Terror in the Balkans (81 page)

in Yugoslavia was allocated just two such regiments. The divisions pos-

sessed cycle, reconnaissance, engineer, and signals troops at company

strength only; by contrast, frontline infantry divisions commanded

entire battalions of such forces. Nor did the occupation divisions pos-

sess medium mortars or medium machine-gun companies, or antitank

or infantry-gun support. They did possess other forms of artillery, but,

unlike frontline divisions, they were allotted an artillery section of circa

three batteries, rather than a full regiment.40 Their mainly reservist

personnel hailed from older age-groups, and such training as they had

received was incomplete when they arrived in Yugoslavia.41

Between May 7 and 24, all four divisions were transported to their new

jurisdictions.42 Initially, they were assigned to guarding rail communica-

tions with Greece and Bulgaria. This was an important task, on which the

southern fl ank of Operation Barbarossa and the Axis position in southeast

Europe depended, but scarcely arduous in itself. Yet these divisions were

destined to provide the bulk of the German security forces in Yugoslavia

well into 1942—a task that would become infi nitely more arduous. They

embodied what was in fact an established approach within the German

military—a cut-price military occupation, employing second-rate com-

manders, the better to resource the army’s frontline formations.43

The fact that about half the personnel across the four divisions hailed

from the Eastern March would bring no particular benefi t. That Austrian-

born personnel were so numerous was due greatly to the logistical ease of

moving troops down to Yugoslavia from the proximate Eastern March.

Granted, senior Austrian-born offi cers would likely bring some regional

82
terror in the balk ans

expertise to their duties, something of which Hitler himself was con-

scious.44 Some Austrian offi cers were profi cient in mountain warfare, a

specialism that might serve them well in Yugoslavian terrain.45 But not

until 1943 would their units be resourced to anything like the extent

required for such a role. The ferocity with which many of them, and

their units, would soon be comporting themselves—partly in an attempt

to compensate for their many defects—would prove much more telling.

All these formations faced increasingly daunting conditions as 1941

wore on. By summer, they would bear the brunt of a Communist-led

uprising, sparked by the campaign of expulsion and killing the Usta-

sha inaugurated in early June, which threatened to engulf them entirely.

The danger the uprising posed grew most severe when the Communists

made common cause with a group towards whom, during the interwar

years, they had felt only hostility—Serbian nationalist irregular fi ghters,

or “Chetniks.”46 How the German army units on the spot reacted to this

threat reveals much about what motivated them.

The travails the 704th Infantry Division faced during 1941, and its

response, are the next chapter’s main focus.

c h a p t e r 5

Islands in an Insurgent Sea

The 704th Infantry Division in Serbia

Brigadier general heinrich borowski, the 704th Infantry

Division’s commander, was born in eastern Prussia in 1880 to

the family of a police inspector. He served as an offi cer in the 1st Field

Artillery Regiment during the Great War, fi rstly on the western front,

then on the eastern front from April 1915 onward. Aside from a month

serving under the German military administration in Warsaw in Sep-

tember 1915, he remained on the eastern front until January 1917. After

fi ghting on the western front in 1917 and 1918, he remained a career

offi cer throughout the interwar years, and commanded two artillery

regiments in succession from 1939 onward.1 It was a reasonably distin-

guished career. It was no preparation for the type of warfare he and his

troops would face in Yugoslavia.

For during summer 1941 the 704th Infantry Division would face lev-

els of resistance that threatened not only the Axis occupation structure,

but also the very survival of the division itself. The intense pressures

which the 704th’s offi cers and men faced on the ground, the mind-set

of the military institution to which they belonged, and the perceptions

of their own commander all played a part in determining how they

responded.

83

84
terror in the balk ans

Initially, the 704th and the other occupation divisions enjoyed rela-

tively benign circumstances in Yugoslavia. The great majority of the

704th’s troops, its main infantry force comprising the 724th and 734th

Infantry Regiments, had been born between 1908 and 1913.2 The divi-

sion described its equipment as “complete”, the makeup of its person-

nel “good.” Its sickness rate was just over 5 percent.3 As yet, there was

little sign of unrest. The 704th was especially well disposed towards the

region’s “friendly and obliging” Muslim population.4 In late May, after

releasing hostages it had been holding to help ensure the population’s

good behavior, it detected a further improvement in the popular mood.5

So relaxed was the atmosphere that in early June the 704th permitted its

personnel to bring reliable civilians along to assist on hunting expedi-

tions. They were forbidden to carry weapons, but this suggests German

troops had been so at ease with the locals that they had been entrusting

them with weapons before.6 Indeed, the division warned its troops that

“social or private relations with the natives may not develop from rela-

tions formed in the course of hunting expeditions. Necessary arrange-

ments (for the expeditions) may not be discussed in private homes.”7

All across Serbia, the Germans were in reasonably sanguine mood

that spring. Serbia Command’s intelligence section observed that the

population “acknowledged German order and the disciplined behav-

iour of Wehrmacht personnel.” It also noted the population’s relief that

it had not been left at the mercy of the Hungarians,8 for the particularly

brutish behavior of many of the Habsburg Army’s Hungarian troops had

marked Serbs’ collective memory of the last war. Hunger, always likely

to turn a subjugated people against its occupiers, was being headed

off by food transports laden with fl our and sugar. The work of Serbia

Command’s intelligence section in building up favorable German- and

Serbian-language newspapers was just one way in which the Germans

sought to exploit this favorable climate.9

It helped, of course, that German troops were not yet mishandling the

population.10 Immediately after the invasion, divisional and higher com-

mands ordered the troops to behave correctly and refrain from plunder.

The Army High Command declared on April 21 that “requisitions are to

be restricted to what is absolutely necessary, and it is essential that they

be carried out by offi cers in exchange for payment or an IOU note . . .

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
85

Anyone who, in the course of service, maliciously or willingly damages

the population’s property will be punished for plunder in accordance

with Article 132 of the Military Penal Code.”11 Both command levels also

wanted to impress the population with German discipline, the better to

dispose the population towards the Germans and win its cooperation.12

Such a spectacle apparently belies German counterinsurgency’s sin-

gularly ferocious image. Yet it was not the France of 1914 providing inspi-

ration here, but the France of 1940. During the campaign in the West that

year, and the military occupation that followed, the German army gener-

ally treated civilians with considerable restraint.13 The contrast with its

conduct in Poland was startling. Some of the contrast was due to com-

manders’ concerns for their troops’ discipline. Much of it was due to the

fact that, in Nazi terms, the French were not an inferior race like the Poles.

And while the Serbs, as southern Slavs, sat lower on the Nazi racial scale

than the French, they sat higher than the Poles. The Germans in Serbia

also had a simpler reason to suppress terroristic urges: they had yet to

face meaningful resistance. Even offi cers schooled in German counter-

insurgency doctrine were unlikely to rain terror on civilians without fi rst

feeling “provoked.” They were even less likely to do so when, in contrast

to 1914, their superiors were not inciting them.

There was a sinister exception to this picture, one that presaged a cam-

paign of racial mass killing soon to unfold across all Serbia. This campaign

would coagulate with similarly murderous “initiatives” across Axis-occu-

pied Europe that summer and autumn. Together, they would culminate

in the emergence of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” of the “problem” of Euro-

pean Jewry.14 This was a process which, in Serbia, would become closely

intertwined with the Wehrmacht’s counter-insurgency campaign.

From the occupation’s start, Wehrmacht authorities were instru-

mental in marking out and discriminating against Serbia’s twenty-three

thousand Jews.15 The fi rst steps were piecemeal. But within weeks, the

measures being enacted—including dismissal from public and private

operations, transfer of goods and property to “Aryan” ownership, ghet-

toization, forced labor, and the wearing of the yellow star—were being

implemented much more systematically.16 The Wehrmacht inaugurated

86
terror in the balk ans

such measures because they satisfi ed not just its anti-Semitic proclivities,

but also its practical needs. For instance, seizing Jewish property freed up

accommodation for its own troops.17 All branches of the German occu-

pation regime were complicit in these acts. But it was the Wehrmacht

Commander in Serbia who not only approved and oversaw all of them,

but who also, within weeks of the occupation commencing, had put them

on that much more systematic footing.18 The historian Walter Manos-

chek writes that “in registering the Jews, marking them out with yellow

armbands bearing the inscription ‘Jew,’ imposing special taxes on them,

‘Aryanizing,’ imposing trust companies on Jewish fi rms, excluding them

from public life and driving them from society, the German occupiers

had concluded the fi rst phase of robbing the Jews in Serbia of their rights

and possessions.”19 On May 30, Serbia Command issued a proclamation

authorizing similar treatment for Serbia’s Sinti and Roma.20

In the 704th’s jurisdiction, anti-Semitic measures affected not only

Serbian Jews, but also several hundred Jewish refugees, mostly from

Austria, who were interned in the town of Šabac. In July these Jews

were set to work in the area command headquarters, the local hospital,

and German offi cers’ private quarters.21 It was the
Kommandanturen
,

rather than the occupation divisions, that had direct responsibility for

enacting the relevant measures. In the 704th’s jurisdiction in late May,

for instance, the town commandant in Valjevo forbade the troops to visit

the town’s Jewish dentist, and announced that “all Jews in Valjevo and

its environs have been instructed by the mayor and the local authorities

to wear a yellow armband from 1 June onward.”22

A letter from Corporal Gerhard Reichert of the 11th Infantry Divi-

sion conveyed the wretchedness to which the Serbian Jews were already

being reduced. He described how “all the Jews have been penned up. In

the towns they’ve even put aside quarters for them, which they’re abso-

lutely forbidden to leave. The roads heading out have been blocked off

with a tangle of wire, and a guard stands before it. I wouldn’t want to be

a Jew.”23 Not every soldier followed anti-Semitic dictates as completely

as they might have done: in late June, Serbia Command’s operations

section complained that some troops, housed in formerly Jewish homes

earmarked for their accommodation, were still allowing Jews to stay in

them.24 But the corrosive effect of years of anti-Semitic indoctrination of

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
87

German soldiers is easy to imagine. Corporal Ludwig Bauer of Supply

Battalion 563 demonstrated it when he wrote that “yesterday there was

a raid on the Jews where we were; they were all hauled off to the edge of

the town. It was really interesting to see what specimens they are. Truly

the scum of humanity.”25 The Wehrmacht reinforced the effect by sub-

jecting its troops to ongoing anti-Semitic propaganda; the 704th Infantry

Division’s troops, for instance, were provided with cinema showings of

the anti-Semitic propaganda fi lm
Jud Süss
.26

And though the 704th Infantry Division, and the other German occupa-

tion divisions operating on Serbian soil, were not directly involved in this

fi rst wave of discriminatory measures, they nevertheless helped to facili-

tate it—simply by allowing the
Kommandanturen
to enact such measures

without hindrance or comment. And the 704th’s example indicates that