Read Terror in the Balkans Online
Authors: Ben Shepherd
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II, #Science & Math, #Earth Sciences, #Geography, #Regional
a few thousand strong, under Kosta Pecánac.35 The second group, com-
prising only thirty men initially but soon to expand rapidly,36 was based in
the Ravna Gora region under Draza Mihailovic´. Mihailovic´ was a colonel
of the former Yugoslav army who, in contrast to Pecánac, had resolved to
form an anti-Axis underground following Yugoslavia’s collapse. Yet he and
his forces were able to establish themselves largely because they quietly
built up their organization and numbers while keeping their heads down.37
Thus, crucial as the MihailovicĆhetniks’ role in the confl ict would even-
tually become, it was not they but the smaller, uncoordinated Chetnik
bands who most disrupted the occupation until Barbarossa.
Already then, the remit of the 704th and its fellow divisions was wid-
ening beyond guarding railways. June brought their fi rst protestations
at their low combat effectiveness. Already at the end of May, XI Corps,
a frontline formation on the point of departing Yugoslavia, asserted that
the occupation divisions’ training was so poor that all other consider-
ations should be subordinate to it. It also asserted that the divisions were
too weak to execute even their static security duties effectively.38 The
state of their equipment became parlous also, with all divisions suffering
alarming shortages of guns and ammunition.39
The rump state of Serbia, with its sixty thousand square kilometers
and 3.8 million inhabitants, was occupied by barely twenty-fi ve thou-
sand German military and police personnel—one man, in other words,
for every 2.4 square kilometers and 152 inhabitants.40 Unsurprisingly, the
704th’s biggest problem was that its static units were spread far apart,
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sometimes to company level, and connected only by an often execrable
road system. It also lacked suffi cient men to operate its horse-drawn
transports.41 Its more southerly units had some access to rail transport
but reaped only limited benefi t from it. Fierce storms and endemic theft
blighted the Serbian postal service. If the telephone system failed too—
and the 704th feared it would, given its signals company’s paltry resources
and personnel—then the division would be wholly reliant on radio.42
Meanwhile, boredom and fatigue were already beginning to erode
the troops’ discipline. At the end of May General Borowski was aghast
to observe a column of soldiers marching through a village, some wear-
ing only swimming trunks. He remarked, understatedly, that “images like
these damage the troops’ standing.”43 On July 21, divisional command
was appalled by several cases of soldiers going unpunished after they had
failed to get themselves screened following sex with local women.44 At the
end of that month, the latrines in the 704th’s jurisdiction were found in an
“indescribable condition,” with all the threat of infection this posed. The
division pledged to punish future infractions by canceling leave.45
These were not trivial matters. Offi cers would have known from their
Great War experience of the damage unchecked discipline could wreak
upon soldiers’ fi ghting power. And if indiscipline did go unchecked, it
could eventually develop into the kind of wild behavior that debilitated
relations with the population—relations neither higher command nor
divisional command were yet prepared to endanger unnecessarily. Gen-
eral Borowski demanded that plunder cases be thoroughly reported—a
clear sign that such cases were increasing.46 But the troops seem to have
ignored him.47 And discipline problems went wider than the 704th; LXV
Corps declared on June 20 that “the tasks of the Category 15 divisions
under command of LXV Corps can only be carried out in the long term if
the troops’ discipline and manner towards the population are
fi rst-class
.
Discipline manifests itself in attitude, appearance, and proper recogni-
tion of authority.”48 All three were clearly suffering, but “the population
must have and
retain
respect for the Wehrmacht.”49
June 22 brought the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and with it an
entirely new dimension to the burgeoning unrest in Yugoslavia. There
Islands in an Insurgent Sea
91
was an almost immediate call from Stalin for the Europe-wide Commu-
nist movement to take up arms in the antifascist struggle.
The Yugoslav Communists, under their leader Josep Broz—“Tito”—
numbered eight thousand members in spring 1941. This was not a huge
number, but it was dramatically higher than the fi fteen hundred they
had counted at the end of 1937.50 The Communists had achieved this
growth, despite their prohibition since 1920, thanks to their increased
contact with the labor movement, their “popular front” strategy of forg-
ing links with bourgeois opposition politicians, and their infi ltration of
nonpolitical groups such as sports clubs and cultural societies.51 The
Communists were also highly disciplined and, after years of persecu-
tion by the Yugoslav police, seasoned in evasion and subterfuge. They
would harness these qualities to form and organize the Partisan detach-
ments that would come to embody the Yugoslav Communist movement’s
military strength.52 Tito wanted a full-blown uprising both to drive out
the occupiers and attain national power for the Communists in postwar
Yugoslavia. He also wanted a central staff to lead the uprising. Accord-
ingly, on April 10, 1941, the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Com-
munist Party established a military committee headed by Tito himself.53
All depended, however, on when the signal to rise up was given by the
Soviet Union. Moscow gave it on July 1:
The hour has struck when Communists are obliged to raise the
people in open struggle against the occupiers. Do not lose a single
minute organizing Partisan detachments and igniting a Partisan war
in the enemy’s rear. Set fi re to war factories, warehouses, fuel dumps
(oil, petrol, etc.), aerodromes; destroy and demolish railways, tele-
graphs and telephone lines; prohibit the transport of troops and
munitions (war materials in general). Organize the peasantry to
hide grain, drive livestock into the forests. It is absolutely essential
to terrorize the enemy by all means so that he will feel himself inside
a besieged fortress.54
As a precursor to driving the Axis out of Yugoslavia completely, and as
a foundation for a postwar Communist order, Tito sought to establish
liberated territories and administer them through people’s liberation
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terror in the balk ans
committees (NOOs). It was in Croatia, with its more advanced industry
and labor movement, that the prewar Yugoslav Communist organization
had been strongest. Hence, Croats would predominate among the Par-
tisan leadership throughout the war. But Tito came to believe that west-
ern Serbia, with its hilly, wooded terrain, Communist-leaning industrial
centers, and tradition of resistance to foreign invasion—not to mention
the arrival there, over summer 1941, of huge numbers of Serb refugees
uprooted by the Ustasha—would be the ideal region in which to com-
mence the revolt.55 The Communists’ hubris was fueled by their belief
that the withdrawal of German forces to the East heralded the occupi-
ers’ imminent collapse as it had done in 1918, and that the Red Army
was about to attack to liberate its “brother Slavs.”56 Yet the Communists
could hope neither to cajole nor persuade large sections of the popula-
tion to revolt unless the conditions the population faced were intolerable.
Fortunately for the Communists, however, this was precisely what was
now happening.
The uprising erupted in July. It received by far its greatest boost not
from the Communists, but from the hundreds of thousands of ethnic
Serbs expelled from or fl eeing from the atavistic Ustasha savagery now
convulsing the NDH.
The Ustasha had been discriminating against Serbs, Jews, and Sinti
and Roma since the NDH’s founding. By June, it was exploiting freshly
passed legislation authorizing lethal measures against purported “ene-
mies of the people and state” to justify the next, far more rabid phase of
its ethnic campaign. The Ustasha claimed that the Serbs in the NDH
were “squatters,” who had been deposited on ancestral Croatian ter-
ritory by their Ottoman or Habsburg masters and had subjected the
Croats to centuries of cruelty. This was a vast oversimplifi cation of a
complex, centuries-old interaction between the two peoples. The Usta-
sha also depicted the Serbs as the bloodstained hatchet men of the Bel-
grade government during the interwar years, with thousands of Croat
deaths on their hands. Granted, Croats had been discriminated against
shamefully over the past two decades, and there had been some deadly if
small-scale incidents between the two peoples. But claims of a murder-
ous ethnic campaign were grossly exaggerated. Yet rewriting history in
this way, the Ustasha believed, would enable it to publicly justify what
Islands in an Insurgent Sea
93
it was about to unleash. The Ustasha-controlled media and, shamefully,
large portions of the Croatian Catholic clergy propagated such distor-
tions enthusiastically.57
The Ustasha did not intend committing genocide on the Serbs. It
did intend to fatally dislocate Serbian community life within the NDH,
exterminating a portion of the Serbs, driving others beyond its borders,
and forcibly converting the rest to Roman Catholicism.58 Thus, from
summer 1941 the Ustasha orchestrated the brutal expulsion or barbaric
slaughter of whole Serb communities. It also herded thousands more
Serbs into newly established concentration camps, mass killing centers
in all but name, the most infamous of which was the camp at Jasenovac.
By February 1942, the German Foreign Ministry in Agram estimated
with some alarm, the Ustasha had butchered approximately three hun-
dred thousand Serbs.59
Matters were made worse by the demographic domino effect of Him-
mler’s misconceived attempt to “Germanize” northern Yugoslavia. Hit-
ler and Himmler sought to expel nearly a quarter of a million Slovenes
from their homeland to make way for ethnic German settlers there. The
Ustasha was willing to make room for them in the NDH, believing this
would excuse “legally” expelling even more Serbs to make way for them.
The Germans and Croats agreed terms for an “orderly” transfer on June
4, 1941. But the Germans soon realized that the Ustasha was actually
expelling up to fi ve times more Serbs into Serbia, under the most brutal
and inhuman conditions, than the number of Slovenes arriving in the
NDH. In late August the German authorities in Serbia, fearful of the
spiraling practical problems and the gathering backlash from the Ser-
bian population, refused to accept any more Serbs from the NDH; some
weeks later, Himmler ordered a halt to the Slovene deportations also.
But thousands of the Serbs spared expulsion from the NDH would now
be massacred by the Ustasha instead.60
In Kozara in Bosnia, the Serb uprising actually preceded the Usta-
sha’s murderous campaign. In Montenegro, the revolt was caused by
the population’s particular grievances against its Italian occupiers. But
for the most part, Serbs in the NDH, and many in Serbia itself, rose up
in response to the killings to preserve their existence within the bloody
ethnic bear pit that was now rapidly evolving. The main revolt spread
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terror in the balk ans
between July 7 and 27 from Krupanj in western Serbia, through Monte-
negro, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia.61
Many German and Italian offi cials were horrifi ed at the Ustasha kill-
ings, if not necessarily for moral reasons then certainly because of the
chaos they threatened to unleash. On June 26 Pavelic´ was prevailed
upon to issue a decree condemning those guilty of “excesses.” Yet apart
from the arrest of a few “bad apples,” and the execution of fewer still, the
Pavelicŕegime did nothing.62 And neither in 1941 nor later did the high-
est German military and diplomatic representatives in the NDH actually
take decisive action to try to halt the Ustasha.
This was partly because they knew Hitler would not have supported
them. Hitler’s own motives for supporting the NDH were power-politi-
cal in part. The NDH was, theoretically, a sovereign state. Being seen to
interfere “excessively” in its affairs might therefore play badly with Ger-
many’s other allies. Hitler was also reluctant to offend Italian sensitivi-
ties by intervening too stridently in a region that was, offi cially, within
the Italian sphere of interest.63 But Hitler also harbored a distinct soft
spot for the Ustasha. This was partly because of their shared Habsburg
heritage, but primarily because he approved of the Ustasha’s extrem-
ism. Indeed, in June 1941 he positively egged Pavelicón, counseling the
Croatian leader to pursue an “intolerant” policy for the next fi fty years.64