Terror in the Balkans (94 page)

alienated the wider population. Tito had lambasted the Montenegrin

Communists for their actions. But in winter 1941–1942 the Communists,

despite losing Serbia also, were again infected with hubris. The cause

this time was the Red Army’s defeat of the Wehrmacht before Moscow

in early December. Certain of the Red Army’s imminent triumph, they

devoted too much energy to ruthlessly digging out and eliminating sup-

posed fi fth columnists. The brutality of this “red terror” increased Chet-

nik support at the Partisans’ expense.24

In February, however, the Partisan movement began to change its

approach. Tito at last sought an end to violent sectarianism and rigid ide-

ology. The Communist leadership of the Partisan movement was as set as

ever on achieving postwar power, but for the duration of the war itself the

movement’s language and approach would extol the cause of national lib-

eration rather than of class struggle. The Partisan leadership now issued

the “Focˇa Instructions,” directing that the movement, and the NOOs

it was establishing, work to establish a broad front of popular support.

Among other things, NOOs operating on Bosnian territory strove to place

the administration of the liberated areas on a more ethnically equitable

footing.25 Tito also recognized that the Partisans could potentially garner

mass support simply by conducting themselves in a morally irreproach-

able fashion towards the general—in other words, non-Chetnik—popula-

tion. This did not always happen in practice, but it happened more than

enough to set the Partisans’ behavior apart from that of the Chetniks and

Ustasha.26 The Partisans also sought to increase their appeal to the Brit-

ish, by making great play of Mihailovic´’s “collaboration” with the Axis.27

The Partisans also stood to gain from the Chetniks’ manifold defects.

The Bosnian Chetniks did benefi t from their links, using Bosnian Serb

refugees as middlemen, with the Nedicŕegime and Mihailovic´’s “Supreme

Command.” But this did not make them more coordinated. Led, as many

were, by assorted local warlords, they were impervious to anything more

than the most fragmentary supervision by the centre.28 Thus, though

Standing Divided
153

Mihailovicśought to co-opt all Chetniks in Yugoslavia, his authority in

real terms extended only as far as Serbia. By and large the Bosnian Chet-

niks were Great Serb in outlook, but concerned fi rst and foremost with

their own narrow interests.29 Squabbles and rivalries between local Chet-

nik commanders became legion; some turned murderous. And although

the Bosnian Chetniks would come to nominally accept Mihailovic´’s lead-

ership, they usually did so only in the hope of acquiring more arms and

legitimacy.30 All this hampered attempts to unify the Chetnik movement,

if indeed a movement it was, more effectively.

And if the Mihailovic´ movement encountered obstacles to mobilizing

the Bosnian Chetniks effectively, its focus on Serb interests prevented it

from gaining broader support. In fact, the MihailovicĆhetniks’ whole

standpoint was rigidly conservative, supporting the monarchy and

organized Church but thereby alienating large strands of urban opin-

ion. They also alienated women, failing to utilize them as the Partisans

did, whether as fi ghters in the fi eld or administrative personnel in the

areas they controlled. Mihailovicánd his commanders, though possess-

ing some military ability, were unsuited to developing their movement’s

political organization and propaganda. Correspondingly, they also

underestimated the Partisans’ abilities on these counts. The Mihailovic´

movement’s leadership compounded its failure to take these weaknesses

more seriously by relying too heavily on the Allies and believing that the

movement was indispensable to them.31

But in early 1942, the Germans were too concerned with the MihailovicĆhetniks—whom they perceived as the main threat to security, particularly security of the rail route to Greece—to take the embryonic Parti-

san movement in the NDH as seriously as they should have. Whether

because they were seeking to impress the Allies, or because they simply

did not wish to dispense with resistance entirely, some Chetnik groups

in both Bosnia and Serbia did persist with sabotage acts during 1942.32

The MihailovicĆhetniks launched a particularly extensive campaign

against the railway line to Greece that autumn.33 But by the end of the

year there could be no reasonable doubt that it was the Partisans who

were the most rapidly growing threat. The most important effect of the

154
terror in the balk ans

Germans’ misjudgment was that it would not be until 1943 that they

would commit genuinely powerful forces to combating them. In 1942,

they relied too heavily on their Italian and Ustasha allies to do the job.

The Germans, with their forces committed to the eastern front or

spread across occupied Europe, relied on the Italians in Yugoslavia in

large part out of necessity. The Italian Second Army comprised a two

hundred thousand strong, albeit poorly trained and led, body of man-

power, which the Germans believed could provide substantial relief for

their own overstretched forces in the region.34 Another important under-

pinning of the Italo-German relationship in the Balkans, as elsewhere,

was personal and political. Hitler valued his strong personal relationship

with Mussolini, their shared worldview, and the Italian dictator’s loyalty

since enabling the Reich to annex Austria in 1938.35 Militarily, however,

the Germans could hardly have chosen more ineffectual allies.36 Rela-

tions were not helped when, over Loznica on January 23, an Italian com-

bat aircraft accidentally killed four German soldiers and one civilian, and

wounded twenty-three soldiers and civilians, despite German troops on

the ground frantically fi ring signal fl ares and waving Nazi fl ags.37

While the derision with which the Germans in Yugoslavia regarded

the Italians is distasteful and not altogether fair, then, it did refl ect real

military failings on the Italians’ part. Lieutenant Peter Geissler, a staff

offi cer with LXV Corps, provided a fl avor of such derision in a private

letter in 1941: “There’s a load of Italian soldiers milling around Belgrade.

Never did a people look so unsoldierly in uniform . . . You barely encoun-

ter any that don’t have their hands in their pockets and a cigarette in their

beak. Just as though they were civilians, the little squirts wear neither

belts nor side arms . . . Still, we shouldn’t talk about the spaghetti eaters

like that. They’re our allies after all.”38

In January 1942 General Mario Roatta exchanged his post of Italian

army chief of staff with General Ambrosio, and thus became the Ital-

ian Second Army’s new commander.39 Roatta tailored his army’s coun-

terinsurgency policy to his troops’ failings. It was not that the Italians

shied away from terror tactics where they deemed them useful. Indeed,

they brought with them a brutal tradition of their own from their colo-

nial campaigns in Libya and Abyssinia. Their suppression of the Mon-

tenegrin revolt of July 1941 was only marginally less ferocious than the

Standing Divided
155

German reprisal campaign in Serbia that year. But the Italians eventually

came to see that, against a Partisan adversary in the mountainous regions

of the NDH, brutal colonial-style methods had their limits. The terrain

was more arduous, and the enemy—even one as militarily weak as the

Partisans still were—too well equipped for the Italians’ own substandard

troops to take on. And the ruthless determination with which the Parti-

sans pursued their cause made them more impervious than Mihailovic´

to the pressure of mass reprisals.40

Instead of relying extensively on force and terror, then, the Italians

were much more likely than the Germans to cut deals with other groups

antagonistic to the Partisans. Above all, this meant cutting deals with

the Chetniks. The Italians were prepared to woo the Chetniks even to

the point of becoming complicit in interethnic killing;41 sometimes they

disarmed the Chetniks’ rivals in the Muslim militias the better to enable

the Chetniks to savage them also.

But there were immense practical failings, not to mention the moral

ones, to the Italians’ approach. Over time, the Italians’ mounting dif-

fi culties would lead them to rely ever more heavily on the Chetniks; by

February 1943, over twenty thousand Chetniks in the NDH had been

organized by the Italians into the Anti-Communist Volunteer Militia

(MVAC).42 The Italians, like the Germans, believed the Chetniks to be

better organized and better led than they actually were. Thus, when the

Italians disengaged from extensive areas of the NDH and left them to the

Chetniks, it was ultimately the Partisans who would occupy the result-

ing vacuum.43 But even if the Germans wanted to prevent the Italians

from pandering to the Chetniks—and their own stance on the matter

would itself prove increasingly ambivalent—they were powerless to do so

as long as their military dominance of the Italians in the Balkan theater

remained far less complete than it was in others.44

An even worse bane for the Germans was the Pavelicŕegime. In 1941, the

regime’s barbarism towards Serbs and other groups within the NDH’s

borders had created perfect conditions for the Serbian national uprising.

In 1942, similarly, Ustasha depravities would greatly fuel Partisan sup-

port across the NDH.

156
terror in the balk ans

Again, however, Hitler approved of the Ustasha’s actions; the Ustashe,

he declared in August 1942, should be allowed to “rage themselves out.”45

Milovan Djilas wrote that “Hitler’s invasion unearthed the long pent-

up shadows of ages past and gave them a new dress, a new motivation:

neighbors who might have lived out their lives side by side were now all

of a sudden plundering and annihilating one another.”46 At various times

in 1941 and 1942, German administrators did manage to compel Pavelic´

to place limited checks on the Ustasha’s rampage. In April 1942, whether

as a fi g leaf or as a genuine acknowledgment that the Ustasha could not

annihilate NDH Serbdom entirely, Pavelicálso announced the forma-

tion of a Croatian orthodox church.47 And such was the spread of Par-

tisan territory by 1943 that the Ustasha’s opportunity for massacre and

cruelty became increasingly limited. But the damage was largely done,

and Partisan support vastly augmented as a result.48

The NDH’s image as a tool of the Axis, and the parlous state of its

economy, would in time erode its limited support amongst the Croatian

population also. This would render Croats increasingly susceptible to

the Partisan cause.49 For this, however, it is the Germans and Italians

who should shoulder most blame.

While the Germans did not formally annex Croatian territory, the

Italians did. This, and the arrogance with which they comported them-

selves—partly to compensate for their own military inadequacies—dis-

gruntled the population immensely. The Italians also introduced an

intrusive, widely resented policy of cultural “Italianization” within the

Governorate of Dalmatia. The Germans treated the Croats more tact-

fully, at least until Italy’s surrender to the Allies in 1943. They also took

responsibility for equipping the Croatian armed forces, mainly with cap-

tured Czech and French weapons. Sometimes they supplied the state

with food from German-occupied territory elsewhere. But they ensured

they got something in return; they, like the Italians, increasingly saw the

NDH as a reservoir of economic resources as the war went on.50

Because the NDH was offi cially a sovereign state, the Germans were

unable to control its economy as closely as they could Serbia’s. Serbia

suffered greater loss of food and labor to the Axis during the war, but

the NDH suffered also. By 1944 the Germans would be press-ganging

Croatian workers in their hundreds of thousands, and routinely ignoring

Standing Divided
157

pledges to maintain decent standards of treatment for them. They also

gained a monopoly, or at least a high priority, over the NDH’s oil and

minerals. Its bauxite mines, for instance, were leased to Germany for

the length of the war, and large amounts of plant were dismantled and

shipped back to the Reich. Heavy costs for the maintenance of occupa-

tion were imposed on the NDH also. To meet them, the Ustasha govern-

ment printed more money and infl ation spiraled.

The Italians infl icted similar woes on the NDH. Italian-controlled

areas of the NDH were actually a food defi cit region, so they were some-

times forced to import food. That aside, however, their exploitation of

the Croatian economy was perhaps even worse than that which the Ger-

mans infl icted.51 They exploited the interior to secure supply sources

and routes from inland Croatia and Bosnia. They also zealously procured

foodstuffs for their occupation troops and for Dalmatia’s Italian popula-