Terror in the Balkans (95 page)

tion. The Croatian population was not only burdened by economic hard-

ship; it also succumbed to general war weariness, and grew increasingly

fearful of being tarred by association with the Ustasha’s crimes.52

When it came to actually combating Partisans, and Chetniks also,

the NDH felt the symptoms of its moribund condition on the front

line: in the Croatian army itself.53 The army could hardly hope for an

enthusiastic soldiery drawn from a population harboring at best only

marginal enthusiasm for the Ustasha regime. Croatian rank-and-fi le

soldiers suffered shortages in clothing, equipment, suitable arms, and

ammunition. Though benefi ting initially from the Yugoslav arms the

Germans sold to them, they later had to make do with poorer-quality

Czech, French, and Polish weaponry. They were also discriminated

against by their own government; when it came to allocating equipment

or duties, the Ustasha regime consistently favored its own militias.

Inevitably, there was deep antagonism between the two institutions.54

Croatian army troops also endured arrogant and abusive behavior from

the German commanders and NCOs with whom their units had to

operate. There was also a lack of well-trained offi cers—the Croatian

army’s offi cer corps consisted of elderly former Habsburg offi cers at

senior levels, of Ustashe with inadequate military experience,55 and of

Croats from the old Yugoslav offi cer corps whose Yugoslav connections

provoked their Ustasha colleagues’ intense distrust. All this, together

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with the mounting impact of serial defeats over the next two years, led

to increasing Partisan infi ltration of the army, epidemic draft dodging,

and, in time, to the army’s disintegration.56

Yet in early 1942 General Bader, the new Commander in Serbia, whose

occupation divisions would become increasingly committed in the

NDH that year, still hoped the Croats would soon be able to assume

full responsibility for their own security.57 Meanwhile, conscious of his

own troops’ limitations, he sought alternative ways of achieving some

stability. Bader’s approach did not rely exclusively on terror. But such

constructive engagement as he did pursue was fi tful and uneven—hardly

helped by a lack of backing from the Armed Forces High Command—and

interspersed with sharp bursts of ruthlessness. That ruthlessness would

intensify as the year wore on; in October, for instance, Bader came close

to praising the 7th Waffen-SS Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen” for its

brutal “Balkan method” of burning down any village whose inhabitants

looked even slightly suspicious.58

And some of Bader’s more “constructive” notions were themselves

misguided. In early 1942, for instance, he advocated granting much of the

territory of eastern Bosnia to Chetniks under Mihailovic´’s representative

there, Colonel Jezdemir Dangic´. What was misguided was the notion

that such a Chetnik administration, even if one overseen by the Ger-

mans, could bring stability to the region. Senior German military and

diplomatic fi gures were horrifi ed at the prospect. They feared the effect

empowering Dangic´ might have upon the integrity of the NDH—with

which Dangicŕefused to cooperate—and upon eastern Bosnia’s stability

more generally. Bader’s arguments were not exactly strengthened by the

DangicĆhetniks’ poor military showing against the Partisans in April.

Ultimately, Hitler vetoed the whole idea. Dangic´, who had also cur-

ried the Italians’ favor, eventually outlived his usefulness to the Axis.

That month the Germans arrested him on a return visit to Serbia.59 The

fact that Bader had contemplated relying on Dangicśo much in the fi rst

place demonstrates not just the imprudence of the general’s approach

but also, in fairness, the diffi culties of achieving a workable state of secu-

rity in the NDH with the means that were available. Indeed, though the

Standing Divided
159

Armed Forces High Command forbade dealings with Chetniks on April

6, there were cases barely a fortnight later of meetings between individ-

ual German units and Chetnik groups.60

In any case, the Germans recognized that they would themselves need

to make at least some active contribution to the counterinsurgency cam-

paign in the NDH. But such was the paucity of their manpower that they

could not hope to resource the kind of sustained campaign that would

impose a suffi ciently permanent troop presence among the population.

Instead, they opted for periodic bouts of brutal offensive action, as and

when they judged them necessary, interspersed with Bader’s inadequate

hearts and minds initiatives. And Lieutenant General Walter Kuntze,

who replaced the ailing Field Marshal List at the end of October 1941 as

Wehrmacht Commander Southeast, would display little appetite for any

measure of constructive engagement.61 The German counterinsurgency

effort of 1942 would reach its gruesome apex during the summer months.

The Germans would have some success with small-scale hunter group

operations. But such operations, if they were to enjoy decisive theater-

level success, needed far more long-term resourcing than the German

high command was prepared to commit. Even so, German commanders

on the spot might have made more use of them than they did. Instead,

whether due to pressure for more rapid and spectacular results, or to

their own predilection for maximum force and maximum terror, they

relied all too often on large-scale encirclement operations. Here a des-

ignated area was cordoned off. Then, with some troops assigned the

task of holding the perimeter to prevent breakouts, the rest advanced

to a central point, in theory combing the area for Partisans as they went

and vetting the villages for suspect elements. This phase saw the most

encounters with insurgents, if any, and the most German casualties. But

the designated daily targets were frequently beyond the capabilities of

the often insuffi cient troop numbers committed to such operations.

Thus, all too often, the insurgents and “suspect elements” who were

the ostensible target of such operations slipped the cordon. Then the

Germans, whether through frustration, pressure from above for results,

or the belief that cowing the population was at least one means of com-

bating the insurgents, turned on civilians. But any “benefi t” gained from

such operations usually proved transitory. Their insuffi cient manpower

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terror in the balk ans

rendered the Germans incapable of occupying a recently cleansed area

over a lengthier period and ensuring that the insurgents did not reestab-

lish themselves there. This pattern would repeat itself numerous times

during the German counterinsurgency campaign in the NDH. Only

from 1943, as the Germans refi ned their tactics and sometimes deployed

high-quality formations, such as the 1st Mountain Division and the Prinz

Eugen Division, did they achieve some successes.62

Despite the so often horrendous civilian casualties such operations

infl icted, Wehrmacht commanders sought to distinguish their “good”

brand of violence from the “bad” violence of the Ustasha. In the words

of the historian Jonathan Gumz, “in the eyes of German staff offi cers,

cool technocrats, not angry men, produced Wehrmacht violence.”63

They saw their own violence as systematic and organized, controlled in

such a way as to prevent the troops from degenerating into savagery, and

executed in the cause of restoring and maintaining order. Ustasha vio-

lence, by contrast, was barbaric, chaotic, and a guarantor of ever greater

support for the Partisans amongst those sections of the population who

were imperiled by it. Accurate though the Wehrmacht’s general assess-

ment of Ustasha violence undoubtedly was, however, Wehrmacht com-

manders certainly had a vested interest in demonizing it. By contrasting

it with their own “proper” terror methods, they could fall back on atavis-

tic Ustasha savagery as an explanation for their own failure to maintain

order and stability.64

The following two chapters focus mainly upon the 718th Infantry

Division. This formation possesses by far the largest source base of any

of the German army occupation divisions that operated in the NDH in

1942. It thus offers a particularly rich insight into how a German army

division conducted its campaign in the face of the mounting, increas-

ingly intractable challenges which the NDH presented to its German

occupiers that year.

c h a p t e r 8

Glimmers of Sanity

The 718th Infantry Division in Bosnia

The 718th infantry division was formed in the Eighteenth

Military District in the Eastern March in spring 1941. The units it

commanded—consisting primarily of the 738th and 750th Infantry Regi-

ments and the 668th Artillery Section—originated from the southern

part of the old Reich as well as from the Eastern March.1 Its commander,

Major General Johann Fortner, was born in Zweibrücken in the Rhine-

land Palatinate in 1884. He spent the fi rst two years of the Great War with

the 5th Bavarian Infantry Regiment on the western front, before being

captured by the British in September 1916. He served in the police during

the 1920s, before retiring and then later resuming his military career. He

took up a post as a training commander in Landeck, in the Eastern March,

before assuming command of the 718th Infantry Division in May 1941.2

The 718th spent the whole of 1942, as well as periods before and after, in

the NDH. It thus not only carried out mobile operations. It also had oppor-

tunity between operations to cultivate popular support, through both

restrained conduct and, as far as practicable, propaganda and construc-

tive engagement. This was, after all, the population of a country to which

Germany was offi cially allied. Nevertheless the 718th did not tread a con-

sistent path during 1942: it sometimes exercised terror more than restraint,

at other times restraint more than terror. What helped shape the division’s

161

162
terror in the balk ans

behavior at any one time, as with other formations, were the particular cir-

cumstances it faced and the particular standpoint of its commander.

Not that any of this was apparent when the 718th began campaigning

that year. Contending with a resourceful opponent, debilitating fi ghting

conditions, and its own substandard fi ghting power, it initially reacted

with what was in many ways textbook ruthlessness.

A trio of mobile operations, taking place between mid-January and mid-

February, were the division’s introduction to the 1942 counterinsurgency

campaign. These operations were part of a larger effort, titled the “Second

Enemy Offensive” by the Partisans. It employed between thirty thousand

and thirty-fi ve thousand troops, the bulk of whom were provided by the

718th Infantry Division and, for the fi rst operation, by the 342d Infantry

Division also. The latter formation had arrived from Serbia after Bulgar-

ian troops had been deployed there. General Bader, having witnessed

the almost complete destruction of the Partisans in Serbia, now sought

to replicate the feat against the Partisans in eastern Bosnia. But the Ger-

man forces in Yugoslavia, subordinated as they were to the needs of their

comrades fi ghting in the Soviet Union, lacked the strength to destroy the

insurgents in eastern Bosnia on their own. Their need instead to rely on

their Croatian and Italian allies would impede the operations’ success con-

siderably. But other factors impeded the operations also. Among other

things, the operations took place in temperatures of minus thirty.3 And the

units prosecuting them, German units included, were seriously lacking in

the kinds of equipment that mountainous, wintry conditions demanded.

The fi rst operation, code-named Southeast Croatia, was the largest

of the three. It took place between January 15 and 23, 1942, in the area

between Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zvornik, and Visegrad in the NDH’s south-

eastern corner.4 The area was viewed by the 718th’s intelligence section

as an “ethnic mishmash of a region.” It consisted overwhelmingly of

Muslims and Orthodox Serbs, but also contained a Catholic Croatian

minority, generally hostile to “Old Serbia” and predominantly employed

on the land.5 Serbia Command viewed it as a major center of hostile activ-

ity, in which the enemy had set up winter quarters and was endangering

important transport routes.6 That enemy, it was reported, comprised up

Glimmers of Sanity
163

to eight thousand Communist Partisans, some of whom were fugitives

from Serbia, and—offi cially classed as the enemy, at least—about twenty

thousand Bosnian Chetniks.7 General Bader was clear about the opera-

tion’s aims. He planned an encirclement with all persons encountered in

the area to “be viewed as the enemy.”8

During the operation the 718th fell under the temporary overall com-