Terror in the Balkans (36 page)

Italian support for the Chetniks gave Muslims a further incentive to

look to their own protection. In August, the Chetniks entered Focˇa and

massacred one thousand members of the Muslim population and the sur-

viving Croatian garrison. It was unclear whether the Italians had simply

stood by or actually aided the Chetniks with artillery fi re. What was clear

was that an Italian relief column had fraternized with the Chetniks on its

arrival in the town.18 The massacre led to calls for an independent armed

Muslim force and Bosnian autonomy under the Reich. Neither would

be forthcoming. But Bosnian Muslim personnel would be employed by

Himmler in a Waffen-SS formation, the Handschar Division, in 1943.19

Meanwhile, particularly in the 718th Infantry Division’s jurisdiction,

the actions of Muslim militias were contributing to the ghastly reality

on the ground. Already in 1941, Muslims had sometimes participated in

Ustasha atrocities against Serbs.20 In May 1942 the 718th reported that

the militias were committing atrocities against Serbian villagers, women

and children included, east of Tuzla.21 By August the main Muslim

militia, the Muslim Legion, was plundering the area enthusiastically.

“Between 21 and 23 August,” it was reported, “Muslims in the vicinity of

Sapna, in cooperation with the local Ustasha and the (Muslim) Legion,

burned down 300 Serbian houses in Jovin Han. The Muslims—be they

the Legion, the Muslim militias, or just members of the general popu-

lation—were responsible for most of the low-level disturbances to the

peace of the land.”22

Navigating the mutual hatreds that animated these different ethnic

groups called for more subtlety than German army units on the ground

194
terror in the balk ans

had hitherto demonstrated. “If we hadn’t arrived here in May of this

year, this pitiful country would have been completely devastated,” wrote

Lieutenant Geissler of the 714th Infantry Division. Refl ecting on the need

to read the ethnic situation with the utmost care, he remarked that “we’re

the real Croats here, and have become proper Balkan politicians. Every

division from Russia that was relocated here and tried to fi ght according

to its old method and experiences would in no time at all suffer heavy

losses, if not be destroyed altogether.”23

In the face of such chaos, co-opting the Chetniks for security duties

could seem an attractive solution. Yet its more enthusiastic advocates,

the Italians particularly, failed to recognize its perils. For the Chetniks,

of course, also actively participated in ethnic terror. Some of their actions

were directed against the Partisans, others against Croats in areas where

Serbs and Croats lived side by side and Serbs themselves were being mas-

sacred by the Ustasha. Others still were directed against Muslims in Bos-

nia and Herzegovina and in Sandjak. The worst massacres the Chetniks

perpetrated were at Focˇa in January, February, and August 1942, and in

Sandjak and southeast Bosnia in January and February 1943.24 Arming

the Chetniks, or excessively accommodating them in other ways, made

such massacres and the destabilization they brought all the more likely.

The 718th Infantry Division, though it had dabbled in cooperation

with the Chetniks, perceived the potential danger especially acutely.

Divisional command claimed to have obtained documents indicating that

the Chetnik leadership had ordered its people to cease fi ghting, hide their

weapons, and prepare themselves for renewed battle. The division was

deeply suspicious of the “sudden readiness for peace of Chetnik groups

probably in contact with Draza Mihailovic´, which is probably just a ploy

to buy time for reorganizing and equipping for a general uprising.”25

The 718th was also highly averse, again for fear of exacerbating inter-

ethnic mayhem, to arming villagers against attack. On May 13, 1942, it

requested of General Bader that it not be required to arm “so-called” vil-

lage protection groups and militias. Allowing the population to possess

weapons, divisional command argued, would destabilize the situation

further, not least because of “the strongly defi ned religious and ethnic

differences, the laws of blood vengeance which are still in force today,”

and also because of “the likelihood that arming people suffering from

The Morass
195

scarce provisions will prompt them to go ‘wandering’ into the forests to

seek subsistence there.”26

Divisional command also feared that, if it did arm civilians, those

arms would simply fall into the hands of the Partisans—particularly if

the Croatian gendarmerie was the only body there to prevent it.27 It only

partly got its wish. General Bader advised the division that, though he

did not intend to arm villagers across the board, the weakness of the

Croatian gendarmerie made some kind of “reliable” militia essential.28

By late September the 718th’s jurisdiction extended to the southwest.

This made matters worse because that jurisdiction now encompassed

more Partisan groups. Meanwhile, the Muslim Legion was creating

havoc as ever, and of the other three groups the 718th’s intelligence sec-

tion drily observed that “Ustasha, Partisans, and Chetniks are, as before,

competing to carry off the Strife Cup.”29 More generally the division

commented that “there is hardly a Serb, Croat, or Muslim in the whole

of eastern Bosnia, who does not have some kind of blood feud to settle

with another.”30

The idea of arming the Chetniks to counter the Serbs’ persecutors

remained one that the 718th regarded with consternation. It still believed

that, despite the increasingly mortal danger the Serbian population

faced from the Ustasha and the Muslim militias, arming the Chetniks

would only make matters worse—especially when the Italians seemed

to indulge them so much.31 More widely, there were even reports that

the Italians were buying off the Partisans with weapons, sometimes even

fi eld guns, in exchange for the return of Italian prisoners. Glaise von

Horstenau, the Wehrmacht’s General in Agram, believed this practice

too was being sanctioned from on high.32

The Chetniks in the 718th’s area, divisional command drily observed,

were essentially seeking to butter up the Germans to obtain peace and

quiet, the Italians to obtain weapons, and the Croats to obtain both.33 This

local-level Chetnik-Croat accommodation was replicated more widely

across the NDH during 1942, as both the Chetniks and the NDH regime

increasingly grasped the need for some degree of co-operation against the

burgeoning threat which the Partisans now posed to them both.34 But the

Chetniks within its jurisdiction, the 718th argued, were in a latent state

of war with the Croatian army, as well as in a real state of war with the

196
terror in the balk ans

Ustasha. The division argued that “the present, inconsistent treatment

of the Chetniks (as fi rm friends by the Italians, as comrades-in-arms by

the 714th Infantry Division, with refusal by the 718th Infantry Division, as

mortal enemies by the Ustasha, as partners in cooperation by Croatian

government representatives) holds massive dangers. Above all, it awak-

ens in the Chetnik leadership the impression that German, Italian, and

Croatian civil and military authorities are divided, and can be played off

against one another.” The 718th considered it essential that the Chetniks

be disarmed and suppressed, even though a unifi ed effort with the Italians

would be needed in order to achieve this.35 But the 718th also recognized

that it needed to be evenhanded. As it opined to General Bader, once the

Chetniks were disarmed, the Ustasha and the Muslim militias would need

disarming also. Failure to do this would only cause a resurgence of the kind

of chaos that would enable the Chetniks to renew themselves.36

It is clear from the 718th’s comments that a fellow German army divi-

sion, General Stahl’s 714th Infantry, was much more open to the idea of

cooperating militarily with the Chetniks than General Fortner’s 718th

was.37 Given the relative restraint with which the 718th had been con-

ducting itself for much of 1942, it is unlikely that Fortner was averse to

arming Chetniks for anything other than pragmatic reasons. That said,

it is only consistent with this study’s approach to consider the possibility

that something in Fortner’s past might have instilled in him some hard-

ened ideological objection to arming the Chetniks.

Between 1914 and his capture by the British in 1916, Fortner served as

an infantry offi cer on the western front. This was perhaps a more brutal-

izing way to spend the Great War, even if it did only last two years rather

than the entire four, than the service with the Imperial German Army’s

air wing which Stahl had undergone. Further, Fortner was a reactivated

offi cer, reentering military service in 1935. During his service in the civil-

ian police during the 1920s and early to mid-1930s, he had risen to the

rank of colonel. The police service of the Weimar period, still more of

the fi rst two years of the Nazi dictatorship, rivalled the Reichswehr offi -

cer corps for authoritarian harshness.38 On the other hand, both Fortner

and Stahl hailed from central western Germany. This was not a birth-

place that would have suffused either of them with anti-Serb contempt as

extensively as an Austrian birthplace would have done.39

The Morass
197

More telling than any biographical nugget is the pragmatic tone

and considered wording, devoid of racist or ideological overtones, that

the 718th employed to argue against arming the Chetniks. More tell-

ing still is the growing commitment to more measured forms of coun-

terinsurgency that the 718th had been displaying throughout much of

1942. Clearly, this was a unit of which pragmatism was a more powerful

driver than National Socialist values. The most likely reason why the

718th’s divisional command recoiled from arming Chetniks during 1942,

then, is also the most likely reason why it was so merciless towards the

MihailovicĆhetniks in its operations at the year’s outset—not ideologi-

cal hatred, but a fi rm intent to stamp on any threat it perceived to the

region’s security and stability.

And in eastern Bosnia, the threat the Chetniks posed to security and

stability was particularly acute. For eastern Bosnia, unlike the regions

further west in which the 714th Infantry Division was operating, con-

tained a Muslim population that outnumbered the Serb population.40

Far from stabilizing the region, then, giving armed Chetniks a promi-

nent security role would have unleashed the Chetnik fox on the Muslim

hen coop with all the havoc that would have entailed. Perhaps even more

frightening were the possible consequences of an armed clash between

the Chetniks and the Muslim Legion on the 718th’s turf.

Conversely, the 714th had its own practical reason to be
open-minded

about arming the Chetniks. It was an especially hard-pressed formation

operating in the particularly ferocious Partisan cauldron of western Bos-

nia. Operation Fruška Mountains, which the 714th headed in August

1942, was only its single largest operational commitment in a particu-

larly unrelenting schedule that summer. A formation under considerably

more immediate pressure than the 718th at this time may have been con-

cerned to arm the Chetniks as a quick fi x to its own problems.

This, then, was the serpentine ethno-political backdrop to the 718th

Infantry Division’s fi nal operations of 1942.41

Meanwhile, over three months during spring and summer 1942, enduring

harrowing conditions along the way, the four thousand Partisans accom-

panying Tito had completed the two-hundred-mile trek to the Bosanska

198
terror in the balk ans

Krajina region of western Bosnia. By late September they had founded a

liberated area of approximately twenty thousand square miles, centered

on the town of Bihac´.42 After the loss of much liberated territory in Her-

zegovina, eastern Bosnia, Montenegro, and the Sandzak, this major new

base provided the Partisans with safety and several considerable advan-

tages. The region had long possessed a particularly strong Communist

organization. It was also adjacent to the similarly robust Communist

organization in Croatia. The Germans had greatly reduced their pres-

ence in Bosanska Krajina when they had transferred the 718th Infantry

Division to eastern Bosnia in late 1941. The region’s distance from the

Serbian border largely dispelled the danger that Chetniks from Serbia

might infi ltrate it. Finally, so slaughterous had been the Ustasha perse-

cutions that had taken place there in 1941 that Partisan combativeness

appealed to the region’s Bosnian Serb population much more than did

the Chetniks’ duplicitous waiting game.43

Above all, the new base enabled the Partisans to further consolidate

their organization and propaganda. They impressed Bosanska Krajina’s