The Pale House (62 page)

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By 1944, with the Germans and their allies in full retreat across most of Central and Eastern Europe, Sarajevo assumed an increasingly vital and strategic place. It was a key transit point for the German retreat, and the decision was made at the highest levels to hold the city at all costs. This meant increasing control over the city and its population and increasing the repression. In February 1945, the leader of the Ustaše, Ante
, sent Vladimir “Maks”
to Sarajevo with orders to destroy the resistance movement. Perhaps best known for being the commandant of the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp, in which tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and others were murdered,
was a committed UstaÅ¡e and a particularly imaginative proponent of state-sponsored terror. He was responsible for a substantial increase in the levels of repression with arrests, tortures, murders, and mass executions. Much of this was ordered or carried out from a villa on the banks of the Miljacka. It was called at the time “the house of terror”; I have renamed it “the Pale House.” Its horrors were documented by, among others, an American journalist called Landrum Bolling who entered Sarajevo with the Partisans on 7 April.

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What
hints at to Reinhardt—that the Ustaše could not be allowed to escape—does come true. The last days of the war saw several hundred thousand Croats—Ustaše, soldiers, and civilians—turned back into Yugoslavia by British troops at Bleiburg, on the Austrian border. Once back in Yugoslavia they were taken prisoner by the Partisans. What ensued remains a stain on Yugoslav history, as well as a sore that festered for decades, as the Partisans summarily executed tens of thousands of Croats and Ustaše, with tens of thousands more succumbing to ill treatment on forced marches to concentration camps.

Despite this carnage and the virtual extinction of the Ustaše as a movement, many of the Ustaše's fighters and most of its highest leaders abandoned their people and escaped the British and the Partisans, vanishing into the Austrian forests and mountains. Some were eventually captured, but some of the worst of them, including
and
, eventually escaped using “ratlines,” which is what Reinhardt stumbles across in Sarajevo.

I have not termed what Reinhardt finds as a “ratline” as such, as that description did not yet really exist. The ratlines were escape routes of varying complexity that mainly operated after the war to bring Nazis and other fascists out of liberated Europe to safety in other countries. Perhaps the most famous Nazi ratline was called ODESSA, run by SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, but there were many more, with new evidence coming to light in declassified archives in Argentina and Italy of extensive state-sanctioned operations.

The destinations were often Frankist Spain or South America, and the Catholic Church—from individual priests, up to the highest levels of the papacy, and often using Vatican resources—played a depressingly central role in the ratlines' functioning. There is also evidence that the Allies, particularly the United States, were also involved in the escape of some of these individuals, particularly as postwar western and eastern tensions began to solidify into what would become known as the Cold War. Allied disinterest or involvement was certain; how else could someone like
live virtually undisturbed in American-occupied Austria until April 1946 before escaping to Rome, where he was sheltered by a network of Croatian priests in, among other places, a monastery that had been infiltrated by U.S. intelligence?

Whoever moved them, and however they were moved, the fact remains that hundreds, if not thousands, of Nazis and fascists, among them some of those most guilty of heinous crimes during the war, escaped Europe and lived peaceable and peaceful lives elsewhere. Whether their consciences ever troubled them, who can know. For sure, save for some notable exceptions—
was eventually killed in 1969 by a man later alleged to be an agent of the UDBA, the Yugoslav secret services, and
was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in Argentina and died in 1959 in Spain—and save for the efforts of some notable activists such as Simon Wiesenthal and the Klarsfelds, they were rarely troubled in any official capacity to account for what they had, or had not, done during the war.

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By early 1945, the German Army was in full retreat across most of Europe. The war in the east was very different from that in the west, and the Germans had recourse to various forms of discipline in order to maintain order and cohesion in the field. Two of the most notable included the Feldjaegerkorps and penal battalions.

The Wehrmacht—the German armed forces—shared with the Soviets the unenviable distinction of incarcerating or executing the highest numbers of their own soldiers for real or perceived breaches of discipline. Although the 999th Balkan Field Punishment Battalion never existed,
strafbattaliones
—often translated as penal battalions—were indeed formed, sometimes under the control of the Feldgendarmerie, to which soldiers who had been sentenced for various breaches of military conduct were assigned. These units were often poorly armed and assigned to the most dangerous and menial tasks, including suicide missions such as leading or covering attacks, often against overwhelming odds, and the construction of front-line defenses under arduous conditions. Sometimes, soldiers who survived their terms were deemed fit to return to normal duties. However, as the war worsened, military tribunals came under increasing pressure to assign those sentenced to penal battalions. By war's end, it is estimated that tens of thousands of Wehrmacht personnel had served in punishment units. The survival rate is unknown but was probably not high given that those sentenced to them were considered as the lowest of the low.