Terror in the Balkans (89 page)

surpassed them. In its conduct echoed decades-old historical enmities.

The enmity that echoed loudest was the one between Austria-Hungary

and Serbia.

The 342d commenced its fi rst mobile operation in late September,

cleansing the Macˇva region, a six-hundred-square-kilometer area west of

Šabac between the Rivers Drina and Sava.25 Advancing into the region

from the north enabled the 342d and its forces to form up in Syrmia, an

area yet to be affected by the uprising.26 As well as being a major cen-

ter of rebel strength, the Germans had an economic motive for targeting

the Drina-Sava region—it would enable them to seize valuable agricul-

tural resources from the insurgents. General Boehme’s quartermaster’s

section extolled this resource grab as being for the economic good of

the homeland and the occupation troops. It would encompass all the

region’s livestock, horses, grain, and feed.27 Three thousand ethnic Ger-

mans from Syrmia and the Banat in northern Yugoslavia were employed

to seize this prize once the fi ghting was over.28

In cleansing the town of Šabac, which the 342d carried out between

September 24 and 27, the division was loaned the second battalion of

the 750th Infantry Regiment and a company of Reserve Police Battalion

64.29 For the operation in the wider region, which took place between

September 28 and October 9, the 342d could also count on air recon-

naissance and, if they were needed urgently, a limited number of Stuka

dive-bombers.30 Yet the operation was a diffi cult prospect nonetheless.

One reason why the region was such a preeminent rebel center was that

the Partisans and Chetniks there, numbering anything between two

thousand and ten thousand by German estimates, had been cooperat-

ing in joint operations for some time. They were also well organized,

well equipped in part, and extensively supported by the population.

That all this heightened the challenge for the 342d may help explain why

Boehme’s orders for the operation were exceptionally harsh.31

And exceptionally harsh they were. The SD reported that the entire

area between Šabac and Bogatic was to be evacuated. Its menfolk would

126
terror in the balk ans

be brought into concentration camps, to be screened by the SD with the

help of the Serbian police. Its women and children were to be driven

from their homes, “onto Mount Cer, south-west of Šabac, there to be

left to their fate.”32 The operation’s general tenor was encapsulated in

an order from Boehme himself: “The population . . . between the Drina

and Sava has attached itself to the uprising. Women and children are

running messages and maintaining the bandits’ basis of supply . . . [The

area] is to be cleansed by exterminating any bands that appear, so as to

deny the bandits the area’s supply in the long term.”33 The most noxious

passage in Boehme’s order conveyed the general’s intention that “ruth-

less measures will set a terrifying example which will, in a short space

of time, resonate across all Serbia.”34 Boehme was equally obdurate over

the specifi cs: “any person involved in the fi ghting in any way is to be

seen as a guerrilla and handled accordingly. Any settlement from which

German soldiers are fi red upon, or in the vicinity of which weapons and

munitions are found, is to be burned down.”35 He further added on Sep-

tember 23 that “the shooting of captured and condemned irregulars is to

be presented to the population as an exemplary spectacle.”36

But the 342d was not going to allow Boehme to overshadow it. An

order it issued on September 25 was even more ruthless. Hinghofer him-

self, not the operations section, departed from the usual practice by issu-

ing the order directly. He defi ned even more sweepingly which sorts of

person constituted an irregular, and what they could expect. “Anyone

who raises a weapon against the occupier
or
supports corresponding

resistance,” he declared,

is an irregular. Accordingly,
every member
of a rebellious band

against whom the division fi ghts is to be treated as an
irregular
. The

juridical punishment
of a member of a rebellious band is to be car-

ried out . . .
with execution in every case
. . . Our opponents should

be regarded by us without exception as irregulars . . . Only (those)

who do not oppose us
in any way
are to be excepted.37

Two days later Hinghofer explicitly extended the target group even fur-

ther. He stipulated that “Serbian offi cials, police, and gendarmerie are to

be disarmed, held as a separate group of prisoners, and then shot.”38 In

Settling Accounts in Blood
127

other words, members of the collaborationist Serbian government and

administration were to be regarded with no less suspicion, and treated

with no less ferocity, than other civilians. Simply to encounter them in

the “bandit-infested” region was to condemn them. Then, on September

29, the division declared that mere suspicion was suffi cient grounds for

killing anyone: “The night passed quietly, (but) no-one should be fooled

by this. Attacks must be reckoned with. Every man encountered in no-

man’s land is to be shot without delay.” “The slightest suspicion” was

reason enough for killing prisoners also.39 Such orders even prompted

XVIII Corps itself to advise the 342d to keep a check on its brutality, and

at least spare for interrogation those “bandits” who could provide valu-

able information.40

The fate of Šabac itself was sealed once German soldiers “incurred

losses” there on September 23.41 The 342d was ordered by Boehme to

sweep up all men in the town aged between fourteen and seventy, put

them in a concentration camp north of the Sava, and “immediately shoot

all inhabitants
who participated in the fi ghting or set themselves against

the troops, and all
male inhabitants
in whose homes weapons or muni-

tions were found, from whose homes shots were fi red, or who tried to

fl ee arrest.”42 The division’s assault on Šabac on September 27 also razed

forty houses to the ground and unleashed Stuka attacks on the sur-

rounding villages. Its own losses were minimal—one man killed and one

lightly wounded from enemy action, together with a reserve policeman

who was killed when his own gun went off.43

The men of the town, along with hundreds of Jews hitherto interned

in Šabac, were then shunted from camp to camp, fi rst in Šabac, then to

Jarak where the 342d’s pioneers were in the process of building a new

concentration camp, and then back again. This “blood march,” as Yugo-

slav historians have titled it, was preceded by the massacre of eighty

prisoners by the 342d for “disobedience,” before the division eventually

handed responsibility for the remaining prisoners to Reserve Police Bat-

talion 64.44

During the fi nal days of September and into October, the 342d

exacted a dreadful toll of “enemy” dead throughout the Macˇva region.

This dwarfed both the hauls of insurgent weaponry the division seized

and its own losses. It is clear that many, at least, of the “enemy” dead

128
terror in the balk ans

were unarmed civilians. When the division shot 250 of its prisoners and

ordered the 698th Infantry Regiment to obliterate the village and male

population of Metkovic´, as retaliation for unspecifi ed “hostile activi-

ties,” it was an average day’s work.45 The following day, the division shot

eighty-four prisoners, from whom only one machine gun and a handful of

rifl es were seized.46 Serbian refugees fl eeing the division’s onslaught were

driven onto the anvil of allied Croatian troops on the Drina, and were

forced to seek refuge in the islands and woods on and around the river.47

Between September 21 and 30 the 342d Infantry Division shot 830

of its eighty-four hundred prisoners. Though it could have shot many

more, it is clear that the great majority of those whom it did shoot were

unarmed civilians. For here, too, the division counted only a handful

of rifl es and a couple of machine guns. The 342d itself suffered three

dead and twenty wounded.48 And here too the division was not merely

following General Boehme’s lead, but also acting on its own initiative.

The reprisal ratios General Boehme specifi ed on October 10 were actu-

ally less severe than the ratio of Serbs to Germans killed at the division’s

hands up to that date.49

The 342d Infantry Division concluded its initial cleansing of the Macˇva

region on October 9. The operation had failed to destroy the main insur-

gent group. The division launched a second, more targeted attack around

Mount Cer—to where the insurgents who had eluded it in the Macˇva

operation had withdrawn—between October 10 and 15, and a third in

the direction of Krupanj on October 19 and 20. Again, few weapons

were taken but a vast number of shootings took place—4,011, the divi-

sion reported, across all three operations. This fi rst phase of the 342d’s

activities in Serbia ended with the relief of Valjevo on October 26.50

For the October 10–15 operations, against Mount Cer and its environs,

the 342d Infantry Division was further augmented by two companies

and two additional platoons from the 202d Panzer Regiment.51 Infest-

ing this area, the division reckoned, were twenty-fi ve hundred well-

equipped Chetniks and up to four thousand generally poorly equipped

Communists.52 The 342d was ordered to annihilate these “bandits” and

end the threat they posed to the transport artery of the River Macˇva.

Settling Accounts in Blood
129

Its formations advanced in three groups into the regions of Prnjavor-

Zminjak, Klenje-Slepcěvic´-Bogatic´, and Vranjska-Šabac. As before, a

Stuka bombardment heralded the attack.53

The Germans’ opponents were set on eluding rather than engaging

them, halting only to defend the roadblocks they had erected. The 342d

ordered several villages destroyed, declaring that “the villages south of

Mount Cer are to be burned. The villages north of Mount Cer are to

be burned . . . only Bela Reka and Petkovica are to be spared.”54 It also

ordered male villagers sent to the concentration camp at Šabac, and the

rest of the inhabitants press-ganged into clearing the roadblocks. During

its advance the 342d also obliterated major insurgent strongholds in the

monasteries of Radovasnica and Mount Tronosa.55

Three days later, the 342d completed the encirclement of the Cer

region. But its minuscule haul of prisoners showed that most of the insur-

gents had escaped again, this time westward. The division surmised that

they had gone in the direction either of the Italians, with whom they

were likely to try to cut a deal, or of ethnic Serb forces fi ghting the Usta-

sha in the NDH.56

The 342d then turned on the insurgents in the Jadar region, and their

main center in and around Krupanj. Of this group, the division wrote

that “the enemy that has surfaced south of the Jadar constitutes not

independent groups or isolated pockets, but organized resistance under

military-style leadership.”57 Three to four thousand were reportedly

gathered in “primeval forest”—perennially ideal country for bandits and

irregulars.58

The 342d launched its assault on Krupanj on October 19. “Some

weeks ago,” the 342d’s divisional command wrote, referring to the disas-

ter that had befallen the two companies of the 724th Infantry Regiment,

“German troops in Krupanj were attacked by overwhelming numbers of

insurgents. The division has the task of avenging this attack with every

measure of harshness.”59 The division committed its entire strength,

intact since the start of operations, aided by two Panzer companies and

patrol boats from the Hungarian Danube Flotilla.60 Within two days,

though an unknown number of insurgents had escaped after leveling

Krupanj’s lead works, the division reported that the town itself had been

destroyed. The 342d shot “suspect” inhabitants before it pulled out.61

130
terror in the balk ans

Mass arrests and shootings saturated this attack also. Armed engage-

ments, rare instances aside, did not. Here too, then, the 342d failed to

deal the rebels a decisive blow.

But if the 342d’s military performance was at best inconsistent dur-

ing these latter two operations, the butchery it infl icted, much of it on

its own initiative, was thoroughly consistent. On October 13, as well as

ordering the destruction of numerous villages within the Mount Cer

region, it reiterated the command to kill on the slightest suspicion “all

those in uniform, as with all civilians encountered in no-man’s land, who

are suspected of belonging to the insurgency, are to be shot.”62 When

it attacked Krupanj, it ordered that “anything found there is to be shot

and the place burned down,”63 and that “every harshness must be visited

upon any civilians encountered, for it is known that the enemy does not

wear uniform.”64