Terror in the Balkans (88 page)

across Russian Poland and into the western Ukraine.1 He also served as

an offi cer in the Habsburg occupation forces in the Ukraine following

the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. During the interwar years Hinghofer dis-

tinguished himself considerably, holding a succession of garrison and

brigade commands before becoming an army administrator. In 1934 he

joined the Austrian Federal War Ministry. By September 1939 Hinghofer

was a brigadier general, serving in a number of staff roles before being

promoted again to major general and receiving command of the 342d

Infantry Division in July 1941.2

Hinghofer’s division arrived in Serbia in September 1941. The 342d,

later joined by the 113th Infantry Division, was to be the Germans’

main counterinsurgency strike force that autumn. It was to bolster the

119

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terror in the balk ans

beleaguered German army units already on the ground, execute large

mobile operations against the insurgents themselves, and act as the

Wehrmacht’s main hatchet man in bringing terror to the Serbs. Of all the

infl uences to which Hinghofer was subjected during his earlier life, none

seem to have colored his conduct of the campaign more decisively than

his eastern front experience during the Great War and, perhaps most

decisively of all, his Austrian origins.

The most centrally important fi gure in the mushrooming ferocity of the

autumn security campaign was Lieutenant General Franz Boehme. On

September 19, Boehme was assigned the new title of Plenipotentiary

Commanding General in Serbia. This position enabled him, aided by the

command staff of the German XVIII Corps, to override the split that had

hitherto existed between LXV Corps and the Wehrmacht Commander in

Serbia.3 Boehme’s appointment was part of a new, radically harsh approach

to crushing the Serbian uprising. Offi cials such as General Danckelmann

had advocated a popular anti-Communist front with the Serbs, and sought

to distance Nedic´ from harsh German reprisals. But these men were now

sidelined or replaced by hard-liners deeply skeptical as to the potential

of Serbo-German cooperation. Danckelmann himself complained at his

treatment. But on October 10, on Boehme’s recommendation, Field Mar-

shal List sacked him for underestimating the danger posed by the uprising

and relying excessively on the Serbian gendarmerie to suppress it.4

Boehme and his methods arrived at a critical juncture for the Ger-

mans in Serbia. The national uprising surged that month as Mihailovic´’s

Chetniks joined forces with the Communist Partisans, and the towns

of Užice, Požega, Gornji Milanovac, and Cˇacˇak all fell within ten days

of one another. This effectively placed all Serbia west of the Belgrade-

Kraljevo line in the insurgents’ hands. Užice, with its bank and arms fac-

tory, was a particularly treasured prize. The Germans fell back to defend

the main urban centers and supply lines. Yet their ability to defend even

these was dangerously threatened.5

On some counts, Boehme pursued a joint approach with Nedic´. In line

with the Serbian leader’s wishes, he ordered the rearming of the Serbian

gendarmerie at the end of September. This measure would be vindicated

Settling Accounts in Blood
121

once the gendarmerie began giving a better account of itself as autumn

progressed. In late September, Boehme exploited the fi rm support for

the new government shown by the Pecánac Chetniks and the Zbor Move-

ment. He and Nedicágreed a joint role for the Serbian gendarmerie and

the Pecánac Chetniks in administering the region south of Belgrade and

east of the River Kolubara.6 Otherwise, however, Boehme fi rmly repaid

the faith in him shown by Field Marshal List—who remained deeply

wary of relying on the Serbs themselves to suppress a genuine national

uprising—by asserting German control over the counteroffensive.7

German reprisals now assumed terrifying dimensions. No longer

would they attempt to distinguish between guilty and innocent in the

way Nedic´ had originally persuaded General Danckelmann to agree to.

Boehme’s September 25 order, quoted at the outset of this study, is worth

repeating here. For it encapsulates Boehme’s expectations of his men and

his invocation of the decades-old anti-Serb hatred with which he sought

to inspire them:

Your objective is to be achieved in a land where, in 1914, streams of

German blood fl owed because of the treachery of the Serbs, men and

women. You are the avengers of those dead. A deterring example

must be established for all of Serbia, one that will have the heaviest

impact on the entire population. Anyone who carries out his duty

in a lenient manner will be called to account, regardless of rank or

position, and tried by a military court.8

The single order that, more than any other, translated this stance into

body counts was Boehme’s October 10 directive. This directive stipulated

that the troops were to shoot one hundred Serbian hostages for every Ger-

man killed in the insurgency, and fi fty for every German wounded.9 It thus

authorized and systematized levels of bloodletting that Wehrmacht com-

mands might hitherto have considered wild if understandable excesses.10

Milovan Djilas, one of Tito’s lieutenants, recalls how the scale of killing

that followed sent a collective shudder through the population:

It was believed at the time that some 5,000 were executed in Kra-

gujevac, and 1,700 in Kraljevo. These fi gures grew with time—by

122
terror in the balk ans

the thousands in both places—though the actual fi gures have never

been confi rmed.
Borba
11 wrote of this but we spoke of it reluctantly,

feeling the deathly horror that had seized Serbia. What “reason” did

the Germans have for undertaking measures which were then so

unthinkable? Was it retaliation, the killing of one hundred Serbs for

every dead German, which they proclaimed during the very fi rst days

of the occupation? Was it the destruction of Serbia’s centers—towns

known for their national consciousness and Communist infl uence?

. . . Certainly the Nazis found suffi cient justifi cation for crushing the

will to resist in a people whom Hitler considered the most politically

creative and thus the most dangerous in the Balkans.12

Moreover, though the Armed Forces High Command had itself autho-

rized the 1:100 hostage policy in a decree of September 16,13 Boehme

went further. He targeted the bulk of hostage-shootings at Serbian Jews,

whom Wehrmacht propaganda already depicted as puppet-masters of

the Communist-led uprising. It was not necessarily fanatical ideology

that led Boehme to issue his decree—though anti-Semitic and anti-

Bolshevik sentiments certainly would have eased the task of issuing it

for him. Rather, his actions were determined by his calculation that tar-

geting Jews together with Sinti and Roma, could impress the rest of the

population with an object lesson in German terror.14 Whilst Boehme was

not departing radically here from the lethally discriminatory measures

which German units had already been enacting in Serbia, he was cer-

tainly
escalating
them radically.

Boehme fi rst executed his policy in response to the killing of a group

of German soldiers at Topola on October 4. To buttress the policy,

Boehme manipulated the details of the attack: when claims that the dead

soldiers had been mutilated beforehand were disproved by autopsy, he

covered this fi nding up. Suppressing the facts also enabled Boehme to

use the image of cruelly mutilated German soldiers to discourage his

troops from surrendering.15

It was those Jews and Sinti and Roma who were already interned whom

Boehme selected as the principal victims of this intensifi ed reprisal cam-

paign. As they had already been interned en masse, shooting them not

only was easier, but would also free up space for the large numbers of

Settling Accounts in Blood
123

genuine rebel suspects whom the Germans would seize as autumn went

on. Boehme reckoned with the approval of the Nedicádministration and

of the SS and police. He also reckoned that the latter’s approval would

improve the Wehrmacht’s general cooperation with it.16

Furthermore, as the number of reprisal victims began to spiral, Ger-

man army units were now ordered to ease the practical burden on the

SS and police by shooting increasing numbers of reprisal victims them-

selves. The worst racially targeted reprisal which army units infl icted

was the work of the third battalion of the 433d Infantry Regiment. This

unit had been temporarily loaned from the 164th Infantry Division to

support the 704th Infantry Division. On 27 October, the battalion shot

twenty-two hundred Jews and Sinti and Roma in retaliation for the death

of ten German soldiers and the wounding of a further twenty-four in the

surrounded town of Valjevo.17 The “700-number” occupation divisions

themselves participated less extensively in such killings, but partici-

pate they did; on October 1, for instance, the fi rst battalion of the 724th

Infantry Regiment, also subordinate to the 704th Infantry Division,

shot sixty-six Jews and Communists.18 On October 14, meanwhile, the

717th Infantry Division specifi cally noted its receipt of General Boehme’s

instructions to seize “Communists, nationalists, democrats, and Jews

. . . as hostages.”19

The killing of Serbian Sinti and Roma in 1941, vicious as it was, was not

wholesale.20 But the killing of Serbian Jews—deadliest of all the Reich’s

racial enemies in the Nazi world-view—was emphatically wholesale. By

the end of the year the entire adult male Jewish population of Serbia had

been put to death; the interned women and children would be extermi-

nated in SS-run camps the following year as that organization’s Reich

Security Main Offi ce fi nally relieved the Wehrmacht of overall responsi-

bility for the campaign against the Serbian Jews.21

From a grisly productionist viewpoint, the extermination of Serbia’s

male Jews meant that demand for targeted reprisal victims was begin-

ning to outstrip supply. Thus, towards the end of 1941, members of the

general Serb population would begin to perish in their thousands also.

On the whole, the “regular” occupation divisions seem to have killed

Jews in large numbers somewhat sporadically that autumn. This doe

not, of course, absolve them of any condemnation for the still substantial

124
terror in the balk ans

part they played in the extermination of the Serbian Jews. But to grasp

the full, devastating extent of the divisions’ actions in Serbia in 1941, it is

necessary to move from the horrors they visited upon the Serbian Jews,

to the horrors they infl icted upon the wider population. It was here that

the 342d Infantry Division, more so even than the 700-number divisions,

truly came into its own.

The 342d Infantry Division’s personnel originated partly from the Twelfth

Military District, based around Koblenz in the old Reich, and partly from

the Seventeenth Military District around Linz in the Eastern March.22 It

was one of eight Category Fourteen divisions raised that month. These

divisions were not among the German army’s fi nest formations. Though

they comprised the standard three regiments—the 697th, 698th, and

699th Infantry Regiments in the 342d’s case—each regiment comprised

twelve companies instead of the usual fourteen. Indeed, according to the

division’s order of battle for September 28, the 698th possessed only

eleven companies.23 They were also fi tted with reduced scales of equip-

ment, and their rank-and-fi le combat troops fell into the twenty-seven to

thirty-two age range. But next to the seven-hundred-number occupation

divisions already in Serbia, a Category Fourteen division like the 342d

was a fairly strong and effective fi ghting force. Among other things, it pos-

sessed an artillery regiment and an antitank company.24

In military terms, the operations the 342d executed that autumn ini-

tially brought mixed results at best. But they eventually helped the Weh-

rmacht to crush the uprising in Serbia and expel its remnants westward.

Though the Partisans would eventually fi nd refuge and regroup within

the borders of the NDH, the Germans’ efforts at least dissipated the

immediate danger the Serbian national uprising had posed.

But the 342d Infantry Division is important to this study not so much

for its uneven military achievements as for the grisly conduct that accom-

panied them. Of all the German army divisions on the ground that

autumn, the 342d was the one that would convert General Boehme’s

commandments into the most sanguinary practice.

And this was not just because of the scale of operations which it

executed. No German army division on Serbian soil exercised restraint

Settling Accounts in Blood
125

during these months. All carried out terrible reprisals on an enormous

scale. But while other divisions followed Boehme’s directives, the 342d