Terror in the Balkans (93 page)

up in tandem with an Allied invasion. But their closeness to Nedic´ was

embroiling them in a double game, one that would increasingly turn

them into de facto collaborators rather than freedom fi ghters. The impli-

cations for their movement, and for Yugoslavia, would be immense.

But in November 1941, the Chetnik–Partisan split offered Boehme one

major opportunity. Free now to turn his fi re entirely against the Parti-

sans, he shortened his front by concentrating his forces on selected areas.

The Partisans, recklessly overconfi dent following the revolt’s early suc-

cesses, had already played into his hands. They had declared the area

around Užice a “free zone” and visibly concentrated their forces there.

This, of course, made it much easier for Boehme to target them in a con-

ventional kind of operation. The operation also succeeded for mundane

practical reasons: the stripping of the fi elds during harvesttime deprived

the Partisans of a major source of cover.132

Though the Partisans were not destroyed outright during Operation

Užice, they came close. According to German reports, two thousand

Partisans were killed during the operation. And the reports’ claim that

2,723 guns were recovered from the Partisan dead indicates that this

time it was armed fi ghters, not defenseless civilians, who had perished

in great numbers.133 The remnant of Tito’s force had to fl ee for its very

existence. It seems the 342d Infantry Division only failed to press its

pursuit of them for fear of antagonizing the Italians with a probe into

their territory. This was probably the closest the Germans ever came to

killing or capturing Tito.134 They would come to rue this lost opportu-

nity at length. Yet for now, the Communist Partisan movement had been

dealt a fearful blow. Tito himself even offered to resign on December 7,

although the offer was rejected.135 His main force now comprised only

Settling Accounts in Blood
147

two thousand fi ghters in the fi eld,136 for whom the only hope of survival

lay in fl eeing Serbia for the mountains of the NDH.

General Boehme departed with the staff of XVIII Corps for the east-

ern front on December 6. His successor, General Bader—who assumed

the title Commander in Serbia rather than Plenipotentiary Commanding

General—was aware that the insurgency had not been crushed conclu-

sively. He feared that the spring thaw could bring new unrest, particu-

larly given the amount of weapons and munitions still in Serb hands. But

for now, in the aftermath of Operation Užice and amid further successful

mopping-up operations, Bader surveyed a situation far less perilous than

that of three months earlier. He felt suffi ciently confi dent, on December

22, to replace Boehme’s now unworkable 1:100 reprisal directive with

one that instead stipulated that “only” fi fty Serbs should be shot for

every German soldier killed.137

The Wehrmacht’s defeat of the Serbian national uprising of 1941 trum-

peted its readiness to employ terror to the utmost. German documents

record that, between August 1 and December 5, the Germans killed

eleven thousand insurgents in combat and executed nearly twenty-

two thousand reprisal victims, at a cost to themselves of fewer than six

hundred killed or wounded.138 But such was the attitude of at least one

particular divisional commander, and the life experiences and life infl u-

ences that had shaped him, that he demonstrated his own ferocity even

more emphatically than his fellows demonstrated theirs.

During 1942, however, a rather different picture would emerge from

the German army occupation divisions operating in the NDH.

c h a p t e r 7

Standing Divided

The Independent State of Croatia, 1942

At first sight, the prognosis for the Partisans in the NDH at

the dawn of 1942 did not look promising.1 Not only had the Axis

expelled them from Serbia. In the NDH, they remained too strongly

associated with the Serbian struggle for them to be yet able to extend

their appeal to the NDH’s Croat and Muslim populations. And such

was Chetnik strength in parts of the NDH, particularly eastern Bosnia,

that the Partisans also faced a serious challenge for control of the NDH’s

remaining Serbian population.

Yet the NDH offered the Partisans potentially fertile territory. In

the NDH’s Croatian regions, they benefi ted from a strong Communist

organization of long standing. They would also benefi t, in time, from a

particular groundswell of support from the oppressed Croatian popula-

tion of Italian-occupied Dalmatia.2 And in Bosnia, the Partisans stood

to benefi t from a particular combination of rugged terrain, strong Com-

munist organization, and considerable potential support.

In 1931, Bosnia’s diverse population of Muslims, Orthodox Serbs,

and (predominantly Croat) Catholics stood at just over 2.3 million; this

was an increase of almost half a million in just ten years.3 The increase

was due to the rapid expansion of that constituency from which the

Bosnian Communists could expect to draw their fi rmest support, the

148

Standing Divided
149

urban working class. But the rural population, nearly 85 percent of Bos-

nia’s population in total, was potentially fertile ground also.4 This was

due in large part to the Communists’ collaboration with the League of

Farmers. After defending the rights of Bosnian Serb peasants against

Muslim landlords during the interwar years, the League enjoyed a strong

following among the ethnic Serbs who in 1931 comprised almost half of

Bosnia’s rural population.5

More generally, the Bosnian Communists’ growth had been aided by

the interwar expansion of Bosnia’s education system. This had brought

together different ethnic groupings as well as urban and rural popula-

tions. It had also engendered an emerging left-wing intelligentsia, partic-

ularly among teachers and university students, from which the Bosnian

Communists drew much of their leadership.6 In the early days of the

Axis occupation the Communists sought to appeal to a collective “Bos-

nian patriotism” among the region’s population groups. They stressed

the brotherhood of all Bosnians and depicted the struggle against the

occupiers as a continuation of the struggle for Bosnian liberation that

had been waged against an oppressive, centralizing government in Bel-

grade during the interwar years.7

By the beginning of 1942, the Communists’ main strength was in

urban areas, western Bosnia, and certain parts of eastern Bosnia. It was

in these areas that the nascent Bosnian Partisan movement now devel-

oped.8 Throughout the war, the Serbs would predominate within the

Bosnian Partisan rank and fi le. But in time, Croats and Bosnian Muslims

would become more visible also.9 Yet in the eastern part of Herzegovina,

Bosnia’s southern region, the Communists were numerically strong but

organizationally weak. And among many population circles of eastern

Bosnia it was the Chetniks who held sway.10

On 25 January 1942, following its expulsion from Serbia and brief hia-

tus in Sandzak, the remnant of Tito’s own Partisan force arrived in Focˇa

in eastern Bosnia.11 Chetniks and Partisans had been tensely coexisting

in eastern Bosnia since the beginning of the Serbian national uprising.

The Chetniks here had even paid some lip service to the rights of Croats

and Muslims.12 But here as in Serbia, long-term cooperation was never

in prospect. As in Serbia, the leaderships of the two groups here had

fundamentally different aims—and already by mid-November 1941, the

150
terror in the balk ans

mere presence of Muslims and Croats in the Bosnian Partisans’ ranks

was becoming a particular deal-breaker for the Bosnian Chetniks.13 The

breakdown of relations between the two movements in Serbia further

removed any incentive to cooperate in eastern Bosnia.14

Moreover, from the early days of the Axis occupation, the Chetniks

were offered cooperation with the Italians instead. In July 1941, as the

interior of the NDH grew increasingly lawless, the Italians sought to

improve their Croatian territory’s economic security and safeguard its

inland communications. Thus, to the Ustasha regime’s great alarm, they

extended their area of occupation as far as Zone III in the NDH.15 To

avoid overstretching themselves, they began employing Chetnik groups

on the ground. They wooed the Bosnian Chetniks with offers of arms

and money to fi ght the Partisans, and wooed Bosnian Serbs more gener-

ally by pledging to protect them from the ravages of the Ustasha.16

But what Italian protection meant in practice would rapidly become

clear—it provided ideal cover for the Chetniks to vent themselves mur-

derously against their Croat and Muslim neighbors. Even without the

Ustasha massacres, Bosnian Chetniks felt intense hostility towards

the NDH’s other ethnic groups. They drew no distinction between

the Ustasha and other Croats, and referred to Bosnia’s Muslim popu-

lation as “Turks.” This particular antagonism was a legacy not just of

centuries-old Muslim–Christian enmity, but also of recent history. Bos-

nian Muslims in Habsburg service had often behaved savagely towards

Serbs during the Great War. During the 1920s, the League of Farmers

had defended Bosnian Serb peasants against Muslim landlords, and

throughout the interwar years Serb and Muslim political parties had

clashed bitterly. All this, and the fact that Bosnia’s Muslim population

was larger than its Croatian one, meant that Bosnian Serbs if anything

hated Muslims even more than they hated Croats.17

What the Italians gained in the Chetniks was relief from administrative

and security duty, and—they believed—a force they could use to increase

their leverage against the NDH. They also believed that, by co-opting

the Chetniks, they could drive the Partisans to more brutal lengths and

thus isolate them from the general population. But the Italians’ machina-

tions would eventually backfi re. It was not the Partisans but the Chet-

niks who would come to alienate many potential supporters, even among

Standing Divided
151

the Bosnian Serbs.18 Partly this was because their quiescence against the

occupiers, and their increasingly open collaboration with them, would

increasingly cause many among the population to perceive them as Axis

stooges. Partly, it was because of the fearful cruelty and massacre to which

they subjected the territory’s Croat and Muslim populations.

And the Chetniks were not just exacting revenge for Ustasha outrages;

indeed, in 1941 the Ustasha killings in eastern Bosnia had been consider-

ably less extensive than elsewhere.19 Their actions belonged instead to a

wider campaign of massacre, expulsion, and subjugation. The Chetniks

were conducting it not only to settle local scores but also to provide the

foundation of a “Great Serbia.” Unlike the Ustasha, the Chetniks lacked

the state apparatus, the strong (albeit vicious) ideology, or the practical

“expertise” that would have enabled them to conduct this program more

thoroughly. But commanders on the spot incited copious mayhem and

butchery in those areas they controlled.20 Mihailovic´ fully supported

the expulsions, though it is much less clear how much he knew of, or

approved of, the killings that were taking place. But there was little,

if anything, he could have done to prevent the killings even if he had

wanted to.21 Horrifi c as the Chetniks’ conduct was, the Partisans would

reap long-term benefi t from it.

But in January 1942, the Partisans seemed far from gaining the upper

hand. For one thing, they faced a diffi cult balancing act. The mainstay of

Partisan rank-and-fi le manpower, as well as Chetnik manpower, was the

Bosnian Serbs. But the Partisans’ Communist leadership did not wish

to appear too partial to Serb interests for fear of alienating the NDH’s

Muslim and Croat populations. As yet though, they lacked the resources

necessary to properly reeducate their Serb rank and fi le to embrace

Yugoslavism.22 The result was that rank-and-fi le Bosnian Serb Partisans

could feel as antagonistic towards Muslims as did Bosnian Chetniks.

And even if they themselves did not perpetrate massacres against Mus-

lims, they were not above actively enabling the Chetniks to do so.23

Yet it was not just rogue Partisan groups, but also the Communist

leadership of the Partisan movement whose exercise of terror in early

1942 was stymieing the support levels the movement might otherwise

152
terror in the balk ans

have enjoyed. Already the Communists had lost much ground to the

Chetniks in Montenegro because, since the July revolt there, they had

spent too little time building popular support and too much time indulg-

ing in terroristic class war. They had been eliminating opponents real or

perceived with a zeal that not only was excessively ruthless, but had also