Hitler's Foreign Executioners (55 page)

The recruits were not quite Islamic warriors. According to German officer Wilhelm Ebeling (in an unpublished memoir cited by historian George Lepre), ‘most were dirt poor and illiterate … It proved difficult to record their personal information for many didn’t know how old they were, so we had to estimate. Some had several wives. In these cases, it had to be determined which wife was to receive the man’s military benefits.’ According to another SS officer, tuberculosis, epilepsy and other serious illnesses were endemic and so ‘a large number of the candidates could not be accepted’. Erich Braun remembered that they ‘arrived in clothing that was simply indescribable. When they received their new SS uniforms, they were overjoyed … Some of the men took their newly-issued uniforms and sold them on the black market. They would then report in the next day as if they were new.’
³⁴
On his return from Bosnia, the Mufti had assured Himmler that many Muslims had served in the Austrian army. But as recruitment got under way, it became all too clear to SS recruiters that most of those volunteers who claimed to have military experience were largely decrepit. This shortfall in officer class recruits had two consequences. The Germans had to promote a larger proportion of Catholic Croatians than Bosnian Muslims – and Berger was forced to transfer unusually high numbers of German and ethnic German officers borrowed from the SS ‘Prinz Eugen’ to form the officer corps of the new division.

Himmler had assured the Mufti and other Muslim leaders in Bosnia, as well as the Croatian government, that the ‘Handschar’ would be trained and deployed in Croatia; to be exact, at the Zemun campon the Duna River, south-east of Novi Sad. But on 6 June 1943, Himmler reneged on his promise – a decision that would have fateful consequences. By now Phleps had returned to the depleted SS ‘Prinz Eugen’ and another Austrian, SS-Standartenführer Herbert von Obwurzer had been appointed to command the SS ‘Handschar’; he would later take over command of the 15th Latvian SS Division. This tall, overbearing and choleric Austrian was an experienced ‘bandit hunter’ and had no doubt that his task was to turn the Bosnian Muslims into ruthless anti-partisan fighters. German occupation authorities
had reported with mounting concern a steady drift of young Bosniaks to Yugoslavian insurgent forces. So to ring fence the Muslim recruits, von Obwurzer urged Berger to move the ‘Handschar’ out of harm’s way. One might have expected the Waffen-SS leadership to transfer the division to a German training camp, such as the one at Wildflecken, near Frankfurt. Instead, Berger ordered von Obwurzer to move his SS division to south central France. In the rolling green hills and villages of the mid-Pyrenees, German SS officers like Gerhard Kretschmer and Anton Wolf would hammer these mountain boys of the Balkans into shape as SS men.

Most German officers assigned to the ‘Handschar’ despised the young Bosnian men who had enlisted in the elite Waffen-SS. Relations between the German commanders had also become fractious. On 23 July, von Obwurzer arrived in the French town of Mende and immediately began rowing with his fellow Austrian Erich Braun. Himmler disliked Obwurzer and news of the rift forced his hand. His first choice as a replacement was Hermann Fegelein, who had led the SS cavalry into the Pripet Marshes in July 1941. But he eventually settled on an obscure Wehrmacht colonel: Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig. It was a distinctly odd choice. Sauberzweig was a Prussian of the old school, who had lost an eye in the First World War and, by the time he assumed command of the SS ‘Handschar’, was a physical wreck. He spoke no Serbo-Croat, had never tried to learn any and had never served in the Balkans or with a ‘Gebirgs’ (mountain) division. But he had a reputation for efficiency (his nickname was
Schnellchen
– speedy) and, according to reports, much liked by his officers and men. On 9 August, Sauberzweig arrived in Mende to take over command of the ‘Handschar’. It was said that he called the Bosnians ‘his children’. But Sauberzweig’s new military family would never be a happy one.

In the meantime, Berger had flown to Zagreb in an effort to acquire more recruits for the ‘Handschar’, which remained under strength. At a meeting with the Foreign Minister Lorković, Berger insisted that all Muslims be released from the Croatian armed forces to serve in the ‘Handschar’. The forceful SS recruitment chief got his way and 3,000 new recruits were soon boarding trains for training in France. Berger’s bullying left Pavelić reeling. In Sarajevo, Muslim community leaders complained bitterly that the perfidious Waffen-SS had not just stripped farms and villages of their young men, but dispatched them to another faraway country. Now their homes and families were in grave danger – for by the summer of 1943, the unrelenting and vicious war between Germans and partisans and between Chetniks and communists had turned the former Yugoslavia into an abattoir.

The murderous activities of Phleps’ SS ‘Prinz Eugen’ made matters a great deal worse – as even Himmler would belatedly acknowledge. That July, a ‘Prinz Eugen’ battalion entered the Muslim village of Kosutica where they discovered the remains
of a dead SS man. Revenge followed swiftly and without mercy. The SS men, all ethnic Germans from the Banat, pushed and shoved the people of Kosutica into the village square then opened fire with machine guns, killing forty women, children and old men.

Some of the dead were, as it turned out, the fathers, wives, daughters and sons of the men now being trained in France.
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Rumours about the atrocities soon reached the men of the SS ‘Handschar’. They had sworn oaths of loyalty to Hitler and the Croatian government, but SS commander Phleps’ ‘root-and-branch’ tactics had in return robbed them of loved ones. Himmler shed a few crocodile tears and lectured Phleps on ‘the old discipline and training’. But for the German occupying forces, reprisal was a military norm. Soon after the Kosutica atrocity, Phleps killed at least 3,000 unarmed civilians in villages along the Dalmatian coast – and this time he was careful to report them to his SS masters as ‘enemy dead’.

In France, emotional turmoil among the SS recruits put enormous pressure on the new Imams. It will be recalled that the Mufti’s agreement with Himmler obligated the Germans to appoint and train a divisional clergy. This had advantages for both parties. Most importantly, Himmler could rely on the Mufti to use the Imams as ideological educators, not just guardians of faith. Part of the job description was to ram home a simple message: ‘kill all Jews’. Himmler regarded the ‘Handschar’ Imams as ‘trustees of Islam’ who would turn the raw Bosnian recruits into ‘good soldiers and SS men’.
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The Wehrmacht was served by Christian chaplains, but Himmler rejected any such pastoral care for Waffen-SS recruits. Himmler was attracted to a mishmash of pagan faiths and regarded Christianity as a ‘Jewish’ creed that would undermine ‘hard’ SS values. He professed himself a
Gottgläubiger
– a ‘believer in God’ – and many SS recruits followed his example. But he took a different position on Islam. In a long oration delivered to both German and Bosnian SS men in January 1944, Himmler elaborated on the close affinity between Islam and National Socialism:

Historians have tended to assume that these sentiments had equal significance for the Bosnian recruits as they had for their German officers; this is unlikely.
Anti-Semitism had limited appeal in the old Ottoman territories of the Balkans; it was, as we have seen, much more potent in Catholic Croatia. Pogroms had been unknown in Bosnia–Herzegovina – and it was a Muslim scholar Dervis Korkut who successfully hid the renowned ‘Sarajevo Haggadah’ from greedy German eyes.
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This is why Himmler and el-Husseini invested so heavily in the divisional Imams and their training. The Muslim religious authorities in Sarajevo, the Ulema, had enthusiastically backed the formation of the ‘Handschar’, hoping it would protect their villages from attacks by Croatian and Chetnik murder squads – and it was the Ulema that had recruited the thirty or so Imams who would serve with the division. Both Himmler and the Mufti insisted that training would take place in Germany at a large villa in Berlin-Babelsberg, near Potsdam. Most of the new Imams had been schoolteachers; many had been educated in Cairo and Alexandria where some had been exposed to the radical teachings of the fundamentalist ‘Muslim Brotherhood’. El-Husseini took a close interest in the young men. They were enthusiastic smokers and whenever he visited Babelsberg, he brought extra cigarette rations. The Imams also visited the Mufti at his splendid villa in Zehlendorf. ‘What splendour and oriental beauty,’ one recalled. He insisted that each Imam must be ‘an example and ideal in his ways, actions and posture’; he must make his comrades ‘despise death and achieve a full life’.

Lectures at the Imam school in Babelsberg included ‘The Waffen-SS: its organisation and its ranks’ and ‘The History of Nationalism’, as well as the rudiments of the German language. The Mufti lectured: ‘Never in its history has Germany attacked a Muslim nation. Germany battles world Jewry, Islam’s principal enemy. Germany also battles England and its allies, who have persecuted millions of Muslims, as well as Bolshevism, which subjugates forty million Muslims and threatens the Islamic faith in other lands.’
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The course was a rush job: it took just three weeks to complete, but it had a powerful impact on some of the young Bosnians. Writing in
Handzar
, the division’s newspaper, Husejin Dzozo, one of the Imams, celebrated the mission of the SS as follows. Aping his German teachers, he denounced the ‘Versailles-Diktat’ which allowed ‘Jews and Freemasons’ to corrupt European governments. ‘Communism, capitalism and Judaism stand shoulder to shoulders against the European continent’ – only the SS, the Imam concluded, can build a new Europe. Under Ottoman rule, Jews and Muslims had lived amicably in Bosnia–Herzegovina; now Himmler and the Grand Mufti rode roughshod over centuries’ old traditions of tolerance.
⁴⁰

The Imams had undeniable impact. The divisional commander Sauberzweig claimed that the Bosniak recruits ‘gladly accepted’ Nazi doctrine, and that they had begun to regard Hitler as ‘a second prophet’ after Mohammed. But not every ‘Handschar’ recruit took the same view as Sauberzweig and Imam Dzozo. Quite
the contrary – they joined the division to wage war against the Reich, rather than its ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ foes. The allegiance of these men was to the Yugoslav partisan cause, not Hitler or the Grand Mufti. Berger warned Himmler that Tito had ‘issued an order that everyone [that supported the partisans] should report for police duty in Croatia’, which implied that partisans would try to infiltrate the new SS division.
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It was the fear that the ‘Handschar’ would prove ‘porous’ to hostile elements that had persuaded Berger and Himmler to transfer recruits ‘out of harm’s way’ to France. But as events would shortly prove, they had closed the stable door much too late.

Ferid Dzanic was a clever young man from a notable Muslim family who had joined Tito’s Yugoslav National Liberation Army (JANL), but then had been captured and incarcerated in German camp near Sarajevo. On 1 August, Muslim recruiters came calling, looking for ‘Handschar’ recruits, and Dzanic applied to join. He was well educated and had been an officer cadet in the Royal Yugoslav Army, so he was eagerly accepted. German SS officers were just as impressed and awarded him a commission. He was dispatched to Dresden where the Mufti had set up another ‘Mullah Training School’, which was also used to indoctrinate promising ‘officer-class’ recruits. It was only later, after Dzanic had revealed his true allegiance, that the Germans characterised him (using an odd set of conflicting epithets) as ‘power hungry, subservient, corrupt and vague … possessing a strong will and power of persuasion’.
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In Dresden, Dzanic ran into Bozo Jelenek, a Catholic Croatian and Communist Party member, and Eduard Matutinovic. NikolaVukelic was another Catholic who, although not yet 20, had also been highly praised by his German commanding officer. Along with another Muslim, Lutfija Dizdarevic, Dzanic formed a secretive cadre determined to derail German plans. It was impossible to do much more than talk and plot in Dresden. But all four conspirators served in the same battalion (SS Gebirgs-Pionier Bataillon 13) and ended up billeted together when they arrived in the French town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue. And it was here that the Bosniak conspirators hatched up a daring plan to wreck the SS division.

Dzanic left no record of his intentions, but it is pretty clear that the conspirators planned to arrest and execute their German officers inVillefranche, then march their battalion to Rodez and the other towns in the
département
where the rest of the SS division was billeted. Then the SS ‘Handschar’ would either join Allied forces in Italy or return to Croatia. The plan was both daring and naïve – for Dzanic had not taken into account the loyalty of the Imams. Just after midnight on 17 September, Dzanic and ‘about ten armed men’ burst into the barracks where some twenty-five German NCOs lay fast asleep. The mutineers roughly shook them awake and locked them in a storeroom. The revolt took the Germans completely
by surprise. Once the first barracks had been secured, Dzanic and the mutineers rushed to the École Superieure, the girls’ school that served as battalion headquar-ters. They arrested and disarmed the German officers and locked the commander Heinrich Kuntz in his room. Then they proceeded to the Hotel Moderne, where other officers had been quartered. One was the unit doctor Willfried Schweiger, who later wrote a detailed report. He heard the rebels demand: “‘Are you with Germany or with us?” Seconds later, a shot … a loud crash. Then it was the turn of SS-Hstuf. Kuntz. The same question … another shot.’