Terror in the Balkans (3 page)

sive developments shaped the mind-set of the military institutions which

encompassed the commanders who are this study’s concern. Some of

these developments were connected to that particular theater of war, the

Balkans, on which this study focuses. Others had wider historical ori-

gins. All had potential to affect the attitudes and behavior of the senior

German army offi cers who would serve in that particular theater during

World War II.

This sets the scene for the study’s core, in Chapters 4 to 10. These

chapters do not provide a comprehensive treatment of the German army’s

counterinsurgency campaign in Yugoslavia. Rather, by providing case

studies of four different divisions between spring 1941 and early 1943,22

they investigate how a range of middle-level commanders and their units

behaved on the ground in different parts of Yugoslavia, and why. They

Introduction
11

also, particularly in Chapters 4 and 7, illuminate the background devel-

opments that shaped the conduct of all sides in the confl ict during this

period, from the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia onward.

One fi nal point needs making here. On the surface, the years between

1914 and 1945 were a time in which Europe experienced a twenty-year

peace, however uneasy, sandwiched between two uniquely destruc-

tive wars. But there is another way of viewing these years; a prominent

adherent of this school is Eric Hobsbawm, who asserts, “Looking back

on the thirty-one years from the assassination of the Austrian Archduke

in Sarajevo to the unconditional surrender of Japan, they must be seen as

an era of havoc comparable to the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth

century in German History.”23 World War II can thus be seen to have

brought the destructive culmination of the bitter national and, even more

importantly, ideological rivalries that were fi rst acted out so calamitously

during this thirty-year period’s opening stages. How far this view accu-

rately encapsulates the period in its entirety is a question over which his-

torians will continue to deliberate. This study contributes to answering

that question, by investigating how the mind-set of a particular group of

offi cers evolved throughout the period, and how those offi cers went on

to behave during its cataclysmic fi nal years.

c h a p t e r 1

Before the Great War

Changes in the Offi cer Corps

The men who comprised the offi cer corps of the army that

served under the Third Reich did not share a common heritage.

During the years following the German Empire’s founding in 1871, the

needs of an expanded army—unifying the armies of the kingdoms of

Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg—compelled the German

offi cer corps to dilute its social exclusivity and accept growing numbers

of entrants from across the spectrum of the German middle classes.

This process accelerated with the continental arms race that preceded

the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Following the Great War, such

was the diminished size of the post-1918 Reichswehr that the leadership

of the new army was able to restore much of its earlier social exclusivity.

But in 1935, Hitler declared the Versailles disarmament clauses dead

and announced the Reichswehr’s replacement with a vastly enlarged,

conscript-based
Heer
, together with a new air force and an expanded

navy. Now the offi cer corps’ social base grew once more. Then, from

1938 onward, ethnic Germans outwith the Reich’s borders swelled the

offi cer corps even further. The biggest intake came from the German-

speaking lands of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany’s erst-

while ally during the Great War. Of these, the biggest intake of all came

from the post-1918 Republic of Austria.

12

Before the Great War
13

The nine generals who are this study’s main focus all commanded

German army divisions that fought insurgents in Axis-occupied Yugo-

slavia. All were born between 1880 and 1890, either in the German Reich

or in the German-speaking parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. All,

Reich Germans and German-speaking Austrians alike, belonged to

institutions that, during the fi rst years of the twentieth century, were

being challenged by powerful forces of social and political change. The

forces themselves, and the mix of resistance and accommodation with

which the two offi cer corps responded to them, would increasingly infl u-

ence the offi cer corps’ character and the attitudes of young men embark-

ing upon service within them. Some of the effects were benefi cent; rather

more would prove pernicious. Nevertheless, new offi cers were in no sense

already set on an ineluctable path towards National Socialist–style war-

fare during this period; it was the events of later years that would ensure

that particular outcome. But important seeds were planted nonetheless.1

The arch-conservatives who headed the imperial German offi cer corps,

whether the general staff or the senior-most fi eld commanders, recog-

nized that a necessarily large, technically profi cient Imperial German

Army necessitated a large, technically profi cient offi cer corps. It would

need to be an offi cer corps whose members were drawn not just from the

centuries-old bastions of service to the Prussian state—the families of

Junker aristocrats and landowners, of Protestant clerics, of senior civil

servants, and of offi cers themselves—but from a much wider middle-

class social spectrum.2

But with expansion came risk. The offi cer corps saw itself as a bul-

wark against disruptive and dangerous social change. Traditionally aloof

from mainstream society, it had long distrusted the bourgeois middle

class, albeit nothing like as intensely as it feared Germany’s emerging

industrial working class.3 Though the army leadership could counte-

nance a necessarily expanded offi cer corps, then, it sought to minimize

the dangers of social dilution by drawing its offi cer candidates from what

it regarded as the “desired circles” of middle-class German society. The

new emperor, Wilhelm II, elaborated on the concept of “desired circles”

in 1890: “In addition to the sons of noble families of the country, and

14
terror in the balk ans

the sons of my loyal offi cers and civil servants, who according to old

tradition constitute the main pillars of the offi cer corps, I see the future

standard-bearers of my army in the sons of those honorable bourgeois

families in which love for the king and fatherland and respect for the

military and Christian morals are cultivated and handed down.”4

Southeast of the German Reich lay the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian

Empire. Here, Magyars and ethnic German Austrians administered a

polyglot empire whose population also comprised Poles, Ruthenes,

Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Rumanians, Croats, Albanians, Serbs, and

Jews. There were three separate armies under the Emperor’s command—

home armies for the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the monarchy,

and a more powerful joint army. It was the joint army, properly titled the

Royal-Imperial Army, that, in the years before the empire’s collapse in

1918, was principal home to all the Austrian-born offi cers in this study.

Like the German offi cer corps, the Royal-Imperial Army’s offi cer

corps was deeply conservative by tradition, socially selective—though

the majority of its personnel came from the families of offi cers, NCOs, or

offi cials, rather than from traditional aristocratic families—and anxious

to remain separate from civil society.5 But like the German offi cer corps,

it needed to reach some sort of accommodation with the imperatives of

change during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most

pressingly, it needed to try and remedy a serious, ongoing shortage of

offi cers in an army that, due to the empire’s relative economic backward-

ness and the parsimony of the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments, was

undersized and underresourced.6 One partial solution was, again, to

open the offi cer corps to candidates from a wider range of social back-

grounds. This drive to greater egalitarianism was further abetted by the

system of military schooling open to offi cer candidates.7

Within the Royal-Imperial Army’s rank and fi le, the empire’s full eth-

nic kaleidoscope was properly represented. But within the offi cer corps,

the ethnic Germans dominated—even if this had less to do with their

ethnicity as such than with the superior education they enjoyed.8

The different branches of both armies maintained a distinct pecking order.

Most sought after was the cavalry, followed by the artillery and fi nally the

Before the Great War
15

infantry.9 For Austro-Hungarian offi cers particularly, going into the infan-

try was a lottery, contingent upon a regiment’s location, the quality of its

offi cers, and the literacy level of its men. The last of these was contingent

upon a unit’s ethnic composition; only a fraction of the army’s units were

monolingual, and of these only a smaller fraction still spoke German.10

Equally rigid were the social conditions in which new offi cers found

themselves. While some German offi cers stationed within the Reich’s

cosmopolitan urban centers were able to pursue some sort of intellectual

existence,11 the German lieutenant’s life was usually deeply conform-

ist. In the Imperial German Army, most offi cers were still required to

train even after receiving their lieutenant’s commission, by attending

the War School (
Kriegsschule
)—eight months’ cram-learning of subjects

including battle tactics, weaponry, fortifi cations, terrain, and military

organization.12 Social life centered on the offi cers’ mess, and socially

conservative, aristocratic values governed virtually every aspect of an

offi cer’s existence, irrespective of his own social origin.

All this made for an existence that, privileged though it was, was also

intensive, narrow, and isolated from society. Not only was there no place

in the curriculum in which to instruct offi cers on the social, political,

and economic context of that wider society; such was the narrow pattern

of their lives, and the strength of the socially conservative programming

to which they were subjected, they were likely to be disinclined to learn

about such things anyway.13 Stunting offi cers’ critical faculties in this

way would have ominous implications for their later development.14

The Austro-Hungarian offi cer corps similarly sought to isolate its

members from society. Given the army’s experience of civilians since

1848—violent revolution that year, frequent ethnic unrest throughout

the empire in the decades that followed, parsimonious civilian parlia-

ments, and stifl ing state bureaucracy—it is small wonder that the army

leadership sought to instill within its offi cers a feeling of aloofness from,

indeed aversion to, civilian infl uences.15 In one respect at least, however,

Austro-Hungarian offi cers were less straitjacketed than their German

colleagues. Thanks to Austria-Hungary’s sheer diversity, the course of

a Habsburg junior offi cer’s military service exposed him to a far greater

variety of peoples and environments than his German counterpart. The

historian Gunther Rothenburg elaborates:

16
terror in the balk ans

The large territorial expanse of the Dual Monarchy, which included

the gentle landscapes of Lower Austria and Bohemia, the mighty

ranges of the Alps and the Carpathians, the rich lands of Slovenia and

the plains of Galicia, the wild forests of Bosnia and Transylvania, as

well as the barren crags of the Dalmatian coast, with garrisons rang-

ing from cities of culture and refi nement like Vienna, Budapest, and

Prague, provincial towns like Graz, Agram, or Budweis, to small,

isolated hamlets, gave service in the joint army a special character.

An offi cer might serve a tour in a big city and fi nd himself during

the next in an isolated fort in Bosnia or in the mud of a small Gali-

cian hamlet. Described by one English journalist “as hard-working,

hard-living men,” the average Austro-Hungarian regimental offi cer

was judged the “superior of the average German offi cer . . . more

intelligent, more readily adaptable, in closer touch with his men, less

given to dissipation, and remarkably free from arrogance.”16

Rothenburg’s English eyewitness is overgeneralizing about the Ger-

man offi cer of the period.17 Yet there is something in the argument that

the German offi cer’s Austro-Hungarian counterpart was, on the whole,

more open-minded. But the argument should not be taken too far. Ulti-

mately, how far an Austro-Hungarian offi cer chose to absorb a better-

developed worldview was down to him individually. Like his German

counterpart, he could expect no meaningful education on wider social,

political, and economic realities from his superiors.

Within both offi cer corps, meanwhile, the years before the Great War