Terror in the Balkans (91 page)

standard, static Category Fifteen division, Hinghofer was clearly being

demoted. And his desperate, ultimately fruitless protest to higher com-

mand shows that he knew it.87

Some impetus for the division’s new approach under General Hoff-

mann came from above. In late October and early November, Boehme

himself, seeing the pragmatic value of greater restraint, displayed further

rare fl ashes of moderation. On October 25 he declared that indiscrimi-

nate arrests and persecution would drive the Serbs into the insurgents’

arms. He also directed that hostages be seized only from villages known

to be centers of the uprising. A week later he directed that, while anyone

found carrying a weapon in the operational area was to be shot, those

who were unarmed were not.88

Hoffmann also invoked an Army High Command directive of October

25, which stated that “the population must be shown clearly that it is point-

less to resist the troops and their instruments of power. Harsh conduct is

required in guilty or doubtful cases. On the other hand, practical support

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and good setting of examples are essential to the reestablishment of peace,

confi dence and trust.” And while he reiterated that the troops must con-

duct themselves harshly, Hoffmann also put new stress on “protecting the

population against Communists and against unpermitted attacks on their

property from any side [including, presumably, from rank-and-fi le Ger-

man troops], help with agriculture through the commitment of personnel

and equipment, support over rebuilding of houses, (and) propaganda to

promote peace, quiet, and work, as well as defense against disruptive ele-

ments.”89 The division now also directed that “suspects are to be taken

prisoner if there is no reason to shoot them.”90

Similarly, units of the 342d taking part in December’s Operation

Mihailovic´, launched against the Chetnik leader’s headquarters in the

Ravna Gora region, did not infl ict butchery on anything like the scale

of earlier operations. That operation saw twelve enemy dead, and 745

men, seven offi cers, and two women taken prisoner. Three hundred and

seventeen rifl es and seven machine guns were seized.91 Saner attitudes

also seemed to be penetrating the subordinate units involved in this par-

ticular operation. “The speediest way to achieve success was through

ruthless offensive action,” reported Antitank Detachment 342. But while

it also described the population as “diffi cult to fi gure out,” it judged it

“friendly for the most part.”92 This was new language for the 342d.

The 342d also issued a directive in late November stressing that the

best means of improving workers’ willingness to toil for the Axis occupa-

tion was to protect them from insurgent attack.93 Reprisals, too, ferocious

though they remained, were now less ferocious than before. Under Gen-

eral Hinghofer, a violent assault on a member of the division’s person-

nel would probably have precipitated a reprisal shooting of fi fty or even

one hundred victims. But under General Hoffmann the 342d’s riposte

to one such incident, the victim being one Lieutenant Friedrich, was to

shoot twenty-fi ve hostages—a brutal act, but less brutal than it might have

been—and fi ne the local population fi ve hundred thousand dinars.94

In December, fi nally, Hoffmann would seek to impress his more

measured stance upon his superiors. Serbia Command’s war diary for

December 11 records that Hoffmann paid a visit that day to recommend

that farmers belonging to Mihailovic´’s movement who were not carry-

ing weapons should not be treated as rebels. Hoffmann believed that the

Settling Accounts in Blood
137

farmers had had no other choice but to join Mihailovicíf they were to

avoid having to join the Communists instead. As long as they comported

themselves quietly, they should be allowed to go about their work and

feel secure in the protection of the German Wehrmacht. Hoffmann also

urged that intensifi ed propaganda be employed among the Serbian farm-

ers, particularly on market days.95

Much of the impetus behind the division’s new approach emanated,

then, from divisional command. And the fact that divisional command

was now under new management can hardly have been coincidental.

Hinghofer’s biography reveals much about what made his approach to

counterinsurgency warfare markedly more ferocious than his succes-

sor’s. In some respects there was little signifi cant difference between

Hinghofer’s background and those of the other divisional commanders

serving in Yugoslavia that autumn. All came from middle-class families;

Hinghofer’s father had been a senior bank inspector, Hoffmann’s a senior

postal offi cial, Borowski’s a police inspector. General Stahl, commander

of the 714th Infantry Division, was perhaps slightly higher on the social

scale, his father having been a privy councilor. But all four offi cers essen-

tially hailed from the families of middle-class petty offi cials, albeit fairly

senior ones.96 Such professions did not belong to the traditional offi cer

recruitment circles of either army. But they did belong to the “reliable”

middle-class circles from which both armies were extensively recruiting

by the early twentieth century.

There were also elements of Hinghofer’s military career common with

those of Borowski, Hoffmann, and Stahl. All were continuing offi cers,

in the Reichswehr or Bundesheer, during the interwar years. Only Hoff-

mann saw any period of civilian employment. He left the army between

November 1932 and March 1935 to work as an offi cial in the area of youth

sport and physical training. He also experienced a spell of unemploy-

ment between October and December 1933.97 Further, all four men had

spent signifi cant periods serving with a specialist technical branch of

the army, a higher-level staff body, or both. In other words, all four had

pursued careers to that level of technical and professional specialization

that could limit offi cers’ wider social outlook and restrict their vision to

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perfecting their professional skills. Indeed, both Hoffmann and Hing-

hofer had gone even further; each had served in the war ministries of

their respective countries during the 1930s.98

Yet when it comes to where the four offi cers served during the Great

War, signifi cant differences do emerge. The impact the eastern front

could have upon an offi cer’s perceptions was considered in Chapter 2.

The fact that Hinghofer served there during the Great War did not in

itself distinguish him from his fellow divisional commanders in Serbia.

For one thing, Hoffmann himself spent considerable periods on the

eastern front during the Great War. After fi ghting in the initial battles

in East Prussia in August 1914, Hoffmann fought on more southerly sec-

tors of the eastern front for lengthy periods between 1915 and 1917. There

was a hiatus in 1916 when he was transferred west to fi ght in the Battle

of Verdun. He then served on the western front again throughout 1918.

Hoffmann’s own ideological convictions may have been particularly

strengthened by his experience during the march into the Baltic region

and the battle against the Bolsheviks there during 1919.99 Borowski

too served for signifi cant periods in the East, as well as on the western

front.100 Stahl interspersed homeland-based staff posts with active ser-

vice in military airships and observation balloons on a number of fronts,

the eastern front included.101But while Borowski’s and Hoffmann’s Great

War service records were less peripatetic than Stahl’s, all three men also

spent signifi cant, sometimes lengthy periods away from the eastern

front.102 Hinghofer, however, served entirely on the eastern front from

1914 through to 1918.103

An offi cer who had experienced the eastern front in this way, and for

this duration, had more time than many to imbibe that particular brew of

experiences—the region’s hostile environment, its peoples, the nature of

the fi ghting and of the opponents against whom it was being waged—that

could render him more susceptible to brutalizing infl uences later in life.

This is not to deny the brutalizing potency of other fronts, not least the

western. But it is to re-emphasize the brutalizing potency of the eastern

front. Of course, Serbia in 1941 was a different region, populated by a dif-

ferent people, to the eastern theater of the Great War. But in north-west

Serbia the 342d Infantry Division contended with a dangerous insur-

gency, an arduous environment, and a population whose reliability was

Settling Accounts in Blood
139

at best doubtful and at worst non-existent. Such conditions could brutal-

ize the view of any commander facing them. They were especially likely

to brutalize it if that commander had undergone experiences during the

Great War that made him highly susceptible to brutalization already.

Hinghofer may also have been particularly susceptible because, hav-

ing served in the Ukraine in 1918, he had already participated in an

occupation regime that prosecuted extremely harsh counterinsurgency

warfare. The Austro-Hungarian portion of the occupied Ukraine was

administered by the Eastern Army, formerly the Austro-Hungarian Sec-

ond Army. Both German and Austrian forces faced brutalizing condi-

tions in the Ukraine that year. They faced an elusive, resourceful, and

ruthless foe—no more ruthless than the Bolsheviks numbered among

their opponents. Such opponents were often indistinguishable from the

wider civilian population, and the Germans and Austrians had to com-

bat them across an area too vast for their own inadequate manpower to

master properly. Matters were made worse by the unsuitability of the

indigenous administrative personnel on whom the Central powers had

to rely, and by their own failure to develop a more coordinated occupa-

tion strategy.104

And the Austrian forces in the Ukraine were slower than the Germans

to develop an approach that sought to genuinely engage the population

instead of simply terrorize it. What may have particularly hardened the

Austrians’ own conduct was their need to stave off a domestic food situ-

ation even more desperate than Germany’s. Certainly their grain requi-

sitioning operation, and the pacifi cation measures that accompanied it,

were particularly brutal.105

Just how directly involved Hinghofer’s 11th Field Artillery Brigade

was in suppressing resistance is something that the sources that could be

accessed for this study do not reveal. At the very least, however, he would

have been acutely aware of the insurgency in the countryside, and the

danger it posed both to the Austrian occupation and to personnel such as

himself in particular. And if the insurgents could assassinate the German

military commander in the Ukraine, Field Marshal von Eichhorn, then no

German or Austrian offi cer was safe.106

Hinghofer and Hoffmann also differed on another score. Hoffmann’s

personal fi le shows him to have been a man who, in a manner all too

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terror in the balk ans

uncommon among senior German army offi cers in Yugoslavia during

World War II, possessed an element of moral courage. The key event took

place after Hoffmann had been transferred from Yugoslavia to the Ukraine.

Here, in September 1943, the Wehrmacht’s Ukraine Command judged

Hoffmann as lacking the “necessary harshness for the war in the East.”

Ukraine Command reached this judgment when Hoffmann disobeyed

an order to decimate by fi ring squad a mutinous Turkic unit in German

service. The term “to decimate” was meant literally here, inspired by the

ancient Roman punishment of executing every tenth legionary in a unit

that had mutinied or deserted. Hoffmann refused to carry out the order

because, he maintained, he did not wish to impose the moral burden for

the killing upon his men. In particular, he did not wish to compel older

personnel to do the deed. The incident seems to have effectively fi nished

Hoffmann’s military career.107 He ended the war as commandant of a

POW camp.108

Courageous though Hoffmann’s stand was, it is important to keep it

in proportion. Hoffmann was anything but a dove in counterinsurgency

matters. Some of his active suggestions to Boehme were anything but

enlightened. For instance, on October 10, 1941, while still commanding

the 717th Infantry Division, he proposed a package of “Balkan-style”

measures to counter the “bandits.” His list included forced labor, house

burning, hostage-taking and reprisals, and the herding of “idle and loi-

tering” men into concentration camps. Most damningly of all, it was

under Hoffmann’s leadership that units of the 717th Infantry Division

committed killings into the thousands, albeit within the boundaries set

by General Boehme, in Kraljevo and Kragujevac. Kragujevac was the

work of one battalion, but at Kraljevo Hoffmann himself oversaw pro-