter and most of his cabinet ministers having fl ed to Lon-

don, Serbia was initially governed by the puppet Acímovicádministra-

tion. From August 29 onward, however, it would be administered by

a German-controlled regime headed by former Yugoslav army general

Milan Nedic´. Of all the regions of occupied Yugoslavia, it was Serbia

that would be saddled with the lowliest position. The fact that most

noteworthy Serbian conservatives had fl ed the country would have

impaired any collaborationist Serbian government from the start. As it

was, the contempt in which Hitler held the Serbs, and the calculation

that suffused the Reich leadership’s perception of Balkan power politics,

combined to reduce Serbia, in Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Rib-

bentrop’s words, “to the smallest limits to prevent . . . conspiracies and

intrigues.”20 Thus was the country truncated to an unviable rump state.

Yet as the historian Matteo Milazzo, considering the paucity of German

occupation troops in Serbia, points out, “what Germany was attempt-

ing . . . was the imposition of a Carthaginian peace on Yugoslavia’s Serb

population which it lacked the strength to enforce.”21

Disastrous as this state of affairs would soon prove, more disastrous still

were the arrangements for governing Croatia. A coastal strip of Croatian

territory, renamed the Governorate of Dalmatia and designated Zone

I in operational parlance, was to be administered directly by General

Vittorio Ambrosio’s Italian Second Army. The rest, offi cially, was to

comprise the Independent State of Croatia, or NDH.22 The NDH was

itself divided into three areas. In Zone II, a demilitarized buffer between

Italian territory and the rest of the NDH, the NDH was to enjoy civilian

administrative power only. Within a strip further inland, Zone III, it was

to enjoy military power. Northeast of Zone III was another demarcation

line, beyond which lay the German sphere of infl uence.

The Germans’ motives in agreeing to this carve-up were twofold. The

fi rst motivation was to give the Croats a power base that would advan-

tage them at the Serbs’ expense—a divide-and-rule ploy the Germans

had already employed with the Czechs and Slovaks. The second was

to place a check on the Italians’ territorial designs. This would help

ensure that much of the region’s valuable economic resources would be

78
terror in the balk ans

controlled by either the Germans themselves or their smaller, more mal-

leable allies—Bulgaria, Hungary, and the NDH itself.23

But from the moment Vladko Macěk, leader of the Croatian Peasants’

Party, rejected German attempts to appoint him head of government,

the NDH was set on a calamitous path. For the Axis then gave the job

to the Ustasha, and its leader, Ante Pavelic´. Favoring Pavelic´ for their

own calculating reasons, the Italians and Germans ignored the fact that

his movement enjoyed only limited support among ordinary Croats.

Exiled for years in Italy as Pavelic´ had been, the Italians regarded him

as indebted to them. In fact, Pavelic´ did not feel beholden to the Italians,

and believed the eventual, inevitable collapse of the Italian army would

give the Ustasha an even freer hand to pursue its ambitions. The Ger-

mans, meanwhile, realized they had underestimated the scale of Italian

ambitions in the Balkans, and were happy to use the NDH to keep them

in check. In addition, Hitler calculated that the Ustasha’s steadfast loy-

alty to the Reich would bring stability to the region.24

That calculation would soon prove particularly risible. For that sum-

mer, the Ustasha would go on to pursue a course that would spark a

catastrophic chain reaction across occupied Yugoslavia. The Ustasha,

extolling a fanatical brand of separatism, was resolved to remodel the

NDH as a “pure” Catholic Croatian state. This was despite the fact

that Croats comprised just over half its 6.5 million inhabitants. The

Ustasha’s commitment to this ideal was partly a response to the dis-

crimination to which interwar Yugoslavia’s Croat population had been

subjected by the Serb-dominated government in Belgrade. But the Usta-

sha’s worship of violence—an exploding bomb adorned the movement’s

symbol—presaged how it would seek to achieve that aim.25 The Usta-

sha’s Nazi-style racism ensured that any campaign for the NDH’s “eth-

nic purity” would target Jews, and Sinti and Roma, as well as Serbs.26

Calculation may well have played a role also; vicious campaigns against

all three groups could channel the Ustasha’s extreme nationalism away

from a premature, potentially damaging confrontation with the Ital-

ians. More simply, the Ustasha regime was militarily weak, and the

Ustasha movement, as a fringe group, enjoyed limited popular support;

terror, therefore, was an alternative means of controlling its ethnically

disparate population.27

Invasion and Occupation
79

The conditions of Axis occupation weakened the new state in other

ways also. It was underdeveloped agriculturally.28 South of the Italian–

German demarcation line, it was subjected to demeaning occupation

measures by an arrogant, exploitative Italian regime. More generally,

both Germans and Italians massively impaired the new state’s military,

diplomatic, and economic independence.29

Yet that same Axis occupation also enabled the Ustasha to pursue its

fanatical program free of outside interference. In particular, the puppet

government in Serbia, fi rmly under German control, would be powerless

to prevent any action the Ustasha took against the NDH’s ethnic Serbs.30

And the action it had in store for the NDH’s Jews would, of course, meet

with German approval.

Moreover, the Ustasha did enjoy the crucial support of the national-

istic, anti-Communist Catholic Church in Croatia, even though many

individual priests would in time come to abhor the Ustasha’s crimes.31

The Ustasha also benefi ted from the fact that in 1941 most Croats, after

centuries of foreign rule and two decades of internal discrimination,

supported the idea of an independent Croatia. Moreover, few among the

population yet appreciated the true extent of the new state’s subordina-

tion to the Axis.32

Granted this window of opportunity, the Ustasha moved quickly. Its

fi rst step, days after the NDH’s foundation, was to legislate to remove

from state employment all elements who did not support the ideal of a

“pure” Croatian state. This gave it the means to expel Jews, Serbs, and

Yugoslav-minded Croats from the state sector. It then stacked the gov-

ernment’s administrative offi ces with its own supporters, irrespective of

whether they were even qualifi ed. This would soon infect the workings

of the new state with crippling levels of corruption and incompetence.

But it also enabled the Ustasha to immediately assimilate the state appa-

ratus with its own party organization and initiate the next phase of its

ethnic program. By May, Nazi-style laws were increasingly excluding Jews

and Sinti and Roma from the social and economic life of the NDH. The

Serbs, much more numerous and potentially much more troublesome,

were at this early stage assaulted somewhat less overtly, but no less surely

for that.33 The regime’s measures, personifi ed by notices springing up

across the NDH proclaiming “No Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and dogs,”34

80
terror in the balk ans

foreshadowed the carnage the Ustasha would soon unleash. The effects

of that carnage would in turn ravage the country’s population and debili-

tate the Axis occupation over the following years. At the same time, rela-

tions between Germany, Italy, and the NDH would become affl icted by a

paralysis that would enfeeble all attempts to remedy this blight.

Germany’s own commitment to the occupation was overseen by Field

Marshal Wilhelm List, the Athens-based Wehrmacht Commander

Southeast. German troops on the ground were thinly spread. In the

NDH was stationed one occupation formation, the 718th Infantry Divi-

sion. In Serbia, under direct German occupation, the somewhat larger

German troop presence was headed by the Luftwaffe’s General Ludwig

von Schröder, whose title was Commander in Serbia. Schröder was to be

replaced in late July, following a fatal air crash, by fellow Luftwaffe gen-

eral Heinrich Danckelmann.35 Under Serbia Command’s direct charge

were the static units of occupation administration, divided among four

area commands (
Feldkommandanturen
) and smaller district commands

(
Kreiskommandanturen
) and local commands (
Ortskommandanturen
).

These were directly overseen by Serbia Command’s Administrative

Offi ce, headed by SS Lieutenant General Harald Turner. Turner’s brief

also extended to overseeing the collaborationist Serbian government.

Serbia Command also exercised direct control, via its Command Staff,

over four substandard territorial battalions, poorly equipped and com-

prising men from older age-groups.36 More impressive were the forces

provided by the SS and police—Einsatzgruppe Yugoslavia of the SD,

and later Reserve Police Battalion 64 from the heavily militarized Order

Police. These units, alongside the Wehrmacht’s own regular military

police and Secret Field Police, would be assigned a prominent role in

countering sabotage, insurgency, and other forms of subversion.37

But the single largest German troop commitment in Serbia, three

additional “700–number” infantry divisions—the 704th, 714th, and

717th—was one over which Serbia Command had only indirect control.

These, together with the 718th Infantry Division, were directly com-

manded by the army’s LXV Corps, headed by Lieutenant General Paul

Bader.38 The fact that the occupation divisions were not under Serbia

Invasion and Occupation
81

Command’s direct charge augured ill for the prospects of effective and

coordinated security.

Bader’s substandard formations were “Category Fifteen” divisions,

raised in spring 1941 specifi cally for occupation duties. Their com-

mands had been formed in the military districts of Dresden (the 704th),

Königsberg (the 714th), and Salzburg in the Eastern March (the 717th

and 718th). Correspondingly, the 704th and 714th’s infantry regiments

were drawn from the old Reich, the 717th’s from the Eastern March. Two

thirds of the 718th’s infantry strength had likewise been raised in the

Eastern March.39 In contrast with the three infantry regiments allocated

to a full-strength frontline infantry division, each occupation division