Terror in the Balkans (79 page)

generals’ views on the eve of the invasion were those of General Erich

Hoepner, commander of the Fourth Panzer Group. “The war against the

Soviet Union,” he wrote early in May 1941, “is an essential component of

the German people’s struggle for existence. It is the old struggle of the

Germans against the Slavs, the defense of European culture against the

Muscovite-Asiatic fl ood, and the repulsion of Judeo-Bolshevism.”48

The war of extermination against the Soviet Union was also a war

into which, through saturation propaganda and ruthless directives,

the generals would endeavor to embed their troops.49 The Barbarossa

Decree, issued by the Armed Forces High Command a month before

the invasion on May 19 1941, declared that “Bolshevism is the mortal

70
terror in the balk ans

enemy of the National Socialist German people. It is against this sub-

versive world-view and its carriers that Germany is fi ghting. This battle

demands ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators,

irregulars, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total eradication of any active

or passive resistance.”50

Ultimately, the hubris that shaped the pitiless conception of the invasion

of the Soviet Union, and indeed the decision to invade in the fi rst place,

would be the Nazi regime’s undoing. It would lead it, in its planning

of Barbarossa, to fatally underestimate the Soviet Union’s capabilities

and fatally overestimate Germany’s own. But in spring 1941, it was the

culmination of a series of developments which had seen the leadership

of the German army become increasingly radicalized and brutalized,

increasingly intertwined with the Nazi regime, and increasingly set on

a course that would implicate it in the regime’s worst deeds. It was a

process to which many if not most of the army’s senior offi cer corps,

including those offi cers who are this study’s concern, had become party

sooner or later.

From the years before 1914, through the Great War and the interwar

years, and up to 1941, the forces that eventually brought the army’s senior

offi cer corps to this threshold had been many and varied. By 1941, a suc-

cession of developments had ensured that senior offi cers were now tech-

nocratic, ruthlessly utilitarian, and ideologically hardened to an extent

that would have been barely conceivable, if at all, to their late-nineteenth

century predecessors. The merging of the two armies in 1938 and their

assimilation into the Nazi state had accelerated the process. Senior offi -

cers now belonged to a body that, as a whole, stood ready to wage a

singularly brutal form of warfare in the service of National Socialism.

Just how far each individual offi cer was prepared to go in the service of

that cause would be determined by the infl uences and experiences that

had shaped him over the course of his life. But the strength of convic-

tion now animating the senior offi cer corps as a whole would manifest

itself with brutal clarity in the campaign the Wehrmacht would conduct

in Yugoslavia that year, just as surely as it would in the Wehrmacht’s

campaign against the Soviet Union.

Bridging Two Hells
71

Yet neither the collective mind-set nor the personal attitudes to which

offi cers subscribed fully explain how those offi cers actually went on to

behave. Yugoslavia’s topography, the political conditions under which

the German occupation regime would operate, and the conditions on

the ground in which German army units would fi nd themselves all

helped shape the circumstances that would in turn determine how offi -

cers’ attitudes translated into action. The interplay of all these forces,

and the behavior that resulted, are the concern of the book’s remaining

chapters. The very next chapter outlines the topographical, political,

and military backdrop of the Wehrmacht’s invasion and occupation of

Yugoslavia in 1941.

c h a p t e r 4

Invasion and Occupation

Yugoslavia, 1941

In march 1941, the impending drive into the Soviet Union was

delayed by events in a different quarter. The Reich’s hapless ally, Italy,

had sought to extend its infl uence in the Balkans since 1939. But so defi -

cient was the Italian army that even the fi rst step, the seizure of Albania

in 1939, had gone far from smoothly. Less smoothly still went the course

of Italy’s next attempted venture, the conquest of Greece.1 Italy’s ongo-

ing failure to subdue the Greeks raised the ominous prospect of Britain

propping Greece up and threatening Germany’s southeastern fl ank in

the run-up to Barbarossa. This threat needed neutralizing before Bar-

barossa was launched. Thus began preparations to divert German forces

southward into an attack on Greece.

But on March 27, 1941, matters became vastly more complicated. That

day, the broadly pro-Axis government of Yugoslavia—the erstwhile

Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—was toppled in a coup

orchestrated by Serbian offi cers of the Yugoslav air force. The offi cers

were hostile to the Axis, and believed that excessive Croat infl uence

had caused the former government to cozy up to Hitler and Mussolini.2

Their disgruntlement was partly a symptom of deeper confl icts that had

beset the country since its inception at the end of the Great War. Those

same confl icts would be catastrophically magnifi ed during the Axis

72

Invasion and Occupation
73

occupation of World War II, and would critically infl uence that occupa-

tion in nearly all its aspects.

The 1921 census records that Serbs—the kingdom’s largest ethnic

group—Croats, and Slovenes comprised nearly ten million of its twelve

million inhabitants. The rest comprised ethnic Germans, Magyars, Mace-

donians, Albanians, Romanians, Turks, and others. The fault lines were

religious as well as ethnic; fi ve and a half million Yugoslavs, including

most Serbs, practiced the Orthodox faith, while the Croats comprised the

majority of the country’s 4.7 million Catholics. There were also 1.3 million

Muslims, including Turks and Albanians as well as Bosnian Muslims.3

Nineteenth-century nationalism, the centuries-old divide-and-rule

tactics of Ottoman and Habsburg rulers, and other cultural, economic,

and political forces had generated much mutual resentment between

these groups. While the desire for a genuinely harmonious, united south-

ern Slavic state was strong and widespread, then, achieving it in practice

was a much greater challenge. An evenhanded, reasonably decentralized

constitution might yet have enabled the new kingdom to achieve it.4 But

instead, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was conceived

in a hurry, partly for fear that delay might lead to Bolshevik revolution,

as a centralized unitary state.

And it was the Serbs, on account of their military, political, and inter-

national clout, who acquired much the greater portion of power within

the new state. This could only increase irredentist and separatist tenden-

cies among other ethnic groups, particularly the Croats and Macedo-

nians. It also hindered efforts to tackle the country’s manifold economic

problems.5 In 1928, a sequence of events including political assassina-

tions, allegations of governmental corruption, and the diminution of

parliament’s prestige in the nation’s eyes led King Alexander to conclude

that the country’s problems could not be solved by conventional political

means. The following year he dissolved parliament, established a royal

dictatorship, and—ostensibly so as to promote the unitary state and

supersede all ethnic divisions—renamed the country Yugoslavia.

“Yugoslavism” as a principle held that not one of the kingdom’s eth-

nic groups should excessively dominate the others. But Yugoslav society

remained polarized, all the more so as the global economic crisis assailed

it and agricultural prices tumbled during the early 1930s.6 Many Croats

74
terror in the balk ans

believed that Alexander’s particular brand of Yugoslavism was merely

cover for a subtler imposition of Serb-oriented centralism.7 One effect

of Yugoslavia’s polarization, born also of widespread anti-Communism

and disdain for “irresolute” liberal democracy, was the emergence of two

far-right movements in the country. The Zbor Movement was robustly

“Great Serbian” in outlook, seeking to further entrench Serb dominance.

In complete contrast, the Croatian Ustasha, whose principal leadership

was forced to operate from exile in Italy, was fervently, violently sepa-

ratist. In 1934, in cahoots with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary

Organization, it assassinated King Alexander himself. This shocking

event seems, with hindsight, to portend the slaughterous mushrooming

of Yugoslavia’s ethnic strife during World War II.

Yet that fate was still not inescapable. With the murdered monarch’s

son, Peter, still in his minority, Alexander’s cousin Prince Paul became

regent. Real power, however, lay with the prime minister, Milan Stoja-

dinovic´. But Stojadinovic´’s successor from February 1939, Dragisa Cvet-

kovic´, sought to build on previous attempts at compromise between the

centralizing and separatist forces by which Yugoslav society was riven.8

In August 1939, on the back of extensive support in Serbia, he granted

the Croats extensive autonomy. To an extent this dug the country out of

one hole of ethnic confl ict into another, for many ethnic Serbs within the

newly formed provinces of Croatia now lost their own autonomy. And

many Croats, increasingly desirous of a separate nation, regarded their

new self-governing powers as being too little, too late.9 These conun-

drums, however, might yet have been resolved.

But the following month, war broke out; though Yugoslavia did not

declare itself for either side, it mobilized its army as a precaution and held

its breath. This, together with a sudden vacuum in Yugoslavia’s political

leadership caused by the death or retirement of many leading statesmen,

put prospects of further political progress on hold.10

Externally, meanwhile, Yugoslavia had become unsettlingly dependent

on Nazi Germany. The Yugoslav government’s bitter opposition to Com-

munism was bound to palliate any accommodation it might reach with

the Nazi regime.11 As it was, by 1934 Yugoslavia’s acute economic vulner-

ability had drawn it into a restrictive trade agreement with Germany. The

League of Nations’ failure to condemn Italian collusion in the murder of

Invasion and Occupation
75

King Alexander had eroded the Yugoslav government’s faith in the West-

ern powers; further accommodation with Berlin seemed the only alterna-

tive offering a measure of security. When Italy invaded Albania in 1939,

Italian encroachment on Yugoslav territory seemed sure to follow; this

too drew the country closer into Germany’s orbit. Germany’s supremacy

on the European continent following its triumphs of 1939–1940 placed

Yugoslavia even more fi rmly in its shadow. All this, of course, suited the

Germans enormously; it seemed to assure them a large economic base

and help safeguard their southern fl ank in advance of Barbarossa. Ger-

man interests in the region were further advanced when, on March 25,

1941, Yugoslavia joined Germany’s Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan.12

For the Germans, then, the 27 March coup was the rudest jolt imagin-

able. Prince Paul was obliged to leave the country, and Peter, still in his

minority, assumed the throne. The new prime minister, Dušan Simovic´,

pledged to maintain good relations with Germany and meet Yugoslavia’s

obligations under the Tripartite Pact. Yet the coup had been accompa-

nied by demonstrations against the pact, isolated excesses against Ger-

man institutions and individuals, and other unsettling incidents. The

Germans suspected the coup had been orchestrated from London.

Certainly the British, though they could have done little if anything to

support the coup practically, saw it as an emphatic slap in the face for

Hitler’s Balkan policy.13

Hitler, enraged at the Yugoslavs’ “betrayal,” fearing for Germany’s

international prestige, anxious to extinguish all uncertainty in the Bal-

kan theater before Barbarossa, and ignoring Simovic´’s protestations of

continued support, vowed to smash Yugoslavia as a military power. Also

driving his decision was that long-standing Serbophobic mind-frame

peculiar to many Austrians during the earlier decades of the twentieth

century. Hitler now resolved on a simultaneous onslaught against Yugo-

slavia as well as Greece.14 The invasion of Yugoslavia, launched on April

6, was intended not just to defeat the country militarily, but also to break

its spirit of resistance through maximum, terrorizing force.

There was no greater contrast than that between the Serbs’ pugna-

cious defense against the Royal and Imperial Army in 1914, and the

76
terror in the balk ans

half-mobilized, ill-equipped Yugoslav army’s almost instant collapse in