Terror in the Balkans (99 page)

had resolved to form “volunteer units” of Chetniks, under Partisan com-

mand but with a degree of autonomy. Yet these units proved of dubious

loyalty at best. Indeed, the Axis offensives of April to June 1942 embold-

ened some “volunteer” Chetniks to attempt coups in several Partisan for-

mations.96 Individual Partisan units, at odds with the more sensible line

now directed by their central leadership, also weakened their support

by continuing to commit the kinds of brutal sectarian excesses—pur-

portedly against fi fth columnists—that could cripple their wider appeal.

In eastern Herzegovina in particular, all these factors eroded the Parti-

san movement’s strength to such a degree that the Trio/Focˇa offensives

merely provided the fi nal push that destroyed it there.97

Yet, overall, the Partisans took more steps forward than backward

during spring and summer 1942. Even the losses they had sustained

in battle came to their aid. For the destruction of poorer-quality units

enabled them to concentrate more committed fi ghters in elite units.98

Proletarian brigades, as mobile forces without affi liation to any particu-

lar region, gave them an edge in combat, even though, as “outsiders,”

they were often viewed with hostility in Bosnian Serb areas. The Par-

tisans also imported the NOOs onto Bosnian territory and intensifi ed

their propaganda campaign.99

One aim of the Partisans’ propaganda effort was to wean their Serb

rank and fi le off the Great Serbian idea. To this end, they also imported

workers and students from the towns and thereby increased the element

within the Partisans that harbored civic, multinational, “Bosnian” val-

ues. They also increasingly engaged with religious groups. In order to

attract support from Croats, Muslims, and Serbs, the Partisans often

employed language designed to pit the “working masses” against the

bourgeoisie in all three ethnic groups. A further perennial theme of

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terror in the balk ans

Partisan propaganda was the treacherous and reactionary nature of the

government-in-exile with which the Mihailovic´ movement was so closely

associated. Organization and control improved at the Partisans’ lower

levels also. From June 1942, they made ever greater use of “mobile” bat-

talion- and detachment-level commissars. These were usually of consid-

erably higher quality than the company-level commissars. The following

month, in order to drive home the advantage that this measure created,

the movement’s Operational Staff decreed that all new recruits must

undergo political instruction.100

Further, given that the Partisans’ burgeoning combat effectiveness

increasingly enabled them to protect the population against the Ustasha,

the Ustasha’s murderous persecution of the Serbs was increasingly likely

to feed the fl ow of Partisan volunteers. The dire state of Croatian admin-

istration, and the Germans’ own thinly-stretched manpower, made it

harder still for the Germans to keep the Ustasha’s barbaric conduct in

check. In June and July’s German-led Operation Kozara, for instance,

the SS reported that the Ustasha was killing the old, orphaned, and

chronically ill among the deportees. In August, the Ustasha was able

to wage a campaign of mass killing in the Syrmian lowlands by taking

advantage of the absence of German troops busily combating Partisans

in the Fruška mountains.101

Meanwhile, German army commanders responded to the burgeoning

Partisan threat by reasserting their faith in “systematic and organized”

terror. Operation Kozara was executed by Combat Group West Bosnia,

headed by General Stahl of the 714th Infantry Division. The immediate

spur for the offensive was the Partisans’ capture of Prijedor and its mine

works, and the severe disruption to communications that had followed.

Kozara saw thirty thousand German and Croatian troops, including

four battalions of the 714th Infantry Division newly arrived from Ser-

bia,102 pitted against thirty-fi ve hundred Partisans. But this was also an

operation against civilians. No serious attempt was made to distinguish

between “guilty” and “innocent,” and in a new and unusual develop-

ment for the Yugoslav campaign, all men over fourteen seized during the

operation were to be held in camps or deported as labor to the Reich. In

the event, the Ustasha murdered huge numbers of civilians seized in the

operation in its concentration camp at Jasenovac.103

Glimmers of Sanity
181

Operation Kozara, which also had support from the air and from the

Hungarian Danube Flotilla, infl icted very heavy losses on the Partisans

in western Bosnia.104 But it failed to pacify the region permanently. Once

the bulk of German and Croatian troops had been withdrawn after the

operation, no effective attempt was made to keep the region pacifi ed with

comprehensive hearts and minds measures, a permanent German troop

presence, or frequent and numerous hunter group patrols. Other opera-

tions which the Germans executed in western Bosnia that summer, even

those which enjoyed some short-term success, similarly failed to achieve

any long-term impact.105

But while the German forces in western Bosnia seem not to have fully

grasped some of the fundamentals of successful counterinsurgency, the

718th Infantry Division’s grasp of them was altogether surer.

For one thing, the 718th favored fl exible hunter group tactics. In moun-

tainous Bosnia such tactics could be more effective than large-scale oper-

ations that, though they might infl ict mass butchery, failed to deal the

Partisans decisive blows. The division employed hunter groups particu-

larly prominently in June 1942. Between June 3 and 22 the 718th, supported

again by Croatian units, sought to winkle out and destroy the Partisan

group in the mountain forests east of Zenica and south of Zavidovicí.

The group was reportedly disrupting the railway line between Sarajevo

and Brod, and terrorizing and plundering the local population.106 The

division was able to commit only four infantry battalions and one of its

batteries to the operation. The remaining forces—four battalions and

four batteries of various types—were provided by the Croatian army.107

Experience had taught the 718th that it lacked enough troops for a com-

prehensive encirclement, something the terrain in the Zenica-Zavidovicí

region rendered harder still. Lieutenant Peter Geissler, now serving with

the 714th Infantry Division, knew this situation only too well. “With us,

sadly, it’s usually a question of wearing down the Partisans and scattering

them, not exterminating them,” he wrote in July 1942. “In these loath-

some mountains it’s hard to do anything else.”108

But the 718th aimed to overcome this hurdle by ordering hunter

groups into the area in a series of speedy, direct, independently operating

182
terror in the balk ans

attacks. The division hoped among other things that this would confuse

the Partisans so much that they would think they were facing more Ger-

man troops than they actually were.109

The division later judged such tactics vindicated, particularly when

the units taking part also distributed propaganda material. “At present,”

the division declared, “such a hunter group stands ready within every

company of the 718th Infantry Division. They stand ready for every

eventuality. They will naturally be strengthened according to each even-

tuality.”110 A further advantage of the hunter group was that, small as it

was, it was easier to equip more formidably.

The 718th Infantry Division submitted a fairly upbeat report at the

close of the Zenica-Zavidovicí operation. It declared that, though the

insurgents, particularly the Partisans, were gaining ever more recruits and

increasingly unsettling hitherto undisturbed areas elsewhere in the NDH,

insurgent activity had fallen in its own operational area signifi cantly.111

Mutual hatred between Partisans and Chetniks aided German paci-

fi cation efforts considerably. The two movements’ totally incompatible

aims, and numerous truces struck between Chetnik and Ustasha units

during 1942,112 had now led the Partisans to identify the Chetniks as

their principal enemy. Where the Partisans lacked the organization on

the ground to properly dominate the country, they simply terrorized

the Chetniks and their settlements as far as they could.113 “The Chet-

niks are fi ghting (in Bosnia as elsewhere) for Greater Serbia, the Parti-

sans for Bolshevik Russia,” the 718th reported. “But Draza Mihailovic´

depicts Communism as being as great an enemy of the Serbian idea as

the occupiers.”114 Following bloody fi ghting between the two groups in

the Majevica and Ozren regions, many Partisans had withdrawn over

the River Sava, or southward into Italian-administered territory. Some

Chetnik groups in the division’s area had agreed to aid the Croatian

authorities against the Partisans.115 One German offi cer approvingly

reported of one such agreement that “the Chetnik group in the Majevica

region is in every respect committed to complying with the necessary

terms as precisely as possible, and has ruthlessly eliminated those of its

own people who have not complied.”116

Yet there was no room whatsoever for complacency. For the Partisans’

partial defeat in Operation Kozara left many areas, including Syrmia,

Glimmers of Sanity
183

Samarica, and northern Herzegovina, where they remained active. In

eastern Bosnia, the 718th Infantry Division’s area of operations, a rela-

tive quiet descended, but it did not last.117 During July and early August,

the 718th tried to engage Partisan groups moving northwest from Mon-

tenegro, but were prevented by the failure of the Ustasha troops serving

alongside them.118 In early August, together with troops from the 714th

and 717th Infantry Divisions, it was assigned to intensive border patrol-

ling. The aim was to prevent the battle between the Chetniks and Usta-

sha from spilling over into Serbia, and also to prevent Chetnik groups

from both sides of the Drina from linking up. Meanwhile, conditions

across the NDH grew ever more alarming. On August 21 Serbia Com-

mand reported that the NDH administration had lost all infl uence north

of the River Sava.119

But the 718th Infantry Division still sought to engage the popula-

tion; indeed, it was striving to this end more than ever. In addition to

the directives it had already issued, it now forbade its troops to burn

down houses and farms from which shots had been fi red or in which

ammunition had been found. For, according to the 718th, this had led

in the past to “sometimes pointless destruction on the greatest scale,

and to the burning of all elements, including those who may have been

innocent, in the troops’ rear.”120 The division also stressed, in capi-

tal letters, that “THESE ORDERS ARE TO BE MADE CLEAR TO

THE TROOPS BEFORE THE OPERATION BEGINS.”121 This

directive illuminates the barbarism many rank-and-fi le troops must

still have been practicing, despite their commanders’ exhortations to

the contrary. But it also highlights how conscientiously the division

was seeking to rein in such barbarism.

Throughout the fi nal week of August the 750th Infantry Regiment,

with Croatian backup, conducted Operation S in the Šekovicí region.

This too was a small-scale affair. Few Partisans were killed or captured,

and the Germans lost more men to illness than to the enemy.122 The oper-

ation’s only signifi cant military effect was that heavy grenade launchers

showed their worth during its course, boosting the men’s morale partic-

ularly strongly when they were fi red in unison. “For the Partisan war in

eastern Bosnia it is our best weapon—we cannot have too many of them,”

the division declared.123

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terror in the balk ans

Operation S was more important for demonstrating the 718th’s ongo-

ing commitment to engaging the population. “Every opportunity must

be taken,” it declared on August 17,

to make clear to the population, in word and deed, that this action

is directed entirely against the Partisans, and that those who are

willing to work will enjoy the protection of German and Croatian

arms. It is therefore forbidden to burn down houses unless the battle

makes it unavoidable, and also forbidden to deprive the population

of its livestock or food supply.124

The 718th ordered the use of Chetniks who, before the fi ghting began,

had declared themselves willing to fi ght the Partisans. It even ordered

its troops to make use of those captured Partisans willing to help guide

efforts to winkle out their former comrades.125 Finally, in Operation S’s

aftermath, Battle Group Faninger embarked on a “propaganda march,”

aided by willing Majevica Chetniks who helped guard the propaganda

troops against both Partisans and a hostile Chetnik group from Serbia.126

The 718th observed in a report of August 2 that:

although the inhabitants of Bosnia seem to lead a disinterested and