Hitler's Foreign Executioners (14 page)

The Ustasha campaign against Croatian Jews began early in April with a flurry of reactionary legislation. The law for the establishment of the army and navy excluded both Jews and Serbs from military service except in labour battalions. Then on 30 April, the law decree on racial belonging and the law decree on the protection of Aryan blood and honour of the Croatian people (modelled on the German Nuremberg Laws) proscribed marriage between gentiles and Jews and sexual relations between Jewish men and Croatian women. Jews would have to register with the Ustasha authorities and if they had changed surnames after 1918 they were compelled to resume the use of their original names. The Ustasha regime prohibited Jews from working in the liberal professions or frequenting restaurants and hotels, cinemas and theatres. Jewish religious and cultural institutions were plundered, and a new ‘Office for the Reconstruction of the National Economy’ plundered Jewish and Serbian businesses.

The impact of this legal blitzkrieg was, as Michael Burleigh succinctly puts it, to ‘abrogate all constitutional and legal provisions that granted religious equality and freedom of conscience’.
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NDH anti-Jewish legislation stated explicitly:

A tiny handful of Jews – if they had rendered noteworthy service to Croatia, voluntarily given up their property or had married a government official – could sometimes evade persecution as ‘honorary Aryans’. It was this kind anomaly which in 1942 so infuriated intelligence officer SS-Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Höttl (another Austrian) and provoked direct SS intervention to finish off what the Ustasha had started – and then bungled.

After 1933, the Nazis had at first proceeded cautiously against German Jews, starting with the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and escalating their onslaught two years later in November 1938. In the new puppet NDH, there was no need for such finesse. The killing must begin immediately. On 6 June, Pavelić travelled to the Berghof for a summit with Hitler. They focused on the future ethnic composition of the new state; Hitler advised Pavelić that ‘if the Croatian state was to be truly
stable, a nationally intolerant policy had to be pursued for 50 years’.
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Hitler’s lethal arm-twisting must be seen in context with what had already begun to take place in Serbia and the Banat region, which was dominated by radicalised ethnic Germans. As soon as they had crossed the Romanian border into the Banat, German troops and local ethnic Germans squads rounded up and imprisoned about a third of all adult male Jews. Then in the summer of 1941, the German military administration, with minimal SS prompting, began to systematically kill Jews and Serbs. As German troops had withdrawn to the Eastern Front, Yugoslav partisans had begun attacking the German garrison troops. According to brutal German reprisal doctrine, Serb villagers would pay the price in blood. At the same time, just as Himmler did, Wehrmacht generals blamed Jewish ‘bandits’ for inciting attacks. Anti-Semitism and hatred of Serbs intricately blended in the German military psyche. Many soldiers called Serbs a
Rattenvolk
(rat people), a term borrowed from the lexicon of anti-Semites. Austrian general Franz Böhme egged on his troops: ‘Your mission … lies in the country in which German blood flowed in 1914 through the treachery of the Serbs, women and children. You are the avengers of these dead.’ In the Banat, the depleted German military administration could call on the assistance of radicalised ethnic Germans – one reason why the liquidation of both Serbs and Jews was accomplished there with such horrible speed.
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So when Pavelić kowtowed to Hitler at the Berghof, the mass murder of both Serbs and Jews was already under way. If the Ustasha failed to act, the German army would take over, exposing the illusory autonomy of the NDH. Pavelić returned to Zagreb with a renewed sense of mission. His Education and Culture Minister, Dr Mile Budak, proclaimed: ‘For minorities such as the Serbs, Jews and gypsies, we have three million bullets.’ The genocide tore open, one Ustasha renegade confessed, ‘a great Croatian wound … Our faces burn for shame’.

The Germans kept up the pressure. On 22 June, Hitler summoned Pavelić’s military henchman Slavko Kvaternik to his new eastern headquarters at Rastenburg. The attack on the Soviet Union had begun at 3.15 that morning. As 3 million German soldiers advanced across the Russian border and the Luftwaffe pounded Soviet cities and airfields, Hitler found time to rant at Kvaternik:

Historians have often debated precisely when Hitler ‘gave the order’ to inaugurate the destruction of all European Jews. It is hard to conceive of a more direct instruction than the Rastenburg tirade lapped by Slavko Kvaternik.

German diplomats stationed in Zagreb left us with detailed accounts of the Croatian Holocaust. The main perpetrators were the new Ustasha militias, formed with German assistance in April and modelled on the SS. As in the Waffen-SS, service was voluntary. The majority of recruits were young, awash with testosterone, devoted to the Poglavnik and unquestioning believers in the maxim ‘Croatia for Croatians’. Their modus operandi resembled murderous Hutu militias like the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, who rampaged through Rwanda half a century later in the spring and summer of 1994. Like the Hutu death squads, the Ustasha used knives, clubs, hatchets – weapons procured from field and farmyard. The killers customarily herded victims into churches and school buildings, closed spaces where the brute force of hatchets and knives had the most deadly effect. The killing was both grisly and intimate. In July 1941, the German Plenipotentiary General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau reported that the Ustasha campaign incited by his own government was driven by ‘blind, bloody fury’. ‘Even among the Croatians,’ he went on, ‘nobody can feel safe. The Croatian revolution is by far the harshest and most brutal of all the different revolutions I have been through at more or less close hand since 1918.’
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The killers were almost without exception good Catholic boys. In the 1960s, Italian journalist Carlo Falconi investigated the wartime Croatian massacres to try to shed light on how much the Vatican had known about the slaughter.
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His report documented in detail what ‘blind bloody fury’ meant for the Jews and Serbs trapped in Croatia. In the villages, where the targets were mainly Serbs, an attack would usually begin just after dawn. Villagers would be woken by the rumble of truck engines and a blaze of headlights. The trucks would stop in the village square and black-capped Ustasha men would throw open the tail gates to fan out through the village, driving people from their farms and houses. In one case, the Ustasha men herded hundreds of Serbs into a local church to attend a service of ‘thanks giving for Croatian independence’. The Ustasha men thrust their way inside brandishing knives and axes. Serbs were traditionally Orthodox not Catholic, but a minority had converted. Ustasha officers were often loath to murder Catholics and they demanded to see any ‘certificates of conversion’. Just two men possessed the correct documents. They alone were released. The Ustasha men now set about butchering everyone else, men, women and children. Falconi discovered that according to many eyewitness accounts, Franciscan priests took a leading part in the slaughter. These men armed themselves with knives and clubs, set fire to Serb homes and
sacked villages. One priest performed a celebratory dance around a pile of Serbian corpses. During one especially hideous massacre that took place in Nevesinie, Ustasha militia rounded up 173 Serbs. Wielding hammers, picks, rifle butts and knives, they mutilated and severed ears, noses, genitals and fingers. They gouged out eyes, they ripped off hair, beards and eyebrows and stuffed them into the mouths of victims. The Ustasha beheaded men and severed the breasts of their wives or sisters. Others they tortured to death in front of their families. When a small boy begged for water he was shot in the head.

The Germans were dismayed by this litany of horrors. They deplored the fact that their Croatian killers acted in ‘hate and hot frenzy’; this was not the German way. Glaise von Horstenau grumbled that the Ustasha militia had ‘gone raging mad’. At a conference of Axis military top brass in Rome in 1942, Generaloberst Alexander Löhr described the situation in Croatia as ‘very unsatisfactory’: the Croatian army was unreliable; the Ustasha were savages. Mussolini concurred: ‘it was madness of the Poglavnik’, he complained, ‘to think he could exterminate two million Serbs’.
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There was a steep learning curve on how to use these non-German executioners.

Croatia was the only Axis satellite state that murdered more non-Jewish than Jewish civilians. But this is not to say that Axis occupation did not energise auto-chthonous anti-Semitic energies. The NDH, as we have seen, passed anti-Jewish legislation that defined Jews in racial terms. Under Edmund Veesenmayer’s tutelage, the Ustasha regime immediately Aryanised the capital and removed Jews from public office and professions with ruthless energy. By May 1941 they had begun rounding up Jews in Zagreb and dispatching them to concentration camps built on the German model. The biggest was Jasenovac, an archipelago of destruction that sprawled alongside the Sava River close to the village of Krapje. Here in different sections the Ustasha segregated Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croats. At Jasenovac at least 25,000 Jews perished. The numbers of Serbs and Gypsies who died was possibly even higher.
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Jasenovac was a place of profligate cruelty. Father Petar ‘Pero’ Brzica, the camp’s most notorious guard, wielded a custom-designed blade strapped to his wrist that he called a ‘Serb cutter’. Inside Jasenovac, the Ustasha gassed their Jewish and Serb victims or cremated them alive. They hurled their bodies into the Sava River. A Croatian prisoner who survived to describe his experience described ‘the screams and wails of despair and extreme suffering, the tortured outcries of the victims, broken by intermittent shooting’.
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At the trial of the Jasenovac camp commander Dinko Šakić in 1994, a 77-year-old witness recalled speaking to Ustasha Lieutenant Zrinusic. ‘He told me (once) he had competed in slaughtering, but lost to Ustashi Lt. Brzica. For him, the genuine Ustashi was the one who had bloodied his hands. The Ustashi who would not kill were punished.’
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Hitler sanctioned this hideous regime – and urged its fanatical leaders to be ‘nationally intolerant’ and to ‘exterminate Jews’. The German Plenipotentiary General Glaise von Horstenau may have, on occasion, deplored Ustasha ‘excesses’, but in 1943 his subordinate Siegfried Kasche proudly reported that Croatia had been successfully cleansed of Jews. On 20 January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, which was convened to plan the administrative details of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’, Himmler’s deputy RSHA chief Heydrich informed delegates that: ‘In Slovakia and Croatia the matter [of the Final Solution] is no longer so difficult, since the most substantial problems in this respect have already been
brought near a solution.
’
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In the Balkans, Himmler and the SS leadership learnt important lessons. The Croatian experience showed that native militias like the Ustasha had a role to play in organised mass murder. But while the Ustasha squads had proved themselves to be effective killers, they had ‘run amok’. According to German observers, there was a right way to carry out mass murder and the Ustasha militias had failed to conform. On 17 February 1942 an SS intelligence chief sent a memorandum to Himmler blaming the Ustasha for igniting Serbian ‘bandit activity’ by committing
Greueltaten
(acts of horror). He estimated that 300,000 Orthodox Serbs ‘have been massacred and sadistically tortured to death’. This was counterproductive.
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Worse, by the summer of 1942 the Ustasha killing spree had run out of steam, forcing the Germans to step in to mop up survivors.

In Himmler’s mind, these acts of horror were merely teething problems. German values would ultimately prevail. There could be no doubt that for the SS planners of genocide, properly organised non-German execution squads would have a vital role to play. As Ustasha militias rampaged through independent Croatia on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, Heydrich issued orders to his Einsatzgruppe commanders that no obstacle should be placed in the way of what he called
Selbstreinigungsbestrebungen
, meaning autonomous cleansing efforts; ‘on the contrary they are to be intensified if necessary and directed into the right channels’.
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On 22 June 1941, along a 1,000-mile front line that stretched from the Finnish border in the north to the Black Sea in the south, three vast German armies waited in the dark; 3 million troops, 3,350 tanks, 7,146 artillery pieces and 2,713 aircraft – the largest invasion force ever assembled. To the north and south, Finnish and Romanian divisions allied to Germany bracketed this stupendous horde. The Polish campaign had been a dress rehearsal for this new ‘war of annihilation’. Hitler was supremely confident. ‘We have only to kick in the Soviet front door,’ he declared, ‘and the whole rotten edifice will come tumbling down.’ At 3.15 a.m. the storm finally broke. The fire and thunder of a monstrous artillery barrage rippled along the front – and the armies of the Reich and its allies roared into the barbaric east, the lair of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ enemy. Above, the massed engines of great fleets of Luftwaffe aircraft pulsed through a cloudless sky. ‘Such a thing only happens once in the whole world!’
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The German attack on the Soviet Union had begun.