Read Terror in the Balkans Online
Authors: Ben Shepherd
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II, #Science & Math, #Earth Sciences, #Geography, #Regional
any long-term impact.105
But while the German forces in western Bosnia seem not to have fully
grasped some of the fundamentals of successful counterinsurgency, the
718th Infantry Division’s grasp of them was altogether surer.
For one thing, the 718th favored fl exible hunter group tactics. In moun-
tainous Bosnia such tactics could be more effective than large-scale oper-
ations that, though they might infl ict mass butchery, failed to deal the
Partisans decisive blows. The division employed hunter groups particu-
larly prominently in June 1942. Between June 3 and 22 the 718th, supported
again by Croatian units, sought to winkle out and destroy the Partisan
group in the mountain forests east of Zenica and south of Zavidovicí.
The group was reportedly disrupting the railway line between Sarajevo
and Brod, and terrorizing and plundering the local population.106 The
division was able to commit only four infantry battalions and one of its
batteries to the operation. The remaining forces—four battalions and
four batteries of various types—were provided by the Croatian army.107
Experience had taught the 718th that it lacked enough troops for a com-
prehensive encirclement, something the terrain in the Zenica-Zavidovicí
region rendered harder still. Lieutenant Peter Geissler, now serving with
the 714th Infantry Division, knew this situation only too well. “With us,
sadly, it’s usually a question of wearing down the Partisans and scattering
them, not exterminating them,” he wrote in July 1942. “In these loath-
some mountains it’s hard to do anything else.”108
But the 718th aimed to overcome this hurdle by ordering hunter
groups into the area in a series of speedy, direct, independently operating
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attacks. The division hoped among other things that this would confuse
the Partisans so much that they would think they were facing more Ger-
man troops than they actually were.109
The division later judged such tactics vindicated, particularly when
the units taking part also distributed propaganda material. “At present,”
the division declared, “such a hunter group stands ready within every
company of the 718th Infantry Division. They stand ready for every
eventuality. They will naturally be strengthened according to each even-
tuality.”110 A further advantage of the hunter group was that, small as it
was, it was easier to equip more formidably.
The 718th Infantry Division submitted a fairly upbeat report at the
close of the Zenica-Zavidovicí operation. It declared that, though the
insurgents, particularly the Partisans, were gaining ever more recruits and
increasingly unsettling hitherto undisturbed areas elsewhere in the NDH,
insurgent activity had fallen in its own operational area signifi cantly.111
Mutual hatred between Partisans and Chetniks aided German paci-
fi cation efforts considerably. The two movements’ totally incompatible
aims, and numerous truces struck between Chetnik and Ustasha units
during 1942,112 had now led the Partisans to identify the Chetniks as
their principal enemy. Where the Partisans lacked the organization on
the ground to properly dominate the country, they simply terrorized
the Chetniks and their settlements as far as they could.113 “The Chet-
niks are fi ghting (in Bosnia as elsewhere) for Greater Serbia, the Parti-
sans for Bolshevik Russia,” the 718th reported. “But Draza Mihailovic´
depicts Communism as being as great an enemy of the Serbian idea as
the occupiers.”114 Following bloody fi ghting between the two groups in
the Majevica and Ozren regions, many Partisans had withdrawn over
the River Sava, or southward into Italian-administered territory. Some
Chetnik groups in the division’s area had agreed to aid the Croatian
authorities against the Partisans.115 One German offi cer approvingly
reported of one such agreement that “the Chetnik group in the Majevica
region is in every respect committed to complying with the necessary
terms as precisely as possible, and has ruthlessly eliminated those of its
own people who have not complied.”116
Yet there was no room whatsoever for complacency. For the Partisans’
partial defeat in Operation Kozara left many areas, including Syrmia,
Glimmers of Sanity
183
Samarica, and northern Herzegovina, where they remained active. In
eastern Bosnia, the 718th Infantry Division’s area of operations, a rela-
tive quiet descended, but it did not last.117 During July and early August,
the 718th tried to engage Partisan groups moving northwest from Mon-
tenegro, but were prevented by the failure of the Ustasha troops serving
alongside them.118 In early August, together with troops from the 714th
and 717th Infantry Divisions, it was assigned to intensive border patrol-
ling. The aim was to prevent the battle between the Chetniks and Usta-
sha from spilling over into Serbia, and also to prevent Chetnik groups
from both sides of the Drina from linking up. Meanwhile, conditions
across the NDH grew ever more alarming. On August 21 Serbia Com-
mand reported that the NDH administration had lost all infl uence north
of the River Sava.119
But the 718th Infantry Division still sought to engage the popula-
tion; indeed, it was striving to this end more than ever. In addition to
the directives it had already issued, it now forbade its troops to burn
down houses and farms from which shots had been fi red or in which
ammunition had been found. For, according to the 718th, this had led
in the past to “sometimes pointless destruction on the greatest scale,
and to the burning of all elements, including those who may have been
innocent, in the troops’ rear.”120 The division also stressed, in capi-
tal letters, that “THESE ORDERS ARE TO BE MADE CLEAR TO
THE TROOPS BEFORE THE OPERATION BEGINS.”121 This
directive illuminates the barbarism many rank-and-fi le troops must
still have been practicing, despite their commanders’ exhortations to
the contrary. But it also highlights how conscientiously the division
was seeking to rein in such barbarism.
Throughout the fi nal week of August the 750th Infantry Regiment,
with Croatian backup, conducted Operation S in the Šekovicí region.
This too was a small-scale affair. Few Partisans were killed or captured,
and the Germans lost more men to illness than to the enemy.122 The oper-
ation’s only signifi cant military effect was that heavy grenade launchers
showed their worth during its course, boosting the men’s morale partic-
ularly strongly when they were fi red in unison. “For the Partisan war in
eastern Bosnia it is our best weapon—we cannot have too many of them,”
the division declared.123
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terror in the balk ans
Operation S was more important for demonstrating the 718th’s ongo-
ing commitment to engaging the population. “Every opportunity must
be taken,” it declared on August 17,
to make clear to the population, in word and deed, that this action
is directed entirely against the Partisans, and that those who are
willing to work will enjoy the protection of German and Croatian
arms. It is therefore forbidden to burn down houses unless the battle
makes it unavoidable, and also forbidden to deprive the population
of its livestock or food supply.124
The 718th ordered the use of Chetniks who, before the fi ghting began,
had declared themselves willing to fi ght the Partisans. It even ordered
its troops to make use of those captured Partisans willing to help guide
efforts to winkle out their former comrades.125 Finally, in Operation S’s
aftermath, Battle Group Faninger embarked on a “propaganda march,”
aided by willing Majevica Chetniks who helped guard the propaganda
troops against both Partisans and a hostile Chetnik group from Serbia.126
The 718th observed in a report of August 2 that:
although the inhabitants of Bosnia seem to lead a disinterested and
lethargic life, they are very receptive to propaganda. Rumor propa-
ganda has a particularly strong effect on them. With their own ten-
dency to exaggerate, bad news and rumors are cultivated, blown out
of proportion and disseminated in fantastical forms. The only way
to combat this is through clear, simple, and insistent propaganda.127
The division also wanted the population to be granted the oppor-
tunity to listen to Wehrmacht reports and read placards in the Croa-
tian language, view weekly German fi lm newsreels, and have access to
simple maps displaying the situation on the eastern front. Furthermore,
specially appointed units should distribute both propaganda and food
to the poor from fi eld kitchens.128 In the Rogatica area, the Field Gen-
darmerie distributed provisions to the population, and reported that
it “soon enjoyed incredible trust in the eyes of the population . . . All
Glimmers of Sanity
185
were treated equally, be they Muslims, Pravoslavs or Catholics.”129 The
718th’s rank-and-fi le troops played their part in these efforts also. “The
sharp discipline and exemplary conduct of individual soldiers, and of
units as a whole, strengthens and maintains the trust and regard which
the German Wehrmacht enjoys,” the division declared.130
With Operation Kozara heralding a hardening of the German coun-
terinsurgency campaign in the NDH, then, the 718th Infantry Division’s
constructive engagement effort was now ahead of that of the campaign in
general. Indeed, it seems clear from a number of divisional reports that
General Fortner was actively seeking to promote hearts and minds mea-
sures not just within his division’s jurisdiction, but also to his superiors.
The irregular warfare that convulsed much of the NDH during the fi rst
eight months of 1942, like the Serbian national uprising before it, pitted
overstretched, often substandard German troops against an increasingly
adroit insurgent enemy. The troops had good reason to blame the highest
leadership levels of the Axis for this state of affairs. While the Nazi leader-
ship, including senior generals, had effectively allowed the Ustasha free
rein, its Italian counterparts had granted even freer and more murderous
rein to the Bosnian Chetniks. The chaos both groups had unleashed had
primarily benefi ted the Partisans, a group destined to eventually triumph
over its rivals, and one that in the meantime proved a growing source of
diffi culty for German troops on the ground. Pressured as they were, and
disposed to anti-Slavic ideology and harsh counterinsurgency doctrine, it
would have been little surprise if German troops had resorted to unbri-
dled terror as surely as their comrades had in Serbia in 1941.
Many indeed did. But there were differences with the Serbian situation
that led some German army units, if only for a limited period, to tem-
per their predilection for terror. That predilection was clearly on show
during these months, in the directives for the 718th Infantry Division’s
operations as well as more widely. But those directives, and the 718th, also
displayed restraint. The 718th’s was not an enlightened, comprehensive
campaign of constructive engagement. But from the start of 1942, the mea-
sures it practiced were less severe than the terrible extremes to which the
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terror in the balk ans
Wehrmacht had gone in Serbia in autumn 1941. The populations of the
areas affected would certainly have appreciated the difference.
That a division might conduct itself more moderately was made more
likely by key differences between the situation in the NDH in 1942 and
the situation in Serbia the previous year. One, which German command-
ers stressed from the start, was that the NDH was an “allied” state. This,
of course, overlooked the fact that the Nedicŕegime in Serbia was sup-
posedly an ally also. But by fostering this perception among their units
more actively, some German commanders undoubtedly helped to dilute
the savagery with which their men might otherwise have conducted
themselves towards the population. A very grim corollary to this is the
fact that, whether because they had been murdered or incarcerated, or
had escaped to the Italian occupation zone or to the Partisans, there were
very few Jews on the ground for the Germans to kill.131
A second key difference was the situation in the fi eld. In Serbia in
autumn 1941 the Germans had been seeking desperately to regain ground
against an opponent who, in the western part of the country at least, had
threatened to overwhelm them. The fear this had engendered was one
of the factors, albeit only one, that had spurred them to such terrible
reprisals. But in the NDH in early 1942, neither Partisans nor Chetniks
constituted the same level of mortal threat. There was no cause yet, then,
for German troops to feel the degrees of fear and desperation that had
assailed their comrades in Serbia. This too was likely to make some Ger-
man army units conduct themselves somewhat less ferociously, at least
for a time.
Bosnia’s mountainous environment, meanwhile, was more remote