Terror in the Balkans (44 page)

macht, due primarily to the manpower demands of the eastern front and

the rest of occupied Europe, never committed enough troops to enable

it to pacify Yugoslavia enduringly. Even during 1943, when German

236

Conclusion
237

military commitment to the Yugoslav theater peaked in response to

fears of an Allied landing in south-east Europe, few of the divisions on

the ground were of full frontline quality.2- Similarly parsimonious was

higher command’s commitment of airpower to the campaign.

With the Germans’ paucity of strength, the actions of the non-German

Axis players acquired greater importance. Perhaps none were more

important than the actions of the Pavelicŕegime. The ethnic chaos

unleashed by the Ustasha’s anti-Serb persecutions guaranteed a fl ood

of support for both Partisans and Chetniks. Senior German command-

ers realized this too late, and even then, whether for political reasons or

personal ones, they failed to act on the knowledge decisively. The Ger-

mans’ consistent failure to take fi rmer action against the Pavelicŕegime,

combined with their own minimal commitment to security on the

ground, rendered it impossible for them to check the Ustasha’s savagery

decisively. Instead, the Germans’ extensive reliance on NDH forces to

provide longer-term “security” in regions recently cleansed of insurgents

only made it more likely that such savagery would be visited upon the

ethnic Serb populations of those regions. Nor, save a few exceptions,

were the NDH forces themselves equal to the task of combating or sup-

pressing Partisan groups.

Nor could the Germans rely upon their Italian allies to check the

groundswell of insurgent support. The Italians persistently failed to

prosecute the counterinsurgency campaign with the necessary rigor,

and the Germans, too sensitive to Italy’s great power pretensions in the

region, failed to cajole them into doing so. Thus on different occasions

the Italians conducted anti-Partisan operations with the utmost inepti-

tude, dragged their feet over committing to such operations in the fi rst

place, or failed to commit to them at all. Instead, they relied excessively

upon the Chetniks to provide “security.”3 But in empowering that par-

ticular group, they ultimately made it even harder for the Axis to exercise

control on the ground.

Co-opting the Chetniks might have yielded tangible long-term ben-

efi ts had it been done in the right way. A fundamental political settle-

ment that decisively curtailed the reach of the NDH’s power and raised

the status of the Serbian rump state might have provided a way forward.

Such an arrangement might have strengthened the Nedicŕegime, and

238
terror in the balk ans

thus drawn more non-Communist Serbs to that surer base of Axis sup-

port, instead of to the Mihailovic´ movement. But such a scenario was

never a serious prospect: Hitler’s support for the Pavelicŕegime, which

abated too little and too late, and his thoroughly unabated Serbophobia

both saw to that. So too did the failure of German diplomatic and mili-

tary fi gures to argue with the Führer more assertively over such matters.4

In the absence of fundamental political reorganization, the Chetniks

aggravated the chaos on the ground. At the same time, they disappointed

as an effective bulwark against the Partisans. The Partisans’ readiness to

take on the occupiers, their improving fi ghting power, and their ability

to appeal to all ethnic groups, all enabled them to achieve increasingly

formidable levels of support and strength at the expense of the prevari-

cating, disorganized, and chauvinistic Chetniks.

Had the Germans appreciated the true extent of the Partisan threat

sooner, and committed more fully against it, they might yet have

largely destroyed the movement by early 1943. Even then, however, the

NDH’s weakness and the Ustasha’s resurgent depravity might well have

spawned a Partisan revival anyway. In the event, however, the Germans

failed to appreciate the threat sooner. In particular, disputes with their

Italian allies in early 1942 stopped them from acting against the Partisan

movement more decisively. This, together with the Italians’ withdrawal

from Zone III in summer 1942, gave the movement vital time in which to

recover following the Serbian debacle of 1941. 5

Yet even when the Partisans were the principal target, the Germans

could not entirely pin the blame for failure upon their Croatian and Ital-

ian allies. Nor could they pin it upon the elusiveness of their enemy.

Granted, the Partisans used classic irregular tactics whenever they could.

However, particularly in autumn 1941’s Operation Užice and again from

1943 onward, the Partisans also fought more as a conventional opponent

would, and it was as a conventional opponent that the Germans so often

failed to defeat them decisively.6

Too many German commanders, weaned on the long-standing prac-

tices of the military establishment to which they belonged, were exces-

sively enamored of brutal reprisals and big encirclements. Here, they

ignored the facts. Firstly, massive reprisals became increasingly unwork-

able as the counterinsurgency campaign in Yugoslavia unfolded. In

Conclusion
239

Serbia in 1941, they faced running out of victims. In the purportedly

“allied” state of the NDH, they were politically impossible. Secondly,

although a big encirclement had worked in Operation Užice, the Ger-

mans forgot that that operation had also succeeded because of particular

environmental and political circumstances. Such encirclements repeat-

edly failed, even if they occasionally came close to success, amid the

much more rugged terrain of Bosnia. Yet between January 1942’s Opera-

tion Southeast Croatia and January 1943’s Operation White I, German

commanders drew none of the right lessons regarding either the harsh-

ness of the terrain, or what they might reasonably have expected of their

so often substandard troops in the face of it.7

Conversely, many German commanders relied too little upon mobile,

well-equipped hunter groups deployed in operations conducted on the

insurgents’ own terms.8 Even when the Germans did employ them effec-

tively, hunter groups were a local-level solution that could not have defeated

the insurgency on their own. Had the Germans committed more troops

on the ground generally, established a proper, permanent presence among

the population, and shown a more imaginative political approach, hunter

groups employed on a larger scale might yet have proved an effective ele-

ment of a potentially winning, four-way combination. There is no way of

knowing for sure, however, because the Germans did far too little to give

such a combination of measures a decent prospect of success.9 Such were

the minimal troop numbers the high command was prepared to commit

to Yugoslavia that few of the already small number of units operating in

the NDH possessed the mobility, equipment, or resilience necessary for

successful hunter group–type operations.10 That same lack of manpower

prevented the Germans from providing a stable long-term troop presence,

partly to reassure and partly to coerce, among the civilian population.

German army units similarly failed to impose such a permanent, predict-

able presence in the anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union.11 Finally,

most higher- and middle-level commanders alike failed to fully realize that

force and terror needed balancing with, or even downgrading in favor of,

an effective political approach. Had they realized it sooner, the senior-

most among them might yet have sought more forcefully to check not only

the destructive free rein granted the Pavelicŕegime, but also the increas-

ingly rapacious Axis exploitation of the NDH economy.

240
terror in the balk ans

Together, all these factors prevented the Germans from destroying

the Partisan movement before early 1943. By then, even though the Ger-

mans were now committing greater air and land forces to the task, the

Partisans had grown too strong, militarily and organizationally, for them

to be defeated conclusively by those forces.

The Germans, reinforced on the ground and in the air, were still able to

land blows on the Partisans in the months following the White opera-

tions. The fact that the Partisans increasingly resembled a regular army

in form, size, and organization certainly refl ected their growing strength.

But it also made them a more visible target, particularly for air attack. In

May 1943’s Operation Black, a revised version of the postponed Opera-

tion White III, the Germans even came close to destroying Tito’s main

Partisan force. Yet even if they had succeeded, so benefi cial was the

NDH’s chaotic state to the Partisan cause, and so incomplete the Ger-

mans’ ability to station suffi cient troops on the ground permanently,

that the Partisans might well have been able to reconstitute themselves

anyway. In any case, close as they came, the Germans did not suc-

ceed.12 This was partly because, even by this stage, they failed to accord

destroying the Partisan movement the proper importance, and sought

instead to defeat decisively both Partisans and MihailovicĆhetniks dur-

ing the operation.13

Operation Black also saw German brutality towards civilians

reach new heights of ferocity.14 In addition, General Löhr successfully

demanded that the region in which the White operations had taken place

be taken out of the NDH and designated a German operational area.

This enabled Himmler to build up the German police presence within

the region, and call upon ethnic German manpower to fi ll the ranks of

the Police and Waffen-SS. Himmler increased his power further in June

1943, when the entire NDH was declared a “bandit area.”15

The Axis in general remained riven by dissension. The Croatian army

continued to hemorrhage its personnel and weapons—both of which

went over to the Partisans in increasingly large quantities—and the NDH

its support. Within German–Italian relations, trust had broken down

entirely; the Germans even concealed their plans for Operation Black

Conclusion
241

from the Italians.16 But Italy’s capitulation to the Allies in summer 1943,

far from unifying the Germans and the NDH, merely removed a buffer

between them and set them at loggerheads even more.

The Germans exploited the NDH’s economic resources ever more

rapaciously. They antagonized the Pavelicŕegime by bypassing it in the

decision-making process, recruiting Croats into the Wehrmacht and

Waffen-SS en masse and, at the end of 1943, embarking on full-scale col-

laboration with the MihailovicĆhetniks. Given the Chetniks’ manifest

indiscipline, incompetence, and military bankruptcy, this new alliance

exemplifi ed the increasing desperation of German efforts against the

Partisans. The Pavelicŕegime also feared that German sponsorship of

the NDH Muslims, which peaked when Himmler handed over Muslim-

dominated northeast Croatia for the Muslim troops of the Waffen-SS

Handschar Division to occupy, would prompt them to secede from the

state. Relations hit a new low when the Prinz Eugen Division massacred

two thousand Croats in early 1944.17

The Ustasha, meanwhile, entirely lost what remained of its grip, par-

ticularly after the loss of eastern Bosnia to the Partisans in October 1943.

It violently reescalated its anti-Serb policy, yet also secretly negotiated

with both the Partisans and the Allies. Yet when the Germans learned

of the negotiations, it led merely to a reshuffl e of the NDH leadership

rather than the abolition of the regime itself. Hitler, disillusioned with

the NDH at last, wanted it absorbed into the Reich or turned into a pro-

tectorate. But the increasingly precarious situation at the front precluded

such radical surgery.18

It was also in 1943 that the western Allies, frustrated at Mihailovic´’s

inaction and his real or de facto collaboration with the Axis, formally

switched their support to the Partisans.19 Following Italy’s fall, this sup-

port comprised not just material aid but also Allied airpower operating

from southern Italian airfi elds. The Partisans were also well placed to

seize vast quantities of abandoned Italian military equipment and hith-

erto Italian-controlled territory.20 Thus were they able to expand and

consolidate their territory, repel the Germans’ ever more desperate offen-

sives, and eventually take the offensive themselves. In early summer 1944,

following earlier aborted attempts, they recommenced their advance into

Serbia, linking up with the Red Army now advancing on the Balkans

242
terror in the balk ans

following the destruction of Germany’s front in the East. This was yet

another blow in a sequence that would eventually culminate in the loss

of all Yugoslavia to Tito’s Partisans and the Red Army.21

German army commanders’ excessive reliance upon bludgeoning ter-