Terror in the Balkans (17 page)

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,

90
terror in the balk ans

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

92
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

94
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