Read Terror in the Balkans Online
Authors: Ben Shepherd
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II, #Science & Math, #Earth Sciences, #Geography, #Regional
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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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-